Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  After they had washed up, she went and sat in the front room by the ‘town window’. She was as glad of the shade as of a different mood. The mother lay on the sofa, her tired legs lifted high on cushions. She read the paper, her face grim and pale, frowning with anxiety. Emily looked at the chestnut trees behind the warehouse, and the clear sky. She could hear the blackbird singing, ‘Bird of Paradise, Bird of Paradise’, over and over again, and then most sweetly, gently, ‘Come butty, come butty, come butty’.

  It was so small a town that ducks swam right through it on the brook. Jays and woodpeckers flew screeching over the roof, regarding it perhaps as no more than a large and stony shadow. The wind sowed hayseeds in the cattle market, and the gardens, even the scratchiest, were scented with their red hawthorns and lilacs. Everywhere one went one breathed them. And there was the river, and the silver-blue hills.

  May, all of May, Emily thought, her arm resting on the sill, her body supple and pleasant. The shadow of their gable was falling on the road, and the sun was pouring gold over the pale blue sky. A slow dusty echo tracked each footstep. But down here in the faded part of the town where there were no hotels but only poor men’s lodging houses, they escaped the weary rummaging on the hill.

  Slum games were scrawled in chalk on the pavements, women looked at their neighbours’ doors, and men in shirt sleeves smoked. The human beings, the trees, bathed in the delight of the evening. Children, grime painting scowls on their faces, sulky mops of hair in their eyes, squealed and squatted akimbo on their games, monkey hands on their knees.

  May, May, May! The time of year when all is perfect and young. The hills were the same, the trees had the same roots, as when she was a child at Aunt Fran’s. How long the grass must be! She could feel her toes combing through it, aching with cold dew, the snapping of a clover head in a sandal buckle. She could see the white billy goat chained to the stone roller. How many horses did Uncle Donovan say it would take to move it? All of them – ten horses. Ten horses in the stable…

  Her mother got up and went out. Emily lapsed on. The women came and seized the children; the doors shut, the air grew purer and more and more transparent, as if for silence to shine through it. At last Emily thought of the river, shining smoothly under the mist, on those early morning bathes. Why did it all seem so near, and closer every day, and yet so irrevocably saddened? If one person dies, the past is altered. Uncle Donovan was dead. People she had loved were dead. When you were young everyone was eternal. Her eyes moved, and she wondered at her emotion on seeing the sleeping man. She almost laughed. Yes, people would say she was in love with him. She laughed at the ridiculousness of her being in love with anybody. She couldn’t be. And the fisherman – he wasn’t like the others. Their talk had been casual, never cautious. They had never seemed to meet for the first time. In fact, although she could remember their first words, they never had ‘met’ any more than animals or birds meet. He was – what? An atmosphere in her own soul. Something more than a mood which was increasing in her.

  ‘My dear, I wish you’d go and ring up Annie.’ Her mother was looking in. A flush was on her cheek and neck, streaking her thinness. Emily knew that this meant great nervous endurance. She jumped up and said she would go at once. Suddenly she shivered. She had to put on her coat.

  It was quiet now, growing dusky. She had sat for a long time waiting for her call to come through. The mirror with the lettering on it was sinking into the shadow of the wall, the smoky voices in the bar were thicker. Suddenly someone shouted: ‘Do with ’im? Give ’im to the Jewish women, and tell ’em to save something alive for the Poles.’ There was a guttural laugh, a hoarse shuffling of tones, and then a blending again. Emily leant on the weak little cane table, the ice-cold edge of a slippery magazine touching her hand. Her heart beat in the long suspense and she sat with her eyes fixed on the telephone hanging in the corner by the door.

  Presently the house emptied. There was a shambling noise in the street: the landlord looked in at her, rubbing his bare arms:

  ‘Not through yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Want a light?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s cold in here,’ the landlord said, buttoning his cuffs, and he went out closing the door, leaving the shutters open. The moonlight fell towards the windowsill, creepingly, like a hand edging on to the keyboard. A twist of breeze made the hem of the white curtains writhe.

