Checkmate

by MARY HOCKING

  She said frantically, ‘Catherine is dreadfully ill. She’s screaming and screaming and I can’t stop her.’

  ‘That’s hysteria,’ Gabriel said. ‘She’ll stop now that she hasn’t got an audience.’

  ‘But why should she get in such a terrible state? She was almost demented and it was seeing me that did it. She said I was unclean. What have I done?’

  ‘I can tell you that, too,’ he said.

  Richard Oliver and Jonas Harkness walked all the afternoon. Towards evening they met and spoilt each other’s plans. Jonas Harkness said bitterly:

  ‘I remember reading a story once of a man who was warned that Death would take him on a particular day. On that day he met Death as he walked in the bazaar, but Death passed him by. The man thought that he could be clever and he ran away to a lonely place thinking that he could escape his destiny; but as he walked along the road. Death joined him. “I was surprised to see you in the town,” Death said, “because I knew that it was here that I was due to meet you”.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Richard Oliver said. ‘But is it relevant?’

  ‘It illustrates the futility of trying to escape.’

  Jonas Harkness looked bleakly at the other man; he did not know how to ask for help because he had long ago lost the art of communication. But Richard Oliver had learnt to recognize certain symptoms and now, wearily, his trained responses took over from his unwilling spirit.

  ‘Things are never as black as they seem.’

  ‘On the contrary, they are often far blacker.’ Jonas Harkness had been preaching all his adult life and now the preacher automatically asserted himself. ‘There are things that we keep at the back of our mind . . . no, not even there . . . in the pit of our stomach, abominable, abhorrent, obscene things . . .’ The sweat pricked at his hairline and above his lip, just as it had when he spoke to Amy Causer. Amy had stopped him, but Richard Oliver, from long habit, let him speak. There was not much that he had failed to discover since he first came to this place; now, when he was no longer interested in making fresh discoveries, he had to listen to the most complete confession of all. When it was over the two men walked for a while in silence.

  ‘We are both of us outcasts,’ Jonas Harkness said eventually. Then he shook his head and corrected himself with uncharacteristic humility. ‘No, perhaps you are not an outcast. You may have lived according to your creed, whatever that may be. But I have betrayed mine. And ever since then I have lived a lie; I have preached and prayed and, worst of all, I have administered the Sacrament although I knew that I was unfit to do so. You don’t know what that means because God means nothing to you. The terrible thing is that I have acted this lie for so long that God has become a part of it and in the process I have destroyed him. I came up here to make a final gesture . . .’ He looked around him. The light was thickening and the horizon was diminishing. ‘Life is so pointless that it isn’t worth ending it.’

  They walked slowly in the direction of the village.

  ‘I don’t know what happened to your wife,’ Richard Oliver said.

  ‘She was my cross. I sometimes wonder whether the way to salvation may not be through her. She is in a mental hospital. Lately I have thought that my punishment might be to have her home again.’

  ‘Might that not be punishing her rather than yourself?’

  Harkness drew in his breath. ‘How you cut through to the bone!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m not. It’s more years than I can remember since I’ve talked to another man on equal terms.’

  He was defeated but no longer desperate. He had always thought that if he could break the long silence, if he could talk freely about his sin, he would find that the burden had been lifted from him. Now he knew that he must carry it always. It was a relief to give up hope; perhaps he would be able to live more easily without it.

  When they parted Richard Oliver walked slowly back to the farmhouse. He tried not to analyse events but he could not control his mind and the pieces began to fit into place. He looked at the house as it loomed up, gaunt in the gathering twilight. It had all happened so long ago, he said to himself, so long ago. What did it matter that the pattern was now complete? The only thing that was of importance was Anna’s happiness. He entered the house and climbed the stairs to her room, but she was not there. The evening breeze chilled the room and seemed to emphasize its emptiness. The brilliant silks tumbled on the floor turned his heart to stone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was a long time since the island had been inhabited. Occasionally tourists visited it, orange peel and a cigarette packet floated in the harbour and a crumpled paper bag skittered across the jetty; the breeze ruffled a blue ribbon in the gashed harbour wall. This evidence of past human traffic made the place seem more desolate; it had none of the freshness of the undiscovered, only the sadness of the abandoned. The row of cottages emphasized this. The roofs gaping at the sky and the grass bushing from the windows bore witness to the defeat of human endeavour.

