by Jem Poster
She stirred her tea slowly, picked up the cup and drank, smiling ingratiatingly at me across its rim.
‘I should think you’d be the man to recognize such a thing, wouldn’t you, Mr Stannard?’
This was distasteful in the extreme; but I was getting the measure of her now, I felt, casting about for a suitably noncommittal response.
‘I’m sure she will make someone an excellent wife.’
She shot me a sharp glance.
‘Someone? But I understood that you’d been addressing your attentions to her.’
Treacherous ground. I answered carefully.
‘I’ve paid her such attentions as any man might reasonably pay a woman this side of courtship.’
Her face hardened suddenly. She set her cup clumsily in its saucer and leaned back in her chair, her eyes fixed angrily on mine.
‘Which side of courtship would that be, Mr Stannard?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you.’
‘I’m speaking clear enough, but I can speak clearer if you need me to. Ann tells me you’ve fucked her.’
In the extraordinary stillness that followed, I heard the laboured breathing of the sick woman in the next room. I looked across at Ann, who was staring at her mother with an expression of such anguish, such helpless, hopeless misery that I could almost have found it in my heart to pity her. She caught my eye for the barest instant and then put her face between her hands and began to cry, her hunched shoulders quivering pathetically. Clearly I was under no obligation to prolong my own part in the absurd charade. I leaped up, snatched my coat from its hook and flung out into the wind and rain, slamming the door behind me.
I ran full-tilt down the hill to the village, careless of my own safety, burning with a savage, undirected fury and incapable of coherent thought. Back in my room, however, I sat and reflected more soberly on the afternoon’s events, trying to construct from the fragments in my possession a plausible version of Ann’s sombre world. What had happened to her since our last meeting? Under what barrage of questions, I wondered, under what hail of blows – and the thought entered my mind like a cold blade – had she betrayed herself and me? I suddenly saw with a horrible clarity the reddened knuckles connecting with the soft flesh of the cheek and Ann staggering backwards, one arm angled stiffly in front of her averted face, the other groping wildly behind her for support.
‘Don’t,’ she cries as her mother draws back her fist to strike her again, ‘please don’t.’ And then, so quietly that the older woman has to bend her head forward to catch the whispered words:
‘You’ll kill it. You’ll kill the baby.’
21
I wasted a good half-hour the following morning in a fruitless search for my gloves, and it was well after nine by the time I reached the cottage; even so, Mrs Jefford looked as if she had just got out of bed, her hair unbrushed and her eyes vague and rheumy. Leaning weakly against the door-edge she seemed to droop like a cut flower. I stepped inside and made for the parlour, but she put out a hand to stop me.
‘He’s in bed,’ she said. ‘Hardly been out of it this past fortnight.’
She went ahead of me up the stairs and paused on the landing.
‘Through here, sir.’
She pushed open the bedroom door and ushered me in. Jefford lay on a large iron bedstead, his back and shoulders supported by two large pillows, his head lolling back uncomfortably against the rusted bars. He looked towards me as I approached, his eyes so disturbingly dark in his hollow face that my greeting faded on my lips.
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said. ‘Mr Banks thought you’d be back last week.’
‘That was my intention. I was delayed.’
He hooked his fingers round the headrail and pulled himself a little higher up the bed.
‘I’ll come straight to the point,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something for you. In there.’
He indicated a small pine chest in the corner of the room. I found it difficult to imagine what Jefford might possess that could conceivably be of interest to me.
‘In the top drawer.’
I hesitated.
‘Go on. Open it.’
Mrs Jefford was hovering in the doorway as if uncertain whether to stay or leave.
‘You’ll be easy on us, won’t you, sir? It was his illness, and his worry about me and the children. If it hadn’t been for that, he’d never have—’
Jefford motioned her away with with a weak, irritable flap of his bony hand. She dithered a moment on the threshold before withdrawing. I heard the boards creak as she retreated across the landing.
‘What’s she talking about?’
‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘Open the drawer.’
It was doubtless because I was so completely unprepared for it that I failed at first to notice the purse. Even when I eventually spotted it, lying at the front of the drawer on a thick pile of yellowed papers, it was a second or two before I recognized it as my own. I picked it out and turned to Jefford.
‘Where did you find it?’
‘In your pocket.’
I must have been a little slow to respond.
‘Your jacket pocket,’ he said. ‘I took the purse that day in the church. When I was breaking up the pews.’
His voice was almost inaudible now, hoarse and feeble. His eyes brimmed suddenly and he drew a stained cloth from the sleeve of his nightshirt and dabbed at them.
‘Thief,’ he whispered. ‘That’s what I am. A petty thief. And as surely a sinner as if I’d taken twenty times as much.’
I opened the purse and tipped the coins on to my palm.
‘It’s all here,’ I said. ‘You’ve spent nothing.’
‘Does that make any difference?’
‘Perhaps. Why didn’t you spend it?’
