“I am sorry, sir,” she said, her voice not much above a whisper. “I knocked and knocked as loud as I dared. Only there is a lady in the kitchen wishing to speak to you.”
“In the kitchen?”
“Yes, sir.” Hannah turned her back and I realised that I had without thinking swung my legs out of the bed. I pulled the counterpane over them again, but was conscious of my shins and feet still being uncovered. Hannah addressed the wall. “The lady came in by the gardens, sir, and rapped on the window.” Her voice grew fainter still. “I thought for a moment she was a ghost.”
I asked Hannah was my grandfather roused too, but, no, she said, there was no one else awake but her. The house was still new to her, she had not yet learned to reconcile herself to its creaks and groans, and for that reason preferred to make up a bed in the kitchen, where she had the fire for comfort, otherwise she might never have heard the lady herself. Besides – she said it again – the lady had asked very particularly if she could speak to me.
I thanked her then for taking such care in delivering the message, as though a lady clambering over the back gardens in the middle of the night was an occurrence of no great irregularity or impropriety with us, and asked her to see to it that the lady was comfortably installed. “You are right,” I said, “there is no need for anyone else to be disturbed.”
My clothes lay where I had dropped them when Courtney had finally weighed anchor and I was able to stagger home. As soon as Hannah had closed the door behind her, I dressed to my waistcoat and, taking my boots in my hand, descended through the house in stockinged feet. My laces were still not tied when I eased open the door into the kitchen.
Hannah was standing just inside, looking at her hands crossed on her skirts. She did not wait for me to ask her to withdraw.
Maria sat, very still, very upright, at the table where Hannah and Molly took their meals (Nisbet was rarely to be found back here these days), a tin cup before her, a candle to one side. She was wearing, I was almost certain, the same dress and lace pelerine as she had worn on the last occasion that I had seen her in town. The bonnet she had had on then nestled in her lap, the brim peeping over the table edge.
“Hannah has looked after you?” I said.
“Yes, thank you.”
Were it not for the candle, we might have been talking at three in the afternoon rather than in the morning.
She tilted the cup towards her. “Máslanka,” she said. “I forget what the word is in English.”
I came to stand beside her. Two strings of onions hung down from the beam above the table, rendered so many shrunken heads by the candlelight. “May I?” I lifted the cup to my nose and straight away withdrew it again. “Buttermilk,” I said (I had never been able to stomach the stuff), “like the lane – the ‘loney’,” and Maria nodded, then all at once began to sob, burying her face in her hands. She was so dreadfully, dreadfully sorry for turning up at my house at such an hour, she said through the tears, but since I had once offered her my protection while she was in Belfast . . . Of course, I said, of course. I dropped to my knees by her chair.
“Whatever can have happened to you?” I asked.
She stood up, spilling her bonnet on to the floor, drawing the candle flame behind her. It was all so foolish and embarrassing, she who had teased me for my inexperience, to have been trapped as she had been trapped tonight.
“Maria!” I exclaimed then, collecting myself, whispered urgently. “In the name of G—, tell me what has happened.”
“You must not think ill of me,” she said as she sat. I promised her I would not, though in truth the images already cavorting across my mind were more grotesque than anything the candlelight could conjure.
She had, she said, when the flame had settled again, come to town tonight hoping to meet a gentleman – she gave the word some consideration before deciding it was the one she wanted – who had offered to help her with her passage to the free port of Odessa, which – I would forgive her, she hoped, if she did not attempt a map tonight – lay fewer than five hundred miles from her home in Łuków.
“So, he has written at last,” I said.
She drew a sigh: I was breaking the thread. “No, ‘he’ has not, but it was never my intention to stay here for ever. Lately I had tried to put hopes of leaving soon out of my head, but then a few nights ago I found myself in conversation with this . . .” – gentleman the second time was too much – “person . . .”
“At the inn?” I knew how petulant I must sound, but I could not help myself. The thought of her talking to anyone else there as she had talked to me filled me with a jealousy close to ungovernable.
