Checkmate

by MARY HOCKING

  In spite of her heightened perception, she was not such a good companion as she had once been. She was less energetic, for one thing. Instead of walking all day she liked to lie in a field, listening to the wind worrying the hedges, parting the long grass with her fingers, examining the different mosses and insects—‘There’s a whole subterranean world down here!’ Or she would sit for hours on the rocks luxuriating in the heat of the sun on her flesh, shivering deliciously as the incoming tide whipped up a sharp breeze. She had spent too much time in the open air for her skin to burn; it simply darkened and acquired a sheen like the dusty bloom on a grape.

  She was drawing away from him fast. He had had some kind of place in the life of the lonely, dour girl he had played with since childhood. At least she had had a need of him as a person to argue with and to dismiss when his presence irritated her. Now that he no longer irritated her, she had ceased to be aware of him.

  He had no difficulty in finding a reason for all this. Anna was in love with Richard Oliver. Gabriel thought that this was disastrous and for once in his life he found adult opinion to support him. No one in the village thought that any good would come to Anna. ‘It’ll be Melita all over again.’ This prophecy seemed to give them a certain satisfaction. Gabriel felt a great contempt for them. If something happened to Anna they would congratulate themselves on having foreseen it, but they would do nothing to forestall it. It remained for him to act. He was not sure what he could do, but he gathered from things he heard that many people were convinced that Richard Oliver was an undesirable character; they would be only too pleased to discover that his designs were very dark indeed. This being the case, all that was needed was the discovery of something which would enable the police to step in. Gabriel did not think that the man took drugs; he had studied him and he showed none of the usual signs. He did not drink a great deal either. Sexually he was undoubtedly depraved, but Gabriel was not sure how he could prove this, or at what stage the police could be expected to intervene. Money seemed to be the answer. Oliver had been in Polwithian for some time now and although he was not working he never seemed short of money. His clothes were not ostentatious, but they were good. Gabriel thought it possible that he was living on the proceeds of a robbery and that some of the money was hidden in his luggage. He looked the type who could carry out a robbery with or without violence. Gabriel could imagine him with a gun in his hand. He could imagine it vividly because he himself had often wanted to play this part.

  Now, while Anna talked about the stars as though God had recently created them especially for her, Gabriel planned his first move. Instead of leaving Anna when they reached the farmhouse gate, he said abruptly:

  ‘May I come in and use the lavatory, please?’

  Visitors were not welcome, he knew, but this surely was one request that could not be refused. She let him in the front door and he went to the lavatory. Before he came out he made sure that the window was open. He hoped that she would ask him to stay; but she ushered him out and said, ‘Good night, Gabriel,’ in the new warm voice which was not meant for him and which made him feel as though he had ceased to exist.

  He watched through the letter-box but could not see where she went because the hall was so dark. He moved off the path on to the grass and began an inspection of the house.

  At the first window that he came to he saw Richard Oliver sitting reading a newspaper by the light of a candle. The candlelight accentuated the harsh lines of the man’s face and gave it a demoniac quality. After a moment, the door opened and Anna came in. She stood at the door while the man lowered the paper. They looked at each other. Although she stood so still, there was something very disturbing about Anna. Her pose was modest, almost submissive, and her face was softened by a strange humility; and yet there was about her whole attitude a terrifying assurance, like a saint who feels light burning down and knows that she is to be blessed. The man got to his feet slowly, in spite of his bulk he moved with great gentleness as though concerned even for the air through which he must pass on his way to her. The candle, which had cast a mellow amber light on the scene, suddenly seemed to burn white as magnesium. They were standing very close now, their bodies not quite touching; then the man put one hand beneath her breast, the hand moved with a sure, tender familiarity. Gabriel found the tenderness more unendurable than any violence. He closed his eyes and where the brilliant light had been there was the dark crimson of his own pounding blood. Here indeed was violence! He turned away, staggering over flower-beds, blundering blindly towards the back of the house.

  As he passed the kitchen he saw Catherine standing by the sink washing up and old Mrs. Jory at the table mixing something in a bowl. The hideous unreliability of life unnerved him as he watched them performing their mundane acts unaware of the terrible consummation which must now be taking place in another room. He stumbled on until he reached the lavatory. There was a pail near by and he stood on this and hauled himself through the window. The hall was very dark, but fortunately the kitchen door was open. He had no wish to explore the front rooms and he made his way towards the kitchen, drawn by the lamplight. He could smell saffron; it made him feel faint because he had not eaten for a long time. He had no idea what he intended to do now and while he was trying to collect his thoughts, Catherine began to speak.

  ‘Rhoda says he isn’t the gypsy. And she leaves it at that. But if he isn’t the gypsy, who is he? He has to be someone. No one will face that fact. No one will even think of it.’

  She turned from the sink, her face grey and sweating from the steamy water; there was sweat under the armpits of her tight lilac dress and her hair was greasy and lung in unkempt strands around her face. Gabriel had never seen her look so tattered before, like a scarecrow gradually disintegrating after a storm had raked the winter fields.

