In the Springtime of the Year (2 page)

Now, the trees would stay. For even if one of the local men had been willing to fell them for her, she would never ask. She asked nothing of anyone, had vowed not to do so, the first day. Besides, the trees, like Balaam, were part of the old life, of everything she now wanted to cling to.

She realised after a few moments of standing there, touching the tree, that she no longer felt strange, the only person in an empty, dead world. The donkey had brayed, she could smell the last of the sweet stocks and the tobacco plants, and there were the hens, just ahead of her, in a line on the top of the coop. Other things lived. The world turned.

The pleasure she took in caring for the hens was the only thing that had never left her, and she had clung to
that
. This nightly journey down the garden had been one thing, the only thing, to which she looked forward each day. The hens knew her. They were trusting. And reliable themselves, too, always in their places as darkness fell, ready to be put away. They made small noises which seemed to come from deep within their plumage, dove-like sounds, as they heard her lift the latch of the gate into their run. She put her hands round each one firmly, and felt the softness of feather, and the sinewy wings, and, coming through them, the blood-and-flesh warmth. They never struggled, unless she picked one of them up awkwardly, and then it would beat its wings into her face, and she had to go on to the next, wait for that one to settle down again.

Ben had laughed at her care for the hens. He had no dislike of them, they were useful, he said, and no trouble, they gave good eggs. But they were stupid creatures, weren’t they, with such small heads, small brains, they made such graceless darts and bobs of movement. He would never believe that Ruth could tell one from another, to him they all looked the same, dull russet-coloured. Balaam now, Balaam he could take an interest in, the donkey amused him, and it had character, but what character had the hens? Ruth had only shaken her head, unable to explain, and he had not minded, as she did not mind his teasing of her.

She shut down the flap of the coop and bolted it, and listened for a moment to the scuttling sounds inside, as the birds settled themselves for the night.
But
in the end they went quiet, and then it was over, and there was nothing else to do except walk back up to the cottage, and she did not want to do it, she never wanted to go back. Not because she was afraid. Or else, if afraid, then only of her own feelings and memories and of the silence that pressed in on her ears within every room, of the sound of her own movements.

She lingered outside. She went to the vegetable patch and knelt down, touching the cold, damp leaves of the spinach plants, and burying her hands deep into the soil, feeling about until she found a potato, and then another; she would cook them, perhaps, make up a small fire and bake them and eat them with butter, it would be a treat. It would be something.

The scarlet runner-bean flowers were grey like laburnum pods in the moonlight. It had been Jo who had come up, and planted and staked them, Jo who had drilled the seed rows, and then thinned out the plants as they grew up. Jo, never asking, only seeing what needed to be done, and getting on with it in silence, keeping things going. Jo knew that he was the only person she would allow at the cottage, to help her, and sometimes to talk. Jo, Ben’s brother and so different from Ben, different from them all. He was fourteen and he might have been a hundred years old, he knew so much, had so much wisdom, so much awareness of himself and of others. She had been able to bear it most easily because he did not look like Ben either, though even with fourteen years between them the brothers had been very close. But she loved Jo
for
himself for what he was, for how he treated her, not because he was a Bryce and her dead husband’s brother.

*

In the kitchen, she said, ‘I will cook them. The potatoes I will cook them,’ and she had spoken, almost cried the words aloud. It no longer terrified her, that she talked to herself, she no longer thought that it was a sign of madness.

During the first weeks, she had gone up and down the stairs, stood in the middle of this room or that, she did not know where, and talked; about what had happened, and how, about her own thoughts and feelings and what she would do. She had talked to Ben, too, because he was still there, wasn’t he, just behind her shoulder, at the end of the landing, on the other side of a door, and it was sometimes just ordinary talk, she might only say, ‘Hello, Ben.’ But for the rest of the time, she blamed him, screamed out in resentment ‘Where are you? Where are you? Why did you have to die? Oh, why did you die?’

