Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  She sat breathing the green, double-hot air of the geranium-trellised conservatory, eating sandwiches and seeing Aunt Fran. Sometimes she was in her greenhouse, stretching her nose over the plants, with the perfume of the vine in all her movements, but most vividly she saw her at her bedroom window on a summer evening about seven o’clock. Emily saw her smiling and waving across the buttercup-yellow fields to the distant shallows where the naked town boys were splashing like stars in the burning silver water. ‘Look, look – I suppose we can call it summer now,’ the aunt would laugh. And it was: such summer as it had never been since. There she would sit, and call Emily to her to come and have her hair curled before going to bed. She held the brush on her lap, and the fingers of her right hand she dipped into a mug of tepid water before twisting each strand of hair into the rags. Emily could feel the slight, drowsy tug at her scalp, and the selected lock sliding through Aunt Fran’s first and second fingers. The book she was reading aloud lay open on the dressing table among the silver things and the old yellow combs – The Story of a Red Deer…

  ‘There! Goodnight. And when you’re in bed sing me a song.’

  ‘What shall I sing?’

  ‘Well – ‘John Peel’ – or – ‘The Keel Row’.’

  Her voice seemed to stir in her as she remembered, and she heard the air coming from herself as she crouched in the bed.

  As I came through Sandgate, through Sandgate, through Sandgate,

  As I came through Sandgate, I heard a lassie sing…

  The silent voice in her was physical now – she could hear it, feel it rising… she never sang at The Friends’ House; she liked to sing out of doors. She saw the leaves in the walnut tree, the wall where Esau, the red cat, sat in the dusk, she heard the owl, and felt the grain of the light fading in the room.

  I heard a lassie sing.

  Why did it all seem beautiful then? It couldn’t have been, not everything. But no Emily nowadays would climb an oak tree to see if sitting in it would make her sing like a blackbird, nor listen to the notes with such an unaffected thrilling expectancy.

  When her work was over she went straight home. A little girl in a red check pinafore, whose two hands had swallowed the door knob, was jigging on the doorstep, and peeping through the keyhole. Her laughter and that of another child inside was pealing out into the street. When she saw Emily she peeped up sideways under her arm.

  ‘Hullo, Aunt Em’ly.’

  ‘Hello, Ann.’

  ‘What d’you think I’m doing?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’m looking at Diddle. And Diddle’s looking at me. I can see her eye. I said I’m going to look in at the keyhole. Because I’m not often out in the street. Hullo, Diddle,’ she bawled, ‘I’m here, are you there?’

  ‘Hullo, Ann, I’m he-ere,’ cackled a smaller voice, with bursts of chuckling. Suddenly Ann lost interest. She gave Emily a long stare that was cool, peculiar and consciously measured. And Emily felt shy of the child’s sudden gaze and stooped to pick a red hair ribbon off the pavement. Ann triumphed, and yet was reassured. She broke up again into a small skipping, smiling creature.

  ‘We’ve all run away from ole Hitler,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Mummy’s here, and Diddle and Jamie. Did you know?’

  She twirled the door knob faster, and the catch inside went clack-clack.

  ‘I knew you were coming,’ said Emily.

  ‘Jamie wasn’t frightened. Diddle was. Wasn’t you, Diddle, eh?’

  ‘Ye-e-s,’ chuckled the child inside.

  ‘Diddle cried. Jamie didn’t. I’m going to open the door. I want to tell you something.’

  They went into the cool stone shadowed passage which was heaped with luggage and a pram. Diddle, a very short fat little thing, was squatting on the mat.

  ‘Don’t touch!’ cried Ann anxiously: ‘This is the-wipe-your-feet mat, Aunt Em’ly. I put something under it. I didn’t want to drop it. It’s a penny. Here it is. Heads or tails?’

  ‘Tails,’ screamed Diddle.

  ‘Not you – Aunt Em’ly,’ said Ann with jovial authority.

  ‘Ann!’ a voice called.

  ‘She’s here, playing pitch and toss,’ shouted Emily.

