Courting Shadows

by Jem Poster

  26

  If I had seen her waiting there by the stile, I should have turned aside and cut down to the village through the woods; but the light was fading and I was not aware of her presence until she stepped away from the hawthorn trunk against which she had been leaning. She was, considering the weather and the hour, decidedly underclad, in a dark dress and a fringed woollen shawl, and I noticed as she drew close that her face was pinched and stiff with cold. She attempted a smile, a poor lopsided grimace, which she abandoned at once. There was no ceremony in her greeting.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you from that direction. Where have you been?’

  I was on the point of telling her that my activities were none of her business, but thought better of it. I sensed that she was in a highly emotional state, and I was anxious to avoid argument.

  ‘I’ve been talking with Mr Redbourne.’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘Of course not. Why should we have spoken of you?’

  I was aware that I might have phrased my denial more tactfully, but I was quite unprepared for the stream of vituperation that followed. It was difficult to make sense of it all, but I was left with the strong impression that she felt Redbourne might corrupt or mislead me in some way.

  ‘I don’t understand you. We’ve simply been conversing over a glass or two of wine.’

  ‘Conversing?’ She mimicked my own careful articulation of the word. ‘Say what you like, I know he’s been telling you stories about me; about my family.’

  ‘Stories?’

  ‘Yes, stories. You’re all story-tellers, you gentlemen – liars if you like. And you’re the worst of all, using me as you do, making me and remaking me as you see fit. No, don’t deny it. You make me, you force me – force me to be this thing or that. I’m an angel, I’m a demon, I’m the sweetness – yes, you said that – the sweetness you’ve waited all your life for, the infection blighting your future for ever. It’s all stories with you. Why won’t you see me as I am? Look me in the eyes! Why can’t you look at me?’

  She was hysterical, of course, and it struck me at that moment that what I was witnessing was the surfacing of some deep hereditary taint, she being perhaps as severely afflicted as her mother. It was, I suppose, partly with the intention of administering the verbal equivalent of a sharp slap that I turned her argument back on her, but I realized as I spoke that I was shaking with anger myself.

  ‘What about your own stories? The way you made and remade yourself when you were a girl. What was it your mother said? You were a saint, a fairy princess, a great lady. And now? If it’s true that I’ve failed to see you as you are, perhaps that’s not entirely my fault.’

  ‘I know what my mother said. But who is she, that little girl dreaming beside the brook? I’ll tell you who she is: she’s a character in yet another story, an imaginary figure called up by a foolish woman in the hope of impressing her daughter’s gentleman visitor. I don’t recognize her.’

  Had I been entirely sober I should not, I think, have acted quite as I did, though I feel even now that my impatience was not entirely unjustified. Slippery, in every sense unstable, Ann had perpetually eluded my grasp, and perhaps I simply wanted to lay hold of her, to pin her down. At all events, I caught her by the arm and shook her, perhaps a little more roughly than the circumstances warranted but certainly not in a manner likely to cause distress. Even so, she winced and started back, twisting her head sideways with an odd jerky movement, as if to avoid a blow. Surprised but also encouraged by her momentary discomposure, I determined to press home my advantage.

  ‘Here’s another portrait: a girl who spends her childhood in fear of her mother’s violence, who reaches womanhood without freeing herself from that violence, who constructs a series of more or less transparent fictions in a misguided attempt to conceal from the world what the world already knows – shall I go on? Is that a figure you recognize?’

  ‘You’re hurting my arm.’

  I relaxed my grip. There was a long silence. When she spoke again, her voice was hushed and unsteady.

  ‘Whose story is that?’

  I realized I had already said too much. I hesitated.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said wearily. ‘I don’t need you to tell me.’ And then, breaking my grip completely, flinging away from me, she suddenly cried out with the most extraordinary vehemence:

  ‘I hope Redbourne burns in hell for what he’s done to my family. And that’s where he’s bound, make no mistake. Next time you see your precious friend – next time you converse with him – ask him about my brother. Let him find a story to explain that.’

  ‘Redbourne has already told me about Daniel. I’m sure that what he did was done with your brother’s interests at heart.’

  She gave me a brief incredulous stare. And then, without warning, she was crying, the tears streaming down her face, her mouth distorted. I should, I suppose, have pitied her; perhaps, to a limited extent, I did. But what I felt above all was embarrassment – embarrassment at a display of unbridled emotion which seemed at once to exclude me and to demand a response. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and held it out to her.

  I believe she may have misinterpreted the gesture. She grasped my extended hand and, with a little moan, pulled herself towards me and laid her head against the lapel of my coat. I should not like it to be thought that such matters were uppermost in my mind at that moment, but I am naturally rather fastidious about my clothing, and as soon as I decently could I applied the handkerchief, wiping her eyes and nose carefully, firmly, as though she were a child. She pressed closer and slipped her arm around my waist.

  ‘Take me away,’ she whispered. ‘Take me away from all this.’

  The idea was unthinkable, yet I had once entertained it.

  ‘It’s out of the question.’

