by Jem Poster
‘What’s the fire over there?’
His voice was shaking, his body rigid. I followed his gaze across the lane to where a plume of grey smoke rose above the hedge.
‘Harris is burning the pews,’ I said.
‘All of them?’
‘There’s nothing reusable there. But you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve salvaged one item. Come and see.’
He followed me reluctantly into the church.
‘There you are,’ I said. ‘I’ve had Jefford put your chorus-girl aside for you.’
I gestured towards the wall and the pew-end which leaned against it. Jefford had managed to detach the piece without significant damage, and I was rather taken aback by Banks’s ungracious response.
‘She’s not mine. She belongs to the church.’
‘It was agreed long ago that the pews were to be replaced. No one will object to your taking the thing.’
‘I don’t think you’ve quite grasped my point. Her place was here, and it would be quite inappropriate for me to set her up as a curiosity in the rectory drawing-room.’
‘Set her up here, then. You might display the piece on the wall, just below that plaque perhaps. Or wherever you like. I could find you a couple of stout brackets and get Harris to do the job for you.’
He walked over to the pew-end and pulled it away from the wall. He examined the figure closely for a moment, craning around it, running his hand with a faintly repellent tenderness over its smooth contours.
‘No,’ he said at last. ‘It wouldn’t do. Let her go. Let her go up in smoke with the rest.’ He gave the pew-end a savage thrust so that it fell back against the wall with a dull jarring sound.
‘Come now, Banks, this is absurd.’
‘Absurd?’ He straightened up and turned to face me. ‘Listen to me, Stannard. Throughout the years of my curacy here this figure has been a potent emblem for me; of continuity, of the illimitable joy of worship. Now – place her where you will, view her from any angle – she’s violation, she’s loss. I don’t want to see her again. Go ahead: take the thing out and burn it.’ And he stormed down the aisle and out of the door before I had time to frame a suitable reply.
And why, I thought with a spasm of irritation, should I say anything? If Banks wanted to sulk – and he was, I felt, behaving like a thwarted child – then let him do so. And if, urged on by what I could only construe as pique, he had made a decision he might later come to regret, was that my fault? I manoeuvred the pew-end out of the church and down the path, leaving it by the gate for Harris to collect on his return.
10
I should have liked to leave earlier but Jefford detained me with an interminable catalogue of miseries – his wife’s cough, his own aches, his children’s uncertain future – and the sky was darkening by the time I set off down the lane. I was not aware of having thought my way through to any decision, yet the matter had, it seemed to me, been brought to some kind of resolution while I worked.
I walk at dusk … I imagined her stepping towards me out of the shadows, one hand outstretched in a gesture at once respectful and tender, her eyes half lifted to mine. And her voice gentle, a little hesitant, as she murmured – what? My own name, perhaps; or love, dear love – the words breathed out like perfume from a summer garden. Sheer folly, I told myself; but as I struggled up the hillside, sweating like a man in the grip of a fever, I could think of nothing else.
I came upon her, as I had obscurely known I should, half-way between the village and the Hall, standing a little aside from the path, still and stiff against the dark mass of the beechwood. Not the slightest pretence on her part that this was an accidental encounter: she was waiting for me, and plainly thought nothing of my knowing it. I began to frame a greeting appropriate to the delicacy of the situation, but it was she who spoke first, impulsive and direct.
‘My letter reached you, then?’
It would have been foolish to pretend otherwise, though the thought not unnaturally crossed my mind. I tapped my breast pocket.
‘I have it here.’
‘Next to your heart?’
I peered through the gloom, scanning her face for confirmation of the faint hint of mockery I thought I might have detected in her tone. As I did so, she stepped up to me, her body confronting mine so closely and so squarely that I found myself obliged, in the interests of propriety, to turn aside.
‘Perhaps we might walk a little,’ I said.
We continued towards the Hall. The evening was still, and for a while I could hear nothing but my own breathing and the whisper of her heavy skirts trailing across the wet grass. When she spoke again her voice was hushed, though not without a certain vibrant intensity.
‘I knew you’d come,’ she said.
I was on the point of retorting that she could have known nothing of the kind when it struck me how poorly placed I was to challenge her presumption. I should have to find firmer ground.
‘I was a little uncertain,’ I said, ‘how to interpret your communication.’
‘I didn’t know whether I should set such things down. I wondered what you’d think.’
She looked up at me, her face suddenly lit by a smile of such challenging intimacy that for a moment I found myself almost unable to meet her gaze.
‘About your letter? If you want my frank opinion, I thought you might have taken greater pains in the writing of it.’
Her eyes widened slightly. The smile flickered and faded.
‘I meant, I wondered whether you’d think me too forward.’
‘It was a letter,’ I said carefully, ‘of a kind I should not have expected to receive from a lady.’
‘But might have expected from someone like me?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘But perhaps you meant it.’
There was a long silence.
‘I have my reputation to consider,’ I said at last.
‘And I have mine. But sometimes we have to let go of small things if we want to lay hold of greater ones.’
