Checkmate

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘Oh Silas!’ she cried out. ‘Silas! Silas!’

  But Silas was not there. She had devoted herself to him for so many years, protecting him, allowing him to lean on her. It was surprising to find that in the end Silas had escaped her protection and that it was she who was the one who could not stand alone. She had never realized how vital he was to her. And now he had faded away. She knew nothing about him. He was less clear in her mind than Melita whom she had not seen for eighteen years.

  She went to the window. She did not approach it directly, but sidled up to it. When she drew the curtains, she looked out obliquely, as though trying to limit the range of her vision. There was a bright moon. The garden was empty and no tell-tale shadows moved on the lawn. Even so, she would not look at the cedar, its fringed branches reaching out like groping fingers.

  ‘What was he doing, do you think?’ a voice said. ‘Standing at the window at that time of night?’

  It was the voice of the police sergeant; an abominable man who had asked a lot of questions. She had been glad when he went, but now the questions remained behind like the grin of the Cheshire cat.

  ‘Was he alone in his bedroom?’ he had begun by asking.

  ‘Of course. It was after midnight.’

  ‘Doesn’t always follow.’ The man, an unpleasant ginger creature, gave Catherine a sideways glance. Catherine’s nostrils dilated, but apart from this she appeared not to have heard. The man went on, not in the least abashed, ‘He hadn’t been well, had he? He might have called out, someone might have gone to him.’

  ‘No one was with him,’ Catherine repeated. ‘If they had been, it is unlikely that this would have happened.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  His small, pink-rimmed eyes narrowed and Catherine realized that this man was an enemy. She was discovering quite a lot of enemies since she had found out about God. She did not attempt to placate the sergeant: silence had always been her weapon. Unfortunately, the sergeant knew about the value of silence, too, and the interview became rather prolonged. It took him nearly three quarters of an hour to satisfy himself that Silas had indeed been alone when he fell.

  ‘So that’s that,’ he said, and a quite extraordinary change came over him. He became talkative and seemed to feel a desire to ingratiate himself with Catherine.

  ‘We have to make these enquiries. We don’t like doing it. But in cases where an inquest is to be held there’s no choice.’

  Catherine folded her hands. ‘A simple accident!’ She shrugged her shoulders, eloquently expressing her disdain of officialdom. The sergeant became earnest.

  ‘Oh, you can never be sure. That’s the trouble, you see. In a case like this, murder’s unlikely, of course; but there’s always suicide to be considered.’

  ‘Suicide!’

  She stared at him and the little, pebbly eyes stared back at her.

  ‘Fall from a window, very popular method with suicides, you know.’

  ‘My cousin had no possible motive . . .’ She stopped and clenched her hands. It was incredible, but she was actually arguing with this abominable creature.

  ‘His wife left him, didn’t she?’

  ‘His wife left him eighteen years ago.’ She had said this only recently, and with much more conviction. Her head was spinning and she had the feeling of going downhill rather fast.

  ‘People brood over things, you’ve no idea . . .’

  ‘You are a policeman, not a psychologist.’ She applied the brake sharply. ‘It is no part of your job to indulge in fanciful theories.’

  ‘Oh, you’re quite right about that.’ He was anxious to give credit where it was due. ‘Theories, no thank you! Theories aren’t any use to a policeman.’

  She waited for him to go on, but he had come to one of his unaccountable periods of silence. But silence was not to be endured now.

  ‘Well, then!’ she prompted.

  ‘He got in touch with us. You knew that, of course?’

  ‘He got in touch with you?’

  ‘Why yes, a couple of months ago it all started.’ He leant forward and said in a confidential tone, ‘Between you and me, we got rather tired of it after the first time.’

  ‘You mean that he got in touch with you more than once?’

  ‘Several times. Regular weekly visits, in fact.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘He wanted us to find his wife, of course,’ he explained patiently.

  Catherine straightened her back and folded her hands again. She summoned all her strength for her own display of patience.

  ‘But his wife left him eighteen years ago. She may even be dead.’

  ‘That’s just what we told him. But people get like that. Something wears down,’ he tapped his forehead meaningly, ‘and they get all sorts of weird ideas. I could tell you stories about people you know and wouldn’t suspect a thing wrong, but inside of them . . .’

  ‘Did you ever carry out any investigations on my cousin’s behalf?’

  ‘Oh, dear no! We’ve enough to do dealing with what you might call the realities. If we were to whisk off down every crank’s side alley . . .’

  ‘But why!’ Things were slipping out of control again. ‘Why did he want to get in touch with her after all this time?’

  ‘It seems he had rather a bad turn a few months back and it suddenly came to him that he hadn’t much time left. Something about his wife had been preying on his mind and he wanted her forgiveness.’ The sergeant grinned at Catherine. ‘Can you beat it? A woman walks out on a man and eighteen years later he starts trying to find her so that she can forgive him. Nothing so queer as folks, is there?’

  And with this cheerful thought he had left Catherine. Later, he had seen Hester and Anna, but he had not mentioned any of this to them. ‘Don’t want to upset the girl and the old woman,’ he had said to Catherine.

