by Susan Hill
Her mother had let out a soft little whimper when she had taken Tommy Carr home the first time. Eve knew what the whimper signified. ‘Not you. Not you as well. First Miriam, now …’
But the whole truth was not just that she did not want to be left alone, it was as much that she had never liked John Bullard and made it clear as clear. He was, variously ‘lazy’ and ‘overcareful’ and he paid her too little attention. The best she had ever been heard to say was that he was ‘nothing special’. But from the first moment he had stepped through the front door, Tommy Carr had become everything John Bullard was not. He was raised to ridiculous heights of virtue and importance from which he could surely only topple.
It had been alarming because Eve herself was not as sure about Tommy as her mother appeared to be, for all that she had recognised him at once as ‘a kind man’. But kindness was only one of many desirable qualities, at the age of twenty, she thought necessary in a young man, let alone in a husband, and she had searched for those each time they met.
She could not have said what it was that she wanted but sometimes pinned it down to the word ‘spark’. He had no spark. He was steady, quiet, calm, reliable, loyal, thoughtful, gentle. A kind man then. But for a long time she resisted those things in favour of something he lacked and which she felt there must surely be.
‘Spark,’ she had said once to Miriam. Her sister, pregnant by then and tired and shocked by how much work there was to be done in a day looking after a house and a man, had snorted in derision.
‘You marry him when he asks,’ their mother said over and again, ‘you see sense. Men like Tommy Carr don’t grow on trees.’
‘He maybe won’t ask and even if he did …’
But he asked soon enough, as Eve had known that he would, known, she realised, from the moment he had helped her unwrap the waterlogged parcel on the canal bank. To see so clearly and without possibility of choice into her own future was terrifying.
It had been the last time, it occurred to her now, that she was seriously afraid of anything, anything at all, for when she married Tommy Carr she moved into a protected circle. She had even thought that nothing could ever hurt her again, but that had not been true, nor should it have been. Pain and hurt were not his to prevent, or so it had seemed, but what he gave her was peace of mind and a reassurance about life, a steadiness. She could even face small things that had once terrified her – large spiders and lightning storms, stray dogs and things people did that she had been brought up to believe were unlucky. Now, if shoes were put on the table or lilac brought into the house, she simply removed the shoes because they belonged on the floor and found a jug for the blossom.
Living with Tommy affected everything about her, changed and strengthened and calmed her, and led her quietly out of childhood and girlhood into adult life. Her mother had been right. The question of whether Eve loved him did not arise for a long time, simply because there were so many other benefits to her marriage. Miriam had talked about love endlessly, before John Bullard and after they met. Eve did not. Only one day, after they had been married for a year, she had unpegged his shirt from the line and suddenly put it to her face to smell the cleanness and been suffused with the sense that it was his shirt and therefore important because of love. She loved. It was as obvious as the blueness of the sky and her state of plain contentment had become one of happiness in a single moment.
4
SHE OPENED the door and looked across to the peak. The early sun had risen higher and was bathing the garden. The hens clucked.
Why did she feel it would be any better if the sky turned curded grey and the rain came on? It had sometimes been like that, or else a bitter wind had cut round her head as she had walked, but it had made no difference, any more than the spring sun and warmth.
How could it? It scarcely mattered.
That day had been fine, with this lapis sky above the peak and the sun warm on her face.
That day.
She filled the kettle and left it on the back of the range for her return and then took the sprays of plum blossom out of the jug, shook the water off the stems and wrapped them tightly in a couple of sheets of newspaper.
There was no one about. By this time in the morning those who went to work had gone and children to school, those who stayed at home were washing and cooking and scrubbing the floors, changing the beds, shaking out dusters, setting the bones and the veg in a pan for stock. Later, they would be out, pegging washing, taking a moment to sit at the open back door in the sun. You always took the moment.
There were six in a row, called cottages but really just small brick houses like the brick houses in the town, the brick houses she and Tommy had been born and brought up in. But someone had thought to set a row out here on the edge of the fields and looking towards the peak. From the back, you could see the smoke from the factory chimneys, and if the wind was this way, hear the faint roar of the furnaces and the thump of the machines. But from the front it was the field and the track across it to the peak. Beyond the peak was another world to which they went sometimes on Sundays, walking over the soft mounded hills. None of them was like the peak, which stood alone as an outcrop, jagged and steep. The peak, marked the change between the two worlds.
* * *
She did not lock the door. No one ever did. A locked door was an insult to a visitor who, if there was no reply, might try the handle and put a head round, call out, but leave again at once if there was no answer. If a door was locked it was like a slap in the face. Only if you went away you might lock and leave a key with a neighbour. But who went away?
