Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

  But there were memories on that street that led me back to her as well, so I found no peace in its quiet. On this street as well was the Anchor & Hope, a good pub where I had taken Valerie and her parents once for a drink, a young man nervously trying to show he was an adult by buying a round. God knows where we had been in the day, perhaps we had all gone shopping together or been to see a play, because when she was young Valerie had liked going to the theatre. I had always liked her parents. They were as visibly contented as any two people I had known, and I had felt encouraged by that, remembering the story that women tend to turn into their mothers. I hoped that a happiness like theirs would be catching, and, indeed, perhaps I can say now that it was.

  The first time I took Valerie to meet my parents I remember she said when I arrived to collect her she was so nervous she wanted to be sick. I had passed my driving test by then and borrowed Ned’s car for the occasion. I drove her back out to Martin and couldn’t help smiling at the anxiety that showed in her every movement, the way she brushed her hair behind her ears, the way she held her hands so tightly in her lap and kept checking her make-up in the mirror. She got annoyed with me for laughing at her, and I couldn’t make her understand how very little there was for her to worry about, that my parents would think she was wonderful. People are very slow to accept how wonderful they are. I have noticed that with everyone I have ever been close to, and valued, and tried to praise.

  She said she liked our home very much when we arrived and parked in front of it, and seemed impressed because she asked whether I was really going to inherit it one day. I told her yes, as the only son, this would be mine in turn to look after, and I remember she said then what a strange responsibility that must be. I asked her why, and she said in her own lifetime she had lived in three different houses in Salisbury; moving house felt to her like an ordinary part of the rhythm of things. The idea of a building that was passed down the generations seemed extraordinary to her. Imagine all the memories whirling round in there, she said, and I replied, oh yes, it’s swimming in that, believe me.

  Dad came out to greet us, and Mum was standing behind him in the doorway. I could see in the way they spoke to her they liked Valerie as much as I had known they would. They thought she was beautiful and charming and intelligent and perfect for me, far better, really, than a boy as uncomplicated as I was could really have hoped to catch. That was what Dad teased me with later, anyway.

  I do not remember what we all talked about, the four of us, over that first breathlessly nervous meal. I remember us laughing, and the feeling it was all going better than I could have hoped, and pride in my parents, who were on their best behaviour, and in Valerie, who enchanted us all. After lunch she and I went for a walk over the nearest few fields and talked about how beautiful it was there, and how surprisingly close to Salisbury and what she called civilisation, laughing as she did so that I knew she was joking. Then she told me she felt tired. We agreed we should cut short our walk and go back to the house and have a glass of water, and then I should drive her home. At that time she didn’t yet know she was pregnant, so we put her tiredness and her sickness down to nerves about meeting my parents.

  MH: My apologies for the interruption.

  GS: That’s quite all right.

  MH: Are you ready to continue?

  GS: Yes, I suppose I am. What do you want to know?

  MH: Well, we need to pin down your movements during the afternoon.

  I had stayed in the hospital for hours after she died, stayed with the body and then filled out forms and spoken with a lot of people I didn’t listen to, and then when they told me I ought to go home I had driven into town and walked, aimlessly, hopelessly, thinking of Valerie. I had thought of the child then, the child who had never been born. I had wished there was a child today for me to talk to.

  It would be fair to say that the discovery of Valerie’s pregnancy did accelerate our plans for marriage, but that is not to suggest that such plans did not already exist. I knew with frightening certainty on that first morning I woke in her bed that it was what I wanted to happen to us, and I believe from all we have said about that time ever since that she felt much the same. Though I think she was always a little more rational than I was and waited a little longer till she knew me better before she admitted those desires to herself.

  Once we knew there was going to be a child, things changed quickly, and a wedding was planned for that summer. I couldn’t believe my luck. Our families met for dinner in a restaurant a week after I proposed. We all ate and drank and celebrated together, and it seemed that her parents got on with my parents. I invited Ned along in case they didn’t and we needed someone to do the talking, and he got drunk and insisted on giving a speech about how perfect Valerie and I were for each other. It is one of the great duties of a friend to play the fool enough to make you yourself look like a catch by comparison, and poor Ned was always good for that when required. After the meal he and I went home with my parents, and Valerie went home with hers. It was still dark when she called me to tell me she had miscarried in the night.

  Her mother knew, but she never told her father, and I never told my parents, so we didn’t allow it to change our plans for the wedding. I didn’t know how to reach her in her sadness, but we told each other it was something we would grow stronger from, that there was a long future ahead of us, that there would be other children. We were married in June in St Martin’s church, where she had been christened, and she moved in with us and became the wife of a farmer. She and Mum always got on, so it was a very happy home then, the light of speech always dancing from mouth to mouth in the kitchen. She had a wonderful singing voice and would sing for us all some evenings, accompanying herself on our rickety old upright, and of course we still went out to dances and drank with our friends, with Ned and his girlfriends and with the other boys on the farm. But she never conceived again, and after five years a quiet kind of acceptance that was like defeat settled on her because, despite her youth, I think she had decided it was not meant to be.