  There, as far as the police were concerned, the matter seemed to have ended. Only for Catherine was it a beginning.

  ‘What was he doing, do you think? Standing at the window at that time of night?’

  That one question went on and on and on, burning itself into her mind. What was he doing? What had he seen?

  There was a violent storm during the night. She had left her curtains drawn back and the lightning disturbed her, but she would not go to the window to draw the curtains. In the morning, she told herself, she would move into the spare room at the front of the house.

  But by morning things had changed. The bright feverish colour of the last few weeks had been washed away and Polwithian had become a drab Cornish village huddled round a muddy estuary. Catherine, happier in a world that had reverted to black and white, felt better.

  Even Richard Oliver, coming out of The Cod and Lobster after breakfast, had the impression that life had reverted to normal. People were about their work again and the weather was the main topic of conversation. It was foolish to imagine that the dramas of the Jory family played an important part in the life of the village.

  The rain went on all day, but by early evening it stopped and the cloud lifted a little. Richard went for a walk by the shore. It was low tide and the ribbed sand stretched to the horizon, dun-coloured in the evening light, pitted with pools of muddied water. There was a smell of seaweed and bad drains. Two little girls passed him on their way back to the village; they had their shoes tied round their necks and their frocks were tucked in their knickers, but as they had obviously rolled in the sand this latter precaution seemed pointless. They asked him the time and when he said, ‘Nine o’clock’ they ran away echoing ‘Nine o’clock!’ in tones of delight sharpened by anxiety. He watched them churning up the damp sand until they were out of sight. Then he turned back to the bay. It was deserted now, except for one distant figure far out beyond the headland. It was an evening for the solitary. Nevertheless, he began to walk towards Anna. There was a semicircle of rocks which were submerged at high tide, the Devil’s Jawbone, the fishermen called them. Anna was sitting on one of these rocks. She d
id not seem so much a part of her background this time, he thought; perhaps because she was more self-aware. She watched him coming towards her, but she gave no indication of welcome or animosity. She was wearing the black dress and her hair hung loose, just as it had when he first saw her. But her manner was no longer so open. She looked at him when he sat beside her, and looked away again without speaking. The silence of familiarity. He watched the dark hair twisted round her throat.

  ‘I’m sorry about your father,’ he said, because he must begin somewhere.

  ‘You didn’t know him.’ The Jory directness was still there.

  ‘I meant that I was sorry for you.’

  ‘I didn’t know him either.’

  He began to search for a stone. She watched him out of the corner of her eye. He had discarded his town clothes and was wearing dark trousers and a navy shirt; as he bent forward she could see the muscles straining beneath the shirt.

  ‘Yet you cried in chapel?’ he said.

  He straightened and began to aim stones at a tin can half-buried in the sand some two hundred yards away.

  ‘Death is so untidy,’ she said. ‘Like a book that stops in the middle of a sentence.’

  ‘That’s where some books should stop.’

  He threw another stone and a seagull perched on a rock near by turned its head and watched him with hostile yellow eyes.

  ‘But there are things I’ve never talked to my father about,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how he first met my mother, or where. I don’t know anything about their life together before they came here. I don’t even know about the years they had with me. And now I can never ask him.’

  She had been cheated of her childhood memories; it was for this she had cried.

  ‘Didn’t anyone ever talk to you about your mother?’ he asked.

  ‘Rhoda told me about her. But my father knew her in her own country.’

  ‘In the burning desert, you mean?’ He bent to pick up another stone. She watched him resentfully. His face glowed a dull bronze in the fading light; it seemed as metallic as bronze, too.

  ‘You’re unkind,’ she said.

  ‘There was nothing unkind about that.’ He threw the stone hard, but inaccurately. ‘I just can’t see that it is very important. Your mother came from a strange country that you are unlikely ever to see . . .’

  ‘On the contrary, I’m going there next year.’

  ‘On a Cook’s tour?’

  ‘No. With Rhoda.’

  He stopped, another stone in his hand, and stared at her.

  ‘You’ve got it all planned, have you?’

  He was angry that she had her life planned a year ahead.

  ‘Of course. I’ve no intention of staying here.’

  His arm swung back; she watched the turn of his powerful shoulders and the glint of the stone between his fingers. This time he hit the tin. The seagull ruffed up its feathers.

  ‘You’re going in search of your mother, are you? Some such romantic dream?’

  ‘My mother is dead.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Rhoda told me.’

  This surprised him, but he refrained from comment and asked another question.

  ‘Then what is the point of going?’

  ‘I want to see the desert. It fascinates me. It’s the only place where you can step back a thousand years.’

  ‘And that seems important to you?’

  ‘It’s tremendously exciting.’

  The wind blew her hair across her face, depositing sand on her cheeks. She drew her hair back and sat for a moment with her hands clasped behind her head, dreaming. The black dress was tight across her breasts.

  ‘It’s wrong to do that,’ he chided.

  She half-turned to him. ‘Why?’

