by Susan Hill
And Kitty sits in bed under the mosquito netting, and reads of Lakes and mountains and rains and mists, of shepherds and daffodils, poems she does not fully understand, and looks up now and again, to dream and make and unmake plans, and listen to the night-howl of the jackals.
15
BY THE time the trap deposited him in front of the inn, it was quite dark and blowing a strong wind off the sea.
Thomas stepped down and set his bag on the floor beside him, waiting until the horse’s footsteps had receded into the roaring night, down the two-mile track into the village.
Then, knowing his way blindfold, he crossed the patch of rough ground to the quay, and felt forwards until he came up against the parapet wall.
Out beyond that, in the pitch blackness, lay the marshes and mud-flats and water, stretching out to the North Sea, from which came now the boom and crash of the waves, brought in on the gale.
At his back, the inn sign swung, creaking and straining. Below the door, a line of oily light, which once or twice fanned out brightly and wavered as someone came in or out, before disappearing again.
The wind beat about his head, and the salt taste came into his mouth, and every anxiety, every petty concern and irritation, every thought of other people in the life left behind, dropped away from him.
Now, he was the other man he had become on every visit here over the years, the same man who was descended from the boy who had gone out in the boat across the water with Collum O’Cool.
And the man of Cambridge, of court and chapel and cloister and book-panelled room, the tutor, the cleric, the scholar, hemmed in, confined, formal, had no existence here.
Now, he turned and, his eyes grown accustomed to the darkness, could make out the hulks and roof-lines of the boat-builder’s sheds and workshops, the falling-down fish stores and warehouses. There was nothing else, save the inn, and the open waterlands to the sea, no dwelling of any kind, and no shelter.
The wind battered at his back, raged about him, wailed and whistled in his ears and he welcomed it, though at the same time hoping for better, calmer weather by dawn, when he meant to set out.
But for now, he let it come at him, and over him, and when a burst of rain and spray whipped his face, turned himself, to catch the full force of it.
But in the end, because he had brought the minimum of spare clothing and did not want to live for four days and nights soaking wet, he picked up his bag and walked across the yard, to push open the heavy door of the Wherry Inn.
They knew him well enough now. Though he was still a curiosity to them, and was not, could never be, one of them. But the drone of conversation faltered only slightly, as he went in, like the step of a lame man, before recovering itself and continuing on its way. One or two heads turned, then back again.
The taproom was small and close, the air furred with tobacco smoke and oil fumes from the lamps and the heavy old black stove in the corner, its funnel rising to a hole in the roof, with the smell of ale and the breaths of a dozen or more men.
Behind the bar, on ledges around the walls, stood the trophies of generations of men, these and so many like them, the cases of stuffed birds, shelduck and widgeon, grey-leg and pink-foot, whimbrel and godwit, harrier and bittern and short-eared owl. There was no other decoration, beside the wooden casks and barrels, and pewter tankards, and a yellowing coastal map. The walls were stained brown, in long tongues, darkening to black near the ceiling, with the accumulated smoke and tar of years.
One man, on a corner bench, nodded, a second, across the room, took his pipe from between his teeth and mumbled the time of day. No more.
Because of the fierceness of the weather they would have been here and immediately outside, for much of the day, unable to put out, drinking, talking, smoking, and in between, roaming restlessly about the quay and the green and up towards the jetty, to look at the sky, and out across the marshes and the water, like caged-in wild creatures, wanting to be free and away. And besides, poor weather meant a poor livelihood for these men who lived by what they caught or shot, the wild-fowlers, punt-gunners, poachers, eel-men, wherry-men.
The landlord finished his sentence, and the serving of ale, before gesturing curtly to Thomas, and going on ahead of him, up the steep staircase and along the dark, narrow passageways, keeping his head bent low, to the door of the attic room which was always his, and the only one let out.
The floorboards sloped and were bare. There was a bed, an oil lamp on a three-legged stool, a low-seated old armchair, a washstand, a single rail across the corner.
Thomas sighed involuntarily, like a man come home.
‘Glass is low, sir. You’ll not be away tomorrow.’
‘So I fear.’
The lamp flared, flickered, steadied itself. The shadow of the landlord loomed like a giant upon the wall.
‘Supper at six, if it ’ud be convenient.’
‘Perfectly, thank you, Mr Jebbings.’
The man nodded, and left, and his footsteps sounded like thunder, down the stairs.
All night and for the whole of the following day, it blew a gale off the sea, roaring and booming about the inn.
He had stood at the window and watched the dawn come up with great, inky clouds piling together like fast-moving ships against the reddening glow.
By noon, the restless frustration of the other men was upon him. He went out two or three times, to pace about, over to the quay, up as far as the boat-sheds, head bent into the wind. His body felt tense, he could settle to nothing, had unpacked his books, but did not read; thought, with guilt, of Cambridge, and the work he had abandoned, and of Georgiana, too much alone.
Now and then, a solitary bird appeared on the near horizon, low-flying, battling against the wind, blown up like paper before dropping down in search of shelter.