‘You think a gentleman’s reputation’s a small matter?’
She stopped and turned slowly to face me.
‘I think it’s a smaller matter than the love that might grow up between a man and a woman,’ she said. She placed her hand on my sleeve and leaned her body lightly against mine. Then she reached up and, with a movement at once awkward and inexpressibly gentle, drew my face downward, touching my cheek with hers.
My instinctual recoil seemed to startle her, but she moved with me and, as I half turned, slipped her arm through mine. And at that moment I became aware of some deep shift in the ground of things, or in my understanding of their nature. It was still the same path, of course, the same hillside, the same broken skyline; but now irradiated – and as we resumed our walk the moon actually emerged from behind the clouds – in such a way as to appear at once alien and familiar, like a childhood landscape revisited after a long absence.
I am not sure how long our silence lasted, but I know that it was she who broke it, her voice at my shoulder sweeter and more musical than seemed humanly possible.
‘Do you mind that I did that?’ she asked.
I remember her having to repeat the question before I could respond.
‘Mind? What should I mind?’
‘I thought you might have been offended.’
‘No. Not offended. Surprised, perhaps. And …’
I felt her arm tighten its hold on mine as I faltered.
‘And what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Tell me,’ she insisted.
What should I have told her? That a life might be shaken to its dusty core by a look, by a touch, by the peculiar inflections of a woman’s voice? It made no sense; and it was, at the same time, self-evidently and incontrovertibly true.
‘Not now,’ I said. ‘Not just now.’
She seemed to withdraw slightly. Not, I think, physically; but I sensed what I thought of at the time, perhaps rather fancifully,
as a contraction of the spirit. And when she spoke again her voice was cooler and a little strained, as though it were reaching me from some more distant or difficult place.
‘May I ask you something?’
Just then I would have given her anything. I spread my hands in a gesture intended to convey as much.
‘What did you mean when you said I might have taken greater pains with my writing?’
‘It was a thoughtless and unreasonable remark. How should a girl like you, born and raised in a village like this, aspire to greater fluency or sophistication?’
Perhaps she failed to recognize my apology for what it was. At all events, her face clouded and she took a pace backwards.
‘Shall you want to see me again?’ she asked.
My hesitation, though momentary and quite unintentional, appeared to heighten her discomfiture. She began to edge away, her head slightly averted but her eyes fixed sullenly on mine.
‘Of course I shall.’ I reached out with a decisiveness which I think took us both by surprise, gripping her arm and drawing her firmly towards me. For the barest instant she resisted; then I felt her body sway forward, half crumpling, half nestling against my own.
I should like to be able to anatomize that moment, to find some way of accounting for the wave of pure exhilaration which, as she pressed close, her head bowed and her hair partially unpinned and tumbling loose about her cheek and forehead, swept over or through me. I can grasp the elements of it – the strange sweetness of her breath, the warmth coming off her skin, the childlike sigh as I smoothed back her hair and bent to brush with my lips the soft hollow just behind the angle of her jaw. But each time I come at it I seem to miss something, something not present in the details: some ambience or essence which, I have reluctantly concluded, may be inherently insusceptible to analysis.
And even the details – or some of them at least – seem questionable. That kiss, for example. Not, I mean, the chaste brushing of the skin beneath her ear, but what followed as she raised her face to mine, her eyes wide with – astonishment, was it? or exultation? – and then, reaching up with her right hand, drew my head down, not gently this time but with a terrible abruptness, her fingers catching in the tangles of – but that’s where it all begins to break down. Because it has occurred to me on subsequent reflection that the tugged hank of hair might have been hers, the entangled fingers mine; and if that was indeed the case and if, as I have also come to suspect, her sudden stagger and near-collapse were caused by my own impulsive movements, then I shall have to acknowledge that I conducted myself, at that particular juncture, with quite uncharacteristic indelicacy.
Yet that was by no means the way the matter presented itself to me at the time. Emphatically not. The rasp of her breath at my ear, the chafing of her mantle against the inner surface of my wrist, the soft working of her mouth on mine – there was no shame there, no distaste or guilt; only a sense of things drawing together, of a world come right at last. And when she attempted to pull away, with a stiffled cry which might have indicated either pleasure or distress, it seemed the most natural thing imaginable to try to hold her there, where she belonged, in that warm, still place which we ourselves had created.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Not that.’
She broke my hold and stepped backward; and as I reached out for her she turned and began to make her way back down the hill, stumbling on the uneven ground. I hung back for a moment and then hurried in pursuit, clutching at her mantle as I drew abreast of her. She twisted to face me, breathing heavily.
‘I have to get home,’ she said.
‘I’ll walk with you.’ I took her arm and we moved on, more slowly now. She was trembling, I noticed, like a trapped bird.
‘You know I’d do nothing to harm you,’ I said.
She stared hard at me for a moment but did not speak until we reached the open ground beyond the line of the beechwood. There, where the path forked, she stopped.
‘That’s your way down to the village,’ she said.
‘And you?’
