by Jem Poster
At that point she disappeared from view. I heard her call once more, from the far side of the building; but it was a good few minutes before she reappeared, moving more slowly now, her head bowed. She made her way to the path and turned to face the church, standing motionless for a moment, hands clasped before her. Then she gave herself a little shake, swung briskly round and moved towards the gate.
I still find it difficult to account for my reaction. I remember leaning my cheek against the cold stone of the embrasure in what I think of as an attitude of resignation, and I have absolutely no recollection of having made any decision to act; yet I was suddenly on the ladder and fighting to get down, my hands hot with friction, my feet slipping on the worn rungs. I swung myself through the lower trap and hit the floor running; and I should have been through the door and out of the building if Harris had not been blocking my way.
I realize in retrospect that his intervention functioned as a desirable check on my own uncharacteristically impulsive behaviour and that I have some cause to be grateful to him, but my immediate response was considerably less generous. I believe I swore violently as I tried to sidestep his ungainly bulk, and I am certain that I struck wildly at him as he reached out a hand and grasped me by the sleeve.
‘Let the girl alone,’ he said, drawing me firmly towards him. The action was threatening, but his tone was oddly gentle, unemphatic. ‘Let her be, Mr Stannard.’
‘This is none of your business, Harris.’
‘I’ve watched Annie growing up over the years,’ he said, ‘and I care for her as I’d care for one of my own.’
‘That doesn’t entitle you to lay hands on me.’
He relaxed his grip a little and I tugged my arm free, taking a pace backward as I did so.
‘I meant no harm,’ he said. ‘But Annie’s not for you. You know it yourself. She’d be as miserable under your roof as a caged lark.’
‘I’ve no intention—’ I began, and stopped abruptly, suddenly and acutely aware of the implications of denial.
‘Of marrying her? Then what kind of a game are you playing with the poor girl?’
The question was so far beyond permissible bounds as to release me from any obligation to continue the conversation. I turned on my heel and made for the door.
‘You’ll not follow her, Mr Stannard?’
‘I’m going back to my lodgings,’ I said. ‘I’ve business to attend to.’
25
I had, in fact, very little business, and none requiring my immediate attention, but it was clearly impossible to remain in the church with Harris. I had it in mind to sit quietly in my room and write for an hour or two before walking out to pay my respects at the Hall.
I had been considering for some time the advisability of taking Redbourne into my confidence, and recent events had sharpened my thinking on the matter. I should be presuming, of course, on an acquaintanceship which was unlikely to ripen into anything more cordial, but I recognized a pressing need to talk with someone who might have knowledge of the girl and her family, and I naturally shrank from broaching the subject with Banks.
I was sitting at my table, beginning for the third or fourth time what was proving to be a peculiarly difficult letter to Aaron, when I heard Mrs Haskell’s footsteps on the stairs. She knocked gently and poked her head round the door.
‘There’s someone outside for you, Mr Stannard.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Annie Rosewell. She says it’s important.’
I am not certain that I was entirely successful in concealing from Mrs Haskell feelings which surprised me both by their force and their ambiguity. I laid down my pen and endeavoured to control the shaking of my hands.
‘Tell her I can’t see her,’ I said.
‘The girl’s in a real state, Mr Stannard, dithering like a mad thing, and her eyes red and puffed up with crying. She said you’d know what it was about.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t have the remotest idea what it’s about, Mrs Haskell, and I don’t have the time to find out now. Tell her I’m busy.’
‘She said she knew you’d be busy, but I was to tell you that nothing could be more important than this.’
‘I’ve given my answer. Perhaps you’d be good enough to communicate it to the young lady and leave me to get on with my work.’
I thought for a moment that she might continue to press for a more favourable response: certainly she seemed reluctant to leave, and at one point she opened her mouth as though to speak. But I turned back to my letter, pointedly ignoring her, and after a while she withdrew and made her way slowly down the stairs.
