by Evie Wyld
‘Is that what you were talking about?’
‘I was enquiring about the possibility of a voluntary short stay at a health spa. A couple of weeks.’
‘A spa? Why would I need to voluntarily stay at a spa? Aren’t all spa visits voluntary?’
There was a pause in which she could sense him trying to arrange his words so that he remained in control.
‘Are you trying to have me admitted to an asylum?’
Peter laughed loudly. ‘Dear God, woman. I just think a break is what you need – a holiday, and there’s a nice place not too far from here. I’m trying to help you. You see, it’s this paranoia that everyone’s out to get you. The reverend told me about the picnic – that you blew a gasket because you lost a game of hide-and-seek. It’s not the best way of making friends, is it?’
‘That is not what happened.’
‘Well, either way, I don’t think you’re very happy the way things are, are you?’
She turned to him. ‘Are you?’
‘Frankly, no.’
‘Well. You’re the one with the heavy workload. Why don’t you go off for a couple of weeks to this spa? Voluntarily. I dare say it would be as good for you as it would be for me.’
He looked at her with his mouth a little open. Then he shook his head, smiled a smile of utter disbelief.
‘I don’t know what has happened to you in the past few months, but you’ve very little to do with the girl I thought I was marrying.’ He swung his legs out from under the covers and stood, taking his dressing gown from the chair. ‘And to be honest, I have to wonder where the behaviour problems that Christopher is experiencing at school have come from.’
He left the room. Ruth sat there. She didn’t feel how she expected to feel. There it was, out in the open. In order to hide his affair, her husband was willing to have her committed to an insane asylum. She felt the thought form and looked at it, and did not feel afraid, just tense and poised. She heard him banging about down the hall in his study, the clink of the top of the whisky decanter being put back too strongly. She heard him marching about. Soon he would settle on the chaise longue and sleep there, she thought, and long after that she would fall asleep and in the morning they would find a way around it again. Instead she heard his study door open, and his heavy footsteps. He was coming back to argue more. Ruth quickly turned off the light and pretended to sleep.
‘Right,’ he said loudly, as though something had been decided between them, ‘come on then.’ He grabbed her by the ankles and pulled her sharply.
‘Peter.’
‘Shut up,’ he said, and yanked up her nightdress, and when she tried to turn away, knelt painfully on her and proceeded anyway. She stopped moving and played dead for the rest of it, because the absolute worst thing she could think of was the children hearing, and once he was finished he rolled over.
‘See,’ he said, ‘there you are, you’re still my wife.’ And it all seemed to make perfect sense to him, because he was suddenly calm and able to fall into a sleep from which he did not wake until late morning.
III
In the night, a familiar smell creeps into our camp. Sarah crawls towards my sleeping space.
‘It’s just a stinkhorn,’ she says with assurance, and she strokes my face, which has become, in the last weeks, covered in a light beard.
But I can’t sleep for the memory that the smell brings with it, the first days of rot, the feeling of a ball of tallow nesting above my heart after Mother’s funeral. The other three sleep, the sniffs and snores of Father and the women; the two of us are silent.
I see my mother’s face in the dark canopy above us.
It is not crying, but the tears run out of me all the same. Sarah takes my hand in the dark. Before I can decide what to do about it, the warmth of her hand has softened the feeling in my chest and has me breathing easy again. All attention in my body is in that hand. I feel her heart beat through it, this live thing, like God. I move it underneath my shirt so that it rests on my chest, and she can feel my heart too. I sleep, I suppose, because the next I know, cold light shows the spiderwebs between leaves and grasses in the dark, which have caught nothing but dew water. The smell of the stinkhorn is lessened in the morning or I am used to it. There is the sound through the rain of running water. Sarah is gone. Perhaps, I think, she is relieving herself or foraging.
