by Susan Hill
Once, she got up and looked out of the window, and saw steely clouds moving fast over the face of the full moon, and the words of a ballad about death jazzed inside her head.
‘They planted an apple tree over his head,
Hum. Ha. Over his head.’
Dora Bryce’s crying died away, the house was quiet. Then, Ruth might have cried. But would not, not here. There was some pride damming up her own grief, she would not let them hear, as they had not been able to see, earlier, what she felt.
It seemed more than ever strange, that this family should be Ben’s, that someone like him should have come from such people. Or Jo, for Jo did not belong here either. Only Alice was at one with them, only she had inherited their narrowness and lack of heart.
Ben had brought her to Foss Lane a week after they met. Because already, after that short time, they knew, both of them, their future was as inevitable as that the trees should continue to grow. He had called for her, on a Sunday afternoon, at Godmother Fry’s, and Ruth had been anxious in case what she was wearing was not right, was too formal or else too plain, was showy – in some way unsuitable. Ben had laughed at her. ‘It’s you,’ he said, ‘they’re going to meet you, aren’t they? They won’t mind what you wear, they won’t notice.’
But he must have known that that was not true, that her dress and every detail about her, hair and shoes and bracelet, would be what they saw first, and scrutinised, and judged her by. She had wanted to be friendly, become a part of them. Now, she knew that no matter how she had looked, what she had worn or said or done, none of it would have made any difference, they had disliked her in advance. Any girl who might take Ben away could not be approved of, or accepted.
This afternoon had brought it back to her, because it had been the same. They had sat on the edges of uncomfortable chairs in the front room, drinking tea out of the best china cups, and Ruth had been unable to think of anything at all to say to them, and so had remained silent, and they had taken that for pride, she was branded for life with that one word. She remembered the way they had looked at her, and how Ben, too, had fallen silent, unable to help her, and only Jo had been himself, talking about a place he knew of, where you might find wild raspberries.
She thought, now I will never come to this house again. There is no love, no kindness, no friendship to bind me to them, and they will be glad of that. I will die to them, as Ben has died. No, more, because they will hoard their memories of him and cling to them, as people keep old letters, Dora Bryce will cling to the past, before I married Ben, she will indulge her own grief and self-pity for the rest of her life, but she will easily rid herself of me.
The extent and depth of her own bitterness frightened her. The night went on. She counted her own heart-beats and listened to the wind, and there was no comfort to be had.
‘Oh Ben he is dead and laid in his grave,
Hum. Ha. Laid in his grave.’
When she was certain that dawn must be near, because she had lain awake in that cold room for a hundred years, she put on her stockings and, carrying her shoes, went down through the silent house, stopping every so often, in dread of waking them. They did not wake. In the kitchen, she saw that it was ten to five by the clock, but the sky was still dark. It was bitterly cold, and the wind had risen again, a gate banged, somewhere in the lane.
On the dresser was the parcel, wrapped in brown paper. Alice had pointed it out to her last night. ‘You can take it with you. It all belongs to you now, doesn’t it?’ and Ruth had been too dazed to follow what she meant. Now, she touched it, and supposed that it contained some old things Ben had never taken up to the cottage, things they now wanted rid of.
For a second, she hesitated, suffused with guilt. Perhaps she ought to write a note to them, to apologise. But what did she have to say that they would believe? It would make no difference, things were as they were. And she could not breathe in this house, she wanted to shake the sight and smell of it off her for good, to forget that she had ever been here.
She took up the parcel and opened the door, and the wind blew hard and cold into her face, the roadway gleamed with black ice. And then she was running down the still-dark street, her hair was wrenched back and streaming behind her like a banner, she was stumbling and almost falling every few yards on the slippery road, but she thought of nothing except getting away, getting home. Somehow, by running, forcing herself into the wind, she might scour herself clean of yesterday. But, just outside the village, she was forced to slow down, and stop, the blood rang in her ears, her head throbbed, and she gasped and shuddered for breath.
The sky was just beginning to pale, as she walked, slowly now, for she was exhausted, up the slope leading to the common.
Here, everything looked familiar, impersonal, like the surface of the moon. There was no life. The revelation of the previous day, the sense of joy and insight and illumination, were gone, and would never return, for they had surely been delusions? She had not been in her right mind. Now, she saw the cottage and the common and the tops of the trees, and knew her world for what it was, in the stained, seeping light of dawn.
But she was home. She was grateful for that. Here, she could be herself, live or die. Do nothing. Endure.
The wind had dropped quite suddenly. She opened the back door and waited for the silence of the house to engulf her. Knew what she had to do. Now, at once, there could be no running away. She went up the stairs.
*
She had forgotten what the room looked like. It was very cold. It might have been empty for years past. She walked around it, opened the door of a wardrobe, and then a drawer, a cupboard, looking at what was there, she picked up his hairbrush and touched the bristles to her face. None of it seemed to have anything to do with her now. Then was this all? Was there nothing more to come? Was this deadness to be what she had to live with, the absence of all grief or love or fear? Nothing more?
