THE MEETING PLACE

by MARY HOCKING

  The dusk was not dark enough for her at this moment and she averted her face. ‘Perhaps it was death of a kind that I wanted.’

  ‘No.’ He was vehement in his rejection of this. ‘You said freedom, that’s the word you used. You have to ask yourself what is this freedom that you need.’

  She was silent and after a few moments he said, his voice hoarse as if strained with pain. ‘I am sorry. I am the one who is foolish and shallow, suggesting that all problems can be resolved with a little reflection after a long walk. Heaven knows I have walked and walked and found the same problems waiting for me unameliorated on my return home.’

  Unequivocally, and with an icy clarity, it came to her: you are the resolution of all my problems. I want the freedom to love you – so perhaps it is not freedom I want, but another kind of bondage. Aloud, she said, ‘This is as far as I can go.’

  He looked out towards the moor where the last of the light glimmered pewter on the rim of the sky. ‘I have been hungry for so long,’ he said. ‘We must talk again, please.’ He turned and took her hands. ‘You must see that we can’t leave things like this. Will you come to the parsonage soon; whenever you are able to arrange it? I will make it my business to stay there for a day or so. In any case, there is much that I have neglected.’ She was looking at him as he spoke, emboldened because it seemed that this might be the last time she would see him, for she certainly could not consent to what he had asked. In the evening light the violet eyes looked huge in the pale face. He touched her cheek with a finger and miraculously, as if he had found a hidden spring, the tears came.

  As he took her in his arms she felt something twist and jerk in her stomach. It was as though a stream had been unblocked; it was running through her body when she hurried back to the farm. She pleaded a headache, said she was upset by the day’s events and consented to accept the sleeping draught that Eleanor prepared. But during the night the stream was running fast and it seemed it must carry the house away, like the time when the great floods had come with a high tide that had beaten the river back over its banks, flooding whole villages, changing the contours of the land. The water altered the colour of everything; the light, even inside the bedroom, was different, wavering, everything unstable.

  IV

  The market in Mellor was so full of people it was a wonder any commerce was possible. The traders had set up their stalls in the middle of the cobbled street, leaving scant room for the activities of officialdom. Even so, people gathered to watch as loaves were weighed, eager to see the bakers condemned, shouting abuse irrespective of which way the scales fell. A big, florid-faced man, greatly puffed by his own importance, read out details of prices, weights and measures, standing rather too near the yarn stall for the comfort of the trader.

  Chimneys belched brown plumes across the pale face of the sky. Smoke and dung mingled with fresh bread, leather and huddled humanity to make a smell that was as special to market day as the traders’ wares. In the narrow alley where Joan had gone in search of food not watched over by a trader, the stench of dunghills was overpowering after the fresh air of the moor. The close, hunched buildings blotted out the sky and for a time she seemed to move in a dark cavern, its sooty walls oozing damp. Then suddenly she came to stables and, beyond, a small courtyard; a door was open and a man was sitting paring vegetables and throwing them into a big pot beside him. He looked as if he might welcome a diversion. Joan told him of her travels and he listened with sympathy. She said that she had lost her husband who had died fighting for King Edward at the battle of St Albans; she had been turned out of her home and left to wander the country. She told the tale tolerably well since some of it was true; she told so many tales she was bound to tell the truth every now and then, even if she did get her battles confused. Over the man’s shoulder she could see a long table in the kitchen laid out with newly baked pies and tarts that made her mouth water; above his head there was a ladder leading to a loft.

  ‘Would there be any apples you might spare?’ she wondered. ‘I do so crave an apple, coming from the country as I do.’

  While he went up to the loft, she went into the kitchen and helped herself to as many pies as she could store in the pocket which, in her one gesture towards frugality, she had stitched into her skirt. The servant returned with apples and also gave her half a loaf of bread and a slab of cheese.

  She carried her bounty away into the warren of dark streets before he could discover his loss. On the outskirts of town she came to the ruin of a house, a few blackened timbers witness to the fire that had destroyed it. She sat on a low, jagged wall and ate the bread and cheese. The tarts she would leave for the juggler.

  Nearby, Clarice ate a bread roll, sitting in the vestibule of a café which was like a dark cavern. The dining area was bright and cheerful, full of pensioners enjoying a day trip. She, however, must sit in purgatorial gloom since she did not want a meal, only coffee and a roll – a compromise of which the establishment appeared to disapprove. She shared a table with a couple similarly ostracised.

  Out in the cobbled street people walked aimlessly up and down, peering in souvenir-shop windows or reading menus. There was little else to do since most of the buildings in the street were eating houses of one kind or another. The yarn market, a handsomely restored building, looked too pristine to awaken a sense of a past age, but it provided a welcome shelter from the biting wind and several people were eating packed lunches perched on the low brick wall that would once have enclosed the stalls. The man at her table read from a leaflet for the information of his bored wife, ‘Erected at the beginning of the seventeenth century, replacing ramshackle stalls known as The Shambles.’ He clicked his teeth at this example of Jacobean discipline prevailing over medieval rough and tumble. Clarice thought The Shambles must have been hell; the humanity here present today was hugger-mugger enough for her.

