The River Within

by Karen Powell

She found Angus gesturing weakly at a glass which lay on its side, ice melting darkly into the bedspread. Sending Hattie away, she helped him into a chair, changed the sheets and blankets. Then she went downstairs, and then down again to the cellars where racks of wine bottles shone dully beneath their shrouds of dust. She bypassed these, pushing aside bicycles of various sizes, Alexander’s old pram, until she came to a row of wooden shelving. On the bottom shelf, a dark, unwieldy bundle was wedged against the cellar wall, like a loosely-wrapped body. This was the tent they’d bought when Alexander was small, at a time when Angus was still trying to interest him in outdoor pursuits. On the shelf above the bundle was a large rucksack. Venetia pulled it down and unknotted the rope at its neck, which was cold and slightly damp to touch. She felt around inside the rucksack and then drew out an enamel mug, one of a pair that had been packed away for years. It was white with a blue rim. The other one, she remembered, had a chip in it. She lifted it experimentally. Far lighter than crystal glassware, with a handle to grasp.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Angus when she had washed the mug, filled it with cold water, and taken it up to the bedroom. He lifted it to his mouth successfully, though his hand was still shaking. ‘Mouth gets so dry.’ Then he scrabbled for the orange plastic bowl.

  Alexander stood in the hallway listening again to everything Venetia had already told him over the phone, nodding his head like a schoolboy receiving instruction. He was lightly tanned from an early Mediterranean spring, looked out of place in the grey light of the hallway, as though someone had painted him from a different palette. He was unusually passive, with no questions to demand of her once she finished. She took him upstairs to see his father. Angus looked like he was sleeping, yet must have been conscious on some level because he started, then murmured to himself as his son entered the room.

  ‘Oh, Papa,’ was all that Alexander could say.

  ‘Why is Uncle James staying here?’ Alexander wanted to know, nodding to the guest room where James’s coat was slung across the bed. They were waiting on the landing while the nurses were about their work in Angus’s bedroom. Venetia could hear the two of them conversing, the creaking of the bed, the tear of paper, plastic. She was grateful for the relief they administered, the quiet words of advice, yet she had started to resent the way even the kindlier of the two appropriated death so readily. She wanted their work to be over as quickly as possible, so the house might return to itself: a private little world of suffering.

  ‘I needed him,’ she said. There was a depth of sorrow in Alexander’s eyes and she knew that nothing she had told him over the crackling phone line had prepared him for the sight of his father, flat and grey as a shadow on the bed. ‘Your father must have someone with him the whole time.’

  Angus moaned in his sleep that evening, shifting and turning, plucking at the sheets as if the weight of them agitated him, all the while carrying on some feverish conversation.

  ‘Do you think he knows I’m here?’ said Alexander, standing over his father. ‘What does he want?’

  Angus’s eyes flicked open, his gaze drifted past them as if they did not exist, lost in some space between sleeping and waking. Beneath his breath he whispered to an invisible audience. They caught only snippets of his agitation: lost train tickets, Suki and Tinker scratching at the door to come in, though his beloved dogs had long been dead, their bones resting beneath the dark soil of the rose garden. Until now Venetia had thought dying a linear process, something gradual, with steady stages, landmarks to be passed, not this trickster that shifted shape overnight, before you had time to get used to its last form.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  CHAPTER 49

  Lennie, September 1955

  Down on her knees, up and down the small patch of earth, Lennie moved like a supplicant between the rosemary and the clumps of purple sage, the thyme and the creeping marjoram, the bronze fennel that glimmered in the sunshine. She dug, with her back turned to the cottage where her father lay, his eyes staring at the ceiling, breath so slow. Two nights since it had happened. Thomas knew now. Lady Richmond said he was hurrying home as fast as he could. Their father could hang on for years, they’d said at the hospital, or go in a moment.

