by Carys Davies
He’d definitely been looking at her then though. Perhaps he’d sensed that she was more the gardener of the two of them. She saw herself leading him out into the back, into the garden that ran all the way down to the edge of the cliff. She saw herself describing how magnificent it would all be in the summer, with the bright flames of the kniphofia, the warm pleasing scent of the olearia. The soft clouds of blue and pink and white with the flax, tamarisk and daisy bush all in bloom. Sylvia could hardly even name them. She would be left standing, she’d have nothing to contribute, nothing with which to strike up a conversation.
Yes, he’d definitely been looking at her then. To this day, Hazel is sure of that. When he leaned forward to take up the frightened rabbit with his spoon, his dark hair almost touched her face and she’d caught again the sharp perfume in his clean dry cheeks. Briefly, then, she had the feeling that everything, after all, was as it should be. His mouth full, he’d smiled at her, gesturing with his spoon to show his appreciation of the food. Flecks of yellow rabbit clung to his teeth and he licked them away with his tongue. She pictured him, staying on for a night or two at the Bed & Breakfast down the road, the two of them sharing a few inches of Bristol Cream in the tooth mug there in the room. She tried a gentle, probing question, Would he be in the area for a while, after his visit to the nursery?
She remembers now that he hadn’t seemed to hear her then, she remembers hating Sylvia for what she was doing. The rest of it has only become clear in the replaying of the scene, which visits her now like a nightmare.
The girls, Grace’s friends, had begun to arrive, all in one big frilly clump, in their frothy pastel frocks and white ankle socks. He was leaning away from Hazel now, looking at all the girls who were jumping about watching Grace tear open her presents. That was when the fresh, green scent of his skin had got away from her, losing itself in the chatter of the noisy girls.
A thousand times she has asked herself if she could have prevented it. She has asked herself if the two of them had repelled him by their eagerness, by their both wanting him too much, falling over each other trying to get his attention, inviting him to more food, pressing him to stay.
She has asked herself if she could have prevented it by holding his interest herself, by being, perhaps, a little more beautiful.
When she’d come back into the room after fetching the cake from the kitchen, the cake with the thirteen candles on it, he was bending down and talking to Grace. She was showing him her presents. A box of Milk Tray. Some mittens and a packet of socks, a record in a white paper sleeve.
Grace smiled at the man. He was tall and dark and had a strange perfume like nothing she was used to inside the rooms of this house. It was like grass, mingled with something else too which was different from the cloying sweetness she was used to, the thickly scented skin of her mother and her aunt. It was like the nice smell of other girls’ fathers.
To Hazel, it had seemed like more than a favour then, his offering to drive the girls home at the end of the party, saving them getting the car out of the garage. It had seemed like a promise, the next stage in their getting to know him, a kindness there would be some opportunity to repay. Each sister had felt a fierce certainty that she would be the one who would find that opportunity.
They’d watched him make room for the girls in the back, moving a box of plants, sea lavender and eryngium, into the boot, brushing off with his hand the grainy trail of sand and soil left behind on the leather. They watched him open the passenger door for Grace, who would show him the way. Each of the sisters was as full of hope at that moment as the other, in spite of the way he’d said, ‘Goodbye then, ladies.’ Neither of them had liked that. Ladies. The way it made a pair of them.
He hadn’t stopped when he dropped Grace back afterwards. Hazel heard her niece’s step in the hall, and when she looked out through the bay window, his black car had already moved away.
Hazel dreams that he’ll come back to them one day. She is fairly sure that if he ever comes, she will kill him.
She has sat, often, in the bay window looking down onto the road and imagined him strolling along it, walking back towards them from the direction of the nursery, his purchases made, a flat box of plants in his arms. She has seen herself going out into the white garage attached to the house, slowly backing out into the road in Sylvia’s green Austin, picking up speed quickly as she motors towards him. She’s seen the shallow box twirl lazily in the air, yellow grasses and silvery shrubs like handfuls of feathers breaking out of their pots and floating down with the man. Shining leaves and crumbs of earth settling themselves over his dead, dry face, his dark fanned-out hair.
