Courting Shadows

by Jem Poster

  ‘A small price to pay for a man’s safety, sir.’

  The accusation hung in the air, unspoken, unmistakable. I turned to go but Harris seemed anxious to detain me.

  ‘Another thing, sir. I was thinking about the next stage. When we cut back beneath the foundations, we’ll need props. The whole weight of the wall bearing down … You said as much yourself.’

  ‘I was urging haste – I wasn’t suggesting the likelihood of imminent collapse. And I should perhaps make it clear that we shan’t be undercutting the whole of the exposed area at once. We shall construct the underpinning in sections, a couple of feet at a time, ensuring that each phase is begun and completed on the same day. That way there’ll be no need of props.’

  He looked doubtfully at the footings, shaking his head almost imperceptibly from side to side.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Harris. These matters are my concern, and you can safely leave them to me.’

  Not a word; just a fleeting glance in my direction as he turned back to his work. But I read his thoughts as clearly as if he had articulated them.

  ‘Harris.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘I don’t want the matter of Jefford’s accident to dominate our dealings with one another. Do you understand?’

  ‘Of course, sir. I’ve been very careful not to mention it. I know how troubled I’d be if I were in your place.’

  Perhaps I was wrong to let it rest there, but the obliquity of the insolence left me uncertain how to respond and, as I hesitated, Harris changed the subject.

  ‘Those bricks against the wall on the other side of the porch – are they for the underpinning?’

  ‘Yes. When you’ve finished what you’re doing I’d like you to bring them over and stack them at the edge of the trench. Not too close, and not too high, but they need to be ready to hand for tomorrow. When that’s done you can go home.’

  He looked as if he were about to object, but I moved quickly away. I had measurements to take for the joiners and had left my tape and notebook in my lodgings. I hurried across the meadow, reaching the far side a little out of breath.

  No doubt it was foolish to attempt to vault the gate. I still think of myself as a young man, but I am already beginning to feel something of the rheumatic stiffness of the upper back which has afflicted my father for much of his adult life; and as I thrust down on the top bar a stab of pain went through my shoulders and up the left side of my neck, throwing me off balance. I cleared the gate but landed heavily, stumbled, and fell face forward in the rutted lane.

  I have always been peculiarly sensitive to any blow to my self-esteem. I still bear on my right forearm a reminder of an occasion on which, attempting to demonstrate my prowess, I caught the tip of one of my blades on some unevenness or obstruction and went sprawling, hurtling across the ice until brought up short by collision with another skater. Nearly twenty-five years on, the raised white cicatrice says nothing to me of pain or fright (though I recall the pressure of a tourniquet around my upper arm and the bright splashes of blood on the trampled snow as I was carried home) but is still capable of reviving the embarrassment of my long helpless slide from grace beneath the eyes of the schoolfellows I had been so anxious to impress. I squirm now as I think of it; I squirm as I think of myself raising my head from the gritty surface of the lane to see the woman running towards me, one hand outstretched, the other hitching her heavy skirt above her ankles. I was on my feet before she reached me, brushing down the front of my coat with my sleeve, trying to ignore the dull ache in my knee.

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  The expressive lilt of her voice was to some extent compromised by a surprisingly strong rural burr.

  ‘Not seriously.’ I examined my grazed wrists and palms. ‘Hardly at all, in fact.’

  ‘Let me see.’ And with a brisk impulsive movement she took my right hand in her own and examined the broken skin.

  ‘You should get this cleaned,’ she said. ‘All that dirt and grit. If you don’t get rid of that—’

  ‘I was on my way back to my lodgings. I’ll do it there.’

  ‘I could help you if you want.’

  I think she herself recognized the extraordinary impropriety of the suggestion, for she blushed faintly and released my hand. I felt that an explicit rejection of her offer was probably unnecessary.

  ‘Thank you for your concern,’ I said. I bowed stiffly and would have walked on if she had not reached out again and laid her hand on my arm.

