In the Springtime of the Year (7 page)

Dora Bryce was speaking, but her head was bent, the words were muffled and distorted with tears.

‘There’s a bed made up for you. For tonight.’

‘No, I’ll go back home.’

‘Up there? You want to be alone up there tonight?’

Oh God, Oh God, it was all going to begin again, she wanted to scream at them, leave me alone, leave me alone!

‘It’d be only right for you to stay with us this once. Today of all days.’

Why
?

‘Isn’t it the least you can do?’ Alice said, her voice ringing out clear and impersonal across the room.

Why? Why should it matter to any of them that she should stay here, under this roof, tonight? Why should it be unkind or disrespectful of her to go back to her own home?

Nothing more was said, because there were footsteps, the men in black overcoats were coming through the doorway and passing by her, on their way upstairs. Ruth thought, I could go, I could still go up, this is the last chance. She saw that Arthur Bryce was looking at her, expecting it.

She turned away. Saw the one car outside in the lane, and the clutch of onlookers, waiting, to stare and to follow behind the family, through the village and up to the church.

Someone had closed the inner door, but she could still hear it, from upstairs, the dull thud-thud of the hammer.

*

The car moved off very slowly, with two of the undertaker’s men walking in front, and behind it, the column of mourners like black ants, and as they turned out of Foss Lane, the sun came out from behind full-bellied
rain
clouds. Ruth felt calm, and withdrawn from it all. She walked alone, needing no one. Jo was a pace behind her, watching, anxious. The wood of the coffin was pale as honey. It seemed to have nothing to do with Ben, because Ben was here, was all around her, was walking next to her, and occasionally, he touched her arm for comfort. She wanted to say, ‘You went away and now you have come back. Where did you go? Why? Why?’ She wondered if she was going out of her mind.

They were waiting at the lych-gate of the flint-faced church, the rector and the curate, like magpies in black and white, and suddenly, she remembered the day she and Ben had been married, remembered walking up here, early in the morning, dressed in plain, cream wool, without a hat or gloves or flowers. It had been a brief wedding, with only half a dozen people there, and afterwards, they had gone straight to the cottage, there had been no party. That was what they both wanted, and they did not care what conclusions the village might draw from the sudden, private ceremony: and Dora Bryce had had no choice but to agree, though she blamed Ruth for it all, for turning Ben against her.

The bell was tolling, and unconsciously, they began to walk in time with it, and everything in the world seemed to be slowing down, her own breathing and the beats of her heart, as well as the steps of the priests and the bearers, and soon, they would stop, it would all stop.

For a moment, it did, time ceased, as the men who had set the coffin down stepped back, and everyone found a place, and the two priests waited for the tolling bell to cease. The church was full. The bell ceased. The church seethed with silence.

Ruth was alone, beside Jo, in a pew in front of everyone else, so that she could only hear the noises of sobbing, the coughs and the shuffling feet, she did not have to look at their faces. Jo sat like a stone.

The priest was speaking, Ruth heard the words very clearly, very distinctly, and yet could find no meaning in them, they were in some foreign tongue. All her senses had become more acute, everything seemed hard-edged and perfectly defined in shape, her ears picked out the sound of every separate person’s breathing.

Then, it burst upon her, as overwhelmingly as on the way home from Thefton market. There seemed to be a light within everything, the stones of the church walls and the dark wood of the pulpit, the white and yellow flowers on the coffin, the stained glass windows, the brass rail, everything shone and was caught up together in some great beauty, and all things were part of a whole. The pattern had fallen into place again, and the meaning of all things was ringing in her head, she could tell them, she could tell them, and then, at last, she heard words which she understood.

‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and
the
sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband: and I heard a great voice from the throne saying, “Behold the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them and they shall be his people and God himself will be with them. And he will wipe every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”

This it was that set her apart from them, as she stood at the front of the church with her dark red hair loose over her shoulders, this revelation that she shared with Ben. Who was here, here. She felt faint, not with grief but with joy, because love was stronger than death.

*

The wind blew into their faces and stirred the funeral flowers and the heads of the poplars behind the church, and the clouds were fast-moving, heavy with rain to come.

When the clods of soil fell lightly on to the pale coffin lid, she thought that if she were to kneel down now, and prise it open, the box would be empty. She could not imagine how they believed, as they did, all black as crows, around the grave, that Ben was dead. She saw that they were watching her and thinking
that
she had still not accepted the truth, or else that it was her pride which kept her from crying. But how could she cry? Why should there be any reason for it? Their faces were all lifeless, carded and blotched with weeping, she wanted to shout out to them, ‘You are the dead people. You!’ For they seemed not to belong to any life she knew about, there was no link between them and the vibrant, dancing colours of the flowers and grasses and the holy breath of the wind, and the blood coursing through her own body.

Someone was touching her. Jo. People were moving away. It was finished. She looked at the rust-dark soil, piled up neatly on either side of the open grave.

‘Ruth …’

Jo had been crying, his eyes were dark as bruises. She took his hand and felt the trembling in it, and they came a long way behind the others, away from the churchyard.

People hovered, perhaps waiting to speak to her, tell her what they themselves felt, but seeing her face, they dropped back or turned aside and remained silent.

Dora Bryce was walking unsteadily, clinging to her husband’s arm, and to Alice on the other side, and so it was around her that people gathered, for they knew what to do with a woman who wept or fainted, who behaved in the way that seemed right, because customary.

