by Susan Hill
It was Colt who came, David Colt, the youngest of the foresters who worked for Rydal. He had been running uphill all the way from Helm Bottom, and when he reached the gate, he leaned on it to get his breath and to prepare himself. Young Colt, small and fair and thin, with bones that looked too fine and brittle for the work he did. Ruth saw him. Saw his face. Knew.
He came around to the back door, and started when she was there already, facing him, waiting. He put up a hand to wipe the sweat from his upper lip.
She said, ‘Where is he?’
‘He…’
‘Where is he? What’s happened to him? He’s hurt, something… I knew he was hurt…’
He began to stammer, his hand still up to his face, he was breathless again.
‘I wasn’t there … I was … It was in Helm Bottom but I was farther up, on the slope … Potter … there was only Potter with him. I wasn’t there.’
His tongue felt thick and swollen, like a cow’s tongue, filling up his mouth.
‘Where is he?’
‘They’re … they’ve had to get him down to the road – the doctor came…, they…’
He turned away from her abruptly, he thought, I don’t know what to do, I can’t say it, Jesus God, please why didn’t they send someone else, why doesn’t one of the others get here?
It was almost dark now. Colder.
Ruth cried out at him in anger, she wanted to shake him, to make him tell her.
‘A tree fell…’
‘He’s gone to the hospital? They’ve taken him away? Where have they taken him? What are they doing to him?’
She must go, she had to be with him, that was all she could think of, she did not want anyone else to touch him in any way.
‘It killed him. He’s dead.’
Everything within her fell into place and she was still. She accepted it at once, and understood, remembering that she had known, known the moment it happened.
‘The tree fell…. they …’
Then, the others came, Potter and another man, she saw the relief on David Colt’s face, which was pale as marble. They seemed like giants moving towards her, giants with enormous arms and striding legs and bodies like rocks. Potter hesitated, and then moved Colt aside, touched Ruth’s arm, to come into the house. She leaped back from him as though she had been scalded. He opened his mouth and began to speak, while the others stood silent behind him in the doorway, and that was when she had blocked her ears and begun to scream, she would not listen. She knew all she needed to know. Ben was dead. She wanted them to say nothing of how it had come about or what the falling tree had done to his body, she tried to drown it all, and the very sight of them, with her own screaming.
Potter stopped speaking. Led her into the other room, to a chair, lit the lamp. And then waited beside her until she, too, went quiet. One of the others had brought her a glass of water. She pushed it away.
‘You get on back,’ Potter said, ‘I’ll fetch her down. She’d best be at Bryce’s now. The doctor can go there. I’ll fetch her down.’
‘NO!’
The others were going from the room.
‘I’m staying here.’
‘It’s for the best. You’ll need to be looked after.’
‘No, no, no…’
He sighed.
‘I’m all right. Ben’s dead, I know. I knew when it happened. I knew. I’m all right.’
‘You can’t stop up here on your own.’
‘Someone went to tell them? To Foss Lane?’
‘Yes.’
‘Leave me by myself.’
‘I can’t do that, how can I?’
Ruth looked up at Potter for a moment. She knew almost nothing about him, though Ben had worked with him for five years or more. He lived alone, across the common, always had.
‘I don’t want to go there. Be with them. I don’t want that.’
She was aware of his distress, that he was shocked himself by what had happened, and at a loss to know how to cope with her, what to say or do that was right; he could not force her to move and feared to leave her alone.
She got up and went into the kitchen and made tea for them, she felt quite calm. So long as they did not try to tell her any more. Now that she knew he was dead, she no longer wanted to be with him, because wherever his body was, it was not Ben any longer. Ben was … She looked up. He was here. Somewhere here. She might put out a hand and touch him. If she spoke to him, he would hear her. The whole house was full of him. Ben.
They drank their tea and the fire spurted up, throwing a brick-red light on to Potter’s face, and his thick hands, wrapped around the mug. Perhaps he would stay with her for a time. She wanted him to stay, now.
She said, ‘It was like spring. I said that, this morning, I said … he laughed at me. There was a frost when he went out but it came up warm, didn’t it? Warm as spring.’
He did not reply. She could not explain to him about her happiness of the previous day and how the whole world had seemed new, nor about her terror in the garden.
She said, ‘I knew.’ But it meant nothing to him.
‘Won’t you go there? Let me fetch you down to the village. It’d be for the best.’
‘No.’
He frowned and wished, as young Colt had wished, for someone else to come, to relieve him of the responsibility for her. He was never easy with other people, except children now and then. He had only seen Ruth at odd times, walking somewhere about, and nodded to her.
Inside his head, he heard over and over again, the creak and crash of the falling elm, and then the silence that had come over the whole wood. He saw himself bending down to the young man’s body and knowing at once, knowing without having to touch. And it had been nobody’s fault. Not his, not Ben’s. An accident. Pointless. Done with.
It made him anxious to watch her, leaning a little towards the fire, not crying. But, because there was nothing else that he could do, he stayed with her, in the silence.
