THE MEETING PLACE

by MARY HOCKING

When at last she got back to the farm, Alan was waiting for her, looking rather like a loving dog, she thought, desperately anxious for the welfare of his meal ticket. Seeing him standing there in the yard, hunched in his anorak, she experienced a great need to cherish him, to hold on to him as never before. The warmth of their embrace surprised them both.

  ‘I was beginning to get worried,’ he said.

  ‘I was well into worry. It was late and I tried to take a short cut and ended up above your blasted mine.’

  ‘I expect you’re tired,’ he said speculatively.

  ‘You want me to hear your lines?’

  ‘It’s just that I think this part is going to be too much for me.’

  ‘You said that all through Hamlet and you got the Thames Valley award for best amateur performance.’

  ‘I was fifteen years younger then,’ he said, following her into the farm. ‘And there are particular difficulties with playing a character who isn’t involved in the action. If you’re not careful the audience is going to wish old Gower would shuffle off for good and let the players get on with it.’

  He came up to her bedroom with her and she heard him say his lines, listened to his anxieties about holding the attention of the audience, and made one or two tentative suggestions which he would not accept now but which would later become so much a part of his performance that he would be convinced he had thought of them himself. This seemed fair enough to her, used to being his subliminal voice.

  ‘It’s very comfortable here,’ he said, looking around him. ‘Much better than where I am. I’ve got Jimmy Howlett next door. His love-making’s as laborious as the delivery of his lines. Different woman each night so far. I’m the constant factor. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since I got here.’

  ‘Do you want to move in here?’

  He thought about this, weighing advantages. ‘Bit isolated. The village is bad enough, if you can call it that, but there are several people from the other companies there as well as our lot.’ He enjoyed the easy conviviality and the undemanding friendship of theatre people; a society in which one was accepted not so much for oneself as for the parts one played.

  ‘Should we eat here?’ he said. ‘Then we could go to the pub afterwards.’

  ‘I don’t suppose that would be a problem. They give me enough food for two anyway.’

  Later, as she looked at him across the table, the lamplight making the thin face cadaverous, she thought that perhaps she hadn’t tried enough to understand him. He wasn’t Robert, but he was all she had and he was her one chance of getting a hold on a reality that threatened to slide away from her.

  ‘Why are you so unsure of yourself?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t think I’m any more unsure of myself than any of the others. I’m confident once I get on stage.’

  ‘I mean you. Not you playing Gower, or Hamlet, or one of Alan Ayckbourn’s born losers.’

  ‘I’m naturally melancholy.’ He had long ago settled for melancholy, having discovered it was a subject few people were disposed to explore. ‘It’s a matter of one’s type of person, I suppose.’

  ‘What do you think your type of person is – apart from being melancholy?’

  He helped himself to more potatoes, considering. ‘Did I ever tell you about the questionnaire my wife and I got from the health farm?’

  ‘No, you never did.’

  ‘Well, you know she worked as a receptionist at a health farm? It seems some of the people had personality problems along with the weight problem. There was a questionnaire they were encouraged to fill in, rather like feeding your symptoms into a computer and having it come up with a diagnosis, only this was concerned with characteristics and responses to people and situations, rather than aches and pains. She insisted we both fill in one of these things. The idea was that it would tell you what type of person you were and this would make it easier for you to live with yourself, stop you straining to be someone else. It turned out that I belonged to a type that is two per cent of the population while she was run-of- the-mill forty per cent. She was furious – the way she talked you’d have thought I’d compiled the questionnaire rather than just filled it in to please her.’

  ‘You mean she thought being two per cent was some sort of claim to superiority?’

  ‘She said I always had to be different.’

  ‘And did it make it easier for you to live with yourself, knowing there weren’t many of you around?’

  ‘I knew that anyway. They picked it up at school – although they didn’t think it was a cause for congratulation.’

  ‘You sound so reconciled to it, Alan. Doesn’t it matter to you, being one on your own, more or less?’