  GS: There was a lot to do at the hospital, of course, and I did all that, all they asked of me. I couldn’t tell you exactly what I did; it’s not clear to me now. I can’t remember it all bit by bit, only all together in a rush. I hope that doesn’t matter?

  MH: No, that doesn’t matter. I understand.

  GS: I was at the hospital until perhaps five, half past five.

  MH: Did you go to get something to eat after that?

  GS: Of course not. How could I have eaten?

  MH: Did you have anything to drink?

  GS: Ah. I see. No, I didn’t have a drink.

  That was when the thinning of the tribe began, after Valerie had decided we weren’t going to add to it. Ned died one day, and she lost her mother and then her father in the three years that followed. Then my father died, and for the rest of our youth it was just me and her and Mum in the house all together. Those were long sad years, because Valerie wanted very much to be a mother, and the time slipped hopelessly by, and nothing changed for us – there was no new life. We told ourselves we were happy. But it was only after my mother had died, when the time had passed when we could have had children, that I believed Valerie to be really content again. Once the possibility of family was well and truly gone, it seemed she was able to give up on those ideas, release herself a little from her own expectations. Though I don’t think she ever stopped remembering the child that died. On her fiftieth birthday she told me it still moved her to tears sometimes, not ever to hear younger voices in the house, and that she had always felt in a way like she had let us down. I spent the rest of her life trying to show her that had never been the case, that we had been happy, that we had known love.

  GS: I didn’t feel hungry at all, you see. I just had a glass of water. I caught a bus away from the hospital. It’s beautiful out at Odstock, have you been there?

  MH: I have.

  GS: There’s a church that’s nestled in the hillside beyond the ho
spital. No houses around it, as far as I can see, just the spire of a little church that rises up among the trees. And I have wondered from time to time over the years what church that was and wanted to visit it, but in the end I thought perhaps I should never go, because there are some things you’re only meant to glimpse from a distance, aren’t there, and never get to.

  MH: I think you mean St Mary’s at Alderbury.

  GS: Yes, I looked at a map once and thought that was probably it. But I decided some time back I never wanted to go and know for certain. I wanted a mystery about it. I wanted it to stay secret.

  It was then she felt able to tell me her last little secret. I had long ago forgotten, by that time, the fact that both of us had had a life before we knew each other, a youth. I had told her all my stories – the adventures, the plans I had nurtured for myself and let slide as I came into a fuller understanding that my life was going to be the farm, and of course the other girls I had known before her. One doesn’t go into very much detail, naturally, but I had told her about them all, and she had teased me, laughing, because of course we both knew what that life had been like, having ourselves both met at a dance.

  It transpired, though, that she had not told me absolutely all her own stories in return. She told me haltingly, almost tearfully, one evening while we sat by the fire in the house both reading our way through the hour after dinner, that there was one she had always been afraid of. So she had hidden it for years and years. I don’t know why she decided to tell me that evening. Perhaps she was thinking of him. She told me the first boy she had ever been with had been Ned, my friend who had died, with whom I had walked into so many dances feeling like we could do anything. Valerie had fallen for him on a night perhaps a year before we met, swept up in his charm and his looks and his confidence. She told me they hadn’t met again after the night they spent together, until to her horror and terror he had appeared at that first meeting between her parents and my parents, that dinner I had brought him to as ballast. They both recognised each other, and she said she could have wept in gratitude when it became clear he was going to pretend they hadn’t met before. At the end of the dinner they parted like friends new-made and said nothing dangerous to each other.

  Weeks passed before they found an opportunity to speak, and when they did, Ned was all reassurance, she told me, and put her at her ease. He told her he knew the first time I talked about the girl I had met at the dance that I had fallen in love with her, and that he had never seen a better matched couple and could want nothing less than for a shared night of their youths to get in the way of me and her getting together. So they agreed to let the matter lie and get to know each other on a different footing, and nothing more was ever said about the matter.

  And, indeed, Ned ended up taking the story to his grave.

  Her story amazed me, of course. I felt a new love for my friend, that he had kept that silence I suppose in the name of protecting me and Valerie for all those years. I thought of the day of our wedding, when he was best man, and how he had calmed me and told me I had never got anything more right in my life. I thought of how Valerie must have felt for him to give the rings away that day, and that seemed very strange to me now, that scene with hindsight, but all the same all I could feel was love for those two people who had done so much to protect me, who must have loved me so much to want to keep me so safe from their little secret. Love, and perhaps just the slightest concern that they might think it would matter so much to me, that they might not realise I would understand. But who knows whether they might not have been right. Perhaps it would have broken the peace between us.

