by James Wilson
The rain was falling continuously now, and with almost every step I took it seemed to become fiercer and more insistent. By the time I had passed the cottages it was an unremitting onslaught, jabbing my eyes and stinging my cheeks and working its way relentlessly through the seams of my coat and boots. If I kept going, I knew I should be drenched to the skin long before I could reach the haven of the Railway Inn.
Looking around for somewhere to shelter, I spotted the dark bulk of the church porch. The lych-gate was still some way ahead; but it was easy enough to scramble over the low wall, and take a short-cut through the jungle of headstones. The porch was unlit, so I had to grope my way on to the stone bench running along the side. As I did so, my hand brushed against something that felt like a cut flower. I picked it up, and gave an oof of pain as a thorn embedded itself in my fingertip.
I held it to my nose. Yes: it was an unseasonal rose. For an instant, as I smelled it, time dissolved, and I glimpsed soft summer shadows on a golden lawn, and caught the distant squeals of a playing child, and had the odd sense that any second I should see her jump out from her hiding-place, and run laughing towards me. So desperate was I to hold on to the vision that I leaned back against a wall-beam and shut my eyes, to stop it from bleeding away into the darkness.
The next moment, from no more than five feet away, I heard a soft intake of breath.
I sat up so abruptly that the rough wood grazed my neck. A woman’s voice said:
‘The vicar’s in the church, you know.’
I peered into the depths of the porch, but my eyes still weren’t sufficiently accustomed to the gloom to see anything. The woman, however, could evidently see me: her tone had been assertive – as if she feared I might attack her, and was letting me know that she could summon help if I tried.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m glad to hear it. On balance, that’s pretty much where you’d want a vicar to be, isn’t it?’
There was a short silence, followed by a snuffling sound that might have been a stifled giggle. Then she asked:
‘Do you know him?’
‘No, I’m afraid not. I’ve never set foot in this place before in my life. But I don’t doubt he’s a splendid fellow.’
‘I hope so.’
‘For any particular reason? Or just from a very creditable concern for the well-being of the church in general?’
She did not reply. Though I still couldn’t see her, I sensed her tortoising further back into the blackness. I flourished the rose, and said:
‘Is this your flower?’
‘Yes. I must have dropped it.’ Her intonation was flat, squashed to a monotone by some heavy weight. ‘Did you hurt yourself with it?’
‘Oh, just gave my finger a little jab, that’s all.’
‘I’m sorry, it was careless of me. May I have it, please?’
I held it towards her. A hand appeared to take it. For the first time, I glimpsed the murky silhouette of a high-collared coat, and a pale blob of a face. Then they diffused into the gloom again.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘A lovely scent.’
She said nothing. But I could hear her delicately sniffing it – and then the start of a sob, which she quickly strangled.
There was, of course, only one remotely likely reason why a solitary woman would bring a hot-house flower to a country churchyard on a damp February evening – and good manners plainly demanded that I should avoid alluding to it. So I was startled to hear myself suddenly saying – as if someone who had never learned good manners had taken control of my vocal cords:
‘Your parents, is it?’
‘No.’ She paused, and I wondered if I had offended her. But the instant she went on again, I knew I hadn’t. The load had lifted from her voice: she sounded surprised, certainly, at the frankness of my question; but relieved, too, that it allowed her to be equally frank herself.
‘The truth is, I haven’t a clue where my parents are buried. Or if they’re buried anywhere at all. They may both still be alive, for all I know.’
‘Do you mean to say that you’ve … completely lost touch with them?’
‘I never knew them.’
‘Heavens,’ I said. ‘But surely there must be some way you could find out? Somebody you could ask?’
I could hear the stirring of her clothes, and feel a whiffle of cold air as she shrugged. ‘They’ve shown no interest in me. Why should I be interested in them?’
First talking dogs, murmured the critic from his box. Now soul-baring strangers.
‘Hm,’ I said. ‘Well, of course, I don’t know the circumstances … But if for no other reason, I’d have thought – well, just out of simple curiosity.’