‘My home’s out there.’ She gestured vaguely into the darkness ahead.
‘Will you be safe?’
‘There’s no danger. I’ve been walking this path for years.’
‘Alone? In the dark?’
‘Darkness and daylight, sunshine and storm. What should I fear?
‘This is hardly the most civilized corner of the country. A young woman alone …’
‘Oh, that.’ She gave a faint snort of laughter. ‘There’s not a man in the parish would so much as steal a kiss of me without my say-so.’
‘Without your say-so? Then—’
‘Never,’ she said emphatically. And she passed her hand lightly across mine where it lay in the crook of her arm.
The barest touch of her fingertips against my knuckles before she broke away and was lost in the night, yet as I walked down the hill towards the village it struck me that some tacit compact had been made between us at that moment. I experienced a fleeting tremor of anxiety; and then my heart, as the old ballad has it, took wing and soared.
The end of my day is governed by certain rituals, habits formed in childhood and essential, I have always felt, to a good night’s sleep. First I fold back the bedclothes, smoothing the exposed area of the undersheet with the flat of my hand. Then I remove all items from my pockets and place them on a convenient surface. My clothes must be neatly folded, my face splashed with water – forehead, cheeks and chin, in that order – and patted dry. I no longer kneel, but I still address a word or two to my Maker before slipping carefully between the sheets and extinguishing my lamp.
But on this occasion I flung my clothes in disarray across the back of the chair and got into bed without washing. Sleep was out of the question, but sleep was not, in any case, what I wanted. I lay on my back in the yellow lamplight, staring at the ceiling and reviewing, in a state of extraordinary excitement, the events of the past few hours.
It was a state, I suppose, of trance or rapture. No, not quite that, since my mind ranged restlessly, revisiting this phrase, that look or gesture, unable to settle; but so intense was my absorption that I was for several hours insensible of my surroundings or of the passage of time, and it was with real astonishment that I heard the clock in the hallway chime four.
A little before five I rose, put on my greatcoat and, taking the lamp from my bedside, went down to the sitting-room. I seated myself at the table, drew a sheet of paper from my writing-case and took up my pen. This, I remember thinking as I stared at the lamplight reflected in the rippled glass of the window, is the sweetness I’ve waited all my life for; and as I framed the words, I began to write, without restraint, perhaps even a little carelessly, yet knowing it all made perfect sense. It was a letter of a kind I should once have dismissed as unacceptably extravagant, both in its substance and its expression. Not any longer. These were the things I had to say, and this was the only way of saying them. I was discovering a new language – or so I phrased it to myself – for a new mode of living.
11
How could I possibly have fallen asleep, fired up as I was? At one moment I was writing like a man inspired, and then, without apparent transition, I was raising my head from the table as Mrs Haskell rapped on the door and stepped into the room with my breakfast-tray. How could that passionate flow of interfused thought and feeling have been so suddenly and decisively interrupted?
I could see Mrs Haskell eyeing the letter as she approached. I shifted position, covering the sheet with the sleeve of my greatcoat.
‘You’ve been at your work all night, haven’t you, Mr Stannard?’
‘Leave the tray there, thank you. I’ll attend to it myself.’
‘You’ll make yourself ill. All that brainwork when you ought to be asleep in bed. You can’t do that and stay healthy. Mr Lashley – he was rector before Mr Banks – he was a man for the midnight oil. Midnight and beyond: sometimes the lamp would still be burning in his study at dawn. And then yo
u’d see him in the pulpit – my heart went out to him, Mr Stannard – so weary he could hardly hold his head up, and his eyes so dark and sad. I’d think to myself, that man’s not likely to be among us very long; and of course he wasn’t. Dead before he was thirty, and tucked up snug enough in the churchyard these ten years and more. But he might have been with us now if he’d only taken more care of himself. You heed my advice, Mr Stannard; there’s a time for work and a time for sleeping, and when people act as if they don’t know the difference—’
I suppose I might have checked her a little less sharply but I dislike unsolicited advice at the best of times, and at that particular moment my desire for solitude and silence outweighed all other considerations. I waited until I heard the kitchen door slam below, then took up my pen again.
Walk with me, I had written just before I fell asleep, walk with me, sweet angel, beloved guide, dear guardian of—Of what? If you had asked me an hour or so earlier, I should have said the torrent was inexhaustible. Now I sat there in the cold half-light staring at a text I barely recognized, groping for whatever phrases might allow me to bring the letter to a not completely inharmonious conclusion. My soul, I wrote at last, and hesitated. In what sense might such a woman be appointed guardian of a man’s soul? To what extent was my integrity compromised by the very notion? I flexed my stiffened fingers and began a new paragraph.
I am aware, I wrote carefully, that the above might appear excessive to you as, indeed, in certain respects it does to me. The language of love is not, after all, the language of everyday use. But I send you these words as evidence of the passion stirred in me by your presence in my life and I trust that you will accept them in the spirit in which they are offered.
I signed off with an awkward flourish. Then I folded the letter neatly in four, secreted it in my writing-case and turned the key.