  Yet once, and not so long ago, there was nothing she would have enjoyed more than sitting in a café looking out at an unfamiliar scene. A new town or village, a new street even, triggered her imagination. The place did not need to be beautifully preserved, she did not require it to be free of visitors other than herself; however seemingly mundane, it lay before her, a scene to be savoured. The light will never fall again in quite this way, she would think; the individual composition of this street at this moment will never be repeated. It was the constant awareness of the uniqueness of the fleeting moment, the attempt to touch the quick of life, to capture the changing quality of light, that had fascinated her and was the impulse behind her painting. Now, she had lost the taste for it.

  And the theatre, to which she must return for the evening performance, had lost its power to enchant. Last night, their opening night, Alan had said to her, ‘I think you’ll be glad when this production’s over.’ In fact, she seemed unable to think of its being over, of packing one’s bags and leaving.

  ‘I know we agreed to stay until Monday to see the next production,’ he had said, ‘but we could go on Sunday morning, if you like. And as for coming down the following weekend to see The Crucible, there’s no need for us to do that.’

  Her mind seemed quite unable to accept these suggestions, as though it was overfull and couldn’t make space for them.

  ‘You aren’t looking at all well,’ he had said. ‘I think this has all been too much for you.’

  ‘I don’t feel able to plan ahead. I’ll be all right if I just take things step by step.’ She wasn’t even sure of that.

  He had been dismayed. Usually, if there was any planning to be done, she was the one who must do it. She couldn’t summon the energy to reassure him; she felt old and dry as a squeezed lemon, all the zest wrung out of her.

  The waitress hovered. Either she must order another coffee or vacate the table. She paid the bill and went out into the teeth of the wind. Memories of other unseasonably cold days came to mind. ‘Stow-on-the-Wold,’ she muttered to herself. ‘I’m too old to face into the wind now’ She turned about.

 
At the end of the street there was a great mound and one tower of the castle peeped out from a dense mass of trees. It reminded her of a castle in France beneath which she had stood one blustery autumn day. How inexorably one is led. This morning when the French party arrived at the farm she had fled in panic like a fugitive. But driving across the moor she had had no sense of having escaped. ‘Something treads on my heels,’ she had thought, ‘and day by day it gains on me.’

  And so now, standing still on the pavement, an awkward obstacle round which people must make their way, some turning to stare resentfully, she saw the red ball bounce out of the crowd and stop, trapped at her feet. A boy of about seven came running after it. The face turned up to her was Teresa’s – the likeness was beyond all questioning, although she had questioned it many times since that moment.

  ‘It’s all coming at me too fast now,’ she said, standing there in the street, blocking the way, seeing the face of the child, a face full of mischief of the kind that only the confident child can enjoy, unafraid to take risks with the tolerance of adults.

  ‘Comment tu t’appelles?’

  ‘She’s a foreigner, poor dear,’ an elderly woman said to her companion as they edged off the kerb to pass her.

  ‘D’où viens tu?’

  ‘Where is it you want, love?’ A big, motherly woman had decided to take her in charge and was speaking loudly on the assumption that all unfortunates are deaf. She spaced her words, ‘Where do you wish to go?’

  ‘The church.’ It was the only place she could think of that might offer space and a chance to be left alone.

  The woman accompanied her down a little street, which ran like a slip road linking the main street to the church green. ‘There you are, love; you’ll be all right now, won’t you?’

  It was a big church and inside there were few visitors. Clarice sat in the south transept where there was, if anything, rather too much space for her comfort. She longed for a Quaker meeting house, combining that atmosphere of simplicity and sanity which she needed as never before. This was too majestic for her; physically and spiritually it dwarfed her. It also posed too many questions.

  From somewhere up in a corner of that vast fan-vaulting Teresa’s child looked down at her, like the Lincoln imp, like the joker that prances behind the solemn procession, mocking and posturing, a black reminder that nothing is sure, that there is no such thing as security.

  Teresa’s child had told her that his name was Guy and he had pointed across the field to where slate roofs rose above the trees. It would make sense that Teresa should be here. This was an area where Clarice knew she and her family had spent several holidays, and not far away was the convent where the eldest daughter had made her vows. Clarice knew she had only to ask the child, ‘May I walk with you?’ and the torment of uncertainty would at last be lifted from her, she would know what it was that she had helped to bring about and the consequences would grant her absolution. But she had not asked. She had watched the child run back into the crowd kicking the red ball before him and she had made no attempt to follow.

  Teresa had made a new start in life here, she had told herself What right have I to cast the shadow of the past over it? In the great church the question echoed hollow. No breath of congratulation rewarded the selfless renunciation, the sacrifice of the soul’s tranquillity. What could I have offered her, what gift could I bring? Only the memory of evil. Somewhere up in that fan-vaulting mockery responded to this pious protestation: it was fear for yourself that held you back.

  Over the years it was the mischief in the child’s face that had haunted her. Was it the lovely naughtiness of boyhood or the legacy of the grandfather? The risk of knowing what she might have helped to perpetuate had been too great and she had settled for uncertainty.

