by Susan Hill
Ben Bryce, who had worked for him since he was fifteen, and even before that, in summer evenings and holidays, for the pleasure of it, who had been reliable, thorough, industrious. Oh, but more than that, more, for all the men worked well enough, it was not only that. Ben Bryce. Rydal had liked to go and talk to him, say some word about the state of the trees, the weather, vermin, anything, he had liked to stand watching the young man at work, because he exuded some sort of contentment and strength, some satisfaction with the world which Rydal knew that he himself had lacked, perhaps ever since he was born. Silent Ben Bryce might sometimes have been, withdrawn, or else abruptly outspoken; but he was never dissatisfied, never unsure. He had been at one with things.
Now, packing down the dark tobacco in the pipe bowl and lighting it again, Rydal thought, I am an old man; though he was not yet sixty. But it seemed that no blood ran in his veins, no life at all. His skin and flesh were dried out, his hair was thin, and he had no purpose, no hope. He was a rich man, and respected, the blue-bound wage book was thick with the list of men who worked for him, and none of it counted, none of it had value. He had stood in the church at Ben Bryce’s funeral and thought only that life had no meaning, and his own least of all.
The pipe was dead again, the taste of burnt smoke bitter in his mouth. He looked down at the papers and did not know, still, about the money for Ruth Bryce and had no heart to work, nor to go back into the huge house and sit opposite the wife who did not love him.
Instead, he walked as far as the top gate, and, leaning on it, looked over the land which belonged to him, and he would have given away all of it, in reparation, because it brought him no joy, and because the tree which had killed Ben Bryce had been his tree and the guilt would never leave him.
No one could have told how old Moony knew, how the ripples had spread out to where he lived, six miles from the village, or whether he had picked the news up somewhere, on his endless walking, nor could they guess that he, too, was, in his own way, affected.
Years ago, his place had been a hut for shepherds, forced to spend nights out during lambing time or in bad weather, there was only one room and the stone walls were patched up with old corrugated tin sheeting, the roof hung askew and leaked at the corner, so that inside, there was always the smell of damp and, often, a pool of water on the floor. But Moony was never cold, never ill. He had a fire, logs or brushwood or peat, and as often as not, the smoke blew back down the chimney tunnel, and clung to the walls, there was a crust of soot over them.
He had carried the news of Ben Bryce’s death back, and brooded over it now, in the reeking hut. He knew them all by name, though they never spoke, but something had set Ben Bryce apart from the rest, and his young brother the same. They told the truth.
In one corner, a tame raven with a damaged wing and no name perched like a scarecrow, and, as Moony fed it out of his hand with bits of bread and grain, he turned over in his mind what he had learned about death. Others might think it chance, or a cruel blow of fate, others might think there were dozens, older, weaker, less good, who should have been struck down before him. But others were wrong. It seemed to Moony that when a man was ready for death, fitted to it, then death did well to take him, before he was altered and soiled by all the evil in this world.
‘I’m ready,’ he said, as the bird jabbed its hard, bright beak down to the palm of his hand. ‘I’ve been ready time enough.’ And so had Ben Bryce, there had been a look about his eyes, the settled look of a man who knew himself and this world, and so, was ready to leave them.
So Moony thought, and more, cooking up his can of meat – a grouse, poached from under one of Rydal’s hedges. He used to tell himself that, one day, he would write it all down, one day – but now he knew that was not necessary, his thoughts were what he lived by, and they were too rich and deep for others. The plans he made, the questions he asked and answered were to his own satisfaction, and that was enough. He lived within himself, as within the four walls of the hut, and had not expected to be moved or startled by anything outside.
Now, this, and it was no ordinary death.
The raven fluffed out its feathers, and then settled down again into them, half-closed its eyes, so that, as it grew dark, there was only the sullen burning of the fire.
The pool was unsettled for a long time, they none of them could feel that life would return to normal, everyone still spoke or brooded, or, like Dora Bryce, moaned and wept, about the death, and perhaps the children were affected more than any, sensing uncertainty and danger, so that, in this house and that, all about the countryside, there were bad dreams and eyes wide open in fear, there was restlessness and bewilderment.
That first week of March blew itself out in gales and rainstorms, Lent came in but the Spring might never follow.
5
SHE THOUGHT, HOW can I go on crying, for there can be no tears left in me? But it was a bottomless well. And there were so many kinds of weeping; the harsh, raking sobs and then a silent steady flow, as she lay inert upon the bed. Her face was sore and chapped and sometimes she got up and bathed it in cold water and was soothed. But she no longer cared to look at herself in the glass, for the tears had made her ugly, Ben would have been ashamed of her. Quite often, this thought came, and she could imagine his voice in the room, begging her to stop, because her crying distressed him, he said, ‘Don’t cry for me. Why? Why? All’s well with me. It’s done with, over, and now, nothing can hurt me again.’
And this made her angry, she screamed back at him, told him the truth, that she was crying for herself, for her own loss, and her dread of the empty future, not for him, not for him. How could he not understand? She blamed him for leaving her, said, you have everything and I have nothing, At least let me do this, leave me alone to weep.