  ‘There must be a raid on. I’ll cancel,’ she said to herself. Five more minutes passed. The landlord had gone back into the smoking room. He was crumpling papers, talking in a petulant undertone with louder bursts of sighs and yawns. A woman spoke sharply, ‘… this time of night?’

  ‘She’s trying to get London.’

  ‘Oh! Well, I’ve locked up—’

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Annie?’

  ‘Yes, Emily – you’ve had my wire?’

  ‘No. Nothing.’

  How cold and queer the air felt! And those old magazines with their odour of linoleum—

  The receiver spouted words, all unintelligible: it whistled, it gurgled and was hollow with some deep resonance, like a dry pump.

  ‘Tomorrow – tomorrow,’ it shouted.

  ‘All right,’ she yelled. ‘You’re coming tomorrow. Is there a raid on?’

  ‘Not ’alf,’ said Annie’s voice in a little space which it exactly filled. ‘It’s not too bad yet but I must get ready to take the children down to the shelter. There, did you hear that? Christ, I hope it’s not going to be as bloody awful as last night.’

  Emily heard her call, ‘All right, I’m coming.’ It was as if a prompter had spoken for the stage, a half-tone, sibilant, expressionless. Then she seemed to have hung up. She went out into the passage and tapped on the hatch.

  ‘Finished?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  The man looked at her as she paid. He stooped, then reached up, and then once more framing himself pushed a little glass towards her. ‘Come on, Miss, drink this. I know you won’t tell on me.’ He winked, but his face was concerned: ‘It’s bad up there.’

  She drank. The blood bristled in her cheeks, she leant against the wall, not because she was overcome, but because for the moment she was concentrating so intensely elsewhere that her own body began to slip sideways. She could see the skies. And those unseen, immeasurable arms which human beings carry folded in their breasts, reached out – out – out to fold back the menace. She stood in this state of extended will, her spirit a vaster version of her physical resistance, for about a minute, and then went out, carefully shutting the street door.

  ‘Emily, how long you have been! Was it all right?’

  ‘Yes, Mother, perfectly. She’s coming down tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, thank God!’

  Her mother was in her purple dressing gown, holding it round her throat, her eyes peering over the light of a tiny lamp she held, with a globe like an orange: ‘There was nothing happening?’

  ‘No, Mother.’

  ‘But why hasn’t she wired?’

  ‘She has. I don’t know why we didn’t get it. I must just go and finish emptying those drawers.’

  ‘It’s a pity you didn’t do it this evening. You ought to go to bed. I’m glad we’ve arranged things.’

  For days they had been discussing receiving Annie and the children. There were only two large upstairs rooms, and the mother wouldn’t think of using the attics in case of incendiaries. She would share the great brass bed with Annie, and the two little girls would have Emily’s room. Emily was to go every night to sleep at Aunt Fran’s farm – about a mile away from the town. It was a gentle level walk, by the river: she would love it. It was the possibility of returning to Aunt Fran’s roof perhaps which was making such a vividness among her memories of her childhood when she had lived at Ell Hall for a year.

  Electricity was expensive. The two women lit a larger lamp and went upstairs. In their dressing gowns and soft shoes they fanned from c
orner to corner, Emily bending over a trunk, her mother absently touching the walls as if she were planning certain movements.

  At last she sat on the end of the sofa to unroll the elastic stocking from her bruised and swollen veins. ‘Jamie’s cot there?’ she murmured. She got up and touched the wash-stand.

  They moved it: somehow they both wanted to complete everything, to move into their own new positions as far as possible that night.

  They continued their soft, hushed midnight work. Sometimes the boards shook under the grey-green carpet, and the young starlings stirred startlingly in the chimney. But at last they were in bed. The blackout curtains of heavy sage-green serge were left across the mother’s window in case she might remember anything she might want to collect in the night. But Emily pulled hers back; her sash window looked towards the garden and the faint irridescent colours of a moon cloud. There were the vine leaves and the path leading to the moon and the cedar tree. She lay on her side facing them, her hair all pushed into a heavy sensation at the back of her head. Her hands burned with the restless touching of the day, but at last they were alone.

