In the Springtime of the Year

by Susan Hill

  His daughter. She remembered that Carter had told her, a few weeks ago -when was it? – of the birth of a second child to the curate’s wife. And there was the other, small girl, perhaps three years old, with very clear, pale skin. Ruth did not even know her name.

  ‘My daughter is dead.’

  And then he struggled to his feet and stood and shouted out, so that the whole wood rang with it, he raved like a man demented.

  ‘She is dead, and where are you now, God, where is all your love and goodness, when she was in pain and there was nothing to ease it, and now she is dead, and what do you know of it, what do you care? What have I got left? Why didn’t you kill me, why not me? Wouldn’t I have been glad of it? But my child is dead and I …’

  The shouting faltered and ceased. He looked up, through the canopy of fading leaves, to the patches of sky. Ruth thought, something will happen to him, he will be struck down. A tree will fall. The sky will fall. And she felt a moment of pure terror, fear for the man and fear of him.

  Nothing happened. The rain fell. And Ratheman began to weep again, covering his face with his hands.

  ‘God forgive me,’ he said, ‘Oh, God forgive me.’

  Ruth stood up then and took his arm gently, and he did not resist. She led him down through the slope of the woods and across the meadow and out into the lane, and all the way back to the village, and the rain came steadily down from a dirty sky, soaking her clothes through to the skin. He followed her like a child, walking blindly, still weeping. She knew that she must help him. She prayed.

  13

  THERE WERE NO lights on and the house was silent. Ruth stood just behind Thomas Ratheman in the dark, wood-panelled hall and the rain dripped from her hair down on to her shoulders and from the hem of her dress on to the floor. She had never been here before, she scarcely knew these people, and what should she do now, go or stay? Ratheman seemed not to be aware of her presence at all.

  A draught blew under the front door. And then, from upstairs somewhere, the hungry, demanding cry of a baby.

  She said, ‘You should take off your wet things.’

  He turned and stared at her, looked puzzled.

  ‘Your wife – is she upstairs or…?’

  But she realised that he had not taken in what she said, and still did not know where he had been or why, what had happened.

  He walked away from her, opened a door and closed it behind him, and then there was silence again, apart from the distant crying.

  It was a large house, and old, and the carpet on the staircase ahead of her was worn away in patches here and there. Ben had told her how poor a curate could be, but she was shocked, all the same, by the shabbiness and the air of neglect about this place. It might have belonged to old, old people who kept half the rooms shut up and empty, and could not pay for servants or very much coal; there seemed to be no light or life here.

  The baby went on crying, so that, in the end, she made her way slowly up the stairs and along a corridor, calling out Mrs. Ratheman’s name as she went. There was no reply, nor any when she knocked twice on the door of the room from which the crying came. She went inside.

  The curtains were half-drawn back and the windows smeared with rain, so that for a moment she could not see very clearly inside. She stood, holding on to the door handle, and twisting it nervously.

  ‘What is it?’

  She was lying in bed, propped on a pillow, with her fair hair in plaits over her shoulders. Mrs. Ratheman. A young woman, perhaps not much older than Ruth, but with eyes and mouth strained and drawn downwards by exhaustion and shock. Ruth remembered someone saying that, since the birth of the second child, she had never been completely well. Now, she looked at Ruth without surprise or much interest.

  ‘What is it?’

  From a cot beside her bed, the crying grew louder, and the mother turned her head on the pillow and looked down, but did not speak to the baby or attempt to pick it up.

  Ruth took a step further into the room. But she wished that she had not come here at all, for what could she do or say? What did this woman think of her?

  ‘It cries. It cries so much. I can’t bear the way it always cries.’

  ‘Can I get something for her? Or lift her up?’

  ‘It cries all the time. Isobel never cried. Hardly ever. Do you know, all day yesterday, when she was so ill, she didn’t cry at all? And now she’s dead and can’t cry. You knew she was dead? Isobel?’