What she would not do was talk to anyone else except, occasionally, to Jo. She had been silent, unless when answering what questions she must about the immediate arrangements, or else refusing something they wanted to give her, food or drink or comfort. They had all watched her, they had been anxious,
clucked
advice at her, admonished, warned. But she had not talked, or wept, in front of any of them.

‘
I will cook them
.’

The potatoes lay in her hand, heavy as eggs, dusty. But she would have to kindle a fire, and she could not make that effort, just for herself, for cooking two potatoes. The range was out. Jo was the one who came up to light it, when he thought that she might need the water hot, and Jo had cooked things for her once or twice, too, until he saw that she did not want them.

But since July, and the long hot days of sun, she had let the range go out, and left it. She washed every day, and her hair, as well, in cold water, and she ate at odd times, in the middle of the morning, or late at night, bits of fruit and cheese or raw vegetables, and the last side of baked ham, never sitting down, with knife and fork and plate, just wandering about the empty house and garden. The eggs she sold now, all of them, she needed the money.

People had sent food up to her at first – even Dora Bryce, who hated her for her independence; plate-pies and legs of chicken, cakes, loaves of bread. She did not eat them. She resented their gifts, saw them as an imposition upon her, though now, she was ashamed of herself, at this churlish rejection of what had only been kindness, after all, and caring. She had not known that it was in her nature to be like that, but her nature had changed, hadn’t it? Or else the truth of it had been uncovered by Ben’s death.

Once, though, she had tried to cook, just once. Jo had come in the morning with a rabbit, ready skinned and cut up, though he had said nothing about it, only found a dish and left it there, on a slab in the larder. And that night, she had found fat and flour and made a pie, with a sauce of stock and herbs and onions for the meat, and the smell of the baking filled the house like new life, her stomach had felt hollow with longing for the food, it had made a pain below her ribs.

The pie had come out of the oven with a soft, barley-brown crust, the meat and gravy spilling out, dark as port, over the white plate. Yet, when she had put a forkful of it into her mouth, her throat had gagged and she could not swallow, she held the meat against her tongue until it went cold, lumpy, and she had rushed outside to be sick upon the grass.

The pie had stayed there, congealing, losing its glaze and savour until, after a couple of days, the flies settled on to it, and she threw it all into the swill bin, which Carter came and emptied every week, for his pigs.

Ruth had wept, then, out of shame and guilt at the waste of the food, and for pity of the rabbit, which had been living, and then shot dead, and all to no purpose.

After that, there had been no more cooking.

She left the potatoes on the kitchen table, and drank a cup of cold milk. And all the time it was there, lying at the back of her mind like a dog, waiting to leap out and attack, the thought of what she must do. For the
past
fortnight, now, she had half-acknowledged that it was there, only to draw herself back from it in dread. When she imagined all that it would mean, her heart pounded, she had to clutch on to a chair or the wall to steady herself. She dare not do it, go there, find him, and ask the questions, listen, discover. For, once she had discovered, none of it could ever again be forgotten.

The pile of sewing, sent down by Mrs. Rydal, lay beside her chair. They were always small, fussy jobs, tedious and unrewarding, jobs no one else would do. She would have liked the chance to make something new, a dress or some petticoats, but even if they felt she could manage it now, they would not ask her; she was the girl who did the mending not the making.

It did not engross her, and so she went over and over the same things in her mind, while her hands patched the elbows of shirts and darned socks, shortened or lengthened hems. Much of the time, it seemed to her that the garments were only fit to be thrown away, the material was almost past repairing. Yet the Rydals owned half the villages and woods for miles around, they could not be poor. It was poor people who darned and redarned, and made up a sheet out of two old ones, sides to middle. If she had had the choice, she would have refused the work, but she had to live, and the only other way to make money would have been to sell the cottage. It was hers, bought with the money Godmother Fry had left her, they had been proud, she and Ben both, that they were not tenants.
Leaving
here she could not contemplate because it was all she had left to cling to, it was Ben, it was life to her, familiar. She dreaded change, new places. And so, she did the sewing, and ironing, too. One of the men brought parcels over from Ridge Farm, and she herself walked back with them and, as often as not, tried to leave them somewhere, to slip into the kitchen when it was empty, and leave again at once, to avoid meeting anyone, having to talk.