  He pursed his lips and frowned, a mime of thought she had long ago learnt to see through in the classroom. She persisted, ‘Don’t you feel you are always sending out signals no one is picking up?’ Plainly, this was not how he felt; the idea that a signal might be emitted from his inner world was alarming. Whatever went on down there was not something on which he wished to receive an unsolicited report.

  Clarice, however, was no longer concerned with Alan’s reactions. ‘I do it all the time – I send out signals to someone out there, someone who is of like mind, who strikes the same chords. A quiet listener sitting on the other side of the hearth, someone who understands the language of the heart. I never seem to meet them, not now, but they were there once. I’m sure they were there once, because I have such a sense of loss, as though a line of communication has been fouled.’

  Involuntarily, Alan moved his hand, as though he would reach out to touch her hand, then, thinking better of it, turned the palm upward in a gesture of rueful regret for the inadequacy of life.

  After a pause, Clarice said abruptly, ‘Have you ever seen a ghost?’

  ‘You know I haven’t,’ he said surprised. ‘You must remember all the trouble I had with Nigel Winterton over those scenes with Hamlet’s father’s ghost, booming away in that sepulchral voice, and standing there swathed in mist. It was quite the wrong way to produce it.’

  ‘What would have been the right way? Of understanding it, I mean, not of how to produce it?’

  ‘An inner urge made visible, I suppose.’

  ‘You mean Angela Wickham is really conjuring up a gardener she can leave to get on with it, without having to pay him?’

  He brightened at the mention of Angela Wickham’s ghostly gardener. ‘No need to ensure he had had a tetanus injection, either. But what’s your problem? Are you in need of some ghostly painter who will understand how to spring-clean your studio without actually moving one single object?’

  ‘I’d have to find out first whether I believed in ghosts. Do you?’

  ‘I don’t fancy the idea. Life’s cluttered enough as it is without finding spirits of another age using one’s space. I think the way I feel about them is the way I know I shouldn’t feel about foreigners – why don’t they stay in their own country?’

  ‘But what if they believe it is their country?’

  ‘Mmh – bit beyond me, I’m afraid.’

  Soon after this he returned to the pub, saying he could see that she was very tired. She stood in the porch for a little while looking into the night sky and thinking how odd it was that man, so fleeting a phenomenon, his lifespan so short, should have such a strong sense of possession.

  The moon was up and it was a bright night, yet something cast an enormous shadow across the farmyard and the field beyond. As once before, she had the feeling of being overhung by walls much higher than those of the farmhouse.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘She sees people,’ Dame Ursula said. ‘A woman, in particular.’ She did not go any further than that because she could not bring herself to credit that the creature might have received a visitation.

  The prioress, not herself notable for her humility, was merciless in putting down any pride in her nuns. She was well aware how Dame Ursula resented the thought that Joan Mosteyn might have received a vis
itation. She herself would have resented it had Dame Ursula been so favoured.

  ‘Our Lady can appear in many guises,’ she said severely. ‘And it is noted that it is often to those whom we think foolish that she reveals herself

  They both looked to where Joan Mosteyn sat sewing, the light shafting gently across her bowed head. She looked quite calm, although she was, in fact, bemoaning the unreasonableness of her husband.

  There was great unrest in the country in 1463 and Martin Mosteyn was away from home much of the time on his lord’s business. Joan was as ill-equipped to defend her hearth as the grape its vineyard. Certainly, she had not the wit to understand the interminable disputes that arose in her husband’s absence, let alone settle them. There was little joy on his return.

  ‘I told you this should not be allowed to continue,’ he was shouting about some misdoing of one of the villeins. ‘I wrote you instructions. Why did you not take the letter to the priest?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to learn to read so that I can understand your instructions myself.’ The steward was giving her instruction in that and much else, while neglecting more pressing duties.

