by Susan Hill
It had stopped raining but the sky above the sagging trees was dough-coloured. She had not wanted to wake, for what could she do with another day, how might she drag herself through eight or ten hours, struggling against remembering too much and falling into despair, or giving in and weeping uselessly, sickening herself. She had taken to going to bed earlier, at seven or eight o’clock, longing for the oblivion which always came to her.
The man was old and dirty and pushed a handcart with one lop-sided wheel. He came over the track, looking down, but making directly towards the cottage and at first she thought that someone was again trying to see her, to pry, under the pretence of bringing her this or that, and she shrank back from the window.
But he was not from the village, she had never seen him before. As he came nearer, she noticed that the cart was half-full, though she could not tell with what, and loosely covered with a tattered sheet of sacking or canvas. Then he was one of the travelling men, selling pots and pans and brushes. She wanted nothing, she would have opened the window and called to him to go away. But she did not, it seemed impossible for her to exert herself even as much as that. And so he came on, leaving the hand cart at the gate and trudging down the path and around to the back door. Well, he would go away, as they all did, she had only to wait.
But after his second or third knocking, she went down, suddenly wanting to have the sight, even for a moment, of another human face, to be in touch again with the real world, outside of herself. Jo had not come yet today.
He was not old, not really, only dirty, with a thin face and stiff limbs. She thought, he does not know me or anything about me, he does not know about Ben. But he must, everyone must know – how could there be a person in the world who did not?
He had begun to speak as she opened the door, a stream of words, pattered off like a rhyme, spoken dozens of times each day.
‘Old clothes, shoes, pots, pans, vases, plates, watches or clocks, working or not, silver, coins, medals, knives, scissors, ornaments, fire-irons, coal-scuttles, blankets, brass …’
‘All that?’
‘Any of that, any …’
‘How? On that cart? How can you have all of that to sell?’
He pulled off his cap and set it back on his head in a single movement, but there was time for her to see that the hair was growing only here and there, in tufts and patches, anyhow, and with scaly, bald places between, like the pelt of an animal with mange.
‘To sell, young lady, anything to sell, old clothes, shoes, pots, pans…’
‘No,’ she said at once, for of course there was nothing and even if there had been, what would she be doing selling it to a travelling man?
He did not stop until he reached the end of his chant again, like a clock which had been wound up and must run right down, could not be interrupted.
Ruth looked past him, at the garden, the soil clogged after days of rain, the path sticky and red with clay. The donkey Balaam stood by the fence, head hanging down as though on a broken neck, stood as she had been standing at her window, scarcely alive.
‘I’ve nothing.’
‘Good money for your old things.’
‘There’s nothing.’
He turned away, thinking, that he’d not waste any more time here, on a young woman who looked as if she were not long married, and just setting up home, having little. It was the old who had always something to sell, the old and the very poor.
It came to her in a flash, then, she knew what she should do, wanted to do, for maybe it would help her, maybe this way she could forget, could somehow try to begin her life afresh. She knew.
‘Wait!’
He stopped, glanced back over his shoulder.
‘If … if you come back… come back later.’
‘Afternoon?’
‘Yes. Yes, come then. Then I’ll have things – a lot of things. I want to sell …’
He did not reply, and she called out again, as he reached the top gate, ‘You will? Please come back, please…’
He touched his cap, nodded and took up the cart. A thin drizzle had begun to fall again.
The idea had taken hold of her like some kind of madness, she was possessed only by the passionate need for it to be accomplished, and there seemed to be so little time. Ah, but when it was over, when she had done it, all of it and the man had been again and gone, then, then…
But she must think. Now. She would begin upstairs.
At first, she pulled out drawers and cupboards at random, half-emptied them, flung things down on the floor or the bed, swept whole shelves bare. Then she realised that there had to be some order to it or she would never be through, and went out into the shed, found some old grain sacks which were slightly damp and smelled of mice, but were still strong enough, they would serve. Into these she shovelled the things, coats, shirts, shoes, trousers, jumpers, one after another, anyhow, and when the clothes were done, she went downstairs, for there was so much, he had had so many things, she had never realised. There were tools, books, pipes, keys, things in the bureau, and all of them went into the sacks, and she would not let herself examine anything closely or stop to think, she hardly let her hands touch them. She kept only one or two things; the rose-quartz, and the magnifying glass, and a leather belt with a silver buckle, and his pocket watch, which she would give to Jo. There was a seal ring, which Ben had never worn, but it had belonged to his grandfather, he had liked to pick it up and look at it sometimes. She would keep that one thing for herself. But nothing else, nothing.
The bedroom looked quite different, it belonged clearly now to one person only. Except for the bed. And seeing it, she wanted that to be gone, too, and perhaps the man with the handcart had some friend who would come for it, or else there might be someone else she could give it to. It was an old, brass bed, high and wide, and had belonged, like so much of the furniture in the cottage, to Godmother Fry. But in the small room was a small bed, and she wanted that in here, and would have exchanged them at once if she had been able to move them on her own; so strong was her desire to change things utterly, to have nothing of Ben and the old life left here, no reminders. She liked to think of sleeping in a very narrow bed, bound about tightly with sheets, so that there could be no space of mattress and pillow to which she might, out of longing or habit, turn in the night.