People around here were lucky, they said, to have Rydal for an employer or a landlord, he paid good enough wages and kept the houses in repair – though he worked the men hard. Ben had worked hard, but that had only been his nature, he had hated to be idle, could never rest, even at home in the evenings, though he had been up and out at half past six, and not home again until seven – or later, in the summer.

‘Sit down,’ she had said sometimes, ‘just sit down with me.’ And he would do so, to please her, but after a few moments, he was restless, he would lean over and start to fiddle with the fire, re-arranging the logs, getting up a draught, and then remember some job to be done. Well, she had not minded. It was the way he was. And he had been there, hadn’t he, there with her, even when he was digging in the garden or mending the roof of the shed, she had been able to hear him, to catch sight of him from the window. He had been there.

She looked down at the clothes. A jacket with the collar frayed, a skirt missing two buttons. Nothing.

The room had gone cooler. The lamp threw its shadows. And if she did not begin to work now, did not find her needle and thread, she would just sit for hours, until she was tired enough to go to bed, sit without moving, her hands in her lap, staring ahead. It seemed now that not just half a year, but half of her life had gone by like that – except that it was not life, it was not anything, except time passing, and the thoughts which passed to and fro like shuttles, the same pictures she saw in her mind, the same words remembered.

She began to sew. She said, I am getting better, and I am doing it by myself for that was the most vital thing of all, if she was going to recover somehow, she should do it without help. Though there were days when she did not believe that anything had changed after all, days which were worse than those at the beginning, because she was no longer shocked or numb now, and so she knew, that it was true and would go on being true, and it was on those days that, if she had not been so afraid, she would have killed herself. It was what they were all expecting, wasn’t it? Perhaps even what they wanted – Ben’s family, and all those people whose help she had spurned.

‘Burying herself up there. Brooding. Living from hand to mouth. Is she right in her mind? A young woman, twenty-one years old just, and alone in that cottage, talking to herself, never giving thought for anyone else.’

Perhaps they thought that she was becoming like old man Moony, out in his hovel beyond Priors Fen. But no, that was different, for he had been odd since anyone could remember, a cussed, dirty old man, who stumped for hours about the countryside, eyes down, giving no one Good-day. They accepted Moony. There had always been one like him, somewhere about. Moony had come back from the war and some said that was what had crazed him, that was the reason for his shutting himself away and trusting no one.

Was that how she wanted to be? ‘Proud,’ they said, ‘she was always proud.’ And it was more than likely she didn’t wash or bother with herself now, didn’t clean the house – though Jo told them that was not true. She had kept herself and the house as tidy and fresh as she had always done. That was what her pride meant.

So they talked about her, Dora Bryce, and Alice, and the wives and mothers of the men Ben had worked with, and told anyone who passed through the village too. They waited for her to go mad and run about the countryside stark naked, to be taken away. To be found dead.

No one missed anything. They knew how often she went across the four fields and down through the slopes of the beech woods to Helm Bottom, and how long she stayed there, crouched near to where the tree had fallen; they knew that she went up, and how often, not by day but at night, to the graveyard. There was nothing they did not know, and although she shut her
doors
and bolted her windows and the elms were thick and the bracken grew high as a man, although it was a mile to the next house and three to the village, she felt that they could see every movement she made, listen to her voice and her crying.

She sat on, sewing, and the house was quiet as a coffin and outside, too, it was quite still and the trunks of the beeches were like columns of lead under the moon.

In his bed, at the top of the house in Foss Lane, Jo lay, his eyes open, so that he saw the thin band of night sky, where the curtains did not meet together, and thought of Ruth, as he always thought of her, with love and fear. He knew that whatever she needed, it could only come from him, all the responsibility for her had fallen from his brother’s shoulders on to his own, and he was not always sure how well he could bear it, along with his own grief, which he had to keep locked within him, he dreaded that he might one day let Ruth down, and be unable to help it. She said, ‘I manage. I don’t need anyone,’ and only he knew that it was not true.