by Susan Hill
‘But you brought me.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Aren’t you afraid I’d tell someone?’
Jo looked away across the stream, to the far bank, where it sloped upwards, ‘Not you,’ he said, ‘You wouldn’t.’
It had been the first secret between them, and Ruth had wanted to say something to thank him, but could not find the words. And that was three years ago, Jo had only been eleven, a small boy, his hair cut short as hay-stubble, and yet there had been even then this wisdom in him, and a confidence about the world.
He finished the eggs, washed and dried the plate. Ruth stood beside the table. The memory of the walk home from the market, and of the last evening spent with Ben, lay like a beam of sunlight over the darker things in her mind. She felt oddly suspended, separate from the world. Time had stopped, at the moment in the garden when she had known about Ben’s dying. She could not imagine how it would begin again.
Joe was touching the piece of crystal with the tips of his broad fingers.
‘Rose-quartz.’
‘Yes. I got it in Thefton. It was a present for Ben.’
‘There’s yellow quartz, like butter, you can find that, too, and white and blue. But blue’s rare.’
Ben had said that Joe would know all about it.
‘It might get knocked off there. It would be damaged. You could put it up on the desk.’
‘No. I want it there.’
Nothing must change, nothing. She realised that Ben might have died a day sooner and never seen the crystal, never known that she wanted him to have a gift. But it was all right.
As soon as the range was hot, she went for a bath, pulling off her clothes in a frenzy, because she had been wearing them all the previous day and night, she felt unclean in them.
When the hot water came up and over her body, she felt that she might melt, or else be carried a long distance away, on this gentle, buoyant tide, and that was what she would have liked; it soothed her to soap her arms and legs and stomach and rinse the skin. It was like being bathed by someone else, as a child.
She thought, ‘As long as I lie here, as long as this water is all around me, nothing bad can come about.’
She closed her eyes and saw colours behind the lids, limpid greens and blues, and then a light, pale and silvery as a star in the far distance. Her legs were weightless, floating on the water. Perhaps this was drowning, and if it was, she would welcome it, there would be no fear or pain, no struggle. She was aware of Ben, very near to her, and he was frowning slightly, not angry, but puzzled. She tried to stretch a hand out to touch his face but he moved away, just out of reach. It did not alarm her, she was content to lie here in the water forever, to wait for him.
‘Ruth…’
The voice came from somewhere else.
‘Ruth.’
And then a tapping on the door. She opened her eyes, and could not think who it might be. Nobody must come here.
‘Can’t you hear me? Are you all right? Ruth?’
Jo.
The water had gone quite cold, with a cloudy scum filming the surface. The skin of her fingers was white and crinkled.
‘I’m all right.’
‘I’m just going to take some water to the donkey.’
She had forgotten the donkey’s existence.
She got out of the bath, fully awake now, and cold. The white walls and porcelain of the sink and bath, the glass of the window, were too bright, burning her eyes, she wanted to put up a hand to shield herself from the glare of them, and the towel felt coarse and grainy, chafing her skin as she dried it. She had emerged from a dream in which there had been warmth and safety, into this bleak room. It was too real to be borne.
*
‘We could play a game,’ Jo said. ‘Draughts, or dominoes, if you like.’
Outside, it was raining a little, a fine, misty rain, the sky was seagull grey. It was afternoon, she thought, or a bit later, she could not tell. Jo had eaten some cold meat and she had drunk milk, and then tea again; the hours seemed to be filled up with the sound of the hissing, boiling kettle, the taste and smell of the dark, soaked leaves. When she was not drinking tea, her mouth was dry as chalk.
What had Jo said? She looked at his face, trying to remember. No. The rain slid like silk down the window-pane.
‘Jo, I don’t want them to come here again. Not anyone. I don’t want to see them.’
‘No.’
‘If they come here…’ She clenched her fist tightly until the nails hurt her palms.
‘It’s all right. I’ll tell them.’
‘But will you stay, Jo?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Yesterday … last night …’ She took a deep breath, forming the words with care, inside her head, before speaking them aloud.
‘Were you there? When they came to Foss Lane, after it happened? Did they tell you?’
‘I opened the door. It was Mr. Rankin.’
She tried to picture it.
‘My mother fainted, they had to give her brandy and the smelling salts. They had to put her to bed.’
He spoke of her with detachment, as though of a stranger.
‘And you? What did you do?’
She was afraid that no one had thought to look after him, give him comfort.
‘I went out. I walked, right up on to the ridge and over the other side. I walked a long way.’
‘By yourself?’
‘Yes. I was thinking. That was all. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to be by myself and think.’
He remembered it. In his pocket, there had been the bone handled pen-knife Ben had given him last birthday, and he had pressed it with his fingers, every so often, for reassurance.
The countryside, over the ridge, had been quite empty and peaceful, in the last of the sun. He had lain down on the grass on his stomach and looked over the small fields, rising one upon the other like green pillows, and at the bitter, brown clumps of woodland between. In the far distance, mauve and blue-grey, and receding as the light faded, the downs and barrows of the next county.