In the end, in the waning light of late afternoon, he went out again, struck off west, to walk six miles or more inland, and as he went, and as the dusk crept in around him, the roaring of the sea at his back faded, so that, gradually, he could hear the soft, rhythmic tread of his own footsteps on the marsh grass, and began to be calmed by it.
He saw no one at all. Ahead, the leaden sky reached down to touch the ground, which darkened to brown and peat-black as it receded from him. Here and there, water gleamed in small pools and tongues. But then, the marshland dried up and gave way to heath and sandy scrub, and eventually to a thin belt of woodland, where he rested out of the wind.
And, in the last few yards, when he was almost into the trees, a short-eared owl, which had been lurking, silent and motionless down close to the ground, so that he had all but stepped on it, rose suddenly on whirring wings and swerved, he saw the fierce glare of its eyes, before it made off in ghostly flight towards the marshes.
And his heart leaped at the sight, and the moth-like beauty of it, and where he had been out of true with his surroundings, his mood fractious, now something within him adjusted, and he relaxed and was at peace, and at one with the world, and his own presence in it.
He returned in darkness, and several times stopped, able to see no further than a yard ahead of him, guided only by instinct and the faint smell of the sea, and the direction of the wind coming off it, he left the path and stumbled and, twice, fell up to his calves in water and thick marsh mud.
He was not afraid, nor ever for a moment doubted that he could find his way back, was only strangely exhilarated, and without thought for anything, except the rough ground beneath his feet and the direction he should be taking, and for shielding himself so far as he could, his head bent into his collar, from the worst of the wind.
He felt himself completely bound up with the air, the storm, the ground, the darkness, like some bird or animal that had been raised here, to be a creature of instinct, and of physical awareness alone, not an alien, cerebral being, a stranger, come from elsewhere into this wild landscape, but one who in all ways belonged. So that he felt guided home by quite other means than any use of reason or recollectio
n.
He came quite suddenly up to the boat-sheds, saw the wavering light from the inn, and was startled, and forced to wait, out in the blackness and swirl of the gale, and in the heavy rain that was now falling, not merely to reorientate himself at the end of his journey, but to get in touch again with himself, to return, as a thinking human being, back into his own body.
But, walking into the smoky, oily light of the taproom, seeing the men there on the benches, as he had seen them the night before, he still felt oddly uncertain of who, or what, he was.
16
GEORGIANA SAT alone under the lamp, reading of a sixteenth-century voyage to China, and looking, if she could have been seen, surprisingly handsome in the tallow light.
But she was not seen. The house was empty. Thomas was in Norfolk, Alice gone to a meeting of her spiritualist fellowship (which troubled Georgiana, who had been very strict that it should always be kept from her brother. Though of the maid’s afternoon seances he had, in fact, long been aware.).
But she read and re-read each paragraph, and could not concentrate, and the usual flights of longing for exotic travels were dulled. She looked up continually, from the emperors and silk roads, to gaze ahead of her, ill at ease, unhappy.
Because of her brother’s abrupt departure, and his recent reserve of manner, his coolness, and his greater withdrawal from intimacy with her. And because she looked ahead and saw only late middle age, and senility beyond, and longed for the past, for the boundless joy and close comradeship, the infinite possibilities, of childhood.
And the dry, cracked throat and dulled senses of a head cold, and a hundred petty irresolutions, and the miasmic airs of November.
In the kitchen, Alice had left the tea tray ready laid, scones and a dundee cake, and fresh bread and butter under a plate, she had only to boil the water.
And in a moment, perhaps, would do so.
In the conservatory, beyond the glass doors, the small birds flew here and there within the cages, on abrupt, bright wings.
And a mile away, old Mrs Gray dozed and snored slightly over her game of patience, and half dreamed peculiar, fleeting dreams, until the maid came in with the evening paper, and rattled the fire irons and raked the curtains irritably shut.
Upstairs, Florence stood at the long mirror, closed her eyes and opened them very abruptly, time after time, hoping to glimpse herself afresh, as another would see her, hoping to admire.
But the face and the figure were inescapably familiar, and what impact she might make, how she might be judged, whether she were handsome or not, she could never tell.
The clock chimed the half-hour. Her mother would be wanting tea.
But she did not go down.
And in other rooms, all over Cambridge, other women sat, alone and with nothing but solitude in prospect.
Only Thea Pontifex, at her desk in the women’s college, was absorbed, in her solitude. She wrote steadily, and occasionally paused, to delve into the pile of books beside her, and her cheeks were flushed with the excitements of scholarship, she was lost to herself, and the world outside.
And, because she knew that the maid’s ill temper would not last, and that there were muffins for tea, but more, because on the whole she was a woman accepting of life, Mrs Gray was happy enough.
Georgiana in her bedroom, lonely still, her head covered by a towel, over a bowl of medicated steam.
The rims of her eyes burned, but down her back, the shivers ran like water.
And so, turned in on herself, and the discomfort and misery of her influenza, she forgot the time, forgot the assurances made to him. Forgot the caged birds.