  Valerie said to me then that when Ned had died she had felt a new guilt about the old affair, which by that time had all but passed out of her mind after so long having Ned for a friend. It had pained her to think of that hidden past between them on the morning when I found his body, the tractor’s wheels still turning in mid-air and Ned beneath it. She hated the idea that because of her there had been a secret between me and my friend that had lasted the rest of our lives. And she had wanted to tell me all about it there and then, but found she couldn’t, for fear I would leave her on her own.

  I stopped her talking then, crossed the room and held her and told her everything was all right, because I couldn’t bear to think she had ever been so afraid of me. I found her story extraordinary, but that was all. It changed nothing between me and her, altered nothing of any memory I had of Ned. Except that it made me think with some amazement that perhaps us young men of Martin had been right after all. Perhaps we had indeed been beautiful.

  The idea that I would ever have left Valerie alone in the world is physically painful to me. I always thought neither of us would ever be able to cope without the other, would barely be able to go on at all. And yet, of course, that is what has happened to me now, and it appears, for the moment at least, that it is a separation I can survive. It has hardly been a smooth progress – a woman has died today, after all – but I am still speeding away from the place where I left my wife. Are we really on our own in the world and only sometimes sharing the way with other people?

  MH: So you drove into Salisbury and you walked around?

  GS: Yes, that’s right.

  MH: Did you not have anyone you wanted to be with?

  GS: No. We never had any children.

  MH: No other friends or family?

  GS: When you get to my age most of your friends and your family tend to have gone on.

  We were never very good at keeping friends. Dinner parties weren’t our way of life. We knew everyone in Martin; we knew our world and did not venture beyond it. All the new relationships that came into our lives after the death of my mother, in fact, took far more curious routes than the traditional method of meeting and befriending and entertaining that other people seem to use to keep up the interest in their lives. After the time had passed when we could have had children, Valerie took up mothering every waif and stray that crossed our path, and that was the only way we really seemed to meet new people. This started with the boy who cut himself on the combine harvester. I was out in the fields when the first chapter of this story took place, so she told it to me later, when the moment of crisis had passed.

  The story as Valerie told it was that a town boy, out on a long bike ride, had stopped to eat his lunch on our farm and for some unfathomable reason decided to clamber around on the combine harvester. I can’t imagine what possessed him, looking back. I suppose there is the impulse in everyone to get up as high as you can and see what the view may be from the highest branch that will hold you. Anyway, this boy, we learned later that his name was Luke or Liam or something like that, when he had finished his ham sandwiches or bread and cheese or whatever it was he had to eat, had clambered up to sit on top of the cab of the combine, and from there had proceeded, by a slip or otherwise by his own idiocy, to fall into the blades. He cut his right hand a little and his right leg very badly at the ankle, so that he could see right down to the bone, and when he extracted himself found he was losing blood very quickly. The boy – I am sure it was Luke – was therefore presented with a dilemma. If he cycled for help he would lose blood faster, but if he waited where he was for someone to find him he might die sitting around. He made the wise decision to get on his bike and seek help, and the first place he came to was our house, where Valerie met him, led him into the kitchen, bound his leg and called an ambulance. The leg was all right and after a spell in hospital and a blood transfusion the boy was all right as well. I am wrong – his name was definitely Liam.

  Valerie received a letter of thanks from him a week later, and another from his parents, and must have replied with an invitation because the next week I came in from the fields to find this boy sitting talking with her in the kitchen. These visits continued for a little while. Valerie would cook a meal and ask Liam while we ate all together about his life, and he would tell her about his school, and what he did with his weekends. After six months he stopped coming to visit
us, but while it lasted I know she loved it very much. We never spoke about him again once he stopped visiting. We knew that boys grow up and tire of things, and let it remain undisturbed as one of her happy memories.

  Then there was the story of Rita, a woman who turned up in tears at our front door one afternoon and told us she had nowhere to stay in the world. Most people would perhaps be suspicious of such an introduction. Valerie did the Christian thing and put her up in the spare room. Then when Rita asked to camp on our land for a little while, Valerie agreed to it and lent her the tent we used to take on holiday to Lulworth in the rare years we found the time to get away. She had been through a lot; it was clear from the way she looked at the world she had seen a lot of trouble. She needed a helping hand to make her way back into the swing of everything, Valerie told me, and the least we could do was give her what she asked when it cost us so very little. Valerie tried to do more than that; in fact, told her she could keep on living in the spare room for as long as she liked, the room where we would have put our children if we had ever had them. Rita had shown by then that she wasn’t there to steal the silver, and we would have both been happy for her to stay in the house. She refused, smiling, and told us she would rather live outside for a little while, as long as it didn’t start snowing. And try to find her bearings. And live as close to the stars as possible without a roof to hide them from her.