She stopped. She had got the better of her tears completely now. “Perhaps I should not have come after all.”
“Please,” I said, “go on.”
“I had met him first when I was in town on other business,” she proceeded, as slowly as if she were testing ice with her toe. “Looking for a pawnbroker to take more of your aunt’s jewels,” I thought, but bit down on my lip, determined not to “crack” again. “He said he had an interest in a merchant ship, which sailed regularly to the Black Sea. He even had a friend in Odessa, a Turk, who could assist me with the onward journey by coach.” For a moment she was transported by the mere word. “Perhaps even less than five hundred miles . . .” She shook her head, returning to the kitchen in Donegall Place, to the handle of the mug of máslanka, which she turned this way and that. “He would not listen to talk of money. He said, ‘I am sure we can come to some arrangement.’” She paused; seemed for a moment to grow a little smaller. “What would you think if a person said this to you, ‘we can come to some arrangement’?”
“Only that,” I said feebly. “An arrangement.”
She shook her head again, as though appalled anew at her own naivety, at the slipperiness of our language. She drew herself up once more to her full height. On her arrival at the “person’s” house tonight (she would not name even the street, although I was narrowing it down to one of two or three), the arrangement had been laid before her in the most explicit terms imaginable and by then it was too late for her easily to extricate herself. So she had tried to keep him talking, and drinking (for that, at least, he needed little persuasion), drinking and talking, until, just when she had begun to fear that she would run out of things to say, or he of things to drink, he had finally got up to relieve himself – for one heart-sinking moment she had thought he meant to use the fireplace, but no, some vestige of decorum lived on within him; he carried on out to the privy – and she had fled.
“My hands were trembling so much I thought I would not be able to turn the key in the lock. Once I was outside I did not stop or look back. I was afraid that if I took the road to the inn he would catch up with me out there in the darkness. I was saying your name over and over as I ran. All I could think of was finding you.”
I had started to raise myself up off my knees, but stopped. “How did you know where I lived?”
“The day you were carried into the inn. Your friends gave instructions when they were sending for the carriage to take you back to town.”
“You have a good memory.”
“It is the exile’s refuge,” she came back at once.
“And a very good sense of direction to come in by the back way.”
“I knew the gate,” she said, then hesitated. “I mean, I had walked down there once before in the daytime.”
“So, you have been doing some spying of your own?” The idea delighted me.
She frowned. “Not spying . . . Only looking.”
Before the last word was out I had leaned forward and kissed her cheek. She averted her face, touching the spot where my lips had landed, then turned back to me. I kissed her mouth, which opened a little, as if in surprise, although it did not close again when the first moment passed, but pressed forward against my own, drawing on my tongue with hers, and now the surprise was all mine, that I was being admitted into this other being, to where her voi
ce resided, her very breath. I felt as I had felt that far-off day when I had put out in the boat with the Second Greatest Engineer in the Empire, that everything I had up to then counted on as a certainty was drifting away from me. This time I did not care if it ever came back.
Maria placed her hand on my jaw, turning my head aside.
All at once I was appalled at myself: she had run to me for refuge from one brutish man and now I, too, was taking advantage.
“Forgive me,” I said.
“No,” the hand on my face softened to a caress, “I am the one who should ask you for forgiveness. Really, I should not have come here like this.”
I started to protest: I would not have had her do otherwise. She stopped me with her fingers on my lips. I heard a movement, a scuffling, where the dresser stood, on the far side of the room. “Mouse,” she whispered, close to my face, “too quiet for rat,” then, drawing back, breathed out like one defeated. “This is not wise.”
“If wise is all,” I said and, acting on I knew not what, took one of her fingertips between my teeth. Her arm went rigid, as though I had discovered a paralysing nerve. I ran my tongue over the pad of that finger and the next, my eyes fixed firmly on hers, glittering in the candlelight. The third finger was in my mouth, then the fourth. Her tongue moved behind her parted lips, mirroring the motion of my own. I placed an arm about her waist and drew her to me. She resisted only for as long as it took her to lean across and blow out the candle.
