THE MEETING PLACE

by MARY HOCKING

  Mary Hocking

  THE MEETING

  PLACE

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter One

  On the way, Clarice turned into a lane with a signpost pointing in the direction of an old town on a hill that looked inviting across the intervening fields. She needed something inviting.

  Clarice Mitchell would have chosen to describe herself, if pressed to do so tiresome a thing, as a capable, no-nonsense person, not by choice but through the circumstances of life. Perhaps by choice she would have been passionate, wild, given to great loves, her life an uncoordinated series of amorous adventures. Perhaps. But the face that had looked back at her in the mirror each morning for sixty-nine years told her she wasn’t modelled that way – had told her so this morning in no uncertain terms. She was small. Everything about her was small, hands, feet, thighs, breasts, all nicely proportioned but small; the Cleopatras were outside her range, the only Shakespearean role she had ever been offered was Mustard Seed. And that was a bit of Freudian casting, for there was more than a suggestion of mustard in her constitution. The eyes, widely spaced, were considerate; the eyes of an observer rather than a dreamer. The puckered mouth suggested that what was observed would be shrewdly evaluated. Ever since she could remember she had been plagued by a prickly intelligence. She hadn’t asked for it, it was just there, like red hair or a Roman nose; there was nothing one could do about it, so one must learn to live with it. That, she supposed, might well have been her predominant attitude to life, accepting what was given and getting on with it, without making a fuss. She hated fuss. So why was she fussing now, driving so slowly up this innocent country lane as if she were heading for the city of dreadful night instead of a one-time county town long relegated to historic village status? And why had she taken this detour, anyway?

  Perhaps the problem lay in accepting the given of this particular occasion. She was making the detour because she needed to pause, and so she had turned off the A road and headed for the old town. It had looked inviting in its retirement, standing back from the modern world that had rejected it, a little lordly on its slight incline. But it was not as near as it had seemed. On either side were green fields and knots of trees behind which old red-brick houses took refuge – a picture conveying that overall sense of placid calm that the English countryside so well contrives. Clarice noted swallows lined up on telephone wires ready for departure and further on a magpie flew from a thicket. She muttered, ‘One for sorrow,’ and couldn’t recall what one was supposed to say to appease the fates if its partner failed to put in an appearance. The hedges were high and she could not see the town as she approached; even after a reassuring sign that proclaimed she had arrived, it seemed to want to hide itself.

  When eventually she had parked in what she took to be the main street, broad and tree-lined, the pale stone buildings sensible straight up and down, she sat for a few minutes letting her eye take in the scene, appreciating the contrasts of light and shade.

  High time she was behaving like this old town, with its cool, silvery look, she told herself; put some distance between herself and the modern world with all its stresses and strains. She got out of the car and turned towards the street, pleasantly full of purpose, but by the time she was sitting at the window of a quiet lounge bar, supplied with soup and a glass of wine, she was aware of her own particular stresses and strains. She was conscious of her breathing; not breathless, but conscious of the mechanism. Her body was like her car, it laboured and needed frequent servicing. Grudgingly she allowed it a pill.

  The eating area – it was scarcely a restaurant – affected the appearance of a private house; it was almost empty, as were the streets of the town. ‘Our season is really over now,’ the proprietor said when she remarked on this. He sounded mildly defensive but was mollified by her enquiry about the stone. ‘Blue lias and sandstone.’ They agreed that the effect was very pleasing. Four women came and sat at a table near the bar and he went to serve them. Clarice found herself drumming her fingers. The soup was both wholesome and appetising; it was also very hot. She tended to rush her meals, but, as this would not be possible, it seemed a good opportunity to study the notes handed out to members of the company by the Theatre Club director. Last chance to turn back, she thought wryly as she sipped the wine. It was only half a joke.

  When the invitation had come from the Beacon Theatre Company she had not at first intended to volunteer her services. She valued the involvement with the local amateur theatre. Her own work as a painter tended to be solitary and she did not enjoy socialising for its own sake, so the opportunity to join with others engaged, however modestly, even at times ineptly, in creative endeavour was important to her. But the idea of putting on a performance in another company’s theatre did not appeal to her. The Beacon was well known in the world of amateur theatre, and not only for its unusual location; its standards were formidably high and its facilities for rehearsal were the envy of many larger companies. The opportunity, not only to mount a production there but to rehearse in one of the old barns, was not to be missed, the director had informed her. Clarice had been about to say that this was one opportunity she was prepared to miss when it suddenly came to her that the name of the place was familiar for reasons quite unconnected with theatre.

  ‘I once knew someone whose grandmother was born in that farm,’ she had exclaimed, reading the letter from the Beacon Theatre Company.

