You should go out, she said when finally he came downstairs. It’s lovely out there.
The light glowed over the yellow tablecloth. She was cooking breakfast. She had put out a jug of coffee already.
I saw you.
I saw you too, at the window. I waved. I thought you might come and join me.
So was it for him that she had held out her arms? She had seemed too far off.
You looked strange standing there, she said. Like a ghost.
She laughed. She was elated, cleansed of the night by the snow.
Whose ghost? he said. And she said, I don’t know, darling, just a ghost, any ghost.
When breakfast was over they went out together, with Jess, out from the back door this time and through the yard, and walked the farm. Perhaps it does not matter so much to the land, he thought, what men do on it. It is only to men that it matters. The land will always be there. Tear at the surface, blast it with craters, and soon enough, it covers over. These fields of his have become white in a night. The plough wasn’t smooth, not quite. Clods of soil broke through on the ridges and the deep snow of the furrows was purpled with shadow. But the rest of the land was smooth. The distance seemed smooth and flat and unmarked right to the horizon.
There was that early cold spell, and then a time of mildness, and then cold again. The first winter they spent on the farm would be the coldest in memory. At least Charlie had those difficult fields done, the headlands finished off late in December when the land was crisp with frost. Billy said they were well on. If Billy said that then it was probably true. Billy knew this farm better than anyone. Got those fields down at least, though we’ll have our work cut out when this freeze is over. Mind you, back when I started, with the horses ’n all, it all took a good while longer. Oh really, she said, learning things that she hadn’t thought needed knowing. And how many horses did you use? And how long did it take? It didn’t take much to set Billy talking. Billy’s talk ran back so far. Fifty years’ work on this one patch of land, more if you counted the days he had come out as a boy picking stones. Billy belonged. When she had Billy there, she too had a sense of belonging, or knew at least what belonging meant.
Hard weather, but there’s something in it. A good freeze’ll kill off the pests. Forecasters say we’re in for a big one. P’raps we’re needing it, after what’s gone on, the war I mean, all that’s gone on.
At the end of January, when they had just thought they might be through, came the worst blizzards, and on into February and March. For those months she looked out onto a flat world almost without colour. From the kitchen, a view of a frozen yard, glassy with ice and then deep in snow, a path cleared across the cobbles, dirtied heaps up against the walls; and from the long windows at the front of the house, drifts now across the fields, a whiteness that ran to a sky which was close to white in itself.
She liked having Billy in because he broke the silence. It was so quiet, otherwise. The snow seemed to muffle even the radio waves, the voices on the wireless crackling and fading as she went across to turn the volume up.
Sometimes he brought in a piece of game, a couple of pigeons or a rabbit or a partridge. He taught her how to deal with them, his old hands gentle with the dead things, deftly skinning or plucking – a drop of spit on blunt thumbs helped the grip on downy breast feathers – how to open a bird’s crop to see what scraps of green or seeds or berries it had found to eat, how to pull pink and blue and burgundy entrails out into a bowl.
There you are, madam, that’s right. We’ll have you a country woman yet.
Not quite yet. The smell of the bird clung to her fingers even when she had scrubbed them. She rubbed a scented cream into her skin and inspected her painted nails.
When Charlie came in, there was the little partridge plucked and drawn and trussed, neat and blood-dark on a white plate. Good old Billy, he’s brought us something today, has he? I meant to go myself. Too late now, it’ll be dark soon. Perhaps I’ll go tomorrow. Yes, she’d say. You should do that. She looked at him standing there, hands idle at his sides. The snow seemed to have stilled him within the house, in his study where he lit his own small fire, after the Aga had been stoked in the morning, where he had his own warmth and his own thoughts, whatever they were, and sat at the desk and rested his head in those empty hands. There were only two rooms now that they heated in the day, his study and her kitchen, where he came to eat or just passed through on his way outdoors, passed through as briefly as he passed through the cold spaces in the house, and didn’t stay, where he didn’t stop for her company, though she had it so warm. Yet his presence was there, all the time. She couldn’t escape it. She’d see the closed door of the study and want to hammer on the wood. She hated whatever it was that he did there, his paperwork or his brooding. If he would not be with her, then better that he was outside. Hunting. Wasn’t that what men were supposed to do? Wasn’t that in them, deep?
Finally the mood took him, and he put on his heavy coat and hat and boots, and took his gun and called Jess to him and went out, and now she was jealous that he had broken out. Let him freeze, she thought. She heard isolated shots. Let him miss, let the birds get away. She pictured the black wings of birds scattering in a darkening sky, others thrown up from trees in which they had already settled. The shots sounded far off, deadened in the snow. Then there was silence, and for a moment she was afraid. Let him come back, she thought then; and then he did come back, and he had two pigeons in his hands and he looked the warmer for having been out in the cold.
Do you think the Nagas know boredom? he said.
