Inch Levels (30 page)

She turned. ‘Now which McLaughlin would that be?’

‘I don’t know.’ He wanted to avoid her name, if possible: but she was prising the information from him simply by standing there. ‘They have a farm.’

‘Farm,’ she repeated, slowing, turning, taking him in, noting the fresh wound on his cheek. Their breath smoked in the air. ‘Sarah, is it?’

‘Sarah, yes, that’s right.’

‘I thought that’s what it was.’ She directed him through the town: a half-mile or so, then left at a pair of white-washed gateposts. A long lane and then the house at the end of it. ‘If she’s there. She was away, is what I heard.’

‘I think she’s back,’ Anthony told her.

‘Who knows?’ the woman said. ‘Who knows? – with that one.’ Then she was gone.

The white-washed gateposts were easily found, and the long lane running downhill between dense hawthorn hedges – and the house too, white-washed too and low, with a densely smoking chimney; and fields beyond, furred with frost. The deeply shadowed yard was overlaid with frost too: and while the whitewash was fresh and the door painted a bright glossy green, the whole place felt sad. It was not merely his imagination that, rushing ahead of itself, made it so – but rather the air, he thought, and the situation, the tell-tale rushes growing in the fields. Yes, sad, and lonely, and that – as his mother back in Winnipeg liked to say, with a brisk rasp together of her hands – really was that.

He stood for a few moments in the tidy yard, feeling the sadness, snuffing the turf smoke that rose in the icy air, and then the back door opened and a young woman emerged, lugging a bucket of laundry. She was well enough dressed, short and a little too stout, a slightly crossed eye – but sweet of face as she turned and saw him and a hoarse voice when she spoke.

‘She’s inside.’

No explanation of his presence seemed necessary.

‘Do you want her?’

He returned her slight smile, and, now seeming emboldened, she stepped from the doorway and into the yard.

‘She should go with you, I think,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid that she won’t.’

This confused him. ‘Do you mean you know she won’t?’ Now she was frowning slightly. ‘Or do you mean –’

‘I’m afraid she won’t,’ the girl said again. ‘I mean, I’m afraid she won’t, is what I mean.’ The slightest emphasis on the
afraid
; clearer now.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can maybe persuade her.’

But she shook her head. ‘I’m afraid she won’t.’ And looking at her more closely, he could see that this was the literal truth, that this stout, odd-looking girl was afraid. ‘But go in,’ she added and pointed at the door. ‘Go in, and try.’ He flashed what he hoped was a reassuring smile, and moved towards the door. On the step, he glanced back. She hadn’t moved, though now she was plucking the skin on her arm. There were tears standing in her eyes.

He pushed the door and went inside.

*

Cassie’s underarms were clammy. She stood on the step, feeling their dampness, feeling beads of sweat run coldly down her arms, smelling her smell. A smell of fear: she was frightened, had been frightened since the frosty early morning when Sarah came home again. And Sarah was frightened too, and not able to talk. I can’t talk to you, Cassie, she said, so don’t talk to me. But I don’t want to talk to her, Cassie thought: I didn’t want to talk to her then, this morning, and I don’t want to talk to her now. Leave me alone, Sarah said to me. Just leave me alone. And I wanted to say, leave me alone too. I don’t want you here now.

Not now. Cassie brushed the tears from her eyes, and then fell again to kneading the skin on her arm. The back door closed behind him, shutting her out here in the frozen yard. He might, she thought: he might take her away, I want him to take her away. I’m afraid he won’t; I’m afraid of what will happen if he doesn’t. In her insides, deep in her belly, a deep animal howl was building; a terrible knot of pain and fear growing. And another knot in her throat, taking her breath, taking her voice, painfully lodged there in her gullet. Help me, she thought, I want someone to help me. But nobody was there to help – and she even looked around the yard, a distracted look, a miserable look – only this man, she thought, and he is too late and not strong enough. Not enough.

The scene earlier this morning: it was terrifying. Earlier this morning, the sun barely up behind bare trees and a white frost on the grass, when Sarah walked through the yard and into the house: distressed, defeated. And Brendan went – berserk. Cassie backed into the corner, upsetting the turf scuttle, the poker: a clatter that was fearful, but that was not even attended to. Too many other things going on to think about an overturned turf scuttle: bellows and shoves and the copper bowl dislodged from the dresser onto the flags; the flash of Brendan’s belt; and screams that gave way, eventually, to tears.