  It was quiet, as though even the Atlantic had ceased to have commerce with the island. The water in the harbour was still; save for the soughing of the wind in the long grass there was no sound until Anna came. Her feet clattered on the broken road waking echoes in a score of empty rooms. A seagull, perched on a pile of rubble, watched her approach with detached hostility.

  She passed the cottages and did not turn for a backward look at the harbour. The boat which she had released on landing had already drifted quite a way out, but she gave it not a glance. She walked on, her face grim as that of a long-absent landlord returning to his ruined domain. The seagull which had agitated its feathers now folded them quietly one over the other and settled down again. Anna took the track that ran along the spine of the island; on either side the ground banked steeply so that the track was a shaft bored in shadow. The going was hard, Anna walked on sharp stones the size of a man’s fist; she could see nothing but the aimlessly moving grass making an unintelligible scrawl on the skyline. The path climbed slowly and arduously for about two miles. Anna walked steadily, her head down, apparently absorbed with the business of putting one foot before the other. When at last she came to the top of the ridge the banks on either side fell away and she could see the land sloping in green folds to the sea. In the distance, the land looked smooth and soft, but nearer the bones of the island showed, long ribs of rock protruding between the long grass. Anna, having reached the highest point of the island, sat down on a boulder and surveyed the territory. Behind her, the cottages and the harbour looked peaceful and resigned as an ancient burial ground. In front, she could see the jagged coastline with here and there bays of golden sand trapped between great pincers of rock. The cliffs on this side of the island were very high and sheer; no human footprints would ever have marked those sands.

  Anna plucked a plume of grass, moving her fingers up the stalk so that the seeds flaked out in her hands; the chaff blew in her face, sweet and dusty. She sat for an hour gazing at the inviolable sands across which the waves frothed delicate as a frill of deep blue lace. Only when the sun began to go down did she get up. She headed in the direction of the distant golden bays, walking quickly as though she had an appointment with the setting sun. When she finally reached the most inhospitable of all the headlands, the sands were no longer golden but in little pools here and there light still lingered turquoise, saffron, kingfisher. Over the sea, the sun was sinking in a glory of renunciation, burnishing paths of bronze across the water. This indeed was the way to die! Anna raised her head and stood poised and proud, splendidly prepared for sacrifice. And then, in that moment when she summoned all her powers of courage and resolution, a light breeze stole from the sea to make mock of her pretensions; merrily it ruffled her hair and twisted her skirt between her legs, impudently it invaded her body, treacherously its soft breath fanned desire. It passed in a moment, frisking away across the grass. Anna looked down at iron grey rocks and muddied sand. The breeze had taken all the
glory with it and left her with an agony too sharp for death to assuage. She ran back the way she had come; she ran like a person on fire, too pain-racked to be still; she ran stumbling, slipping, scrambling sometimes on all fours, but never stopping until she came in sight of the cottages and the harbour.

  The last light had dwindled. All was grey now. The decaying cottages gathered together, sombrely reflected in the still water. There was nothing here to trouble the senses: this was the true death. Anna collapsed on the grass not far from the end cottage. At first she fought for breath and her body trembled from exertion; but gradually she, too, became quiet. The blood ebbed from her face, weariness eased out pain. She sat staring across the water, her face vacant as the windowless cottages. Once she spread her hand out on the ground and her fingers felt the rock beneath the lean grass.