I leave the clearing and the sleeping bodies. The morning is unseasonably warm, and my throat pricked with thirst. The river is not far at all from our camp, I find it in minutes. I will wash my face and look for fish to catch. I daydream of returning to the clearing with three large trout, how Cook will place them over the fire and blacken their skin, when I see that Sarah is in the river. She wears nothing except for her shawl, which is wrapped around her and clings to her when she stands, billows up like wings when she floats. She is singing to herself, something I don’t know. He’ll give up all his comfort and sleep out in the rain. It is slow and serious like a wail of abandonment. Her belly, I see, is rounded in a way that tells of a child tucked away in there. I did not see this weeks ago, in the pig shed. But then I don’t know how long it has been since that moment. It may be months rather than weeks.
My father shouts from the clearing. Sarah turns and she sees me, clutches her shawl to herself and makes towards the bank, but I am gone before she gets there.
The Widow Clements has gone in the night. Her coat lies like a body on the ground. Cook has a fever and her stomach makes sounds we can hear if nobody talks.
‘Charlotte!’ my father calls into the forest. ‘Charlotte, where are you? Come back! I’m sorry!’
We spread out and search to the river and the same depth of forest all around. There is nothing. We wait in the glade. I want to point out that the widow was for leaving Sarah when she was just gone a few moments finding us food, but I don’t. Father looks afraid. Cook’s eyes bulge, she is silent. The sun glides briskly overhead, shadows move and dance in the rain, and we build up the fire and leave Cook curled next to it, and set out and search again.
‘She’s gone,’ Sarah says, when we are far enough behind Father that he can’t hear us. ‘And we should go too.’
‘Father isn’t going to want to leave without her.’
‘Don’t be so sure of that,’ she says, but when I ask her what she means, she shakes her head.
‘We must keep moving.’
‘What are you talking about?’
But she turns to me, takes my hand and puts it under her dress to the tight drum of her stomach. My skin prickles and my mouth waters as though she is hare. She stands on the tips of her toes to reach my face and gives me a kiss; inside her mouth is hot, the rain finds its way between our lips, I taste salt. When she comes away, I am thudding to leave with her, my groin aches. We will leave together now and I will fuck her again, and all will be well.
‘I cannot abandon my father.’
‘He abandoned you.’
I decide not to hear her.
‘What were you singing in the river?’ I ask.
‘It’s a mourning song. I think I made it up.’
‘Is it a spell?’
‘It’s just a song.’
‘What were you doing in the river?’
‘Washing.’
‘And . . .’ I say, but am not sure how to continue.
‘My belly,’ she says simply. ‘I would not have chosen it, but there it is. It is not the first time. It will not be the last.’
My face burns with heroic thoughts. Though we are both young, when we get to where we are going I will help her, we can be together with the child, we can pretend it is mine. I can have her to keep, and her red hair and her white skin. The children at my feet, my hand on her knee.
We stop walking.
In front of us the forest floor has been rucked up, dead leaves and moss, freshly upturned earthworms and black beetles, the carcass of some animal, its ribs reaching out of the ground, the meat on them still red. There is the smell a
gain, the stinkhorn, strong. Wolves. Sarah takes my arm and we turn round and make back for the clearing without speaking.
More time than we realised has passed when we get back. Father sits with his face in his hands and stands up quickly as we arrive.
‘You’re back.’
‘Yes.’
‘Nothing?’
I feel Sarah looking at me. ‘Nothing.’
Cook is curled around the fire and does not wake. Her skin has a greenish colour, the sound of her breath like a broom sweeping a wooden floor. The next morning she is dead. All of us heard her last breaths in the night, and pretended we did not.
II
Bernadette sat with Michael by the fire. They missed each other in term time, and now the long summer holidays were on them, and they were thick with secrets. That was how Ruth thought about it now, not that she missed the children but that Bernadette was lonely without them. She saw a cleverness in the girl that scared her. It would be impossible for her to be happy in North Berwick once she was a young woman, when Christopher and Michael had left – and if an attraction should grow between the boys and the girl, Peter may insist upon her leaving. Betty was teaching Bernadette to cook, and without intervention the girl would leave school and be in service within a few years.
