Air and Angels

by Susan Hill

  And all in a second. No more.

  Slowly, she stood up. Again she did not ask him for a hand to help her. He would not have dared to give it.

  She faced him.

  He said, ‘Kitty.’

  And thought to die, then.

  Very carefully, she stepped back into the little boat, and sat, gathering her skirts around her, her back straight, eyes wide. He saw the pulse leaping in her throat.

  And took up the oars and in silence and stillness, rowed them back, and the sun had slipped down a little in the sky, and shone onto her and blazed round her, and all was different between them, and the world wholly changed for ever.

  27

  ‘KITTY?’

  But it was the maid, Ena, who was in the room, changing the water jug.

  The headache had not lessened, though the sickness was gone.

  ‘Miss Kitty has gone out, ma’am, for a tour of the colleges.’

  ‘With some of her friends? The undergraduates?’

  ‘No, ma’am, with the Reverend Mr Cavendish, who called.’

  But she was not well enough to get up until the following afternoon, and then, felt the usual, bruised wariness, afraid that some sudden movement would trigger the headache again. It was like a thunderstorm that has rolled away, to linger dully somewhere in the near distance, and might at any time return.

  At tea, she said, ‘I hear you visited the colleges? Privilege indeed!’

  ‘Yes.’ Kitty spread honey upon a slice of bread. Her hair was plaited tight at the back of her head, her dark linen dress severely plain. She was not the same person.

  Would never be.

  ‘It was very interesting.’

  But, staring into her face, Florence found it closed, and defying admittance.

  Only, the previous evening, it had not defied old Mrs Gray, who had been sitting at the window when Kitty returned and had looked into it, and into his face, too, and seen what was open and plainly written there.

  But would of course say nothing.

  28

  IN THE early morning, Lewis leaves the house and rides, and feels well, strong, vigorous, able, even, to tolerate the intolerable heat. On Friday, at last, he will leave for the Hills.

  By noon, he shivers with fever at his desk, and later, is giddy, disorientated.

  Later still, before midnight, dead, on the floor beside the bed, where he has fallen, eyes wide open, staring, staring.

  29

  IT WAS such a short time, to change lives so irrevocably, and all over so quickly.

  (For Florence and Georgiana were gone on the train to London, to be taken around St Faith’s Shelter for the fallen young women, they would stay at a good hotel close to the park, and go to theatres and galleries, too, and shop in St James’s, they would enjoy themselves, it would do them both good.)

  It was only three days.

  But it seemed to him that it lasted for ever, looking back, it had been the whole of his life.

  (Though Kitty, looking back, if she ever did, could barely recall it.)

  She had said that she would like more friends, that she had only Miss Pontifex’s undergraduates, who in any case were older, and had their own lives, and perhaps had merely been kind.

  ‘I will give you friends – new friends, of just your own age, or thereabouts, they will be glad to welcome you.’

  And so they went, on the train for a short distance, and then, through the lanes in a trap, between verges, thick and creamy with the late flowering of cow parsley, and, here and there, wild scabious, pale, chalky blue, and clouds of tiny butterflies, orange-tipped, drifted up as the wheel brushed against the grass.

  It was the most perfect of days once more.

  (And what old Mrs Gray thought, she did not speak, only wondered sadly, sitting at the wide window in Cambridge, about Florence and all her illusions.)

  He had left a note on his door in college, and done no work at all, and seen no one, and did not think of any of it for a moment.

  Kitty sat straight-backed, very still, they were quite silent with one another.

  But now and then she smiled, at him, or away, at some distant, secret thing.

  And looking at him, she felt old beyond her years, and responsible, too. She was not girlish, had no thought of chattering about any of it to such friends as she had, understanding that it was not a thing of that kind. Though she had never until now known anything of love, that had been to do with some distant, possible future, she had not bothered to consider it.

  She saw that he looked at her, and saw love, again, and recognised its rarity, its absolute value. But felt quite calm, though knew that he was not, and that for him it was momentous in a way she could only dimly comprehend, that he trembled and was afraid. Felt for him.

  But whether she loved in return, she could not have told.

  The trap turned into the village, where honeysuckle and the first of the roses flowered and climbed and cascaded over walls and doors.

  Corridors, Georgiana thought, it is always corridors. And high, narrow windows, and iron beds, primly made, and girls with sad faces scrubbing floors. Texts on the walls. Bibles. Sheets being hemmed, in a great, bare basement hall.

  And the babies taken away from them as soon as born.

  And all for what? she thought, for what? Wanting to weep.

  In India, the message makes its slow way up from Calcutta to the Hills, passed without interest through a dozen hands.

  Eleanor sits on the verandah and looks at the green, green trees on the opposite slope, and is aloof from Myrtle Piggerton (whose flirtation has petered out, but who must still suffer the social consequences), and is lonely, and will be lonelier still, soon.

  But rings the bell for iced tea, not yet knowing.

  In the garden of the vicarage, more roses, and beds of great, pink, blowsy peonies, and the children, the girls walking arm in arm (for of course, they had taken to her at once, and especially Elizabeth, she was straightaway become a friend), and the baby peaceful in the pram.