  The moon had been a faint oval in the twilight sky, but as the darkness deepened it glowed with a cold lustre, avidly drawing warmth from everything it touched. Anna twisted her face to one side trying to shield herself from the devouring light. After a time she stretched out, face down. She pressed fiercely to the earth, hungry for darkness; her fingers curled at the roots of the grass and soil worked beneath her nails. She pressed her face down, the earth was in her nostrils, against the eyelids. Gradually her body relaxed and grew heavy so that there was no longer any tension between her and the earth. It grew darker and the darkness had depth. There was a spiral curving down into the earth; she could feel it curving round and round, drawing her down and down. Something seemed to close over her.

  The moon shone on the ruined cottages, the gashed harbour wall, it made a wide track across the sea linking the island with the mainland; it silvered the cobbled streets and huddled houses of Polwithian. A thin pencil of moonlight slid between the curtains of the room where Gabriel lay in bed, his troubled eyes staring at the ceiling.

  ‘I did it for her sake,’ Gabriel was saying to himself. ‘Someone had to tell her.’

  He didn’t believe it. Anna had sinned. Thanks to his father Gabriel was well-versed in such matters and he knew that incest had a high rating in the catalogue of sins. Admittedly Anna was innocent, but innocence, Gabriel also knew, was a liability rather than an asset and it certainly provided no let-out from the consequences of sin. Nevertheless, something inside him which had nothing to do with his father’s beliefs, told him that he himself had committed the greatest sin of all. He could not analyse the conviction but he felt its reality deep in the pit of his stomach. He had in the past done, quite deliberately, things which should have damned him and he had come to no real harm: it seemed terrible that, quite accidentally, he should have done something of which he would be ashamed for the rest of his life. He had lost Anna, he accepted that. But he had lost something else as well, a kind of irresponsibility which had been very sweet and which he had not sufficiently cherished. While he lay there, they would be searching the moors for her as they had searched all the evening. He was sure that they would not find her. If Anna wanted to hide she would do it successfully, she was a very determined person. He was not afraid for Anna. It was for Gabriel that he grieved.

  No moonlight intruded in Catherine’s room. She had drawn the curtains tight across the window when at last she went to bed. They were gone from the house, Anna and the man; gone their separate ways, no matter where or why. She had thought that there would be peace without them. But it was not so. The house was full of voices which became louder and more insistent. Some of the voices belonged to the past, they spoke in the bedrooms, the kitchen, outside the lounge door; voices brave and gay, coarse and angry, gentle and infinitely corruptible. It was disturbing to realize that the house had known so many moods. But the most frightening of all were the voices that belonged to the future, a continuous unintelligible murmur waiting to pounce on her at the end of the corridor, from the dark turning of the stair, waiting to destroy her.

  A real voice belonging to the present intruded. Rhoda was speaking to someone in the hall.

  ‘No, she hasn’t come back. The men are still searching the moors.’

  It wouldn’t do them any good to search the moor. Anna had taken a boat. The man to whom the boat belonged had come to the house to report its loss to the police in case it had any significance. The sergeant had just left, but Catherine had said that she would give him the message when he returned from the moors. Two hours later she had given the sergeant tea, but nothing else. Anna had brought all this trouble on them; she must never be allowed to return.

  Something tapped against the window-pane and Catherine started up in bed moaning. But it was only a branch of creeper. The wind was up. It tumbled the branches of the cedar, blustered across the waves sending breakers dashing over the jetty at Polwithian. Farther out to sea it grew calmer and only a gentle ripple crept up the island’s beaches and stirred the long grass where Anna lay.