Again, they were all crowded into the front room. Ruth watched them as they began to relax, in their
unfamiliar
clothes, and were easier, talking to one another, now that the coffin had gone from the house. She saw their hands reach out for sandwiches and small cakes, their fingers stirring spoons round and round, in the best china cups. Jo sat beside her, not speaking, and after a while, they stopped pressing her to eat or drink, they ignored her, out of embarrassment or mistrust. The afternoon trailed on and none of them went home and their voices rose and fell and buzzed about like insects trapped in her ears. The tiredness came back, deadening her limbs, she had not the will or energy to try, again, to return home. Her eyelids felt swollen and sore. She could not move, she might never move again.

*

The room was empty. They were all of them gone. The table was a mess of empty plates and doilies and spoons. The silence brought her back to herself.

She let Alice take her up the stairs and into the bedroom they had made ready for her. It was very clean and cold, very small, there were no ornaments or pictures, and the sheets were bound tight as bandages over the bed.

Knowing that she would not sleep, she did not bother to disturb them, nor to undress, except for her shoes and stockings They were forcing her to take part in some curious ritual of their own and
she
had no strength left in her to battle with them. But what good she could be doing, what duty she fulfilled by spending this one, enforced night in the house of her dead husband’s family, she could not fathom. Did not try. Her brain ached with tiredness and with the emotions that had overtaken her, one after another and so completely, in the course of the past four days.

Nobody came to her, and she did not want any false gestures of friendship. But, lying on the high, narrow bed, and hearing the movements all about the house, she wanted someone, anyone, some touch or word.

For the beginning of the night, she listened to the keening of Dora Bryce, it came to her as clearly as if there were no walls to the house. It was a terrible noise, she was ashamed of the woman for making it, and ashamed of herself, because she could not. It rose and fell, in a mad, distracting rhythm of its own, and then, in the aftermath, a muffled sobbing, and the rumble of Arthur Bryce’s voice. There were footsteps up and down the staircase. Alice was there with her mother, and she too was crying. Ruth’s body was rigid. The night was the length of all the nights she had ever lived through. Outside, the wind made a thin, high sound of its own, as it passed by the house.

Once, she got up and looked out of the window, and saw steely clouds moving fast over the face of the full moon, and the words of a ballad about death jazzed inside her head.

‘They planted an apple tree over his head,

Hum. Ha. Over his head.’

Dora Bryce’s crying died away, the house was quiet. Then, Ruth might have cried. But would not, not here. There was some pride damming up her own grief, she would not let them hear, as they had not been able to see, earlier, what she felt.

It seemed more than ever strange, that this family should be Ben’s, that someone like him should have come from such people. Or Jo, for Jo did not belong here either. Only Alice was at one with them, only she had inherited their narrowness and lack of heart.

Ben had brought her to Foss Lane a week after they met. Because already, after that short time, they knew, both of them, their future was as inevitable as that the trees should continue to grow. He had called for her, on a Sunday afternoon, at Godmother Fry’s, and Ruth had been anxious in case what she was wearing was not right, was too formal or else too plain, was showy – in some way unsuitable. Ben had laughed at her. ‘It’s you,’ he said, ‘they’re going to meet you, aren’t they? They won’t mind what you wear, they won’t notice.’

But he must have known that that was not true, that her dress and every detail about her, hair and shoes and bracelet, would be what they saw first, and scrutinised, and judged her by. She had wanted to be friendly, become a part of them. Now, she knew that
no
matter how she had looked, what she had worn or said or done, none of it would have made any difference, they had disliked her in advance. Any girl who might take Ben away could not be approved of, or accepted.

This afternoon had brought it back to her, because it had been the same. They had sat on the edges of uncomfortable chairs in the front room, drinking tea out of the best china cups, and Ruth had been unable to think of anything at all to say to them, and so had remained silent, and they had taken that for pride, she was branded for life with that one word. She remembered the way they had looked at her, and how Ben, too, had fallen silent, unable to help her, and only Jo had been himself, talking about a place he knew of, where you might find wild raspberries.

She thought, now I will never come to this house again. There is no love, no kindness, no friendship to bind me to them, and they will be glad of that. I will die to them, as Ben has died. No, more, because they will hoard their memories of him and cling to them, as people keep old letters, Dora Bryce will cling to the past, before I married Ben, she will indulge her own grief and self-pity for the rest of her life, but she will easily rid herself of me.

The extent and depth of her own bitterness frightened her. The night went on. She counted her own heart-beats and listened to the wind, and there was no comfort to be had.

‘Oh Ben he is dead and laid in his grave,

Hum. Ha. Laid in his grave.’

When she was certain that dawn must be near, because she had lain awake in that cold room for a hundred years, she put on her stockings and, carrying her shoes, went down through the silent house, stopping every so often, in dread of waking them. They did not wake. In the kitchen, she saw that it was ten to five by the clock, but the sky was still dark. It was bitterly cold, and the wind had risen again, a gate banged, somewhere in the lane.

On the dresser was the parcel, wrapped in brown paper. Alice had pointed it out to her last night. ‘You can take it with you. It all belongs to you now, doesn’t it?’ and Ruth had been too dazed to follow what she meant. Now, she touched it, and supposed that it contained some old things Ben had never taken up to the cottage, things they now wanted rid of.

For a second, she hesitated, suffused with guilt. Perhaps she ought to write a note to them, to apologise. But what did she have to say that they would believe? It would make no difference, things were as they were. And she could not breathe in this house, she wanted to shake the sight and smell of it off her for good, to forget that she had ever been here.

She took up the parcel and opened the door, and the wind blew hard and cold into her face, the roadway gleamed with black ice. And then she was running
down
the still-dark street, her hair was wrenched back and streaming behind her like a banner, she was stumbling and almost falling every few yards on the slippery road, but she thought of nothing except getting away, getting home. Somehow, by running, forcing herself into the wind, she might scour herself clean of yesterday. But, just outside the village, she was forced to slow down, and stop, the blood rang in her ears, her head throbbed, and she gasped and shuddered for breath.