  Later, after tea, they played French cricket, where the lawn ran down towards unkempt grass and the great hawthorn hedge.

  (But Isobel stayed in the house, she felt unsafe in the outside world, vulnerable. And they were used to it, their life continued more or less without her, though several times, one or other of them had gone back to see her, and the sense of her despair hovered around the edges of the day, and the summer sunshine, souring them a little.)

  But Kitty did not feel it, Kitty was not soured, Kitty ran and threw and laughed and kicked off her shoes and rocked the baby back to sleep, and tossed her hair from off her face, and the small boys clambered about her, pulling her down, spinning her round, ambushing her with shouts. Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.

  She was a child among them.

  But once, caught him looking at her, and smiled, bright-faced, joyous, and he saw that, after all, he had no need to speak, that she knew, had long known, and that all was open between them, and then, his heart leaped, in pain and pleasure, then, all things in the world were possible, and there was no hurt or harm anywhere.

  Standing beside him, Cecil Moxton saw too, and stared, bewildered, disbelieving.

  Slowly, they began to walk away together, out of the garden, echoing with the cries of the children and through the gate that led to the fields, and followed the path bordering the wood, the terrier running before them. They walked for a mile or more, until they were out of sight of the house, the hayfields thick and rich and sweet around them.

  But for a long time he could not speak, only looked at the hayfields stretching all around and away from them in the late afternoon light, the faint haze on the horizon, as if the sea lay there. And he had again the sense of time, as well as space, stretching infinitely ahead of him, and yet of there being no time, and of standing here at the still centre of things, the place to which he had been journeying all his life.

  In the end, he struggled for some way to speak of it to Moxton, some way
of explaining.

  But he could only say, at length, ‘I saw her … I walked from home, across the Backs. She was – standing on the bridge.’

  He fell silent, seeing it again, as he had seen it a thousand times in his mind’s eye, Kitty standing, looking down into the water.

  ‘You see – my life is changed – utterly and irrevocably changed – and I – I am not the same man – I – it is as though …’

  Cecil walked away a few paces away from him, and stood, head bent.

  ‘It is all I want – all I – I want nothing more in life. But … how can that be? Why should it be?’ He was crying for help.

  Cecil half turned, but did not look at him, could not meet his eye. When he spoke, his voice sounded tight, strange.

  He said, ‘But she is a child. She is fifteen years old. She is younger than Elizabeth.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She … you cannot …’

  Then Thomas said, simply, ‘Why should I not marry her?’

  ‘Marry?’

  ‘Not … when she is older … a little older … Why?’ Wildly, as he spoke, he thought it possible.

  Knew that it was not.

  He said, ‘I have never known love. I am fifty-five, and I have not known love until this time.’

  ‘No.’

  And Cecil looked at him then and saw that it was true, and that his face was softened and made young by it; it was as though he looked not at a sober, fleshly man, but at someone changed and made altogether new, reborn. And wholly innocent.

  And he thought then of his own love, for his wife, as it had begun so many years ago, and of Isobel now, her face blank and turned from him, of the days and nights of despair.

  ‘What am I to do?’

  Moxton shook his head, not knowing.

  ‘It is all. There is nothing else, do you not understand that?’ His voice was urgent, angry even, yet he whispered and could scarcely be heard.

  In the end, Cecil turned and slowly began to walk away, back in the direction of the house and the garden, the laughing children. Kitty. And after a few moments, Thomas followed him.

  Whether it was better to have spoken or whether he should have kept altogether silent, he did not know.

  But, looking up and seeing Kitty, standing slightly apart from the others, at the corner of the lawn, he cared nothing either, forgot it, everything, in thrall to, stunned again by, love.

  Looking at his face again, Moxton felt a spurt of anguish and cold fear, but intermingled with a sudden, mad hope, and the desire to defend him.

  The game ended, the circle of figures broke. There were joyful shouts, and then the children came running, laughing towards them over the lawn.

  In its pram underneath the tree, the baby stirred in sleep, eyelids fluttering a little. But he did not wake.

  And in the trap, driving through the night lanes, Kitty slept, too, and he stopped and laid his coat over her, and then drove on with infinite care, as if the road beneath them were made of glass.

  In the little, rattling train, empty apart from themselves, she sat in the corner of the carriage, huddled back against the seat, pale and moth-like, as the moon rose, silvering the countryside. And the train whistled, eerie, ghostly, running through a tunnel, frightening the vixen who raced away from it, back to her cubs in the far spinney.

  ‘You are very tired,’ he said, ‘I have been very wrong to keep you out so late.’

  ‘Oh no, I am only drowsy. And …’

  ‘And?’

  But she shook her head, and looking out of the window, he saw the backs of the first, dark terraces, on the edge of the town. And – for time still stood, for them and must never spring forward, nothing must end, said.

  ‘Then perhaps, tomorrow, you would like to go …’ he hesitated, ‘go to the sea.’

  ‘The sea,’ she said gravely. ‘Yes. I should like that most of all.’

