by Janet Tanner
For a moment he looked at her, puzzled, then he brought his fist down hard on the bedpost.
“That old bugger had something to do with it, I’ll bet! She was frightened to death of him. I’ll go and see him and find out the truth if it’s the last thing I do!”
“No, Ted,” Charlotte said. “He’s gone, too. He had a stroke last spring. It was no surprise, by all accounts …”
“Well, her mother must know anyway. Is she still there?”
Charlotte shook her head. “She went funny. She’s in the asylum, Ted. Now look, it’s awful, I know, and it’s going to take you a long while to get over it. But what’s happened has happened, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. They’re gone, both of them, and that’s the end of it.”
The words seemed to penetrate Ted’s brain as nothing else had. He sagged, then straightened, and the pain in his eyes was so vivid that James and Charlotte both looked away.
Without another word he turned for the door, and neither of his parents did anything to stop him. They were wise enough to know that he must endure his grief alone.
They heard his footsteps clattering down the stairs, and the surprised voices of Jack and Amy as he went through the kitchen. Then the back door slammed, and they knew he had gone out.
Charlotte, feeling sick and old once more, sank back against the crumpled pillows. “Why did I ever have children?” she asked weakly.
James wheezed into his handkerchief. “You always wanted them, Lotty.”
She grimaced. “I must have been born silly. It’s one long nightmare. Everything that goes wrong for them, you feel ten times more keenly than if it was yourself. I’d sell my soul for their happiness, but it’s the one thing I can’t give them.”
James looked at her with sad but mild blue eyes.
“They’m still better off than a lot,” he said prosaically, and Charlotte turned her head into his shoulder in search of a comfort that she knew, in the depths of her being, would elude her.
“I sometimes wonder what we’re put in this world for,” she muttered, but the words were muffled and he did not hear her.
“He’ll get over it, Lotty,” James said, smoothing her hair. “Just like the rest of us, he’ll get over it.”
THE CHURCHYARD was bare and winter-brown, and the lowering December skies seemed almost to be resting on the square, turreted church tower.
Ted, still half in a dream, followed the path around the weathered old stone walls that he and Becky had taken in that long-ago summer of 1915 and passed beneath the sun-dial carved in the South Wall with the inscription that had always intrigued him.
When as a child I laughed and wept
Time crept
When as a youth I thought and talked
Time walked
When I became a full grown man
Time ran
When older still I daily grew
Time flew
Soon I shall find in passing on
Time gone.
‘Time gone’—that was it. For Becky and for him, time had gone. Those fleeting summer days, too perfect to last. Looking back now, they seemed like a dream. Yet once he had been the boy who had walked hand in hand with her and lain beside her in the long grass, listening to the sounds of summer, feeling the sun warm upon his face, smelling the fresh sweetness of new-mown hay. It seemed so long now since he had done any of those things. And he knew that for him they would always mean Becky.
Three years can be a lifetime or a day. Every gravestone he passed was so achingly familiar that it seemed hardly possible to him that it was not just last week when he had last walked this way. But the vast emptiness inside him told a different story.
He did not know how he knew which way to go. Perhaps she had once told him which plot her father had bought for the family. But whatever the reason, he followed the path without hesitating, climbing the steps and turning towards the newer part of the churchyard.
There were flowers on the graves here, bronze and yellow chrysanthemums, even a Christmas rose or two. These were the paves of those who had gone within living memory, those who still, had relatives left to care. The stones were new, the grass between the kerbs neatly trimmed.
On, on, he walked, his steps small and quick, his eyes darting about him as he went. It must be up here somewhere if they had been buried in Hillsbridge, and somehow he was sure they had been. Hillsbridge, after all, had seen the greatest of Alfred Church’s achievements. Here he was known and would be remembered. People would look at his grave and say, “Oh yes, he was the secretary of the Co-op.” But where was he buried? Find Alfred, and he would find Becky …
When he saw it, a marble angel mounted on a pedestal and inscribed with her name, a sense of deep shock ran through him, making him tremble.
He left the path, his feet sinking into the soft turf between the graves, and stood reading the words on the gravestone beneath the angel’s out-stretched arms.
R EBECCA A NNIE ,
daughter of Alfred and Winifred Church,
died 15th August, 1916, aged 18 years.
Sleeping in the arms of Jesus.
It was true, then. She was dead, and the pain and the despair were so intense he felt he was choking. But still his numbed brain only half-believed. Becky was sweetness and life. Becky was sunshine on early morning dew, the deep sparkle of spring water over stones, the soft green coolness of moss and dock leaves. She couldn’t be there in the dank, cloying earth, under a shovelful of chipped granite—not his Becky.
He thought of the body which had been soft and rounded lying there in a cold coffin and decaying, and suddenly it was more than he could bear. The pain became a silent scream, rushing through him like an angry wind, and he clutched handfuls of empty air. Becky, oh Becky, what have they done to you? I went to war, leaving you safe, as I thought. But I am back in one piece, and you …
The trees at the edge of the churchyard rustled, and he looked towards them. Their bare arms reaching towards the leaden sky looked as dead as the bodies they stood guard over. But they were not dead. In the spring they would put out new green shoots. Mam would probably say there was a lesson there, but at the moment he could not see it. Becky was dead, and spring could never be the same again. Becky was dead.
