A Spell of Swallows

by Sarah Harrison

  Word soon starts coming down—old Townshend’s holed up in Kut with what was left after Ctesiphon, the Turks are tightening the noose on him, and a relief force has to be got up there as soon as possible. How, seems to be the trouble. When I’m foraging down at the docks I keep my eyes and ears open. It doesn’t take a genius to see that we don’t exactly have a fleet of gunboats ready for the off. What’s out there is a collection of scruffy barges, a fair number of the local mahelas—pirate-boats we call them and some tugs. Oh, and a handful of paddle steamers, the sort of thing (scrubbed up a bit) you’d take a nice little tootle up the Thames on, back in England. But this isn’t Old Father Thames, it’s the stinking whore Euphrates, with more hazards on the water and off it than you can shake a stick at. Those of us who were on the hospital ships know, not that our opinion will be asked. What are we going to do? Try and sail up and be shot like fish in a barrel the moment we stick on a sandbank, or march for sodding miles in and out of all those fucking ditches, getting further and further away from the supply wagons? What use are we going to be to old Townshend once we get there? If it was me in charge I’d let him stew. Make or break.

  Jarvis is his old self again. Probably thinks I’ve forgotten our little incident in the heat of battle. We resume normal relations. He had a couple of letters waiting for him when we got back—his mother and the sweetheart—and that’s perked him up no end. He’s sorry for me, never getting any.

  ‘Who’s waiting for you at home, Ashe?’ he asks. ‘Who do you look forward to seeing again?’

  ‘No one, sir. Both times.’

  ‘Come on, I bet ten pounds that’s not true.’

  For two pins I’d take that bet, but what would be the point? ‘It is, sir.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He looks it, too.

  ‘No need, sir,’ I say. I’m buffing his tunic buttons, sliding them on to the board and going at them like the devil; my hand’s a blur.

  ‘Stop that for a moment,’ he says. I stop. He smiles, shakes his head. ‘I never knew anyone so busy.’

  I say nothing; I’m waiting.

  ‘Now I come to think of it,’ he says. ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you mention your family—not once in all the time we’ve been out here.’

  ‘There you are then, sir.’

  He narrows his eyes, trying to work me out, poor sod. ‘You don’t give much away, do you Ashe?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘I suppose you did have a mother? You didn’t just spring from the ground like the warriors from the dragon’s teeth?’

  He likes his little classical reference. He may not mean it, but it’s a way of pulling rank. I begin polishing again. I spit on the buttons first.

  ‘Hm?’ He tilts his head.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Very well, I can take a hint. I beg your pardon Ashe, it’s rude of me to interrogate you like this.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ Looking down, he shakes his head again. The man who knows about Cadmus, looking at the man who cleans the buttons. ‘You’re a man of many talents, Ashe.’

  Fuck off.

  My greatest talent is one he doesn’t even know about: hate.

  I’m a genius at hating; a natural. But practice makes perfect. I once heard some pompous prick at the newspaper say about a murder we were reporting: ‘Of course love and hate are so close, they’re almost the same thing.’

  What?

  If he thought that, then he’s never felt either of them. I can’t speak for love, never having tried it, or wanted to; but I’ve observed other people who claim to be at it and it’s a stupid, muddy, muddled condition. People in love are confused, not themselves, and (here’s the incredible thing) proud of it!

  Hate is pure. Crystal clear. Perfect. We haters know exactly who we are and what we’re up to. And to hide hate, to keep it close and not let on—that’s power.

  Oddly enough I don’t hate Jarvis. You might think I would, especially with our little shared secret, but I don’t. I’m reserving judgement. I don’t bestow my hate on just anyone, they have to earn it. The person I hate most perfectly is my mother. She may have meant to hurt me, but when she did that she didn’t realise she was doing a disservice to the whole female sex.

  Most people I don’t care about either way. There may be blokes out there who think of me as a sort of friend, but they’re wrong. I don’t care whether they live or die.

  So no, I don’t hate Jarvis. Not yet.

