Bellman

by Diane Setterfield

  William flicked the earth into the grave and walked quickly away.

  That was that. He had buried his wife. He had buried three of his children. His task now was to go home and help his fourth and last child to die.

  “She knows no one now,” Mrs. Lane told him at the door to the sickroom.

  Nothing could now surprise him at the deathbed. All was as it had been before. He spoke to his child and observed that she appeared not to know him. Mrs. Lane pressed a cool cloth to Dora’s forehead from time to time; she no longer murmured the endearments that the girl could not hear. The minutes stretched out, and he measured the empty length of every long second that filed past him. Mrs. Lane prayed. He murmured Amen.

  Neither of them suffered the hope that had burdened them the first times. There was still the habit of protest inside him, though it was much weakened. The remnant of the father he had once been still raged at the taking of his child, but he felt it as an empty mansion feels the anger of a fly against a window. Death had him in harness. He lumbered in his servitude.

  As for Dora, it was quite normal that Bellman did not recognize the figure in the bed. Hair shorn, pale skin stretched tightly over the sharp bridge of her nose, sunken eyes: this child in the bed seemed quite unrelated to his curly-haired and pink-cheeked girl of a fortnight ago. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her breathing was hoarse and painful. Already she more than half-belonged to another realm.

  Bellman was prepared. Each stage of this illness he recognized; each moment told him what the next would be. Minute by minute, hour after hour, he had stood like this, feet planted on the limewashed floors, watching his children die. He knew the process so well he could foresee each step of the descent. And now a great gasp, he predicted, and the moribund gave a great gasp. And now the start of the great convulsions, and the convulsions came. Death had him so well trained that he could have overseen the work in her place. He was himself a kind of conductor, knowing all the movements, all the rhythms, the arpeggios and the cadences of its melody.

  Now, he assessed Dora and realized that the end was still a long way off. Ten hours. Twelve more likely.

  “Why don’t you get some sleep?” Mrs. Lane suggested. “You look done in.”

  He left the sickroom and went to his own bedroom. Rose’s dress was at the end of the bed, where she had left it after taking it off to die. It was made of sturdy stuff that held a bosomy shape even when she was not in it. When he reached for it, the fabric collapsed and Rose’s bosom exhaled its last breath. He turned his back. He could not sleep here. He could not sleep at all.

  He went to the Red Lion.

  ***

  Poll greeted him and poured a jug of cider without a reference to either the old days or the new one. He sat quietly and drank one glass after another. He drank methodically, expecting nothing from it. The cider obscured the sharper details of his grief, without denting the fearfulness of its bleakness.

  At a certain point of drunkenness William understood a good many things that had evaded him previously. The world, the universe, God too, if there was one, were ranged against mankind. From this newly unveiled vantage point he saw that his old good fortune was a cruel joke: encourage a man to think he is lucky all the better to bring him down afterward. He realized his essential smallness, the vanity of his efforts to control his fate. He, William Bellman, master of the mill, was nothing. All these years he had believed in his own power, not once recognizing the presence of the vast rival who could crush him in a day, if it once chose to. His happiness and his success, which he had taken to be solid things, hewn out of his own effort and talent, had proved as fragile as a dandelion clock; all it took was for this unsuspected competitor to release his breath and the seedhead disappeared. Why, he wondered, had he never known? He, who knew everything? What had kept him in ignorance all these years?

  He drank. The clarity of his thinking on this new topic was dazzling to him, but his head dropped lower and lower until it rested on his arms on the table and eventually he snored.

  Poll shook him awake. She heaved him to his feet and got him to the door. “Home, William Bellman. It is not a good place but it is the only place. Go there.”

  Outside it was dark. He did not know whether it was cold, because the alcohol had isolated his body and filled it with an artificial trembling warmth. Stumbling in the dark he went. He did not know where he was going but put one foot in front of the other, because if he stayed still his agony would settle all the more heavily on him. All his adult life he had lived with a purpose. His every minute had been actively spent with some object in mind. Now he sought to know what his purpose was. There was nothing for him to do at home. All that could be done was being done. He was superfluous there. He was not wanted at the mill. His tragic presence cast a shadow over the hands. They feared him, because they feared what had happened to his family. Where then?

  There was a part of Bellman’s mind that functioned automatically to solve problems. Whether it was habit, self-training, or just a characteristic he had been born with, he couldn’t say. It functioned so efficiently that he never needed to set it into action, for it was up and running the moment he wanted it. In fact, it was so fast that it often provided solutions before he’d even realized he had a problem. It ran like clockwork, ticking routinely in the back of his mind, while the front dealt with the immediate, the superficial, the mundane. This evening he observed that this engine in his mind was running through a number of options for dealing with a powerful rival.

  Option one: agree terms. So much for you and so much for me, and we all get what we want . . . He’d tried that, and it hadn’t worked. Option two: sell. But this is Dora. So even if this rival seemed willing to buy—and so far he had only destroyed and stolen—Bellman could not sell. No sale then. Option three: hide. Keep a low profile, stay small, and hope the rival finds you too insignificant to worry about. Too late. He was already in the rival’s sights. What does that leave? Option four: collaborate. But how on earth could that come about? It was impossible. Back to option one. Agree terms. But he’d tried that . . .