Jo said, ‘It seemed …’ But stopped, for how could he explain to her, that odd sense of rightness he had had, as though something had fitted together – it had been missing, like the piece of a puzzle, and was now in its proper place. He had never thought of death like that. It made no sense, how could it? He ought to feel anger and loss, and that everything had disintegrated, there was no point or purpose anywhere discernible. How could he tell her?
‘I knew when it happened,’ Ruth said. ‘I was in the garden, and I thought … it was as though I was dying, myself. I was afraid. I knew something terrible was happening.’
‘People do know, sometimes. Animals know, as well.’
‘How, Jo? How did I know?’
But she did not really need his answer. Loving Ben had meant being able to read his thoughts, to tell, wherever he was, however far away, what he was feeling, if he were happy or not. And so it had been with his dying.
Jo got up and drew the curtains.
‘Don’t they want you back? Shouldn’t you go home?’
‘Do you want me to?’
‘No.’
‘Well … they don’t bother.’
‘You told them where you were?’
‘I left a note. But it’s nothing much to them, what I do.’ It did not seem to trouble him.
He found the board and they played draughts, sitting close up to the fire, hearing the rain. Ruth felt as though she was outside of herself, another person, looking on at this girl in the wheat-coloured blouse and skirt; it was not her own hands which pushed the little red discs from square to square. Jo played the game well, and honestly, not holding back in order to let her win, and so she did not win, not once, which did not matter. Nothing mattered.
‘Are you tired?’
The two people she had been, merged together again, at the sound of his voice.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Should I get you something to eat now?’<
br />
‘No.’
But when he had made his own meal, she picked a lump of cheese off the plate, and half a tomato, and they were enough, they satisfied her, though they tasted of nothing in her mouth.
‘I’ll sleep here, if you want me to,’ Jo said.
Sleep. Yes, she could sleep again. But not upstairs – she could not face that room, with the bed, and all the drawers and cupboards full of Ben’s clothes, and the smell of his hair left on the pillow. She would stay down here, sleep in the upright fireside chair again. And if she did not sleep, at least she would have the comfort of Jo’s presence in the house.
‘I’ll make a bed for you. In the small room.’
‘I can do it.’
‘No.’
For she must not simply sit and sit, as though the blood was dammed up within her.
As she opened the door of the small room, it was again as though she had come face to face with Ben. She said his name aloud. A slight breeze puffed the cotton curtain, bringing in the smell of rain-soaked bracken and turf.
‘Ben?’
The sky seemed full of him too, and he was part of the breaths she drew in, but he was also standing just behind her, looking over her shoulder. She wondered why she was not afraid, not of him, but of these things which she had never believed could happen. It was not the same as remembering Ben, or picturing him in her mind, it was a knowledge, that he was there. And most of all, he was there at moments when she had not been thinking of him: as she had come into this room, she had only been wondering which sheets to put on the bed for Jo, and whether it was at all damp.
She said, ‘Ben. I’m all right. Nothing else can happen. I can’t be hurt. You’re here, and Jo is here. It is all right.’
Why did she speak to him? Ben was dead and gone away, was with God. But not here, in this room. Not here.
Yet he was here. She closed the curtain and wiped the beads of rain off the ledge. And thought, only let it stay like this, only let the clock stand still and let me feel no more than I feel now, let me have this reassurance. If it stays like this, I can bear it.
But she knew that it would not stay, that this was only a calm, to accept and be grateful for, something to hold to, before the coming of the storm.
*
That night, she scarcely slept at all. The exhaustion and shock had drained out of her like anaesthetic, she felt as though some great tide had thrown her up on to a beach and left her, wide awake. It was still raining. Ben had been right then, the spring had not come yet, and the two days of clear skies and sunlight seemed years away, a memory from childhood.
She had no sense, now, of Ben’s presence in the house. She tried to recapture it, spoke to him again, but the room was empty. And now, she could not stop thinking about where they had taken him, after the accident, and what they were doing to his body.
She imagined how it might have been, wondered what they did to prepare a man for his coffin. She had never been in contact with the events of a death. Godmother Fry had died in her sleep, the week after Ruth had returned home, and the death of her mother had been years ago, when she was only three, they had shielded her from it completely, sent her away, to cousins in Derbyshire.
She supposed he was in the mortuary at the hospital, lying – lying where? On a bed or a stretcher? Or on a slab of marble? How did he look? Was he like Ben, or was he utterly changed, stiff and pale, like the dead piglet they had once found by a gateway? Ben had picked it up, and buried it in their own garden, under the apple trees. She had watched him. Now they would bury Ben. Perhaps he was bandaged, or already sewn into the cotton shroud. Other people had touched him, people who had no rights, they had been strange, impersonal hands which had undressed him and washed his body, closed his eyelids, and she resented them, he was hers, no one else should have violated him in that way. Because her feeling that his body was nothing, an empty shell, had left her, she could not think of him now, except in terms of flesh and blood and hair and bone, a living body. What she most desperately wanted to know she dare not ask; if the tree had broken open his head, or fallen on his chest, crushing the rib cage, and the lungs and heart pulsing inside it. And what did they do? Did they mend the fractures and stitch up the open wounds of a dead body, or leave it as it was, because there would be no point?