  ‘Yes, I met your husband. I was out walking in the wood and… and he was there. He told me. I brought him home.’

  ‘You’re Ben Bryce’s widow.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘To see … I thought Mr. Ratheman should come home. It was raining. It didn’t seem right for him to be wandering about, he was so upset, and … I thought there might be something I could do.’

  ‘What can you do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Ruth said quietly, ‘nothing.’

  ‘No. You’d know that. There’s nothing anyone can do.’

  ‘Perhaps…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I could make a meal – or see to the baby. I could help.’

  ‘Why should you?’

  ‘But perhaps you’d rather I went away. You won’t want strangers.’

  ‘Where has my husband gone?’

  ‘He’s downstairs. He went into one of the rooms.’

  ‘He cried, do you know that? All last night. He didn’t go to bed, he didn’t undress. He sat in that chair and wept and couldn’t find anything to say to help himself, and I couldn’t help him. But I didn’t weep. I should be the one to weep, but I didn’t. They cry, my husband and the baby. Isobel never cried, not even when she was very small, do you know that?’

  ‘You told me.’

  But the young woman went on, talking very rapidly, as though afraid of what might happen if she stopped, afraid of silence.

  ‘When she was a baby, and she was hungry, she just opened her eyes; she whimpered sometimes, when her gums were sore, but I could pick her up and talk to her, and then she stopped, it was easy to make her quiet and sleep. And yesterday…’

  She shifted about in the bed, stirred her arms and legs so that the faded pink quilt slipped a little to one side.

  ‘She said, “My head hurts, my head hurts.” But she didn’t cry, not at all. I wouldn’t have known that she was ill. Not really ill. It was Tom – he knew. She was more his child, she was close to him, and he knew. Her eyes looked strange, she kept putting her hand over them. She said, “My head hurts.” And she was so hot, you could put your hands over her cot and feel the heat coming from her. That was when the doctor came. But she was dying, he said so, she had a brain fever – something, nobody could help her, it was nobody’s fault. I couldn’t bear it, sitting there, watching her, waiting for her to die, I didn’t stay. He stayed. He sat by her all day, and the baby cried and cried. It always cries. But Isobel didn’t cry and then she died. One minute she was alive and breathing and then she was dead. Nobody could help her. It was nobody’s fault.’

  She sat up suddenly and shouted out at the baby, ‘Oh stop, stop, why can’t you stop? I can’t stand it – cry, cry, cry.’

  Ruth crossed the room and picked the child up. It was quiet at once, and gazed up at her, its eyes dark as acorns. She sat in a chair and rocked it a little. And looked across, at the young mother, lying in the high bed. But she had turned away, on to her side, with one of the thick plaits of hair covering her face, and after a while, she slept, and so Ruth sat on, with the baby in her arms, until it slept, also, and then there was only the rain to watch as it streamed down the window.

  *

  She did not know exactly how it came about that she stayed with them for the whole of the following week. Nothing was said, she was not asked to be there, or to do the work, but after that first morning, when she bathed and changed the baby, and then lit the range in the kitchen and took down the shutters and cooked breakfast,
they simply came to rely upon her completely, as she had relied upon Jo. She did the washing and ironing, cooked and cleaned the house, knowing that if she did not, everything would be left.

  Ratheman’s wife would get up in the middle of the day, and dress and then sit, staring out of the window on to the garden. Or else, more often, she would follow Ruth about the house, talking, talking, about the dead child, Isobel, and the endless crying of the baby, repeating the same words in desperation, as though Ruth had not yet understood. And Ruth grew afraid of her, of the wild, and distant expression in her eyes and the monotonous, hysterical voice. She wondered if Miriam Ratheman had been ill even before Isobel’s death, not only in body but in her mind. She was withdrawn, even while she talked, her whole attention was focused on some point deep inside her own self, and the flood of speech was like an issue of blood she could not control, was not even aware of.