Ruth heard them laughing and wanted to see what it was about but feared disturbing them, it would have been terrible to interrupt. Instead she walked stealthily to the door of the drawing room and peered through the crack. They were whispering, smiling. Michael put a hand up and smote Bernadette with an imaginary weapon. She writhed on the floor calling, ‘You’ve done it now, you old witch!’ The pair collapsed in laughter, and Ruth retreated to the kitchen to make tea. The play was still so innocent. The baby twitched against her pelvis.
She had not seen Christopher since lunchtime, when he took his net and set off for the rock pools at Milsey. Ordinarily the others would have gone too, but today they kept their distance. He was older suddenly, after the last term. He needed space. The boyishness had been siphoned off and replaced with something else. She would give it until two o’clock and then go looking for him.
She poured a cup without using a saucer, and some of the tea dribbled down the spout. She had not the knack. She wiped this away, located the biscuit tin. She was not hungry, just wanted something to occupy herself with, and Peter had been on at her that she needed more weight on for the baby’s sake. He had threatened her with the health spa if she did not keep the weight up. But he had meant it kindly this time. He had made sure also to be at home more frequently, only away for one night here and there, and the odd day like today. If she inhaled deeply and thought about it just in the right way, she could see how she may have been wrong about things. Or at least she could see how her pregnancy changed things for Peter and that was where she made her thinking stop. In order to be happy, one must think happy thoughts. This was the advice of her mother during the terrible first months of the pregnancy, when Ruth had felt like she was adrift on a rough sea and had to lie with a damp cloth over her eyes and sip lemonade. It was only once the sick months had passed that she thought about this advice and how her mother had assumed it was put on out of unhappiness. And then again, she wondered, was it?
There was a knobbled flapjack which she placed on the saucer she ought to have used for her cup and she carried it into the dining room so that she could view the sea without disturbing the children. There was to be a cricket game on Sunday, and she had been asked to provide a savoury sandwich filling, and she was not quite clear on how much she was expected to make – Janet had said, ‘Oh, no need to go mad.’ An irritating answer. She would go mad if she pleased. She would ask Betty, though be firm that she was not asking her to carry out the task, which Betty would doubtlessly undertake to do anyway. The afternoon held a deep yellow light, and a warmth. Her thoughts at times felt not her own. A hamper had arrived, sent by Peter apparently, from Fortnum & Mason. The card reminded her to eat. The hamper sat unopened on the dining table. She knew what was inside – proof that he was in London. As though one couldn’t arrange such a thing over the telephone. As though just because one was in London, one was automatically alone. Ruth blinked the thought away and took a cigarette from her pocket. The tea and flapjack sat untouched on the table and she smoked and looked out the window.
The sun reflected upon the water softly, not its usual sharp blinding light. The waves frothy at the water’s edge, the shadows thrown by seaweed and rocks sharply defined and black. She thought of Christopher and his fishing net over in the next bay. How lovely to spend hours poring over the shapes and colours of those pools, alone, undisturbed, to be safe on the rocks and not to hear afterwards from one of the ladies in a cheery voice that you had been spotted tottering around, endangering yourself and the baby. The ripples that ebbed outwards as you poured sand into a pool, the urchins hiding in their turtlenecks. Perhaps she would take a net out, gambol like a child in the shallows. She didn’t have to climb the rocks.
Ruth looked towards the rocks and saw Christopher was not in fact at Milney but closer, on an outcrop that usually had a fisherman posted to it. He must have stopped on his way back, and was now one of the black shapes upon the black rocks. No doubt he was smoking. He looked out to sea as the waves splashed gently around him. On another day, this would have been dangerous, but the day was so calm.