  ‘Everyone talks about reality.’ Her voice jerked like an instrument barely under control. ‘But you all behave as though the man wasn’t real, as though he wasn’t here. But he is here. And he has to be someone.’ She wiped a hand across her forehead and said, ‘I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, because I can’t rest not knowing what it all means. It nibbles into my mind at night and I can’t sleep. But now I’ve found the answer. He is Anna’s father.’

  Old Mrs. Jory went on kneading the dough.

  ‘Doesn’t that disgust you?’

  ‘Got to keep going at it steadily,’ the old woman said, ‘Otherwise it’ll spoil.’

  ‘Incest . . . and all you worry about is saffron cake!’

  ‘I can make the one, there’s nothing I can do about t’other.’

  ‘Melita must have known him a long time, perhaps he followed her here from abroad.’ Catherine was talking to herself now. Gabriel thought she sounded as though she was telling a fairy story, the dark kind. ‘And now he has come back to claim Anna. She is the daughter of the devil.’

  She went on muttering while old Mrs. Jory kneaded the dough as though nothing had been said. Gabriel supposed she had outgrown feeling; her face certainly did not betray any.

  He decided not to search the man’s room; he did not think his stomach would allow him to enter it. He was glad to get outside again. When he made his way back round the side of the house there was no light from that other room. The wind had dropped and it was very still; he stood on the lawn, scarcely daring to breathe. The window of the room was open, and as he hesitated a sound came from the velvet darkness, a low, husky laugh. This was followed by a moment of unbearable silence and then came a trill of delight that rippled across the lawn and died with a half-stifled cry. That ecstatic cry was like a red hot wire drawn through the centre of his body. He turned and ran round the side of the house, down the garden path to the front gate. All the way home his body throbbed uncomfortably; he was blindingly angry and determined that retribution should follow. He had not lived with his father all these years without learning that pleasure must be paid for.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was a warm night and the stars
were diamond holes piercing a black velvet sky. All the richness of the summer’s store was leased into the air, a compost of flowers, fruit and hay, dew-wet grass and blown seeds. Old Hester’s hand moved on the cooling sill as she sat by the window. She did not often open the window, but she had felt sick when she got to her room and had thought that the fresh air might revive her. Brandy would have been better, she now realized; this night, poised on the edge of autumn, lush with a hint of decay, disturbed her. Memory got out of control. Harvest: working late in the fields, seeing the silhouettes of the men against the sky, loitering afterwards in the narrow lane, lying in the shadow of the hedge; the farm boys so lean and hard and young, no thickening of flesh, no deadening sense of sin. Oh those boys, those wilful, wayward randy boys long since transformed into oxen yoked to wife and children, how she grieved for them! The clawlike fingers scraped on the hard sill, bone on bone. And there had been an apple. Where she had picked it or when she did not recall; she remembered only that the skin was warm against her lips but when her teeth closed into it, it was cold and the flesh was hard and white. It was a simple act, eating an apple in a sunny orchard, the passing of an idle moment; how was she to have known that this was the most completely satisfying experience that life would give her? She could feel a tremor of it still, a sharpness in her mouth.

  She hauled herself to her feet and shut the window before other memories, not so pleasant, crowded in and brought the sickness back. She drew the curtains and then made her way to the bed; she was used to moving in the dark and needed a candle as little as a blind person. When she got to the bed she sat down to get her breath back and then found a box of matches and lit her candle. She looked at the clock on the bedside table. The hands pointed to half-past eleven. Catherine would be in her room, but would she be asleep? Hester fumbled behind the clock and brought out a bottle of tablets which the doctor had prescribed for Silas; whether they had done him any good was questionable, but they had certainly made him sleep. Hester put the bottle in the pocket of her long black skirt and went to the door. Tablets prescribed for Silas might not suit Catherine, but the situation warranted a risk: a few more sleepless nights and Catherine would lose all control of herself, her talk in the kitchen had been very wild.

  Hester opened the door of Catherine’s room. The moonlight fell across the bed covering Catherine in a silver pall. She always slept without a pillow because years ago she had decided to go without one as a penance for self-indulgence: the moment of weakness which had necessitated this was long forgotten, but the habit of sleeping without a pillow remained. Now her head was strained back revealing her thin neck and rather prominent Adam’s apple; her mouth was slightly open and her sharp nose thrust from her face like the beak of a bird. She was asleep, but not deeply enough to quiet her mind which raced just beneath the surface of consciousness.

  Hester drew up a chair and sat beside the bed. On the mantelpiece a clock ticked softly and in the bed Catherine made tiny, inarticulate noises, her fingers twitching nervously at the sheets. Hester’s head inclined forward, her eyes hooded, but she did not sleep.

