In the Springtime of the Year (6 page)

The funeral loomed ahead of her like some terrible cliff face which she must climb, for there was no way round or back. She sat, gripping the arms of the chair, and prayed for strength to bear it all, without losing her reason.

At first, she did not understand the cry that came from
upstairs
. She had been locked up within herself unaware of the room and the darkness, the last heat from the core of the fire.

Then she jumped up. Jo was here. It was Jo.

He was sitting up in bed holding his hands over his face.

‘Jo…’

He did not move. The room smelled damp.

Ruth sat on the bed and touched his arm, but when, at last, he took his hands away, she saw that he had not been crying, as she had supposed, his eyes were dry, and huge in his wide-boned face, the skin was taut and gleaming with fear.

‘Jo … it’s all right, I’m here. What happened?’

For a time, he did not reply, or appear to feel her touch.

Then, he breathed very deeply several times, and lay back.

‘I was dreaming, I didn’t know where I was.’

‘You’re here.’

‘It was the trees.’

She waited, afraid of what she would hear. ‘I was in the wood somewhere. It was beautiful – sunny and quiet, you know how it is? I was happy and all the trees had faces and the faces were laughing. I was laughing.’

He took another breath and shivered slightly. Ruth touched her fingers to the side of his face.

‘Then it went dark and all the faces changed. They were ugly faces, leering, like those gargoyles on the
church
tower, they were devils. They were all coming down on me, and I’d fallen, I couldn’t get away.’

Nightmares. But perhaps, in the end, they might help him to work out his grief and fear. All hers were to come.

‘Should I make a drink?’

‘What time is it?’

She did not know.

‘But I’ll sit here with you. I’ll make us some cocoa.’ By the time she returned, Jo’s face had relaxed, there was some colour in it and his eyes were no longer wide with the recollection of his terror.

He said, ‘What will you do, Ruth? Afterwards? What will happen to you?’

Afterwards? She had not thought of it, such a time did not yet exist.

‘I shouldn’t want you to go away.’

‘Away? No … Oh, no.’

For even if she could bear the idea of it, where was there to go? This was her home, she belonged nowhere else now.

She had come three years ago to stay with Godmother Fry, after the wedding of her father and Ellen Gage. Ellen, who was kind to her, wanted to love her and be accepted, who would make a good wife for him. Ruth had been happy about it, most of all because now she could be free, she was not the only person her father lived for, he no longer wanted to tie her to him. She liked Ellen, but, after the marriage, she had wanted to
come
away, to prove to herself that it was possible, now that she was eighteen, a person in her own right.

Godmother Fry had been almost ninety by then, and half-blind, she walked with a stick. But there had never been anyone so full of vigour and courage, and she cared about others, interested herself in them, so that the house was always full of visitors, being happy in her company. She had welcomed Ruth as a child of her own, and Ruth, in return, had cooked and done work about the house, and taken the old woman out, to walk slowly through the village. It was June, high summer, the backs of the men haymaking in Rydal’s top fields were burnt brown as toffee. It seemed like home then, even before she met Ben.

‘Where could I go, where else is there, Jo?’

He set his empty mug down on the shelf.

‘Did I tell you about the shells?’

She blinked. But this was typical of him, he always expected people to have followed his quick changes of thought.

‘I found them in the attic cupboard. They were shells my great-grandfather brought back from the West Indies and China. Some of them look as if they were made of pearl, and there’s a pink one, coiled like a snake. I’m going to read about them.’

Shells. Shells and stones, birds and plants and insects and the fungi that grew in the damp, secret crevices of the woods – Jo knew about them all.

‘I’d like to go to those places.’ His voice was becoming drowsy. ‘I’d like to be a sailor. Think of what I’d see.’

‘Shouldn’t you miss it here? Everything you’ve always known?’

‘Yes. And so I don’t know what I’ll do. There are countries I read about, hot places, where the birds are all bright as parrots, flying about among the trees, just like sparrows and things here. And jungle rivers and forests. And storms, going round Cape Horn. All of that … sometimes, it’s all I want.’

