Air and Angels

by Susan Hill

And was content. And would not die yet awhile.

  17

  HE WOKE in the night to silence. The storm had blown itself out.

  Thomas went to the window and saw that the whole quayside and the salt flats and the great, still expanse of the estuary beyond, were washed in moonlight, and the face of the moon gazed back at itself, serene in the waters.

  And, as he looked at them, he imagined how they would be now, the secret reedbeds and inlets, the mud-flats and saltings, right away to the shoreline itself, seething with birds, feeding, flying, or lying low in the water, and other birds tucked into banks and hollows, knew that what appeared to be so silent, so still, so dead under the moon, teemed with hidden life.

  Then, as he stood, he heard the faintest sound, the soft slip of an oar into the water. And the smell of pipe tobacco came up to him faintly, sweetly, on the night air.

  The small boats were leaving, the first few gliding away across the estuary, the outline of the men dark as felt against the moon.

  The punt-gunners, the wild-fowlers, at the end of their frustration and confinement in the storm, were making silently, stealthily, for their hunting grounds out on the waters, and their secret watching and waiting for the night birds and the dawn birds, their prey.

  He would not sleep again now, would not even wait until first light.

  For he, like the other men, was restless to be away, to be out there on the water, though quite alone, and with a less violent purpose.

  He dressed and packed his things in the canvas bag, and as he did so, he felt that everything else had dropped away, every other thought or consideration in the world, he felt light and unburdened, and full of exhilaration.

  And he was a boy again, the same boy who had got ready like this, furtively, quietly, to go out in the hush of early morning, through the mist that lay low over the Lake, in the fishing boat of Collum O’Cool. Collum O’Cool, who scarcely spoke, only rowed and fished and sat, close and still. And there had been an absolute bond between them, a companionship and understanding such as he had never known in the rest of his life.

  Nor did he expect ever to know it again.

  He descended the dark, creaking staircase, and, after leaving money on the taproom counter in payment, went out of the inn and across the moonlit quay to the boat-shed, where Abel Sinnett had made the small dinghy ready for him days before.

  And the smell of the salt sea blew across into his nostrils and the rich, wet, pungent reek of the marsh, and he felt as if his own body were light enough to rise and soar into the night sky towards the stars pricked out in it, like one of the sea-birds, great of wing.

  The island was very small, no more than a few dozen yards across, and marshy, with reeds fringing the outer edges, and thicker grass and some alder and willows towards the centre. On the eastern side stood the hut, with the houseboat moored beside it. And all around, water, flat and still and luminous under the moon.

  He tied up the dinghy and for a moment or two, rested there; as the lap of the waves he had made stilled and died away, there was silence again, thin and pure.

  Then, in the distance, the faintest of cries, a curlew, passing along the far fringe of the tide.

  And soon, that other sound, like no other in the natural world, at first a breath on the air, a movement, rather than a sound, but growing rapidly louder, as the geese came through the night towards him. He could see the skein now, flying towards the sea, white in the moonlight. As they approached, the beating of their wings sounded across the silent water-lands, and then he could hear them yelping, baying like hounds in full cry, their huge, beating bodies directly over his head, he looked up into the heart of the fast-flying pack, before they had gone, over the marshes and the tongue of the estuary, and away to sea, and only the last echo came back, like the faint wash after a great wave, and was absorbed again into the surrounding silence.

  With the smallest sigh over the water, the tide turned.

  Then the cold, hard crack of a gunshot, from one of the hidden men, and the crack reverberated, around the rim of the night sky, and others quickly succeeded it, and then the ducks rose in panic and clamour, and made away.

  Once, he had shot birds himself, in Ireland as a boy, and for a time out here, with the fowlers. But his heart had pulled against it, and he had regretted every bird shot, every airy, feathered body that had plummeted like lead from the free sky. Until finally he had shot a curlew, and felt as if the death that sprayed out of his gun had come instead from his own body, and the smoke of it had risen into his throat and nostrils and he had choked on it.

