Memories Of The Storm

by Willett, Marcia

  'Do you remember, Hes, when Mother read Hendy's report about nightingales over Bossington way and we went out one evening to hear them?' His voice is pitched very low and Lucy has to strain to hear him.

  Hester chuckles. 'I was allowed to go as a treat, though Nanny said I was too young to be up late. Mother insisted. "She might never hear one again," she said.'

  'We all went in the end, except Nanny. Father piled us all into the car and we took Thermos flasks and rugs. I remember that it was jolly cold. It must have been the Easter holidays.'

  'I don't think I minded too much about the nightingale. I just loved the idea of an expedition over the moor instead of going to bed.'

  'We heard them in the end, in an orchard near Bossington. Magical.

  'And where those crimping fern-leaves ramp among

  The hazel's under-boughs, I've nestled down

  And watched her while she sung, and her renown

  Hath made me marvel that so famed a bird

  Should have no better dress than russet brown . . .'

  Lucy listens with delight. The phrases conjure up images of the wood in the summer; the path winding beside the murmuring river and the trees ringing with the sound of birdsong. Perhaps Edward has a secret house in the woods and an imaginary friend with whom he shares the roll and the egg. She and Jack have played games like that, taking food wrapped in a cotton handkerchief to eat later in the hollow of a big tree all hidden by its low, sweeping branches.

  'The mind plays tricks,' Edward is saying. 'Poor old John Clare went mad, didn't he? Didn't know who he was in the end, poor devil. Do you remember that Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall"? I know what he means now. That's the frightening part about it all. You never know when you might suddenly be standing on the edge of one of those cliffs. Yet I can remember the nightingales.'

  'Well, that's the important thing, isn't it? You have to hold on to that and wait for the other thing to pass.'

  'And Eleanor? Is she prepared to wait too while we all play the pretending game?'

  Behind the sofa Lucy is riveted with surprise: so the grown-ups know that Edward is playing games. They know how he steals food and about the other Edward that he plays at being and they don't really mind. In fact they are playing the game with him.

  'It's just that the doctor fears that any emotional confrontation might be damaging,' Hester is saying gently. 'Do you remember what he said?'

  'Oh, I remember. But, my God, Hes, can you imagine what a tremendous release it would be to make love to my wife. Can you possibly imagine the relief it would be just to do it? Oh, don't worry. I'm not likely to, not the way she looks at me. The sight of me disgusts her and I don't blame her . . . She and Michael seem to be very close.'

  'We're all very close. The war has seen to that, and having Lucy with us has made Michael more like a brother than a friend. Go on with the poem, Edward.'

  There is a little silence but when he begins to read his voice is calm again and Lucy relaxes. For one moment, when he talked about Eleanor, she'd feared that the other Edward might emerge.

  'How curious is the nest: no other bird

  Uses such loose materials or weaves

  Its dwelling in such spots – dead oaken leaves

  Are placed without and velvet moss within

  And little scraps of grass and, scant and spare,

  What scarcely seem materials, down and hair . . .'

  Lucy can picture the nest. She and Jack found one once, so tiny it was, so beautifully made, and Jack climbed a tree and put the nest carefully in a fork in one of the branches but low down so they could see it from the ground. They waited and waited but no bird ever came to lay its eggs in it.

  'What sillies you are,' Nanny said later, when she heard about the nest. 'The babies are all grown up now and flown away, that's why the nest was on the ground. It's not needed any more.'

  'Deep adown

  The nest is made, a hermit's mossy cell.

  Snug lie her curious eggs in number five

  Of deadened green or rather olive-brown,

  And the old prickly thorn-bush guards them well.

  So here we'll leave them, still unknown to wrong,

  As the old woodland's legacy of song.'

  The chocolate biscuit and the milk are all finished up but Lucy continues to sit, cross-legged, waiting. Some instinct warns her that it would be unwise to show herself. Luckily, Hester is stirring, talking about preparing dinner, and presently she gets up and goes out, leaving the door open. Carefully and very slowly, Lucy edges her way out from behind the sofa, leaving the tea-set but carrying her dolly and Rabbit.