  Chapter Thirteen

  His room at the vicarage was pretty cell-like to begin with, and Ashe kept it that way. It was how he liked things: plain, empty, austere. Apart from the bedclothes (always immaculately neat), and his shaving tackle on the washstand you wouldn’t have known there was anyone living in it. It had once been the maid’s room, and at first this disgusted him. It hadn’t been that long ago, either; the previous incumbent would certainly have had someone living in. Bile had come into Ashe’s mouth at the thought of some young woman in here, picking, scratching, washing, brushing her hair, taking off her clothes—particularly her underclothes with that distinctive reek that women’s things had. The place must have held traces of her: flakes of skin, hairs, nails, bodily secretions . . . It made Ashe’s gorge rise. Unbeknown to anyone, even Hilda, he had scrubbed the room from top to bottom with carbolic. There was nothing he could do about the sheets, but he trusted Hilda to be punctilious about boiling.

  He was here, under their roof, but they would scarcely know it. His presence would be if anything even less intrusive than before. They would scarcely notice him. The closer he got, the less visible he would be.

  It had all happened so easily and swiftly in the end, confirming Ashe in his belief that most events in life were as inevitable as walking. They had a natural rhythm, a preordained movement from balance, through imbalance, and back to balance. Very little was needed except intention, expectation and belief. If you grew and nourished an idea it would soon enough seed out in other people’s heads and left well alone it would grow and come to fruition.

  He had succeeded in making Hilda his unwitting ally and accomplice. Hilda, who had never wanted to live in at the vicarage, had nonetheless espoused his cause. Of course she did not know the precise nature of that cause or she might not have done what she did.

  She might not have said to Mrs Mariner: ‘He might as well be living here, the hours he works.’ And might not have then pointed out that the maid’s room at the top of the old back stairs was standing empty. Or that Ashe could be a great help to her, too, doing the heavier stuff around the house, the grates, carrying groceries and so on. She might not have confided to Mrs Mariner that there were very few persons of her acquaintance, let alone male persons, of whom she would have said this, but John Ashe was someone you could trust with your last farthing.

  Which Mrs Mariner knew, of course. She’d said it herself: ‘I trust you.’

  The vicar had not proved the stumbling block he had expected; that was interesting. If Ashe had been asked to predict a difficulty it would have been in that quarter. But it appeared that he had acceded to the plan the moment it was put to him by his wife. For Ashe was sure that this was the chain of events, though it might have been significant that Mariner, alone, had put the suggestion formally. He had come out to Ashe in the garden and the two of them had stood beneath the trees, in the area Ashe was landscaping.

  ‘This is a large house, almost too large for the two us,’ said Mariner. ‘It’s built for a family with at least one domestic—um—member of staff.’

  Ashe waited.

  Mariner went on: ‘Hilda has never wanted to leave her house—she’s a widow and it’s her home, with associations for her of her late husband and so on—but I understand that your digs in the village aren’t especially comfortable.’

  ‘They’re adequate.’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps, who can say,’ was Mariner’s rather odd comment. It was clear he was deeply uncomfortable with the whol
e exchange, but was heading one way and didn’t wish to be deflected. ‘At any rate I want to suggest—wonder if you’d consider—living at the vicarage while you’re working for us.’

  Ashe waited again. Considering, as he’d been asked to do. Allowing Mariner the time to be a little more pressing. Which he duly did.

  ‘There would be advantages to both sides,’ he said, as if describing some arcane sporting competition. ‘You would have no rent to pay, and we should benefit from having you in situ, so to speak. You could keep an eye on things, deal with any little problems in the house and garden as they occur. And the church, too of course, let’s not forget that.’

  Ashe asked the polite question to which he already knew the answer. Are you sure Hilda wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘No, no, it was she . . . no, I’m quite sure not. My wife, who knows her best, says that she would be all for the idea.’

  ‘Then yes.’

  Mariner’s pointed elf-like eyebrows flew up as if the startled by the speed of the agreement. ‘Good!’

  ‘That’s all in, is it?’