Days passed and nights passed and, sometimes, Jo was there, and she did not care if he heard her or saw her face. Time was not measured out in hours or by lightness and dark, grief had a time of its own, and a rhythm, so that she was either weeping over some particular memory, or craving for his physical body and its closeness, like a child taken from its mother; or else her mind was a blur, like the windows that streamed with rain, she was drowning, but never quite losing consciousness in it all. But she did know, in some way, when it was evening, and time to put the hens into their coop and then, no matter how she felt, she always got up and stumbled down through the wet garden, she did not miss a day.
At times, she woke up, cramped with cold, but unable to make the effort of pulling blankets over her, or going down to the fire Jo always made up. Or else she was thirsty, with the kind of desperate thirst which seemed to reach down to the pit of her stomach, which was shrivelled and burning. She got up and drank water from a white jug, pint after pint, it hurt her throat to swallow, but still the thirst was not slaked. She did eat, picked up a piece of fruit or a raw vegetable, some cheese, and crammed it into her mouth, because it seemed to be in some way obscene, the act of eating was ugly, inhuman.
She slept, by day or by night, for hours or minutes, and sometimes dreamed, of Jo’s leering, threatening tree-faces. But it still seemed that this was a time to endure, a grief to pass through, like a dark tunnel, and at the end of it, everything would be as it had always been, she would be with Ben again. She thought, dying is like being born, and now I am doing both, with Ben. For she wanted to share in everything with him, could not accept that, in death, be had to be alone. She said, I should have been with him, I wanted to have been there with him when the tree fell, there when he died, I failed him, I left him by himself.
But out of it all, two days separated themselves, two days in which everything changed and she was temporarily released from weeping and restored to herself, sane and quieted.
The first time, Jo was there, down in the kitchen, and she in bed, and exhausted beyond bearing with grief, and for a while, she had no more tears left, she slept, for how long she could not tell, but it was like a waking sleep, a trance, and in it, she dreamed of
Ben. He was here, in the room with her, but he would not let her see his face, he stood somewhere just behind her. She sensed that he did not want her to turn round; but he was Ben, real and whole and unharmed, and more alive, more himself than he had ever been, so that she was startled, she thought, or said, ‘I never knew I had so much, I thought you were … but I didn’t know anything about you, you were a shadow then, but now … and I never knew.’
It did not distress her. How could it? When he was so much more, so fulfilled and perfected?
For a while, nothing else happened, in the dream, except this awareness and the fact that she was not allowed to see him.
And then he said, ‘I will always help you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Wherever you are, I will always help you. Ruth?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ruth…’
She was coming awake to the sound of her own name, lying very quietly on the bed. She and the room and the whole house were filled with the dream. But something else, also. Outside, the sky was mould-grey, it was late afternoon, raining. But Ruth saw, instead, the other light, glowing out of everything and it was the same light that had changed the face of the world on the day before Ben’s dying, and at the funeral.
The chair beside the bed, and the faded floral curtains, the dark oak wardrobe and the mirror and the ceiling were lit from within, as though some fire were burning deep down, but it was not a harsh, bright light, it was pale and translucent. And Ruth herself seemed to be filled with it. She lifted up her arm and saw each finger and the milky nails and blue veins, the joint of her wrist, as though they were newly made, and of some substance altogether finer and more beautiful than flesh and bone. She closed her eyes and opened them again, but it was still the same. Except that, as the sky outside darkened, the light in the room glowed more strongly. She lay and let it bathe over her like spring-water, she felt entirely calm, rested and refreshed. All the crying was done with, that had belonged to another time and place, a different Ruth.
She remembered the words and spoke them aloud.
‘And he will wipe every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.’
So now she knew, she understood, as she understood only that in the church. She wept, not tears of relief but of gratitude.
Jo knocked quietly on the door, and when she answered, came in, and stopped, a little way from the bed.
‘Jo?’
It was dark. The dream and the light were fading.
‘What is it?’
She heard her own voice and it sounded as it used to sound. She turned her head. There was a curious, puzzled or frightened expression on his face. He came slowly over to her, knelt down and put his head on her arm.
‘What happened, Ruth? Something happened.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘What happened? I was in the kitchen and … I don’t know what it was.’
‘You shouldn’t be afraid, Jo.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It wasn’t anything bad.’
‘What was it, Ruth?’
She was silent. The room had gone quite dark, now. She was fully awake.
She said, ‘I don’t know what it was.’ Because that was the truth.
‘Do you feel better?’
‘Yes. I went to sleep.’
She put her hand out and touched his head. The hair was thick and coarse-textured. Not like Ben’s. He had thought or felt something, the dream had passed through him, too, but not for long enough, and he was afraid. She wondered if she might come to be so, too, and remembered what had happened before, that she had forgotten the dream entirely and tried to recall it – and failed. That would be so again, and then the world would be unbearably real, dead and opaque and colourless. Perhaps it might come back. But only if she did not ask or expect it. And if it did not? If it had never been?