Remembered.
Which was how, in the forgetting and the startled remembering, the rush and the guilt and confusion, in fumbling with a latch and fiddling with a seed dish, which she dropped and broke on the tiled conservatory floor, she let a door of the cage swing accidentally open.
Not noticing, aware only of the scattered mess of seed and china-shard, of weak legs and aching head, she went to ring for Alice, and the dustpan, while first one and then several of the small birds found their way out into the freedom of the room.
The bell, ringing suddenly above the kitchen door, startled Alice, comfortable in the rocking chair, out of her worries about life and death, life after death.
For the fortnightly spiritualist fellowship always filled her with an ardent conviction, until a little later in the evening, when the doubts gnawed like worms into her brain.
‘But could it not all have been invented?’
(There had been too much just lately in the newspapers, about mediums exposed as tricksters and frauds.)
Yet her friend Annie had wept tears of joyous recognition at the message from her sister, one year dead, had clung to Alice’s hand when the medium spoke. It had, she had said, made the whole world perfect for her, and everything right again.
Life and death. Death. Death. Alice worried at it, and the thoughts would not leave her.
Life and death.
But whom to trust?
Life and death.
Perhaps, as it troubled her so much, preyed on her mind for all these hours afterwards, she should not go at all to the spiritualist fellowship.
But what had a man like Thomas Cavendish to offer? There had been no comfort for Annie from the likes of him.
Life and death.
And then the bell rang.
‘I was disturbed that you should have left so abruptly, and while there was such unease and ill feeling between us.’
So he wrote to Eustace Partridge, for he could not banish the anguished face of the boy from his mind; and the storm raged on outside, and the light from the oil lamp wavered across the paper.
‘In my distress on your behalf, and my own disappointment, I spoke coldly to you, and offered you no help, no comfort, and for that I am heartily sorry.
‘But what saddened me most was the impression you gave that you felt no great emotion, no deep and overwhelming love for …’
Here he paused. Laid down his pen. Here the wind tore at the casement like a desperate thing. And he was uncertain how he should refer to the young woman.
‘… the young woman who is to become your wife.’
And which (he would have written) would perhaps have excused it all. But the mere indulgence of the flesh, those cravings, that curiosity about fleshly matters …
But he did not write it. He wrote no more. Only sat, in bitterness and resentment that the boy and his folly should have intruded upon him here.
Alice found Georgiana, her cheeks flushed, eyes bright with panic and fever, hysterical among the escaped and fluttering birds, and so, the questions of life and death were for the time being suspended.
And because she saw that they were better left to themselves, and, having cleared up the broken seed dish, could be of no further use here, she simply led Georgiana away to bed, and medicine, and hot water laced with rum and lemon.
In the end, nervous of their freedom, the little birds quietly returned to roost in their cages, and coming in later, and seeing them so, Alice simply closed and latched the door.
But one remained free, one bird Alice did not see, perched high up, close to the skylight, its vivid wings closed, head bent into an iridescent breast.
Georgiana slept. Half woke in confusion. Fell back again into a snake-pit of turbulent, poisoned dreams.
Woke again, with thoughts of death. Death clung to her. But deliberately, knowing that it was the fever, she turned her mind to childhood, as onto sweet, soft pillows, and was at once soothed and made cool.
And the small, vivid bird roosted on alone, close to the skylight, close to the glass, to the air, to freedom.
She started up again, out of her reverie of Ireland, remembering what had almost happened through her own fault, her own forgetfulness. Almost.
But it had not. And Alice would surely say nothing to him and so, how could he ever know?
She was a child again, terrif
ied of incurring his displeasure, for he was the bright, the fixed star in her universe, afraid to confess that she had forfeited his trust.
Thought, almost said out loud, but I am a grown woman, I am forty-four years old, why must I endlessly look back to our childhood? Why do I still, still see him in the old light, why am I so anxious that he, and he alone, should approve, praise, trust, like, love?
Why has no life since then ever fully satisfied?
What is it I lack?
But then, because of the fever, and the low ebb of her spirits in these ghostly hours before dawn, because of her restless limbs and aching head, she submitted again, and let her mind drift back. To the stories he had told her, sitting before the fire, or on the deep window-seat, looking out at the soft silver veils of rain drifting up across the garden from the Lake. And the books he had read to her, of wild journeys and far countries beyond exotic seas, and their exultant voyages together across ancient maps.
And so, for a time, kept back the visible skull, the vision of death that stalked, grinning over her shoulder.
But life and death and all the troubled thoughts of it preyed upon Alice in her room at the end of the passage, and rattled the window lock, and the handle of the wardrobe door, and would not be denied.
So that in the end, she went down in her dressing-gown to the kitchen, and heated milk, and sat on the chair beside the range and rocked to soothe herself.
Life and death. Life and death. Life and death.
Old Mrs Gray thought of death, too, death more than life now, in the long, wakeful hours.
But then, she always did, and was quite untroubled by it.
Only sat at the half-open window and smelled the balmy, gentle smell of night, blowing from off the river.
