The vibrating strains of a hymn emanated from the stone interior. It was one that the old man seemed to recognise from childhood days; gazing towards the church, striving to place the tune, a picture of the scene therein rose in his mind. Stinsford, too, had not entirely escaped the indignities of over-zealous restoration. The works of eighteen forty had seen the loss of most of the high-sided oak pews from the Caroline and early Georgian periods, and those of eighteen seventy had needlessly destroyed a fine Tudor waggon roof, ruining the proportions between the tower and the nave. Yet it was easy enough for his imagination to undo those changes and to return the church to its former condition, with the old string choir – his grandfather on the ’cello, his father and uncle on the violin – playing a final encore in the west gallery.
As he gazed further, he found himself not entirely attached to the earth. The same sense of lightness that he had noticed earlier allowed the breeze to dislodge him from his stationary post and to set him in motion. He crossed the ground without effort, without a single step, his thoughts seeming to lead him invisibly on; there was a definite, steady pull, a current, carrying him to that part of the churchyard overlooked by gargoyles. When he had been a child they had frightened him horribly; clinging like misshapen bats to the roof’s edge and with their faces drawn, as it seemed, from a nightmare, he had understood them to be souls in torment, facing the prospect of eternal damnation. Now he saw them otherwise, the expressions of horror and fear on their countenances deriving from contemplation of the terrestrial scene. For more than five centuries they had been watching affairs in this small space of earth; how much they must have witnessed of sorrow and unhappiness. Hopes dashed, love spurned; the best of intentions brought to nought. How short to them must seem the span of a human life! The chubby babe brought here to be baptised in the ancient font was, in a score of years, the proud bride walking to the altar; in another twenty, she was the doughty matron, attending her father’s funeral; and in twenty more, the cold, wrinkled corpse borne by her sons to the grave.
The gargoyles themselves were badly eroded; they too would vanish in due course. Likewise, the lettering on most of the headstones had begun to fade. The stone invariably used by the Stinsford masons was not granite or marble but a variety of limestone from one of the local quarries, and a material far less resistant to change. Nature, in the form of rain, wind, frost and ice, soon attacked those upraised letters and chiselled edges, as if mocking their pretensions to immortality, and many of the older tablets were now blank faces covered in pin-cushions of moss, dew-soaked spider webs and the irregular, frilly growths of rusty pink lichens; long since, they had ceased to offer any clues as to the identities of the men and women in whose names they had been erected. Well; so it would be for him. In the end nothing would remain, save a few of his books, which might survive as his true memorials, although even they would eventually pass into obscurity. His life spread before him, set against the immensity of time, seemed a thing of utter insignificance, a speck in the firmament.
Which parts of his work would endure longest? That it would be his poetry he very much hoped; judged by the highest standards of art, his novels fell well short. They were workmanlike enough, but the early novels had been written in a hurry and crammed with incident in order to meet the requirements of the serial magazines, and even the later novels contained manifest faults of style and construction. And yet, as time had gone by, and as praise had come to be heaped upon them, he had noticed them steadily rising in his estimation. It still rankled that they attracted so much more attention than his poems, but perhaps they were not so bad; perhaps they would still be read a century hence, as accounts of a certain sensibility. People saw them as stories of country life, which they were, but they were also stories about love and its deceptions. Love, not the country, had been his true subject. And women? Women, too. Women were more fascinating than men, it seemed to him. The clothes they wore, the way they did their hair, their scents and voices, their music. He understood women more than men; when he examined his own self, he often felt that he had within him a larger than average portion of femininity.
Of course, he had been brought up by powerful women. His mother; his mother’s mother. He recalled them vividly, conjuring his childhood in the little cottage with its dusky red walls. Even now, blindfold, he could have felt his way from room to room, up and down the creaking stairs, over the uneven floors. How long ago it all was! He was among the last survivors of a distant age; all but a few of those who had lived and breathed at that time now lay still, a fallen army. But the space between then and now shifted strangely, with Time compressing and expanding like a hurdy-gurdy. At one moment it seemed an aeon since the days of his boyhood, at another it was scarcely a day since he had danced and whirled to the fiddle’s tune.
