by Jem Poster
And what of Banks, sitting quietly beside my bed night after night, often still in his chair at dawn, jotting down at my dictation in a fat leather-bound notebook the startling insights which, it seemed to me, needed only to be properly ordered for the meaning and purpose of human existence to be revealed? Yes, he told me later, he had visited on a number of occasions, sometimes for an hour or more at a time, and I might well have seen him there as I gabbled and moaned, thrusting back the sheets, sporadically attempting to rise; but the notebook, I learned with a pang of unreasonable sadness, did not exist.
And then there are the areas of total blankness, gaps in my knowledge of real events. I remember nothing of the storms which, I gather, battered the region for three days on end shortly after the onset of my illness, nothing of Redbourne’s visit; and though I was able, with Banks’s assistance, to retrieve and reconstruct much of what he referred to as my midnight excursion, a number of crucial details remain tantalizingly obscure.
To begin with, I simply do not know how I got to the church. I mean, I assume that I must have taken my usual route, cutting through the meadow and diagonally across the churchyard; but I have no recollection of that particular journey. Was I not cold, stepping out barefoot across the frosted grass, my coat, as I now understand, thrown over my nightshirt but apparently unbuttoned, my bedside lamp in my hand? What was in my mind as I pushed back the door and made my way, as I must have done, down the aisle towards the chancel arch?
This extraordinary blankness is the more surprising to me in that many details of my involuntary visitation are remarkably clear or, if not exactly clear, powerfully present in my memory. I remember, for example, standing beneath the scaffold, holding the lamp above my head, disconcerted and I think frustrated by the feebleness of its glow in that hushed space. Yes, and the piers immediately to left and right of me glimmering faintly against a ground of shifting and indeterminate shadow; the deeper shades beyond that; and the sudden dizziness I experienced as I lifted my eyes to the impenetrable obscurity above me.
I remember, too, that my legs trembled as I climbed the ladder, so that I was obliged to stop as I reached the top, my free hand gripping the guard-rail, before heaving myself clumsily and with rather greater difficulty than I had anticipated on to the platform. I stumbled forward and fell heavily to my knees, jarring the boards, the sound echoing through the nave like thunder.
But here I find another gap. I can see myself there on my knees, the lamp beside and a little behind me so that my own shadow bobs and flutters across the painted figures. I can see the woman’s agonized stare, her chalky lips framing their soundless cry; the pale expanse of swelling flesh and the dark insinuation of the body at her back. But where did I get the – chisel, is it, or gouge? – with which, with savage, sweeping strokes, I am scoring the decorated surface, slashing at breasts and belly, at the long throat and the tilted face? Did I bring the implement with me, in my coat pocket perhaps, or did it come accidentally to hand as I knelt there on the dusty boards? And what did I think I was about as I dragged the blade backwards and forwards across the disintegrating mortar, my hands and wrists aching and showered with dust? I surmise now that, feverishly confused and with my mind running obsessively on the work, I was misguidedly attempting to prepare the surface for re-rendering; but this doesn’t seem to me to explain either the ferocity of my actions – I remember grunting and sobbing like a madman, breathless with effort, the sweat stinging my eyes – or the peculiar sense of anxiety that accompanied them. There is something here which eludes me; and this part of the episode seems in any case to be overshadowed by what happened after I upset the lamp.
Perhaps I struck it with my foot, or with the skirts of my coat. I have, in fact, very little sense of how it might have happened, but I retain the most vivid impression of its leisurely, uneven roll to the edge of the boards and its long fall into the shadows below. It hit the floor with a metallic chime; then the globe splintered and flew in all directions while what was left of the oil flared and sputtered at the base of the scaffold.
My fear at that stage was straightforward and essentially rational: I imagined the flames licking upward, the crackle and roar as they took hold of the timbers, my own body caught in the conflagration. I grasped one of the uprights and leaned out over the guard-rail, the blood rushing to my head as I craned forward and down; but as I did so the flames subsided and went out.
I find it difficult to analyse the terror of that moment. I have never had any particular anxiety about heights and in normal circumstances the twenty or so feet above which I hung, my right hand gripping the rough wood of the upright, would have caused me no concern. But in that blank intensity of darkness I seemed to float above – no, not above, since that suggests precisely the grasp of spatial relationship which, at that moment, utterly deserted me. I mean that there was, quite simply, nothing out there, nothing at all; and, more terrifying still, that my own presence, extending interminably into the blackness or irresistibly infiltrated by it, was itself in doubt. I can still feel the convulsive effort with which I jerked myself back from the edge. I groped my way over to the wall where, with my shoulders pressed hard against the plaster and one elbow on the side-rail, I spent what seemed an extraordinary length of time fumbling for my matches before realizing that I had none.
That was the point at which I began to shake. More terrible than anything I had experienced out on the hillside, this was a shuddering which gripped my entire body, forcing itself up and through me from some unfathomable centre, transmitting itself to the rocking boards so that I felt, or seemed to feel, the whole structure in motion beneath me. I eased myself down the wall, whimpering, moaning, crying upon a Maker whose very existence was called into question by the formless darkness around me, and began to crawl forward, groping my way towards the ladder.