  The mind machine worked on and on. Its proposals grew more and more desperate: he would sabotage the fellow’s machinery! Slash prices to force him out of business! He would hire thugs to set fire to his premises, steal his best men, spread malicious rumors about his shoddy goods! Ludicrous notions, given the rival in question. The wilder his ideas grew, the stranger he grew to himself. He had never known he was capable of such devious and desperate measures. He was not the man he thought he was. He was too fatigued to stop the mechanism in his head, and in any case, he didn’t know how to switch it off. He’d never needed to.

  How could he live, with this in his head—this ceaseless effort to solve the unsolvable?

  Agree terms, sell, hide, collaborate.

  It would drive him mad. It was already driving him mad.

  Why would his brain not learn that nothing could be done and he had lost?

  And now, suddenly, he was here. Close to the old cottage where he had grown up. The fields were dark, but the cottage was a visible rectangle of darkness and the old oak reached its branches blackly across the sky. He began to make his way toward it.

  Here was a new project: how to switch off his mind?

  He came to the tree and stood beneath it. This was the right place to be. He felt it. His brain was clear and working smoothly.

  This branch here was strong enough and the right height. He could climb up on the other side, make his way onto it, sit there to make ready and when all was done, let himself fall, plumb, to the end. He eyed it all up, ran through it in his mind to see where the flaws in the plan were, made some minor alterations . . . Perfect!

  All he needed was some rope—and he knew where to get it! The coffins were lowered into the graves on ropes, and because there were so many funerals at present—two or three every day—the ropes were not p
ut away but left on a hook halfway down the steps to the vault. He’d seen them. There was no risk of theft. No thief wants a rope that has been lowering bodies into graves.

  Bellman set off to the churchyard. An achievable goal! He was feeling better already.

  Lit by a sliver of moon, the sky was less than black, and the yews of the churchyard were dark against it. He walked slowly, stumbling where he veered off the path onto the uneven grass. He found the rope, and on his way back to the churchyard gate, Rose’s new grave came into view.

  His pace slowed and then he stopped.

  He was not alone. A little way off the man in black was leaning against an old gravestone. He was doing nothing, only gazing patiently at the tree line, dark against the sky.

  If there had been a breeze, it fell still now. The air did not move but hung still.

  The man gave the impression that he had been waiting a long time, yet he was not in a hurry. He appeared to have all the time in the world.

  Turning to William, there was a kindly curiosity in his gaze.

  “I’m sorry about this afternoon,” he said and his voice was ordinary and benign. “I could have handled things better, I admit.”

  “Who the hell are you?” said William.

  “A friend.” And he eyed William beadily, to see how this went down with him.

  “A friend? We’ve not been introduced.”

  The man in black put his head on one side and considered. “True. And yet my intentions are friendly. I thought we might have a talk.”

  William shifted the rope on his shoulder and made to move on.

  “Might you feel better for a talk?” the man suggested.

  “So that’s how it goes! I stay for a chat with you now and in the morning my body is discovered here in this graveyard? Is that it?”

  The stranger’s eye lingered for a moment on the rope that William was carrying. Then his gaze, gentle and ironic, moved to William.

  He knows, William thought.

  But the man in black made a gesture as though to brush that idea right away.

  “No, no, no. I can see you’ve got me all wrong. I’ve come to help you—or rather to ask you to help me. It amounts to the same thing. Why don’t you put that down”—he nodded at the rope—“and take a seat.”

  Wearily William dropped the rope and slumped on a tombstone on the far side of Rose’s grave from the man in black.

  “Look at this, Mr. Bellman.” The man raised a cloaked arm and swept it to take in the entire graveyard. “Tell me what you see.”

  “What I see?”

  Before them were graves. The older ones had their statues and their tombstones, their angels and their crosses and their urns. The newer ones had bare earth still. Flowers gleamed white on Rose’s grave. New graves waited empty, ready for tomorrow and the next day. One would be Dora’s.

  Anger fired up in William, through the drink. “What do I see? I’ll tell you what I see! I see my wife. I see three of my children. I see them dead. I see that grave there, cold and empty, waiting for my last child, who is dying now. I see misery and suffering and despair. I see the futility of everything I have ever done and everything I may ever do! I see every reason to do away with myself right here and now, and be finished with it! Forever!”

  William collapsed onto the tomb. He shrank into a ball and pulled at his hair, face contorting so powerfully it was as if his skin wanted to come away from the bone . He waited for the pain to submerge him, to sweep him away and deposit him in some other place, but it did not happen. The agony remained, unaltering, unending, unendurable, and here. He craved escape, but the only thing that could escape was the cry from his lips, an expulsion of feeling, a howl, a bellow. It set up a welcome vibration in his head.

  The ringing in his head died down. Perhaps the man was gone by now. Perhaps he had never been there in the first place? Could he go and do the thing he intended to do? Bellman raised his eyes.