  She dug, trying to get to the root of things, grubbing around the dandelions that held onto to the earth so tenaciously, plucking at the more delicate weeds that sat like green froth upon the surface, came away with a gentler pull. She pushed her hands deeper into the earth, fingers moving like blind worms through the dark soil, blood and bone of everything that had once been alive. The earth could not lie: her hands would find out the truth.

  Dark earth shifting, the taste of blood on her tongue. Damp air rising from the river.

  I love you, Lennie

  The river had roared, wanting to snatch the words from his mouth, to drown them. She had not understood. Danny Masters was a good, kind boy; she had kissed him because he was handsome and she could see in his eyes that he wanted her to. She had taken him by the hand and led him into the clearing in the woods. It had nothing to do with that love. It was the night air and the moon, the clean-sweat smell of him. Like the day she had watched him swimming in the woods, Danny’s long body pale beneath the surface of the river pool, the smooth strokes of his arms cutting the water, how she could not move for the sight of him.

  Love lived in her imagination and on the surface of her skin, her senses, the golden haze of Alexander almost blinding her. It was private but public too, with rules to be followed. With her hands deep in the earth, Lennie knew that there were parts of her love did not touch. It did not go bone-deep.

  Danny holding onto her as if trying to keep afloat on the sea of the forest floor. Dark petals falling on the river bank; blood blooming in his palms like stigmata. How surprised he had looked, staring down at the blood, at her. She had pushed him away, run through the black trees till all the breath was gone from her lungs, slammed the cottage door shut behind her.

  Hands in the earth. Small white hands, pushing Danny Masters to his death.

  But no. She sat back on her heels, blinking at the sky. Was there something else, some other truth? It was hard to think straight with the little music box of a cottage at her back, waiting to contain her again. Danny lowering himself into the cold black rush of the Stride, his own fingers letting go of the wet rock? Whichever way. Everyone said she was a good girl but she made bad things happen. Brought trouble to others and to herself. Lennie bent forwards, pushed her hands down into the earth again, deep as they would go. It told her the only truth there was: the world makes its choices and it does not care.

  CHAPTER 50

  Venetia, Spring 1955

  She did not mind the crocuses on the Great Lawn, they signalled the coming spring in a delicate, almost apologetic manner, and the snowdrops were white waxen tears, offensive to no one. It was the daffodils she loathed, so full of self-assurance, thrusting their sulphurous, penile buds out the ground.

  At least it came quickly. The words of some well-meaning relative later, at Angus’s funeral. Not fucking quickly enough, she had wanted to shout, and then to laugh hysterically all in the same moment.

  Angus’s body fought death long after the game was up. Even in sleep his ribs heaved, pulling useless spasms of air into failing lungs, his dried throat rasping. Always it was too hot for him in the room, despite the open windows and a good breeze lifting the curtains. It was as if his body was flushing out the last of life. Day and night they sponged his hands and face with cool water. When he managed to speak it was in whispers, half-sentences, but he lifted his face like a flower to the sun, submitting to her care, to the enamel cup lifted to his dry lips. It was all she could do for him, now food and language had become too complex for his regressing body to process. Water, touch. The instinct of the first blind, single-celled creatures on the littoral of existence, reaching out into the unknown. She wondered if that felt any different fro
m reaching back, to the time before one began.

  Lucidity came in odd flashes, just when she’d given up expecting it.

  ‘Speed it up!’ A sharp little joke that astonished her one morning when she took too long to pour fresh water into the enamel cup.

  Later he swallowed, wincing at the effort. ‘Alexan­der . . . home.’

  ‘Yes.’ Alexander would be happy to hear that Angus had registered his presence. Yet she had noticed that he would not be left alone with his father, went straight to his own room after dinner each evening, leaving her and James to care for him through the night. She could not find the energy to ask her son if he was scared of death or of the dying.

  ‘Worse than I thought.’

  ‘You should rest.’

  Still his ravaged body was not ready to release him.

  ‘He is a strong man,’ said Dr. Harrison in a low voice. They stood in the doorway of the bedroom. ‘Anyone else by now . . . ’

  ‘He’s lost so much weight. You know he’s not eaten for days. Surely it can’t be long now?’