  He had never shot again. But he would not condemn those who did, the men who lay out there now, in punts and hides among the reeds and rushes, and whose harsh livelihood this was.

  And now, the dawn came up, pale light seeped into the sky and spread surreptitiously across the waters, and with the first light, a flicker of a breeze, breaking the stillness.

  He tied up the dinghy and climbed out and hauled himself, and his bag, up the rungs of the ladder onto the tarred wooden houseboat. Abel Sinnett had opened it up the week before, aired and cleaned it, and left him supplies, food and oil, candles and fresh water.

  Now, Thomas stowed his books and few clothes away, and refamiliarised himself with the close, cramped little rooms, the smell and feel of them, set up a kettle to boil on the primus; and when his tea was made, took it out onto the deck, to sit and look out over the wide waters.

  And as he sat, from nowhere, as though exhaled by the body of some invisible marsh creature, a mist began to steal towards him, wreathing and unearthly, so that in a few moments, the water below and all around him and then the island, the boat and the dinghy, were swathed in its cold dampness. And with the mist, the silence returned, and pressed in upon his ears, a new, uncanny, muffling silence, quite unlike the clear silence of the moonlit night.

  But then, so that it caused a shiver to creep over his flesh like the creeping of the breeze that rippled the water, he heard the strange, ill-omened booming of the bittern.

  18

  KITTY RIDES out at dawn, at barely five o’clock, and only the servants see her, rides out across the blue plains towards the river and beyond, mile after mile, with the syce for company, because that is the rule. But the syce keeps a few paces behind her and soon, she begins to gallop to try and outstrip him, and he knows it and allows it, though always keeping her in view, in reach.

  And it is this that she would miss if she were to leave, the freedom to race across country. Above her, the sky is silver-white but tinged faintly bronze where the rim meets the land, and her head is rinsed clean and clear, as a bowl rinsed in a spring, of any thoughts, any words, there is only the exhilaration and the movement, the rush of the air towards her.

  But Miss Hartshorn is awake, as always at this time, she sleeps so fitfully here, sits up in bed with a board across her knees, writing about Kitty’s future to her friend in Warwickshire, taking it upon herself to make tentative plans.

  Eleanor sleeps, cocooned in her dreams of glory, for she was admired on all sides, and looked magnificent and Lewis basked in it, and still none of it has faded, the satisfaction continues to warm them. And when she does stir and wake, it is only to the glow of happy recollections, like a young girl after a first ball, and then to think vaguely that before long it will be Christmas, which of course Kitty adores, and Kitty will be here with them, and so perhaps, everything else can be left to resolve itself, there are no troubles breaking upon the calm surface of her life.

  19

  QUITE SUDDENLY, the sun broke through the mist, dissolving and clearing it, flushing the water rose-red, and then, a few feet away from him he saw the bird. It was standing, solitary, motionless, on reedstalk legs, silhouetted against the sheen of the mud which had been exposed by the receding tides, at the island’s edge.

  And it seemed to Thomas that this place was a sort of paradise and he at the heart of it was in that state of bliss which saints and visionaries and poet
s attempted to describe. And, looking at the bird, perfectly poised against water and land and sky, he thought that no created thing was ever more beautiful.

  20

  ON NOVEMBER 22, at St Margaret’s church, by special licence. Eustace Partridge to Mary Wimpole.

  But it was a glorious afternoon, winter, the trees bare, and yet still flushed with the last of autumn in the air, in the sunlight.

  And Mary Wimpole, who was so small, so neat, wore lavender-grey and a hat trimmed with silver silk roses. But there was a puffy paleness about the skin below her eyes.

  No one knew them here, the town was miles away from their homes which was what had been thought best; the families had met together and it had all been decided.

  After the wedding, there was luncheon in a hotel, champagne had been served, and claret with the game pie, and so, things had passed off well enough, people had become quite friendly. There had been good wishes and a certain amount of laughter.

  Later, they had walked the short distance, arm in arm, down to catch the ferry to the Isle of Wight and the late afternoon sun struck gold upon the water. Everyone was making the best of it.