Hazel has begun to knit a blanket, a blue one because she feels in her bones that it will be a boy. She will wrap the baby up in it when he is born and keep him warm. She has come to think of the blanket as something powerful that will help him after his awful start. He will be safe and they will look after him. He will grow up and he will forgive them for everything and so, perhaps, will Grace.
She and Sylvia talked once, briefly, once it began to be clear what had occurred, of going to the police, but Sylvia wouldn’t have it and in the end Hazel came round to her way of thinking. It was better to be quiet about everything. Grace, after all, has never, ever talked about what happened to her. No word about it, about the man, has ever been spoken.
What matters now is Grace, what’s important is to protect her in every way, to make her life easy and comfortable.
When spring comes, they leave the white house and take a small one further down the coast.
It’s Hazel who arranges everything, who finds the new house to rent, who notifies the school that they are moving out of the area.
‘We’ve found the prettiest place,’ she tells her niece. ‘You won’t need to go to school when we move. You can do your work at home for a change, your mother and I will teach you between us.’
It turns out that Hazel takes care of all the teaching, Sylvia scarcely seems up to it. Sylvia seems to shrink from any of the necessary arrangements. She has taken it all very, very hard. She is quiet and brooding, spends her days reading in her chair in the corner of the front room.
Hazel asks Grace if she minds moving house, if she’ll miss her old school. The girl shrugs, says she’ll miss her friends.
Everything Hazel does now, she does with Grace in mind, so that everything will go smoothly after the terrible thing that has happened.
Mostly they stay indoors, Sylvia reading in her chair, crumpled and withdrawn from everything. Hazel’s life is taken up with caring for Grace, with her lessons, with cooking the things she likes to eat, with choosing books for her from the library. Hazel goes out for all the shopping. In the street, she keeps her eyes down, the world seems to her these days to be full of men. She looks away from them, as if she’s afraid of some fresh horror, some new ambush.
Sylvia does come out sometimes, to walk with Hazel and Grace in the early morning when the beaches are empty. Only a few times they have been met by other people, who gape rudely at the two women with the schoolgirl. Frail legs in white socks, a fair pony-tail in a nylon band, damp and straggly in the salty wind, big and swollen like a sparrow. Hazel has watched their mouths fall open, blame spilling out onto the wet sand like fish, hanging around in heaps behind their backs after she’s taken Grace by the hand and led her away, back into the little house behind the dunes.
Grace, mercifully, doesn’t seem to notice people looking. Hazel is proud of her, of the girl’s quiet strength. Hazel has read the postcards her niece sends to her old friends. They’re full of ordinary things, about the new house, about the weather and ice-creams on the beach, about this or that book she has just finished.
Now that the birth is so close, Hazel has begun to feel more peaceful. Excited in a tentative, hopeful way. She has bought a set of cotton chemises for him, a supply of napkins, a little wool cap, and put everything in the bottom drawer of the chest in her own bedroom. He will be born here at h
ome. She pictures Grace propped up against the pillows, her proud smile, her white finger gripped in his new fist. Everything behind them, the mess she and Sylvia have made. Each thing—the move to the new house, the buying one by one of his miniature garments—has felt like a small repair to their lives.
Only sometimes, there’s a cold fluttering in Hazel’s throat, a falling in her stomach as if she’s descending too fast in the shaft of a lift. She’s afraid that there’s something in all of this that is not quite as it should be, that their situation, on the brink of the baby’s arrival, should be in some way different.
Sometimes, in the evenings, when Grace is upstairs sleeping, and she and Sylvia are together in the front room—Sylvia reading in her chair under the lamp in the corner, while she knits by the window—Hazel feels the press of their silence in the little rented room, looks across it at her sister and asks herself if there isn’t something in all her careful preparations that she has failed to take care of. It preys on her, the fear that she’s missed something, that she’s left something out.
