by Jane Gardam
It was the best army house we had ever found. The posting to Hong Kong promised to be a short one. I had been there before and hated it—I hate crowded places—and I decided to stay behind alone.
He said, ‘But you will be alone, mind. The camp is a good way off and most people will have gone with us. It’s the North. You’ll make no friends. They take ten years to do more than wag their heads at you in the street up here. Now, are you sure?’
I said I was and I stayed and found that he was quite wrong. Within days, almost within hours of my miserable drive home from Darlington Station to see him off, I found that I was behaving as if I’d always known the people here and they were doing the same to me. I got home from the station and stopped the car outside my beautiful front door and sat still, thinking, ‘He has gone again. Again he has gone. What a marriage. Always alone. Shall I forget his face again? Like last time? Shall I begin to brood? Over-eat? Drink by myself in the evenings—rather more every evening? Shall I start tramping about the lanes pretending I like long walks?’ I sat there thinking and a great truculent female head with glaring eyes stuck itself through the car window.
‘D’you want some beans?’
‘Oh!’
‘Some beans? Stick beans?’
‘Oh I don’t—? Can you spare—?’
‘Beans, beans. Masses of beans. They’re growin’ out of me ears. Grand beans. Up to you.’
‘I’d love some beans.’
A sheaf of them was dumped on the seat beside me. ‘There’s plenty more. You’ve just to say. So ’e’s off then? The Captain?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, yer not to fret. There’s always a cup of tea at our place. Come rount back but wear yer wellies or you’ll get in a slather int yard.’
In the post office they asked kindly for news. Of how I was settling, of where I had come from. The vicar called. A man in a Land Rover with a kind face—the doctor—waved his hat. A woman in the ironmonger’s buying paraffin in gloves and a hat invited me to tea in a farmhouse the size of a mill with a ha-ha and a terrace at the back, gravel a foot thick and a thousand dahlias stalked like artillerymen and luminious with autumn. The tea cups must have been two hundred years old.
I was asked to small places too—a farm so isolated that the sheep and cows looked up aghast when I found my way to it, and the sheep-dogs nearly garrotted themselves on the end of hairy ropes.
‘You’ll be missin’ the Captain,’ the farmer’s wife said as she opened the door. Her accent was not the local one.
I said, ‘You talk differently,’ and she said, ‘Well, I would do. I come from Stennersceugh. It was a Danish settlement long since. It’s all of ten miles off.’
Never in my life had I had so much attention paid to me by strangers, nor been told so many intimate things from the heart—of marriages, love and death; of children or the lack of them, fears of sickness, pregnancy; of lost loves and desperate remedies. Three old ladies living by the church, I heard, drank three crates of sherry a week (‘It’s the chemist delivers’). A husband had ‘drowned ’isself in Ash Beck for fear of a thing growing out of the side of his head’.
There seemed to be total classlessness, total acceptance, offence only taken if you gave yourself airs, offered money in return for presents or didn’t open your door wide enough at the sound of every bell. There was a certain amount of derision at bad management—‘She never gets out to the shops till twelve o’clock.’ ‘She hasn’t had them curtains down in a twelvemonth’—but I met no violence, no hatred. There were threats of ‘bringin’ me gun’ to walkers on the fells with unleashed dogs, but not one farmer in ten possessed a gun or would have known how to use if he had. Language addressed to animals was foul and unrefined, ringing over the fells and sheep dips and clipping sheds—but bore no relation to conversation with humans or at any rate not with me. ‘Come ’ere yer bloody, buggerin’ little— ’ello there, Mrs. Bainbridge, now. Grand day. Comin’ over for yer tea then?’
Alan had told me that when he came home I’d be used to my tea as my supper and then more tea just before bedtime and I would forget how to cook a steak. However he was wrong again, because it had been dinner I had been invited to at Mealbeck the night of the waving woman, and a much better dinner than I’d ever have got in Aldershot.
