The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  A kestrel is hovering above and in front of her. The bird has been tamed by the populated heath and it hangs in the air closer than she has ever seen one before. She can make out its grey hood and the black tipped markings on its wings and tail as it drops and rises, balancing on the currents of the breeze, poised with potential. Like a horse galloping or a fish swimming it is beautiful simply because it is doing what it has been born to do. Living what it is. She watches the delicate tight-rope act of its hovering, perfectly balanced between motion and stillness, and recognises how the bird’s state describes so eloquently how she feels herself, sitting there on that bench: motionless, yet poised between two movements, ready to drop or to rise, depending on what the next half hour brings.

  Theresa sits on the bench, waiting and watching the view with the same attention and expectancy as the hawk scanning the grass for its prey because she is waiting to discover how she will live: what kind of a life she will have, whether she will have children who will visit this bench in years to come and tell their children how their grandmother sat here, waiting. As she waits she feels the nervous energy of her anticipation swell inside her like a wave. With each minute that passes the surges get stronger and she tries to distract herself, first by looking at the view, then the hunting kestrel and then, with a force of effort, by thinking not of the years to come, but of the years that have been instead. The years that have brought her here, to this hill and this bench, risking her future because of her past, trying to live who she is.

  ♦

  It was when he was having his appendix removed on the kitchen table that her father (or rather Tom, the man she had known as her father) had finally apologised to Theresa. The white sheet over his legs and the wooden tabletop were both soaked in his blood. There was more of it on the flagstones, big dark splashes around where the doctor had been standing. He had lost a lot during the operation and she remembered how the kitchen had smelt not like a kitchen at all, but more like a slaughter-house.

  Tom must have thought he was going to die and perhaps that is why he did what he did, hoping to make amends before he went, relieving himself of his sins before he met St Peter. She remembered him asking the doctor to leave the room, his voice weak and husky, and the doctor nodding solemnly as if he understood everything about this, pain and suffering and people. Picking up his black leather bag, he had walked out of the back door to his car, leaving just Tom, lying on the table, his head propped up on a cushion, Theresa and her mother. Lifting one arm Tom had taken Theresa’s hand and drawn her closer to him. She remembered thinking how pale he was, pale and fragile, his naked chest collapsing with each breath, the tightly curled hairs dark against his skin. He was a farmer, and she had only ever known him with the colour of an outdoor life in his cheeks. With that colour drained she saw how old he was, really, behind his work and his clothes. It was ten years ago, she must have been twenty-two or twenty-three.

  He didn’t say much, but for him, she knew it was the most he would ever say on the matter. And she was not surprised when he didn’t look at her as he spoke, but chose to stare at the ceiling instead, holding her hand limply in his.

  ‘Theresa,’ he’d said, ‘I know I wasn’t always fair. It was wrong, girl, I know that now.’ A pause, during which he shuts his eyes and lets out a tired breath. Then he spoke again, ‘Take cart- of your mother, won’t you?’

  But there had been no need for that passing request. A couple of months later he’d made a full recovery and was back to his old self. She was living in London by then, and though she came to visit them often he never mentioned it again, either his apology or what he had been apologising for. Theresa, however, knew only too well what he had been speaking about.

  As a child she had never understood why her father always took against her. Why he punished her so harshly for reading in her room, or being late to the table, or for not doing a chore well enough. Her brothers, in comparison, always seemed to escape his anger whereas with her, he not only flew into a temper at the slightest provocation but even seemed to resent her any success. When she won a scholarship to Lewes Grammar School for Girls she had expected the news to cheer him, but it did the opposite. He remained in a black mood for days and found countless reasons to criticise her behaviour. As she got older she came to assume it was simply because she was a girl. That, unlike her brothers, she was not able to help her father on the farm with the heavy or manual work, that he had wanted a boy and that she, a girl, was no more than a burden to him. Over the years his treatment stopped seeming unfair or even unusual. It was just the way of things, and that is how she thought of it, until at the age of fourteen, she discovered the truth herself.

  It was a package that did it. A package sent to the school in Lewes from her Aunt Lotty who had addressed the parcel (intentionally or accidentally, she will never know, her mother forbade her to speak to her aunt again) to ‘Theresa Sargent’. It was then, and only then, after Theresa had written to her, that her mother came to Lewes and, no doubt fearing that someone else would tell her if she didn’t, told Theresa the truth about her parentage. The truth about a young man called Arthur Cripps, a curate she had known in her youth, who, she admitted, looking red-faced and flustered at the floor, had been her lover. A young man called Arthur Cripps who was Theresa’s father.

  They were sitting in a tea house in Lewes. She remembers it all so clearly. Her mother’s face, close enough to feel her hot breath on her cheek. Her hand over hers on the soft leather of the Bible she carried in her handbag, as she made her swear to never tell anyone about her parentage, ever. Then holding her tea cup, its handle hot against her fingers, its thin china trembling against her lip as her head swam and her eyes filmed over with tears. The feeling that sitting there, in that tea room, she was somehow drifting away from herself like a boat she had once seen, loosed from its mooring on Rye pier, slowly drifting out to sea, diminishing and fragile on the swell of the waves. Her mother carried on talking, but she could not hear her. Her mind was scattered, racing, unbelieving. Everything was altered, like when the optician had placed the testing spectacles over her eyes and slipped in lens after lens, turning the world strange.