He spoke as if boredom hurt. As if each day hurt in this snow-bound house, all these days that were all the same, the two of them criss-crossing from room to room, he to his study – but it was still Ralph’s study, wasn’t it, though he had begun to move things, to sort the papers, put some for burning – she to the kitchen. She had papers too, white paper spread on the kitchen table like the snow, which had to be moved aside when they sat down to eat. She was making a plan for the garden, but she knew nothing of gardens, only what was in Ralph’s old books, and already there was a smear of marmalade on the paper, the ring of a teacup. Later she brought the books with her into the sitting room. They lit the fire there just for the evenings. It didn’t seem necessary as they already had two rooms warm. It was a waste, really, to heat another whole room and sit in it and say so little, and do only the same things that they had done in those other rooms in the day. A waste of wood, all for some kind of custom that they seemed to think it was necessary to keep.
It was you who lived with the Nagas, not me.
I don’t think they did. They didn’t know boredom and they didn’t know time. They just lived.
Then shall we stop winding the clocks? This clock, and all the other clocks in the house? None of them are right anyway, they all chime at different times. Then there won’t be any time here.
There’ll still be the clock on the church.
Yes, but you hardly hear that. When the wind’s in some directions, you don’t hear it at all.
At that moment, just as she said that, the power went again. He took up a box of matches in the flicker of the firelight, and lit the candles, and their light doubled in the mantel mirror, a golden glow on the clock and the figurines and on the reflection of the room. Then he went to the chair where she sat and pulled her from it to the rug before the fire.
No sense of time now. Only the fire burned and the clock ticked on. But the pressure of time within her, an urgency in her for the future. The need to take him in to the dark core of her and make a child.
He saw the man across the marketplace. A small man, quick-moving. It was the way the man moved that first drew his attention. A little bit bow-legged. Bundled up in a tweed coat with a peaked cap and a bit of ginger hair showing but a thick wool scarf and the collar of the coat pulled up obscuring part of his face. He knew that ginger hair, and the way the man moved. A jockey. A Newmarket man. What was he doing in Swaffham?
But there was no racing this winter. They wouldn’t even be riding out. There was snow, and the going frozen beneath. The horses would be in the stables – and the jockeys, the jockeys might as well be in Swaffham as anywhere. The man came out of the bank, put his hands in his pockets, walked along swiftly, shoulders hunched, walking towards them down the length of the marketplace, past the parked cars, and the dainty market building that was like a temple, and the few stalls that braved the winter.
What is it, darling?
They had just got out of the car. They came into town together when there was shopping to do so that he could be there if the road was blocked or the car got stuck, and anyway Claire didn’t like to drive in the snow. Now she had taken the basket out from the boot of the car but he was still standing with his hand to the driver’s door, transfixed.
Who is it, someone you know?
The man was coming closer. He would walk right by them. His hands were in his pockets and his head was bent down into his scarf and his collar. He might have been Tommy’s brother. Did Tommy have a brother? Might almost have been Tommy.
No, he said. It’s nothing. Nothing at all. He found that he had slipped the car keys into his pocket. He had to take them out again to lock the car door.
He knew that he would go on seeing them. All the rest of his life he will be catching sight of them, their heads, their backs, their gestures on the street.
He didn’t run after them any more. There had been that time when he and Claire were just married. They had been away on honeymoon and had just got off the train at Euston, he carrying the suitcases, Claire walking beside him to the taxi rank. He had dropped the cases even as he ran. Then come back to her standing beside the cases looking shocked.
She had said the same thing.
Who was it, darling? Was it someone you knew?
No.
Just someone who had the look of someone that he had known.
Nothing. No one he knew. Every time he said those things he felt a little further from her. There was glass between them. Cold glass, like ice and like mirror. He had had the sense before, when he came down from the hills to Calcutta, and on the ship, most of all on the ship home, but even, now he thought about it, on that first arrival in Mokokchung, on seeing Hussey and his bungalow and all that was so familiar. He had thought that it would leave him, the sense that this world he had come back to was a looking-glass world, not quite the world that he had left but one turned about, reversed, left to right and right to left, changed in surface if not in substance – or was it in substance but not surface? – just so much distorted. There had been stretches of time since he had come to the farm when the feeling quite left him, but at other times it persisted, as now in this winter in the snow, when there was nothing he could do to occupy himself, the physical world about him covered over and gone to ice. Now in Swaffham this man walked past, head down into his scarf, blowing or whistling oh-so-softly, the breath coming like steam from between his lips. He was very like Tommy, even in his features. But not Tommy. And besides, there was a sheet of glass between them also. The glass was between him and everyone. He wanted to break the glass, but glass when it broke was sharp. What is it, darling? she asked. He did not want to hurt her.
Only he did hurt her.
Don’t you trust me?
He was driving the Hillman, slow in the slush. The main road had been cleared and gritted. All that way she had been silent. There had been only the sound of the car and the snowy landscape that was beginning to darken, and the almost empty road. Now they had turned off on a by-road towards the village. One of the other farmers had come through with a digger and pushed the snow from the centre of the road, leaving it high at the sides. There was just one pair of tracks to follow. If they met another car someone would have to find a place to reverse to get past.
Of course I trust you.
Then why do you tell me lies?