He opened his eyes. He was rested. But he said, ‘What about you, Ruth? What about you?’

She shook her head, and after a moment, left him. And stood on the landing opposite the door of the room she dared not enter.

It was almost four o’clock. She slept a little, restlessly, and took on Jo’s dream, so that she flinched back from the faces of the trees and the way they threatened her, and then, she saw that they wore the expressions of all those people who had been up here since yesterday, Potter and Alice, David Colt, the curate, and others, too, the ones she had still to see, Dora and Arthur Bryce, and all the people of the village. It seemed to last for hours, but when she woke again, it was only just after five. She sat, letting the nightmare wash over her and recede gradually, until her head was rinsed clean and clear of all things, memories, faces, fears.
She
watched the hands of the clock move from five to half past, to six, and then seven, when Jo came quietly into the room.

Now it was Thursday. Only another day and another night, only this small amount of precious time, like a globule of water hanging from a tap, but ready to fall, to burst open.

In the kitchen, Jo filled the range and put the kettle on to boil. The sounds comforted her.

*

It was just after five o’clock. She rinsed her hands and face at the tap in the kitchen, and the water was icy, burning her skin.

In that time between the fading of moonlight and the rising of dawn, everything about her seemed curiously insubstantial, and she herself felt weightless, as though she were in a dream. But the long grass at the side of the path brushed against her legs like damp feathers. The world was real enough.

The path led out into the lane, which sloped for a mile, between the beeches. All the night animals had retreated into nests and burrows, and as she came up to the field gate, the first birds were making individual, exploratory calls.

The sky paled a little and now she saw the mist, like soft grey bundles of wool left about at the bottom of the meadow, and on the margin of the wood. The
grass
smelled sappy and fresh as she trod it down, and the mist gave off its own peculiar, raw smell as she passed through it.

Inside the wood, the ground sloped sharply downhill, and was a mulch of wet leaves and moss and soil, she had to hold on to branches and roots, to steady herself. But every moment, it was growing lighter, now she could see the grey outline of trees, a few yards ahead. She felt nothing, was not afraid, she only concentrated upon getting there.

Lower down there was more mist, trailing about her like tattered chiffon scarves. The beeches gave way to oak and elm, with low bushes and briars. A weasel streaked across the path ahead of her, red eyes gleaming like berries. Then, another slope down to the last clearing. It was very still here. Everything was gradually taking on its own colour again, as the first light filtered through, the various shades of grey separated themselves from one another, and the brown of soil and dead leaf, the silvery fringed lichen and mould-green moss.

Helm Bottom.

At first, she saw nothing to indicate that this was the place. And then, behind her, the pile of cut-down undergrowth and pruned branches, laid together.

The tree itself was a few feet away, the roots had been half torn-out of the ground like teeth from a gum, leaving a ragged hole. When she went close to it, she could see that the wood was rotten, a honeycomb
of
dead, dry cells running through its core. But the outer branches looked healthy, there were buds forming. It had been nobody’s fault, no one could have known.

Very slowly, she crouched down and put her hands on the tree bark. It was faintly spongy with moss. So this was it. This. Though she had no way of telling which part of it had fallen on to him, the ground was trampled and churned up, where all the men had been, he might have lain anywhere.

She understood that it had been utterly right for Ben to die here, in the wood. Because it was his place, he had known it since childhood, he was a forester. She was grateful. She would not have wanted him sick, in bed for months in some strange hospital. Everything was well.

A thin dart of sunlight came between two branches and caught on a cobweb laid out on the hawthorn, the tiny water-beads were iridescent. She was stiff and cold, kneeling there, she could feel the damp soaking through her clothing, but she did not go, she laid her face against the fallen tree, and it gave her some sort of courage, some sort of hope. She half-slept, and pictures shuffled like cards before her eyes, she heard the bird-song and then it was confused with snatches of human speech, so that she thought they had all come for her, were surrounding her, in the wood.