She wonders if Sylvia looks at herself sometimes, as she has, in the mirror, and asks herself if she could have made things turn out differently by being, perhaps, just a little more beautiful.
‘Penny for them’, she whispers softly to her sister one night near the end. But Sylvia doesn’t even look up from her book, perhaps she doesn’t hear, and the silence about it all that they’ve grown so used to glides over them again, still and heavy like water.
She watches Sylvia in the mornings when Grace comes down in her nightie for breakfast. She watches her sister’s crumpled face searching for another spot in the little kitchen to rest her eyes, to save herself the agony of having to look at her daughter.
Hazel wonders how, exactly, the stranger’s visit replays itself in her sister’s mind, how exactly Sylvia feels about what has happened.
Sylvia looks these days, like a woman in mourning. Her mouth, unpainted, sags at the corners. She dresses in long cardigans and shapeless skirts, in thick stockings and flat-heeled shoes, but then, doesn’t Hazel do more or less the same? Doesn’t she have a horror of the way the two of them used to rig themselves out? The black slacks, the soft inviting sweaters? Don’t the two of them look the same now, a pair of sad repentant twins? Two middle-aged women, a stoop beginning in their narrow cardiganed shoulders because of the weight they both carry, the weight of the guilt and the shame?
But Hazel can’t say for sure what goes on in her sister’s mind as she sits there in her chair on the other side of the silent room, because they’ve never talked about it to each other, never talked about any of it except that once when it became clear what the man had done. Like Grace’s postcards, their talk is always of ordinary things, of anything but what’s happened. It’s about the quality of Sunday’s pork shoulder, about the new shape of the dunes after last night’s winds. Like Grace, they’ve stayed silent, mute, about the other thing, about the stranger and the baby who’ll be with them soon.
Every evening now, before the light goes completely, Hazel knits by the window of the plain rented room. The blanket is nearly finished, there’s just the border to do now. Knit one, slip one, a different rhythm from the rest.
Tonight Grace has come to sit with her aunt. Sylvia has gone to bed early. She said she felt tired. Hazel knits. From time to time she looks up so she can smile at Grace. Looking at her after looking at Sylvia is like a balm, her clear skin, her steady mouth. She looks peaceful, contented, very, very young. Hazel feels herself soften, relax, the fearful flutter in her throat subsides. However painful this has all been for them, whatever the horrible confusion is that torments Sylvia, Grace is here, Grace is safe.
Hazel knits with smooth and incredible speed. She tells Grace she’ll have the blanket finished in another couple of evenings. Grace sits for a while watching her aunt’s fast hands. Her breath, Hazel notices, has begun to grow shorter, more difficult these past few days with the full weight of him inside her. Grace reaches out and strokes the soft blue wool. Hazel smiles back at her, hoping that her smile will say that everything will be all right, that the blanket will be given to the baby when he is born in another week or so and that it will keep him safe and warm.
Then Grace asks, ‘Who is the blanket for?’
Hazel stops knitting, lays her work down in her lap. A chill settles beneath her heart and the room seems to shrink around her, seems to press in on her with the full force of the silence they have preserved so carefully, she and Sylvia, wanting only to put their crime behind them, wanting only—surely—to protect Grace, to make things easier for her, to do the best they can.
Who is the blanket for?
The girl’s question hangs between them by a hair.
‘For the baby, love,’ says Hazel quietly, leaning forward and taking Grace’s hand.
Grace blinks, tilts her head.
‘What baby?’
THE REDEMPTION OF GALEN PIKE
THE QUIET
SHE DIDN’T HEAR him arrive.
The wind was up and the rain was thundering down on the tin roof like a shower of stones and in the midst of all the noise she didn’t hear the rattle of his old buggy approaching. She didn’t hear the scrape of his iron-rimmed wheels on the track, the soft thump of his feet in the wet dust. She didn’t know he was there until she looked up from her bucket of soapy water and saw his face at her window, his pale green eyes with their tiny black pin-prick pupils blinking at her through the glass.