  Anna’s face was close against the ground and she hardly seemed to breathe; but as the breeze touched her cheek she frowned and the one visible eyelid flickered. After a moment she put a hand to her cheek and felt the imprint of the earth there. The hand became taut, the fingers clenched tight; and yet the tears came. There was earth in her nostrils, in her mouth; she began to cough. The coughing was bad; she heaved herself stiffly to her knees, retching, spitting out earth. She fought for breath; she had no intention of choking to death. She had in any case, it seemed, no intention of dying. When at last the coughing eased, she fumbled for a handkerchief and blew her nose. The grass around her was crushed where her body had lain; she ran her fingers through the grass. The tears came again, more freely now. She said, ‘Richard’ and repeated the name over and over again. It was useless to think that she could escape from him, he was all that she had. Something in her that was fiercely reckless, some old gambler’s instinct, told her to cling to that. He had asked her to trust him, but she was beyond trust now: she could only stake everything on him. It made sense in a grim way, and sense she badly needed.

  She looked around her, shivering. The breeze was gentle, but it was a night breeze. What to do? Her brain was in command now: it said, ‘Light a fire.’ Out there beyond the water’s edge it was so dark; it was not only for warmth that she would need a fire. The making of it would not be easy, of course; but having made the momentous decision to live, it was inconceivable that she should be unable to light a fire.

  She stood up and looked round her. There were no trees or shrubs on the island; as far as wood was concerned, the cottages represented the best hope. They were stone, but she could see a strip of wood where one window gaped. It was more difficult than she had expected to wrench it free and she tore her hands; but torn hands mattered little. She went to the next cottage. The walls seemed to close in on her, low and damp as a tomb; she had no respect for its dusty peace and clattered about as she pleased.

  She went from cottage to cottage and in the last one she found the wreck of a staircase. She tore her hand again on a rusty nail and splinters drove into her fingers. She swore monotonously while she worked. It took a long time and even when she had enough wood, the pieces were too large. She ran along the road, through the long grass towards the hill track. Here she gathered several sharp stones. The wood was rotten and she managed to hack it into fairly small chips; then she carried the bundle to a sheltered patch close against the wall of one of the cottages. She sat cross-legged beside the heaped wood and rubbed two sharp stones together. It took a long time and some blood and tears before a spark was kindled, but in the end she succeeded and soon there was smoke blackening her face. The wood caught gradually; it was not a cheerful fire, but it gave an illusion of warmth and it kept the darkness at bay.

  She looked out from the shelter of the cottage at the harbour wall, crumbling to dust; she looked behind at the road petering into wilderness, at the desolate, stone-littered hills beyond. Oh, yes, she would risk everything for Richard! She would go to the crest of the hill tomorrow and light another fire; the grass was tinder dry up there
. She would set fire to the whole island if necessary.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In the morning they went out, Rhoda, Richard Oliver, even Hester who suddenly decided to go down to Rhoda’s cottage. Richard Oliver went out on the moors accompanied by the police sergeant. Catherine had seen the two men talking before they set off; the sergeant’s manner, though respectful, had seemed to her to be inexplicably familiar.

  Alone in the house, Catherine found herself completely at the mercy of the voices. It was a tremendous relief when towards midday the front door opened. She ran into the hall hoping that Rhoda had returned and found herself confronted by Richard Oliver.

  He did not speak. Usually he was ready enough with words, but this time he stood watching her as though he might never speak again. He looked older; he had not shaved, which did not improve him and the part of his face that was not bristly was grey. At any other time Catherine would have wondered whether he was ill. But all that she noticed now was that the front door was still ajar, an arrow of light fell on the hall floor. It was not too late to end this unwanted interview. She went across and put one hand on the latch.

  ‘They are all out,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll have a word with you, then.’

  He reached across her and shut the door. For a moment their bodies touched and she jerked back as though he had burnt her.

  ‘Where can we talk?’ He was indifferent to her reaction. ‘In the drawing-room?’

  He turned away without waiting for a reply and went into the drawing-room. His brusqueness was the result of extreme fatigue but she felt that he was being deliberately boorish. She had never seen any good in him.

  ‘I’ve got to make tea for the men,’ she said, standing in the doorway.

  ‘They won’t be back yet. They’re the other side of the moors. So, you see, we have plenty of time.’ He made a gesture towards the high-backed chair; his movements were rigidly controlled. ‘Won’t you sit down?’