“Did you know her, my son?”
At the sound of the Rector’s voice, he swung around, resenting the interruption of his thoughts and feeling oddly guilty at having been caught standing here beside Becky’s grave.
“She … I …” he faltered, then added, as if to explain everything, “I’ve just got home from Germany, sir.”
The Reverend Reuben Clarke looked at him with deep compassion.
In his years in Hillsbridge, he had seen enough trouble and suffering to mellow his early zeal. He had turned more and more to his God as the weary war years passed, drawing on a spiritual strength that grew only deeper and more sure as he increased his dependence on it, and sharing it somehow with those of his parishioners who needed its healing comfort.
And the Lord knew, there had been enough of those. Sometimes Reuben Clarke had felt that the whole valley was awash with grief. But his faith never faltered. The darker the night, the brighter burns the candle.
“She lives on, you know,” he said gently, aware that the baldly spoken sentiment sounded false and trite, and he saw the young man’s face twist bitterly as if for a moment he had expected more, far more, than that, and had been disappointed.
“Lives, Rector? How can you say that?”
“Oh, my son, I wish I could tell you. But I can see you’re not the sort to be comforted by the simple phrases we invent to cover a depth of meaning that is fathomless. To explain would take longer than either of us can spare just now. So I will have to ask you to take my word for it that I know it is so.”
For a moment he thought he had caught the boy’s interest. There was a sharp curiosity behind the grief, but also scepticism. Then he kicked at a sod of earth.
“You ca
n’t fool me, Rector. When you’re dead, you’re dead.”
Sadness filled the Rector. Oh Lord, show me the way to help this young man, he prayed.
“How can you tell me different when this whole churchyard is full of dead bodies,” Ted persisted.
“Bodies, yes,” the Rector agreed. “ But we are not talking of bodies. We are talking of spirits. Ah, yes, I can see from your face that the spirit sounds to you like more milk-sop fairy stories to fill the needs of the masses. But you and I both know there is more to us than other folk can see, and I don’t mean just our brains or our bones. I mean the essential something inside us that makes us what we are.”
Ted shrugged. “Maybe so. But dead is still dead.”
“No. The body dies. The spirit lives on.”
The wind, cutting through the tombstones, made the Rector shiver. He drew his cloak more tightly around him, and as he did so, the analogy came to him.
“You’ve seen plenty of dead, I dare say,” he said conversationally, and Ted grimaced.
“I’ve seen my share, yes.”
“And how did they look to you?”
“A hell of a mess, Rector. More of a mess than you’ve ever seen a man in.”
“I expect you’re right,” the Rector acknowledged. “ But that wasn’t quite what I meant. Did they still seem like your friends lying there—or did they seem different?”
“Well, of course, they were different,” Ted said impatiently. “They were dead.”
The Rector smiled. “Exactly. And in dying, the essential part of them, the something inside that made them who they were went from the body, so that what was left behind was no more that person than their coat left hanging behind the door. The body is a garment for the soul. When it is no longer needed, it can be discarded like a worn-out shirt. And if the spirit is no longer in the body, then where is it? It must be somewhere, living on.”
“Where?” Ted asked bluntly.
The Rector shook his head. “Ah, well, there you have it. We don’t know, any of us. We can only theorize. Now, we see through a glass darkly, but one day we shall see face to face.”
For a moment, Ted stood deep in thought, oblivious of the cold. If only there could be something in it. If only he could believe all that stuff about the essential part of Becky not being dead at all but still living! If only there was something that would make sense of the whole bloody mess. But if he believed in a God, it was a God of nature, who showed himself in the regeneration of the countryside, and after almost three years of looking at bomb-shattered landscapes, even that belief had been sorely tested. Ted the realist did not see how he could alter beliefs to suit his own convenience, and the talk of spirits seemed to him, even with the Rector’s clever analogy, a lot of pie in the sky with no more foundation in reality than his mother’s superstitious dislike of seeing the new moon through the glass.
“My brother Jack would probably agree with you,” he said at last “But I’m a man that needs proof first. I suppose I’m your modern Doubting Thomas.”
The Rector sighed. Oh Lord, thy way is often hard, he thought. But how much harder for those who are denied faith!
He reached out to touch the boy’s arm, painfully thin beneath his cheap demobilization suit.
“Think about it, my son,” he said. “ Remember that in God everything, however senseless, has its place. Go to Him, ask His help, and He will give it to you.”
“And would it have helped if I’d asked Him to look after Becky?” Ted asked bitterly. “I’m sorry, Rector, I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong person. You’re catching your death of cold and all for nothing.”
The Rector inclined his head, acknowledging defeat. “If you want me, my doors are always open,” he said. Then he turned as a sudden flash of inspiration showed him the boy more as a secular figure than a religious one. “Think of Danny Boy, my son. He went to war and left his love behind, just as you did. But remember what she told him.”
“What?”
“Oh no, my boy. I’ve talked enough. Good day to you.”