The door of the large wardrobe hung open. She stared into the depths of it, put her hand inside and felt only space and the length of smooth round rail, where his clothes had hung.
The sacks were heavy, she had to drag them, bumping behind her, down the stairs, and she put them in the kitchen close to the door, and then waited for the afternoon to come, and the man with the handcart, she could do or think of nothing else, could not move forward in time until everything had gone.
She did not worry at all about what any of them might say, the family, other people in the village, or even of what Ben would have thought. She could only feel for herself, and the things were hers now, weren’t they, she might do as she chose with them and what use were they to her? It was this, or else give his clothes away to men in the village, and then see them wearing what had belonged to him, had covered his flesh, and that she could not have borne.
As the morning went on, the drizzle condensed into a mist which rolled up the garden and across the common, closing in upon the cottage, until she could neither hear nor see anything outside and so, none of it concerned her, she was estranged from all people, all life, and wanted it that way. Perhaps they did, too. They did not wish to see her, because they were embarrassed or hostile, and she reminded them of too much, brought death too close to them. They thought, but shied away, at once, from those thoughts.
It was almost five o’clock and her heart had begun to thump hard with the fear that he might not come back, she walked in and out of the rooms, and stood, first at the front window, then at the back, she prayed for him to come, for if he did not, how could she live with those sacks, piled up by the door, like bodies awaiting buria
l. She would not be able to open them and take everything out, restore the things to their old places, she could not bear to think of touching them again. She remembered the children in the wood. Well, she would copy them; somehow, she would drag the sacks down to the meadow, or into the copse, and either bury them or make a pyre and burn them in the garden.
But he came back, when the mist was thickening and darkening, she heard the rattle of the loose wheel over the path. The handcart was empty now.
He leaned over one of the sacks, pulled apart the string she had tied roughly round the top, and was going to tip the things out on to the kitchen floor.
‘No!’
She grabbed at his arm in her panic, for she must not see any of them ever again.
‘Take them. I just want you to take them away.’
‘I have to see what’s there, don’t I, what’s any good?’
‘No … it’s … I don’t want you to open them.’
He stood upright slowly, and stared at her.
‘There are clothes… men’s … everything, and tools and… it’s all good.’
‘You say…’
‘I don’t care what you give me for them – anything, please, take them all away, please.’
For you will hear, she thought, they will tell you, any of them, pass the story down through the village, say where you’ve been, who gave you these things, and they will tell you all you want to know.
He said nothing else. He lifted the sacks on to the handcart, covered them over with the canvas sheet, gave her some money, and Ruth did not look at it, or at him, again, she closed the door and went back, hid in the corner of the room, so that she need not see the loaded cart, though she heard it, and his footsteps, going away through the fog.
She was trembling with relief, and tiredness, and with shame too, for she was afraid of what she had done, and angry, and startled by how violently the need to get rid of everything had taken her, how urgently she had acted.
The room was dark. After a long time, she opened her hand which was holding the money, and looked down. A few coins. She did not count them. They felt dirty, she seemed to be holding thirty pieces of silver, the betrayal was so great. And just as she had needed to empty the house of Ben’s possessions, so, now, the one thing she must do was to get rid of this evil money
She ran out of the house and down the garden through the soaking mist, struggled over the fence into the meadow and went on, running, running, stumbling on tussocks of grass and soaking her feet and ankles with wet and mud, she was gasping, her chest burned She had to push her way through the undergrowth, briars and black, tangled roots and branches, tearing her clothes, to get into the copse, and here, the mud was thicker, she fell once and gashed her hand on something, and struggled up again, bleeding and coated with a mulch of sodden leaves. She could not see, only grope her way to the top of the slope, beyond which the coppice dropped down steeply towards the beech woods. It was there, into the black space that fell away at her feet, that she flung the money, and turned away at once, not wanting to hear it fall, began to run again, back through the mud and bushes and sodden grass of the meadow, to the cottage, and there, surely, she would feel clean, for she had thrown everything far away from her, she had not even counted the money, she had done her penance.
But she had not. She knew, as she opened the door into that house, from which she had so violently banished everything of Ben. She stood, looking down at herself, at the torn, soiled clothes and shoes, at the caked mud and the smears of blood on her hand and arm.
And dropped to her knees then, and wept for forgiveness.
9
THE DAYS HAD been grey forever, there had always been rain and mist, and Lent would not come to an end.
But when she awoke, in the very early morning of the day after the travelling man had been, the sun was rising and spreading out through the room. When she went to the window, she looked out upon a gold and green world, upon spring. It was the end of April, it was Easter Saturday; and she understood that the forgiveness had come.
It no longer mattered about the empty drawers and cupboards, she closed them, and dressed and went through the house, opening every window wide, though the air which came in was still quite cold. But she wanted that, fresh air and light, everything must be light.
