by Susan Hill
It was Alice who interrupted, Alice, not Jo, who could no longer sit in that stifling room, hearing the endless complaints, the self-pity and bitterness. She got up.
‘Leave it,’ she said, ‘leave him alone. Does it matter where he went? It does no harm. Can’t we talk like normal people, can’t anybody forget about it for a moment?’
‘You? You as well? Taking her side, going against me?’
‘No one’s against you.’
‘I could have been Someone, Miss, had a real life, I could.’
‘We all know what you fancy you could have been. A lady! We’ve heard it all our lives and do you suppose we believe it? Why should we? And does it matter? Because whatever you might have been is a day-dream, isn’t it, an escape from the truth? You live in a day dream. But this is real, this is what you are, here, a woman of fifty, married to a farm hand. Well why can’t you be satisfied, why not make do?’
Dora Bryce leaned against the wall, swaying slightly, a hand up to her face.
‘And I’m not staying. I’m not sitting here in this room, waiting for something you dream about, hopes, half-plans, waiting this year, next year, sometime, never, and most likely it’ll be never, I’m not going to be what you think you’ll make of me, do what you fancy you could have done, I’ll find something of my own, live my own life and be glad of it, whatever it is. I’ll make do when you can’t.’
Jo wanted to make them stop somehow, he could not bear the sound of their voices, raised, harsh, and the cruel words that darted to and fro and were meant to wound and to be remembered. But he could do nothing. They did not notice when he slipped out of the room and the front door, his visit to the sea was forgotten now. He went down the lane and out of the village, and the lump in his chest was waiting to rise up, he would cry, for the hatred in Foss Lane, and for what they had said about Ruth, he would cry because, if Ben had been here, he would have known what to do to silence them, to resolve everything.
He went his usual way, up the field and over the ridge, and it was not until he got there that he could let go, lie on the ground and weep. But not for himself. He would survive. It was for them, and because the memory of that magic day by the sea had been soiled over, now that they knew of it. He only had the pebbles, and be took one of them out of his pocket and held it against his face. It was something.
Alice Bryce went too, out of the cottage and, after a moment’s thought, away, in a different direction, to Harmer’s Barn, where Rob Foley lived. Rob Foley, the farrier, who spoke to her when he could, looked at her in a particular way. Wanted her. She felt guilty and excited and half-afraid, she felt mistress of herself, and held her head up, not caring who saw her or what they said.
And so it was Arthur Bryce, come home after drinking beer, who had to face the bitter complaints and renewed crying, on his own, and be blamed for everything that had gone wrong in her life. He sat wearily, feeling the old pain in his injured arm and shoulder, saying nothing, for where would be the point? But he wished he could have done something to make her happier, to change her life or else resign her to this one, for in spite of it all, he loved her.
*
If she had to go, again and again, to the graveyard, as though pulled by some force outside herself, there was another place, Helm Bottom, and that was different, it soothed her, all the thoughts and feelings which churned about inside her when she sat by the grave were stilled, she could take hold of herself again, here in the woods, and breathe quietly, memories came back and they were happy.
For some days, the fine, clear weather went on and there was again a sense of the approaching spring. It was early afternoon, a Saturday. She had crossed the field and gone between the beeches and the sunlight shafted in, here and there, picking out the brown and yellow of the dead leaves and gilding them, casting long, rippling shadows. She came to the bottom of the slope, in among the bushes, and then she heard it. Stopped. There was a sound of singing, coming from somewhere on the other side of the clearing, a curious chant, and the voices were high, childish. At first, she could not make out any words, nor could she see them, but after a few moments, they emerged from between the trees, in a small, slow procession. She backed a little, behind an oak tree, waited.
There were five children, girls, and she knew them all, they came from the village. Each of them wore long clothes, old skirts and dresses which belonged to their mothers or adult sisters, made of cotton or silk, and with a piece of white cloth, sheeting or curtaining, draped over their heads like nuns’ veiling. The first child carried something in her hands, holding it a little away from her body, some sort of small, white box.
They seemed quite unreal, figures out of a dream or a haunting, but the sight of them stirred a memory in Ruth of the file of mourners, walking up the church path behind the coffin-bearers. Except that they had been black, all black, and the children wore white. They were singing the same lines over and over again, and none of their voices quite kept in time with one another, they did not blend.
‘All the birds in the trees
Fell a-sighing and a-sobbing
When they heard of the death
Of poor Cock Robin,
When they heard of the death
Of poor Cock Robin.’
They came nearer, the singing continued without a break. They stopped, not far from the fallen elm tree, and only then, one by one, faltered into silence. The girl, Jenny Colt, who carried the box, bent down, set it on a pile of leaves, and a second child came forward and began to dig a hole with a rusty garden trowel. The others watched, their faces old-young and very solemn, their bodies like statues, draped in the long, rag-bag clothes.
The hole was made.
‘Now you sing. When I bury it I say the words and you sing.’
She knelt and lifted the box, and laid it with great care in the earth, and began to say something as she covered it over with soil and leaf mould, the chanting started up again, and her own words were for a moment confused with the singing. But eventually, Ruth could make it out.
‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’
No more.
‘All the birds in the trees,
Fell a-sighing and a-sobbing …’
She had stuck a cross made of twigs into the ground, and now, got up and stood, head bowed, reverent as a priest, and the singing never stopped. Soon, they all turned and went away with the same slow steps, through the trees and their voices came floating back, until there was only the echo of them. And then silence, and the fresh grave, of some bird or small animal.
Ruth went over to the elm tree, and as she sat on it, the sun broke through here too, and she felt a moment of happiness, and more, an assurance that she would survive; she would one day emerge from the long, dark tunnel and on the other side of it, would be more herself than she had ever been, remade, whole. How it would happen or when, and what else had to come before it, she could not tell, and if she asked, would receive no answer. But if she were to drown and die, before she was allowed to live again, she would not be alone, not be without love and protection, for all she might feel that it were so.
The children were safe, because they had been able to act out the ritual of a death and a funeral, they would not come to harm. She was glad that she had seen them, and heard the solemn, broken singing, the tune and the words rang round her head for days afterwards, and at night the white figures crossed and re-crossed the paths of her dreams.
She did not go so often to the graveyard. Something else was over. She came instead to Helm Bottom and sat on the tree, remembered. For only by remembering might she piece the pattern together and understand it. Until now, she had only seen it in flashes, as though a light had been turned on to a picture, but turned off again, at once, before she had had a clear view of it.
7
FOR TWO HOURS each afternoon, Godmother Fry used to sleep, on the low couch in her sitting room, and then Ruth h
ad gone out alone, to explore all of this new countryside which pleased her, because it was so unlike home. At home, the fields were flat and often, in spring or winter, colourless under water or ice; there were few trees and only thin, streaky hedges, and the sky seemed to be not only above but on all sides, like a great, bleak dome.
Here, everything had shape, and so many contrasts, in the dips and rises, the high narrow ridge and the secret pockets of woodland, here, hedges were tall, with steep, grassy banks leading up to them, and when you came to a gap or a gateway, you looked over pastures or thick corn, towards the beech woods on the far slope, or else further, to the smoky, lilac hills.
It was June. Hot. But the trees were still a fresh, sappy green, and the hay was full of clover. Traveller’s joy and the white, bell flowers of convolvulus were thrown over all the hedges and trailed down like ragged clothes set out to dry, the fields were set about with ox-eye daisies and corn-marigold. Every day, Ruth picked handfuls of different flowers, white and mauve and butter yellow, and carried them back for her Godmother, and could never accept that wild plants would not thrive indoors, she arranged them faithfully, in bowls and jugs of water, only to find them the next morning, drooping and crumpled, for lack of something vital to them. But still she picked them, went scrambling up the banks, for white mouse-ear and the hidden beautiful heart’s-ease, tangling her skirt in the thorn hedges and slipping, now and then, down into some dry ditch, covered over by the long grass.
She walked and walked, under the speedwell-blue sky, and everything was amazing, rare, she had never been so happy, and there was something more, just below the surface of things, some expectancy. She was nineteen, she was free, and she remembered again and again, like touching wood, that her father had married Ellen, after all the years during which he had clung on to Ruth, through anxiety and loneliness, stifling her and chaining her down, and all the time calling it love. And so it was, a kind of love, but not a good kind. If he had not married Ellen, she wondered what she would have done, how tried to break away, for she was not resourceful, or courageous.
But it was all right, it was all right. And so, she crossed fields and went along the river bank, she lay on the short, dry grass of the ridge and heard the larks which spiralled up and above her head, and was, at last, alive, a person and full of hope.
If the early afternoon sun was too hot, she walked in the woods, feeling like some sea-creature in the watery green light.
And this Friday, when she saw Ben in the clearing, at the heart of Ditcher’s Copse, she realised that he was the one who had watched her as she came out of the church that Sunday, and whose face she had remembered, without knowing why.
He was sitting on the ground, with a lunch bag open beside him, and she hesitated, afraid perhaps, though not of him. He turned round hearing her.
Now, it was this sight of him which came back to her most clearly. In her memories of him in other places, later on, even when she had been closest to him, she could not recall his face, she woke in terror at night, trying and trying to bring it into view, but it was always a blur, so familiar and yet apparently already forgotten.
But this was never forgotten.
For her own part, she had never been surprised at what happened. She was only nineteen, she had known no men, outside of the circle of her father’s friends and relatives, because he had discouraged any others, seeing them as threats to himself.
Here, she was newly set free, given full possession of herself for the first time in her life. And so, meeting Ben, she loved him. She was grateful that it had been Ben, because she had been so open to love and might have met anyone and been made unhappy, and would not have been able to defend herself against it.
But it was Ben’s love for her, just as immediate, which never ceased to surprise her, because he was older, twenty-seven, an independent man, he must have known others, and she did not set any particular store by herself. Her father had once said, ‘You’ll never make a beauty,’ and she had accepted that. When she asked him, Ben had said no, there had never been anyone he wanted to know well, until now.