What checked me was the notion that I might fall – fall, I thought with a spasm of redoubled terror, and go on falling. Or that the ladder might descend, like that in the mural, to the depths of – but again, that misses the point. For the world I envisaged as I lay huddled on the boards, knees drawn up to my belly, hands locked together at the nape of my neck, was not illuminated by hellfire or inhabited by demons; nor was it home to any suffering spirit but my own. No, the ladder, if it existed at all, would descend for ever, through undifferentiated darkness, and whatever vestigial scrap of consciousness or selfhood clung there would, of necessity, be obliterated. I recognize now, of course, the sheer absurdity of all this, the blind irrationality into which my illness had plunged me; but the illusion presented itself to me at the time with such compelling force that I could do nothing but lie where I was. I was not waiting for anything: I am fairly certain that the idea of the eventual approach of daylight never so much as entered my head. I was simply incapable of movement.
How long did I lie there before the light returned? Not daylight, for the clerestory windows were still dark, but a yellow glow stealing up from below, making me think at first, quite illogically, that the fire had, after all, taken hold. I lifted my head. Footsteps. A crunching of broken glass. Banks’s voice.
‘Who’s there?’
I wanted to answer but was unable to do so. My mouth worked, but soundlessly, my own name dissolving off my tongue. I rolled over and peered down into the nave. Banks lifted his lantern and looked up, his angular face lit like a saint’s.
‘Is that you, Stannard? What are you doing here?’
I shook my head helplessly. I remember his expression darkening suddenly, his abrupt movement to the foot of the scaffold.
‘Are you hurt? Can you get down?’
I raised myself to my hands and knees and shuffled forward. I have a particularly strong recollection of manoeuvring myself into position above the ladder, my left knee on the platform supporting my weight, my right leg extended and feeling for the rungs. I am thinking or muttering to myself: it’s all right, it’s all right. But it is patently not all right because my body is heavy and unres
ponsive and, although my right foot finds what it is looking for, my left leg refuses to move. I cannot look down, but I feel Banks clambering up the ladder below me, feel his hand gripping my right heel.
‘Now bring your other leg down. I’m supporting you.’
I bowed my head, pressing my cheek against the upright. I am not sure whether, from where he stood, Banks was able to see, let alone interpret, the gesture, but he must have realized very quickly that he would need to do more for me. A moment later he was at my back, coaxing, bullying, one hand grasping the top of the ladder, the other tapping and tugging at my left foot until, quite unexpectedly, I found myself able to move it. He positioned himself more securely behind me, still talking, encircling me protectively with his arms and body as I recall my father doing on the first occasion he allowed me to help with the apple-picking. After that it was easier. Even now I did not look down; but I kept going, hand and foot, hand and foot, determinedly focused on the grain of the rungs before my eyes, on their pressure against my instep, until I stood at last on solid ground.
I say solid, but that wasn’t the impression I had as I hesitated there at the foot of the ladder, unsteady as a man newly disembarked from a rough crossing, feeling the floor shift and slide beneath me. I was acutely aware of Banks’s gaze, though I avoided meeting it.
‘What’s going on, Stannard?’
‘Nothing.’ My voice rose unrecognizably thin and childish from my lips and was lost in the dim space above us. I felt like a small boy apprehended in an act of mischief which had got out of hand. ‘Nothing,’ I repeated stupidly, ‘nothing.’ I closed my eyes and leaned heavily against the scaffolding.
He was running his hand across my forehead, touching my cheeks with his knuckles. Opening my eyes again, I saw his face disconcertingly close to mine, his brows puckered with anxiety.
‘You’re still sick,’ he said. ‘Very sick. I must get you back to your lodgings. Do you think you can walk?’
He appeared to consider my silence carefully, as though it were an answer. Then he picked up his lantern, moved round to my side, drew me gently away from the scaffold and, half guiding, half supporting, walked me up the aisle and out of the church.
Was Mrs Haskell there as we mounted the stairs to my bedroom? I have a faint sense of her presence at the stairhead – holding a lamp, perhaps, opening a door – though I imagine she must have left it to Banks to attend to me. My feet, I seem to remember, were bleeding, cut, it may have been, by fragments of the shattered globe. I have a memory of Banks stooping over the end of my bed, dabbing at my soles with a wet cloth. His face is tense and, brightly lit from the side, appears vaguely distorted. But the images come and go; and this particular manifestation is, I realize as I struggle to call it up again in all its hallucinatory brilliance, neither more nor less real to me than the stunted figure which, after the lamp had been extinguished, lunged towards me out of the darkness screaming a single, terrible word; a word which, though it eludes me now, seemed at the time to encapsulate all I had ever experienced of emptiness and loss.
17
Banks was later to intimate that Mrs Haskell’s care of me during my illness had been exemplary, and I am certainly not ungrateful; but I am not sure that my convalescence was assisted by her continued presence at my bedside. She would sit there hour after hour in the wicker chair, her embroidery draped over her knees, stitching and talking. One anecdote after another, while I drifted between sleep and waking, catching at whatever fragments presented themselves during my more lucid intervals.