  ‘I saw you at church yesterday,’ she said, blurting out the words, flushing more deeply now. Her gaucheness, and indeed her sheer lack of breeding, astonished me. That dignity of bearing which had struck me so forcibly on the previous morning had vanished completely; had perhaps never existed. This, I realized, was a woman scarcely beyond girlhood, seventeen or eighteen years old at most, possessed, admittedly, of considerable beauty and a certain naïve charm but not – emphatically not – the imposing figure I thought I had seen. I stepped back a pace, breaking her hold on my sleeve.

  ‘I was there with my mother. Did you see me?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. There were so many people in the congregation, and their faces are all new to me.’

  ‘Of course.’ She smiled dazzlingly, unexpectedly. ‘I suppose you’ll have written us off as a dull lot.’

  ‘Not at all. What makes you think that?’

  ‘Your life must be very different from ours. The people you meet, the places you go.’

  Her conversational strategies were transparent, as childishly unsophisticated as her demeanour. I was not going to be drawn.

  ‘I’m afraid I have work to do,’ I said.

  She seemed to miss the point of the remark.

  ‘Important work, Mr Banks says. I suppose it will keep you here for some time.’

  ‘For several months, certainly.’

  She stood looking at me for a second or two, her head on one side, before resuming with a kind of stumbling eagerness.

  ‘We have so few visitors here. Almost none. Nobody worth speaking of anyway. And to have someone like you among us – well, I don’t know you of course, but just seeing your face – I mean, seeing you there in church …’

  Her words died on the damp air. And I was flattered – flattered and not a little intrigued – by a discomposure which seemed to reveal more than the girl could possibly have intended. I narrowed the space between us again, at my ease now and rather more inclined to indulge her evident hunger for company and conversation.

  ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘you can see the advantages of seclusion. Yours is a simpler world than mine, certainly, but there are many who would envy you your simplicity.’

  She appeared to find something unpalatable in the observation. I saw her body stiffen slightly, her gaze harden.

  ‘And you?’ she asked. ‘Do you envy me? Would you change places with me, or with anyone here?’

  I judged it advisable to change tack. ‘I presume,’ I said, ‘that you’ve always lived in the village?’

  ‘Just outside.’ She waved a slender hand towards the hillside. ‘Over there.’

  ‘With your mother?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Brothers? Sisters?’

  ‘I have a brother. He doesn’t live with us any more.’

  ‘And your father? What’s his trade?’

  ‘All these questions,’ she said uneasily, tossing back her head so that I caught the fragrance wafting from her thick hair. ‘You can’t expect to find out everything about a person at your first meeting.’

  I was later to examine the remark more closely, but at the time I simply laughed – yes, laughed out loud with a sudden and not entirely explicable sense of exhilaration – at what I took to be its artlessness.

  ‘So you anticipate further meetings?’

  She stared at me, wide-eyed; clapped her hand to the side of her face.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, visibly flustered, ‘you mustn’t think I meant … only that we’re
bound to meet again, you being here in the village for so long and me—’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself about it,’ I said quickly. And then, surprising myself with my own galanterie: ‘A man might be forgiven for wishing you had meant a little more.’

  There was a long silence. I could see from her expression that I had made insufficient allowance for the literal-mindedness of an unsophisticated country girl. Time, I thought, to bring the conversation to a close.

  ‘You must forgive me,’ I said. ‘I really must be getting on.’

  She stood aside to let me pass.

  ‘Of course. Your work.’ And then, abruptly, with an odd nervous movement of her head: ‘My name’s Ann. Ann Rosewell.’

  ‘I know.’

  I recognized my own stupidity almost before the words were out. She said nothing, but I saw her expression change. A slight narrowing of the eyes, lifted suddenly to mine with a confidence bordering on audacity; and then that smile again, more prolonged this time, disturbing in its suggestions of power and awareness. If I had begun the interview on a stronger footing I should no doubt have found some way of reasserting my own authority, but as it was, I turned and moved off in confusion, mumbling a clumsy farewell, my knee throbbing painfully as I went. I imagined her gaze on me as I limped down the lane towards my lodgings, careful not to look back, careful not to stop.