  ‘Toss you for tuppence, Ann, PQ’

  ‘I’ve won, I’ve won. I always know. That’s what I wanted to tell you. This is tails,’ said Ann mysteriously.

  ‘Tails,’ said Diddle.

  ‘You look.’

  ‘Ye-e-es.’

  ‘You mustn’t look!’

  ‘I muttoned look…’

  Annie appeared, slanting out of a doorway, lunging into an apron.

  ‘Ann, for God’s sake—’ her voice was dry with fatigue. ‘Will you come and drink your milk?’ she muttered, seizing each bland child. She was thinner even than Emily, her terse red dress tossed over the wind of her limbs. She held Emily’s eyes for a moment, in her own an unconscious hardness and contempt for all things irrelevant to pure animal life – a look which was the mother’s at times. Yet far back, there was a friendliness: ‘Hullo, sister, when there’s a moment I shall see you…’

  ‘See you. See you. See you. No, you won’t. I don’t live in your eyes,’ said Emily to herself. She stepped out into the tiny stone yard; it seemed dull there – something was missing. Oh yes, the lid of the well was down and a great stone on it. The dark, ivy-green water was buried and all its flight of reflections.

  ‘Emily,’ said her mother, draining the potatoes over the grating so that the steam climbed the wall like a plant – ‘Emily, fetch me that cloth, dear. I’m sorry there aren’t any greens. I hadn’t time to… thank you. Perhaps before you go you’d get us some nettle tops. Poor Annie has more than she can do.’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  She could hear the canaries cracking their seeds with a tiny insect-like pop. It was so hot that the stones were tepid in the shade. The pods of broom and gorse burst in the sun with that wee minute crack, with only the linnet to make the stillness alive. Emily remembered, as if she saw the burnt grass and the sky above, the clicking and whirring world of heat. Upstairs the children being put to bed dropped a geranium leaf on her head and laughed in the bow window. She looked at her mother’s amethyst beads and thought of the river. Under the drops and the silver, her mother’s neck was patched with a scattered flush. Her love for her own children was all anxiety, only what she felt for her grandchildren was physical and enjoyable. She sat at the table straining not to interfere, not to run upstairs with kisses when Jamie cried, not to be upset by Annie’s retorting voice. Annie, however, said less and less, and towards the end of the meal abruptly drew her chair back into the window and there sitting bowed with her strangely gnarled nervous hands binding her knees, cried wearily. Suddenly she seemed younger than Emily, younger even than her own children. And her attractive matronly little face which owed some of its beauty to work, but nothing to her everyday mind, became a rarer face – the real face. Seeing her crying, her breath jerking, terrified and childish, they knelt by her and tried to smooth the movements of her frightened body with their touches.

  ‘He’ll be killed. Oh Mother, Mother.’

  ‘No, he won’t, dear. No, he won’t. Please… there,’ pleaded the mother.

  ‘Yes…’ Annie cried; her tone struck them and they looked at her in silence. In the sunshine her shining tears crusted her: she smeared them from her eyes with her queer powerful fingers whose tips were like drops of coldness: ‘Yes. I can’t live, I can’t live. I don’t know anybody here. I want Tom. I want Tom.’

  ‘Annie, darling, you’ve got the children!’

  The temper of hysteria, which is so like mad fury, shook her. She stood up, crying out as she flew through the door: ‘To hell with the children! I shall send them all to school and go back to Tom.’

  The mother sat down, sighing. A slight breeze came blowing down from the garden and the vine leaves bent as though stroked by the dress of someone coming walking along the path. With that movement came
the phase of evening, its entire separation from the day.

  ‘What we shall do with her – what we shall we do – if Tom – if anything should happen to Tom. She told me before you came in – when she was quite quiet, you know – she told me he says she must be responsible for the children. She said, he said they must have one…’

  ‘Yes,’ said Emily drearily.