  That someone had been Clarice’s headmistress and until this moment Clarice had never given a thought to the occasionally mentioned grandmother, let alone the remote farm where she had been born. Miss Wilcox had sprung fully formed into Clarice’s life; the fact that she had begetters had seemed irrelevant, if not actually implausible. Hers was the reality of the immortals of fiction. Now, re-reading the letter, Clarice saw and heard Miss Wilcox with the vividness of actuality rather than memory. She was saying:

  ‘We are unique, each one of us, and our life is our unique gift. But it needs to be released, because it has been locked up by the forces of custom and convention. I intend to release your life.’ As she spoke she raised her arms. She was a woman of generous proportions, physical and emotional, and the sleeves of her gown seemed to envelop the children so that they saw themselves in a dark cavern and believed that Miss Wilcox would indeed free them from it. Miss Wilcox, hovering above them like a vast, benign bat, had one last word. ‘And when I have released you, you must still beware of expectation – your own as well as that of others.’ When she first read the letter from the Beacon Theatre Company, Clarice had felt she had received an imperative to go to the source of Miss Wilcox’s magic. Now, sitting in this small lounge, waiting for the soup to cool, she felt a belated need to rationalise the impulse. Much of her life had been spent torn between her father’s rationality and Miss Wilcox’s irrationality.

  ‘A good time to be travelling,’ the proprietor said, pausing by her table. ‘Fewer cars on the road.’

  ‘But not sensible.’

  A little perplexed, he moved on.

  Clarice folded the letter and put it back in her bag. Despite her misgivings, she knew she did not intend to turn back. But it hadn’
t been a sensible decision. There was no denying that lately, very gradually, the capable, no-nonsense Clarice Mitchell had started to part company with another, more unpredictable person who lived in deep seclusion, making only rare, but uncomfortably telling, forays into the outer world. One such appearance had put an end to what had promised to be a distinguished career in education. Order had been restored since then, but only because Clarice had agreed to change her way of life to accommodate the recluse. If it came to a parting, Clarice knew with whom she would be left. She had no wish for the recluse to take charge of this present enterprise and it was in order to call the no-nonsense person into service that she had stopped here, in this quiet old town so harmoniously set among the small green fields and gently sloping hills.

  For a time, she thought the strategy had worked. After leaving the eating place, she found the Quaker meeting house further down the road and sat for a time enjoying the familiar peace. When she left the town she was admirably relaxed at the wheel and philosophical about the farm vehicles, so like prehistoric creatures that have slipped their notch in time. She amused herself by visualising a series of illustrations which might accompany a fable on these lines.

  Three-quarters of an hour later, driving through open country, she was aware of the ground rising almost imperceptibly mile by mile, and realised she was nearing her destination.

  Nearing, or leaving behind? She asked herself this question when she stopped at a viewing point. She got out of the car and walked to the low stone wall that edged the parking bay. Leaving behind seemed to be the answer, for what now lay beneath her was the country through which she had passed. She seemed, standing here, to belong more to air than earth. She looked towards earth with detached interest.

  Immediately in front of her, blown grass on the hillside and the moving shadows of cloud. Far below, land laid out in patterns of activity; marshy levels that were ancient, the lay-out of fields that was medieval, intersected by roads and scattered with buildings that modern needs had imposed on them. She saw the relationship between roads and bridges, farm and hamlet, river and estuary; she observed how tracks, thin as veins, allowed passage through the marshes, and her eyes followed the line of a disused railway that had been superseded by a motorway serving the industrial needs of the distant city to the north. She saw the remains of an old fort sticking out of a field like a broken tooth, the restored water-mill that she had inspected only yesterday, and far on the horizon the chimneys of a power station.

  This is history, she thought, delighted. I hope they bring children up here to demonstrate: history, so often taught as a linear development, here seen as a tapestry, past and present co-existent. She looked at it, stretched out beneath, the nature of the land and the patterns of life it nourished, the events it recorded – the detritus of battles fought between armies long since departed and the continuing battle with the hungry sea, presently quiescent beyond the no-man’s-land of the marshes. In this setting of sowing and reaping, commerce and industry, the achievements and the mistakes were indelibly imprinted on the land, not to be smoothed away but incorporated, lived with and borne into the future that perhaps was also laid out before her, although she had not the eyes to see it.

  There was an edge to the wind she hadn’t noticed before. A billowing canopy of cloud had appeared, from the outer edges of which cones and tufts and wedges emerged as if someone had torn frantically at a great bale of cotton-wool. She turned back to the car park and saw, high above a scrubby hill, a tangle of brown fern and discouraged heather across which was scrawled the illusion of a path that seemed to hang on with difficulty and might at some stage lose its hold and slither down into that other world below.

  She had only one reminder of that other world once she had left the car park. Bracken and stunted trees obscured the view but at one point, at a turn of the path, there was a gate hung with an old tyre and tangled wire, and through this gap was a distant view of patchworked fields, limelit in a shaft of sunlight. Thereafter the track commanded her full attention. It climbed and climbed and eventually levelled out, rewarding her with nothing. Nothing, that is to say, but gorse and heather running dun into the distance. Nothing here to distract the attention, clutter the mind, charm the eye. On the gritty road ahead water gleamed inkily. Once here, the stages of her journey fell away, clean out of her mind. No other world seemed possible, though world was hardly the right word to describe something that seemed to have existed before worlds had been thought out properly. She was tired now and couldn’t handle her ideas. She let it be, and after this it was as if she had consented to something, although she didn’t know what, and was only aware of some change in her thinking or perhaps that she had now left thinking behind. Once, when the track narrowed, she said aloud, ‘If I go on I may not be able to turn back . . .’ She went on and forgot about it.