She shut the gate and set off, across the wide empty field, the plum blossom in her hand pointing down-wards to the ground. The sky seemed huge and to grow wider as she reached the middle. From here, there was only a thin haze in the distance and a faint rising plume of smoke to mark the town. It was a walk of two miles and she took it three times every year, at Christmas, in August and on this day, which was the one that counted. Once, she had had pneumonia at Christmas, one August Tommy’s mother had died and she had been forced to miss, but somehow it had not mattered greatly. It was understood. She had never missed this April day and never would as long as her legs could bear her.
The track reached the foot of the peak and then forked into two, narrower paths, one going straight ahead up the steep slope and the other around the base of it to the far side. Eve paused. A lark, so high that she could not see it, was streaming out a song that came spiralling down to her through empty space. Far above the peak, two buzzards soared silently, flat wings outstretched like windmill sails. Tommy had never been with her and never spoken to her about it either, but she knew well that it was not for any want of feeling but for an excess of it, overflowing but somehow damned up inside him. She did not lay any blame. If he had ever forgotten and not gone out to cut the branch of blossom for her to bring, perhaps that would be the time for blame. But he would never forget, she could be sure of that.
She walked slowly because she needed to feel herself getting nearer a little at a time, making the journey as people made a pilgrimage and because, in spite of her usual prayer for grey skies, once she was out here she savoured the spring air and the sun and the smell of the new earth and the growing things, loved to hear the larks. As she rounded the peak, she looked up and ahead to the far slope where the sheep were with their lambs, dozens of them scattered about the hillside like scraps of paper thrown up in the air and allowed to settle anywhere. If there was a wind it usually blew their bleating towards her but today it was quite still. She only heard the soft sound of her footsteps on the track.
The slope was gentle and after a half-mile, at the point where an old plough had been abandoned and lay knotted over with bindweed and grass, she could see the church tower. It had four flying angels on each corner and they caught the sun and shone gold. But today, just as she looked up to them, skeins of cloud were drawn across and the angels were dulled.
Centuries before there
had been a large village up here, but it had been deserted after a plague and reestablished further down on the far side, and the church had been left stranded by itself among ruins which had gradually fallen away and disappeared. But the church was never abandoned and services were even held in it half a dozen times each summer. People valued it. Guidebooks referred to what had become known as ‘St Paul-Alone’ or ‘St Paul-in-the Meadow’. Once or twice a visitor had been there when Eve had arrived and perhaps smiled or exchanged a word. The first time she had thought that she might mind, but she had not, there was a friendliness about having others here and she welcomed it, always looked out to see if people might be there.
She walked more slowly still up the last few yards. There was no stone wall, though perhaps it had once been there, no gate or entrance, no shady trees. The church stood alone with its tower rising up strongly and the angels flying freely in the wind, and for a path there was simply a worn track up to the door. And on two sides the churchyard, which was part of the hillside, part of the whole wide landscape, not penned in or confined, and the ancient gravestones set out anyhow, like the sheep on the opposite hill. Ancient but for a handful. The village was all but gone save for three or four cottages. Now and then a person died but few were buried here.
The first time she had ever come, quite by chance and years ago, Eve had felt a strange surge of rightness and belonging, something she had never known before. They went to church as a family for Christmas and Easter, she and her sister had been baptised and confirmed in the parish church in the centre of the town, a great, granite place with a chill in its bones. She had always felt a formal reverence and respect but never any closeness.
So that when the time had come, she had unhesitatingly picked St Paul-Alone for the burial. There had never been a doubt, and Tommy had gone along with her wishes, knowing how she felt. He had a deep sense of what was good and even holy but no connection with any church or chapel.
No one else was here. The sheeps’ cries and the bleating of the lambs came to her now on the wind. Another lark sang high out of sight.
No one had understood why she had chosen this place and she had not felt able to explain, just insisted over and over again that it must be, and Tommy had agreed and stood by her even if he too had not fully understood. It was others who murmured together and felt resentful. She had ignored them and never for one moment regretted what she had done. Her feelings had been absolute and could not have been gainsaid.
The path was grassy and dry. They had not had heavy rain for weeks. Her footsteps made a soft brushing sound as she stepped over the old, leaning gravestones, patched with yellow and grey sponge moss and lichen. Some had lettering too worn to be read, others had whole words obscured. Some she now knew by heart.
Joseph Garnett. Born 1802. Died 1870.
And his wife Adeline.
‘And he shall stand at the latter day.’
In loving memory of Samuel Pettifer.
And of Mary Pettifer of this parish.
And their children Maud, Archibald, Victoria.
She stopped again to wonder as always who Mary Pettifer was, wife or mother or daughter, and why her dates of birth and death had not been carved.
Surgeon Captain Makin Lownes,
a gallant officer and comrade.
Born 1789. Died at sea, 1824.
One by one she counted them, read them, set them aside, and so, slowly, made her way to the far end.
It was set a little apart from the old graves, but the stone no longer looked raw and smooth, the wind and rain that drove up the hill in winter had pitted and darkened it.