  And now the seven o’clock train was in, two hours late, standing in the station releasing puffs of steam, and the light was beginning to bank against the trees and the yellow meadows. With a basket Emily was moving slowly along the coal dust path against a grey hedge of nettles, nipping off their tops with her gloved fingers.

  Through the palings she saw the hurrying flickers of people with suitcases, bicycles, push chairs and children – all scuttering, like the pictures on the sticks of a fan which is shaken out and flicked back. The sound of their feet threaded past the new factory site where the hammering had ceased – the sound of their thin words, the tune of a stick being tapped out, towards the town, and three taxis shooting down the road. The greasy dark engine slid away: then came the pure smell of evening, the scent of sky and grazed fields, water and shadows.

  She turned and put her basket down. She looked at two chestnut trees in flower, broad green and tapering blossoms balancing, that grew in a piece of willowy waste. The sunlight on them seemed part of themselves, and the flowers looked as if each one had been placed by a hand among the splayed leaves.

  The birds sang. Their notes were always like echoes; as though one never heard the voice but only its reflection. The calls were the length of dark woods… as they sang, thought Emily, in the rain outside the rooms one loved, where the fire was one slow old log charred like an owl’s breast.

  ‘I’d love to sit at a window and sew and look out at trees like that. For hours and hours and hours of quiet…’

  In that minute she realised that she had achieved the complete vision of her desire and her indifference. Her desire was peace and freedom – the wildness of peace, the speed and voicelessness of it. Her indifference was her duty, which she would do. Try to do. The spirit of life would be laid by for years of spiritual unemployment, that was a part of war. She glanced at the trees, their leaves drooping now in the sinking light. She would take with her their stillness: as she left them she said goodbye.

  ‘If you neglect yourself you must automatically belong to something else. The State. There’s nothing else to claim you…’

  Some quiet long task at a window looking out on chestnut trees in bloom. Sewing, writing poetry, or just growing older. Aunt Fran shelling peas, gathering raspberries. That kind of order, order not for its own sake, but for the wilder, more ecstatic rhythm which it imitated. Life’s natural conformity to life, not to this warped form of death.

  War has no seasonableness. No light or darkness, no true time but lies, lies, lies, to make the hands go faster.

  She began to hurry, thinking of the clock.

  Walking along the river to Aunt Fran’s that night Emily met the fisherman. He came up the bank through the willows chewing a grass. She started when she saw him: she had been staring at the sky, all clear light, a sky which she seemed to have seen before but not on earth. As she stood wondering and unconscious, a dream of the night before came back to her with a feeling of distance and quietude. She remembered a kite bursting in space and two giant figures stepping down arm in arm and walking away, never turning round…

  The fisherman wished her good evening. For the first time they shook hands. He asked her where she was going; when she told him, he said that if she liked to walk back with him to the boathouse he would row her up the river.

  ‘It would save you going all round by the bridge,’ he said. ‘Would you like to? I’ve got the keys.’

  Emily said she would love it, it was years since she had been on the water. So they turned and strolled along the bank. It was quiet and cool: they could smell the meadows up for hay and see the moonlight forming round the moon on the pale horizon.

  ‘The moon looks as if it were made of thistledown,’ said Emily.

  He looked at her quickly, and away at the water again.

  ‘Are you fond of the country?’

  ‘Sometimes I think I’m fond of nothing else.’

  They talked but seemed to give their minds to the river and the twilight. He went before her, holding back the bloom-laden sprays of hawthorn round which little moths were spinning their balls of flight: her legs were damp: in her flesh she felt the familiar chill of the fields at dusk and the clear wakefulness which often precedes sudden and deep sleep.

  She was patient now, and at peace… she saw his olive hand with the greenish tan on it, holding back the branches, and she wondered how it came to be that they should know each other so completely and yet so subtly ignore each other.

  He walked slowly, his feet making a frail noise in the grass. Over the flowerlit meadows on the other side a shell of mist was closing. There was an exquisite clear coolness and spaciousness. Water under a root fluted like some stationary bird.

  ‘I work at the factory,’ he said. ‘That’s why I haven’t seen you for a long time. I’m a chargehand now.’