  ‘Naturally. With a few extra hours here and there.’

  ‘I understand that.’

  ‘So it’s settled then.’ Mariner patted his pockets in a nervous gesture as if checking their contents.

  ‘When would you like me to come?’

  ‘What about the weekend?’

  ‘Saturday.’

  ‘Saturday it is.’

  It was now early August and Ashe had been living at the vicarage for just over two weeks. The days were beginning almost imperceptibly to shorten. He’d woken before five as usual this morning and it was barely light, though that might have been due to overcast skies.

  He slept with the curtains open in order to wake with the dawn.

  Very often he rose at once, got dressed and went out to work in the garden or the churchyard. Even if he didn’t get up, but simply lay in bed for a while as he did now, watching the sky change, he savoured the sensation of being the only one awake in the house—perhaps in the village. Alert and clear-headed, alone with his thoughts, he stole a march on the others.

  August was a bad month, he’d always thought so. Ashe was no countryman, but he instinctively disliked this long, stale plateau of late summer, when there was nothing doing. The spurt of growth and greenness was over; the crops had recovered from the beating they’d taken in July and the first of the harvesters were out in the fields; casual village labour, including women and children, had been mobilised to bind the stocks and stone-pick. Nature was in an exhausted stasis, waiting to die.

  He was restless. For now, the swallows, his timekeepers, were still around, flitting in and out of their nest just above his window, accompanying their young on maiden flights. The small sounds of their comings and goings reminded him of his promise to himself. Not much time left. By the end of September he should be on his way, ready or not.

  This thought galvanised him into action. He got out of bed—naked, as always—poured water out of the jug on his washstand and sloshed it over his face and neck, then scrubbed the rest of his body with his flannel. Cool, his skin tingling, he stood by the window and stretched. The angle of the gable containing the Mariners’ bedroom window was upward and to his left, not visible but close enough that if he wanted to he could have leaned out and touched the brickwork. He wondered what they were doing in there, Sound asleep, or stirring, starting to touch each other . . . Or maybe they’d stopped all that.

  Looking down at himself Ashe noticed, with dispassionate interest, that the body had a mind of its own.

  Vivien had trouble sleeping. Usually it was Saxon who went through phases of having restless nights, rising after midnight to go to the study, or moving to the camp bed in his dressing room for a change of scene. Her own sleep had always been deep and untroubled.

  She didn’t as a result feel tired, rather the opposite. Her disturbed nights were due to an excess of energy, that would not allow her to relax. Darkness only made it worse, as if switching off the light turned on a different one in her head. When she did sleep, she dreamed—such dreams! She would wake up with a start, damp with sweat and arousal; shocked and exhilarated. Next to her Saxon would be sleeping peacefully, and she never woke him. He was contented at the moment, writing, engaged in his little charitable project with Susan Clay. If she had woken him, what would she have said that wouldn’t have spoiled that contentment? Her dreams were not, after all, about him.

  If she’d hoped to see more of Ashe when he moved in, she was disappointed. His arrival was quiet, his presence unobtrusive. He worked all day long, quiet and self-contained. There were doors on both sides of the back stairs, and the room he occupied lay beyond both of them, so there was no need for him and the Mariners to see each other at all as they went to and fro outside his working hours. But Vivien was never less than acutely conscious of his presence, which was like a continuous background note, so high and fine that it could only be felt, not heard. That note told her where he was at any given moment, the movement of the air he displaced.

  As often as not these days she woke before dawn, instantly clear-headed, eyes wide in the semi-darkness, and knew, with her recently acquired sixth sense that Ashe was awake, too. She had taken to leaving the curtains half-drawn so she could watch the slow lightening of the sky.

  Tonight she had scarcely slept, and at four o’clock was unable to lie there any longer. She got out of bed, slipped her feet into her walking shoes, shrugged on her dressing gown and went out of the bedroom. She crept across the landing like a guilty child and then ran down the stairs, her hand on the banister taking her weight so that she seemed to fly, her feet scarcely touching the treads. Not wanting to disturb the dog, who would in turn disturb Saxon, she unlocked the front door and went out that way.