  In her hands, a sodden pyjama top. The water she had given Angus had slipped straight from his mouth.

  ‘What about a child’s cup?’ the nurse had said yesterday, watching as Venetia tried to help him drink. ’One of those with the lid and a spout. Somebody round here must have one.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Venetia had said. ‘Perhaps.’ She’d waited till the nurse had gone before going downstairs to hunt in the back of the kitchen dresser.

  ‘Hard to tell,’ said Dr. Harrison. ‘It may be that his heart just gives out at some point.’

  She hesitated.

  ‘And there’s nothing you can do? He gets so agitated.’ Angus slept nearly all the time now, but to call it rest was an outrage, for it resembled nothing more than the troubled sleep of the damned. For hours at a time he groaned to himself, crying out loud, or carrying on a fretful commentary beneath his breath, little of which she and James managed to catch.

  Dr. Harrison was slow to respond.

  ‘All I can do is continue to increase the morphine and the tranquillisers in increments, in order to make him more comfortable.’ They watched one another, both of them knowing there was only one comfort left for the man who lay in the bed. ‘Eventually, of course, the combination of the two, and the weakness of the body . . . but there are no guarantees.’ He looked at her steadily, then glanced towards the windowsill, his eye caught by the blue plastic infant’s cup which sat there, unused.

  ‘You should use that, you know. Less mess.’

  In the chapel, Venetia prayed in a way she would have despised as theatrical had she been able to view herself, down on her knees, hands clasped in supplication.

  Make it stop.

  The baldest of requests. She could not specify death in her prayers, and any kind of reversal would be nothing more than a reprieve.

  Till now she had thought of death differently: a noisy, visceral mess on a stretcher, like the soldiers in the garden wing, poor brother Ned, during the fall of Crete, or else a shadow descending somewhere close by, like a hand passing in front of a lamp. This wringing out of a life, day after day, had a singular horror of its own. Exhausted, she fell asleep in the chair one night when she was supposed to be watching him, awoke to see transparent fingers clawing the air. She ran downstairs to fetch more water, more ice, to assuage his incessant thirst. Keeping him alive when his body had long since announced its wish to die.

  CHAPTER 51

  Lennie, September 1955

  Snap. Her limbs were made of plastic, pink and shiny and snappable, like the dancer’s in the music box. Little ballerina spinning round and round until the lid closed down with a slam. Across the parlour, her father was a rag doll crumpled on his bed, lopsided eyes staring. Upstairs, the cuckoo clock chimed. Nobody came.

  Snap.

  Just twigs breaking beneath her feet. It was colder here, among the tallest trees, the sky a distant green and gold above. She had never been afraid of the woods. Black roots clawed at the earth. Her ankles were beating a sure path through the undergrowth and her arms were pliable, strong, like young hazel branches. She pulled the fox stole more tightly around her, butting her cheek against its animal warmth. How lucky her mother had been to own such a beautiful thing.

  You are like a dryad, Alexander had said. She had not known what he meant, saved up the word to check with Thomas later.

  I’ll walk you home.

  Not Alexander but Danny Masters. A young girl like Lennie ought not to be at home on a Saturday night, said Miss Price, making Lennie feel sad for herself, then angry. In the village hall, the girls with covetous eyes, their smiles sticking to their teeth. She did not need walking home but she liked the feeling of him beside her, tall and certain. The roses are like spice, she told him on the riverbank. Afterwards, he straightened his clothes and helped her to her feet. The sky was violet above and the undergrowth snapped as they walked back to the river path in silence. She had wounded him. She knew that but she did not comfort him.

  I love you, Lennie.

  How his voice shook. Words that had nothing to do with the smell of him on her skin, the blackness swirling round the base of the trees. She tucked his words away in the collar of her dress where no-one could find them and then ran all the way home in the dark, slamming the cottage door shut behind her, pushing the lock into place with a snap.

