by Susan Hill
Eleanor stands, tall, her hair long and loose on her shoulders. Beautiful hair. But this way, it makes her face look older.
‘I thought that I would write to Florence. In Cambridge.’
‘Yes,’ he says at once. Turns on his side. ‘Yes, of course.’
Which she sensibly takes for his approval.
And so, the following day, she does write.
And so – and all, really, very quickly, and easily – and so, it is arranged.
The Turn of the Year
DECEMBER. the snow fell early. It was a white Christmas, for once in a lifetime. People even skated on the river. There are photographs in attics, to prove it.
And out on the fens, the birds froze quietly to death and the reeds rattled together in the bitter wind, and then were still.
Snow all over England. And in the midst of the snow, the old images, the old words, spoken again. But to some, they sounded freshly.
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.
On Christmas Eve, Florence dined with a bishop and was bored, but not disagreeably, and later, went to church, and, hearing the old words, bent her head suddenly, and vowed to work for good.
Old Mrs Gray, waking at three on Christmas morning, made up her mind to go to Scotland again, and well before the spring, and so lay awake, planning, dreaming, remembering, listening to the clocks, excited as any child.
In the college chapel, the candlelight shone on the great scene of the Nativity, and on the face of the one, rapt, kneeling figure of no importance and Thomas recognised it afresh, and, reading the old words aloud, admired their beauty. But no more, perhaps, the beauty did not pierce the heart.
Snow fell. Eustace Partridge walked the fields, gun under arm, and hares fled and shrews stiffened, cold in ditches, and he went on doggedly, and did not think of the college chapel, nor of the narrow streets, the books, the firesides, the friends, his own, once dazzling future.
And in another country place, Cecil Moxton spoke the old words, too, before trudging back towards his parsonage through the snow. And, seeing the lighted windows ahead of him, was lifted up a little in gladness for the child to come, and turned his face aside from the gathering shadows, the same ones that always darkened around his wife, after a birth.
Snow fell. The year turned.
Impatient with the meanderings of the Committee for Moral Welfare, Florence abruptly offered most of the money for the house in the country from her own purse, and got the rest out of rich Miss Quayle the brewer’s daughter, who was ill, and anxious to buy off death by almsgiving.
And so, the purchase was quickly secured.
On the second day of the new year, Eustace Partridge’s wife miscarried her child.
The snow melted.
A pair of wagtails scurried and bobbed about the grass of the Fellows’ court, beneath the little fountain.
Florence and Georgiana had talked of a week’s holiday together, walking in Switzerland, made tentative plans.
But now, of course, that had all been set aside, because of the letter from India.
And so, everything to do with the house in the country being for the time being accomplished, Florence turned her mind to the arrival of her young cousin, Kitty Moorehead.
The weather turned mild. The new year wore in.
Just perceptibly, the days began to lengthen.
* * *
Part Two
* * *
1
AND QUITE suddenly, there it had been. The land. Home. The cliffs and then the green, green fields. Just as they had talked of, just as they all remembered.
And at once, everyone had fallen silent, had withdrawn into their own thoughts, and intense emotions, and simply stood, leaning on the rails, and stared, stared. And the sight of it began immediately and perceptibly, to change them. They drank it in desperately, home, the green land, the white cliffs, and the little red-roofed houses, and were themselves like parched, cracked, long-dry land, drinking in water, they relaxed, softened, began to blossom. And then had to come to terms with what it meant.
And who am I? thought Kitty, standing on, as the ship sailed slowly, and the later afternoon light flushed the fields pink and gold.
Who am I now?
And she, too, was overwhelmed by the thoughts and feelings that poured in, confusing her, was uncertain how to sort them out, and so, simply stood, alone, and received them.
With the first sight of England, it was as though she had indeed entered into a new world, a new existence. But she realised at once that it did not have anything to do with the past, and her childhood, or with anything at all that she remembered (for in fact, she remembered very little, there were merely flashes, still pictures illuminated here and there, but unrelated to one another. They were tableaux, and of little interest.)
Kitty had a profound and shocking sense that her own life was beginning, here, now, as if she were somehow wakening to real consciousness for the first time. India, the heat and the brightness, the people, that way of life, were behind her, and had receded not merely in distance but in time, so that already, they belonged to another consciousness altogether, to memory.
And the voyage had come between, and now, sitting here, watching the shadows slip over the land, and the darkening water, she felt utterly different, and strange. Older. And that anything was possible. And she was afraid, and shrank from it, yet excited and went boldly forward to embrace it.
Who am I?
The thoughts were grave, cold, solemn.
She shivered. The air smelled faintly sweet and damp.
Now, in the little houses among the folds of the dark hills, lights were coming on. But then, spaces, and silence in between.
Who am I?
And the future rushed to meet her in the furrow at the prow of the ship, and she welcomed, yet could not think of or imagine it. She looked down at her own hands, pale as ghosts on the rail before her.