  Catherine woke once in the night. The room was very dark by that time and a clock was beating like a great gong. Suddenly, from out of the darkness a black figure swung forward and a seamed yellow face grotesque as a carnival mask hung above her. Her fingers plucked at her throat and she opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came. The terrible clock was beating inside her head now. She turned to the wall in terror. Later, the sound of the clock became muffled as a bell sounding through water; she could feel the weight of the water pressing on her limbs and slime trailing across her forehead. And then it was calm. She could see reeds wavering gracefully in front of her and there was a water lily among the reeds, its petals haloed with dew like tears. Suddenly a hand stretched up from the centre of the water lily, a long ivory hand with delicate, tapering fingers. She took the hand and pressed it against her cheek. Immediately she felt a great release as though something malignant had been taken from her and all the dark evil things that she feared floated away leaving her in peace at last. When she woke the sun was streaming through the window, a blackbird was singing somewhere in the trees and a breeze from the open window played across her face. For a moment she thought that she was a child again with life stretching ahead of her like an ambling country lane drowsy in the morning stillness. Then, turning her head, she saw Hester sitting beside the bed, her face shrunken with fatigue.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Catherine whispered.

  The old woman’s lips drew back over the bare gums; it was like seeing an old dog laughing obscenely to itself.

  ‘Well, at least you recognize me! A nice time I’ve had with you.’ She got up and shuffled across the room. ‘I’ll close the window now. I opened it in the night to cool the room a bit, you were raving so.’

  She closed the window and drew the blind. The room became grey and sick. Catherine began to cry desolately, ‘Oh, Aunt Hester, I wish Melita would come back! I wish she would come back, I wish she would come back, I wish she would come back . . .’

  Hester took a glass of water from the mantelpiece and emptied three tablets into it.

  ‘Here, take these, they’ll calm you down. You had better stay in bed today.’

  Catherine obeyed and after a while she slipped away again, down into that reedy water.

  Rhoda also woke to hear a blackbird singing and she, too, was taken back to her childhood. But the experience did not end in tears for her; she had cried all her tears the night before. Her body ached and she felt exhausted, but something had been shaken into place by the transport of grief.

  When she went to the window of her bedroom the familiar scene had the freshness which comes in those rare moments when the spirit is ready to absorb a new experience. Some obstacle which had prevented her from exploring the resources of the present had been removed and she knew that she must stop this long regret for things that could never be while the things that might be passed unnoticed. She hoped that she was not too late. It was a pity that Frank was by now on holiday in Ireland; she would have to wait until the beginning of the autumn term to tell him that she had decided to marry him.

  She went down the stairs and prepared her breakfast. Outside in the garden the blackbird continued his song of praise and Rhoda, too, lifted up her heart, grateful to be alive. She had intended to go to the farm to see how Catherine was and to talk to Anna about a visit they had planned to the Minack Theatre, but she decided not to go. The time had come to release Anna. Or so she thought.

  There was a mid-week service at the chapel, but Rhoda did not go to that, either, preferring to keep the blackbird company in the garden. Jonas Harkness preached to an audience of three. Amy Causer, Mr. Marsden and old Mrs. Parker. After the service he stood at the door and shook hands as the old people went out, just as he always did. Then he shut the chapel door and instead of returning to his house took the road to the moors. He had several visits to make that morning and a circuit meeting to attend. None of this was of any importance, however, since he had decided to end his life.

  Richard Oliver also went to the moors. He had decided to begin his life, a decision which involved more planning than did Mr. Harkness’s. There was unfinished business at the farmhouse. He had always seen things through before, it was one of the principles on which he had founded his life; if he turned aside now he would alter the whole course of his life. He had thought that he had lived dangerously in the past, but now he was aware that he had been guided by rules and regulations which were not of his making. To step outside that carefully balanced world of danger and discipline, violence and order, was to take a step into chaos. He walked all the morning trying to adjust himself to the consequences of his momentous decision.

  Catherine got up in the afternoon. She was feeling sick and very thirsty. Hester was no longer there. Catherine went down the stairs to the kitchen and drank a lot of cold water. She returned to the hall. The house was changing all the t
ime now. The drawing-room door was open and she could see as she peered timorously through the aperture that the French windows were open also. The curtains moved in the breeze. The terrible, violent wind had died down of late but the little breezes that stole through every crack and chink were infinitely more disturbing. And the grass was so green, so passionately green that it hurt her eyes. She turned away without bothering to shut doors or windows, the invader had too strong a hold of the house now. She went up the stairs, her heart thudding uncomfortably. Someone was singing a light, lilting melody that rang in the rafters of the house. Catherine paused on the landing, gathering her failing strength, and then went up the attic stairs. She flung open the bedroom door and for a moment the sunlight blinded her. Then she saw that Melita was there attired in all her glory like the lilies of the field. Catherine screamed. Anna tried to comfort her, but Catherine went on screaming. Thoroughly frightened, Anna threw off the brilliant silks and struggled into her old slacks and pullover. She ran down the stairs and out into the street. The first person that she encountered was Gabriel who had been hanging round the house for some time.

  ‘I can’t stop,’ she said impatiently. ‘I must get Dr. Arnold.’

  ‘He’s just gone out, I saw his car.’