by Jem Poster
There was a long silence.
‘Will’s dying,’ he said at last. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’
‘I can see that he’s very ill. But remember what they say, Harris: where there’s life, there’s hope.’
He gave me a hard stare. ‘There’s precious little hope in the Jeffords’ house,’ he said. ‘You must have seen that.’
‘I’ve known men make the most remarkable recovery from serious illness. You’d be surprised.’
‘Maybe so. But however I look at it, I can’t see Will working here again. And I’d meant to say, sir, George is looking for something to tide him over till the spring. Bring him in now and we’ll have the job done in half the time.’
He could hardly have made a less appealing suggestion. I could think of nothing more damaging to my authority than to have the two brothers working alongside one another on a daily basis.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ll manage. Just the two of us.’
‘But all this rendering, sir. George was in the plastering trade until a few years back. You’ll not find a better man for the job in the village, nor for thirty miles round about.’
‘You told me you’d been in the trade yourself. It was one of the reasons I took you on.’
‘Oh,’ he said hastily, ‘I can do it all right. Only I was thinking—’
‘Leave the thinking to me, Harris. For the moment I consider it best to continue as we are. I’ll let you know if my views change.’
That put an end to the matter and, indeed, an end to all conversation between us for the rest of the morning. His silence was clearly a form of reproach, and I was not unduly surprised when at midday, instead of settling down with his lunch in the usual way, he grabbed his knapsack and marched out of the church.
What did surprise me, however, was his failure to return. Whatever his shortcomings, Harris had proved himself a reasonably conscientious timekeeper, and by the middle of the afternoon I was sufficiently concerned – or perhaps simply sufficiently provoked – to set off in search of him.
I found him almost immediately, sitting on the wet grass by the roadside, his back against the churchyard wall. His demeanour had improved markedly, I thought, walking slowly towards him, faintly disconcerted by his bland, untroubled gaze.
‘What are you doing out here, Harris? You should have been back at work an hour and a half ago.’
‘I’m coming,’ he said affably. ‘Just give me a moment.’ He rose awkwardly to his feet and stood with one hand on the wall, swaying slightly.
‘What’s the matter? Are you ill?’
‘Never felt better,’ he said, throwing back his head and drawing a deep breath. ‘Never better.’
‘Have you been drinking?’
His face darkened and he took an unsteady step towards me. ‘Suppose I have,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t a man have the right to take a pint or two with his grub? And,’ he added with sudden, disturbing vehemence, ‘the right to give a lift to his spirits when he’s down?’
I sized up the situation at a glance. Harris was not so far gone as to be physically incapable of returning to work, but I could see that he was unlikely to be in an appropriate frame of mind. There was, in any case, little more than an hour of daylight remaining.
‘I think you should give yourself a holiday for the remainder of the afternoon,’ I said diplomatically.
‘A holiday? Very kind of you, sir.’ He touched his cap, looking into my face with a curious mocking smile. ‘Would that be on full pay?’
The suggestion that he might be paid at all was outrageous, but this was not, I felt, the moment to debate the point. ‘We can talk about that tomorrow,’ I said. ‘You get off home now.’
He hesitated, just long enough to start me wondering whether he might make matters difficult for me; then he turned and moved slowly off down the lane.
I returned to the church and set to again with vicious energy, hacking away at the weakened plaster until the sweat broke out on my forehead and my wrist ached. How was it, I fumed, muttering like a madman as I worked, that I found myself time and again at the mercy of these people? – mocked, threatened, insulted, robbed, misled; held hostage among the teacups in a filthy hovel. And as I squatted there with the fragments flying around me, I felt rage harden into resolution: I should, after all, revisit the cottage. Enid Rosewell or no Enid Rosewell, I was going back for my gloves. A small act in itself, no doubt, but one with a certain symbolic value: I should be – and I remember phrasing it in exactly this way at the time – setting out to reclaim my own.
I emerged from the porch into pale sunlight, but the clouds were thickening again as I climbed the hill, and by the time I reached the cottage it had begun to rain. I tapped gently at the door. No answer. I stepped over to the window, shaded my eyes with my hands and peered in. The fire almost out, no hint of movement in the room. My gloves, I noticed, were still on the table, apparently undisturbed since my precipitate departure. I tapped again, then cautiously lifted the latch and let myself in.
Retrieving the gloves should have been the work of a moment, but as I reached out to pick them up my eye was drawn to the battered book beside them – or, to be more accurate, to the handwritten sheet protruding from between its pages.
What was it about the discovery of my own letter that so profoundly troubled me? Not simply, I think, the fact that it had been used as a bookmark for what was clearly some twopenny-halfpenny romance, but also – and perhaps more importantly – the implicit suggestion that concealment was unnecessary. I had no doubt that the letter had been read by Enid Rosewell, and I felt my face grow hot at the thought.
I took the book from the table, opened it and removed the letter. And I should doubtless have closed it again immediately if I had not been struck by a passage underlined in pencil at the top of the left-hand page: is unquenchable, it ran, and will blaze out through the present gloom, a beacon guiding you safely to the haven of my arms. I await, eagerly but without impatience, the realization of my vision. Ever your own – Alicia.
