THE MEETING PLACE

by MARY HOCKING

  She walked on and up, stronger than she had ever supposed herself to be. For a time, she thrilled to the knowledge that she could so pit herself against the elements. She forgot why she was there, where she was going, there was only the intense excitement of the present. She felt fully alive to each moment and when her limbs began to shake, she urged herself on, passionate for more testing as the dark ferocity of the great hill loomed above her. The path was veering again, bringing her into the wind so that she must fight for breath. She turned her head to one side for relief and, straying off the path, she eventually fell against one of the standing stones. It was a heavy fall and she lay staring upwards, her face as blanched as the sky.

  It was easier to breathe lying there. She concentrated her mind on it. After a time, her mind told her she should get up. Gradually, with caution now, she drew her legs up and rolled over into a kneeling position and there she rested again, holding to the stone that was cold and unyielding. She could see the dark flank of the barrow. Beyond, the more distant hills were like daubs in a child’s painting. The sky was now inky black with a silver tassel shredding from the west. She was probably more than half-way to West Bentham. But it was of Edward she was thinking as the first spot of rain fell on her eyelid and trickled down her cheek. The fall had shaken her body but had focused her mind, and her thoughts arranged themselves with stark simplicity. She and Jory had talked of the meaning of love: Edward was the one given to her to love; if she failed him, he would be destroyed and Veronica would be left to bear the burden. She struggled up in panic, calling out the child’s name.

  Her madness had passed, leaving her weak. Had it not been downhill most of the way, she would never have made the return journey. As it was, she fell many times. Now that the decision was made, she saw in her mind as she forced herself onward, not the anxious people at the farm, but Jory waiting at the parsonage. She cried for him in his bitter disappointment, but she did not turn back. Hewn of the rock he might not be, but he was strong. He would continue to walk the moors and the plans for his school would kindle his enthusiasm when his spirits were low. The full force of the rain came, blinding her to all else.

  In one moment, she was drenched to the skin. Encompassed on all sides, she made her passage like a ghost condemned to walk through a never-ending wall. Pebbles and stones travelled faster, rushing past her, bringing mounds of mud in their wake. The path had become a river bed; water scored channels in the grass on either side, so that the hill was like a maypole with great ribbons of water running down to the valley. She no longer had any idea of what was happening; the force of the rain drove her on long after she lost awareness of purpose. When she left the barrow behind and reached level ground it was no better. The moor bubbled like a cauldron. She slithered and fell and staggered up, but now her legs sank to her calves in mud and she gained only a few yards before she fell again. She called her child’s name, but could not rise. She was by now nearer the farm than she realised and the wind carried the call to the ears of one of the hands who was fighting his way along the path where she lay, driving the few cattle he had managed to herd. But for him, she must have died on the moor.

  The peasants were in a desperate plight and in their despair they turned once more against the priory, claiming that witches were harboured there. Had not the madwoman been sent to them with food and medicine, had she not nursed some of the sick, yet she herself remained untouched by the sickness? Two men had forced their way through the gate only yesterday and had been repelled by Dame Katherine armed with a pitchfork and Dame Ursula with a bucket of live coals. There was only one solution and they all knew it. The prioress had scruples.

  ‘These people will ill-use you if you go to them again,’ she said to Joan. ‘Do you understand what I am saying to you?’

  ‘I would go to them. I was ever a good nurse.’

  ‘I would like you to think about what I have said to you. For your own sake.’

  Joan looked blank, surprised to discover that she no longer had an own sake, and stared around her as if it might have fallen off somewhere. Dimly, she thought she saw the woman with the shorn hair, looking at her with great pity. The light was slanting through the slit window to her left and she raised her eyes, expecting to see the Lady there. Her expression was such that the prioress involuntarily crossed herself. ‘She sees Our Lady,’ she whispered. ‘It is true, then.’ But Joan had looked beyond the vision to light unmediated.

  ‘I would go to them,’ she said. ‘I was ever a good nurse.’

  She seemed not to see properly and the nuns helped, some might have said propelled, her to the door.

  ‘She is blind,’ the prioress said. ‘Blind and ignorant. Lord have mercy on her and on all of us.’

  The nuns gazed at the prioress and she gazed at them. Dame Ursula said, ‘It is true that she is better able to nurse than most, because even the foulest stench does not sicken her.’ This she thought a cause for suspicion.

  The prioress said severely, ‘We are called on to love all our fellow creatures, even the foulest among them.’

  One might as well scratch the surface of a stone for a sign of love, she thought, looking at their obdurate faces. But when had the seeds of love been sown at Foxlow Priory? Devotion, discipline, sobriety and a modicum of practical good sense were what she asked of her nuns. Love had not been required of them; love was left to the men and women who moved about in the sinful world. The prioress looked at these wretched women who were the living proof of her own failure to love, and found comfort only in the kindly face of Dame Priscilla.

  Joan Mosteyn did not return.

  ‘It was her choice,’ Dame Ursula said. ‘We only sent her because she asked to go.’