*
She lost count of how many people came up to the cottage that night, there seemed to be no end to them, all the long evening, no end to the sound of footsteps and the respectful knocks upon the door, the set faces – older and younger men, Mrs. Rydal and Carter’s wife, and Alice Bryce. But they all seemed to be a great distance away from her, even as they filled up the small room, she heard what they said as though it came from down a long tunnel.
‘Come back with us. You shouldn’t stop here. It’s the shock. You don’t know what you’re doing. It’s not right to be on your own after this. It isn’t what Ben would have wanted for you.’
She was appalled that they should think to know better than she did what he would want, and would have told them not to mention him at all, except that she knew, within her, that it did not matter, for she had Ben, all to herself, now, they could never reach him.
‘I’m staying here. I’m all right. Please.’
She had not moved from the chair by the fire. Potter had long since gone.
‘I’m all right.’
It exhausted her, it was like trying to make the deaf or the mad understand what she was saying.
Alice Bryce sat at the table, her face turned away from Ruth. Alice, almost as tall as Ben, and like him, in feature, though not in colouring or manner, nor at all in the person she was.
Proud, they had always said that of Ruth. But it was Alice who was proud, of her own beauty and grace of movement, and proud because of the way Dora Bryce had brought her up, the things she had made her believe about herself.
‘You’ll be what I never had the chance to be. I won’t live to see you waste your life, throw yourself away on a man with no prospects, and stuck in a place like this, never having enough, never doing what you could have done. You’re going to be somebody.’
She was wearing a dark blue dress, high up to her neck, and it suited her, showed off her hair and the sheen of her fair skin. Whatever money there was over, at Foss Lane, went on clothes for Alice.
; ‘Go back,’ Ruth said again. ‘Go back home.’
For she needed more than anything to be alone with this vivid, certain awareness of Ben, all these people who came here were shutting him out, keeping him away from her.
‘They had to get mother to bed. The doctor had to come, give her something to make her sleep. She couldn’t have come up here with me.’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you care about us? What we feel? He didn’t only belong to you. Don’t you know what it was like for her, having them come to tell her like that?’
Ruth got up and went into the kitchen, and saw that the moon had risen and the light of it was shining on to the rose-quartz, which was still where Ben had left it, on the kitchen table. And something seemed to come from it and its beauty, so that, looking at it, she could take hold of herself again, and so forgive Alice for what she had said. She wanted to stay in the quiet, cold kitchen alone. While she was there, she did not feel so detached from everything; she held the knowledge that Ben was dead and yet here, with her, steadily in the front of her mind. She was not shocked or sick or afraid. Everything in the world was in pace. The clock ticked. They thought that she had not taken it in, they had all waited for her to collapse and begin to scream again, to depend upon them.
‘You’re not normal.’
Alice had said that, Ben’s sister, sitting in the other room, Alice, who had no possible idea of how, in this one day, Ruth had utterly changed. From the moment of buying the piece of quartz at Thefton and the revelation of a new world in the sunlight as she had walked home up the hill, from then on, everything formed a pattern, as regular and beautiful as that of the crystal. A pattern only she could see.
Alice. She must go back, must speak to Alice again. Not to explain to her, no. But try and be kind, at least, to this girl who had never liked or accepted her. For none of them had been given what had come to her, the understanding of the pattern, completed at four o’clock, with Ben’s dying. Whatever happened afterwards, she would not lose that knowledge, it might be all that, in the end, could save her.
‘I’ll make a drink for you?’
Alice stared. ‘You haven’t understood, have you? You’re going about like someone asleep. Ben’s dead. He is dead.’
And she beat her hands suddenly, down on the table.
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t know, you haven’t believed it yet.’
‘There’s tea. Or cocoa. I bought some cocoa at the market.’
‘Don’t you …’
But then, she got up quickly, looked round for her coat. It was late now, past midnight. Nobody else had come.
‘You said you wanted to be left. All right, I’ll leave you. You don’t need anything from me. Any of us. You never have.’
Ruth stood in the doorway, feeling sorry for Alice, and yet far away from her again, a world distant.
She said, ‘There’s a moon. You’ll be able to see down the hill. You’ll be all right.’
A log toppled over in the grate and the sparks splattered up, and then fell again, like a firework.
‘There was a message,’ Alice’s voice was hard ‘Is he to be brought here, when they’ve done, or come to Foss Lane? You’re the one to say.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Which?’
‘Your mother…
‘She wants him home.’
‘Then let her.’
For she did not want a coffin here, she did not want the body, she had all she wanted, Ben with her, and the house full of him, as he had been alive in it.
‘It would be easiest.’
The words would hardly come out of her mouth, she was suddenly stupid with tiredness.
‘From there. It’s nearer.’
At the front door, Alice turned.
‘You’re not even crying. You’ve not even feeling enough to cry.’
Ruth went back to her chair, and slept at once, and the fire slipped down and darkened and died within the grate, so that when Jo came to her, just after six the next morning, the room was cold and without any comfort, in the first, thin light.