  Mary Wimpole – but Mary Partridge now – had smiled, and kissed both sets of parents very sweetly, and held his arm as the boat began to pull away.

  And they had waved. Everybody had waved, the figures on the jetty grew smaller and smaller, and became pin figures and still they were waving. And the sea-birds had wheeled and cried and followed in their wake.

  It seemed to Eustace that he was, for the time being, for these moments, really perfectly happy, perfectly content. To stand on the deck looking back to the mainland in the last of the sun, which had a little warmth as well as brightness in it.

  Except that he himself was not here, and had taken no part at all in the day’s events, there had been a stranger inhabiting his own body, filling his new suit of clothes, while his real self was in suspense somewhere, looking on from outside, and frozen in mid-frame, mid-life. Yet soon, surely, things would be as they were again, and he would be himself and back in Cambridge, the past would reassert itself.

  Meanwhile, they walked the cliff paths on the Isle of Wight, and slowly along deserted beaches beside the creaming tide, and the weather held all that week, though the fog-horn blew in the early mornings, and once, there was a frost at night.

  And Mary Wimpole chattered to him, and he looked after her with infinite care and tenderness, as he would some object that had been entrusted to him, but temporarily, that was not his but which he was to hand back.

  At night, he lay awake beside her, and when she slept, inched his body away, careful not to touch hers at any point, and after that, only listened to her quiet breathing, and the sound of the sea through the window and could neither sleep nor think. Only towards dawn, he became tangled in dreams from which he could not extricate himself when the fog-horn woke him in the muffled night.

  On Wednesday afternoon he left her lying on the bed, because she felt slightly unwell, and walked by himself, climbed to the top of Tennyson Down and sat there on the grass beside the cropping sheep, and remembered a holiday spent on the island when he was a small boy. He had come up here then, and sea and sky had stretched away all around and below him, and he had felt himself to be king of the world.

  Now, he lay on his back, and felt the earth turn, and thought that perhaps after all he might make the best of things.

  But he did not know her, and though she spoke lovingly, she knew nothing, nothing at all, of him.

  And then, realising that, and struck by the truth of it all, he stood up abruptly, and as he did so, recalled the childhood feeling that when the wind blew it would lift him off the ground and he would soar.

  As Thomas walks back across the dark heathland and marsh towards the sea, and the gale and the light of the Wherry Inn, seventy miles away, across that flat country, Adèle Hemmings is walking, too, down through the tangle of the neglected garden, where unspeakable horrors lie casually hidden in the grass, to the back gate (whose wood is slimy with rot and whose hinges are eaten away by rust, so that it always hangs half open).

  Beyond the back gate, a lane, between high walls, and hedges and fences, and other, more substantial gates, a cutting, a snicket, a ginnel, an alley. And beyond the lane, and beyond all the quiet, respectable avenues, the open fields, the Backs, the river. The world.

  Thinks Adèle Hemmings, who has scarcely been into it. The world, under the racing sky. For she looks up, and sees the clouds drift apart like veils, to let out a little of the watery moonlight, before they merge thickly together again and the moon goes out, and she is made giddy, and has to look down.

  In the satin parlour, her aunt rings a petulant bell. But Adèle Hemmings is gone, has stepped boldly out into the dark lane, beyond the broken gate, and does not hear and does not care, and even the cats, lying fatly about on their cushions, scarcely twitch, scarcely stir.

  Half a dozen dishes, of china and tin and pot, sit about the scullery floor, smeared and crusted with the remains of food, stained with the sour rims of cream (for the maids are paid too little, even by the poor standards of all such maids, and do not like cats, and are thoughtlessly treated, and do not stay. And the present maid is a sluttish thing, and will soon give in her notice.).

  In corners, here and there, blobs and skeins of entrail and matted fur, from the day’s slaughter.

  Adèle Hemmings (whose parents are twenty years dead. But she still remembers them, still weeps) walks out of the shelter of the alley and into the wind, and the wind blows her clothes about and lifts them up, exciting her, her heart takes off and pounds, with the realisation of where she is, alone at night in the silent streets.

