by James Wilson
I sensed her starting to edge towards me. I looked up at her, and smiled. She hesitated, then settled herself on the trunk, no more than a couple of yards from me, to listen.
‘It turned out to be the light from a small game-keeper’s cottage, standing all by itself in a clearing,’ I said. ‘I knocked on the door. A young man appeared, who said he was just leaving and would be happy to show me the quickest way to the nearest village. He led me through a queer old overgrown gateway into a beautiful rolling park, where the grass shone silver in the moonlight. Half-way across it he said: “I must leave you here. But if you continue straight you’ll come to a drive that will lead you out on to the road.”’
I turned towards her. She was sitting hunched forward, her hands pressed together, her mouth half-open.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘What happened?’
‘I followed his directions, and they brought me into the village, exactly as he had said. But just as I got there, it started to rain – not just a shower, but a biblical deluge – and I decided to take shelter in the church porch. It was completely dark by this point, but I could see just far enough inside to make out the end of a stone bench where I could sit and wait out the storm.
‘As I groped my way in, I felt something brush against my hand. I picked it up, and found it was a rose – a cut rose, in February! It smelt wonderful – but when I held it to my nose, one of the thorns jabbed my finger, and I let out a cry of pain.’
Her anticipation was palpable. I could feel it prickling my cheek like a rash. I paused, playing out the line for a moment, then started to reel it in again:
‘Naturally, I had assumed I was quite alone. So you can imagine my astonishment when the next moment, out of the darkness, no further away from me than you are now, I heard a woman’s voice speaking to me.’
‘Oh!’ she gasped, shrinking back and putting a hand over her mouth. ‘Was it a ghost?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It was a real woman. She’d come in to take refuge from the rain, as I had.’
Her shoulders slumped – half with relief, and half with disappointment. ‘Ah.’
‘But there was a mystery about her, nonetheless.’
‘Really?’
I nodded. ‘The flower was hers, it seemed. I held it towards her, and a hand appeared from the darkness to take it. I could hear her sob as she sniffed it, so I asked her if she had brought it to put on her parents’ grave?
‘“No,” she said. “I’ve no idea where my parents are buried – or even if they are alive or dead.”’
I leaned forward, consolidating my grip on Largo’s collar. But it was an unnecessary precaution: she clearly still had no inkling where I was leading her.
‘So who was the rose for?’ she asked impatiently.
‘For her son. He was still-born, so he couldn’t have a proper funeral. But she had saved a lock of his hair, and wanted to bury it in the churchyard.’
‘Oh, the poor woman.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Only there were too many people there, so she hadn’t been able to. So in the end I said I’d bury it for her.’
I suddenly remembered the smell of the damp earth, and its pliancy beneath my fingers as I pressed it down on the box. I shut my eyes, trying desperately again to summon up the child, to make him incarnate for long enough to be a witness to the dénouement of the journey we had embarked on together that evening.
‘And did you?’ she asked.
It was no good: he was still obstinately coiled away in his hiding-place. I opened my eyes again. ‘Yes. But that wasn’t the end of it. Afterwards I found myself … haunted, you could say –’
‘By him, you mean?’
‘By both of them. By the situation.’
She nodded. ‘Well, of course … For a mother … The loss of a child is the most dreadful thing that can happen.’ She shivered, and clasped her hands about her knees.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘For a father, too. But for this woman it wasn’t just an isolated horror. It was symptomatic of her entire existence.’ I hesitated, considering how much more I could say without making it obvious whom I was talking about. The answer, I decided, was very little: the enchantment would start to fade soon, and then it could only be a matter of time before she deduced why I was here. So, lame though I knew it sounded, I added simply:
‘Or that’s how she felt it, anyway.’
She nodded. Then, glancing down, and busying herself with straightening her coat, she said quietly:
‘I think I can understand that more easily than you might imagine, Mr. Roper.’
Had she guessed already? I couldn’t be sure. But I forced myself not to show my anxiety by looking at her.
‘Well, I’m sorry to hear it,’ I said. ‘But – forgive me if this seems impertinent – you at least have other children to console you. This woman has nothing. I’d defy anyone to see such unhappiness and not feel moved to try to alleviate it, if they could.’
I heard the rustle of her clothes as she re-settled herself on the tree. ‘And can you?’
‘I can’t. But I think I know how it could be done. With someone else’s help.’
‘Well, that’s very noble of you, Mr. Roper,’ she said, getting up abruptly. ‘And I wish you luck. I must be going in now. Come on, Largo!’
He tried to follow her, but I pressed him down and closed my hands around his neck.
‘Mrs. Cooper,’ I said. ‘Please don’t imagine I am judging you. I know only too well, believe me, how easy it is to make mistakes. My own life is a catalogue of them. My only reason in coming here is to appeal to you, as one flawed human being to another, to –’
She darted towards me suddenly, snapping the leash again. For a second I thought she was going to hit me with it; but instead she bent down, brushing my face with her hat, and began fumbling the clasp back on to the dog’s collar.