They would never have sent him up here, he must have made his own decision to come, and then, nothing would have stopped him. When she opened her eyes, he was there, a few feet away, looking at her anxiously.
‘Jo …’
She moved, and all the muscles down her neck and back were aching, her left arm had gone numb, where she had leaned upon it.
The room looked the same, everything in its familiar place, and that surprised her for a moment, she had somehow expected it to be altogether changed.
‘Jo,’ she said again, and with pleasure, for he was the only person she wanted to be with – when she saw him, relief flooded her, because he would not try to make her do anything against her wishes, and there would be no need for explanations.
‘You didn’t go to bed.’
‘But I did sleep. I didn’t think I’d want to … I couldn’t get upstairs, I was so tired.’
She remembered the exhaustion, so great that her thoughts were incoherent, she had not known what she was doing.
‘You wouldn’t have been comfortable.’
‘It didn’t matter.’
They were silent, for a moment, looking at each other. But not because they were either of them afraid or embarrassed. There was no need for much speaking.
Jo went into the kitchen, she heard him open the range and begin to riddle out the cold ashes; he went outside for coal, filled the kettle.
He called through, ‘I’ll do the hens, in a minute, when this is going.’
‘No.’
For she wanted to do something herself, and she wanted to see the hens. She took the scoop and filled it with meal. Jo did not argue. He accepted, always, what people said, respected them.
The hens were restless inside the coop, waiting like a gaggle of school-children for the gates to be unlocked, they came out and flapped around her legs, bumping up against one another, as she mixed the meal and water. It seemed a hundred years since yesterday morning, when she had come down to do this same job, after Ben had left for work.
Then there were the eggs, several of them still warm. She put them into the empty scoop and, lying there in a clutch together, pale brown and creamy grey, they were like the beach stones Jo had collected, on a holiday the family had taken, when he was six. The Bryces had had some money then, put by over the years, and they had all of them gone forty miles on the train from Thefton, to the sea. Jo had told her about it, he remembered every detail, the five days’ holiday still shone out in magic splendour from the past. That was before Ruth had come here, and it was a time she liked to hear about, because anything that had happened in Ben’s life was important to her, she wanted to link herself with it in her imagination.
It had only been a month afterwards that Arthur Bryce had been gored by the bull, and though he went back to work for Rydal eventually, it was only on odd jobs, the money wasn’t the same and so there had been no more holidays.
‘I could fry an egg for you,’ Jo said, when she brought them in, ‘The range is getting up all right.’
‘No.’
He didn’t press her.
‘But you have one. You get some breakfast, Jo.’
‘I came straight out when I woke. The others weren’t up.’
‘Alice was here until late.’
‘Yes. And then they went on all night, crying and everything. I kept hearing them.’
He selected an egg.
‘You didn’t cry, Ruth.’
‘No.’
Jo – how could he be only fourteen and know so much, be so sure of what to do, how to talk to her? He was small for his age, and he had his father’s build, broad-shouldered and with wide-spread hands and feet. It was Ben and Alice who were tall and light-boned like their mother.
He cooked two eggs with great care, basting them with fat, until the membrane over the yolks went milky and opaque. Was there nothing he could not d
o? And do well, because he was patient and thorough. He went to the cupboard for a plate, paused, glanced at her. Ruth shook her head. But it pleased her to watch Jo eating the eggs, with bread and butter, his face serious and yet calm – they were both of them at ease.
She had met Jo only a few days after the first time she saw Ben, and an affection and understanding had at once been born between them. Jo had told her about the hoopoe he had seen in the woods, near Charnley, and how he had gone numb with the excitement of it, the bird was so rare and beautiful, with its exotic plumage and crest.
‘No one believed me,’ he had said, ‘I wished I’d not told them. They all went out, right through the woods looking for it. Well, I knew they wouldn’t see it, they made too much of a noise, you don’t get to see anything that way. They said I’d been day-dreaming, only they meant lying. But it was a hoopoe. I know it was, I saw it.’
The next day, he had brought a bird book to show her, to Godmother Fry’s cottage, where she was staying.
‘It belonged to my great-grandfather.’ He turned over the pages with immense care. ‘There’s a lot of his things in our house. Nobody else bothers with them.’
The book was heavy, bound in wine-red leather and with thin sheets of tissue paper covering each picture. They were tinted engravings, with all the fine details of feather-patterns and colours. They looked for a long time at the drawing of the hoopoe.
‘I mayn’t see one again,’ Jo said, ‘never in my life. They hardly ever come. But I did see it, that once. It’s not a thing you could forget.’
Jo knew where there were kingfishers, too, in the stream that ran through the farthest edge of Rydal’s woods, he had taken her there, one hot, still afternoon and taught her how to move, without disturbing anything. The blue of their wings caught the sun, reflected off the surface of the bright water.
‘I don’t tell people where they are,’ Jo said, ‘I come here by myself.’