  She would come to Ruth and stand helplessly in front of her, would ask, ‘Should I eat now? Should I change my dress? Is it time to bath the baby?’ and then wait like a small child to be given instructions. Ruth became used to it, and would reply, but it was strange, frightening, to be so depended upon.

  The curate himself she scarcely saw. But what shocked her most of all was how little contact there seemed to be between husband and wife, how little they noticed each other’s existence in the house. He sat in his study, with the door locked, or else went out, walking for hours on end, to return, exhausted and pale, with his clothes damp or torn, and then he would eat whatever Ruth had cooked for him, but without seeming to know what it was. People came, and he would not see them. And so Ruth realised at last how she herself had been, and how it had seemed to others, when she had shut herself away, or spent hours in the woods, or beside Ben’s grave at night, all sense of time lost.

  And, just as she had visited the grave, Ratheman would go up to the small bedroom in which his dead child lay, and sit beside her, thinking perhaps that he might somehow be given the power to bring her to life again.

  Ruth had avoided that room. But on the day before the funeral, as she was drying her hands after washing up the crockery, she knew that she must go up there, now, at once, that she must see and should not run away.

  As she touched the door-handle, she felt a tightness in her chest and throat, and wondered how she could breathe. But she must see. She went inside slowly.

  He was sitting with his head in his hands, weeping. Ruth moved towards the bed, which was beside the window. He did not notice her. She looked down.

  She thought, so this is death. This. This is Ben, and Godmother Fry, and every other person in the world who has ever lived, and breathed and then ceased to breathe. This is the body, after the spirit has left it. She put out a hand and touched the child, and the skin felt cold and smooth, like fruit. But there was peace in this room, peace and a sense of inevitability, for the small girl looked as though she had never been destined to grow and change. She had come just so far. That was all.

  But how would she have felt if it had been her child, conceived by Ben and delivered out of her own body? Would not this death then have seemed to her an utterly evil thing? She could not tell. She could only look on at the grief and despair of the father, and at the mother’s madness, and understand how it was for them, know how far they had to go, and feel pity.

  The young man lifted his head. He was unshaven and his flesh looked curded, as if it had even less life in it than that of the child.

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why? Why do other people live, old people, sick people, bad people, when she is dead? Why don’t they die? Why?’

  Ruth was silent.

  ‘Don’t you wonder that, too? You should, oh, you should. Why did your husband die? What sort of justice was that? And I prayed. I prayed for a miracle, for her to be well and live, and after she was dead, I prayed for her to be raised up again. But she is dead. She is still dead.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And tomorrow I have to carry her in a coffin and lay her in the ground. How can I do that? How can I let her go?’

  ‘You must.’

  His face crumpled, as though she had struck a blow to it, he turned away from her, and bent down over the bed, and began to sob again, but loudly now, out of anger and resentment.

  Ruth left him, for there was nothing at all that she could say to help him.

  She went back to the kitchen, and began to wash the baby’s clothes, and outside the window, the sun shone on to the grass and a blackbird hopped and hopped about, its feathers glistening like washed coal.

  *

  Ruth was sitting alone in the rocking chair, beside the kitchen window, when he came looking for her.

  She wanted to go home now, to be alone again, for this week with the Rathemans had tired her out. There had been the work, her body ached at the end of each day, even though Carter’s wife had come in two mornings, to help with the cleaning. But it was their grief and distress which had exhausted her most of all, she felt as though they had sucked her down into it, asked her to share it with them, at times, even, to carry it for them altogether, and she was not ready, her own misery and bewilderment and loss were still upon her, she was still trying to work out her own salvation.

  She needed the empty cottage, and time and space for her own thoughts, the slow process of her own recovery, though she felt ashamed of this selfishness.

  She had not been to the child’s funeral, but stayed with Miriam Ratheman, who had lain in her bed all the day, and was either still and silent, or asleep, or else sitting up, talking in odd fragmented sentences, scarcely pausing for breath, and making no sense, her eyes intent all the time upon Ruth’s face.