Light was already leaking into the sky beyond the kitchen window. We had minutes together, not hours, although I could scarcely have told you one from the other; it was nothing like enough time and it was time enough; the axis of my life had tilted.
At the first stirrings on the house side of the kitchen door, we drew apart. I held her face in my hands. Her eyes were closed. I had never seen her so at peace, had never felt myself so comfortable in another’s presence, so unaware of where one of us ended and the other began. I kissed each eyelid in turn and felt the kisses as though the lips were hers, the eyelids mine. She murmured something that I neither caught nor asked her to repeat. The expression on her face told me all that I needed to know. It looked how I imagined my own did at that moment.
And then, like the minutes that had led up to it, that moment too passed.
Maria adjusted her dress. I retrieved her pelerine from the foot of the chair, her bonnet from where it had come to rest under the table. The latter’s lace trim had picked up dust, stray hairs, and a single grey down feather on its journey. I blew along it. The feather, and hairs, took harmless flight, but the dust, having soot in it too, left behind a smirch.
“I am afraid your bonnet has got a bit grubby,” I said.
She took it from me and rubbed the mark carelessly between forefinger and thumb, which only had the effect of smudging it more. “There,” she said. “All better.”
I led her across the yard and through the gardens, past the midden, past the privy, past the hen run, past beds of scallions and peas and raspberry bushes just coming into flower, to the gate on to Fountain Street. Several gardens down, Mr Sinclair’s dogs were baying to be let loose on the town. He had run them only the morning before; I knew, even if the dogs did not, that they would not be out again so soon.
“Take the next street on the right. I will meet you at the end of it in five minutes,” I said. Maria rocked forward on her toes and placed a final kiss on my lips.
“I know the way. Remember?” she said, then slipped out through the gate. Dew had saturated the toe of my boots. It had seeped through the stitching of the soles. I might as well have been barefoot.
Hannah had returned to the kitchen in the time that I had been out and was tending to the fire. She rose and curtsied as I came in. At almost the same moment, Molly entered the kitchen from the other end, fastening her apron, frowning. “Have you that fire never lit yet . . . ? Oh!” She held a hand theatrically to her breast. “I had not expected to see you at this hour, Master Gilbert.”
“The birds woke me,” I said.
Hannah, who had knelt again before the hearth, said nothing.
“It is the time of year for them, all right,” said Molly. Her eyes lit on the remains of Maria’s buttermilk. I picked up the cup and drank it off, squeezing my eyes shut against the tang. When I opened them, Molly’s head was angled to one side. Could this be the same wee boy who had told her on more than one occasion when he was growing that she could keep her buttermilk for bleaching the table linen? I smacked my lips. She shook her head then took a basket from a hook by the door and continued into the yard. When she had gone I went out to the cloakroom where a search of the coat I had worn the night before yielded a farthing and two sixpences, and not, as the smell of the thing suggested, a couple of pipes with their ashes still in them. I came back to the kitchen and, bending down, placed the sixpences in the pocket of Hannah’s apron. She acknowledged them with a bob of her head and shoulders.
“The lady was able to make her way home shortly after you retired,” I told her; again the bob. Molly returned, her basket already in that short time four eggs the heavier, but lighter still than she could have hoped. “It is a wonder they have not stopped laying altogether,” she said, “the sound of those dogs.”
I asked her to tell my grandfather that I had gone to work early and would see him that evening at supper.
First the crack-of-dawn rising, then the buttermilk, now the haste to get to work . . . Molly’s eyebrows signalled that no one could tell her there were not still surprises to be had in this world of ours.