  She strained my body to hers with a sudden vicious intensity, and I felt her breath on my throat.

  ‘It’s not just that you owe me this,’ she said. ‘It’s what we really want, you as well as me. This closeness. This touching. Surely you can see that?’

  ‘I can see no such thing. You’re speaking like a whore.’

  Intemperate words, and I immediately regretted them; but I noted with a certain disquiet that she scarcely flinched.

  ‘I’m speaking the truth,’ she said.

  She threw back her head and fixed me for a moment with a gaze so direct and unintimidated that I squirmed beneath it.

  ‘Why won’t you admit it?’ she asked. And then, with a sharp cry, she caught hold of the hair at the nape of my neck and pressed her mouth against mine, at the same moment reaching down with her left hand to touch the inside of my thigh. I recoiled, but her right hand tightened its grip while the left came up to grasp the collar of my coat, and she pushed her face against mine with the blind, desperate movements of a suckling animal. I ducked and twisted, trying to break her hold, but she clung to me in the darkness like one of the suffocating presences of my childhood nightmares, sobbing and sighing.

  I am obviously not proud of my reaction, which I now recognize to have been informed by a degree of panic; but the circumstances were clearly so extreme as to leave me little alternative. Freeing my hands, I thrust her back from me and, as she stumbled, struck her smartly across the face.

  If the blow had had the desired effect, I should no doubt have found it unnecessary to strike her again. I am unable to recall now the exact sequence of events or piece together all of the details, though I know that even when she fell to the ground she refused to relinquish her hold, twisting the fabric of my coat about her fingers and wrist as she lay at my feet. And if – as I hazily remember and as such evidence as I had seemed subsequently to confirm – I kicked out at her at that point, I naturally regret that; but I console myself with the reflection that my actions were a not altogether reprehensible response to behaviour so ungoverned and ungovernable as to constitute a genuine if admittedly indefinite threat. I will not say that I actually feared for my lif
e, but I did experience in that girl’s presence, out there in the biting wind, beneath the dark bulk of the massing clouds, a remarkable sense of menace, even of evil; of her possession by forces which might well, if I were to relax my vigilance for an instant, draw me into their ambit.

  No doubt of it. I see her now, struggling to rise but momentarily frozen in an attitude so purely and primevally savage that it assumes for me, as I re-examine it, an emblematic or monitory force. Squatting among the tussocks, one hand extended to steady herself and the other clasped to the back of her neck, she glares up at me from under her thick brows. Her left cheek is marked by a dark smear, and a hank of damp hair straggles across her mouth and sagging chin. The expression on her face might be one of rage or grief, desire or disgust, but what is unquestionable is the brutal energy which informs it. Yes, I am afraid to look at her; I am afraid to look away.

  I must have made some movement towards her for I remember her dropping back on to her hands and knees and scrambling away from me with a wild scream, so shrill and raw it set my teeth on edge. ‘Don’t,’ it might have been, or ‘No’ – her neck arched backward, her mouth wide. And then, quite suddenly, she was – as one might say – herself again. Simply and reassuringly herself: a gauche country girl snivelling into her muddied skirts in the middle of an open field. It was with a profound sense of relief, not unmixed, I should like to think, with genuine solicitude, that I reached out to help her to her feet.

  She was, I thought, about to take my hand; but then, with a curious shrug or shudder, she rose unsteadily to her feet and began to stagger towards the beechwood. I followed at what I felt to be a suitable distance, calling her name softly at intervals. As she reached the wood’s edge she appeared to stoop and fumble among the bracken stalks; then she half straightened and turned to face me. ‘Let me be,’ she said. ‘I’ll have no more to do with you.’

  It had begun to snow, fine gritty flakes driven slantwise, stinging the side of my face. My lips and tongue were clumsy with cold.

  ‘Let me see you home,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll see myself home.’

  She coughed convulsively, spat; seemed momentarily to lose her balance.

  ‘Come on, Annie.’

  ‘Don’t Annie me.’

  She eased herself back against a beech trunk, breathing heavily. I approached her as one might approach a frightened animal, cautious, placatory. As I closed on her, I slowly extended my arm and placed my hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly; and I imagine that at that moment I really meant it. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I think it was the surprise of the attack as much as its force – her sudden duck and swing, the heavy stick catching me under the ribs as I stepped hurriedly backward – that brought me to my knees, but the pain was by no means negligible. I curled forward, pressing my face into the cold leaf-mould, both arms raised to protect my head and shoulders – though there was in fact no second blow. When I looked up she was still just visible, a hunched, graceless figure stumbling away between the trees. I fancied I saw her look back at me over her shoulder, though it was hard to be sure; then the darkness closed around her and she was gone.

  She must have delivered the letter while I was at the Hall. Mrs Haskell had wedged it against the catch of my living-room door, doubtless to ensure that I would see it as I reached out to let myself in. There was, I realized, little point in reading the thing – whatever Ann might have had to say earlier had obviously been superseded by our recent exchange – but I was understandably curious. I lit the lamp and spread the crumpled sheet on the table beside it.