My correspondence took longer than I had anticipated, and it was late in the afternoon before I reached the hall. Redbourne opened the door himself. He was visibly taken aback by my unannounced arrival and stood staring stupidly into my face as though unable to place me.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Redbourne. I wonder if I might have a word with you?’
Even then, he made no move. I began to regret having called.
‘You suggested that I might—’
‘Of course.’ He seemed to come to himself, throwing the door wide and standing aside to let me pass. He took my coat and led me down the corridor to a spacious but cluttered living-room.
‘You’ll have to excuse this.’ He waved a hand vaguely at the litter of books and botanical specimens strewn across the floor. ‘If I’d known you planned to visit …’
‘I’m afraid there was no planning involved. I must apologize.’
‘Please, Stannard.’ He motioned me to sit down. ‘You’ll take a glass of claret?’
Two bottles stood side by side on a low table, one empty, the other evidently only just broached. He opened the door of an ornately carved cabinet, brought out a glass and filled it for me.
‘A little early for you, perhaps, but as you see’ – he indicated a full glass on the floor beside his chair – ‘I’ve already begun.’
It struck me that he had probably begun some considerable time earlier and that discussion of the serious matter I had in mind might be better postponed, but the directness of his approach seemed to rule out that option.
‘Now, Stannard,’ he said, swinging his chair round to face mine, ‘tell me what brings you here. You may have walked out for the sake of your health, but I fancy not.’
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘Nor for friendship’s sake?’
There was the faintest hint of reproach in the question. I shifted uncomfortably under his gaze.
‘Naturally our friendship—’
‘Naturally. But that’s not why you’ve come.’
‘No. The fact is, Redbourne, that I appear to have created something of a problem for myself. There’s a girl—’
‘Ann Rosewell.’
‘Yes. How did you know?’
‘Don’t be absurd, Stannard. The whole place has been buzzing with the affair for weeks. When an outsider such as yourself comes to stay in a village like this, he inevitably attracts attention. When he chooses to address his attentions to one of the villagers – a girl, moreover, who has already generated a certain amount of interest in her own right – gossip and speculation run wild. Did you imagine it was some kind of secret? Every servant in this household knows – or thinks he knows – what’s going on. Hadn’t it occurred to you how closely you’d be scrutinized? How widely the affair would be discussed?’
‘I’m beginning to realize.’ I sat back for a moment, flushed and awkward. ‘What do you mean when you say that Ann has already generated interest?’
‘Well, to begin with, there’s her beauty, which has led to a feverish and not entirely good-natured scuffling for her favours among the susceptible young men of the neighbourhood. She might have kept herself aloof from that, of course; but what makes her so interesting to the village at large is the extent to which – you must forgive me, Stannard – she seems to have compromised herself in the bestowing of those favours.’
�
�How can you be sure that that’s anything more than village rumour? She told me—’
‘For heaven’s sake, Stannard. I’m sure you know as well as I do that what a woman tells a man in a situation of this kind is unlikely to be entirely true, and may well deviate so far from the truth as to be unrecognizable to anyone familiar with the facts. You have to remember, too, that women of Ann’s social class – well, let’s just say that it’s better to avoid involvement. This is terra incognita as far as you’re concerned, and those who venture into unfamiliar territory risk error and ambush. This really isn’t my business, but since you’ve evidently come here expressly to discuss the matter, allow me to warn you to be on your guard against the girl. In particular let me caution you against imagining that you’re under any obligation to her. You’re not the first to be snared by her charms, and you certainly won’t be the last. My advice is simple: you should let her know, unequivocally and at the earliest opportunity, that you want nothing further to do with her.’
‘Eminently sensible. But it might not be as easy as that.’
‘Nonsense. She’ll come round to it more quickly than you think. You’d have been quite a catch for her, admittedly, and she’ll resist the assault on her dreams of social advancement as well as resenting your rejection of her. But women are more resilient than they’d have us believe, and Ann herself would have no difficulty in finding consolation elsewhere. I can think of half a dozen handsome and not particularly fastidious young men who would be delighted to step’ – he smiled, intimate, collusive – ‘into the breach.’