The Rector turned, and Ted watched his black-cloaked figure walk down the path in the direction of the church. Quite a character, he thought. He might almost have converted me. But what did he mean about Danny Boy?
He looked again at Becky’s resting place, and in his head the haunting Irish tune began to run like one of the gramophone records he liked to play. He had sung the words a hundred times, and now they ran through his head, line by line, until he reached the end.
And I shall hear, though soft your tread above me
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter, be
And you will bend and tell me that you love me
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.
The first hot searing tears blurred his eyes. Without knowing
how he got there, he was on his knees on the marble kerbstone,
his head bent low, his hands spreading out over the granite chippings.
“Oh, Becky, Becky, Becky,” he whispered.
There was no need for him to say more.
HIS MOOD lasted until he reached the churchyard gates once more and then, quite suddenly, his anger returned like the uprush of a rekindled forest fire licking through dry brush and fanned by the wind of his grief.
Crushing his cap between his hands he stood, while the sky above the tower deepened to violet and the hatred in his heart darkened every part of him. And there, in the shadow of the church, he swore an oath—before God.
If ever I find out that there was something sinister about her death, if ever I find out that someone was responsible for harming her, I’ll kill them with my own bare hands.
By all that’s Holy in this place, I swear that. And may God strike me dead if I fail.
Chapter Twenty-Four
In that grim winter of 1918, funeral followed funeral in Hillsbridge. The town that had mourned so many sons, lost for ever on foreign soil, saw burials enough to satisfy even the most greedy of undertakers, as the effects of war, broken hearts and broken spirits made folk reel beneath the great flu epidemic.
Dr Froster was one of the first to die of it, with Charlie Durrant following not far behind. Then, before January was out Ada Clements had also died.
“You never know what you’re going to hear next,” Charlotte said when news of Ada’s death reached her. “ She’s been a creaking gate for years, I know, but it’s still a shock.”
The people of the rank agreed. Without Ada’s line of washing blowing high above the gardens day after day life would never be the same again. And what would become of the family now? Wally, the eldest boy, had faked his age to join the army and was still away. Rosa was in Bristol, and Harold had gone to Yorkshire in search of work. But there were still three boys at home, and Walter struggling as always to keep a roof over their heads. Clearly, there was only one solution.
A week after her mother was laid to rest, Rosa Clements returned home for good.
She came up the rank one cold, bright afternoon with all her worldly belongings packed into a carpet bag, wearing a new slouch hat and a skirt that Charlotte considered to be far too short to be decent. But her hair was as long, dark and lustrous as ever, her complexion as clear and fresh as a young girl’s.
She walked with her head held high, her expression giving no hint as to what she might be thinking or feeling. Only someone who knew her well could have guessed at the turmoil of excitement, anticipation and awe that were within her, and there were few enough of those.
I’m home. And Ted is home too, she thought, her heady joy far outweighing her grief for the haggard and complaining woman who had been her mother.
Only one thing marred Rosa’s home-coming and that she pushed aside. There had been a time when she had felt guilty about Rebecca Church. She had made one of her spells, after all, to ‘send her away’, and sometimes, in the dead of night, she had lain awake wondering just what it was she had done. The frightening feeling of power had been one of the rea
sons behind her going to Bristol. She had felt she needed to get away for a while from everything and everybody that was familiar to her, and to be out of reach of the temptation of the woods, the rope, and the circle beneath the trees. But once there, things had fallen back into perspective.
There was a pattern to life. It was as it had to be. And Ted and she were meant for one another. She was as sure of that as she was of the sequence of the seasons.
Her first thought, as she went into the scullery, was how tiny and cramped it was compared to the room she had rented in Bristol. She felt almost claustrophobic in the tiny dwelling. But she pushed that to the back of her mind. Ted was the other side of that confining wall. And if Ted was there, anything was bearable.
She thought about him all the time, as she went about the mundane chores and tried to make life as comfortable for the family as her mother had done. But the first time she saw him, she was shocked by the look of him, by his slimness turned to thinness, by the dark hollows in his once handsome face. And even more worrying was his air of detachment, of being removed from the happenings of the real world.
When she smiled at him, he smiled back. When she passed the time of day, he replied, but his mind was far away. Was it the legacy of the prison camp, she wondered, or was there more to it than that?
“I could help you, Ted, if only you’d let me,” she told him silently. “I could make you forget it all if you’d just give me the chance.”
But he seemed hardly to notice her, and fate was against her, too. However hard she tried to engineer things so that she would accidentally meet him, something always happened to divert his attention.
And then, late in January, the snow came.
It fell during the night, and the people of Hillsbridge woke to a white world. Beneath a leaden sky, which promised more to come, the batches rose like a range of Alps, and the squat, ugly buildings and the bare fields and allotments were all softened by a thick layer of cotton wool.
The wind had blown it against the backs of the houses in the rank, so that it lay against the windows and doors in deeply draped drifts. Families had to dig themselves out to cross the back yards to the privies. At Walter’s insistence, the Clements boys had cleared the worst of the drift from directly outside the door before leaving for school and work. But there was no time to cut a proper path and salt it before it froze, and Rosa knew that if the way was to be cleared before nightfall she would have to do it herself.