  Once outside, away from the heavily enclosed spaces of the house, it was much less dark. A soft, still greyness lay over everything; here and there floated pockets of low mist. The house behind her seemed like a tall ship becalmed; she half expected to hear its joists creak in the silence. She walked carefully on the gravel and then down the narrow way between the garage and the house, with one simple objective: to stand on the lawn, unknown to Ashe, and stare boldly up at his window as he slept: to take advantage of him; in effect, to spy.

  When she reached the back of the house she did not at first look up. Savouring the anticipation she walked at an angle across the grass until she reached the point from which she calculated she would have a clear view of his room. A heavy dew soaked the hem of her dressing gown. She shivered, from excitement as well as the damp.

  When she looked up, he was there. In a reversal of the very first time they’d seen one another he was standing at his uncurtained window, looking back at her: indistinct but unmistakable, a thin, white figure in the half light: his black hair, his face that was always half in shadow.

  Slowly, head down, like an animal loath to break cover, she crept away. When she reached the side of the house she almost collapsed against the wall, panting as though she’d been running for her life.

  Later that morning Susan was on her way to the vicarage. The village at this time of year had a strange, rather febrile atmosphere, its rhythms disrupted by the harvest. And with fewer men these days, people who would normally have been at home were out in the fields. Noises—of shouting, farm machinery, horses, barking dogs-came from unusual quarters. Women were out and about at midday taking the men’s bait up to where they were working.

  But if the centre of village gravity had shifted, Susan’s had not: it remained the vicarage. The house represented her magnetic north, its pull greater than ever now that not only the dog but Ashe too was there. And she had her little jobs in the church, about which she was meticulous: Mr Mariner had said how pleased he was with the way she did them.

  Her mother, always alert to the possibility of her being a nuisance, had been doubtful at first, but had gradually grown accustomed to the idea and now thoroughly a
pproved of it. Unknown to Susan, Ted Clay had even gone so far as to mention what Edith would never have permitted herself to think.

  ‘What’s the likelihood of our Susan earning a bit?’

  ‘Ted! She couldn’t!’

  ‘I don’t see why not if she’s up there regular and doing a proper job.’

  ‘She’s in the church!’

  ‘That Ashe, he’s keeping the churchyard tidy, I bet he’s not working for free.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Ted looked sceptical. ‘He’s got his knees under the table at the vicarage.’

  ‘He found their dog,’ said Edith. ‘They were grateful. Anyway, that’s nothing to do with us, and we’re not asking for money for what our Susan does. It’s good of them to let her help out.’

  ‘Good be blowed,’ muttered Ted. ‘Cheap labour if you ask me.’ And that was where it had rested.

  But Susan knew nothing of this, and was blissfully content with her routine, these days one largely of her own devising. Mr Mariner had asked her if she might be able to dust and polish once a week, and help clear up after the flower-arrangers every two weeks. But she derived so much pleasure from what she did that she went there most mornings. Mr Mariner said the church had never looked so nice. She dusted all the hymn and prayer books and hung the hassocks neatly on their hooks. Any creatures she found she carefully caught and took outside. She filled the watering can at the tap and topped up the vases, never spilling a drop.

  When she’d done in the church she’d go and tell Mr Mariner. He was worried that she was working too hard, but he said it in a pleased way. One day when she tapped on his study door—a thing which would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago—he took some treacle toffees from the drawer in his desk and gave her one, which she had put in her pocket for later.

  Her next port of call was the kitchen where Hilda would greet her with a severe expression and a mug of sweet milky tea or lemonade—always Hilda’s choice, not Susan’s, but which she accepted gratefully. Then she would find Mrs Mariner and ask to take Boots for a walk. If the answer was yes, there was a prescribed route: down the road into the village, through to the river bank for a short distance, into the village again and back up the road. A circuit around the churchyard was also permitted, especially if Ashe was there. These days the dog behaved well, and walked to heel, but he was never to be let off the lead.