‘I was curious for a long time. You can’t imagine the stories I told myself. I’d been stolen by gypsies, and my grieving parents were even then scouring the country, looking for me. Or my mother was a grand duchess in the Balkans, who hadn’t wanted to part with me, but had been forced to by her wicked uncle, so he could seize the throne for himself.’
She paused.
‘But would a grand duchy have a throne?’ I said, blurting out the first thing that came into my head, merely to keep her talking. ‘And if it did, could a daughter inherit it?’
She gave a broken-glass little laugh. ‘That’s the advantage of stories, isn’t it? They don’t have to bear any relation to reality at all.’
An odd gargling sound erupted in my throat, which I tried – and failed – to turn into a cough. I was saved only by a sudden bluster of wind outside, which set the trees cracking and creaking, and hurled a ferocious scattershot of rain on to the paving stones, turning them into a spitting lake.
‘Goodness,’ I said. ‘The old gods are in a taking about something tonight.’
She drew in a long unsteady breath, that sounded like a series of hiccoughs.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘Would you like my coat? It isn’t awfully dry, I’m afraid, or awfully clean, but it’ll help to keep the cold out.’
‘Oh, that’s very kind of you, but really …’ But her jaw was quivering so much that she sounded as if she were biting the words rather than saying them.
‘Come on.’ I removed it, and held it out to her. After a moment she relented, and edged closer – her face still hidden, and her back turned towards me. As I draped the coat round her shoulders, the substantiality of her body, even through so many layers, took me by surprise. Not that it was large: it felt, on the contrary, delicately-framed and slender. But there seemed to be a kind of super-solidity about it – as if it were made not of flesh, but of gold.
‘Thank you,’ she said. And then, as she retreated again, huddling the coat around her, I heard a fastidious sniff.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve barely taken it off for three days. And last night I was sleeping under the stars, so it had to do duty as my blanket, too.’
‘Why?’
‘Ah, well, now, there’s a question.’ I sighed, and cleared my throat. ‘Home, you might say, lost its power to hold me. The hearth was reduced to cold ashes. And nothing I could do would warm them up again.’
She hesitated a moment. ‘Because of your wife, is it?’
For a fraction of a second I was dumbfounded by her directness. Then I remembered the way I had spoken to her.
‘My wife, yes, I suppose that’s part of it,’ I said.
‘Oh, dear, has she –?’
‘Oh, no, not that, she’s still very much alive. Or was, at any rate, the last time I heard. But we’re – we’re not awfully close any more. Actually, that any more’s a bit redundant. We’ve never been awfully close, that’s the truth of it. We just muddled along, a bit like England and Germany, eyeing each other suspiciously across the North Sea of the dining-room table.’
She laughed again – more gently, this time. ‘So why did you get married?’
‘Well … It seemed the thing. People do, don’t they?’
‘Yes.’ There was a kind of unsurprised acceptance i
n the way she said it that made me think her case might not be very different.
‘Not that I blame her. It’s at least as much my fault as hers. A perfect stranger would have seen at a glance that we were destined to make each other unhappy. We just didn’t see it ourselves, for some reason – until the first morning of our honeymoon, when I suggested a cliff-top walk, and she favoured an expedition to the shops, followed by a saunter along the sea-front, and tea in front of the bandstand. And we’ve gone on in much the same vein ever since. Which is why I’m here, and she’s staying with her brother in Hove.’
‘Oh, dear.’ She laughed – but with so much ruefulness, that it was almost a confession.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘This is a queer business, isn’t it? Two people meet by chance in a church porch. Neither of them really knows what the other looks like – let alone what he – or she – is called. And yet in no time at all they’re talking like old friends. More than old friends. Well, in my case, anyway. My closest pal’s a chap called Cyril Jessop, and I couldn’t have this kind of conversation with him. Or with anyone else, for that matter.’
I paused. After a second she said:
‘Moi non plus.’