  ‘I saw you yesterday,’ she said, ‘in Saint’s Cottages. You were asleep, though.’

  ‘Yes.’ His voice was expressionless. ‘I don’t like little rooms in the summer. My shift’s changed now. I shall be on days tomorrow.’

  She went with him dreamily, her mind full of vague emotion and one sharp thought, that she would never forget this, because somehow she also knew that they would never meet again.

  The river was bent like a scythe, and on it a single swan sailed opposite the boathouse. Its whiteness was sharp, distinct, and its being seemed to cease at the water line, it made so little restlessness of swimming.

  Inside the boathouse was a huge hollow rolling noise and a wooden banging. That too was familiar: clubmen used it as a skittle alley. While the fisherman went in Emily stood looking down at the deep ditch under the hawthorns where the water was concealed by the white floating petals. The smell of the bloom was like forgetfulness. She held a branch to her face, and when she released it it flew up into the tree with a battering sound like a concealed wood pigeon’s wild shudder into flight. She sighed a deep sigh to give her heart room. The fisherman came out with a pair of sculls. They stepped down to the landing. A moorhen whirred the water.

  ‘Get in,’ he said.

  She walked steadily down the boat. She had a feeling as if her feet were breathing. Weeds wavered under the surface, darkness rose and clung. There was a sense of mist rather than dusk broken around them. The boat rocked and then poised itself into narrow balance. The river under it was taut and vibrant as a gut under a fiddler’s finger…

  The fisherman pushed out, then all in one movement he sat down and opened the wide embrace of the oars. They glided to the middle and then upstream. They had only a short way to go, the river making less than a quarter of the way that the fields roamed.

  Pausing a moment, drawing his fists towards his chest and bunching them there, he looked at her smiling and asked: ‘Can you row?’

  ‘No,’ she said; ‘what does it feel like?’

  ‘Grand.’

  He added: ‘I like to feel the oars bringing the tremble of the water up to my hands. They almost throb, you know, here and here. It’s such a strong feeling, though – powerful—’

  ‘Like electricity,’ she said.

  ‘Ye-e-es. A sort of connection with something one doesn’t know. You think a lot, don’t you?’ he suddenly asked, fixing his eyes on her.

  ‘No,’ she said sadly.

  ‘Well, you look as if you do. But perhaps you call it something else.’

  She dipped her hand, sank and floated it, watched its inner fingertips of round green pearls sliding mistily along under the surface. Dandelion seeds were drowning; all the stillness of the grey elf world was flowing and they were silent for a while, the ba
nks piled on either side of this quiet corridor of water darkening its edges.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ she sighed in her thoughts.

  ‘I often row up and down here all night,’ said the fisherman: ‘all night,’ he repeated to himself.

  ‘Do you?’

  He stooped again as if he were lifting the river on his back, and strokes sent them jetting upward.

  ‘Yes. I love the river. To me there’s nothing like it.’

  She imagined him at the factory all day and then out here, all night alone, never asleep, never losing sight of himself: ‘But don’t you ever sleep then? Aren’t you tired the next day?’

  ‘No, I don’t feel tired. You see I can’t live my life among a lot of people all the time, and then just sleep.’

  She said nothing for a moment, laying her wet hand on her forehead. Then she asked, puzzled:

  ‘How long are the shifts then?’

  ‘Eleven hours.’

  He smiled at her. Emily tried to smile back, but her mouth felt as if it had been trodden on. There was an extraordinary solitude upon his face like that of a man who is standing away, right away beyond the last shelter, watching the lightning.

  ‘My mother was a Frenchwoman,’ he told her abruptly: ‘but she wasn’t a bit the sort of person you’d think. Not thrifty or tidy or anything Frenchwomen are supposed to be. I never knew what it was to have a solid pocket or a weathertight button on me… I used to wander about the fields. I’ve got the habits of a tramp now… oh, not the visible ones, I hope – no – but I can’t stand houses simply because it seems you can never be alone in them. However—’