When she opened her eyes again, she knew something more. That this was a good place, because Ben
had
died here and he had been good. ‘Whenever she came here, it could only give her peace, she could not be assailed by any fear, nothing could harm her here. For if a bad death haunted a place with evil, why should not a good death imprint its own goodness?

It was a long time before she got up, and tried to bring back some warmth to her cramped limbs.

The mist had folded back and back upon itself like a long pillow at the bottom of Low Field. She found mushrooms, more than a dozen of them, with their delicate pink-brown grilles and tops of white suede, she put some in her pockets and carried the rest between cupped hands back up the hill and across the common, to where she found Jo waiting, full of alarm, by the gate. She called out, to reassure him, and the donkey heard her, too, and brayed.

‘Ruth…’

‘It’s all right.’

‘Mushrooms!’

‘I found them in Low Field.’

He glanced at her quickly.

‘I went there. To Helm Bottom. I had to go.’

‘Yes.’

‘I had to go by myself.’

‘Is it all right?’

‘Yes.’

Yes, for now, she had something to hold on to, some
kind
of reassurance which would take her through this day. It was only the end of it she dreaded, and dared not look beyond, for the worst would come to her, she knew, when, for everyone else, it was all over.

3

AS SHE TURNED
into Foss Lane and saw the house, she had again the sensation of being outside her own body, of watching her own actions with interest but without emotion. There were people round the doorway, but they moved back, murmuring a little and then falling silent, as they saw her. She was wearing the brown skirt and coat, and no hat, because she did not possess a hat, and it had not occurred to her to buy one specially. That would have changed her, she would not be the person Ben knew.

At the open door, she paused, and her heart began to beat violently, she gripped her hands together.

There they were. All of them, in black, and the women in hats, the men formal and unfamiliar in suits, with arm-bands. And as she entered the tiny front room, they, too, fell silent. Nobody came to her.

Dora Bryce was in a chair beside the fire, a handkerchief to her face. The room was hot. Ruth felt that she would choke, she wanted to run away from these ashen, sepulchral faces, What had any of this to do with her, or with Ben? She remembered what Jo had
told
her, about people in the early church who wore white at a funeral for rejoicing.

‘Ruth …’

Arthur Bryce took her arm, and then let it go, awkwardly. His neck looked red and swollen under the stiff white collar.

Perhaps he did not dislike her, perhaps, if it had not been for the women, he might have been her friend, But he went along with them, Dora and Alice, did what they did.

Who were all the others? They looked curiously alike; they must be aunts and uncles and cousins of the Bryces. None of them was related to her. They either glanced at her and away quickly, or else stared with set faces. She thought, you’ve heard about me, and what you have heard you believe, there isn’t anything they will not have told you.

Where was Jo? If Jo would come … She had never felt so lonely, so set apart from other people, in her life, and she had only her own courage and pride to rely on.

‘You’ll want to come up.’

Arthur Bryce was standing in the doorway, at the foot of the stairs and for a moment she did not understand. When she did, she stepped back, the room tilted and her ears rang.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘No.’

Dora Bryce lifted her head.

‘You’re not going to pay your respects? You don’t even want to say goodbye to him?’

‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll come with you, girl.’

Arthur Bryce fingered his collar. ‘He looks …’

‘No!’

She saw the expression on Alice’s face, remembered what she had said that night. ‘You’ve not even feeling enough to cry.’ But she could not go upstairs, the sight of his body, lying in a coffin, which would soon be sealed up forever, would be more than she could bear. And it would mean nothing, now. She looked around the room. So they had all been up? Yes. She imagined the file of dark mourners mounting the stairs and peering down into the coffin. At Ben. Ben. How could they? How could so many people have touched him and looked at him, unasked, since the moment of his death, when she herself had not?

But it was better. She thought, they don’t have Ben. When I last saw him, he was alive, walking up the path, at the beginning of an ordinary day, and we were happy, and that is what I want to remember, there is no strange, dead image to lie like a mask over that.