He shrugged helplessly. Mrs Jefford, I noticed, was back in the doorway, fidgeting uneasily.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just couldn’t do it.’
‘Will’s a good man, Mr Stannard. This looks bad, I know, but he’s always been a kindly husband to me and a loving father to the children. He did this for us. But then he couldn’t carry it through. It’s not ours, he said. We’ll keep it by in case we need it – though God knows we had need enough then – and return it later, when things get better.’
‘And have things got any better?’
She looked at me as though she were about to cry.
‘Better, sir? Just look at us. They could hardly be worse.’
‘Then why return the money now?’
Jefford shifted uneasily in the bed, rucking the sheet beneath him. He tugged at it fretfully for a moment, then leaned back again, staring vacantly at the opposite wall.
‘I’m letting in the light,’ he said at last.
‘Letting in the light?’
‘That’s how I see it. We’ve all got secrets. Some of them don’t matter too much. But there’s a kind of secret sits in your chest like a toad in a drystone wall. And instead of letting it out, you close up around it, hoping no one will notice it there. But it’s there right enough, sitting tight around your heart and clogging your throat so you can’t breathe or speak as you should. In the end, for all your efforts to keep it close, everyone around knows it’s in you. They may not know what it is exactly, but they see it in your eyes, they hear it in the way you stammer or clam up when they speak to you. There’s men go to the grave with such secrets, never letting the light back in. But not me.’
He seemed suddenly animated, edgily defiant, his eyes bright and a faint flush mantling his cheeks and neck.
‘I had a dream the other night, Mr Stannard, Not an ordinary dream, not about the usual things. I was on a hill or mountain, very high, with snow and ice around me and the sky so blue it hurt my eyes. And my body – I looked down and I could see right through myself; clear as a window-pane, and the light pouring through me so that it was almost as if I wasn’t there at all. But I was there, Mr Stannard, because I knew all this
was happening. And just for a moment I felt as if – I can’t get this quite right now, but it was so strong in the dream – as if there was nothing that couldn’t be seen and grasped, nothing in this world or beyond it.’
Mrs Jefford gave a nervous cough. ‘Mr Stannard won’t want to hear all this, Will. And you should rest now.’
He showed no sign of having heard her.
‘It was all so clear and bright,’ he continued, ‘that when I woke I thought it must really have happened. I mean, I knew I’d been lying in my bed all the time, but it seemed I’d been out there too. Out in all that light and space, though in here it was dark as the grave. Was it only a dream, do you think?’
‘What else would it have been?’
‘It would be a cruel thing to know it was just my mind fooling me. I call it a dream because I’ve no other name for it, but lying there in the dark that night I had a notion it was something more. Anyway, that was when I decided I had to see you, to give you back what was rightly yours. Mr Banks offered to do it for me, offered to explain things, but I wouldn’t have that. No, I said, I have to see him myself, I have to say the word myself. Thief. Even now I find it hard to say. That’s the weight in my chest, you see; that’s the secret I’ve been holding so close.’
He fell silent, his eyes fixed on mine with such a desperate expression of – yearning, was it, or entreaty? – that I began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. I stuffed the empty purse into my pocket and held out the coins. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Have this.’
He shook his head.
‘Take it.’
‘I can’t, sir.’
His features had slackened again and the colour was gone. He leaned forward, swaying unsteadily from the waist.
‘It was a sin,’ he said. ‘No other way of seeing it. Circumstances don’t justify it, though there’s those would say they did. I spent a long time making excuses to myself. Now I’ve come to see it’s not excuses I need, but forgiveness.’
I turned, suddenly tired of the whole business, and placed the coins on the scratched surface of the chest.
‘Do as you like with this,’ I said. ‘I have to go now.’
Jefford nodded wearily and settled back against the pillows.
‘Perhaps you’ll come again when you have time,’ he said. ‘I need to know there’s no bitterness between us on this score.’
Mrs Jefford seemed unwilling to move from the doorway. I pressed past her, rather more brusquely than I had intended, and began to descend the stairs. She pulled the door shut behind her and called after me in a hoarse whisper. I turned.
‘What is it?’
‘There’s no point leaving the money, sir. Not so far as he’s concerned. That’s not what he’s after.’
‘I thought it might come in useful. I’m not insensitive to your predicament.’
It was as though a mask had slipped. She hung above me at the stairhead, one hand on the banister-rail, her neck grotesquely extended and her hair swinging loose about her contorted face.
‘Not insensitive?’ she hissed. ‘Then why not let him have what he wants? He doesn’t give this for your twenty-two shillings and bloody sixpence’ – she made an abrupt, brutal gesture with her left hand – ‘though you owe us that, and more.’
‘Owe you? What do I owe you? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
Her anger appeared to subside as suddenly and inexplicably as it had erupted. Her face softened and she began to cry, the tears coursing freely down her thin cheeks.
‘There’s no need to come down,’ I said. ‘I’ll see myself out.’