  The night was the ghost of the day, as the moon was the ghost of the sun. And the fragrance which balanced in the window was the ghost within a ghost, neither retreating nor advancing, but fluttering outstretched and withdrawn like a breath.

  She didn’t sleep. Her eyes refused to close over the dream in her brain. Planes drove over; and it was as if they were seaming together long strips of sky. But when they had gone the wavy stillness of the night still clung about the leaves unchanged.

  She began to see Annie in the shelter, the baby on her lap, and the little girls in the top bunk, peeping tearfully over the abyss. Guns, bombs, barrage, and then the screech of a plane being drawn into the vacuum.

  She sat up suddenly, and drove her head between her knees, embracing her body with those amazingly powerful thin arms: ‘All this! Oh, what a pity I can’t go to sleep because then I get there, I get there…’

  She rocked, and then driven to stillness crouched in a knot, surprised at her dry voice. Her eyes felt as if they must work, must see everything; not seeing anything, she was reduced to their corner in her flesh.

  Unexpectedly she saw. What she saw was the fisherman’s peaceful face, asleep. She had started up at the shelter scene, but now she lay down again and turned her face into the shelter of her hands, lined, as it were, with chilly, green grass. She found she could array her thoughts if she couldn’t release them.

  When you were out of doors your body became the touch, the texture of the world, with all its fluid airs, plants, waters, wind. The wind’s flesh crept against yours, and the grass clothed the prone body with its feeling of openness and closeness.

  She saw the river meadows, the little red bays in the bank where the turf had slipped into deep pools, and bendings where the river bent, the narrow green path rubbed into the grass. Across it lay a fishing rod. Sitting precariously on one of the jutting turfs which was dead and brown fibre, was a man, feet braced against a lolling alder limb. It was March; he wore a belted raincoat, but he had thrown a scarf into the tree. She was walking towards him: as she came closer he turned his face and looked quietly at her. And then suddenly, but not as if it were suddenly, they were speaking to each other. This happened quite often until six weeks ago, but as an image she retained none except the first meeting. She knew that of all the faces she had met, there was none at all like this one. It was secret, if candour can be secrecy; it could have been knowing, but she had never seen it when it was. Very dark shining eyes, oval, olive cheeks and chin, a smooth skin. They couldn’t resemble each other physically but she felt as though each of them sent the same lights and shadows up to the surface. She walked on guessing, ‘I can look like that.’ For a few weeks every time she walked that way she met him, and then one day, not. She didn’t see him again until she looked at him in the weedy rooms of the ruins. But she was sure they had understood something instantly, perfectly, and for ever. They were friends. And in their perfect familiarity with each other there was incalculable individual solitude.

  She smiled into her hands. And this time it didn’t feel as if she were roaring with laughter in the middle of everybody’s despair. It felt as if she were talking to the fisherman about the curlews and watching the male bird go round and round the sky, calling and searching. The fisherman always made her think of the bird, the hills and the river, and not of himself: he recalled to her a beam of the true meaning of freedom and fulfilment: with him or thinking of him she became again the real Emily who used to swim across the river in the early mornings, who was free, whose being absorbed and radiated the harmony of the countryside in which she was growing. Perhaps it was talking to him which had made her ponder so much on her childhood this terrible spring.

  Sleep was like tears in her open eyes, sharp yet tender. She was getting there. Her mind swayed and she no longer knew herself as separate and conscious. The room was the linen room at Aunt Fran’s where she had slept, with the dark brown cupboard at the foot of the stairs and the dull leaded window, like a pattern of muslin in grey and black with another pattern of twigs shadowed through it. She remembered how coarse seemed the texture of the sky seen though the thick glass… She was looking up at the candle Aunt Fran was holding, floating in its haze, blinking… And then the room was gone and she was sitting on the garden seat watching her aunt’s fingers as she split filberts open with a silver penknife. They were sitting under the Wellingtonian and the air was full of the scent of resin. Aunt Fran was saying:

  ‘Your uncle and I are very fond of you. You have always been good with us.’