‘So should we introduce ourselves, do you think?’
The idea appeared to surprise her.
‘Yes, I suppose we should, shouldn’t we?’
‘My name’s Corley Roper.’
I was braced for the inevitable: ‘Not the Corley Roper, surely?’ But she merely replied:
‘I’m Mary Wilson.’
‘How do you do?’
Our hands briefly touched, before withdrawing into their own worlds. For a few seconds, neither of us spoke. Then, falteringly, she began:
‘And why … how …?’
‘Did England and Germany finally fall out?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah, well.’ I hesitated. But having already revealed more to her than I had to any other living person, there seemed little point in now clinging – as it were – to my last few undergarments. So I showed myself in all my nakedness:
‘We lost our child.’
She said nothing. But at that instant I knew, from the sudden flutter of her breathing, that she had lost hers, too, and that that was why she was here.
‘You’d have thought it might perhaps have brought us closer together again,’ I said. ‘But it had the opposite effect.’
‘Why, does she hold you responsible in some way?’
‘For … Elspeth’s dying? No, I don’t think so. But she – my wife’s – interested in spiritualism, you see. And I think it’s pure humbug, I’m afraid. I did, finally, reluctantly agree to go to one séance with her, after …You know … But I simply couldn’t bear it. The dark, and the suffocating warmth, and all that cheap flummery. The thought that my daughter, whom I’d held on my knee, should be reduced to trying to communicate with us like that … It was worse than simply accepting that she’d gone, and there was an end of it.’
The woman whimpered.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to …’ I hesitated. Then, so softly that it came out as a whisper, I asked:
‘Was yours a boy or a girl?’
‘A boy.’
‘How old?’
‘Nothing at all. He was still-born. Strangled by his own … his own …’
I reached into the darkness and found her hand again.
‘What a dreadful thing. I’m sorry.’
‘You can’t bury a still-born baby,’ she said. ‘Not in consecrated ground. Because he hasn’t been baptized. So they just took the body away, and …’ She swallowed hard to suppress a sob. ‘I don’t know what they did with it. But I managed to save a lock of his hair. And I wanted to put it over there, under the yew tree. Only there seemed to be a constant stream of people. Families leaving flowers on graves. A grave-digger digging a new one. So I sat here all afternoon, reading my book, hoping no one would notice me, and looking out every few minutes, to see if the coast was clear.’
‘Heavens! You must be frozen!’
‘Yes,’ she said, in a flat, dismissive voice that suggested physical discomfort was her usual condition, and she was surprised I should even bother to mention it. ‘And then, just when everyone had finally gone and I at last got my trowel out, the vicar turned up.’
‘Ah, and what, he objected, did he?’
‘I didn’t give him a chance to. I slipped everything back into my bag, and tried to look as if I’d just wandered in to admire the architecture.’ She gave a little huff of derision. ‘And it must have been a pretty convincing performance, I think, because I was rewarded with a twenty-minute lecture on ogees and trefoil windows. And then, of course, no sooner had he finally gone inside than the heavens opened, and I had to take refuge in here again to avoid being drowned. As it is, my hat’s ruined.’
There was something unnerving in the way her tone had shifted from grief to sarcasm, without her apparently being aware of it – as if she found it hard to differentiate between the loss of her child and the arrival of the vicar and the onset of the rain, and saw them all merely as ploys of a vindictive life that was determined to spite her at every turn.
‘Do you not think’, I said, as gently as I could, ‘that it might have been better simply to tell him the truth? My guess is you’d have probably found him quite sympathetic. I mean, this isn’t the middle ages, is it –?’
‘No!’ she said, so forcefully that it cannoned off the stone walls. The noise seemed to startle her as much as it had me. She gave a gasp of surprise. Then, almost sheepishly, as if she feared she might have offended the spirits of the dead lying all around us, she said: ‘The thing is, you see, it isn’t as if I’ve any right to be here. It isn’t even my parish.’