Mealbeck is the big Gothic house of two sisters—a magnificent cold, turretted, slightly idiotic house, something between the Brighton Pavilion and the Carpathians. We ate not in a corner of it but the corner of a corner, passing from the tremendous door, over flagged halls, a great polar-bearskin rug and down a long cold passage. At the end was a little room which must once have been the housekeeper’s and crammed into it among the housekeeper’s possessions—a clock, a set of bells, a little hat-stand, a photograph of servants like rows of suet dumplings, starched and stalwart and long ago dead—were a Thomas Lawrence, photographs by Lenare and haunted Ypres faces in 1914 khaki. On the housekeeper’s old table where she must have handed out the wages was some fine silver and glass fit for emperors.
Good wine, too. The sisters, Millicent and Gertie, knew their wine. They also knew their scotch and resorted to it wordlessly after the best pheasant and lemon pudding I think I’ve ever eaten.
I said, ‘Oh this has been lovely. Lovely.’ We stood under the green moon that did not so much light the fells as isolate them in the long clean lines of the faded day.
‘You are from Sussex,’ said Millicent. ‘You must find this very bare.’
‘It’s wonderful. I love it.’
‘I hope you’ll stay the winter,’ said Gertie. ‘And I hope you’ll come here soon again.’
The two of them walked, not too steadily to the iron gates and I roared off in the little Fiat down the drive and out on to the fell, between the knobbly blocks of the stone walls flashing up in the car lights. I felt minute between the long lines snaking away, the long low undecorated horizon, the clear hard pencil lines cut with a very sharp hard point. Gigantic lamp-eyes of sheep now and then came shining into the headlights. It was midnight. I did not meet a single car between Mealbeck and Naresby and the road rippled up and down, narrow and sweeping and black and quiet. I thought of Alan in Hong Kong. It would be breakfast time. I wished he were with me. Then I forgot him in the emptiness of the road under the moon and the great encircling ball of the stars.
I went flying through High Thwaite, hurtling through Low Thwaite and the same landscape spread out still in front of me—endlessly deserted, not a light in any cottage, not a dog barking, not a cry of a bird. It was just after what appeared to be the loneliest part of the road that I took a corner rather faster than I should and saw the woman standing in her garden and waving at me with a slow decorous arm. You could see from the moonlight that her head was piled up high with queenly hair. I think I was about two miles on before I really took this in and I was so shaken by it that I stopped the car.
I was not many miles from home now—my village, my new house, my heavy safe front door. The road had dropped low to a humped bridge, and after a moment when I had switched off the engine I could hear the clear quick brown water running deep and noisy below it. I thought, ‘There can’t have been anyone. I’m drunk.’
I got out of the car and walked about. It was cold. I stood on the bridge. Apart from the noise of the beck everything was absolutely quiet. There was not a light from any house in any direction. Down here by the beck I could see no horizons, not the fell’s edge, not even the sweet nibbled grass beside the road. The air smelled clean like fresh sheets.
This was the pedlar’s road. For five hundred years, they had walked it with packs of ribbons and laces and buttons and medicines, and a great many of them according to all the stories had been murdered for them or disappeared in the snow in winter—often not found until Martinmas. If my car doesn’t start now, I thought I shall be very much alone.
Had the woman been asking
for help? I wondered whether to go back. I felt absolutely certain—and it is amazing how much even at midnight under only the palest moon the eye can know from the angle of a moving arm—that she hadn’t.
She had been waving kindly. Not afraid. Not asking. Not even beckoning. She had been waving in some sort of recognition.
I had never been so frightened in my life.
‘I went to Mealbeck last night.’
‘Y’d get a fair plateful there.’
‘Yes.’
‘And a fair skinful.’
‘We—yes. Lovely wine.’
‘Wine, eh? And mebbe a tot?’
‘I had a lovely time. They’re very nice. Very kind.’
‘That’s right. They’re kind. Home boozers. Did you get back safe? They say the police sits outside Mealbeck when there’s entertaining. When they can spare’t time.’