I turned back to the previous page, scarcely able to believe the evidence of my own eyes; but there was no doubt of it. I have been dreaming, I read, drifting in and out of sleep. And now the first birds are beginning to stir and sing. The fire is almost out, a heap of grey ash in the grate. But the love in my heart, my darling—
I snapped the book shut, pocketed my letter and snatched my gloves from the table. As I turned to go I heard the old woman cry out from the back room.
‘Is that you, Annie?’
I held my breath.
‘Annie?’
I could hear the bars of the bed rattle as she turned; then the repeated knocking of her stick on the floor. ‘Annie,’ she called again, her voice shrill and raw. ‘Come here when you’re bid, girl.’
I stepped quickly out into the rain and pulled the door shut behind me.
If I had stayed in the house three minutes longer, Ann would have discovered me there. As it was, it was I who had the advantage, spotting her on the path ahead a moment or two before she became aware of my presence. When she saw me she started forward impulsively, almost breaking into a run before such decorum as she possessed reasserted itself.
‘Had you walked out to see me?’ she asked, approaching just a little more closely than seemed necessary. The situation, I realized, required careful handling.
‘I thought we might talk,’ I said.
She smiled up at me, and as she did so, some indefinable passion – grief, rage, desire, I don’t know what – swept through me like a tidal wave, leaving me trembling and confused.
‘Come back to my house,’ she whispered. ‘My mother’s away.’
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not there.’
‘But we can’t stay out here. We’ll be soaked to the skin.’
The skin of her thigh when she lay beneath me that night; the soft skin slick with rain.
‘I don’t expect our talk to be a long one,’ I said.
&n
bsp; Her smile faded. ‘All the time I was waiting I kept thinking how it would be when you came back,’ she said. ‘I thought there’d be no end to the talking. If only my mother hadn’t been there when you called … You’ve no idea how difficult things have been for me since your visit.’
‘I should have thought your difficulties started rather earlier than that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Exactly what I say. Your mother had already struck you when I arrived.’
She stared vacantly at me, shaking her head a little from side to side.
‘Struck me?’
‘The bruising on your face. I thought …’
She touched her cheek gingerly with her fingertips and I experienced, for the briefest instant, as if through the tips of my own fingers, the warmth and density of the discoloured flesh.
‘You thought my mother would have done that to me? If she hadn’t scared you off the other day, you might have got to know her better. I suppose you see her as a hard woman, and in some ways that’s true: she’s been hardened by the blows her life has dealt her. But you’re misjudging her if you imagine she’d harm me.’
‘So the bruise …?’
‘An accident. I was reaching for a jug from the top of the dresser. The stool slipped. It was nothing, only I was embarrassed that you should have seen me like this.’
She took a step towards me. I was careful to make no answering movement.
‘I was concerned for you,’ I said. ‘But I’ve been concerned for myself too. For my own health.’
‘You’ve had good reason. Mr Banks told me there was a time he feared for your life.’
‘I’m not thinking of the fever. Since then I’ve developed symptoms – nothing very definite, you understand, but … To put it bluntly, Ann, I need to know whether I might have contracted any infection from you when we lay together that night.’
She recoiled as though she had been struck, her mouth wide, her face and neck reddening furiously. For a moment she seemed to teeter on the verge of flight; then she squared up to me again, eyes blazing.
‘What kind of a gentleman would ask a question like that? No one else has ever—’
Later, much later, I would come back to that abruptly truncated phrase, weighing the words, interrogating the momentary silence which succeeded them; but at the time, swept on by the sheer force of her indignation, I had no opportunity for analytical thought.
‘Couldn’t you tell?’ she hissed. ‘Didn’t you realize?’
‘Realize? What should I have realized?’
‘That I was a virgin when I came to you. How could you have taken infection from me? Did I give you all that – did I give you myself? – for you to humiliate me in this way, for you to—’
‘Keep your voice down.’
‘There’s no one around. And why should I care who hears me anyway? I’ve nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of except my own foolishness in giving you something you didn’t even know you were being offered.’
I hesitated, disquieted by the vigour of her response but needing to know more.
‘There’s something else,’ I said at last. ‘Are you bearing my child?’
She averted her eyes, gazing down the hill towards the church. When she answered, her voice was calm again, her features composed.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I’m not. You’ve nothing to worry about.’
I realize on reflection that my barely disguised relief might well have given offence, but she was evidently too deeply engrossed in her own thoughts to pay much attention to my reaction.
‘What would you have done?’ she asked. ‘I mean, if there had been a child?’
‘There’s no need to discuss the hypothetical. The important thing is that we’re free to get on with our own lives.’
I could hardly have expressed myself more clearly, yet she gave every indication of having missed the point of the remark, reaching out and twining her fingers in mine.
‘It’s as well it didn’t happen like that,’ she said. ‘If there should ever be a child, I’d want everything to be just right for it.’
I disengaged my hand and took a pace backwards.
‘I must get back to work,’ I said.
‘When shall we meet again?’