His name was Henry Fowler and she hated it when he came.
She hated him sitting there for hours on end talking to Tom about hens and beets and pigs, filling his smelly pipe with minute pinches of tobacco from a pouch in his cracked sheepskin waistcoat, tamping down the flakes with his little thumb, lighting and re-lighting the bowl and sucking at the stem, slurping his tea and sitting there on the edge of his chair like a small observant bird, and all the time stealing glances at her and looking at her with his sharp eyes as if he could see right through her. It filled her with a kind of shame. She felt she’d do almost anything to stop Henry Fowler looking at her like that, anything to make him leave and clear off back to his end of the valley. It felt like the worst thing in the world to her, him looking at her the way he did.
He was looking at her now on the other side of the glass, blinking at her through the falling rain. She wished she didn’t have to invite him in. She wished she could send him away without asking him in and offering him a cup of something, but he was their neighbour and he had come six miles across the valley in his bone-shaking old buggy and the water had begun to pool around the brim of his old felt hat and drip onto the shoulders of his crumpled shirt. It was bouncing back up off the ground and splashing against his boots and his baggy serge trousers. She would have to offer him a chair by the stove for half an hour, refreshment. A cup of tea at least. She wiped her soapy hands on her skirt and went to the door and opened it and called to him.
‘You’d better come in Mr. Fowler. Out of the rain.’
Her name was Susan Boyce and she was twenty-six years old. It was eight months now since she and Thomas had sailed out of Liverpool on their wedding day aboard the Hurricane in search of a new life. It had excited them both, the idea of starting from nothing. They’d liked the razed, empty look of everything on the map, the vast unpunctuated distances, and at the beginning of it all she hadn’t minded that the only company was the sound of the wind and the rain and the crackle of the dry grass in the sunshine. At the beginning of it all, she hadn’t minded the quiet.
She hadn’t minded that when they’d arrived in the town they’d found nothing more than a single dusty street. No railway station and no church, only an empty hotel and a draper, a dry goods store that doubled as a doctor’s surgery, a smithy and a pen for market day. She hadn’t minded that when they’d ridden out twelve miles into the parched country beyond the town they’d found rocks and gum trees and small coarse bushes and the biggest sky she’d ever se
en and in the middle of it all their own patch of ground and low, fallen-down house. She hadn’t minded that there weren’t other farms nearby, other wives. She hadn’t minded that there was no one but Henry Fowler, who lived six miles off and had no wife. No, she hadn’t minded any of it and wouldn’t now, she was sure, if things with Tom were not as they were.
Now she wished there was another wife somewhere not too far away. Someone she might by this time have come to consider as a friend; someone she might be able to bring herself to tell. But there was no such person. There was her married sister in Poole who she could write to, but what good would that do, when it might be a year before a reply came? A year was an eternity; she didn’t think she could last a year, and even then, she wasn’t really sure she could get the thing down on paper in the first place.
Once, a month ago, when she and Tom had gone into town and he was off buying nails, she’d got as far as the black varnished door of the doctor’s consulting room in the dry goods store. She’d stood there outside it, gripping her purse, listening to the low murmur of a woman’s voice on the other side of the door and she’d tried to imagine her own voice in there in its place and she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. It was an impossible thing for her to do. What if the doctor said he had to speak to Thomas? What then?
If there’d been a church in town, she might have gone to the priest. A priest, she thought, might be an easy person to tell; but even there, she wasn’t sure what a priest would say on such a matter. What if he just told her to go back home and pray? Would she be able to tell him that she’d tried that already? That every night for more than half a year she’d lain in bed and prayed till she was blue in the face and it hadn’t worked? Anyway it was a waste of time to think about a priest because there wasn’t a church for a hundred miles. It was a godless place they’d come to. Godless and friendless and only Henry Fowler’s wizened walnut face at her window at nine o’clock in the morning, poking his nose into her private business.