The baby moved inside her. She wanted to stand in quiet reverence of the ocean with Christopher, name the birds, test the direction of the wind, break open the empty husk of a crab shell and watch it float away on the wind. Another shape emerged from the rocks – Reverend Jon Brown, and she wondered how long he had been there, if he had in fact been with Christopher all along. There was a lurch in her stomach, a tincture of alarm that made her look down, expecting to see an elbow poking out of her dress. She watched the man put his arm around Christopher’s shoulders and move close to his face. It took a while for Ruth to understand Reverend Jon Brown was lighting his cigarette for him. He then walked away from the boy, who remained still and fixed on the horizon, and he walked with practised ease, like a man on holiday. Perhaps the reverend found that by giving Christopher a cigarette, the boy would trust him, and tell him the things that were troubling him. She tried hard to think happy thoughts, but what she found was that a familiar seasickness began to churn through her.
Reverend Jon Brown walked slowly to the mid-point of the bay, and the wind picked up. It was only evident in the way his hair danced straight upwards, like he hung upside down, and how his coat billowed out behind him. He turned to face the sea and he opened out his arms, as though beckoning down the sun. Another figure appeared quite suddenly at the dunes – unmistakable: it was Betty, not walking or running, but loping, as though she carried a great weight. Ruth picked up her cup. Betty’s scarf blew off her head and her hair came loose around her. She must have called Jon Brown’s name because he turned towards her, but in a matter of seconds she had taken a mallet from beneath her coat and brought it down between his neck and shoulder, as though trying to strike his head off his body. He went down and Ruth could see his black open mouth, surprised, and Betty raised the mallet again, this time perhaps making contact with his head. Ruth could not say for sure; all she could see were Reverend Jon Brown’s boots cycling pathetically in the sand. Betty raised up the mallet again and again brought it down, and the boots then were still. Ruth dropped her cup and held both hands over her mouth. From the drawing room, laughter.
She ran out the back door, through the garden gate and onto the empty golf course before she recognised she was barefoot, but carried on; the mild day turned suddenly very cold, the gust of wind that played in Reverend Jon Brown’s hair moments ago had brought with it ice from the north. She searched the black rocks for Christopher, but couldn’t see him. She reached the sand, where things were bad. Betty sitting in the sand keening, wailing. The water licked at her ankles and Reverend Jon Brown’s head. Jon Brown, dead. His ears the same, his hairlin
e the same, but his face gone, just an empty basket of bone and pulp. The mallet lay next to him in the water. The sand around them a cake of pink, but the water by Jon Brown’s head, black.
‘What did you do?’ Ruth said into the wind. She held her fingers over her mouth in case she might breathe in some airborne pulp.
Betty looked up at her, black hair plastered all over her face, catching in her eyelashes. ‘He took my Mary’s brain. He had them burn it out of her.’
There was barely a moment of hesitation, and Ruth found it hard to understand her strength as she pulled the rowing boat down to the water’s edge.
‘Help me lift him,’ she said and Betty looked up as if she had forgotten Ruth was there. The woman’s face was far away and white. She stood slowly, wiped her hands down her coat, and took Jon Brown’s shoulders. She looked directly into the cave of his face.
‘Don’t look at it.’ Ruth took the scarf that had blown off Betty’s head and covered the face.
She took his ankles. He was so heavy, the water was seeping into him, even just a leg felt impossible.
‘On three. One, two—’
They heaved and scrabbled, Betty sinking into the waterline, Ruth feeling herself bearing down, like she might birth there and then.
‘One, two—’ Again, they half lifted, half pushed Jon Brown into the small boat, where he tumbled, leaden, into the hull, landing face down, making the water in the bottom of the boat turn brilliant crimson, then, quickly, black. Betty hurled in the mallet and it gonged like a church bell.
I
‘Now look,’ I say as we pull up outside the house. The sky is just lightening, it has rained in North Berwick recently, the road is sodden. ‘I have a friend staying.’
My sister looks at me. ‘Is this the guy you’re seeing?’
‘No. Her name is Maggie.’
‘Oh. Oh – are you seeing Maggie?’