And now, this man in an army jeep, arriving too late.

Help me, Cassie, she said. Help me. That was afterwards. Brendan was first, she thought; and the copper bowl, with a bruise now on its lip. I know who brought the bowl here to the house in the first place, as a bride, years ago, years before I ever arrived. And now it’s damaged: and I have to do something with it before Brendan comes back and sees it again. But I have to do something with it, I have to, but I don’t know how.

The back door was closed and the yard was quiet, except for a hen or two, and the rooster waving his wattles; and Cassie stood in the middle of it, in tears once more. They were talking, inside, but she knew it was too late.

*

It was too late. Surely Anthony felt it, in the air; and surely he saw it, in the red marks on her wrist where had father had held her. Sarah caught her reflection in the dim, spotted looking glass on the wall: it was set, it was frozen, there was no expression at all. Even in the midst of this – of the thick, congealed air in the room, dense as porridge – surely he noticed this: how the muscles in her face hardly moved. Shuttered, a sealed window.

But no. He could hardly
see
her at all. The room, with its dresser, a wooden table and chairs, a smoking fire at one end – was only dimly lit. There were too few windows in this house, there were patches of darkness in every room – and so perhaps it was too dim to see her face, to see anything. Perhaps we should go outside, she thought, into the sunshine – and she felt startled at this faint thought, this pulse of hope.

Perhaps he could see her face, perhaps he could see the change in her expression – for the first thing he said was, ‘Can I see around?’ Not a demand for an explanation, not a note of complaint. Perhaps he thought there were rooms in this house where you could actually see the hand in front of your face.

Sarah said, ‘No.’

‘Let me see around.’

‘There isn’t anything to see,’ she said, ‘and I don’t want to show you anyway.’

He said, ‘So that was Cassie I met outside.’

‘Yes,’ and there was a pause.

‘I don’t know what happened last night,’ he said at last. Now he dragged a chair across the flagged floor – a fearful clatter, and her eyes flickered to the window – and sat down. He sat there, solidly. Not going anywhere.

‘Where’s your father?’

‘At the barns.’ Sarah remained standing: she had scarcely moved a muscle since he arrived, except to glance towards the window now and again. Then, after the silence had continued for a few more reverberating moments, she spoke.

‘You’d better go. He’ll be back.’

‘I’m not going.’

She paused, then seemed to gather her strength and said again, ‘You’d better.’

He said, ‘Why?’ More abruptly than his usual manner, to be sure, perhaps his patience was wearing thin.

‘Because you’d better.’ She glanced again at the window. ‘Because he’ll be back soon and –’

‘And he won’t want to see me.’

‘Not you,’ she told him. ‘Anyone in uniform. Anyone at all.’

He paused.

‘And because he did this,’ she said. She held out her wrist. ‘And other things here,’ and she pointed at her legs, ‘with his belt.’

He stared at her.

‘So you’d better go.’

‘Or I’d better have a word with him,’ Anthony said; and she shook her head violently at this, and moved rapidly across the room.

‘No. That would be worst of all. You’d better go.’

‘Is that what you want?’

She paused now, but only for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I want you to go too.’

‘And that’s all?’

She shook her head slightly. That was all. But she was aware of the din in her head. She had heard the town band tuning up several times over the years, in preparation for a Christmas or Easter or summer concert in the Temperance Hall – and this noise in her head was like that noise: discordant, appalling, deafening.

It had been like this all morning – all the previous night, in her quarters at the hospital, lying in her narrow bed and looking up at the curved, damp metal ceiling of the hut; listening to the other girls arrive home in the early hours, whispering and laughing in the darkness, finally falling asleep. She had lain awake the whole of the night, unable to sleep because of that terrible din in her head; before getting up in the darkness and catching the first bus heading north, heading for – home, she should say. But not home: she was here only because there was nowhere else to go.