  By the time I got back to the church the light was beginning to fade. I had expected the stacking of the bricks to keep Harris busy until nightfall and was surprised and a little put out to find that he had already finished the task and gone. There was no sign of Banks, either in the graveyard or in the church itself. I stood uneasily for a moment in the hushed nave; then I took my tape and notebook from my pocket and set to work.

  I was unable to identify the noise at first: a faint whirring in the air somewhere above me; a bump, a scrabbling, a light fluttering rustle. Then silence. I looked up.

  I rather dislike starlings as a rule – their swagger, their jostling vulgarity – but for an instant I saw this specimen quite literally in a new light. The bird hung there, motionless against one of the clerestory windows, its claws gripping the buckled leads, its wings heraldically outstretched, the fanned primaries lit from behind, delicately translucent. Only for an instant; then it was off again, crossing and recrossing the darkening nave, hurling itself with what looked like increasing uncertainty of judgement from one window to another.

  I was so intent on its erratic movements that I did not register Banks’s presence at my back until he spoke. ‘Once they’ve found their way in here – I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you – once they’re in, it’s surprisingly difficult to get them out. Eventually, of course, they exhaust or injure themselves and can be caught, but by that time it’s usually too late.’

  ‘Too late?’

  ‘Too late for the birds, I mean. Where there seems to be any hope at all, I tend them, but very few survive.’

  He was silent for a moment, staring into the gloom above. Flutter and bump; and, from the tower, the steady ticking of the clock.

  ‘Ita haec vita hominum ad modicum apparet. Bede’s sparrow, you’ll remember, has an altogether cleaner trajectory: swiftly in at one end of the hall and straight out through the other. I wonder, though, whether this poor creature, flinging itself hopelessly against incomprehensible barriers, may not be the fitter emblem of the human condition.’

  ‘The germ of a sermon?’

  ‘No. Just a private observation arising from a particular state of mind, a particular preoccupation.’

  ‘You’re thinking of the Jeffords?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I think we’ve done what we can for them.’

  ‘If what we’ve done is insufficient – as it clearly is – then we must ask ourselves whether we can do more.’ He paused, his eyes fixed on mine as though he were waiting for a response. I said nothing, and had the satisfaction of seeing his gaze falter – just a flicker, but an unmistakable acknowledgement of my own force of character – before he returned to his theme.

  ‘Mrs Jefford was naturally grateful for your visit, but was concerned that she might have failed to give you the welcome you deserved. I told her you’d understand the situation, but she was troubled by your rather abrupt departure.’

  ‘I found the circumstances oppressive.’

  ‘Indeed. So, no doubt, do the Jeffords. The difference is that they don’t have the option of leaving.’

  ‘You make it sound as though that were my fault.’

  ‘That’s not my intention. But it’s perhaps salutary to remind ourselves that we – you and I, Mr Stannard – are privileged beyond the ordinary, and far beyond the wildest hopes of people like Will and Laura Jefford. And we cannot – I mean we must not – turn away from suffering, least of all when we find it on our own doorstep.’

  ‘Your doorstep, Mr Banks, not mine. It has already been made abundantly clear to me that I don’t belong here.’

  He looked at me sharply, even, it seemed to me, a shade aggressively; then his expression softened and he laid a hand on my arm.

  ‘These matters are difficult,’ he said quietly. ‘Indescribably difficult. For me as well as for you.’

  ‘No doubt your faith sustains you.’