I had rather hoped to postpone discussion of my visit but Banks had obviously been on the lookout and, as I approached the church, he emerged from the rectory and came striding across the field towards me. I stopped just outside the porch and waited for him to join me.
‘How is he today?’
‘He seems to have lost a good deal of ground. I hadn’t realized he was bedridden.’
‘He’s very weak. Listen, Stannard, this business with the purse—’
‘You knew about that.’ Something which had been burning dully in me sparked and flared. ‘You knew when you asked me to call on him. You might have said something to prepare me.’
‘Jefford particularly asked me not to mention the subject before he’d had the opportunity to talk with you. He was afraid you’d refuse to see him.’
‘That might well have been my decision. I should have liked to have been in a position to make an informed judgement.’
It was, I felt, a fair point, well made, and I confess that I derived a certain satisfaction from Banks’s evident discomfiture. It is not, after all, unreasonable for a man to want to see how the land lies about him, or to expect others to help him to do so. Banks had not proved a reliable guide.
‘There’s something else,’ I said. ‘I was misled by your account of Jefford’s character. Scrupulous to a fault – those were your words. Yet the man turns out to be, by his own admission, a petty thief. I feel betrayed, Banks, and not by Jefford alone.’
‘I’m sorry if that’s so. But I spoke as I believed. Jefford’s reputation in the village was borne out by everything I knew of him. I still believe him to be, as these things go, a fundamentally good man. You have to consider the effects of his injury, of his wife’s sickness. You have to imagine the fears that kept him waking night after night – above all, the fear that his children would be left without any provision made for their future. When you can clearly visualize all of that – when you can feel it, Stannard – then you may be in a position to make an informed judgement.’
He had hurled my own phrase back at me with such extraordinary vehemence as to throw himself quite literally off balance. He reached out and placed one hand against the porch wall before resuming in a more measured tone.
‘I can’t tell you how my heart aches for the man. So much suffering there already, and to have compounded that suffering by a single impulsive act. And now that act, that sin as he insists on calling it—’
‘You’re surely not suggesting that the term’s inapplicable to the case?’
‘Not exactly, no. But in the long catalogue of human sins his theft seems to me to figure rather insignificantly. It’s a question of proportion. We need to be able to distinguish between right and wrong – that goes without saying. But we also need to discriminate in subtler ways. Yes, Jefford’s a sinner, as we all are; but so clearly deserving of our leniency – of our love, Stannard – that I’d have no hesitation, even in your place, in reaching out to him. The matter’s pertinent: he attaches great importance to the idea of some kind of personal forgiveness. Your forgiveness. Did he speak to you about that?’
‘He touched on the matter just before I left.’
‘I hope you were able to respond appropriately.’
‘I don’t think my response was inappropriate.’
I could see him weighing this up.
‘Have you forgiven him?’ he asked at last.
‘I’ve no intention of reporting the theft, if that’s what you mean.’
He stared at me in silence for so long and with such unsettling intensity that I felt compelled to make a move. I stepped into the porch and raised the latch.
‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s not what I mean.’
I pushed open the door. To my relief he made no attempt to follow me in.
22
I slept badly that night and woke before dawn, having dreamed myself indissolubly tied to a family of ragged children. They leaped and clamoured around me, one holding out her scrawny arms as though imploring me to pick her up. There’s no proof, I remember thinking in my dream as I turned away, that the child is mine; but I lay a long time after waking, examining both the dream itself and the particular anxiety which had no doubt given rise to it.
By the time I left for work my unease had been augmented by a more immediate vexation: it had occurred to me over breakfast that my missing gloves must have been
left behind in my flurried retreat from Ann’s cottage. As good as lost, I thought, imagining the embarrassment of presenting myself at the door to reclaim them. And as if all this were not enough, I arrived at the church to find Harris gloomily preoccupied by the plight of the Jeffords.
‘Will’s no older than me,’ he said without preamble, almost before I was through the door, ‘though you’d not think it to look at him now.’ He wiped his forearm across his face and leaned back against the wall. ‘He’s been dealt a rough hand, no doubt of it. And he doesn’t deserve it.’
‘Life doesn’t deal fairly with us, Harris. The evidence is all around you.’
‘Yes, but I never felt the unfairness the way I do now. Or the misery. I was lying awake last night thinking how Will might be lying awake too. I started to wonder, what’s it like staring into the dark knowing there’s nothing there for you any more, knowing you can’t help yourself or the people who depend on you? And after a while I seemed to be suffering with him – not just thinking about the misery but feeling it deep inside me. I couldn’t get clear of it. It was still with me when I got up, Will’s sadness lodged in my own chest, so tight I could hardly breathe. It’s not like me, sir, but I don’t mind telling you I shed a tear or two on my way in to work this morning, understanding how it must be for him.’
‘Understanding is one thing, Harris; a morbid involvement with other people’s misfortunes is another. The best thing we can do, for Jefford as well as ourselves, is to get on with our own business, hoping to see him back with us before too long.’