  A tiny sound alerts Edward to her presence and he looks round quickly. Lucy stands stiffly, clasping the doll and the rabbit to her chest, waiting for some kind of angry reaction from him. He stares at her and, to her surprise, she sees that his eyes are full of tears. They make his eyes shine in the firelight and one rolls down his sunken cheek. Lucy swallows, controlling her desire to run. The tears make her think of Jack, of Robin, of the frustrations and misunderstandings of the children's world and, instead, she holds out the doll to him.

  Edward leans forward to take it and his face is gentle again. He sits the doll on the cushion beside him, smoothing her skirts and settling her carefully, and then stretches a hand to Lucy. She goes to him, scrambling up beside him, and they sit close together, sharing a wordless kind of loving.

  What shall we do? Hester asks herself. Oh, what shall we do?

  As she heats up the vegetable soup she wonders how long they can go from day to day simply postponing the moment of decision. Do they really believe that one morning Edward will wake, revitalized, normal, as he was four years before, and that, by some miracle, Eleanor will fall in love with him all over again?

  The point is, thinks Hester, that I have to believe it – for what else is there to do? A tiny part of her mind tells her that Michael should take Eleanor and Lucy and go back to London; that Edward would soon come to terms with Eleanor's defection and that he would be more stable once Eleanor was out of the way. This might be so but has she, Hester, the courage to manage Edward, to have sole care of him? Nanny has offered to come back if she can be of any assistance – and that might be an option. Nevertheless, there are times when Michael's strength has been necessary to subdue Edward and Hester's heart quakes at the prospect of being alone with him, even with Nanny to assist.

  Opening the oven door to check the rabbit stew, she thinks of the frightening episode that happened on the first day that Edward insisted on getting up in time for breakfast downstairs.

  'I think he's beginning to get restless at being treated as an invalid,' Michael had said. 'It's best to let him, Hes.'

  When he'd arrived in the dining-room he'd been carrying an old coffee tin. The lettering had been completely rubbed away and it was dented and shiny with constant handling. Edward placed it beside his plate and, sitting down, carefully repositioned his knife and fork, putting them together beside the tin. They have grown used to this behaviour. Each lunchtime – the only meal Edward has so far shared with them all – he tends to collect his cutlery together and becomes distressed if any of it is removed during lunch. They've discovered that it's best to leave everything he uses at his place and then it is cleared only after he has left the room.

  On this occasion, Hester had simply picked up the tin so that she could put his coffee cup beside his plate but his reaction had been instantaneous. He'd leaped up with a scream of rage, his chair flung backwards, and he'd seized Hester's wrist in one hand and wrenched the coffee tin from her with the other whilst desperate words bubbled unintelligibly from his lips. It was Michael who had come to her rescue, forcibly unlocking Edward's fingers, wrestling him away and back into his chair where he'd held him down whilst Edward wept uncontrollably and clutched his tin. Eleanor had simply fled the room whilst Lucy had disappeared under the table, waiting for the storm to pass.

  Now,
as Hester puts out some apples into a bowl, she wonders what other unconsidered action might bring down Edward's wrath upon her. How would she manage without Michael? She suspects that she simply doesn't have the will or the energy to make a decision; they will go on, from day to day, hoping for a miracle.

  As it happens, the decision is taken out of her hands. Because it is not her nature to be either devious or self-seeking it does not occur to Hester that Eleanor has decided to pre-empt the situation. Their relationship is better than it has ever been but Eleanor does not confide her idea to Hester. She is careful to put her new plan into action only when Hester is nowhere to be seen and, if possible, when Michael hasn't seen Edward nearby or doesn't know he's within earshot. She begins so cautiously, so cleverly, that even Michael doesn't realize that she is deliberately inflaming Edward into some kind of response.