  In the world.

  She is even excited by the silken sound of her own stockings. Thinks that she might laugh out loud, cackle and shriek. Or run about naked.

  Though in the parlour of the house, the irritable bell rings and rings, and if she is too far away and too much in the wind and too reluctant, for her ears to hear it, nevertheless, it reaches her, it rings inside her head, the walls of her skull trap and magnify the sound and it cannot be got out.

  Adèle Hemmings does not walk very far – fifty yards into the wind, but never out of the shelter of the respectable avenue.

  Behind her, a cat follows, slipping along the shadows of the hedge, watchful as a spy sent out from the house.

  Later, the clouds began to gather, dark as grapes, bringing rain. Later, he stood on the cliff-top and thought that he might simply jump down, down onto the shingle and dark rocks.

  But of course he did not, only turned, feeling the first spatter of rain on his face, to walk back to the hotel, and to his wife.

  She has ridden very hard, delighted in letting the pony have its head, she has thrown off the syce and his cautions, his frown of disapproval, galloping, galloping. But the sun is higher now, they have turned for home, sedately trotting, barely disturbing the dust. Sadu is content again.

  Exhausted, hot, jubilant, Kitty’s head is full of the week to come. There is to be a moonlight picnic, there are no fewer than three garden parties, there is the gymkhana, the social round is unceasing, and suddenly, she sees that it is fun after all, great fun, there are friends, there is so much to enjoy.

  Except, perhaps, that it is always Eleanor who is the bright star, glittering at the centre of it all and around whom everything revolves.

  They are trotting towards a village, a few houses among the beanfields, for a little way the track takes on the slight resemblance to a road. And in the dust at the edge of the road, but still some distance from the nearest house, she sees a figure, scuttling slowly, crab-wise, bent close to the earth, and, nearing it, looks down at a crippled woman, thin, deformed, with twisted legs and arms, and a hunch on her bent back, like an incubus. And the legs end in stumps and are running with sores, and pus runs out of one of the eye sockets.

  She is dragging her body in the ditch, towards the village, a
nd beside her, running easily to keep pace, small boys dance a mocking dance, and jabber and jeer. And then one picks up a handful of dust and stones and hurls it and the others cry out joyfully, and bend to follow suit.

  And in shouting at them, cracking her whip to disperse them, in pulling her pony up and round, and calling to Sadu for help, in the swirl of dust and the yelling and confusion, Kitty sees the crippled woman trip and fall half under the hooves of the pony, half into the ditch, she rolls and flails her stunted, withered arms, to save herself.

  And Kitty would dismount, do something to help, for the small boys have raced away now. But Sadu rides fast alongside her, bends to take her reins and then urges both ponies on, so that Kitty is obliged to go too and to hold tight to the saddle as they gallop on, she only sees, glancing over her shoulder as she is pulled away, that the woman has begun to move again, crawling slowly, painfully through the dust towards the houses. And though she screams at the syce, screeches at him, angrily, and beats her fists on the saddle in frustration, she knows that it is no use, that he will not stop, but only forces the two ponies grimly on, until they are a mile or more away, and on the last lap towards home, when he releases the rein, gives it back into her control, and then drops a pace or two behind her again, knowing that she will not go back now.

  She knows perfectly well what has happened. She is unsurprised. He is a Hindu, and she herself is the daughter of a memsahib, and the cripple is untouchable. That is all there is to it.

  In the drive, she dismounts stiffly from her sweating pony and drops the reins for the syce to retrieve, turns her back on him, without looking in his direction.

  Impassively, the man leads both ponies off, around to the stables and out of sight.

  And, bursting into the house and into her mother’s bedroom, where Eleanor is creaming her throat at the mirror, the fury and outrage and frustration swelling up behind her eyes, roaring in her ears like the sea, Kitty says, ‘I hate India. I hate this dreadful country, do you hear? I hate it all.’ And bursts out sobbing, her face scarlet, so that Lewis comes in alarm out of his dressing-room, to demand an explanation for the hubbub.