I flared suddenly with an intense and irrational anger.
‘And if I don’t wish to relinquish my own place? Have you considered the possibility that I might—’ I hesitated, feeling on my tongue the weight of the word which had come so spontaneously to mind; testing, rejecting – ‘that I might admire her?’
‘It has occurred to me that you might be – that you must be – infatuated with her, yes. But you can surely see that the whole business is preposterous. How could you ever have thought of bringing the affair to any but the obvious conclusion? It may seem cruel to turn her loose now, but how much crueller not to do so. Imagine yourself shackled to such a woman, Stannard: what kind of happiness do you think there’d be for either of you?’
He refilled my glass and threw a thick wedge of pinewood on to the fire. We watched as the flames took hold.
‘It seemed to me at one time,’ I said after a moment’s reflection, ‘that I might make something of her. She has some natural assets – there’s beauty there, undoubtedly, and a certain elegance of bearing and, for the rest, she might well have proved teachable.’
Redbourne shook his head. ‘Not Ann,’ he said. ‘She looks the part, I grant you, but it’s skin-deep. If you want to know what you’d be left with once the surface bloom was gone, take a look at her mother. And then there’s the father—’
‘Lost at sea, I gather.’
‘Well, that’s a convenient fiction. Certainly Thomas Rosewell was a sailor, and equally certainly he set off some ten years ago on a voyage from which he never returned. In that sense, he’s undoubtedly lost, and it seems unlikely that the family will ever see him again. But the word in the village – and it’s something more substantial than rumour – is that he has settled in Australia and simply refuses to come home. I can’t entirely blame him for that – Enid Rosewell is an unstable and sometimes irrational woman and must have been almost impossible to live with – but his departure left the children vulnerably exposed to her unpredictable bouts of violence.’
‘Violence against the children? There’s bruising on Ann’s face. She told me she’d fallen against the dresser. Is that—?’
‘Another fiction. There’s not a stick of furniture in the cottage against which that poor girl hasn’t stumbled at one time or another. The answer comes pat: I fell and struck the table, the shelf, the bookcase. She’s had enough practice. And the whole village, to its shame, colludes in the lie. Believe me, those children have suffered over the years, Daniel even more than Ann. When he first came to me, he was in a pitiful state, literally shaking with fear.’
‘When you say he came to you—’
‘He ran away from home. We had spoken occasionally, and my small kindnesses to him had perhaps encouraged him to see me as some kind of saviour. I wish I could have given him more of the love he so clearly needed, but I suppose it was too late. All the evidence pointed to a history of surprisingly savage beatings; and how do you undo that? You’d have been shocked, Stannard: the boy not yet seventeen years old, the delicate skin of his shoulders and upper back permanently marked by large patches of scar tissue, puckered and rough to the touch.’
‘To the touch?’
‘And what damage had been done to his spirit, heaven alone knows. A growing boy profits from firm guidance, perhaps even from occasional chastisement, but there’s a profound difference between that and the sheer brutality to which he had evidently been subjected. He would sometimes wake in the night, crying out and sobbing, completely inconsolable. And all the time he was with me he remained tense, easily startled, always strangely hunched in his posture, as though he were waiting for the next blow to fall.’
‘You took him in?’
‘What else could I do? I offered him one of my vacant cottages and found him enough work around the estate to justify his presence there. I did what I could for him, but he seemed unable to settle to anything and moved on within a year. We see him back here now and again, drinking in the Black Dog or wandering through the meadows around the village, sometimes in Ann’s company; but I don’t believe he ever visits his mother.’
I thought suddenly of the young man with the scarred forehead lunging at me across the bar-room table.
‘What is it, Stannard?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s a sad story.’