‘… but every night she’d shriek and howl, beating on the door with her fists, keeping the whole neighbourhood awake with her din. In the end they hit upon the idea of burying the body in a new grave somewhere beyond the village—’
‘You’ve already told me this story, Mrs Haskell.’
‘Maybe I have. When they got to the place they’d fixed on, they laid the thing down on the ground, still in its sailcloth shroud, and began to dig. And as they lifted the turf they heard a wailing from the marshes, a queer mournful sound coming and going on the wind. And Cassie’s great-grandpa looked at the rector and saw his face as pale as death in the light of the lantern—’
‘The rector wasn’t there, Mrs Haskell.’
‘How do you know?’
‘You told me it was the sexton who went out with the girl’s father.’
‘What if I did? They tell this more ways than one.’
‘But you must realize that only one version can be true.’
She paused in her stitching and gave me a sly sidelong glance.
‘I’m surprised you should think either of them’s true, Mr Stannard, but if you want the sexton you shall have him. White with fear he was, and shaking like a leaf; but he picked up the bundle and the two of them followed the sound, stepping from tussock to tussock, working their way slowly down to the estuary. And when they came to the water’s edge they saw them gathered there, swimming a little way out, lifting their faces to the moon and crying, with their mouths wide open – and their mouths are like fishes’ mouths, Mr Stannard, with hard bony lips – and their faces shining with tears and brine. When they saw the two men most of them scattered and dived; but one swam steadily towards them, completely silent now, until it touched land. Then it hauled itself up on to the mud and lay there, with its arm stretched out like this’ – she extended her left hand towards me, palm upward – ‘and with its head thrown back so that its cold eyes stared straight up at them. It wants the body, said Cassie’s great-grandpa. So the sexton stepped forward and squatted down, holding out the bundle at arm’s length, not liking to get too close but not wanting to show disrespect by dropping or throwing the thing. And as he did so, the creature lunged out and snatched it from him – and as long as he lived he never forgot the touch of its hand – and then turned and wriggled back into the water, slick as an eel.’
She tilted her embroidery towards the window and screwed up her eyes. ‘I used to be able to see every stitch,’ she said. ‘Even by lamplight. Nowadays I can’t really be sure of the details. Does this look all right to you?’
She leaned over, holding out her work. I made a show of examining it.
‘It’s excellent, Mrs Haskell. I wonder if I might ask you to draw the curtains when you leave.’
‘Are you tired?’
‘Very tired.’
‘Don’t you want to hear the rest of the story?’
‘I thought you’d finished.’
‘Not quite. As it swam back, the others rose to the surface and clustered around it. There was a terrible stillness, as if they were waiting for something. Then the creature lifted the bundle high above its head and they all began to sing, their voices softer than before and the sound so sweet and sad that the men couldn’t keep from crying. At last the whole group drew off, heading for the open sea; and as the singing died away the men stumbled back across the marshland, still crying like children. And that was really the end of the business, except that—’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Haskell. I must sleep now.’
‘Lift your head a moment.’ She placed her embroidery on the blanket-chest and bent over me to rearrange the pillows. Soap and camphor, the crisp rustle of starched cloth; her wrist, plump and lightly downed, closer to my face than I cared for.
‘There’s no need,’ I said.
‘Did your mother never do this for you when you were a child?’
‘Possibly. But my childhood’s long past.’
‘Or tell you stories?’
‘I don’t believe so.’
‘She should have done.’
I think the light touch of her hand on my cheek was accidental, but I jerked back my head involuntarily. She straightened up and retrieved her embroidery.
‘Mr Banks visited this morning,’ she said. ‘While you were asleep. He said he’d call again later.’
‘I’ve no wish for company.’
‘He’s been a good friend to you in your illness, Mr Stannar
d, and I hope you’ll keep that in mind.’
I pressed my head back into the pillows and closed my eyes.
‘The curtains, if you don’t mind, Mrs Haskell.’
She pulled them to and left me to myself in the darkness.
I had reckoned without the sheer boredom of a protracted convalescence. By the beginning of the following week, tired both of my own thoughts and of Mrs Haskell’s mindless prattle, I had come to anticipate Banks’s regular visits with something approaching pleasure. Never, in my view, an entirely engaging conversationalist, he nevertheless brought with him a welcome sense of life going on somewhere beyond the confines of my sickroom, and I was able to use our talks as a means of re-establishing contact with a world which had, I felt, almost slipped from my grasp.
‘What about the work?’ I asked him one evening.
‘At a standstill until you return. Harris finished hacking out the rotted plaster from the north wall, but said he’d do nothing more without your instructions.’
‘And Jefford?’
‘Jefford’s condition seems to have worsened again. He hasn’t been out of the house for more than a week.’
‘Have they said anything about their wages?’
‘Not to me. Do you want me to convey any message to them?’
I shook my head. ‘I’ll speak to them myself,’ I said.
Banks looked searchingly into my face.
‘You know it will be quite some time before you’ll be well enough to start work again? Dr Barratt was very clear on that point.’
‘How long?’
‘Another fortnight. Maybe more.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘I shall be back by the end of the week.’