  Despite the shock and the shame, she did not cry. Not there in that crowded, smoky tea house. Nor did she cry outside, in the busy Saturday street. But later, when her mother had gone and she sat alone on her bed in her dormitory (the other girls had been at supper), retracing her life, testing her memories against what her mother had told her, then she had cried. Hard, bitter tears of frustration, confusion and anger, welling up from inside her, and drawing with them, like water drawn from a bore hole, a thousand unanswered questions. Who was Arthur Cripps? What type of a man was he? Where was he now? Why had he left? Why had her mother never told her before? Did her brothers know? Did the school know?

  She was angry with everyone: her mother, the stranger who was her father, her aunt and even her brothers. But she was especially angry at Tom. She was sure this was why he had hated her. Knowing why, however, did not make his treatment of her any more forgivable. If anything, in Theresa’s eyes, it made it worse. Because he had not hated her for how she was, but for who she was, and that was something she could never have done anything about, something she could never have changed. However much she had tried to win his favour, he would still have hated her, because she could not escape who she was to him: another man’s child, reared as his own under his roof. An illegitimate. A bastard.

  ♦

  Theresa looks about the heath. The light is fading from the day, but the clouds are still bright on their flat undersides, and the heath is still moving with people. She takes a deep breath and looks at her wrist watch. Still five more minutes. She looks up again and is glad she chose a Sunday and not a weekday. On any other day she may have felt conspicuous, sitting here, waiting on her own, but on a Sunday the heath is full of people and no one was really alone. On her way up to the hill she had passed old men walking to swim in the ponds, their white hair blown
in the wind, young, earnest men strolling along, their hands in their pockets, reaching decisions, mothers and nannies pushing their children in prams along the paths. On the bench just along from her there is another woman sitting alone, a lady older than Theresa, reading a novel and wearing a winter coat and a fur stole, despite the Indian summer sun. And along with the other individuals, there are groups of people to dilute her solitude too. Families laying out picnics (two boys squabbling remind her of her brothers), an outing of schoolchildren passing along in crocodile formation and gaggles of young women in hats, secretaries or office workers, followed by groups of young men, swaggering in their Sunday suits with cigarettes wagging at the corner of their mouths.

  Theresa is waiting for her own young man, Stuart Hildred. Although, she supposes, neither of them is that young any more. She has left it late for this kind of thing, she knows that. Her mother can’t understand why she has, but Theresa wouldn’t have had it any other way. Unlike the other girls she’d spent her twenties travelling rather than looking for a husband, and she had needed those years. To find a bigger world, accessible, new and different. Just to know it was there, the possibility of escape, of undoing ties, pulling up roots. She and her best friend Dina would take off on their two-week holidays whenever they could: to Venice, the Italian Lakes, Biarritz, Switzerland. Back in her digs she had thick albums of photos and postcards from her travels, the plane tickets for each trip stuck on the pages in between. She had seen the Alps, the Dolomites, the waves of the Mediterranean. On one of their excursions, she had even met a man, an Italian called Mario. She has photos of him in her album too, his arm about her shoulder on the shore of Lake Como, a pipe in the corner of his mouth and his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. When she returned to England he had written dramatic love letters to her, but she knew he would never follow the letters, that he was in love with love not her, and that he would never follow her to England.

  There had, of course, been other men since: young clerks from the Barclay’s Bank where she worked, an older man from the post office when she was in Portsmouth, but no one who she could seriously consider as a husband. Until Stuart. There had been something different about Stuart, a solidness and calmness that gave Theresa comfort, a balance that the other men seemed to have lacked. Perhaps it was because he was already married when she first met him.

  Stuart worked in her office at the bank, and from the start she had known he was married. She had even met his wife, Nancy. Stuart introduced them at the manager’s annual party. That was three years ago now, but even then she had noticed how frail Nancy was. How Stuart supported her at her elbow as if he was afraid the wind would blow her away or knock her down. ‘Cancer,’ he had explained the following day when she’d asked. ‘The doctor says there’s not much he can do.’ He spoke with his head down, in a low voice as he sorted some papers on his desk. Theresa felt awful for asking but then Stuart had looked up at her and, sensing her awkwardness, he’d smiled at her, as if to tell her it was all right. ‘But she’s fine,’ he’d said. ‘Really. Fine.’

  Theresa knew when Nancy had died. It was a Monday morning and when Stuart didn’t arrive at his desk, everyone in the bank thought they knew why. It must have happened over the weekend. They’d been expecting it for some time, no one had seen Nancy for months and when they asked after her Stuart’s replies had been getting briefer and briefer: ‘Oh, she’s well, well enough,’ or ‘Not bad. Very tired, though, very tired.’ When he returned to work, two days later, he had the look of a man who was empty of something inside, like a blown bird’s egg, complete but somehow lighter. His grief was not dramatic, black, but delicate, fragile and it was then, watching him move about the office in his usual way, a quiet vacuum at his centre, that Theresa knew for certain that she loved him.