  The prioress called them all to prayer in the chapel and she kept them there all through the day and the night. This they endured without complaint and were careful to keep their heads bent so that if any glow should be reflected on the windows it might not disturb their meditation. Incense burned steadily obscuring the smell of tar-soaked faggots.

  There was a great mountain with flaming tongues leaping from it and she was climbing on a path that went round and round towards the summit – and all this was within her mind; it was her mind and not her body that spiralled endlessly up through the flames. Occasionally she glimpsed faces in the flames; Edward and Veronica, they too were part of the inexorable motion, glimpsed like people in a crowd seen from a merry-go-round. They held out their hands and she tried to reach them, but they passed out of her sight as her mind spiralled upwards.

  Her body could not stand this. Her flesh was on fire; her limbs ached as if there were weights attached to them, the pain bit into her bones; at every breath she took a red-hot poker was driven into her chest. But her mind spiralled relentlessly, insisting that she climb higher and higher and higher.

  She was very high now, the corkscrew pressure was tighter and everything she had ever known was dropping away from her as the flesh peeled from her bones. But as the faces watching the merry-go-round swung into sight again she found there was one thing she had with her still and she thrust it into the man’s keeping. ‘The school, Edward, you promised . . .’ Her hand brushed the child’s cheek as she swung upwards again into the heart of the fire, where she heard another voice say quite calmly, ‘Now is my time . . .’ as one might speak of the pain of labour.

  ‘Thursday,’ Alan said over the telephone. ‘More than halfway through the run. I wonder if you’d mind if Jeannie joins us? She always gets depressed in the second half

  And she is in the second half of life, widowed, lonely and wanting someone to care for, Clarice thought. You have an animal instinct for survival, Alan.

  ‘I was wanting time on my own,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘But I mean it.’

  There was someone standing out of earshot, but waiting. She put the receiver down and ran quickly up to her room. Too quickly; thumps of protest on the wall of her chest.

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bsp; She sat on the chair by the window, trying to restore inner calm, letting her eyes dwell on the green hill now freeing itself of mist. ‘You are given time to grow into your harrowing.’ Those had been her words spoken to Alan; the clue that had eluded her at the time. This is my harrowing, all that has come to me in this strange place is my harrowing. I could hardly tell Alan that. Only those two women who have kept me company would understand. Her hands were icy cold and crossing them she ran her fingers up the sleeves of her pullover as far as the elbows. Thus straitjacketed, she considered her position.

  Thursday. Thursday’s child has far to go. She was a Thursday’s child; but she had been and didn’t feel there was anywhere left to go. In fact, had a strong sense of its all being behind her, of having in the last few days made a resume of her life. In giving the past its airing she seemed to have exhausted its usefulness; even Robert had lost his power to disturb her. There remained one thing from which she had not yet been set free.

  At least the blood was circulating well enough to have warmed her hands. She went into the bathroom, took a pill and examined herself in the mirror. A wan sight she made, face pallid and crumpled as old wash-leather. Whatever happened, she had an instinct to get out into the open, away from this house where the walls of her mind, let alone her chest, seemed to be breaking down. She put on an anorak and went out of the room and down the stairs, feeling rather like the lollard who must pass through a testing time before he sits down to his next meal.

  Her little local difficulty was waiting for her in the porch, a tall young Frenchman who said, ‘Excuse me, Madame – I see in the book of visitors the name Clarice Mitchell. And only you are staying here – so . . .?’

  ‘I’m Clarice Mitchell.’ She felt as if a last account had been rendered as she admitted this.

  ‘And were you . . . is it possible you were the headmistress of Lady Catherine Prynne School?’

  ‘I was.’

  She was feeling in the pockets of her anorak, not looking at him directly. He said, rather grandly, ‘I am Guy Matheos,’ as if the announcement were normally accompanied by a roll of drums.

  Clarice said, ‘Oh yes?’ looking suspiciously at the lining of a pocket.

  ‘You would have known my mother as Teresa Davies.’

  ‘I’m going for a walk.’ Clarice was increasingly desperate to get into the open air. ‘Perhaps you’d like to come with me.’

  They went, by common consent, up to the moor. She kept her eyes steadfastly ahead, as if a close scrutiny of her companion might reveal some irregularity – that he cast no shadow, perhaps? For his part, he might have wanted a broad space for the enactment of his little drama, or it could have been that he realised he would not have her full attention while they were climbing. Or perhaps he merely waited for her to ask questions. For whatever reason, he said little at first.

  They passed sheep sitting in the road, waiting for a passing car so that they could live dangerously. A silver-tan calf eyed them curiously from the shelter of its mother’s flank. Further on, ponies cropped the thin grass and far below a river shone like a blue serpent weaving between the burnished swathes of bracken. Then the land levelled out into an abstract design in varying shades of brown, stretched to the horizon, its canvas scored here and there with tiny scratches.

  Along one of these scratches, Clarice and the young Frenchman walked, and it was here that he said, ‘I can hardly believe this. Two years ago I came to England and tried to find you – and now, quite by chance, we meet. It is very strange, is it not?’ His voice, slightly teasing, suggested that what was really strange was the behaviour of this elderly woman, so inhibited she could not meet his eye.