His mind projected into the future. Florence no doubt would stay here after his death, but the day would come when she too would die, and then his books, his furniture, his pictures, his notebooks – the careful accumulations and accretions of a lifetime’s thought – would be dispersed. The house, too, would go under the hammer, or be sold by private treaty; another man would live there in his stead. It was an uneasy prospect. What would he think, this unknown occupant, of his distinguished predecessor? What changes might he make?
He drifted away. The crimped leaves of hart’s-tongue fern gleamed in the damp corner at the base of the vestry door. Gradually the breeze bore him back to the open grave. Peering into the pit, he recoiled at the flat boards of Emma’s coffin and the sludge of streaky grey clay.
If only he could have believed in God, or something of the sort! But what was the supreme being in which mankind was expected to believe? An old schoolmaster squatting on a cloud, flapping his hands, dispatching angels and thunderbolts – who could possibly believe that any longer? Had anyone ever believed that, in their heart of hearts? It seemed most unlikely. What was this world but a whirling body of matter in the immeasurable vacuities of space? If God was anything, surely, he was a ripple of birdsong, a pearl of dew, a flash of sunlight on the trunk of a tree! It was ironic to reflect that, as a young man, he had been an avid student of the Bible and had seriously considered taking holy orders.
But the service was over. The church door was flung open, and the coffin with its six pairs of dark legs and shining black shoes appeared like some giant beetle. To whom did these legs belong? Who were his bearers on this last, short journey? As the beetle turned towards him, the faces of those on the nearer side came into view. Lawrence was the first, and a good man to be carrying one’s coffin. Then Cockerell, of course; he liked Cockerell, had often been charmed by him. Siegfried Sassoon, looking very pale and strained, was the third man in the line, and that pleased him, for Sassoon was a fine poet, with a highly developed literary sensibility. Who else? He was unable to make out the faces of those on the far side of the coffin, but no doubt there had been some considerable competition between writers for the honour. Well, it would not be for him to settle their petty disputes, though he sincerely hoped that it would not be Kipling. Once, years ago, he had spent several days trying to help Kipling find a house near Weymouth; but between them there had been too many differences of outlook and temperament for a true friendship to take root. The Nobel Prize had also come between them. He had never quite forgiven Kipling for winning an honour which he should have liked for himself and of which he believed that he was much more deserving. Every year for years he had been nominated, and every year he was mysteriously overlooked. He used to affect indifference, and as a joke, to cover his disappointment, say that he felt as if he had won the No-No-Nobel. But Kipling! It irked him, even now. What had possessed those Swedish greybeards?
The mourners slowly followed the coffin to the graveside. The men doffed their hats, while several red-eyed women, he was gratified to see, clutched handkerchiefs. It was a long procession; several minutes passed before all were assembled around the gaping ground. A month hence, he asked himself, how many of th
ese mourning men and women would return in their thoughts to grieve him? How soon, how very soon, he would be forgotten! He looked for Florence. Ah, there she was, in that old cloche hat – and on the arm of Barrie! What did that portend?
The grave awaited, with its mounds of freshly dug earth. The sky was featureless, the colour of zinc. The breeze blew hard.
As the coffin was lowered, as it met the ground, the stays eased and creaked. The bearers stepped back, their work done, and the vicar intoned the last rites in a sonorous voice that rose above the breeze. Then a hush; no one moved or spoke; but a horse outside the churchyard gave an impatient whinny, and a thrush high in one of the elms, its pale breast shining, began to sing. Its musical notes rang out loud and clear, piercing the twilight, as if to defy the finality of what was ensuing below. And where was he in all this? Not in the box, on which the vicar had tossed a token quantity of earth; but somewhere nearby, on a convenient branch, head cocked to one side, observing and reflecting a little. So he had done in the course of his life: might it not be possible to continue the practice, for a fixed space, after his death?