She took off her coat and laid it on the chair. And then, because nothing was going to happen, and there seemed nothing else she had to do, she opened the brown paper parcel. She had not thought. It was so obvious and yet she had not expected it. She took them out, one by one, these clothes in which he had died, the blue shirt and the dark, woollen jersey, the corduroy trousers and thick socks, and lifted each one up, wanting to smell, beneath the wool or cotton, his own smell. She did not, and then realised that the things had been newly washed and ironed.
She put her head down and pressed her face into the pile of garments and at last the grief broke open and drowned her, for they had taken even this away from her, they had washed away his blood and now, she understood fully and finally that Ben was dead and gone from her, that she had nothing, nothing left.
4
THE DEATH OF Ben Bryce had been like a stone cast into still water, and the water had become a whirlpool with Ruth sucked down into the terrible heart of it. But the waves spread out, through the countryside down to the village and beyond the village. People felt changed, as by war or earthquake or fire, even those who lived closest to death and knew its face.
And shock and grief drew them closer together, feelings were observed and understood among them, though nothing might be said. For no one could remember being so affected by any one death. Accidents happened, life was uncertain, a child or an old man or an animal was killed, new graves were dug in the churchyard often enough, there was mourning. Why was this different? What had it been about Ben Bryce? They thought of him and tried to discover, and each of them had some particular memory upon which to dwell, and the memories, taken together, revealed all the aspects of love.
Potter, in his own cottage, planned to set out the first vegetable seedlings under glass. But he did nothing, except sit, with some half-eaten bread and cheese at his hand, remembering. And his dog Teal, sensing the change in him, was restless, would not settle in front of the fire, but padded about the house, or came up to Potter and bumped its head against the man’s leg for reassurance
Potter ha
d known death. Had seen his own brother cough and choke himself dead, of a slow lung disease, had been at the bedside of his mother and his father, when death had come to them, in old age. But that had been expected, a natural thing, he would not have had them grow any older, weakening and crumbling in body and mind, suffering more. This was not the same. He could not believe that Ben Bryce was dead. Ben, who had been so vital, and contented with himself, and with the world. Those who were with him had felt his health and pleasure and confidence in living overtake them and seep into their own minds and hearts, though he had not been any saint, nor always an easy man to work with, there were times when he withdrew into himself, as though in defence, and no one could tell his thoughts, people kept at a distance from him. There were times when he spoke his mind and it was too close to the truth.
It was not only the circumstances of the accident which Potter could not forget, the creak and crash of the falling tree and the silence which had followed. It was what had come over him as he bent down and knew that the man was dead. In that moment, he had discovered some great, clear truth and that truth had changed him. Kneeling on the moist earth beside the still figure, he had felt entirely alone with death and known that it was good. If he had ever doubted immortality, he could not doubt it now. Awe had come over him, and a kind of reverence, he had knelt and been, for a while, paralysed, for the whole wood was filled with this momentous thing, this parting of body and soul. And when he had put out a hand and touched Ben Bryce’s arm, felt his wrist and the thick bone, and the hairs covering the flesh, it had been like an electric shock, some impulse, whose meaning he did not fully understand, had passed into him. And it had not left him, he felt it still.
Standing at the very back of the small church during the funeral, he had known it again, though the shock of the death had come fully upon him by then, the numb sense of disbelief, and there was grief, too, for himself, for Ruth, for all of them, at this loss.
He shook his head. There had been a door through which he had passed and now, on the other side of it, he tried to come to terms with what he found, with his altered self.
He lived alone, had done so for thirty years, and he was content; he was not a thinking man. Now, he could do nothing save think.
The dog was snuffling at the crack under the door, and then it came back to Potter, whined softly, so that the man got up, they went out into the raw, grey evening. They walked down through the beech woods and Low Field, up on to the ridge, and over the other side. Nothing moved, nothing had colour, the sky looked sour.
It seemed to him that things would not be the same again, with him, or with the rest of the village, their world had tilted, and they must get accustomed to it, for there would be no going back.
He stayed out until dark, and, returning, he saw a light in Ruth Bryce’s window, and paused, looking at it, distressed for her, but knowing that he could not go near, because he would be rejected, he carried upon him the taint of her husband’s dying. He did not know what would happen to her. He felt fear.
In the house at Foss Lane, it was as though a dank fog had crept into every room and settled there, and all night and all day, there was the sound of Dora Bryce’s weeping. She lay in bed, or else got up and sat huddled near the grate, and her eyes and lips were swollen and stained with the salt of her tears. When she spoke, it was only to herself, the same, bitter, repeated words.
‘Why should it happen to me? What have I done to deserve it? What harm did he ever do? How shall I live, how shall I live? How can he be dead?’
And, after a time, it embarrassed or irritated them and they gave up trying to console or quieten her. Arthur Bryce stood about, a large man with a damaged arm and shoulder, helpless, his own grief buried far within him, never articulated; and Jo retreated, out into the woods or over beyond the ridge, walked alone, before going to Ruth, to do her work for her, and to give and receive comfort.