  And they looked into one another’s faces, one another’s eyes, then, and so remained, looking, and never looked away until the train drew into the station.

  Hearing their voices and the closing of the door, old Mrs Gray sat on the armchair beside her bed, fully dressed. But did not go down, did not interfere. Only remembered things that were a lifetime away and, understanding what she had seen in his face, and the meaning of it, feared for him.

  30

  ‘THE SEA,’ she had said, ‘I should like that most of all.’

  And so they went, nothing could have been simpler, and if the world stirred uneasily, beneath the bright, serene, sunlit surface, a calm before the storm, and if he knew, he was entirely careless of it.

  There had not been a cloud in the sky for days, they were grown used to it, took it for granted, everybody did.

  From the railway station, they walked up the hill, past the granite-faced church, and at the brow, before the slope began to run down again, stopped, and looked over the rooftops of the little pink- and white- and lemon-painted houses, to where the sea lay, flat and smooth and bright blue as a child’s sea in a picture.

  Though when they reached the level, and the narrow lanes that led out onto the foreshore, the houses, those belonging to the fishermen, were not all so pretty, some were dingy and mean, with blank windows that let in no light.

  And the shingle beach sloped down to the water’s edge and the waves swelled up and tumbled over, foaming and swirling all around, it was not, even today, a gentle, sheltered sea.

  The pebbles were pale, grey upon grey as gull’s wings, and the gulls themselves perched on the breakwater, and rawked from the rooftops, wheeling suddenly about the sky, riding the water, far out. The air tasted salt on their lips.

  They walked away from the town, and Kitty took off her shoes and the water washed over her bare feet, making her laugh with pleasure.

  He wondered how it could be that he was content simply for there to be this, to walk with her, look at her, have her in this place with him, and be entirely happy, in a state of bliss and utter satisfaction, to need nothing else, nothing more. For all of his past, the old interests and concerns had dropped quite away from him, and his old self was sloughed off, like a skin. And looking about him, he saw the world re-created, all things were strange, new, brave and infinitely rare and beautiful to his eyes. He looked at sea and sky, at the stones beneath his feet, and the shimmer of the far horizon, and the bird balanced on the post ahead, and he had never seen their like before, all were miraculously new to him.

  Kitty was standing, her shoes in her hand, the sea water creaming, opaque, green and white as bottle glass, around her ankles.

  She turned, ‘Oh, it is beautiful here. It is a wonderful place. It is quite perfect.’

  And danced then, stretching out her arms, in the sunlight, at the edge of the water.

  Behind the town, behind the sea wall, lay the marshes, and the river wound slowly across them inland for mile after mile, under the great, pale bowl of sky.

  Later, they came here, and walked again, and as soon as they had left the sea and dropped down onto the marsh path, they left the sound of it, too, the ceaseless rushing up and falling over and sucking back upon itself, rasping down the pebbles. Here it was utterly quiet, save for the odd, haunting cry of a bird and the brush of their legs against the dry grasses.

  The water lay low in pools, half dried up, and the river ran like a silver snail-thread.

  Farther away, the sky was darker, as though condensing like a bruise. The air was very close, very still, it seemed harder to breathe here.

  And then, as if both had agreed upon it, though neither had spoken, they sat down, on the dry path, overlooking the water, and the wide, pale marsh, and began, falteringly, to talk to one another in the way of lovers, though neither knew it, or knew that this was a common thing.

  He told Kitty what he had scarcely spoken of before, not because the things were secret, but because there had never been any chance, or occasion, any other person, to tell. Told of childhood and of the house in Ireland, and
his days out in the boat with Collum O’Cool, of his sister and her love for him, how she would follow him about; of his mother, school, the university, the church, his friend Cecil Moxton, his work, his God, his love for the birds, the island and the hours spent alone there, told her his thoughts, feelings, fears, and, in between, the small details, that he did not know he had so much as remembered, and the dreams and the nightmares.

  And Kitty told, too, and as she told, relived, and saw it all vividly before her, India, the hot days, the house, the Hills, the servants, the horses, the crying of the jackals at night, the procession of governesses, and talking of it, wanted it again, missed it, and speaking of her mother and father, cried, as she had not let herself cry since coming to England and the tears seemed necessary. But they were not tears of unhappiness.

  They sat, a little apart, not touching, looking away from one another, and after a long time of talking, fell silent, and there was only the whistle of a bird now and then, in the silence of the marshes around them.

  He said, ‘You must eat something. We should go back to the town.’ But, looking up, he saw that the sky had gathered and darkened and was hanging heavily over them, there was thunder faintly in the distance, and the first heavy drops of rain.

  All around them, the open marsh, save for, perhaps a hundred yards away, near to the river-shore, a half-derelict hut, once used by the punt-gunners, abandoned now, for they no longer came to this part.

  But it was clean and dry inside, though quite bare. Through the glass-less window, and the door that swung half open, they looked out at the rain, as it came in soft, pale clouds, sweeping over the marsh, shutting out the line of the land, where it met the sky. The air smelled of earth and salt and of the mud, stirred by the first rain for weeks.