She had walked as slowly as she could up the lane. In springtime, these familiar hawthorn hedges were white and heavy with blossom, these banks were a haze of bluebells: now, in freezing December, the hedges were a different white, hoary with frost; and the banks frosted too, and muddy-brown in sheltered crevices where the chill could not reach. The low winter sun was rising as she turned the last corner: it was just clipping the roof of the house and shining cold into the near corner of the yard. She paused on the step, girding herself, then turned the handle and walked into the kitchen. And there the scene was laid: her father bent, setting the fire; Cassie at the range, busy with porridge.

This was the same scene that she remembered, in which she had participated, morning by morning, year by year since Cassie came to live with them. The only difference had been in the light, in the fall of sunshine on the ground, on the white walls of the yard outside, varying minutely as month had followed month. In May and June and July, these white walls were splashed with a glowing white from the sun, high then in the sky; now, in December, the sunshine barely touched that far corner, before sinking again behind the roof. The inside of the house – this dusky, smoky kitchen – never saw the sunshine.

Brendan turned from the hearth: and she saw at once that he was furious: raging, she thought, raging and furious; as though a threshold suddenly had been crossed or a dam broken. She watched him standing there, his eyes gleaming with rage – and immediately she was fighting the impulse to run.

‘What are you doing here?’

Worse, much worse than she expected. It flashed through her mind to use this welcome as an excuse, to seize her opportunity and take to her heels out of the place. But go where? – and now Brendan was striding across and taking her by the wrist and bringing, dragging her into the centre of the dark room.

‘We’re surprised to see you here, aren’t we, Cassie? We haven’t heard a peep out of you these weeks and now here you appear…’ He paused for breath: Cassie had her back pressed to the range; she looked petrified. ‘Bold as brass,’ Brendan went on, ‘and healthy as a trout too, from the look of things. What’s been keeping you healthy as a trout, eh? The British army paying you and feeding you and putting a roof over your head, is it?’ His grip tightened, bulging eyes uncomfortably close to her own. ‘No shame, have you? And coming back now to flaunt it in our faces? Why didn’t you just stay away for good? No shame. Your mammy’ll spinning in her grave at having such a daughter.’ His breath was hot on her cheeks. A pause and then, ‘Cooking and so on for them, I hear you are. Well, you didn’t do much of that for us, did you? That’s a new talent for you, isn’t it?’

‘I came to see you, to see how you were doing,’ Sarah said at last. Then, in a rush, ‘No, that’s not it. That’s not why I came.’

‘Needed time off from the Army, is it?’

Her lip trembled. She shook her head. ‘No, that’s not it.’ Impossible to say what it was. What was she doing here, when it all began here?

Cassie hadn’t moved – but now, though still pressed against the range, she said, ‘Will I make some tea?’

Sarah nodded. Yes, some tea, but before she could say anything, her father released his terrible grip and as he pushed her away from him she flung her hands out – and caught her mother’s copper bowl that stood poised on the shelf. It fell to the flagged floor and rolled away.

A dent showed on the lip of the bowl.

There was a silence. Brendan was staring at the bowl, at the dent.

‘Now look what you did.’

‘I didn’t –’

‘Look what you did,’ Brendan repeated, still gazing at the floor, the bowl.

Cassie said again, ‘Will I make some tea?’

But Brendan was taking off his belt. In a familiar way: deliberate and purposeful and very slow. ‘I’ll give you tea,’ he said.

When he had finished beating her – on her back and her legs – and when Cassie’s screams had died away into whimpering, he put his belt back on, again in a familiar and deliberate way and left the house.

‘Tea!’ he said as he was going. ‘Give her some tea now, if she wants it.’ And Cassie brought tea – and yes, she and Sarah drank: standing, of course, for Sarah’s pulsing stripes would not allow her to sit. Cassie picked the copper bowl from the floor and set it in its place. Then, she gathered the washing into the basket: Sarah stood in the heat of the range and watched Cassie go out into the yard with the laundry; and then watched as Cassie turned and stood stock-still in the middle of the yard. And now there was Anthony, framed in the window; and that din rang louder in her head, as though someone was raising the volume notch by notch.

It seemed that there was a choice to be made, once and for all.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ Anthony said. ‘I’ll go down to that pretty park by the water, and I’ll wait for you there. I’ll wait for one hour, no more. And if you don’t come, I’ll leave.’ He looked at her. ‘And that’s the deal.’