  The track should by now have joined what passed for a main road across the moorland. ‘What do you mean by main road?’ a friend had asked dubiously when Clarice had shown her the route she intended to take. ‘I mean one that goes from here to there without endlessly wiggling about and has been allotted a colour – in this case, yellow.’ There was no sign of the yellow road and the track was descending, which Clarice was sure it shouldn’t have done; worse still, it wiggled incessantly. Banks rose steeply on either side and trees arched ahead. She stopped and opened the window. There was the sound of water running.

  She needed to ask the way. But how, when she was on her own in what was apparently uninhabited land? It was then, at a sharp bend where she couldn’t possibly stop, that she saw the woman. It was as if some unseen hand had thrown an old painting down in front of her; a woman standing in a rocky pool formed by a spring. On the verge there was a long pole with bundles tied to it. The mouth of the stream was hidden in vegetation, but Clarice could see water cascading down the side of the bank. The noise must have blocked out the sound of the car, for the woman did not turn her head and all Clarice glimpsed of her was a tangle of unkempt tawny hair. Her dress was wrapped up around her thighs. Scarcely a walker’s outfit, so with any luck, unbelievable though it might seem, she was a native and could give directions, if not to the Beacon Theatre, then to the yellow road. She might even be grateful for a lift. Clarice stopped the car on the far side of the bend. It completely blocked the track, but as she had come to think of it as her private road, this did not concern her. She scrambled out and went back to the spring. The woman had gone. Clarice said loudly, ‘I don’t believe this!’ She was contemplating clambering up the bank when there was the sound of footsteps and a man appeared, a man in corduroys and muddy Wellington boots who had every appearance of knowing where he was. He accepted her statement that she was lost without surprise and, despite never having heard of the Beacon Theatre, confidently identified her route for her when shown the sketch map with which she had been provided. As she drove away, Clarice felt a tinge of regret that she and the woman had not even exchanged the wayfarers’ smile as their paths crossed.

  The farmer’s directions were clear, which was fortunate because the only human beings Clarice saw as she drove along the yellow road were two people on horseback and they were some distance away. Above her, dark purple cloud; on either side, long bands of hills, one behind the other, a dull burnish on them in the foreground, in the distance a thumb smear of charcoal on the skyline. She was relieved when she reached the farm.

  It had once been a wayside inn, so she had heard. That would have been a long time ago, but when she had her first sight of it, this was how it seemed: a staging post. She stopped some distance from the building. When she switched off the engine and opened the window she could hear water running and recalled that ever since she climbed on to the moor there had been the sound of hidden running water and the soughing of wind.

  She felt unjustifiably tired by her journey and something more than that, a tense exhaustion as though she had pushed herself to some limit. She did not want immediately to leave the shelter of the car. She
sat back and felt the wind cold against her cheek while she studied the house, as if she had the option of deciding this wasn’t what she wanted and could push on somewhere else.

  It had been built above a steep-sided valley; being close to where a spring of water rises, the site must always have had an attraction for settlers. Although it stood on high ground, surprising in this area where most dwellings were in the valley, the land to the south swept upward, fold on fold, giving some shelter. The oldest, two-storey part of the house, was built in the middle of the sixteenth century and low, one-storey extensions had been added later on either side. The result was a long, narrow house, well bedded in its green surround. The stonework, light with a hint of blue, was attractive and might have graced a more impressive structure – and in fact had, for the farmhouse, built at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, was on the site of a small priory.

  This was an area that had largely escaped recorded history and little was known about the priory, or the manor that replaced it. It was not Clarice’s idea of a manor, but no doubt life in this wild place had been fairly basic in the sixteenth century and the dwelling, which she saw as being just about adequate to accommodate Clarice Mitchell in modest comfort, might well have been considerable in the eyes of the few people who inhabited it. What surprised her more was that for a period during the succeeding centuries it had become an inn before reverting to a farmhouse. The place was so isolated she wondered where its customers would have come from; it could hardly have relied on passing trade. But, she reminded herself, highways as she recognised them did not exist here even now, and perhaps the track across the high moorland that she had followed was of greater significance in earlier times. She had read in a guidebook that as late as the 1880s men had walked over high commonland to an old homestead for a haircut. So an inn in this remote place might not, after all, be remarkable.

  The wind was getting stronger and the light was beginning to thin. She couldn’t stay here any longer or she would begin to re-evaluate her insistence that she should be accommodated at the farm, rather than at one of the pubs in the area. She had insisted and that was that. She got out of the car and walked into the farmyard. A woman who was retrieving a small child from what might appear to be an attempt to drown itself in a paddling pool, looked up and said pleasantly, ‘Miss Mitchell?’