  The letter offered further proof, if any were needed, of the woman’s true nature. Scrappily written, confused in its arguments, decidedly unbalanced in tone, it confirmed the fundamental wisdom of my own response – of actions which, though apparently unbalanced themselves, could hardly, given the circumstances, have been carried through in any other way.

  Dearest,

  Mrs Haskell was kind when I called this morning, she could see how it was with me. But you would not come down. When I got home I was raging but now I am quieter. And I ask you again. Please let me see you, please let me speak with you. I shall go out at dusk to the usual place.

  I beg you do not ignore this letter. It is not for my sake only that I write, but for yours. Did you think when we lay in the dark with the rain falling on us that that was the end? I know you did. But it need not be so. Before that you loved me. Tipping my face to the moon you loved me and earlier too, looking up as I stood watching you in the churchyard. I know it and you know it. And why not again? Did I disappoint you in some way? I think this but I do not know your thoughts. And I want to know you better and I want you to know me better for that is where love really begins. In knowing people as they are. My mother says you should marry me and so you should but not for her bidding and not even because I ask it but because of your own need. I am sad when I think of you. And sometimes I am sorry for myself and sometimes for you. Can you see that you hurt yourself too? I mean you will not take what you need even when it is offered. I offer it now.

  I am thinking of you. Of your hand on my breast when you loved me. We could be like that again if you wanted. I can not give you all you want but I can give you more than you think. Why should I hide this longing I have for you? Why should I be made to feel ashamed? I am not in the wrong in wanting you near me. I am not in the wrong in wanting to spend my life with you. You have no right to treat me badly, I have done nothing to deserve your content. I am angry again when I think of this but still your loving

  Ann

  I think she must have meant contempt. I knelt down beside the hearth and raked up the fire; then I set the letter edgewise among the turned coals and watched as the flames took hold.

  Long after the embers had cooled I was still sitting in my chair, staring into the grate, listening to the hollow sobbing of the wind in the flue. It was not indecision that held me there through those leisurely hours; it was, rather, the assurance of a man whose decision had already been made and who, knowing his path to be clear, had no need of haste. I was leaving. That night. Nothing could have been simpler.

  Called upon to account for that decision, I might have invoked in my own defence the ingratitude of a community, the duplicity of a woman, the sheer futility of the task which had brought me to the village in the first place. Reason enough for the world, I should imagine, but falling short of some essential truth. How should I have explained the rest? – the emptiness glimpsed behind or at the heart of things; that absolving darkness which, even as I sat there in the lamplight, continued to ripple over and through me like a tide, washing me clean of obstruction. Who would have understood? And to whom, in any case, was I accountable?

  I must have resisted Ann’s advances with rather more vigour than had been apparent to me at the time, for the upper surface of my right boot was flecked with blood. I took a sheet from my notebook and dipped it in the ewer, dabbing the leather as clean as my inadequate means allowed before squeezing the paper into a ball and dropping it into the grate alongside the filmy residue of the letter. Then I packed my valise with all I wished to keep or needed for the next day or two: my plans, instruments and notebooks, my toilet-case, a change of clothing. I felt a little light-headed, oddly detached from my own actions as I threw the remainder – shirts, breeches, even my tweed shooting-jacket – into my trunk and snapped down the clasp.

  The note I left for Mrs Haskell, along with what was actually a rather generous sum of money in settlement of my debts, instructed her simply to sell both trunk and clothes and to use whatever she could get for them as she saw fit. I might have given more specific guidance on the last point, and certainly the Jeffords were in my mind as I wrote the words; yet the plain truth is that I found it impossible to take any serious interest in what might happen in that godforsaken place after my departure.

  And that, I thought as I let myself quietly out of the house, was that. I walked the ei
ght miles to the station through the narrow lanes, arriving shortly before dawn. I remember very little of that part of my journey, but a few details stand out with preternatural clarity: the shrilling of the wind in the leafless hedgerows; my boots scuffing the powdery snow on the deserted platform; the dim carriage, the familiar smells of polish, leather and horsehair; the sky just beginning to lighten as I unbuttoned my greatcoat and settled back in my seat.

  27

  I tell myself that this, or something like it, has happened, though I am careful, with each fresh recapitulation, to leave intact some essential grain of doubt. A boy is walking with his dog on the fringes of the wood above the village when the animal suddenly bounds forward, yelping. The boy follows, treading down the bracken, pressing into the gloom, and almost stumbles over what he takes at first to be a heap of abandoned clothes.

  The girl is lying on her side, her cheek resting on the grey beech-roots. She has covered her face with her right arm as a sleeper might; but the fine snow lies unmelted in the folds of her dress, on her dark hair and in the hollow of her left hand, and the boy knows at once that she is dead. He turns and, with his dog at his heels, runs down the slope towards the village.

  The boy reappears, now at the head of a small group of men. They climb the hill, briskly but without haste. One of the men carries over his shoulder a roll of stained sailcloth. The dog capers around the group, leaping, lunging, nosing the frosted tussocks. Nobody pays it any attention. Nobody speaks.