  In his hypersensitive condition tiny things alert him only too readily: Eleanor's hand lingering overlong on Michael's shoulder when she leans across him to place something on the table; a quick reach up on tiptoe to whisper something private in his ear; a reluctance to leave a stolen embrace. Her quick ears and sharpened awareness seem to judge exactly when Edward will appear so that he sees just enough to arouse his emotions. After three weeks of anxious care, Michael's antennae are blunted and he is beginning to flag in his watchfulness. He cannot understand why Edward is less open with him; he seems silent and surly and Michael is at a loss as to what to do. Because they have all witnessed Edward's sudden, uncontrollable rages Michael never guesses for a moment that Eleanor might be actually hoping to precipitate Edward into an action that will force a decision.

  As for himself, Michael is slowly coming to understand that there can be no future for him with Eleanor. To his shame and confusion he sees that he has added what he knew and loved of Susan to what he feels physically for Eleanor and in these few weeks constantly in her company he sees that he has been a fool. Eleanor is no Susan and he realizes now that they have little in common. She is not particularly interested in Lucy, except as a means to his own heart, and he is filled with a kind of paralysing horror at the thought of spending the rest of his life with her. He is also terrified at the prospect of telling her this – and, anyway, how is he simply to take Lucy and go back to London, leaving Hester with Edward? He knows now that there is no question of Eleanor remaining with her husband.

  Although he is not aware of it, Eleanor picks up all the signs of his growing dilatoriness and is even more determined to make a push for her own future.

  Events come to a head one stormy evening as she sits with Michael in the drawing-room. All day the rain has fallen in drenching sheets of water, teeming down the windows, streaming from the moors and fields into the rapidly rising river. Now, shortly before dinner, the downpour has ceased although the wind is rising. It rattles at the windows and echoes in the chimneys.

  Eleanor has seen Edward go out onto the terrace a few moments before Michael comes in: the French doors are closed but the curtains are pulled back. Now, so concentrated is she on the darkness beyond the firelight that she doesn't notice Lucy slip into the room whilst she is pleading with Michael, persuading him to make the break. They sit close together, their knees touching and she takes his cold, unwilling hands in her own.

  'I can't just walk out on Hester,' Michael is saying, in a low, desperate whisper. 'You must see that. And, anyway . . .'

  His voice dies away but Eleanor is alarmed at the 'And, anyway', all her senses are alerted and she is determined not to allow any kind of doubt in his love for her to be voiced. She speaks urgently, her voice hard.

  'It's because of Lucy, isn't it? If it weren't for her we could get away. You're a fool, Michael. Something terrible is going to happen and it will be because of Lucy.'

  At this moment Eleanor sees what she has been waiting for: a flicker of white in the darkness on the terrace. Edward has returned and is outside the window, peering into the room. She puts her hands on Michael's shoulders and kisses him passionately on the mouth and, in the same second, Hester comes in and switches on the light just as Edward bursts through the French doors pursued by the clamouring noise of water.

  Even in the face of his fury, Eleanor clings for as long as she can to Michael; she has staked everything on this throw and she is going to make the most of it. Edward seizes her by the shoulder, his fingers cruel and hard, and she cries out with the pain of it, and then Michael is grappling with him, dragging him away, aided by Hester, who is crying out, 'Oh, don't, Edward, please don't,' and hanging on to his jacket. Eleanor begins to scream, though she finds the violence of the scene faintly exciting, and the two men struggle together, crashing into the furniture and grunting with exertion.

  They are near to the open French doors when Edward flings Michael off and turns again on Eleanor. This time she is truly frightened and, when he takes her by the throat, she realizes just what a risk she has taken. Edward might look feeble and old but there is the strength of the madman in his fingers. Michael rushes him, catching him off balance and punches him violently in the face. The blow completely unbalances Edward, who staggers back at a run, releasing Eleanor and stumbling on to the terrace. He falls, collapsing half over the low wall and then disappears into the swollen, tumbling water below.

  Hester is there, almost as he falls, though Eleanor seizes her by the shoulders as if to restrain her physically from following him into the water. Below them Edward is struggling, trying to cling to the overhanging branches of a hazel tree, before being swept away by the current.

  It is Michael, dazed, blood oozing from his mouth, who cries out in despair. He yells as if for help and goes racing along the terrace and out on to the bridge still calling just as the rain begins to fall again in torrents.