‘I’m not saying anything against them’
‘That’s right then.’ He—it was the farmer who had the demented dogs and whose wife came from the Danish settlement—he looked satisfied. I could see he had been wondering if I was too fancy to answer back. ‘They’re all right. Old Gertie and Millicent. There’s nowt amiss wi’ them. Did you have a fair drive home?’
‘Fair,’ I said. ‘One thing wasn’t though. I passed a place— I saw a ghost.’
‘Oh aye. Y’d see half a dozen after a night out at Mealbeck.’
‘No, I don’t think it was that. I saw someone at a gate. It was a woman waving.’
‘Oh aye.’
‘Well—it was nearly one o’clock in the morning.’
‘Did yer stop?’ He was clipping. The sheep was taut between his legs, its yellow eyes glaring. The clippers snapped deep into the dirty heathery wool.
‘Well, no. I didn’t believe it till I was miles past. It took a minute. Then I thought I’d dreamed. Dropped asleep.’
‘Woman was it? Dark-haired?’
‘I didn’t see the colour. Just the shape.’
‘Did yer go on back?’
‘No—well. She didn’t seem to be in trouble or anything. I hope I did right. Not going back.’
He said nothing till the fleece of the sheep fell away and the animal sprang out of his clutches like a soul released and slithered dizzily light into the yard.
‘Watch now or yer’ll get yerself hiked,’ he said as I stood clear. ‘The Missus’ll have a pot of tea if you fancy it.’
‘Was it a ghost?’
‘Missus!’
She appeared at the door and looked pleased to see me—this really was a wonderfully friendly country—‘Kettle’s on,’ she called. ‘I hear yer’ve bin gallivanting at the Hall.’
‘Was it a ghost?’ I asked again before I went in to tea.
‘I’d not think so,’ he said.
I went back along the road the very next day and at first I could find no sign of the house at all. Or at any rate I could not decide which one it was. The fell that had looked so bare at night, by daylight could be seen to be dotted with crumpled, squat little stone farms, their backs turned to the view, two trees to each to form a wind-break, grey with white stone slabs to the window and only a tall spire of smoke to show they were occupied. It was not the townsfolk-country-cottage belt so that there was not much white paint about, lined curtains, urns on yard walls—and any one of several little isolated farms could have been the eerie one. In the end I turned back and found the bridge where I’d stopped. I got out of the car again as I had before, and walked back a mile or two until I came to a lane going alongside a garden end. All I could see from the road was the garden end—a stone wall and a gate quite high up above me and behind that a huge slab-stoned roof so low that the farmhouse must have been built deep down in a dip.
Now nobody stood at the gate—more of a look-out post, a signalling post above the road. There were tangled flowers behind it. There was no excuse for me to go up the lane that must have led to the house and it was not inviting. I thought of pretending to have lost my way or asking for a drink of water but these things you grow out of doing. I might perhaps just ask if there were eggs for sale. This was quite usual. Yet I hung back because the lane was dark and overgrown. I sat down instead on a rickety milk platform meant for churns but all stuck through with nettles and which hardly took my weight. It must have been years since any churn was near it. I sat there in the still afternoon and nobody passed.
Then I felt I was being watched. There was no sound or snapping twig, no breathing and no branch stirred but I looked quickly up and into a big bewildered face, mouth a little open, large bright mooning eyes. The hair was waved deeply like an old Vogue photograph and the neckline of the dress was rounded, quite high with a string of pearls. The hands of the woman were on the wall and I think they were gloved—neat pretty kid gloves. The trappings of the whole figure were all the very soul of order and confidence. The figure itself, however, almost yearned with uncertainty and loss.
‘Whatever time is it?’ she said.
‘About three o’clock.’ I found I had stood up and turned to face her. For all the misery in the face there were the relics of unswervable good manners which demanded good manners back; as well as a quite curious sensation, quite without visible foundation, that this body, this dotty half-bemused memsahib had once commanded respect, inspired good sense.
‘It’s just after three,’ I said again.