  Still there. Standing, hands clasped behind his back, chest out, unperturbable.

  He glanced down at William. “Good! Good!” he said, encouragingly.

  William scowled. Was he talking to a madman?

  “Well. It’s early days.” He unclasped his hands, thought better of it and clasped them again. “I see things differently, you know.”

  “I suppose you would.” William’s voice was weakened from the bellowing.

  “Yes. What I see here, in front of me”—he took a deep breath, as though drawing on a particularly expensive and exotic cigar, and exhaled it with relish—“is an opportunity.”

  William stared. The fellow was unhinged. Then something rang a bell in his mind.

  What was it?

  Agree terms, sell, hide, collaborate.

  Collaborate.

  He thought of Dora.

  He nodded once. “You’ve got a deal.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chill morning air entered his nostrils. A pause. Warmer air, stalely scented with liquor emerged from his mouth.

  Was he awake? This was like waking. He had been asleep, then.

  With the slowness of Lazarus he gathered his senses to him. His head ached. His chest felt bruised, as if his lungs had been in a battle all night. He was lying in a cold, hard place and something damp and coarse was scratching his cheek. He opened an eye. Ah! He was in the churchyard. A tombstone for a bed and a pillow of rope. A new grave was nearby. Rose’s grave.

  He closed the eye to think. It had been his wife’s funeral. He had gone to the Red Lion. Drunk too much. And then . . . The feathered end of something stroked his consciousness . . .

  . . . and was gone again.

  Then a very clear and urgent thought barged into his mind.

  Dora!

  With clumsy urgency, he swung himself up, got to his feet.

  He must go home.

  Without a glance at the coil of rope behind him, he set off, his mind full of his child and the things that must be done to safeguard her life. For she would live. He was persuaded of that now. She would live! And—though he did not think of this—so would he.

  ***

  When Bellman entered the sickroom, Mrs. Lane did not comment on the rope furrows impressed in his cheek, nor the smell of drink and the grave upon him but only opened the door and ushered him in. All could be forgiven a man in his circumstances.

  It appeared to be the final movement: Dora was gripped by the great convulsions. This time Bellman did not flinch nor clutch at his hair. His eyes did not roam the room in desperate search of salvation. He stood by, face unchanged, still as a tombstone.

  The quiet period of ever-shallower breathing began. Mrs. Lane folded the girl’s hands over her breast and knelt by the bed, where she began to whisper the Lord’s Prayer.

  Bellman spoke it with her. His voice was steady and unwavering.

  When they had finished the prayer, flickers of life danced about her lips, unextinguished. Mildly perturbed, Mrs. Lane began the prayer again. “Our Father . . . “

  At Amen the girl was breathing still.

  A faint embarrassment took hold of Mrs. Lane. She glanced uncertainly at Bellman, was struck by the calm of his expression.

  “Does it seem to you, Mr. Bellman, that her breathing is freer?” she asked.

  “It does.”

  They leaned over the girl, peering into the white face. Mrs. Lane lifted an eyelid with her gentle thumb then took the girl’s hands, uncrossed them, and began to warm them in her own. “Lord in thy mercy,” she began and, ambushed by her own astonishment, got no further.

  Dora’s breathing remained shallow but grew more regular. Degree by degree her hands thawed. Her pallor diminished fractionally. Mrs. Lane shifted her ministrations away from the girl’s soul and back to the body. An hour or so after the crisis, Dora seemed to stir. She did not wake
but resettled into something that appeared more like sleep than coma.

  Bellman did not move. He appeared neither to see nor to hear Mrs. Lane. He stared fixedly at his daughter, yet it was not certain that he saw her either.

  After Sanderson had called and shaken his head in astonishment at the miracle, Bellman at last allowed himself to rest. He tossed Rose’s dress to the floor, lay down fully dressed, and sank instantly into a deep slumber.

  ***

  Last night. A handshake—or as good as—over a grave, in the dark, with a man he could hardly see. Today. His daughter returned from the dead.

  Into his sleep there crept not the faintest chink of light to illuminate the unmaking and the remaking of the mind of William Bellman.

  Something had ended. Something was about to begin.

  Part II

  SOCRATES: Let us suppose that every mind contains

  a kind of aviary stocked with birds of every sort,

  some in flocks apart from the rest, some in small groups

  and some solitary, flying in any direction among them all.

  THEAETETUS: Be it so. What follows?

  —Plato, from Theaetetus

  Chapter One

  At five to eleven, Bellman entered his daughter’s room and Mrs. Lane stood ready to leave it.

  “The gong?” she asked.

  “As you like.”

  Downstairs she went to her daughter, Mary, in the kitchen.

  “What is it to be today, Mother?”

  “Whatever we choose.”

  “Can we not let off the pistol out the kitchen window?”

  Her mother frowned. “Mary, this is not for your entertainment. What have we done lately? Pans yesterday and the gong on Tuesday. What did we do on Monday?”

  “The piano?”

  “He can’t expect us always to think of new things. I’d throw the dessert plates down the stairs, if it would do any good but—Good heavens, it’s time!”