‘Oh, really? Then why did you choose it?’
‘Well …When I was a girl, I was at school in Southsea. And one of the mistresses had a cottage here, and sometimes I’d spend some of the holidays with her. So –’
She stopped abruptly. The clock in the church tower was striking the quarter. When it had finished, she said:
‘You didn’t by any chance happen to see a motor-car on your way here, did you?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Oh, it’s only that there should be one coming for me soon.’
She stirred, as if she were preparing to venture out to look for it. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’ll hear it, won’t we?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘We will,’ I said. And then, without giving her time to reply: ‘So, anyway, you were happy?’
‘Hm? Oh, here, you mean. Yes, yes – the happiest I’ve ever been anywhere in my life.’ She pondered for a moment. ‘The only place I’ve really been happy.’
‘Well, that’s easy enough to understand, at any rate. The downs are the best of England, pretty near.’
‘Yes, I think so.’ She paused for a moment, and I heard an odd grating noise, as if she were slowly scratching the stone with her fingernail. ‘All the time I was abroad, whenever I tried to picture home, this is what used to come into my head. You know: the grass, and the wild flowers, and the sheep …’
‘I do know,’ I said. ‘And the glorious loneliness. And the feeling that any moment you might stumble on a fairy ring, or a sleeping giant –’
‘Yes. And the rabbits. That was what I liked best. There was a big warren about half a mile above the house. I’d go there almost every day, and sit and watch them scuttling in and out of their burrows. They were frightened at first, but if you kept still they’d soon get used to your being there. I even persuaded myself I could recognize some of them, and gave them names, and pretended they were my friends.’
A blade seemed to slip between my lower ribs. I hunched forward, but managed to keep myself from crying out.
‘There was one – or I thought it was just one, anyway – Alexander, I called him – who seemed to be the old grandfather of the family. And I was convinced he could remember me from one year t
o the next, and was glad to see me. Stupid, of course. It was probably a different animal every time.’
‘Not stupid,’ I said, between gritted teeth. ‘Perfectly understandable.’
‘No.’ Then she registered the change in my voice, and paused for a second or two, trying to interpret it. ‘What’s the matter? Have I upset you?’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘You must forgive me. It just so happens that I’m rather in flight from friendly rabbits at the moment.’
‘Oh, oh, I’m sorry.’ But it was too hasty, and said with a kind of sulky resignation that directed the feeling to her predicament rather than to mine – as if it was just her luck to pick the one subject that would offend me, and she really should have known better than to open her mouth at all.
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘you couldn’t possibly have realized. The truth is, I’m afraid, that I’ve just spent far too much time with them. Whenever my life’s proved too troublesome, I’ve simply taken refuge in theirs. Only now it’s failed me. The sanctuary has been violated.’
I heard the soft whisper of my coat as she started to shift position, and assumed she must be edging nervously away. But then, just as I was about to try to explain myself, her face swam out of the darkness towards me. It was small and pale and heart-shaped, with a long nose and straight black eyebrows that looked as if they’d been pencilled on in charcoal. It was not exactly beautiful; but for some reason – perhaps just that, having entertained so many possibilities about her appearance, it was a shock to find them all suddenly reduced to a single concrete reality – the sight of it seemed to knock the wind from me like a blow to the stomach.
‘Your child, do you mean?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I stammered.
‘What, you used to make up stories for –?’
‘Yes. Well, I don’t know about make up. I never felt I was inventing anything, exactly. It was more like drawing aside a curtain in my own head, and leading her through into the world of Alcuin Hare, and Mr. Largo Frog, and their friends the Coneys.’
Her brow creased in puzzlement.
‘Coney?’ I said. ‘A fine old English word. Pretty much banished from polite society these days, though you still sometimes find country people using it. It’s wirier than rabbit. And not so babyish as bunny. Anyway, that’s where we went, whenever she was ill or upset. And it always worked. Because, of course, it was a magical place, where nothing could be amiss for long.’