He was aware of the metaphysical conundrum here. He had spent his professional life consorting with the dead, bringing them back to life in different fictional guises; yet he did not, when pressed, find himself able to believe in the existence of a permanent after-life, at least in the sense of an after-life that was a continuation of earthly existence. Against it too much weighed, despite the endeavours of the spiritualists. Yet the notion of a temporary lingering, of a gradual rather than sudden withdrawal into the shades, still appealed to him. At certain times, in certain places, he himself had felt so strongly the presence of the departed, just out of vision, that his breath had been checked.
As a boy he had been told more than a few stories about ghosts. Belief in hob-goblins, will-o’-the-wisps, witches and other nocturnal apparitions was common in the Wessex countryside, and his paternal grandmother had enjoyed herself in describing a spot on Egdon, by a clump of seven Scotch pines, where she had watched the walking ghost of a murdered man, a notorious smuggler, who had betrayed his comrades in crime and had been killed in consequence. If he had been deeply impressed by that, he was also curious, but whenever he questioned the aged woman (how many times had she seen it? what did it look like?), she refused to answer, merely pursing her lips into an enigmatic smile. The determination grew within him that he must see the ghost for himself, and late one summer’s day he persuaded his sister Mary to accompany him there. He must have been six or seven while Mary was a year and a half younger. The pines stood on a knoll in a deserted part of the heath fully a mile from the nearest human habitation. He and Mary arrived soon after sunset, with the pines black against a sky that was rapidly shedding the last vestiges of light. With every passing moment their apprehension grew. The light dwindled further, the outspread body of the heath sank into darkness, and the legions of tiny, invisible insects that had remained silent during the day set about their usual droning. Then a nearby night-hawk began to utter its loud whirring call from the pines. Of all the heath’s birds, none was so secretive nor so mysterious, and when it flew out of the branches and wheeled to and fro over their heads, clapping its wings, they fled for fear of their lives.
As he grew up and became exposed, through his reading, to the wider currents of rational and scientific thought that nowadays rule the Western world, he turned sceptic and dismissed all ghosts as fanciful inventions or tricks of the suggestive imagination. Then, one misty Christmastide, he had been visiting Emma’s grave in this very churchyard when a man dressed in an antique military garb from the Napoleonic era stepped into view. He knew at once that it must be a ghost, chiefly from its insubstantiality of form, with the lower part of the apparition like a piece of gauzy tissue through which the solid facts beyond – the dark ground, the grey stones, the dripping trees – were still discernible. In a light breeze the figure of the ghost seemed to ripple.
After recovering from speechlessness, he had given a cough of inquiry. Good afternoon! The spectre raised its head and lifted a stiff hand before gliding – it would not be true to say that it walked – towards the church. Following uncertainly, he saw it thin and fade into its immaterial self.
What was all that? A piece of fancy? No: he did not think so.
He toyed with the thought that the world was full of ghosts but that only a very few of the living were able to perceive them. Or was it that ghosts, though generally invisible, occasionally attained visibility, perhaps when they chanced to draw near familiar scenes?
He toyed with another thought: that ghosts were able to perceive fellow spirits. Might two such, lovers in former times, meet, draw close, entwine? Might they kiss – their pale lips brushing – in memory of kisses shared during their earthly residence?
Were ghosts souls who had somehow failed to find the narrow way into heaven? (But he did not believe in heaven.) Or was it that the dead continued to live in the time in which they had lived when on earth? Where, after all, should they live else? Time, if so, was not, as commonly thought, a process, but a series of metaphysical spaces. Ghosts were seen when, for reasons unknown, they inadvertently slipped from their allotted time into the present.