No, it had been. And if it was only a dream, then wasn’t that something, a lull, a peace at the heart of the storm? She might always sleep and dream again.
She got up and went to put away the hens, and then stood for a moment or two, her ankles deep in the wet grass, stroking the nose and neck of the donkey, and everything was quiet, and she was quiet within herself.
*
That night, and the day following it, were worse than any she had lived through before. Jo went home. She poured out a cup of milk and began to sip it, and heard the rain pattering off the roof on to the grass. And she was ice-cold, her flesh felt stiff, the roof of her mouth was dry. She thought, Ben is dead and in his grave, and that is all, he is nowhere, there is nothing left of him and so it would have been better if he had not lived. There was no point in my meeting and loving and marrying him, no purpose in our happiness. For there is only this world and the misery of it, there was a chance, an accident, the falling of a tree and the person who was Ben, thinking and feeling, the live person, was finished, gone into a black pit, he knew nothing about it, and he knows nothing now. He is nowhere. He should never have been, the whole world should never have been.
She was sick with dread that this was the truth, now that she was wide awake, and that the dream was nothing, as the light had been nothing, or else some illusion she had somehow manufactured for her own consolation, her own deception. She cried out, ‘Why did you give it to me, if you were going to take it away? Why did you give me Ben and then kill him?’ And did not know who she was accusing, God or not-God, life or death, or Ben himself.
She was certain, then, that her mind was diseased and her feelings delusions, that she was mad to believe what she had believed. She leaned over the wooden table and wept and cried out like an animal in a trap, words and non-words, all caught up and whirled about anyhow among the tears. She wiped her arm over her face again and again, and then, because she wanted to escape, somehow, somehow, she went to the wall and beat her head against it, and then her fists, and when she felt pain, only beat harder, for the one thing she had left was the power to injure herself, as Ben had been injured.
She did not go back upstairs, there was no strength in her, she lay on the floor in front of the fire and sobbed there, her face pressed into the rug, and all night, the rain, the rain.
Once, half-waking, she wished that her Godmother Fry were still alive, for she was the only person who might have helped her. Godmother Fry had believed, had talked to Ruth once, and without dread, about her own death, which would surely come soon, for she was almost ninety; she had been ready, she trusted. Everything Ruth believed had come from Godmother Fry, or from Ben, for they had been alike, in the things they knew, which were not of this world. It had been her Godmother who taught her that Easter was the time which counted, the testing time, for Christmas was tinselled over with legend and children’s dreams, it was true, but Easter was stripped bare of the dreams, Easter was suffering and death and resurrection, was despair and hope and certainty.
And Easter was not long away, and she could not tell if it would matter to her now.
Early in the morning, she came out of some half-sleep, half-death, aching and shivering with cold and exhaustion, but still she could not move, she lay all through the morning, her eyes open, staring at the dead ashes in the grate, and she had never known, until now, what it was truly to despair.
Jo came. Saw her. Knelt down and touched her. She said nothing. He left her, she heard him doing the jobs he always did, and she thought dimly that she should get up, because he, too, needed help, love, and perhaps she frightened or disgusted him.
She closed her eyes again to shut out the dank, grubby daylight, and the sight of the cold ashes, and put her hands up to her ears to muffle the sound of the endless rain. And through her head, the same words. He is dead. He is nothing. He is nowhere. He is dead. He is dead. She made clutching movements with her fists, as if she could somehow take hold again of her old belief or hope, but there was only the empty air.
S
he did get up, though there seemed no reason for it, and washed herself and her hair, and stared at the water coming from the tap – water, which she had always thought beautiful, in its clearness and suppleness, any water, sea or stream, rain or pond; and now it was like everything else, dead, and when it dribbled away, dirtied by its contact with her own skin and hair, she was repelled by it.
*
In the kitchen, Jo stood beside the range, feeling the heat coming off it, but it did not warm him, he shivered because he was so afraid for Ruth, he so loved her, and was helpless, there was nothing he could do or say, no way he could reach her. No one else could share this with him. At Foss Lane, her name was never spoken, and his mother, her own crying ended now, dragged herself about the house, an old woman, his father came and went to work, ate and drank, said nothing,
What should he do?
‘God,’ he said, ‘God, please …’
What? He was not sure. ‘Make her well again. Make her well.’ But in his heart he thought that nothing could make her well, except Ben, the old life.
He saw the rose-quartz, still on the table, and touched it and felt, as when he first saw it, some kind of truth which emanated from the crystal and was bound up with the shaping of it. Then, he could not believe in death. He knew that it was not so, had always known. But how to tell Ruth? How to make her believe it? He had thought that she did. Yesterday, when there had been such a stillness and peace in the house, and in her, her voice and touch, yesterday, relief had spurted up within him, because she was well again, she knew, something had happened.
And now, today …
He put the kettle on the range and boiled it and made tea, cupping his hands around the china and holding it close to his face for warmth. He heard the door of the bedroom close and dare not go up to her with a drink, because somehow, her fear and despair and misery might reach out and enter him, eat away at his own strength and belief.