  From the window, Ruth had watched the curate leave the house, carrying the coffin in his arms. How must that have felt to him? She had said again, God help them. But did not know how it might be.

  Now, he said, ‘They’re asleep. They are both asleep and I feel as if I shall never sleep again. I wanted the doctor to see her, but she won’t have anyone. I don’t know if she is really ill, if she’s out of her mind. I can’t tell. I can’t do anything for her.’

  ‘Could any doctor help her?’

  For it seemed to Ruth that what had been true for her would be so for Ratheman and his wife, that they had to make the journey through their own grief, and there was no medicine which could ever help them.

  ‘I came to thank you,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘I must thank you.’

  He had been speaking formally, politely, but now, suddenly, he shouted out at her, ‘What are you doing this for? Why are you here with us? Haven’t you seen enough of death and suffering?’

  Yes, she thought, yes. But did not answer him. After a moment, he sat down heavily on one of the upright wooden chairs.

  He said, ‘I should leave here. I should resign from Holy Orders and go away from this place. What right have I to stay now?’

  ‘Because your child died?’

  ‘Because she has died and now I know that everything I believed in and lived for has died with her. Because my life is a lie. I am a lie. How can I visit them, people sick, people dying and in distress, needing truth, what have I to say to them? How can I take services in the church and preach and pray and know that it is all a lie? I used to know what words to say, but there are no words, and there is no help for anyone. I think of how I went to people and talked to them, about death and goodness and consolation, and I feel ashamed, I knew nothing, I had never felt what they felt. I read books and learned lessons and thought I understood. But it was a lie. How can I stay here?’

  Ruth said slowly, ‘Things change. They seem different. After a time, they are different.’

  Though these were only words, too, and she did not know how he could follow her meaning, because it was so unclear even to herself.

  ‘But it was the same for you. I know it. You shut yourself away, you wouldn’t see me, or anyone, and at his funeral, you didn’t weep. I saw
you in the churchyard at night, lying beside his grave, and what were you thinking then? What could anyone have said to you? I saw well enough how it was, and now I know myself. I blamed you. I don’t blame you now.’

  ‘But there were some days … after he died … some days, it was easier. There were things I seemed to understand.’

  He shook his head violently.

  ‘How could there be anything to understand? There was no meaning to it. Your husband was young and fit, and a good man, he was happy, you were happy, and then he was dead, and now my child is dead, and there is only cruelty, there is no purpose in any of it. It means nothing.’

  Ruth rubbed the cloth of her skirt between her fingers, afraid of the violence of his despair, and the bitterness in his voice, and shocked, too, for she had thought that a priest must surely know more, be able to understand and explain more than any other person.

  She began to try and tell him about the way the world had looked changed and altogether beautiful, sometimes, how, here and there, without warning, it seemed that she had been given some brief glimpse of the pattern of things; told him what she had felt at the funeral, and what Potter had felt, as he had knelt beside Ben’s body in the wood. And Ratheman gazed at her, and she saw that nothing she had said held any meaning for him, that she had no right at all to speak, there was no comfort for his own loss.

  He said, ‘Everything is broken into pieces and no one can fit them together again. Why? Why?’

  But how could she know?

  ‘My father was a priest, and his father, too, there was never any question about it – that it was what I would be. My father was a good man, and I thought I should be like him. Before he died, he was very ill, for months, he grew weaker and thinner, he had more and more pain, but it was so slow. He kept on, trying to work, taking the services, visiting people because they relied on him but, in the end, he couldn’t even read. And yet it took so long for him to die, even when he asked to die. I came home – I was at the university and they sent for me – I can’t forget how he looked. I didn’t recognise him. He was shrivelled, it was as though he had no flesh left, you could just see bones, showing through the skin. His skin was yellow. He looked so old. He couldn’t eat anything. My mother sat with him and gave him sips of water, that was all. And then, one night, we thought he was dying, and I sat with him. And he said, “I always believed. But now I know.” But what has happened to me? I do not believe, and I know nothing. Why do I have to live at all?’