  ‘Trying to learn to read!’ Their roles seemed to be reversed and Martin Mosteyn sounded for all the world like a shrewish wife, his voice shrill with frustration. ‘You can’t cook or sew or manage the servants, yet you waste time trying to learn to read.’

  ‘I can’t cook or sew,’ she stamped a foot to emphasise each failing, ‘or manage the house or read or write. And I’ll not try to please you more.’

  Martin was pale and quivering. He knew that he should have beaten her, but he was afraid to touch her; it was as though he had wakened a wild animal to a need to defend itself. Her rage died as quickly as it had flared up, but she made no apology and he did not have the courage to extort one. This the servants noted.

  He had thought her a simple creature when he married her, but she had grown more unfathomable each time he returned home. Once her eyes had looked into his with such artless candour that he felt a shock run through his breast as though she had driven a stake deep into his soul; but now there was an inexplicable sadness in those eyes that he found the more disturbing. He punished her by refusing her need for clothing and cutting down the amount of food that was put before her; she was a slow eater, as she was slow in everything else, and if she lingered over a meal he made the servants take it away. But he did not beat her. When he made love to her he showed no tenderness. Once this had distressed her, but now she did not seem to care; when he hurt her, she moaned a little, but there was no reproach in the eyes that stared past him out of the window or into the shadows of the room, as though he were not there. Her indifference made him vicious, but even this she bore with stoicism; she was very strong physically. After he had been home only a short time, she began to complain of sickness and she told him that she was with child. This was a great relief to him. He became more generous, allowing her a few delicacies that she fancied and tolerating her indolent ways.

  Joan was happy that summer and would often walk to the priory, where the nuns were kind to her and tried to teach her to sew. She would sit on a bench in the sun practising her stitches, full and content. The sun that shone day after day warmed her and hope surged within her so that her very heart seemed to expand. She had always felt herself to be trembling on the verge of some great happiness and now believed it would come to her with the birth of the baby, a creature especially designed to bring her delight. She was sure it was the steward’s child.

  ‘He was so beautiful,’ she said. ‘So beautiful. And my husband said that there must have been a gypsy in my family, for his people were never so swarthy.’

  ‘This is the son she is talking about, fathered, it would seem, by her husband’s steward,’ Dame Ursula said, thin-lipped. ‘She is forever in and out of the past.’ This particular piece of the past she had no difficulty in crediting.

  The prioress said, ‘She is preparing to meet her end, as we all must, and she is reviewing her life, gathering up the threads.’

  And a threadbare garment it would be when assembled. Dame Ursula thought.

  Chapter Nine

  Edward Tresham had come across an old history of the moor. It was not a work of scholarship, being more concerned with folklore and anecdote, but he had read it in the hope that it might contain details of the building of Foxlow Priory, about which so little seemed to be known. It became plain as he read, however, that the author knew rather less than Edward himself. He put the book aside and immediately the anxieties he had been trying to keep at bay took possession of his mind.

  The lamp he had lit flickered in a draught; he had placed it on the window-sill so that Rhoda would see it when she came into the yard. Daylight was only just beginning to die and there was really no need of the lamp, but it gave him comfort. In the room below he could hear Eleanor, Rhoda’s cousin, admonishing the children. When he had gone downstairs to seek his wife ten minutes ago, she had told him that Rhoda had gone for a walk, tossing the remark over her shoulder as though it were of no consequence, while she busied herself with sorting linen.

  ‘I would rather Rhoda didn’t do this,’ he had said, but she had only shrugged and replied, ‘She’ll come to no harm. Harold’s up there, he’ll keep an eye on her.’

  ‘Your husband can hardly survey the whole moor.’

  ‘And ’tis fine and dry and the air will do her good.’ A woman incapable of attending to more than one thing at a time, Edward thought, as he left her folding sheets.

  He regretted the decision to come here, but Rhoda had been ill and longed for the place, and in his weakness he had humoured her. The building, which until the beginning of the century had been an inn, was possessed of a set of rooms which, although now normally occupied by the farmer and his wife, could on occasions be set aside for guests. He could have wished their lodging a little less comfortable; she might then have been subjected to the full rigours and crudity of farm life and severed her romantic attachment to it.

