Piranha to Scurfy (22 page)

“You must go, Ben. I’m not going anywhere. This is where I live and I always will, you know. The people who live here never want to go away.” She reached down from her higher stair and touched him on the arm. It was electric, that touch; he felt the shock of it run up his arm and rattle his body. “But you must go,” she said.

“Of course I’m not going,” he shouted. “I’m staying here, and I’m going to get you away from these people.”

He meant it. He thought he could. He ran back to his car and drove home to Gothic House, where he began composing a letter to Susannah’s parents and another, for good measure I suppose, to Susannah’s grandmother. Perhaps he was thinking of her in the capacity of a village elder. Then by one of those coincidences, just as he was writing “Dear Mrs. Fowler,” the phone rang. It was the estate agent to tell him Susannah’s grandmother had received a better offer than his for her house.

“What is it?” he said. “I’ll match it.” Recklessness, which can be as much the effect of terror as of happiness, made him say, “I’ll top it.”

“Mrs. Fowler has already accepted the offer.”

He tore up the letter he’d started writing. The one he’d written to the Peddars remained on his desk. But he intended to send it. He intended to fight. This time he refused to allow himself to become despondent. He pushed away the longings for her that came, the desire that was an inevitable concomitant of thinking of her. He would fight for her, he would think of that. What did the loss of the cottage matter? They couldn’t live in this village, anyway.

He refused to let her become part of what he saw as an exceptionally large commune, where wife-swapping was the norm and husbands couldn’t tell which were their own offspring. For a moment he had seen it, very briefly he’d seen it, as the ideal that all men, and women too perhaps, would want. But that had been a moment of madness. These people had made a reality out of a common fantasy, but he was not going to be drawn into it and nor was Susannah. Nor was he going to leave the village until it was to take her with him.

8

They got rid of me. I had no idea of the reason for my expulsion—no, that’s not true. I did have ideas, they just weren’t the right ones. I did have explanations of a kind. I was a “foreigner,” so to speak, born and bred a long way off with most of my life lived elsewhere. I’d sacked Sandy.When I asked myself if it also had something to do with my repudiation of John Peddar I was getting near the truth, but I thought it too far-fetched. Aware that I had somehow offended, I could never believe that I had done anything reprehensible enough to deserve the treatment I got.

The day after the bathers had extended their invitation to me—the final overture, as it happened, from any of them—I went to church. I tried to go to church. It was Saint John’s day and the church’s dedication was to Saint John, and I had noticed that a special service was always held on that day, whether it fell during the week or on a Sunday. They had a wonderful organist at Saint John’s, a Burns who came from a village some miles away but was, I suppose, a cousin of that Angela, the hairdresser. The visiting clergyman preached a good sermon, and everyone sang the hymns lustily.

One of the sidesmen or wardens—I don’t know what he was but he was a Stamford, I knew that—met me in the church porch. He was waiting for me. They knew I’d come, and they’d despatched him to wait for me.

“The service is private this morning,” he said.

“What do you mean, private?”

“I’m not obliged to explain to you,” he said, and he stood with his back against the heavy old door, barring my way.

There wasn’t much I could do. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t get involved in a struggle with him. I went back to my car and drove home, indignant and humiliated. I wasn’t frightened then, not yet, not by then.

A week later I came down again. I came on the Friday evening, as I often did when I could make it. Of course I’d thought a lot about what had happened when I’d tried to get into the church, but the incident became less a cause for rage and indignation the more I considered it. Perhaps I’d asked my question aggressively and Stamford, also being inclined to belligerence, had answered in kind. Perhaps he was having a bad day, was already angry. It was nonsense, I decided, to suppose “they” had sent him; it was paranoia. He happened to be there, was probably just arriving himself, when I arrived.

All this, somewhat recycled and much reviewed, was passing through my mind as I reached the village at dusk that Friday evening. They knew I would come, knew too approximately what time I’d come, and besides that, I had to pass the Greshams’ house two minutes before I entered the village proper. They used the phone and their own grapevine.

It was like pictures that one sees of streets that royalty or some other celebrity is about to pass through.They were all outside, standing in front of their houses. They stood in front gardens if they had them, on the road itself if they didn’t. But those waiting to welcome someone famous are preparing to smile and wave, even to cheer. These people, these Kirkmans and Burnses, Stamfords and Wantages, Clementses and Atkinses and Fowlers, all of them, some with children in their arms, tall, fair, handsome people, stood and stared.

As I approached I saw their eyes all turned in my direction, and as I passed I’ve no doubt their eyes followed, for in my driving mirror I could see them staring after me. All down that village street they were outside their houses, waiting for me. Not one of them smiled. Not one of them even moved beyond turning their eyes to follow me. Outside the last house three old people stood, a woman between two men, all holding hands. I don’t know why this hand-holding particularly unnerved me. Perhaps it was the implication of total solidarity it conveyed. Now I think it symbolized what I had rejected: diffused love.