  It was evening. Children were shouting; a vast splash of light over the west meadows dazzled through the trees. She put out her hand to lift the basket from the grass when suddenly she was awake and knew there had been an eruption of sound which she hadn’t heard. It was like a silent explosion which shattered the perfect sphere of rest in which she was lying, and it was the siren.

  The mother woke up convinced that she was young again. Her husband was alive: he was with her in the dream; she was married to him but they were being introduced. She woke, talking; part of her speech still seemed to be joined to her, but part had vanished.

  ‘The wind was so lonely last night with the window bare that I went to bed early. It seemed so long since I had been playing the piano and talking…’

  Then she heard herself say: ‘Beethoven.’

  She lifted her head: ‘Where’s the cot? Where’s Jamie, my little Jamie? Annie! Where are the children?’ She struck a match. She was awake now: ‘Emily, Emily…’

  She could just see the empty corner where the washstand had been.

  Emily came in: ‘I don’t hear anything, do you? It must be Bristol again. Or Gloucester.’ She was smoking and seemed tenuous with sleep, her body clinging to the support of the wall.

  But as she came wavering round the big double bed, the mother moved to put her feet down, and seeing that unhappy blue and white flesh hovering to reach the floor, a pity and an anger which she could never have mentioned caused her heart to make something like a gesture in her body.

  ‘Don’t get up, Mother,’ she begged: ‘It can’t be anything else.’

  ‘I hope they don’t bomb the bridge,’ began her mother. The bridge was very close, carrying the line across the street where they lived. Like a great many of the older women in this small town, Emily’s mother instinctively regarded it as an exceedingly likely target – as indeed it might have been had the raiders ever discovered the whereabouts of the great filling factory at Chepsford. The groan and slow thunder of the ammunition trains was a part of their nights. ‘Lethal,’ the mother would murmur, and the walls would tremble, like the pillars of the market house when the tanks and dismembered planes came swerving down the narrow streets.

  They listened, their chins lifted, their necks stretched. Was that a plane?

  ‘Bombs!’

  They looked at
each other in incredulous silence. And there fell through the sky two percussions locked in each other’s vibrations. Clash, clash – like cymbals, like lightning with music. Emily had never heard two sounds so simultaneous yet so separate. It was most beautiful, distinct, entrancing, the way the skies played for that moment.

  No thud came. No blow. The quicksilver fled all over their bodies: in the silence they stared and heard the mice ripping at the lining of the old house, rustling and searching through the crowded pockets of its deep cupboards.

  ‘Put out the light!’ said the mother.

  About ten minutes passed in darkness. Some soot fell down the chimney and they heard it showering in the fender. A bird squeaked. The hush was the suspense of thousands listening, an underground, underdark thing, conscious and of the earth.

  ‘I’m going to look out of the window,’ said Emily. She saw fire on Hangbury Hill, red fire, crawling into the woods. She gazed and remembered how the birds and rabbits and snakes screamed when the heath was burned.

  There were three bombs, they heard the next day. The man who is always present, no matter how outlandish the fact or the hour, described how he had seen them burst in the woods. He said the trees had writhed, there had been a kind of ashen light and the furrow in which he was standing had wriggled like a snake. He told the tale in the market square, outside the station, and in seven pubs.

  Some of the strangers laughed.

  ‘Well, damn!’ they said. ‘Fancy bombs here! Well what next, I say?’

  But some of the rich ones were packing already, having heard of the neighbouring factories.

  To Emily the event of the bombs crowded into an already crowded day. She wouldn’t think about them. The weather was clear, but there was something stifling in the air, something sated and flaccid. Through the warm swishing streets the scent of meadows and chestnuts in bloom drifted with the smell of the fire-blighted broom and gorse now scattering in slow smoke. She was busy: a great many patients were admitted, but there was nothing dramatic in this day’s work: and as she sat eating her lunch in Mr Jones’ conservatory, where somebody had left the hose dribbling among the legs of half a dozen wormy kitchen chairs, her mind returned again and again to that one generous year of childhood with her aunt. There was something then on or behind those smoking hills for her. One by one her passions were being lost, but this – this spirit of place, this identification of self with unregarded loveliness and joy – seemed, after a dormant cycle, to be becoming her life.