Was it possible that some advance in science, akin to the discovery of X rays, would eventually allow the living to view a world crowded with noiseless, flitting ghosts?
He remained sceptical – it was impossible not to be sceptical – and yet he was also a romantic. He toyed with the notion of transformation. A man died to become the dust from which rose a tree, and in its green shade sat the man’s grandson. Was this beyond all bounds of possibility? In a material universe – and, sadly, the evidence in favour of a material universe was very great – was this not the truest version of an after-life?
The service was over. The mourners were shuffling away, though Florence remained, her pale, powdered face deeply imbued with tragedy. She still clutched Barrie’s arm, and the old man was glad of that. Let her find happiness where’er she might! Gertie was there too, with old Harry Tilley, dropping a small bunch of snowdrops into the pit. He liked the elegance of the gesture: what a fine creature she was!
Yet the one who caught his attention as the crowd thinned was a woman somewhat like Gertie but not entirely she, a woman whom he had never seen before, but whom he seemed to know with an intimacy which ran to the bone: the ideal woman, the well-beloved, the Shelleyan avatar of whom he had so long dreamed and who had haunted every novel he had ever written. Beneath a wide black hat she gazed into the grave before slowly raising her head as if to bid him a final farewell. Her precise features remained elusive, for her face was veiled, yet he had no doubt that she had full knowledge of his presence, and he would have liked to step forward, or to make, at least, some corresponding gesture, but found himself unable. Then she and all other members of the human race faded from view, and he was left alone by the yew tree, in the winter wind.
Something had changed during the service. His self was now light as a wisp of nothing, while his vision had dimmed. As through a darkening glass he watched a shadowy robin hop down to tug some invisible creature from the sodden earth by the edge of the pit. The earth bore the many footmarks of the mourners and bearers who in time to come, like him, would cross the gulf that lay between the living and the dead.
Presently he heard the sound of bells slowly rolling over the meads, through the gathering gloom, like waves at sea.
The light ebbed in the study. The dusk was dull and heavy. The birds in the garden had long ago fallen silent, retiring to their sequestered roosts.
A knock on the door.
‘Yes?’
‘Please, sir,’ asked the maid, ‘would you like me to light the lamps?’
‘Thank you.’
So, from his meanderings in the future and the past, he was recalled to the present. He watched the girl as she made her way from one lamp to another. No doubt she knew that he and Florence had had an argume
nt; the maids always knew. It would have been impossible to have run the house without domestics; yet, even after so many years, he had never quite managed to accustom himself to their presence.
‘Is Mrs. Hardy back?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Not back?’
‘No, sir.’
Not back, he thought: well. He blinked, but said nothing.
In the lamplight there shone on the pane before him the mask of his face, his cheekbones and eyebrows visible in upraised patches, the rest lost in darkness. My dead self, he thought: my spirit self.
The maid raised her arms to draw together the curtains.
‘Will that be all, sir?’
‘Thank you.’
CHAPTER IX
I am in a state of triumph. No, that is not it, but I am, at least, in a state of heightened determination. For I have become aware of something. My life does not have to be as it is. I do not have to submit, I can act to change the course of events. Why should I submit to his tyranny? Why does the woman always have to submit to the man? From now on I shall be no longer weak and self-pitying but strong and resolute. I shall no longer give way upon every occasion, I shall no longer submit to his silences. If only I were not so cold! Even in the taxi, even though I have a rug tucked round my legs, it is very cold. But I am confident and determined, and I have made up my mind how I shall deal with Gertrude. My stay will be short and brisk and business-like; I shall not take off my coat or gloves, and if she offers me tea I shall decline. No doubt she will put up some resistance, but I shall not enter into negotiations. Politely, calmly (it is most important that I remain calm), I shall say what I have to say, and take my leave. I am impatient to get it over and done with. Why is the taxi going so slowly? For some time we have been crawling along. We are barely moving at more than walking pace.
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