  He drew her to him and answered with his hands. She did not protest. Perhaps she was still dreaming of Sinai: he fancied he had a cure for that. He kissed her more passionately than he had kissed her under the cedar and she responded with growing excitement. The tide had turned and the wind was getting up. When he unfastened the front of her dress, she shivered in his arms and whispered:

  ‘Is this wrong, too?’

  ‘It may be.’

  She stayed his hand beneath her breast, testing the more reliable answer of the heartbeat.

  ‘I don’t think I care.’

  He should have protected her, she was young and innocent; but at this moment she was the stronger of the two and she did not want him to cease this tender exploration. He felt her body come to life beneath his touch as though he was discovering it for her. She showed her pleasure exquisitely. Gradually, he began to caress her more intimately. At first, he was very gentle, reminding himself that he was touching parts of her body that had hitherto been private to her; but as his own pleasure increased, he began to be less aware of her or of the need for any consideration save the urge of the blood. Then, at the moment when he least wanted to be aware of her as a separate person, she began to pull away from him.

  He let her go. It hurt him, but he let her go. The surprising thing was that he was not angry. His feeling was one of utter desolation, as though he had been cut off from something more fundamental than a moment’s pleasure. He sat staring in front of him while the sweat cooled on his body. The last evening light glimmered on the sand, the pools of water between the rocks were black as ebony and the rocks themselves were losing their sharp outline. He watched the pattern of the scaled sand fading, shape and substance dissolving into night. A world of water and wind and darkness, without time or history. Anna had no need to go to Syria: Cornwall was a primaeval country. He turned to her. She was sitting with her back to him. He ran his finger down her arm and forced himself to speak lightly.

  ‘You mustn’t be angry.’

  ‘I’m not angry.’

  The dark hair shielded her face; he folded it back and looked at her, ‘Have I upset you?’

  ‘No . . . please . . . no . . .’ She began to struggle and he released her.

  ‘Shall we go back now?’ he suggested.

  She gave him a confused, reproachful look, as though she had expected something else: an apology or a more determined assault on her resistance? He was not sure, and he was not going to risk anything now.

  They stood up and she straightened her dress; she was crying a little, but he thought it was best not to comfort her. He looked towards the shore; there were lights in houses now, but a dark shadow had fallen across the sand and the wind was blowing more strongly. Anna said, ‘I’m ready.’ But she did not turn towards the land; she looked out to sea, her eyes straining in the dusk.

  ‘There’s an island out there. A long way out. I went there once.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Peaceful. As though you had come to the end of things.’

  He turned towards the shore.

  ‘I don’t like islands.’

  Her foot scraped against the rocks and she complained, near to tears again:

  ‘You don’t have to be so bad-tempered.’

  ‘I’m not bad-tempered.’

  She slipped on a piece of seaweed and fell against him. A hot flame of anger flared up in him.

  ‘Why don’t you get away from here, go to a town, lead a normal life, become a real woman? What’s the point in running away to bury yourself in a desert or on an island?’

  She did not answer. Her profile looked stubborn. Behind them a long black line curved across the sand like a serpent driven inland by the wind; the tide was coming in fast, forked tongues flicked out to reclaim the waiting sand. They walked more quickly. The wind was tearing at them; but above the noise of the wind was the distant roar of surf and they were reminded that farther along the coast the sea never left the rocks.

  They were further out than they had realized. When they reached the cliffs they had a long walk to the beach; by the time they reached it, the waves were breaking against the rocks and channels of water penetrated inwards, boiling in the hollows between
the boulders. They could hear the harsh drag of water on pebbles.

  Away to the right the dark line of the headland thrust into the bay and somewhere at the top, beyond the stone wall, was the Jory farm.

  ‘Who does the farm belong to now?’ he asked. ‘To you?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It can’t go to a woman.’

  ‘But if there is no male to inherit, what then?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m going away next year.’

  She spoke defiantly and he knew that she had discovered that this mattered to him.

  ‘A lot can happen in a year,’ he said.

  ‘Not here,’ she said.

  He took her by the shoulders. He kissed her eyes, her lips, her throat; she struggled but this time he did not release her until she had been subdued. Someone had to be the master and he hoped to demonstrate that it would be he.

  Chapter Nine

  The wind whipped the canvas awning outside the fishmonger’s and sent a shower of rainwater on top of the already wet huddle of customers. Even the gulls’ wings slapped the air with a wet sound. The tide was full and the town smelt of the sea and the rank odour of the marsh. From her parlour window Amy Causer looked at the wet cobblestones and reflected that the rain would settle the dust.

  ‘Rain is a great blessing,’ she said, and was rather abashed at having made such a definite statement. She found it increasingly difficult lately to let simple statements alone and now she went on, ‘I can quite understand them praying for rain when they have these terrible riots in America and all those other violent places; I always find that problems seem to sort themselves out after a good downpour.’

  The wind gusted through the ill-fitting window frame and Amy drew her cardigan closer round her neck. The minister observed:

  ‘It is not always the case; but I can believe that it would be true of your problems. You are a good woman.’