And the voyage, too, had been terrible. Terrible and wonderful and shocking and it, too, had changed her, in ways she had only just begun to recognise, and could not yet understand.
The voyage and what had happened on it had overwhelmed her.
But not the sights. Those she had taken for granted – the schools of silver flying fish, the porpoises, the hot nights thick with stars, the seething ports, with naked children clamouring at the docksides, the endless yellow and brown land and the heat and then the unexpected cold, and the blueness of the sea, and the slowness of it all.
None of that.
Life at home, in the past, had been like so much of that.
But all the rest of it.
Below deck, Miss Amelia Hartshorn, on the bunk in her cabin, was overwhelmed too by the confusion of emotion. She sat, straight-backed, and absolutely still, and all around her, the boxes and suitcases and bags, neatly packed and labelled, so that the little, dark, stuffy place that had been her home, her refuge, was once again bleak and bare and unfamiliar.
When the siren had sounded, and she had heard the voices from above calling out, ‘Land!’ and ‘Home! Home!’, she had been among the first, heart pounding, scurrying up the iron staircase, pushing her way to a place at the rail, desperate, like the rest of them, for the sight of the cliffs, the coast of England.
Home.
The reality of it, the actual, rather ordinary sight – and yes, yes, of course, it was so green, and all was as it should be, yet, so much smaller than she had expected – the land itself, had made her tremble, and a rush of memory, a whole flood of recollection, of times, events, and words forgotten, pushed deliberately down into oblivion, had rushed over her, so that, after only a moment, she had gone back down the stairs alone, and into the silent cabin. And the crowd at the rail had parted slightly to let her through and then closed together again at once, her agitation had gone unnoticed.
She thought, it is here, it is now, that I have so longed for, and t
he rest is over.
For a second, she felt absolute joy.
But what she had had was her own adventure. Now, somewhere, stood the cottage in Warwickshire, behind the woods and overlooking the water-meadows. The words of the psalm ran through her head, as they had done so often in India, filling her with longing.
Like as the hart panteth after cooling streams.
She had forgotten why she had ever gone there, why she had made her escape. Had forgotten, once there, how like some bright, glittering mirage it had always seemed to beckon. Endlessly, she had read the stories, the legends, the descriptions, and her head had been filled, waking and sleeping, with dreams and visions, of vivid birds flying and jewelled turrets, of mountain peaks and hot plains and teeming bazaars. All the romantic things of elegant society.
In the cottage, where the rain dripped endlessly off the trees and the river ran swollen and brown and the darkness gathered and was never pierced by the sun for day after day, Marjorie Pepys held her book up rather close to her eyes, and the room smelled faintly of dog, and the clock ticked, ticked, ticked.
Well, then, Amelia Hartshorn thought, so it is over.
But did not look up and out of the small porthole at the cliffs, gliding by in the dusk.
And at least, the voyage was almost at an end, too, there was that relief.
2
ELEANOR NO longer weeps. There are no tears left. And she must comfort Lewis, who cares more than either of them had expected and is shocked by it, the grief is unceasing, and harsh, and leaves him vulnerable, shaken, guilty. They reach out falteringly for one another, and cling together, though they speak very little.
And the cool house is empty, and all the rooms seem silent, the dust in them lies undisturbed.
But after a time, they allow life to reassert itself, and Lewis works and Eleanor, of course, is always busy.
And they know it is the best for Kitty, and soon, very soon, there will be letters. Apart from that, there will be the arrival of the Hot Season, and all the business of the move to the hills.
At the club, the social round grows more frantic, now that the end is in sight.
Eleanor finds other women with whom to talk intimately, about the sending away of children, of parting, and agonising and worrying and waiting for news and making the best.
‘At least,’ she says, over and over again, in one way or another, ‘at least we had her childhood. And she is almost sixteen now, after all, we cannot hold onto her for ever. She needs to stretch her wings. But at least, we have so much to remember.’
The other women stare at her with large eyes in which tears almost always stand, and see not hers but their own children’s faces, and gaze and gaze, for fear that they may fade and be impossible to recall. Their own children are very young, much younger than Kitty Moorehead. They listen to Eleanor’s words and find themselves hating her.
And Lewis wakes in the night still to find that he has been weeping.
3
TO BEGIN with, naturally, they had been absolutely necessary to one another, because of the strangeness of the shipboard life, and of their fellow passengers, each had been the other’s only refuge. And Miss Hartshorn had felt her own responsibility keenly.
They had shared a cabin, they had eaten quietly together, they had sat out on deck, through the hot days, and late into the beautiful, star-filled evenings, reading aloud from Miss Hartshorn’s books, discussing poetry, and drama and prose, ideas and images, they had done crossword puzzles and played elaborate games of patience, and walked up and down, up and down. And Miss Hartshorn had talked.
Kitty had not allowed herself to think, to dwell on home and the past, or to speculate about the future, and the enormity of what she was doing.