There was a shallow rectangle cut from the grass and edged with more cut stone laid flat.
Eve held her breath for a moment. Whenever she saw it again, at the moment she read the lettering, her heart seemed to stop in its beating. The first few times she had longed for it never to start up again.
Jeannie Eliza Carr
Aged 3 years
Beloved daughter
She knelt down and brushed a few leaves away, then laid the branches of white blossom carefully down on the grass.
5
AT FIRST they had lived with Tommy’s mother in the terraces behind the works and Eve had dreaded it, being shy and not knowing how Rose Carr liked things and how she would fit into the household. But it was easy enough, though crowded. Tommy had a brother with whom he had used to share a room and Alan had had to move into the box room. He had not seemed to resent it, or even to notice, but Eve had felt uncomfortable and after a few months only they had moved out when one of the houses on the opposite side of the terrace came free. It was pleasant enough and she tried to make the best of it but it was dark morning, noon and night, because the works buildings loomed over it and, having a north aspect, no room was ever lightened by the sun.
She was happy with Tommy Carr. He was indeed ‘a kind man’, thoughtful, quiet, gentle, undemanding, eating anything that was put in front of him, tidy and clean, unwilling to put her to any trouble, and, unlike every other man she knew of or had known, glad to help her in the house. He would not only fetch in the coals and deal with the fires and the range but set the table and clear it, bring in the washing from the line and clean both his own shoes and hers. They liked one another. They were suited.
But from the beginning both had been clear that they wanted a child, ‘to make a family’ as he said, ‘out of the two of us’.
After seven months in the dark house no child had been conceived, and Eve had struggled with herself through the long autumn and winter of early dark and grey skies, low-spirited and lacking in interest for anything in the small rooms whose walls pressed in on her ‘like coffin sides’, she said one evening.
Tommy laid down his knife and fork and looked across the tea table at her, his face troubled and full of concern.
‘That’s a strong thing to say.’
‘Yes.’
‘You feel it that badly then?’
She did. She had, she now knew, been ‘feeling it that badly’ for some time.
He said nothing more until he brought the stack of dishes in and set them on the wooden draining board beside her. Then he put his hand on her shoulder.
‘You should have said.’
‘No, no, it’s nothing.’
‘That isn’t how it sounded.’
‘I don’t want to worry you, Tom. I’m just having a down day.’
He went out again and she finished the dishes, set them to drain, looked out of the window onto the gathering sky and saw rain spots dashing against the window.
He had stoked up the range to a blaze and set their chairs closer to it, put a cushion for Eve’s back, which she had hurt in turning round too sharply the previous week. She brought in fresh cups of tea.
The evening paper was beside him as usual, but after only a glance he set it quietly down.
‘It’s the house,’ he said, ‘the dark that gets you down.’
‘Oh, it’ll be better when the days lengthen, take no notice of me.’
‘Of course I take notice of you. Besides, winter or summer, the works is still there and you can’t turn a house around.’
She smiled. There were his work socks to darn in the basket at her feet but she went on drinking her tea and looking into the fire.
‘I know what I should do.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Move us. Move you to where it’s light and open and you can breathe a bit. That’d be the best thing, and for a bairn when one wants to come to us as well. Maybe that’s why. It’s thinking it won’t put in an appearance to be brought up in a coal-hole.’
He had made little of the absence of a child, reassuring her that one would come when it was ready, though she could not be so easy in her mind now that Miriam had two boys and a third expected and was wondering how to stop.
She could hardly talk to her sister, hardly visit them because her envy spurted up like bile in her mouth.
She went so
metimes to the great dark granite church to ask for the gift of a child and liked it better when she sat there alone rather than at the services which they occasionally went to. Miriam’s babies were christened there and each one had cried. ‘It’s cold,’ Eve had said, ‘that’s why they cry. It’s never been warm inside that place in all its history.’
Perhaps, she sometimes thought, God had deserted it Himself for that very reason.
‘I’ll find us somewhere,’ Tommy had said that evening, and being a man of his word, a week later, he had done so, though not telling her at first, just suggesting they walk out that Saturday afternoon. It had been a fine day, blowy and chill, but as they had left the town streets and started off towards the first fields that hemmed it round she had felt her spirits lighten.
He had looked at her. ‘Your cheeks have got pink now,’ he had said, ‘in the fresher air.’
Though you could still smell the factory chimneys and taste the smoke faintly in your mouth.
‘Look.’
He had pointed to the terrace of six brick houses facing the field and the peak further away.
‘Look where?’
‘There.’
‘Houses.’
He laughed.
But he had led her to them and walked along to the last one, on the end and so with open fields on three sides. For a moment they had stood looking at it, a small, neat, plain house with a long ruler of garden running from the door, which was painted a dark red.