The Flags were in shadow when I stepped outside, but a broad band of sunlight slanted across the front of the White Linen Hall to my right, a perfect demonstration of the points of the weathervane perched on its cupola, and a fair reflection of my altered outlook on the world. I turned left, north, and found Maria waiting where I had directed, at the junction with Castle Street. She fell in beside me without a word. I do not know that we so much as turned to look at one another directly. At some point, however, before we had reached the forty-seventh, or forty-ninth, butcher’s shop on Hercules Street, she threaded a hand under my arm, which I crooked, laying my own hand on hers. It pleased me to think that no one seeing such a chaste arrangement of limbs would guess how intimately they had been entangled just a short time before, unless Maria’s jaunty twirling of her bonnet, attached by its ribbons to her free wrist, was a signal, or be able to detect the currents that continued to flow beneath the surface of the skin, heightening every sense. The sky looked bluer, the breeze smelled fresher; when a child’s laugh rang out from behind the door of one roadside cottage I would have sworn I had never before heard a sound as sweet.
On the Milewater Bridge an old woman tossed crusts for the gulls that manoeuvred for advantage in the air above her head. She smiled out from under her shawl as we passed, teeth insufficient to the scraps she gave away, told us we would do a body’s heart the “power of good” – yes indeed, the power of good.
The Mill announced itself with columns of smoke from the largest of its chimneys: building up steam for another day’s grinding. We stopped short of it, arms once more by our sides.
“Who would ever have dreamt this?” Maria said quietly, and I did not tell her that I had many times dreamt something like it, for in truth none of those dreams came close.
“I will come back tonight,” I said.
“No, not tonight. It will be as much as I can do to fill up the pots without washing the floor with ale. And you, too,” she said, “will want rest.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
She nodded. “Tomorrow.”
Neither of us attempted to kiss the other, as though that had been an explicit agreement between us. I watched her walk away from me, wondering would she turn then wondering that she did not then wondering whether her not turning was an indication of her certainty that I was still there, or her fear that I had already left, or indeed of her complete indifference to my staying or going
. She had arrived almost at the archway to the stables before she looked back. I saw her hand go to her lips. I saw it reach towards me, her head tip forward in the act of blowing.
She nearly knocked me off my feet.
Who had need of hot-air balloons? I flew back to town under the power of that kiss. I had had so little sleep and yet my legs were light – not the least trace now of hurt – my lungs seemingly inexhaustible. I felt as though I could run and run and run. I was seventeen! Why should I ever stop? I leapt bushes, I leapt logs, I leapt a three-legged dog that was too slow to get out of my path. I scattered the gulls on the Milewater Bridge, shouted “hello” to the old woman who had attracted them there. Down York Street, I ran, down Donegall Street, along the front of the Commercial Buildings, down Sugarhouse Entry, round a parked sedan chair from which a pair of legs stuck out (the sedan man’s? a reveller’s, too drunk to remember which way home lay?), left on to High Street, past Skipper Street, Bluebell Entry, Quay Lane, arriving at last at Chichester Quay and the door of the Ballast Office.
Bright had arrived just ahead of me. He looked as though he had just that moment stepped out of Bourdot and Galbraith’s.
“Heavens!” he exclaimed, then glanced behind me. “Do you think you managed to shake off the hounds?”
An image came to me of Lord Belfast on his grey mare, amid the writhing mass of Sinclair’s hunting pack. I stood, hands on hips, waiting for my breath at least to catch up with me. Bright narrowed one eye at me. “Another kind of pursuit? Two legs, cuckold’s horns?”
He made the sign above his head – index finger and little finger extended – then quickly turned them into a comb, which he drew, needlessly, through his hair. Sir Clueless was coming towards us, nose stuck in the shipping news. There were boats in want of ballast, or very soon would be, there was silt and sand as yet undredged. “Boys,” he said, more an identification of a species than a greeting. He selected a key from the ring at his waist. We entered behind him. The heels of his shoes were worn almost to the wooden block: all that pacing about he did in the course of a day.
The Mill for Grinding Old People Young Page 13