  It’s happened now.

  It had happened and it couldn’t be undone.

  CHAPTER 52

  Venetia, September 1955

  She must throw away the cup with the teddy bear transfer on it. It was a simple enough act, she should have done it before now—open the drawer, remove the cup, take it downstairs. She shouldn’t delegate it to someone else. She was about to approach the chest of drawers when a movement caught her eye. From the bedroom window she saw that a taxi had pulled up at the bottom of the driveway, outside Gatekeeper’s Cottage. She watched as Thomas got out. Even at a distance, she could sense urgency in his movements, the staccato thrust of money, the seizing of his luggage from the boot of the car. Visiting Lennie and her father again had been next on Venetia’s list, but Tom would want some time alone with them now. She left the bedroom, closing the door behind her, went down the stairs and took the side doorway out into the garden.

  Many of the plots were still given over to vegetables, with rationing only having been lifted the previous summer. Venetia wasn’t much interested in the vegetable plots, leaving them and also the formal rose garden to be taken care of by Nathan Lacey and his crew, but she had reclaimed a number of beds for herself over the years, including a wide gravel-edged border which faced southwest and was sheltered by the high wall that separated the gardens from the rest of the grounds.

  She walked the length of this border, checking each plant as she went. In the sharp light of the September afternoon the garden was hushed, like a stage set between scenes, or a mirage that might waver into nothing. The border would not reach maturity for another year or two but she had planted it generously and with her favourite things, a soft palette of white, pink, blues, against a background of cool greenery and silver grey foliage. Here were the last stems of snowy phlox, their delicious perfume drifting on the air, asters, as simple and charming as a child’s sketch. There was lychnis elbowing its way in wherever it could, mounds of common sage, leaves rough and leathery as an old cat’s tongue.

  If it had been earlier in summer or even just a month ago, Venetia might have deadheaded as she moved along the border, or have been tempted to go and fetch her shears so that she might cut back here and there, in an attempt to bring shape and order to the planting. But so many of the plants were at their peak now: the leggy verbena branching out at shoulder-height, its small lilac flower heads trembling in the warm currents of air that the earth gave back at this time of day, the catmint, which was flowering
for a second time, tumbling over the edges in clouds of hazy blue, even some of the dog roses were still blooming, producing fresh green leaves like little pleated skirts. All along the border plants twisted and intertwined, scrambling up neighbours, clambering over one other, all angling for the light, the last heat of summer. It would be wrong to contain them when winter was such a long time. You could never tell which plants would survive. In a garden youth and beauty counted for little. Strong roots were required to make it through a Yorkshire winter. Even the most gorgeous and abundant plant might be slayed by a harsh frost.

  Venetia stooped to run her hand over the feathery foliage of the achillea that she had planted last summer. How well it sat against the spikes of mauve hyssop. Towards the back of the border, the pale, open faces of the Japanese anemones peeped through the purple branches of angelica where, earlier in the season, the honey bees had swarmed in pollen-fuelled ecstasy all day long. The anemones, she noted, would be ready for dividing soon.

  She heard the sound of gravel being scattered on the other side of the wall. Whoever was coming up the driveway towards the house was moving quickly. She heard the front door being slammed followed by a commotion in the hallway. She heard Lennie’s voice. Venetia retraced her steps along the border, hurrying in case Peter Fairweather’s condition had worsened. Where on earth was Alexander when you needed him? Yes, it had been her idea that he should leave, but it had been three days now!

  Lennie stood in the centre of the hallway, her extraordinary hair spilling over her shoulders. She was still in her nightdress, which gave weight to Venetia’s concerns that there had been some new emergency with her father. Sunlight shone through the thin cotton of Lennie’s nightdress, outlining her frame, the darkness between her legs. Something must have happened for her to have left the house without changing or even stopping for a dressing gown. Venetia was relieved to see Thomas at the doorway behind her. He was breathless, chest heaving.