  He heard her footsteps in the yard and stood looking down while their daughter ran out to greet her mother, a lively, dancing creature often years, who usually lightened his heart. Today, when he felt himself separated from them in sympathy and understanding, the sight of these two, his dearest possessions, wrenched at his heart.

  ‘Veronica so enjoys being with the other children, I have said she may stay down there for another half-hour,’ Rhoda said apologetically when she entered the room. Then, seeing his drawn face, she came and laid a hand on his arm. ‘My dear, there was no need to worry. See how well wrapped I am.’

  ‘But you should not go out alone on the moor.’

  ‘I only walked as far as the shepherd’s hut.’

  ‘The place is not good for you,’ he said as he helped her out of her cloak, noticing with joy and fear how she emerged from the brown cloth like a butterfly from its chrysalis. ‘I know it draws you, but there is something morbid in this strange fascination.’

  She looked up at him, smiling, hoping to ease him out of this unhappy mood. ‘It is not a fascination, Edward. This is the place where I grew up and it is home to me.’ She smoothed the sleeves of her gown with little nervous gestures and he noticed how fine and fragile were her wrists.

  ‘Home is in London,’ he reproved her. ‘You can’t know how much you wound me when you say these things.’

  ‘I meant only that it is familiar and friendly’ she answered lightly, trying to keep the conversation from becoming too serious.

  ‘Friendly, that!’ He thrust his arm towards the window in an uncharacteristically dramatic gesture.

  She fetched the lamp from the window-sill, pausing for a moment to look at the hills, now rapidly darkening as the light failed. ‘It is friendly because it is familiar.’ Nevertheless, she turned away and brought the lamp to the table. ‘Just as you find your first sight of Highgate Hill welcomes you when we return, so, as the path climbs up from the river, I can smell the air and . .
.’

  ‘The air here is bad for you.’

  She sat by the fire, which he had neglected in his distress. ‘But it is as fresh at the end of the day as it is in the morning. You cannot say that of the London air.’ She picked up the poker. ‘I don’t know what has happened here, Edward; you are usually so . . .’

  ‘The London air is not so harsh as this.’ He took the poker from her and went down on one knee to consider where to place it to the best effect.

  ‘And I like the great distances here. In London everything crowds in so.’

  He looked into her face. ‘You have no idea what a misery it is to me to know you are so unhappy in your home.’

  She leant forward and put her hands on his shoulders, returning look for look. ‘Edward, that is hardly fair. When have I ever complained or said that I am unhappy? All I ask is that you should allow me to be happy here, too, on this holiday to which you have so generously consented. How can you possibly object to my being happy in two places?’

  He turned away and set his mind to the fire and she thought this would be an end to it. Later, however, when their daughter was in bed, and Millie had brought them tea, he said, ‘But you must admit, my dear, there is so much pleasure in London that we both share, the walks in the park, the opportunity to hear music, to visit the exhibitions . . .’

  ‘Yes, all these are great pleasures,’ she assented, but averted her face and looked into the fire.

  ‘A much greater pleasure,’ he persisted, ‘you must surely admit, than any offered here. If you are honest, you will admit there is no comparison.’

  She said to the fire, ‘Pleasure, yes; perhaps that is so.’

  He knew she was thinking of something beyond pleasure that she found walking out there on the moor. Even now, as she thought about it, she had withdrawn from him into a world he could not share. He needed to possess her soul and to establish a secure place in her mind even more than he needed her body. He could never be at ease unless he knew what was going on inside all the people who mattered to him. At such moments as this, he was like an animal who cannot know when its mistress leaves it whether she has gone for an hour or for ever. His despair was absolute. No assurances, no promises, could reach him at such times. Once she moved outside the range of his own thoughts and pursuits she was lost to him. He could not trust her to be herself and still love him.