‘Do you not think, in all honesty,’ I whispered, trying to turn our brief awkward proximity into a kind of intimacy, ‘that it would be a relief to you?’
She was quiet for a moment. Perhaps, I thought, against all the odds, I had winged her with my last shot. But then, squaring her shoulders like a boxer, she said softly:
‘Please let Largo go, Mr. Roper.’
I let him go. She got up and started towards the wicket at a regal pace that challenged me to try to overtake her. After she had gone thirty yards or so she wheeled round and called:
‘What you want me to do is quite impossible.’
Then she turned again, and continued to the gate without looking back.
XVIII
Alice Dangerfield had warned me I should fail. I had known it myself, rationally. And yet, however hard you try to imagine how the world will appear to you when the last thread of hope has gone and the thing you fear established itself as irrevocable fact, it is impossible. I had prepared myself for deep despair or guilty relief, but in the event I felt neither – only the flat, fatalistic sense you get as a child when, at the end of the summer, reality finally breaks in, and you’re waiting for the train that will take you back to school. There was the same sense of desolation; the same unaccustomed hardness in the air, making it sound as if the boots clacking along the platform had all been soled in concrete; the same sense that all the light and shadow in the world had been averaged out to a dull warship grey.
My first thought, naturally enough, was that I ought to go to see Mary Wilson again; but after a few minutes’ reflection I realized that I was under no obligation to tell her what I had learned. She might, of course, be gratified that someone cared enough for her to take so much trouble on her behalf; but discovering the depth of her mother’s indifference to her could only leave her feeling more unwanted and abandoned than ever.
What I should do instead, I finally decided – not with much enthusiasm – was go home, and take a few days to recover from my fruitless quest before starting to consider my future. To reassure my wife that I had no intention of laying claim to the house, or of intruding p
ermanently on her life again, I sent her a telegram, warning her of my arrival, but saying I should not be staying long, and asking her to tell Chieveley to make up the bunk in the cabin. She must have received it, because the gardener’s boy was waiting for me at the station with the trap. But when we got home, Chieveley greeted me at the door with the news that she wasn’t there, but had gone to stay with her brother.
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘When did she leave?’
‘This afternoon, sir. Luke dropped her when he came to meet you.’
‘Ah. That’s a bit of a … Did she arrange this a long time ago, do you know?’
‘I’m afraid I couldn’t say, sir.’
‘Well, when did she tell you about it?’
‘Just this morning, sir.’
I expected to find a note in the cabin, saying when she would be back; but there was nothing from her at all. Apart from the freshly-made bed, in fact, the place appeared exactly as I had left it, so that when I went inside, I had the eerie sense that I was entering a photograph from some earlier stage of my own life.
I was past feeling hurt by Violet’s behaviour, but I was troubled by it. My intention had been to concede her demand for a permanent separation – asking, in return, only that she should allow me a grace period of a week or two in which to make the necessary arrangements. But her sudden flight suggested that the idea of my being there at all had become intolerable to her, and that the best I could hope for would be a return to the prickly armed truce under which we had lived before I had embarked on my adventure. Even that, in fact, seemed optimistic now.
I was too tired to do anything that night, but the next morning I finally settled down at my desk and forced myself to take stock of my situation. It was, I soon concluded, quite lamentable – and, what was worse, almost entirely of my own making. I was like a man who deliberately turns his back on the sun to walk headlong into driving rain. I had squandered time and money I could not afford in a doomed attempt to save a poor lost woman who had not asked for my help, and to accommodate myself to a wife who only wanted to be rid of me. In doing so, I had neglected my true gift – and my one practical hope of earning a living again – and systematically ignored the advice of my real friends, and those who wished me well.
It suddenly struck me that perhaps Alice Dangerfield had been right: my inability to write had been nothing more than a kind of temporary paralysis, brought on by grief – and it was my failure to understand that it was only temporary that had sent me blundering off so blindly in the wrong direction. And, if that were the case, perhaps it was not too late to go back, and pick up the path I had foolishly abandoned then.
I opened the drawer in my desk, and started to gather up the story I had been working on when Elspeth had died – but one glimpse of the words Little Mouse was enough to make me drop it back again. It was asking too much of my own fortitude to start there. Better to try to reintroduce myself to the business of being an author more gently, by embarking on something new.
I picked up my pen, took a fresh notebook from the cabinet, turned to the first page, and settled back in my chair to stare at it. For a long time nothing happened, and I began to wonder if, after all, the old magic had really deserted me. But then I felt a familiar shiver tightening my skin, and saw an image, like the faint impression left by a traced drawing, form itself on the whiteness: a caravan.
There: I still didn’t know who the hero was, or why he was doing it, or whom he would meet along the way; but of one thing I was already certain: he would go on a journey in a caravan.