  I was offered a chance and I refused it, she said; I was afraid of what might be shown to me and I have been haunted ever since. This time there was no mockery, only a dry acceptance. The joker had played his part and seemed to have departed. She, too, got up and went out of the church.

  Horses’ hooves clattered on cobbles, echoing in the constricted area, and from out of the narrow archway came a horse ridden by a girl of some twelve years. Horse and rider seemed surprised by their surroundings. The animal snorted and tossed its head while the girl looked around fearfully, plainly a stranger to these noxious alleyways. She was dressed in a velvet cloak with a hint of fine silk beneath; castle rather than cottage was her natural setting.

  ‘Help me,’ she said to Joan, presenting herself with the confidence of one who has no need to fear that her commands will not be obeyed.

  ‘Aye, that I will, if you’ll but tell me how.’

  The response to this reasonable request occasioned some uncertainty. Help did not usually require explanation. The girl considered her situation and eventually announced, ‘I must be away from this place.’

  Joan pointed, ‘The market lies yonder, past the stables.’

  The girl thumped the whip against her thigh in impatience. ‘I don’t want the market, dolt. I mean to be away from the town.’

  The words hung in the air, detached from the speaker, who seemed aware for the first time of their import. She sat staring ahead, like a boy who having announced his intention of running away to sea finds himself surveying the vastness of the ocean. Her face crumpled in the helpless grief of childhood forever confronted by matter beyond its control.

  She said, ‘They mean me to marry Sir Andrew Pellow and he is old and ugly and stinks abominably.’

  She herself was rosy, dimpled and sweet smelling. She looked at Joan, unbelieving of such a fate; a plumped pullet awakening to the nature of the feast for which it has been prepared.

  Joan thought: this is my daughter. She had seen her son many times, but this was her first encounter with her daughter. It did not surprise her that the child should have aged so little over the years; she was vague about the ages of her children and usually imagined them as she had last seen them, give or take a few years. Her attitude to herself was not much different. When she looked at the girl, she saw herself in the bright face that seemed made for all the shining things which bedazzle a child’s eye.

  She said, ‘You shan’t marry him if you don’t want to.’

  The girl dismounted and came to sit beside Joan on the broken wall. She seemed not to think it odd to talk to this old bundle. ‘You are with the travelling players that have recently come to the town,’ she said. ‘My maid told me there is a woman among them who knows the way of a person’s life just by looking in their eyes as you look in mine now.’

  Joan had never told anyone the way of their life by looking in their eyes, but she was prepared to try. What had she to give? Only her dreams, it seemed. They had never been realised, never put to use, and so must be in very good condition to hand on to someone else. As the juggler created magic with his hands, she could spread pictures out before this girl as they travelled the road that would lead eventually to a village idling in a long summer’s heat, people drowsing in trouble-free peace. She could conjure up the droning sound of the place, the smell of dust and baked earth, the warm sweetness of trodden meadow flowers, the sun closing sleepy eyelids. And somewhere a man such as the steward, proud as a peacock, with a strong young body and blue-black hair.

  The girl thought she would like this.

  ‘Then come with me, but you must leave your horse.’

  ‘Then how will I get there?’

  ‘You must walk.’

  The girl considered this, weighing the inconvenience against the unpleasantness of Sir Andrew Pellow. She consented to walk, but with a look in her eyes that suggested she would expect some improvement in her situation to follow quite rapidly.

  Even without the horse, she would draw attention in any crowd. The juggler was good at creating fine fabrics; Joan wasn’t sure he would be much help in making them invisible. She led the girl away from the market, impelled only by the certainty that these narrow streets could not stretch m
uch further. The town was not large; one’s eye encompassed it readily from the brow of the hill as one travelled towards it. Her instinct, always a better friend than reason, was right and soon they came out on the bank of a stream and saw the great church not far away, men pushing barrows and others loading buckets to be hauled up to the masons at work on a part of the roof. When she had left the juggler to find food the cart had been standing so that one looked across the spine of the church to the tower. She urged the girl forward, ‘This way, this way. We must cross the stream into the field.’

  There were many travelling people in the field now and the townspeople were beginning to drift over from the market. The juggler was distinguishable for his lack of activity, sitting hunched with his head in his hands and Joan knew that he feared he had lost her. It would not have occurred to him to have left the cart unguarded to find her; he fretted about each spoke in each wheel in case the cart should come to harm and leave them stranded. When he saw her he jumped up and struck her for putting him in such despair. They fell to quarrelling and fighting, which was rare for them, and by the time they had finished the mutton tarts she had saved for him were mostly spoilt. They had also attracted attention.

  At the far side of the field a small body of armed men was making its way through the crowd, pausing every now and again to push open booths or look inside tents, clubbing to the ground any who impeded their progress. Nearby, people turned to look at the girl, standing in the shelter of the cart, holding her cloak around her and trying to look disdainful, though fear darkened her eyes.

  ‘Leave her,’ the juggler said to Joan.

  ‘But she is . . .’

  ‘She is nothing to us, leave her. We must get away from here.’ He tried to drag Joan into the cart.

  But she was not going to run away; she had run away once before and it had been a sore trouble to her ever since, so this time she would stand her ground even if the whole town burnt down around her.