  'Michael, wait,' shouts Hester. 'Wait. There's no point . . .' She goes after him, knowing he can't hear her above the river and the wind, and seizes him by the arm. 'Michael, wait. There's no point going along the road. Nobody will come that way at this time of night. And Edward will be carried downstream. Come and help me look for him.'

  He suffers himself to be led back and Eleanor hurries to him, putting an arm about his shoulders and taking him inside, but now it is Hester who takes control.

  'Go and wake Lucy,' she says almost angrily to Eleanor. 'Pack her things and Michael's. You must go now, all of you. Whatever happens you must get away. We can't risk another confrontation. Come with me, Michael.'

  They go together out through the house, running along the lawn to the end of the garden where the bank gives shallowly into the river and here they find Edward, lying halfway up the bank, soaked and exhausted. Even so, he rouses himself at the sight of Michael, shouting feebly and fighting his attempts to haul him out. Once they have dragged him across the grass and it is clear that he can stand, Hester gestures at Michael to let go of him.

  'Go now,' she shouts at him, her words flung away by the wind, hardly audible above the river's tremendous voice. 'For God's sake. Just go now as quick as you can,' and he hesitates only for a second before hurrying into the house.

  When Lucy hears Eleanor running up the stairs she clenches herself even tighter into a ball beneath the blankets. She is trembling with shock: first the breaking of the Midsummer Cushion, the dried flowers crumbling to dust, the glass splintering on the floorboards; then the fight between her father and Edward. Their hands, clutching and gripping, seemed swollen with violence and the final blow seemed all of a piece with the savage wildness of the howling wind and the thunderous, surging water. She seems to hear voices in her head: first Jack's saying, 'If we touch it something really bad will happen,' and then Eleanor's saying, 'Something terrible will happen and it will be because of Lucy.' She has touched the Midsummer Cushion, she has broken it, and something very bad indeed has happened. Yet, even now, she can't quite take it all in. The events of the evening have been so appalling that she wonders if she has been having a nightmare: perhaps she will wake to find that it is one of her bad
dreams.

  Eleanor is real enough, though. She bends over the bed, speaking her name urgently, but Lucy squeezes her eyes closed and holds herself rigid.

  'Wake up, Lucy!' Eleanor says in a kind of furious whisper. 'We've got to go to London. Get up. Be quick.'

  Lucy unrolls herself, still clutching the blanket up to her chin, and stares up at her.

  'I'm not going,' she says tremulously.

  'Oh yes, you are,' says Eleanor, tugging the blanket away, and when Lucy struggles and begins to cry she takes her by the shoulders and her fingers dig in so painfully that Lucy stops crying and stares at her in amazement.

  'We're going to London,' whispers Eleanor, her face close to Lucy's, 'because your daddy has killed Edward. They had a fight and he's killed him. Now do you understand? If he stays here he'll be caught and taken to prison. Now get up and get dressed quickly and never say a word about this to anyone. Not anyone, especially not your father. Do you understand? Now where are your clothes? Put on plenty of warm things. Is this your case? Be quick.'

  Too frightened to utter a word, Lucy begins to dress, pulling on her knickers and liberty bodice and her jersey while Eleanor opens the little painted chest and folds Lucy's clothes with quick movements. Lucy hurries to take her Little Grey Rabbit books from the shelf lest they should be forgotten and picks up Rabbit and her dolly, hugging them to her chest, and all the time she is shaking with fear. The terrible thing has happened and it is all her fault.

  'Wait there,' Eleanor says, again in that fierce whisper and, shutting Lucy's door behind her, she goes away across the landing whiles Lucy, sitting obediently on the bed, still shivering with terror, can hear her opening drawers and closing cupboards.

  When she's packed as much as she can for herself and Michael, Eleanor hears him coming up the stairs. She hurries to meet him, putting her finger to her lips and gesturing towards Lucy's door.

  'He's OK,' he mutters. 'He and Hes are in the kitchen getting him dried off. He's pretty bashed about but he's OK, thank God. Hester needs some dry clothes for him.'