‘Even sadder than you might think. Because, odd as this may sound after all I’ve just told you, I’m convinced that Enid Rosewell loves her children – loves them with a genuine if somewhat disordered passion. A few days after Daniel’s defection, she appeared on my doorstep with Ann at her side, demanding to see her son. My first impulse was to protect him, but I quickly realized that she was quite capable of dragging my name through the dirt if it served her turn to do so, and I was left with no choice but to betray his whereabouts. I thought she would simply march in and haul him home and was pleased to be proved wrong, though I suspect that the vigour of his resistance owed as much to his not unreasonable fear of retribution as to any newly acquired strength of will. She, for her part, seemed badly affected by the business, and certainly she has never forgiven me.’
He swayed forward in his chair and rested his elbows on his knees, staring into his glass. I listened to the pinewood cracking and whistling in the grate.
‘No,’ he said at last with a little grimace, ‘it’s rotten stock, Stannard; and tend it how you will, rotten stock bears rotten fruit. I’ve given you my advice: take it or leave it, as you wish.’
He rose unsteadily and went to the window, squinting up at the sky through the misted panes.
‘It will be getting dark soon,’ he said, ‘and it looks as though we’ll have snow before the evening’s out. I suggest you get back while you can.’
It was cold, certainly, the wind stronger now and blowing from the north-east. Redbourne walked with me as far as the back gate.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Sorry? For what?’
‘I suspect that what I’ve told you may not have been exactly what you wanted to hear.’
‘I don’t know what I wanted to hear. The truth, I suppose. And I’m grateful to you.’
‘The truth?’ He leaned close, so that I caught the sour tang of wine on his breath. ‘Is that what you thought you were getting?’
‘Isn’t that what you were offering?’
‘Nothing so dignified, I’m afraid. Just the view from where I stand.’
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sp; A sudden gust whipped across the garden, throwing the straggling laurels at his back into a frenzy of agitation. He held out his hand.
‘Good luck, Stannard.’
‘Thank you. You must come and inspect our progress on the church before too long. We’re nearly there now: another fortnight should see us through.’
He hunched his shoulders and jammed his hands into the pockets of his smoking-jacket.
‘I’m cold,’ he said. ‘I must get back to my fire.’
I turned up the collar of my greatcoat and set off into the wind. Redbourne’s warning had been timely: a bank of cloud was sweeping in, dark and distinct, across the translucent blue of the evening sky. I imagined the hillside featureless under a mantle of blown snow, and quickened my pace.
A fortnight? Wildly optimistic, I reflected as I walked; an estimate based on nothing more substantial than my own desperate wish to be out of the place. Perhaps, with luck, a month, though even that was questionable. Quite apart from the repointing of the exterior – and the full extent of that work was still unclear – there were the new pews to be fixed in position, the stove to be installed and the base of the north wall re-rendered; and I should be obliged, of course, to make good the damaged plasterwork around the chancel arch.
Make good: that was the phrase in my contract. But supposing, I thought, there is no possibility of making good. What if the structures we inherit are fundamentally flawed or debased beyond redemption? Why should we take upon ourselves the burden of restoring what was never good and can never be made so? – a decaying patchwork of stone, wood and plaster, a world of damage and disease. Perhaps it was the claret or an after-effect of my illness, but I was suddenly buoyed on a wave of elation, lifted and washed clear of my moorings. The vision, if one can call it that, was not in any obvious sense either illuminating or consoling: on the contrary, what presented itself to me was a chilling and terrible immensity of darkness, formless and ungovernable. I have been here before, I said to myself; but now I let myself drift out, thrillingly aware of my own helplessness and knowing – yes, knowing, for however brief an instant, beyond any trace of a doubt – that all my actions, past and future, were sanctioned by that uncoercible emptiness. I can leave, I thought, leave with the new pews still cluttering the aisles, the rendering unrepaired, the floors unswept; no farewells, no explanations. As I walked down the hill towards the village I threw back my head and began to sing.