What do you mean? he said, but only automatically. He needed his concentration for the road. The slush that had been worn down during the day was beginning to freeze once more.
You knew that man. Who was he?
No I didn’t. I just thought I did. For a moment.
A rather long moment.
No, really, I was thinking about – I don’t know what.
Why not say so, if you thought he was someone you knew?
Darling, I’m trying to drive.
But she didn’t let it go. He took a glance at her and saw that she was crying. Why cry now? Why cry in the car in the snow? Why, when he was driving and they were in the car where words echoed back and couldn’t escape? Hard enough to drive as it was, and now there were ribbons of fog drifting towards them, caught in the beams of the headlamps. She didn’t let it go at all. She went on speaking as he bent forward and peered out through the windscreen and watched the tracks running ahead of the car and the looming strips of fog. What was she saying? She was saying that there were too many things that he didn’t say, too many secrets. That he left her alone. What had he brought her here for? What had he married her for, if he was to leave her alone? She was breaking the glass. If he did not break the glass, then she must break it. Damn it, Claire. His shout filled the car. Beneath the glass there was more glass, always more glass, like the ice that he knew could be there beneath the snow. He howled then to silence her, but not looking at her but looking ahead trying to see the road, his hands hard on the wheel. And there was ice, on a bend that he took too fast, though he was going so slowly, though he was staring ahead so carefully, trying so hard to concentrate on the road. His hands were tight with the effort, stiff on the wheel, and the car skidded, almost in slow-motion, so slowly it was travelling, and his howl died and they came to rest in a snow-filled ditch.
It was as if the car itself was winded, all the air gone from it. For a moment, nothing to breathe.
Are you all right?
Yes. Her gloved hand reached to his that seemed stuck to the wheel. The headlamps lit a tall hedge, lumps of snow dislodging from the branches onto the bonnet of the car.
We’re both all right then.
Yes.
We’ll have to walk. Not far to walk though, we were nearly home. I can come back with the tractor and pull the car out in the morning. See the damage. I think it’s just enough off the road, if anyone else comes.
They got out like suddenly sobered drunks and took the shopping from the car boot. At least they had a torch. They had had the sense to keep a torch in the car. On the verge they were knee-high in snow but they were soon back to the ruts where it was cleared. It wasn’t quite dark. It would never be quite dark because of the snow, which also made their path visible, the slippery tracks showing black down a road which luckily they knew well.
They barely spoke for the rest of the evening. Claire went to bed before he did and turned out the light. He had it in his head now, what he might have said. But it was too late. If she was awake when he came upstairs she showed no sign. That was better, he thought. Best that he didn’t tell her, any of it. She only knew about the heroes. She couldn’t be expected to understand.
What the jungle saw
How narrow a dividing line there could be between amazement and tedium. You thought it extraordinary to be there, with a piece of your mind. You saw it with wonder, like the pictures you had looked at when you were a child. And then it became your dull reality. Perhaps it was just the exhaustion. The trek, the humidity, the constant tension of looking about, the fear in any unusual or unidentifiable sound. Walking always at the same pace as the others. The need to walk together, act together, see together. Four men on patrol, meant to see as one.
Only Luke kept his amazement, constantly looking up, holding his gun limp, wide-eyed. Walter hissed to get his attention. Japs’re hardly likely to be up there, are they, boy?
Luke wanted to see a hornbill. Someone had told him there were hornbills in the Naga Hills.
What do they look like?
Big black-and-white bird.
Beak like – well, like a horn. You’d know one if you saw one.
Right then. Eyes peeled. We’ll keep a lookout for them too, won’t we? Tommy said. Luke didn’t look up for a long time after that.
The day before, they had encountered some villagers who were hiding out in the jungle. They had their livestock with them, a small herd of mithun and half a dozen black pigs. The villagers had indicated that a party of Japs had passed close by, moving east, but they had seen no sign of them since. Neither hide nor hair. That was a hunter’s phrase, wasn’t it, neither hide nor hair? He hadn’t thought of that before. It was just one of those pointless idioms people liked to use. Rider Haggard probably used it. There was time between one pace and the next to let thoughts run, forward and back, so removed he was from all of the rest of his life.
When they heard the Jap he didn’t sound like a man. The sound he made was more like one of those pigs, a sort of snorting and grunting, as he came towards them through the undergrowth, half hunched, hands in the air.
Ugly. Hair and hide. Perhaps it was his fear that made him ugly. Blubbing, grunting, shaking, a little scrawny bow-legged fellow with round specs clouded over. Falling on the ground in front of them. The sight of him made all of that battle crash back into his head, the battle that he had left behind, that they had all four of them left behind when they had entered this green. The hell-hole, the mud, the slaughter, all flooded in again about this wretched grovelling man. Those sounds must be words, grunting Japanese words like words they had heard in the battle. Only he didn’t speak to them, but to the ground, to the trees to his side, behind their shoulders, to the ground again, his face distorted as he removed his specs and wiped his eyes. Probably he could barely see anyway without the specs, the glass on them was so thick.
Land of the Living Page 13