It was not clear to me whether her obtuseness was genuine or assumed, but either way she was making my task peculiarly difficult.
‘I feel it would be better for both of us,’ I said, ‘if we were to agree not to see one another for some considerable time.’
‘Some considerable time? What do you mean by that?’
‘Simply that present circumstances—’
‘Simply fiddlesticks,’ she cried, suddenly back on the attack. ‘Nothing’s simple where you’re concerned. You use words to confuse people, not to help them understand. Why can’t you be straight with me?’
I was stung, of course, by the injustice of the accusation, but what angered me above all was to have it flung at me by a woman whose own position in this respect was so obviously assailable. My retaliation was perhaps ungentlemanly but not, I think, entirely unjustifiable. I drew the letter from my coat pocket and held it up to her face. ‘Do you know where I found this?’ I asked.
She stared at it, frowning slightly.
‘Of course I know. I used it to mark my page. What were you doing in the house?’
‘Do you remember the page in question?’
‘You’ve stolen that letter. You’ve no right to it.’
‘I’ve every right. The letter’s mine.’ I crumpled it in my hand and thrust it back into my pocket.
‘But given to me, treasured by me. There’s a little of your heart in that letter. Can’t you at least leave me that much to hold on to?’
I am not sure that I was not more irritated by the mawkishness of her appeal than by the preposterous accusation of theft. In any event, my response was understandably sharp.
‘Treasured? Stuck between the pages of a third-rate novel and left lying around in the kitchen, where anyone might get hold of it. Where no doubt your mother did get hold of it.’
‘No. She found the book under my pillow, and your letter inside it. I couldn’t have known she’d go poking about in my bedroom. And the book’s not what you say it is, either. Parts of it are so beautiful that I go on reading them over and over again.’
‘And among its particular attractions, I presume, the passage you so shamelessly plagiarized when you wrote to me.’
‘I don’t understand all the words you use. But if you mean I copied the letter from the book, yes, of course I did. I wanted something nice to send you, something you’d want to read. How could that have been wrong?’
‘You passed off the letter as your own.’
‘I was trying to let you know what I felt.’
‘Or what someone else felt. They weren’t your words.’
She paused awkwardly before replying.
‘I’d already tried to give you my words. You didn’t want them. I might have taken greater pains, you said. And I went back that night wondering how I could find words that would please you and still be true. I must have written half a dozen letters over the next few days, but I couldn’t send them for fear I’d said the wrong thing, or perhaps just said the right thing in the wrong way. You talk as if I’d deceived you, but that’s not so. When I read that letter in the novel it seemed truer than anything I could have written myself – so fine and clear. As fine and clear as my love for you. Why shouldn’t I have used the words if they told you what I wanted you to know?’
It seems to me axiomatic that a woman arguing in defence of her own dishonest dealings is unlikely to have anything very illuminating to say about either truth or love. I could see no point in prolonging the discussion.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I really have to go.’
At the turn of the path I looked round, to see her standing exactly where I had left her, quite motionless, her head bowed and her hands covering her face.
She might have been crying, but from that distance it was difficult to be certain.
23
There was no mistaking Harris’s bulky frame. As I made my way down the hillside in the failing light I could see him sitting on the gate, his head bent forward, his forearms resting on his knees. He raised his eyes at my approach, easy and unsurprised, and wagged the stem of a short pipe towards the slope behind me.
‘That’ll be a well-trodden path for you, Mr Stannard.’
I scanned his face carefully. His eyes gave nothing away.
‘I’m in the habit of taking a short stroll in the evenings,’ I said. ‘This is as good a walk as any.’
He grinned suddenly, baring his uneven teeth.
‘It’s the scenery makes a walk worth taking, I always say. A man might go a long way to find scenery like that.’
There was something about his tone which made me uneasy: a sly, knowing mockery, perhaps the faintest hint of menace. I stepped forward and placed one hand on the gate but he showed no inclination to move.
‘Do you smoke, Mr Stannard?’ He was probing the bowl of his pipe with a small bone-handled clasp-knife. ‘A filthy business when you come to think of it. Look at this.’
He tapped the pipe into his palm and held out the broken wad of dottle, half overbalancing as he did so, his heavy face almost brushing mine. I recoiled from the threatened contact, from the warmth of his beery breath.
‘All that muck in there,’ he said, recovering his balance and settling himself more firmly. He let the fragments fall and wiped his palm on his corduroys. ‘All that muck, and a fool at the other end sucking away at it.’
‘If you’ll excuse me, Harris, I have to get back to my lodgings.’
He closed the clasp-knife with unnecessary care and slipped it, along with his pipe, into his pocket. Then he clambered down, lifted the bar and pushed back the gate, bowing me through with exaggerated formality.
‘I’ll walk back with you,’ he said.
I set a brisk pace but Harris, though by no means entirely steady on his legs, had no difficulty in keeping up with me. For a few moments he maintained what I took to be a respectful silence; but as we stepped off the cart-track into the lane he veered towards me and, with a graceless familiarity which I attributed to his condition, grasped me by the elbow.