It was Alice who lost her temper, for she realised, now, how much she loathed this house, and wanted to be free from it, she felt stifled and unnerved in the close atmosphere of self-pity and bitterness generated by her mother, and she had nothing with which to occupy herself, nowhere to go.
In the middle of the evening, she got up suddenly, went and stood over her mother and shook her arm. Dora Bryce rocked herself to and fro, like a creature in pain.
‘Stop that! Stop that, mother, how do you think we can bear to hear you, crying and crying, and complaining? Don’t you think we feel, too? Don’t you think all of us feel, but what good are you doing? What help is it?’
Her mother stared up at her and saw the girl’s face, angry, proud and without pity.
‘It does no good, does it? Will it alter things? Will it bring him back? Haven’t you any dignity, any pride in yourself?’
She was disgusted, not only by the endless crying, but because her mother would not bother with herself, would not wash or brush out her hair or change her clothes, and the cooking and work about the house she left to be managed somehow, by Alice and Jo.
‘What good will it do?’
Dora Bryce did not answer, only moved nearer the fire, trapped in the vicious circle of her own misery and resentment. She thought, now my own daughter is turning against me, and what have I left? A man who gives me no help, a man no use for anything, and a child who might not belong here. What have I left in this world? And she thought again of her first born, her son, Ben, and how he had been, and her imagination gilded him with every perfection, every virtue, it seemed to her, now, that he had been the only one of them to love her, that he had paid her constant attention, had cared, had understood, as none of the others wanted to understand. Ben.
The sobbing rose up from her stomach and the ugly, angry noise began again. She did not notice when Alice, too, went out, that they had all left her, because they were exhausted and ashamed, they had lost patience. She said, I have had nothing in my life, no satisfaction, no fulfilment, no rewards or pleasures, I have been cheated and deceived.
The death of her son only confirmed it, only reminded her of what she might have had, what she ought to have been.
Now, there was nothing.
The curate, Thomas Ratheman, leaned over the bed of his sleeping daughter, saw the fine, mauve-flushed skin of her closed eyelids, and felt all the old amazement, that she should have come from him, and now be here, a separate life. But he was troubled, he could not forget Ruth Bryce, who had hidden from him when he called, and the sight of her face, and the way she had carried herself, apart from everyone else, at the funeral.
He thought he should go to her again, talk, help her somehow with her grief, and though he was conscientious, he did not think to do this out of duty but for love, he had come to love all these people.
The child, Isobel, stirred, turned over and murmured in sleep and, thinking of the fallen tree, the sudden, casual death, he was afraid for her in this world, he said, nothing shall touch her, no harm shall ever come to her; even while knowing that it was not possible, not true, that she must grow and suffer and change, if she were ever to be herself and free.
Ben Bryce had left no child for his wife’s comfort. Did she regret it? Again, the idea of going there, now, even so late in the evening, came to him urgently, and he knew why, remembering he had heard one or other of them say, in the village that morning:
‘She’ll do away with herself, she’ll not bear it like this, on her own, you mind.’
He had stopped and prayed, at that moment, for Ruth to have courage and for evil not to overtake her.
When he was a boy, a friend of his father’s, a priest too, had hanged himself from a roof beam in the barn, a year after his wife’s death; a year during which he had fought with misery and loneliness and temptation, and had failed, had succumbed, worn out and crazed by it all.
And the same night, Ratheman’s father had woken in a sweat of fear, his head full of a dream he had had, of the friend in some appalling need and distress, and he would have dressed and go
ne to him, although it was seven miles away and winter, thick snow. But, standing, undecided, in the bedroom, he had listened to reason which told him that a dream was a dream and not prophetic, that the fears had sprung from some dark place in his own mind. He was a reasonable man, scholarly, faithful, unimaginative, he did not set store by his own chance emotions, or those of others, and so he had gone back to bed and the dream did not disturb him again.
In the morning, very early, someone had come through the snow to tell him of his friend’s suicide, in the middle of the previous night. He had never ceased to blame himself and pray for forgiveness, of God and of his friend, for the rest of his life, tormented by the dream which had been a cry for help that he had not answered. That experience, that death, had aged and altered him, and his son had not forgotten either, so that now, thinking of Ruth Bryce, he was restless and perturbed, he prayed again, and, if the child had not woken and begun to cry loudly, with some pain, he would have gone to the cottage, for his own peace of mind.
*
Rydal, in his office, lit and re-lit a pipe, used up match after match, and sought to attend to his paper work and could not, nor could he think what money he should offer to Ruth Bryce, or whether she would even accept it from him. They were his woods, it had been his tree, and so he was to blame, though they had contradicted him, Potter, and Heykes, the farm manager, they had all of them been to inspect the fallen elm and Rydal saw for himself that they could not have known, nobody could have prevented it, But at night, he lay awake, sick with guilt and with a sense of the futility of his own life, of all their lives.