But after a week, of restless, cramped nights in the close, dark little cabin, perhaps even less than a week, she had grown restless, had looked away from the books, and up and about her, wandered off alone sometimes, had hidden on the far side of the ship and leaned on the rail, and watched the flying fish soar past like flights of silver arrows, catching the sun, and felt by turn tremendous energy, and surges of excitement, so that she thought she might have leaped up like the fish and touched the sun; and fear, terrible fear, that threatened to obliterate her.
On the eighth day, she had asked for a cabin of her own. But there was not one, of course, to spare, so that instead, she had had a mattress and blanket brought up on deck and slept out, through the tropics, in defiance of Miss Hartshorn. It was not until much later, on reaching the Mediterranean, that the sudden coldness at night had driven her back below.
On the tenth day, the young officer, whose name was Hartley Hanson Kay, had come to stand beside her at the rail, and after a while, invited her to play a game of deck quoits.
And perhaps Kitty had liked him or perhaps she had not. But either way she had enjoyed herself hugely, hurled herself into game after game, and others had joined them from among the younger passengers, junior civil servants, young wives, there had been boisterousness and laughter. Later, they had sat on deckchairs, Kitty and Hartley Hanson Kay, talking a little, laughing at rather feeble jokes.
Miss Hartshorn, finding them there, had intervened at once, had taken Kitty down to the cabin, admonished, warned, reproved.
‘You are not yet even sixteen,’ she had said, over and over again. ‘And you are in my charge, my care, I am solely responsible, until we arrive in England.’
(But after that, at the quayside, one presumed, her responsibilities would be over, she would hand Kitty over and that would be the end of it. She resented that, resented the whole matter of the cousin, and the arrangements for Cambridge which had been made behind her back.)
That evening, she had gone up alone and spoken to several passengers, and finally, to the young man, who was amiable and pliable and stupid enough, and wanted no trouble, certainly, and, so, the next day, had ignored Kitty, and kept to the other side of the ship entirely, among his own crowd.
Kitty felt bewilderment, and a profound sense of injustice.
As well, perhaps, as a certain relief. Thought fiercely, standing once again, quite alone, that she had not come all this way, had not left her home, merely to find the company of some young man attractive. She burned with a hunger for learning, real learning, far above Miss Amelia Hartshorn’s little books, for knowledge, and the desire to do good.
So that the time was exactly ripe for the meeting, which took place by chance the following day, with Miss Lovelady.
‘A missionary,’ Amelia Hartshorn had said, dismissing the woman with the grey hair rolled up like a tight fat pincushion at her neck.
Not that she herself was irreligious.
Only, she had picked up, on the voyage out to India, a certain knowledge of the hierarchy of the ship, the unwritten code which was the guide to how things were done.
Missionaries were not regarded. If they travelled together, they kept together. Travelling alone, they were left alone. Which was to say, shunned.
Not that she had anything against missionaries.
(For governesses, she was aware, came scarcely any higher up in the order of things.)
‘A missionary, a Scots person, I daresay.’ (Though Miss Lovelady was not.)
And so, the little, dumpy woman had passed by and out of sight and they had gone on with their reading of Swinburne.
And then, there had been the incident over the young man, Hartley Hanson Kay.
The following day, the weather had worsened, after the progression of so many calm, still days and nights. There was a storm – discomforting, though not particularly serious. And Kitty had felt exhilarated by it, the rough sea and the wind, the turbulence matched her own mood.
But Miss Hartshorn was prostrated. She lay on her bunk in the cabin and was scarcely able to raise her head, from the appalling seasickness. She had no energy left at all to attend to Kitty, was barely even aware of her existence.
So Kitty went up on deck, thrilled by the rollin
g, boiling sea, and the wind whipped her hair into her face and she tasted salt on her lips and felt that she might sing and dance and shout with exhilaration, it was as though she were riding the ship, and her own body was part of the wild movements.
After a moment or two, she became aware that the little dumpy woman, the missionary, was on deck too, standing with her face turned upwards to the rain and the blown spray, wrapped from head to foot in a long mackintosh cape like a grey cloud billowing up and around her.
They smiled at one another. But words were shouted, yelled out, yet still went unheard above the din. In the end, exhausted, they were obliged to retreat, and then, naturally, came together to talk, in a corner of the passenger lounge, which was entirely empty.
And the woman, who was a missionary, introduced herself as Editha Lovelady. And so, the friendship was begun.
For the next three days they became inseparable. Though for two hours every afternoon, Miss Lovelady rested in her cabin, and then, Kitty wandered about disconsolately, picked up a book and did not read it, stared at the water, thought about their conversations. And Miss Lovelady retired quite early to bed. She had been seriously ill, it was a heart condition that obliged her to return home earlier than she had ever planned, from the missionary field. Indeed, she had never planned to return at all.
‘I would have hoped to remain there. To die in India. That has been home, there is no other. And I am only sixty-two. I dare say that seems very old to you. So old! But I could have worked for, oh, another ten years at least. I feel I am still needed, that I have something left to give. But we do not always choose, Kitty. And I have accepted it.’