‘You were waiting?’
‘Yes. It’s best to wait.’
Their first conversation she remembered so well because she had gone over it for hours in her room at Godmother Fry’s that night, and all the following days, it was like a poem learned by heart in childhood, and so it came back to her easily, she could hear their voices in her head, and smell the woodland smell around them.
‘You’re Miss Fry’s Goddaughter.’ And he had smiled, at once, at her startled look. ‘Oh, don’t you know how it is? Everyone knows everything here. And tells.’
Oh.’ She would have said, ‘I don’t know you,’ but could not.
‘Have you come to live here?’
‘Only – I don’t know. For a while. Perhaps until the autumn. I don’t know.’
‘Miss Fry is a good, true person.’ It should have sounded strange – from anyone else it would have sounded strange, but this was Ben’s way, she was used to it from the beginning. And it was right, her Godmother was so, a ‘good, true person’.
Ben said what he thought or felt, and expected it to be accepted, there was no duplicity in him, and because she had no experience of how men behaved towards women, of the possible devices of human evasion, of flattery and pretence, she believed him, when he said, ‘I hope you stay here.’ Though often, later, Ben’s directness was to startle her, cause her to draw back and consider. Other people were no longer startled, they accepted from Ben things which no one else would say to them.
Suddenly, she had felt no anxiety in talking to him, it was the easiest thing, she told him about her father and Ellen, about home, and how she liked it here, what she did every day, where she had been, and he listened, sitting very still, not fidgeting with anything. Remembering that, she thought, he sat still that first time, and on the night before he died, he was eased of his usual restless need to be up and working, occupying his hands. And the two occasions formed the beginning and the end of a complete circle, a small circle, but one within which she seemed to have spent the whole of her life. He had got up, to go on with his work, and she had walked away, up the slope between the beeches, thinking of what he had said, how he looked, and only when she came out into the sunlit lane did she stop, realising that he had not asked her name, though she knew his. She wished that she might go back and tell him.
*
The days lengthened, moving towards midsummer, spun out like fine, golden threads, and Godmother Fry watched her, seeing the change, though she said nothing. Until the Sunday, when he came to the house, and by then, he knew her name, and wanted to take her to Cantlow Hill, with a picnic. Then, everything had fallen into place, and she was not surprised at it, only felt more than ever in possession of herself and of the world.
Cantlow Hill. It was six miles away but she was good at walking.
‘There,’ he had said, and pointed to the small stone church at the top, surrounded by sweet-chestnut trees, which spread out long fingers of shade. They went up the close-turfed hill, between sheep, which cantered away at the sight of them, bleating anxious calls to one another, and the calls echoed and were taken up all around them. The air was dry and fragrant with hay-dust, and just ahead, it danced and shimmered with the reflected heat.
She saw Ben every day for the next three weeks, but it was that first time, at Cantlow Hill, which she brought back to mind over and over again.
She had kept glancing at him and each time, she expected him to have vanished. When she looked away again, down the hill to where the fields and woods and the flat beige ribbon of road lay, and Cantlow village, rose-red under the sun, everything seemed to have changed, everything was somehow caught up in her happiness. She loved everything she saw, for itself and because it existed in the same world as Ben.
He took her inside the church, where it was as cool as a dairy, and there was a curious, sandy light. It was a very plain church. He showed her the carvin
gs of animals and birds that ran round the tops of all the stone pillars, and the wall paintings of the Virgin and Child, just showing flaky blue and cream, by the altar. The pews were of pale wood, and there were no coloured windows, no embroidered hangings or kneelers, and so the shapes of the archways and pillars and roof were clear. And the outside world was set in the frame of the porch, like a picture, vividly green and blazing with sunlight, the band of the sky vibrating faintly at the edge. From far away, they heard the sheep cries and from the churchyard, blackbirds and the churr of wood pigeons.
They ate their picnic, eggs and apples and cheese and bread, sitting on the cool grass among the gravestones, and Ruth had closed her eyes and prayed for this never to end.
*
The scents of the day hung about in the warm evening air, the sky seemed not to darken but to grow paler and paler, losing its colour, and the trees and hedges threw blackberry shadows, and every sound was separately held, like the air within a soap bubble.
They went down through the woods to a stream and picked handfuls of dark watercress, and crushed wild thyme under their feet. The water was as clear as glass and very shallow, running over silvery pebbles. Ruth lay down and put her hands in it up to the wrists, and they took on a strange phosphorescence as the water slipped between her fingers. She touched the thin, cold stalks of weed.
The light became mossy-green, and a slight, warm breeze stirred the tops of the trees, with a sound like the very distant sea.
‘Well,’ Godmother Fry had said, when she got in, ‘well!’ and had held out her hand, and brought Ruth closer to her chair, looked into her face, knowing.
8
RUTH SAW THE man first from the window. She had been up for half an hour, perhaps more, had washed and dressed; and then done nothing but stand here, looking out, too tired to think or feel, drugged with the night’s heavy sleep.