On Thursday, he would be brought to Foss Lane. It was what Dora Bryce wanted, and Ruth had said, and meant it, that it did not matter to her. But now, it did matter, now she wanted him here, wanted to touch him, to sit beside him as long as she could. He belonged here.
Ratheman, the curate, had come over about the funeral, and to speak to her, but she had fled upstairs and hidden in the small room, he had been forced to leave a message with Jo. Why had she been so afraid to see him? He was a good man, and she believed what he believed. But she did not want him to talk to her, about Ben’s dying, and being reborn into eternal life, for she knew it already, and what she did not know, she would discover in her own way, by herself.
The funeral was on Friday, and someone would fetch her, ‘No. I can walk there. I’d rather that.’
Jo looked anxious.
“What is it?’
‘You ought to … they want you to go to the house first. Then everybody’s together, walking behind, up to the church.’
Everybody together. She did not want to be with any of them. She resented the people’s grief, and knew how keen it would be, for everyone had loved Ben, everyone would feel the loss. But she wanted to be the only one who mourned him, the only one who was bereft.
The funeral loomed ahead of her like some terrible cliff face which she must climb, for there was no way round or back. She sat, gripping the arms of the chair, and prayed for strength to bear it all, without losing her reason.
At first, she did not understand the cry that came from upstairs. She had been locked up within herself unaware of the room and the darkness, the last heat from the core of the fire.
Then she jumped up. Jo was here. It was Jo.
He was sitting up in bed holding his hands over his face.
‘Jo…’
He did not move. The room smelled damp.
Ruth sat on the bed and touched his arm, but when, at last, he took his hands away, she saw that he had not been crying, as she had supposed, his eyes were dry, and huge in his wide-boned face, the skin was taut and gleaming with fear.
‘Jo … it’s all right, I’m here. What happened?’
For a time, he did not reply, or appear to feel her touch.
Then, he breathed very deeply several times, and lay back.
‘I was dreaming, I didn’t know where I was.’
‘You’re here.’
‘It was the trees.’
She waited, afraid of what she would hear. ‘I was in the wood somewhere. It was beautiful – sunny and quiet, you know how it is? I was happy and all the trees had faces and the faces were laughing. I was laughing.’
He took another breath and shivered slightly. Ruth touched her fingers to the side of his face.
‘Then it went dark and all the faces changed. They were ugly faces, leering, like those gargoyles on the church tower, they were devils. They were all coming down on me, and I’d fallen, I couldn’t get away.’
Nightmares. But perhaps, in the end, they might help him to work out his grief and fear. All hers were to come.
‘Should I make a drink?’
‘What time is it?’
She did not know.
‘But I’ll sit here with you. I’ll make us some cocoa.’ By the time she returned, Jo’s face had relaxed, there was some colour in it and his eyes were no longer wide with the recollection of his terror.
He said, ‘What will you do, Ruth? Afterwards? What will happen to you?’
Afterwards? She had not thought of it, such a time did not yet exist.
‘I shouldn’t want you to go away.’
‘Away? No … Oh, no.’
For even if she could bear the idea of it, where was t
here to go? This was her home, she belonged nowhere else now.
She had come three years ago to stay with Godmother Fry, after the wedding of her father and Ellen Gage. Ellen, who was kind to her, wanted to love her and be accepted, who would make a good wife for him. Ruth had been happy about it, most of all because now she could be free, she was not the only person her father lived for, he no longer wanted to tie her to him. She liked Ellen, but, after the marriage, she had wanted to come away, to prove to herself that it was possible, now that she was eighteen, a person in her own right.
Godmother Fry had been almost ninety by then, and half-blind, she walked with a stick. But there had never been anyone so full of vigour and courage, and she cared about others, interested herself in them, so that the house was always full of visitors, being happy in her company. She had welcomed Ruth as a child of her own, and Ruth, in return, had cooked and done work about the house, and taken the old woman out, to walk slowly through the village. It was June, high summer, the backs of the men haymaking in Rydal’s top fields were burnt brown as toffee. It seemed like home then, even before she met Ben.
‘Where could I go, where else is there, Jo?’
He set his empty mug down on the shelf.
‘Did I tell you about the shells?’
She blinked. But this was typical of him, he always expected people to have followed his quick changes of thought.
‘I found them in the attic cupboard. They were shells my great-grandfather brought back from the West Indies and China. Some of them look as if they were made of pearl, and there’s a pink one, coiled like a snake. I’m going to read about them.’
Shells. Shells and stones, birds and plants and insects and the fungi that grew in the damp, secret crevices of the woods – Jo knew about them all.
‘I’d like to go to those places.’ His voice was becoming drowsy. ‘I’d like to be a sailor. Think of what I’d see.’
‘Shouldn’t you miss it here? Everything you’ve always known?’
‘Yes. And so I don’t know what I’ll do. There are countries I read about, hot places, where the birds are all bright as parrots, flying about among the trees, just like sparrows and things here. And jungle rivers and forests. And storms, going round Cape Horn. All of that … sometimes, it’s all I want.’