‘Oh, good gracious—good gracious.’ She turned with a funny, bent movement feeling for the wall to support her as she moved away. The face had not been an old woman’s but the stance, the tottering walk were ancient. The dreadful sense of loss, the melancholy, were so thick in the air that there was almost a smell, a sick smell of them.
She was gone, and utterly silently, as if I had slept for a moment in the sunshine and had a momentary dream. She had seemed like a shade, a classical Greek shade, though why I should think of ancient Greece in bleak North Westmorland I did not know.
As I stood looking up at the gate there was a muffled urgent plunging noise and round the bend of the road came sheep—a hundred of them with a shepherd and two dogs. The sheep shouldered each other, fussing, pushing, a stream of fat fleeces pressed together, eyes sharp with pandemonium. The dogs were happily tearing about. The shepherd walked with long steps behind. The sheep new-clipped filled the road like snow. They stopped when they saw me, then when they were yelled at came on careering drunkenly round me, surrounding me and I stood knee deep in them and the flat blank rattle of bleats, the smell of sheep dip and dog and man—and petrol, for when I looked beyond I found a Land Rover had been crawling behind and at the wheel the doctor with the tweed hat was sitting laughing.
He said, ‘Well! You look terrified.’
‘They were so sudden.’
‘They’ll not hurt you.’
‘No. I know—just they were so—quiet. They broke in—’
‘Broke in?’
‘To the silence. It’s very—silent here, isn’t it?’ I was inane.
He got down from the car and came round near me. ‘You’ve not been here long, have you? We haven’t been introduced. I’m the doctor.’
‘I know. I’m—’
‘Yes. I know too. And we’re to know each other better. We’re both to go dining out at the good sisters’ in a week or so. I gather we’re not supposed to know it yet. We are both supposed to be lonely.’
I said how could one be lonely here? I had made friends so fast.
‘Some are,’ he said. ‘Who aren’t born to it. Not many. It’s always all right at first.’ We both looked together towards the high gate and he said, ‘Poor Rose. My next patient. Not that I expect to be let in.’
‘Is she—?’
‘A daughter of the regiment like yourself. Well, I mustn’t discuss patients. I call on her now and then.’
He walked up the s
ide lane waving the tweed hat and left me. As he reached the point where the little lane bent out of sight he turned and cheerfully waved again, and I turned too and walked the two miles back to my car. As I reached it the Land Rover passed me going very fast and the doctor made no signal and I could not see his face. I thought he must be reckless to drive at that lick on a sheep-strewn road but soon forgot it in the pleasure of the afternoon—the bright fire I’d light at home and the smell of wood smoke and supper with a book ahead. No telephone, thank God. As I turned into my yard I found I was very put out to see Mrs. Metcalfe coming across it with yet another great basket of beans.
‘Tek ’em or leave ’em,’ she said. ‘But we’ve more than we’ll want and they’ll just get the worm in. Here, you could do wi’ a few taties too from the look of you. Oh aye—and I’ve just heard. That daft woman up near Mealbeck. She’s dead. The doctor’s just left her. Or I hear tell. She hanged herself.’
It was no story.
Or rather it is the most detestable, inadmissable story. For I don’t yet know half the facts and I don’t feel I want to invent any. It would be a story so easy to improve upon. There are half a dozen theories about poor Rose’s hanging and half a dozen about the reason for her growing isolation and idleness and seclusion. There is only one view about her character though, and that is odd because the whole community in the fells and dales survives on firmly-grounded assessment of motives and results; the gradations and developments of character are vital to life and give validity to passing years. Reputations change and rise and fall. But Rose—Rose had always been very well-liked and had very much liked living here. Gertie and Millicent said she had fitted in round here as if she were country born. She had been one of the few southerners they said who had seemed to belong. She had loved the house—a queer place. It had been the heart of a Quaker settlement. Panes of glass so thick you could hardly see out. She had grown more and more attached to it. She didn’t seem able to leave it in the end.