A little way down the road I slowed and saw in the mirror the three of them turn and go back into the house. I drove to Gothic House, and when I got out of the car I found that I was trembling. They had done very little, but they had frightened me. I hadn’t much food in the house and I’d meant to go to the village shop in the morning, but now I wouldn’t go. I’d take the road that didn’t pass through the village to the town four miles away.

I’ve since wondered if they approached every newcomer to the village or if they applied some system of selection. Would they, for instance, tolerate someone for the sake of a spouse, as in the case of the farmer from Lynn? Would elderly retired people be welcome? I thought not, since their principal motivation was to draw in new genes to their pool and the old were past breeding.

I should therefore, I suppose, have been flattered, for I was getting on to forty. Did they hope I would settle there, would
live
there,
marry
some selected man? I shall never know. I shall never know why they wanted Ben, although it has occurred to me that it might have been for his intellect. He had a good mind, and perhaps they thought that brains too might be passed on. Perhaps whoever decided these things—all of them in concert? like a parliament?—discerned a falling intelligence quotient in the village.

He too tried to go to church. It was Sandy’s wedding, and Susannah had said they would go to it together. His mind had magnified her invitation to a firm promise, and he still believed she’d honor it. He stuck for a long while to his belief that, having said and said many times that she loved him, she would come to him and stay with him.

He wasn’t, then, frightened of the village the way I was. He walked there boldly and knocked on the Peddars’ door. Carol opened it. When she saw who it was she tried to shut the door, but he put his foot in the way. He pushed past her into the house, and she came after him as he kicked the door open and burst into their living room.There was nobody there: all the Peddars but Carol had already gone to the wedding. He didn’t believe her, and he ran upstairs, going into all the rooms.

“Where’s Susannah?”

“Gone,” she said. “Gone to the church. You’ll never get her—you might as well give up. Why don’t you go away?”

Leave the house was what he thought she meant. He didn’t, then, take in the wider implication. Sandy was just arriving at the church when he got there, Sandy in a morning coat and carrying a topper, looking completely different from the handyman and window cleaner Ben knew. His best man was one of the Kirkmans, similarly dressed, red-faced, very blond, self-conscious. Ben stood by the gate and let them go in. Then he tried to get in himself, and his way was barred by two tall men who came out of the porch and simply marched at him. Ben didn’t recognize them, though they sounded from his description like George Whiteson and Roger Atkins. They marched at him, and he stood his ground.

For a moment. It’s hard to do that when you’re being borne down upon, but Ben did his best. He walked at them, and there was an impasse as he struggled to break through the high wall their bodies made and they pushed at him with the flat of their hands. They were determined not to assault him directly, Ben was sure of that. He, however, was indifferent as to whether he assaulted them or not. He said he beat at them with his fists, and that was when other men joined in: John Peddar, who came out of the church, and Philip Wantage, who had just arrived with his daughter, the bride. They pinned Ben’s arms behind him, lifted him up, and dropped him onto the grass on the other side of the wall.

With these indignities heaped on him, he sat up in time to see Rosalind Wantage in white lace and streaming veil proceed up the path with a bevy of pink-clad Kirkman and Atkins and Clements girls behind her. He tried to go after them but was once more stopped at the porch. Another tall, straight-backed guardian gave him a heavy push that sent him sprawling and retreated into the church. Ben sprang at the door in time to hear a heavy bolt slide across it on the inside.

The more of this they did, the more he believed that they might be acting on Susannah’s behalf but not with her consent. It was a conspiracy to keep her from him. He sat on the grass outside the church gate and waited for the wedding to be over. It was a fine, sunny day and such windows in the church as could be opened were open. Hymns, swelling from the throats of almost the entire village, floated out to him, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” and “The Voice That Breathed o’er Eden.”

“For dower of blessed children,
For love and faith’s sweet sake,
For high mysterious union
Which nought on earth may break.”

No one should break the union he had with Susannah and, sitting out there in the sunshine, perhaps he thought of the night they had spent, of transcendence and sex made spirit, which he had written of in his diary. It didn’t occur to him then, though it did later, that a high mysterious union was what that village had, what those village people had.

They began coming out of the church, bride and bridegroom first, then bridesmaids and parents. Susannah came out with her parents and Carol. He said that when he saw her he saw no one else. Everyone else became shadows, gradually became invisible, when she was there. She came down the path, let herself out of the gate. What the others did he said he didn’t know, if they stared after her or made to follow her, he had no eyes for them.