  ‘Why were you looking for me two years ago?’

  ‘My mother asked me to find you. But no one at the school could tell me what had happened to you. And the telephone directory . . .’ He mimed its weight in his arms. ‘All those Mitchells! I was on a farming course and didn’t have long.’

  She knew that he was watching her face, sensing mystery and amused by it. As his grandfather had found life amusing? She said, ‘Why did your mother ask you to find me?’

  ‘She said she would like you to meet me. That was all. She seldom speaks of her life in England and we are curious about it. I expect she was a naughty girl? We know she ran away from school in England.’

  But do you know she was thirteen at the time, Clarice wondered, and asked, ‘Where did she go – immediately, I mean – that night she ran away?’

  ‘To a farm where she had stayed en vacances. But the couple there are old now and very close; they tell little when we ask questions. You know the people in that region, they are close with everything. We have a joke that they don’t like to give you the time of day. My mother went to a convent school not far away from there, where her sister is a nun. She, too, is very close.’

  And how much could she say? Clarice wondered. No more, surely, than the close couple. He sensed a mystery and was intrigued, but there was no urgency underlying his curiosity. For him the reality of his mother’s life was in France; probably he saw her as rooted in himself rather than he in her

  ‘I saw you once before, I think,’ she said, because he expected her to say something.

  ‘Surely not? I would have remembered.’

  She did not pursue it because the more she told him the more she would have to explain and one thing would lead to another. She must be careful to give him no information he did not already possess. Somewhere out on the moor a curlew gave its bubbling call that sounded like a splutter of laughter and suddenly, as if he were looking over her shoulder, she saw the black joker that had gazed down at her from the fan-vaulting in Mellor church. ‘Oh dear,’ he seemed to say, ‘so it’s his possession of information we are concerned about, is it? His protection? Or are we perhaps afraid of the pit that might open up at our feet?’ I haven’t the energy, she protested; I have struggled against this for so long I have exhausted all my reserves.

  In fact, she wasn’t sure she had the energy to finish this walk; she could feel it running out of her so fast she almost expected to see it lying in a little heap on the path when she turned her head. Gower’s words, that Alan would speak again tonight, came to mock her: ‘Now our sands are almost run. More a little and then dumb. This, my last boon, give me . . .’ Why not? Could it be she had been too Puritan, asked for too little?

  ‘Are you tired?’ He was politely disappointed. ‘Should we go back now?’

  She went on walking. ‘Tell me about your family.’ As she said this she realised she had laid down a burden she had carried for too long.

  ‘There is my mother and my father, who is a farmer also, and we are four children, two boys and two girls. I am the eldest.’

  She had strength enough for the one last question. ‘And your mother – all is well with her? She is happy?’

  ‘You can ask that?’ He laughed and stretched out his arms in the exuberant arrogance of young manhood. ‘I am her son!’

  She looked at him then. Full in the face she saw him and read what was there to read. He was less like Teresa than he had been when she glimpsed him as a child, the forehead broader, the nose straighter; but he had the same brilliant, deep-set eyes. What she saw in those eyes was that pure energy and zest for life that must have been his grandfather’s when he was young and expectant, before the canker of failure had corrupted him. At the sight of that candid, unshadowed face, she experienced such joy that all her breath rushed out in a great cry of thanksgiving.

  He was kneeling beside her, folding up his anorak to put under her head. ‘I’m all right,’ she gasped, wondering why he should be so concerned.

  It grew very hot, there must be a fire in the heather. She could not breathe, the heat scorched her throat, seared her lungs. For a time she lost all thought in the struggle for breath. And then she saw them standing around her, the still forms with the archaic faces; like pillars of fire they stood. Now is my time, she thought, and closing the book on he
r lap she got up and walked between them into darkness where it was neither hot nor cold.

  There was a moon and she walked along the path that led to the farm. She was alone and nothing stirred. In the distance there was a dark building with a single light silhouetted against the night sky and when she came closer she saw that the light shone above the sign of a wayside inn. The door was open and a tall woman and a girl with a mass of tangled hair stood on the threshold, hand in hand, their faces grave and loving as they waited for her to join them.

  Mary Hocking

  Born in London in 1921, Mary was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Girls School, Acton. During the Second World War she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) attached to the Fleet Air Arm Meteorology branch and then briefly with the Signal Section in Plymouth.

  Writing was in her blood. Juggling her work as a local government officer in Middlesex Education Department with writing, at first short stories for magazines and pieces for The Times Educational Supplement, she then had her first book, The Winter City, published in 1961.

  The book was a success and enabled Mary to relinquish her full time occupation to devote her time to writing. Long before family sagas had become cult viewing, she had embarked upon the `Fairley Family’ trilogy – Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes, and Welcome Strangers – books which give her readers a faithful, realistic and uncompromising portrayal of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, between the years of 1933 and 1946.

  For many years she was an active member of the `Monday Lit’, a Lewes-based group which brought in current writers and poets to speak about their work, an enthusiastic supporter of Lewes Little Theatre, and worshipped at the town’s St Pancras RC Church.