I started to scribble some notes about the adventures he would have: sharing a picnic with a family of new-found friends in a meadow; meeting a strange old woman (or was she a bird?) who lived in a hut in the woods woven from the tendrils of creepers; finding a map buried under a tree, and following the route it showed, down winding lanes scented with wild garlic and over a queer crooked bridge, until he reached …What? I couldn’t say, yet. But that didn’t trouble me: scattered and incomplete though they were, these few ideas had the authentic, fecund feel – how exhilarating to experience it again! – of seeds that would grow while my attention was elsewhere, so that when I went back to them again I should find they had worked themselves into a story of their own accord.
But the moment I turned to the hero himself, for some reason, my inspiration left me. When you find the right character, you know it at once, as if it had been there in the shadows all along, and all you have done is to reveal it by shining your torch into the corner where it has been hiding. But none of the possibilities that suggested themselves now – a mole? A vole? A squirrel? – had that sense of inevitability about it. I tried to make them more interesting by giving them idiosyncrasies: the mole stuttered; the vole had a sweet tooth, and kept a bee for a pet. But it was useless: simply pinning trinkets on a line of tailor’s dummies in the hope of bringing one of them to life.
Perhaps the mistake was to think he must be an animal. Why could he not be a child instead? But as soon as I began to consider what he might be called, and who his parents were, and where they lived, and how he came to be in possession of a caravan, I found myself in the same difficulty. He just hung there, inert and featureless, like a sail refusing to take the wind.
I was still vainly struggling to animate him when I became aware of a fluttering in my temple. It was not particularly violent or insistent: in fact, there was something almost joyful about it, like the delighted splashing of an infant in its bath. But it was disturbing to know it was still there. For some days, it had seemed to be dwindling away; and since my abortive interview with Emily Cooper I had assumed it had finally evaporated, together with the fantasy that I could help its mother.
Come on, old fellow, time to go, I said. Instantly it was still, and – imagining it had grown so weak that one gentle injunction had been enough to remove it – I went back to work. But no sooner had my thoughts settled themselves in the caravan again than it returned – hovering at the edge of my consciousness like a buzzing fly that you can never quite swat or shoo out of the window. I struggled on; but after half an hour or so it had become so distracting that I admitted defeat, and took myself off for a walk on the hill behind the house.
I had gone no more than a quarter of a mile when I realized that the whirring had stopped, and my head was clear again.
*
I had a late lunch of bread and cheese in a little riverside pub, enjoying the smoky frowst of the bar, and the noise of real people discussing real things: horses; the king’s health; the state of the weather. Watching their flushed, earnest faces, it was hard to believe that any of them had ever fretted over an invented character, or imagined that a ghost had taken up residence in his brain, or considered for a moment that there might be anything beyond the immediate reach of his own senses. And, as can sometimes happen, the effect of the warmth and the beer was to blur the boundaries between us and make me somehow a temporary member of their number; so that by the time I left I had convinced myself that the spirit of the dead child was an utter absurdity, and that only a fool would allow himself to be held to ransom by it for even a second.
This John Bull-ishness started to fade on the way home, as the influence of the alcohol wore off; but there was still enough of it left when I got to the cabin to make me open the notebook again, and settle myself determinedly back in my chair to work. I had not been there five minutes, however, when I was distracted by a movement out of the corner of my eye.
A man was walking towards me across the lawn. For a second or two he was too far away for me to be able to tell who it was; but as he emerged from the shadow of the cedar I recognized my brother-in-law, Hubert Ashburn. He peered in at the window as he passed, and – seeing I had noticed him – pulled his face into a comical grimace. A moment later, he lifted the latch, opened the door a couple of inches, and called through the crack:
‘Knock! Knock!’
Then, without waiting for a response, he came inside and said:
/>
‘Hullo, old man. Thought I’d find you here.’
I stood up, but was too taken aback to say anything.
‘Sorry just to barge in like this,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid we need to have a bit of a chat.’
‘About what?’
‘Oh, you know …’He started edging towards my chair. ‘Mind if I sit down?’
I stood my ground. ‘Let’s go up to the house, if it’s that important. We’d be more comfortable there.’
‘Hm.’ He grimaced again. ‘We probably would. But you know how it is. The very walls have ears. And eyes.’
‘What, is Violet here?’
He shook his head.
‘Then –?’
‘That’s what we have to talk about.’ He nodded towards the chair. ‘Please, Corley.’
I hesitated, then sat down in it again myself. He looked round, discomfited, before finally perching awkwardly on the edge of the bunk.
‘You’ve been away, I gather,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Anywhere nice?’
‘A few days in France. Some time in London.’
‘Ah.’ He ratcheted his face into a smile. But it did not reach as far as his eyes, which continued to watch me apprehensively. ‘I think Violet was under the impression you’d gone for good. Bit of a surprise for her when all of a sudden you just popped up again, what!’
‘I did tell her I wasn’t intending to stay long.’
‘Did you? Ah. Didn’t realize that.’ He took in a deep breath, then let it out again as a ragged sigh. ‘Look, Corley, this is damned ticklish. I don’t know when I’ve ever had to do anything I hated more. But there it is. She’s asked me to ask you to …Well, not to put too fine a point upon it, to vacate the premises again.’