Susannah was in a pale blue dress. If she had stood against the sky, he said, it would have disappeared into the blueness, it was like a thin scanty slip of sky. She pushed back her hair with long pale fingers. He wanted to fall at her feet, her beautiful white feet, and worship her.

“You must go away, Ben,” she said to him. “I’ve told you that before, but you didn’t hear me.”

“They’ve put you up to this,” he said. “You’re wrong to listen. Why do you listen? You’re old enough to make up your own mind. Don’t you understand that away from here you can have a great life? You can do anything.”

“I don’t want us to have to hurt you, Ben.” She didn’t say “them,” she said “us.”“We needn’t do that if you go.You can have a day.You don’t have to go till Monday, but you must go on Monday.”

“You and I will go on Monday.” But her use of that “us” and that “we” had shaken him. “You’re coming with me, Susannah,” he said, but his doubts had at last begun.

“No, Ben, you’ll go.You’ll have to.” She added, as if inconsequentially, but it was a consequence, it was an absolute corollary, “Sandy’s buying the cottage, Grandma’s cottage, for him and Roz to live in.”

I haven’t said much about the forest.

The forest surrounded the lake in a horseshoe shape with a gap on the side where the road left its shores and turned toward the village. Behind the arms of the horseshoe it extended for many miles, dense and intersected only by trails or as a scattered sprinkling of trees with healthy clearings between them. It was protected, and parts of it were a nature reserve, the habitat of the little owl and the greater spotted woodpecker. If I haven’t mentioned it much, if I’ve avoided referring to it, it’s because of the experience I had within its depths, the event that drove me from the village and made me decide to sell Gothic House.

Already, by then, the place was losing its charms for me. I avoided it for a whole month after that Friday night drive through the village, confronted as I’d been by the silent, staring inhabitants. But I still liked the house and its situation, I loved the lake and walking in the forest, the nightingales in spring and the owl calling in winter, the great skies and the swans and water lilies. Unwilling to face that silent hostility again, I drove down very late. I passed through half an hour before midnight.

No one was about, but every light was on.They had turned on the lights in every room in the front of their houses, upstairs and down. The village was ablaze. And yet not a face showed at any of those bright windows. It was if they had turned on their lights and left, departed somewhere, perhaps to be swallowed up by the forest. I think those lights were more frightening than the hostile stares had been, and then and there I resolved not to pass through the village again, for, as I slowed and turned to look, the lights were one after another turned off; all died into darkness. No one had departed: they were there, and they had done their work.

I wouldn’t pass through the village again, not at least until they had got over whatever it was, had come to accept me again. I really believed then that this would happen. But not passing through hardly meant I had to stay indoors. There is, after all, little point in a weekend retreat in the country if you never go out of it.

On Saturday afternoons I was in the habit of going for a walk in the forest. If I had a guest I asked that guest to go with me; if I was alone I went alone. They knew I was alone that weekend. If I hadn’t seen them behind their lights they had seen me, alone at the wheel in an otherwise empty car.

At three in the afternoon I set out into the forest. It was May, just one year before Ben went there, not a glorious day but fine enough, the sun coming out for half an hour, then retreating behind fluffy white clouds. A little wind was blowing, not then much more than a breeze. Ten minutes into the forest and I saw the first of them. I was walking on the wide path that ran for several miles into the forest’s heart. He stood close to the silver-gray trunk of a beech tree. I recognized him as George Whiteson, but if he recognized me—and of course he did, I was why he was there—he gave no sign of it. He wasn’t staring this time, but looking at the ground around his feet.

A hundred yards on, three of them were sitting on a log, Kirkmans or Kirkmans and an Atkins, I forget and it doesn’t matter, but I saw them and they affected not to see me, and almost immediately there were more, a man and a woman on the ground embracing—a demonstration for my benefit, I suppose—then two children in the branches of a tree, a knot of women—those bathers, standing in a ring, holding hands.

The sun was shining onto a clearing, and it was beautiful in there, all the tiny wildflowers in blossom in the close heathy turf, crab-apple trees flowering, and the sunlight flitting, as the wind drove clouds across it and bared it again. But it was terrible too, with those people, the whole village it seemed, there waiting for me but making no sign they’d seen me. They were everywhere, near at hand or in the depths of the forest, close to the path or just discernible at the distant end of a green trail, Burnses and Whitesons, Atkinses and Fowlers and Stamfords, men and women, young and old. And as I walked on, as I tried to stick it out and keep on, I became aware that they were following me. As I passed they fell into silent step behind, so that when I turned around—it was quite a long time before I turned around—I saw behind me this stream of people padding along quietly on the sandy path, on last year’s dry, fallen leaves.