  ‘I’ll be truthful with you: Mr Stannard. My faith is severely tested by such scenes as we witnessed this afternoon. In common, I imagine, with most of mankind, I look for evidence of pattern and meaning in the universe; but what design is revealed to us by the sufferings of the Jeffords and others like them? Good people, by and large, caught in the mire of poverty, disease and despair, battered by forces which seem to know nothing of their virtues and deserts. Oh, I know the stock response, but even a clergyman may be permitted a certain scepticism, a little bitterness, hearing for perhaps the thousandth time that God’s plan is developing along lines as orderly as they are inscrutable. It may be so; but I shouldn’t feel inclined to argue the case very forcefully, certainly not in the presence of a man prevented by injury from earning the wages his family so desperately needs and a young consumptive oppressed by the not unreasonable fear that she may not survive the winter.’

  ‘Yes, I’d be worried about Mrs Jefford if I were her doctor. I’m less sure about her husband, though. What exactly is the extent of his injuries?’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing broken, but he’s bruised and quite severely shaken. Dr Barratt tells me it’s the shock to the system in general, rather than any specific injury, which has brought him so low.’

  ‘There’s no possibility that he’s malingering, is there?’

  ‘Out of the question. Look, Stannard, I thought I’d made it clear: Jefford’s as scrupulous and plain-dealing a man as you’ll find in this village or several dozen round about. And what in any case could he hope to gain from such a strategy?’

  ‘Nothing at all – unless, of course, he had been led to expect that I should continue to support him while he sat at home.’

  ‘I can give you my firm assurance that the matter has never been so much as hinted at in our conversations. Nevertheless, I’m appealing to you now. You’ve seen these people’s circumstances; please do what you can to alleviate their distress.’

  ‘I’ve agreed to hold his job for him until the end of the week.’

  ‘I don’t imagine that Jefford would have dared hope for more, but you must forgive me if I express my own disappointment. The family is desperately short of money and your continuing to pay Jefford – no, listen to me – your continuing to pay him during the period of his convalescence would remove one of his more immediate worries. The situation is stark and simple: either he receives those wages or his children go hungry.’

  ‘Wages? This sounds more like charity.’

  ‘If you like, yes. And charity, St Peter tells us, shall cover the multitude of sins.’

  I resented Banks’s coercive rhetoric, and should perhaps have made my feelings plainer. I might quite reasonably have chal
lenged his melodramatic analysis of Jefford’s predicament or taken issue with the offensive suggestion that such assistance as I might be prepared to offer could be viewed as a form of expiation. In the event, however, I did neither.

  ‘To the end of the week, then. I shall hold his job open and pay him his full rate until then. Beyond that point he must either return to work or fend for himself.’

  Banks’s face lit up as though he himself had been the recipient of my generosity.

  ‘Thank you, Stannard. I know that Jefford will be greatly relieved. Would you like to tell him or shall I?’

  I pictured again the dingy room, the sick woman, the man weeping as though he would never stop.

  ‘You may tell him,’ I said.

  5

  I arrived at the churchyard next morning to find Harris hunkered down against one of the gravestones, staring at the spoil-heap. He looked up as I approached.

  ‘Someone’s been at the coffin,’ he said, rising clumsily to his feet. ‘Look at this.’

  The slippage might conceivably have occurred naturally, but the bootprints around the site of the disturbance suggested otherwise. One side of the coffin had been completely exposed, and some attempt seemed to have been made to clear the soil from above. The smell of decay hung in the air around us.

  ‘The rector’s already been over. He wants a word with you.’

  ‘Is he coming back?’

  ‘Just now, sir.’ He nodded towards the gate.

  Banks’s greeting was perfunctory to the point of rudeness: a grunt, a slight inclination of the head. He came up beside me and stood looking at the coffin for a moment before speaking.

  ‘All this damage,’ he said at last. ‘All this disturbance. And I can’t help asking myself how much more we’ll see before you’re finished here.’

  ‘I hope you’re not suggesting that I’m responsible for this.’

  ‘Not directly responsible, no. I suspect it’s the work of one or more of the villagers. Curiosity, I should like to think, rather than outright vandalism.’

  ‘Rather a sinister form of curiosity, I’d say.’