  They became good friends. They would go out for lunch together and Stuart would sometimes talk about his late wife to Theresa. She never felt jealous. In fact she had felt privileged to be so close to this fine, rarefied grief, this grief that was a gentle afterburn of love. She admired his ability to remember her, his ability to love and, strange though it was, that is why she had fallen in love with him herself: for his loving of another woman.

  Stuart’s hobby was music, composing for and playing the piano. Theresa had inherited both her mother’s voice and an old carved piano she had kept under a blanket in the back room of the farm in Icklesham. That autumn Stuart started to visit her digs on the weekends, sitting at the piano and playing his songs when they had finished their tea, his long, pianist’s hands running the length of its keyboard.

  Encouraged by him, Theresa would sing the accompaniment. Then one day he had asked her if she would like to take a walk instead, and they had come here, to this hill and this bench, where, for the first time, he had kissed her. Just lightly and just once, but he had kissed her. And ever since this bench, Albert’s bench, had become their regular place on the heath. It was the destination of their walks, their meeting place, where they brought their picnics last summer. It was also where, a week ago, almost exactly a year after that first kiss, Stuart had asked her to marry him. And that is why she hadn’t needed to tell him where to meet her this evening. She had simply written, ‘on the heath at 5 a.m.’ He would know where to come, if he was coming at all. There was nowhere else she could have meant; for them, this was the heath. This bench and this view, consecrated as it was by their shared memories.

  When Stuart proposed Theresa had wanted to say yes straight away, with all her heart. She could no longer imagine a future without him in her life. But she could not say yes, she knew that. Not without him knowing the truth about her. Not without her telling him what she had sworn on her mother’s Bible in that tea room in Lewes never to tell anyone. So she had written to him that night, after he had walked her to her door and said goodbye, trying to keep the disappointment at bay in his voice. She had written to him and told him everything: about Tom not being her father, and about Arthur Cripps, who was. She even told him how Arthur had written to her once a few months after her mother had visited her at Lewes, a strange, polite, guarded letter: ‘You must be, I think, that little girl of four I saw all those years ago…’

  She finished the letter by telling Stuart that if he still wanted to marry her, then he should meet her ‘Next Sunday, on the heath at 5 a.m.’ She had said she would understand if he did not come, that she would understand if he never wanted to see her again. Then she signed the bottom of the paper, ‘your Theresa’, and blew on the ink to dry it. She did not read the letter over, but folded it, sealed the envelope, addressed it and walked out to post it straight away, before she had time to change her mind.

  That was a week ago. Since then, she had heard nothing from Stuart, but that was what she had requested, a week of silence to consider what she had told him. But now, waiting for him on Albert’s bench, she was beginning to wish she had never written that letter. What had she done? What would she do if he did not arrive, if he never came? How long would she wait for him?

  ♦

  Suddenly the kestrel drops from the sky, a brown streak, its talons drawn, landing in the grass with its wings outstretched. Theresa watches its dive, then its hunched position in the long grass and its grey hooded head, peering over its shoulder before turning away and stabbing with short, sharp jerks between its legs. A little boy points at it and tugs the sleeve of his father. Theresa thinks of the animal, the shrew or the mouse that is there, unseen and unheard but still there under the talons of the bird, struggling for its life.

  She looks at her watch, two minutes past five, then back up at the heath with its wandering couples and individuals passing each other, each person involved in their own lives, their own futures; their thoughts unseen, unheard by her, but like the kestrel’s prey, still there. She wonders what this evening means for them? What are they all remembering or considering as they stroll along, talking, or as they stand alone, pausing under a willow to look through its leaves at the sky? Were any of t
hem, she wondered, feeling as she was: their life on a knife edge, everything they valued hanging by a thread that would either be rescued or cut loose in the next ten minutes? It was impossible to know. All she could be certain of is that like her, they would feel the low sun, flaring at the edges of their eyelids, the touch of the breeze on their faces. That some of them may have seen the kestrel dive, and that others would not. A million sensations were passing through them all as they shared this time and space on the heath. Passing through and passing on, a stream of thoughts and feelings, some which will snag and remain as memories, but most which will live and die in the passing of a breath.

  And then, among the milling people on the path below, she sees him. Striding along, a bunch of red flowers bright against his brown suit, emerging from the anonymous crowd. And suddenly, he is there, in her world, breaking into her isolation. He is looking up at her and has been all the time she was watching the kestrel. She has been so alert, waiting, expecting him and now he has surprised her. Although he is far away below the hill he stops in the path, lifts the flowers and waves them at her. She can not make out the details of his face but she knows he is smiling. She feels a flood of relief rush through her and her eyes prick with tears. The scene she has been watching, which has been so clear, so sharp on her senses, swims back into an everyday focus. Because she is no longer waiting. He knows who she is, her story, and he has come to be with her, now and forever. He waves the flowers again, and as she lifts her hand to wave in reply, she feels her world fall back to her, as suddenly and violently as the kestrel, dropping to earth out of the sky.