In the larder, she found a small loaf of bread, wrapped in white cloth, which Jo must have left for her, and though it was no longer very moist, she cut and buttered and ate it, slice after slice, before going down to let out the hens and bring up the eggs.
And the eggs themselves looked different, no longer, dull, heavy things, pale as stones; she cracked open two and beat them up with butter and they were golden yellow, glistening and sweet in the pan. She felt as if she had never eaten food before. It was a new gift, everything was a gift, and what she knew, above all else, was that she must take it, take it and be glad, not only for her own sake but for Ben’s. This was what he had been waiting for, and wanting. It might not last.
By eight o’clock Jo was here, and as she saw him coming towards her through the sunlight, he, too, looked changed, his hair and pale skin were like those of a new-born child, he walked with a grace and lightness Ruth had never seen before. He stopped, and saw her face, and smiled, all anxiety gone from him.
He said, ‘Tomorrow…’
‘Easter. Yes. Oh, and I’d forgotten, Jo – how could I have forgotten?’
For Easter had been so important. Fleetingly, she remembered last year, when it had been much earlier, in March, and still really winter.
‘We should go,’ Jo said, ‘or I’ll go, if you don’t want to. I shall understand – if you’d rather not. But somebody must go.’
He looked about him, and up at the sky, over the copse, ‘It’s the best sort of day. You don’t always get a day like this for it.’
He was talking about gathering the flowers, in the woods and along banks and hedgerows, and moss from beside the stream. On Easter Saturday evening, people took them up to the churchyard and spent hours, dressing the graves, making beautiful floral patterns on the turf, they worked until it was dark and even later, by lantern light, so that, on the following morning, all the dead should be decked out with fresh-growing blooms, a resurrection.
‘I shan’t mind, if you want me to go and do it on my own.’
‘Oh, no. No.’
Because this was the first real thing she could do for Ben, and she wanted to have the pleasure of it, of going with Jo about the countryside, filling up the baskets with damp green moss and spring flowers.
‘No, we must go together.’
Jo frowned, and glanced away from her.
‘And the others?’ Ruth said.
He shrugged.
‘Well – Alice might come.’
But he shook his head.
All the colours of that day were green and gold, even the sky seemed to have taken on a reflection from the white-gold sun and the upturned petals of yellow flowers in field and meadow, and along the margins of the woods.
As they stood at the top of the field for a moment, looking down, Ruth and Jo saw, first, the haze of green, like an openwork shawl laid over the tops of all the trees, where the buds were unfolding into first leaf. Ruth thought that she could never have seen so many different shades of green; the emerald of the larches that fringed the beech woods, and the yellowish-green early poplars, ash green willow leaves and the pale, oaten-olive tinge of the young wheat. The grass was green, dark as moss in the shadow of the banks, and clear as lime, high up in the full sun, and when they went into the wood, the light was pond-green and, at their feet, the polished green blades of bluebells.
They went right down through the beeches, which sloped to the stream, and passed by the exact place where Ruth had first spoken to Ben, and she knew it, and did not stop, did not mind, she felt only contentment.
This was the same stream, flowing quite quickly today, into which she and Ben had looked down at their own faces, which had shi
mmered and changed, as the water rippled. Jo began to pull up the soft sphagnum moss and line the flat, open baskets with it. It was curled close and springy as a child’s head of hair, and sweet, damp-smelling. They were careful to take enough of the soil clinging to it, so that the moss would not wither before the day was out, and would lie well on top of the graves. They worked quietly, happily, moving up the bank, trying not to slip; but once, Ruth did stumble over, so that her foot went into the water; it was stinging cold. But it did not matter, nothing could be wrong. Here and there, the wood was darker, but the beech leaves were still light, they would not be out until the first week in May, and so, almost everywhere, the sun shone through, their hands and faces were gilded and the stones under the water of the stream shone in flat, translucent ovals or glinted up in points of light. They were ready to pick the flowers.
‘Yellow,’ Jo said, laughing, ‘it’s all yellow – it’s like finding – treasure, coins, under the sea.
There were lemon primroses, and the deeper tinted cowslips, celandines and rich marsh-marigolds, the last of the miniature daffodils, and dandelions, bright as medallions – which might be weeds but were beautiful enough for any grave.
Hidden in among all this gold were the white and mauve flowers, ladies’ smocks and dark wood violets and anemones, periwinkle, and then the sorrel with shell-pink streaks. They went home, to water the baskets and put them on the cool slab of the larder, before setting out again, this time to gather so many bluebells that they could not help but drop some, and so, they left a trail of misty blue all the way up the fields and the lane. Ruth’s hands were stained and slimy with the sap that oozed out of the glutinous stems, she put her face down into the flowers and smelled the smell of spring, and felt dizzy with it. Then, she looked at Jo as he walked beside her, his skin ruddy at the end of the day’s sunshine, and for the first time, she saw in him some resemblance to Ben, some fleeting expression of eyes and mouth. It did not give her any sense of shock, it comforted her, and she loved Jo more – because of this, but because he was also so much himself, was linked by blood to his dead brother and yet was such a different person.
