The Angry Tide (54 page)

Ross walked home beside his horse. Shock and horror had made his limbs so weak that to go home slowly step by step with Sheridan beside him was more instinct than choice.

He walked through Grambler village and past Sawle Church out on to the moorland. A wind was soughing over the land.

This was the most familiar way in the world to him; he had run from one house to the other in childhood and in boyhood; he had ridden this way and walked this way more times than he could estimate. But it was Sheridan who knew the path tonight.

One or two people passed and called good night. It was a Cornish custom, not always mere friendliness but often curiosity to identify the other in the dark. Tonight he did not reply. The horror was on him. As a soldier he had seen enough, but this was different. That she should have decayed like that while still looking so beautiful was something he would never be able to rid himself of. This was what love came to. This was what beauty came to. The worm. God in Christ!

He shuddered and spat. The sickness lay in his stomach like the gangrene she had died of.

He came
up
to the Meeting House beside Wheal Maiden. There was a light in it. Probably Sam. Perhaps a few faithful members of the class praying or listening to him read. Perhaps he should go in, kneel in a corner, ask for guidance and pray for humility. That was what all men lacked. Humility and perspective. But the latter was dangerous. With perspective one could always perceive the end.

Something moved. 'Is it you, Ross?'

'Demelza,' he said. 'What are you doing here?'

'I thought to come this far - just to watch for you
...
Why are you walking?'

'I - wished to take my time.'

She said: 'I know wha
t's happened. Caroline sent Myne
rs over to tell us.' 'I'm glad you know.'

They turned and began to walk back. She said: 'I'm that grieved.' He said: 'Let us not talk about it.'

They went down the valley. As soon as they r
eached home she went in and hustl
ed the children out of the parlour, and he sat before the fire and drank the brandy she brought. She helped him off with his boots.

'Do you want to be alone?'

'Not if you'll stay.'

So she told the children to be quiet in the kitchen, and fetched her sewing and took a chair on the other side of the fire. He drank brandy for about an hour. She had a couple of small glasses. At last he looked up.

'I'm sorry,' he said.

'Do you want supper?'

'No.
No
food.
But take some yourself. Are the children in the dining-room?
’
‘I
don't know. I'm not that hungry.'

'It's been a dark day,' he said. 'Sometimes I think there are days in December when the human spirit is at its lowest. This is such a one.' 'With good reason. Did she -' 'I'd - rather not talk about it.'

They sat for about another hour. He had stopped drinking but lay back dozing, with his head against the back of the high chair. She went out and said good night to the children and cut herself a piece of bread and cheese.

W
hen she went in again he said: ‘I
think I'll go for a walk.'

'At this time?'

'Yes
...
it might help. Don't wait up.'

'You don't want for me to come with you, then?'

'I think I shall go too far.'

She said: 'Remember to come back.'

When he got out the three-quarter moon was rising, invisible and smothered in cloud, but lighte
ning the way. He went on to Hen
drawna Beach, where the tide was far out and began to walk across it. The sand broke under his weight, as crisp as frost. His own shadow, vague as a ghost, moved about his feet.

He went the way Drake had walked in his tribulation some months ago, but at the Holy Well he deserted the beach and climbed the rocky steps beside it till he reached the old path that the pilgrims had used centuries ago. Up and down, skirting the sandhills, with the sea murmuring just below, he stumbled on, passing the Dark Cliffs and Ellenglaze, skirted Hoblyn's Cove and dipped into the valley beyond. Except for the solitary crofter or gypsy, this was empty land, windswept and sand-swept, barren of vegetation except the marram grass and a few patches of gorse and heather. Not a tree. It was years since he had come this way. He did not remember ever having come this way since he returned from America sixteen years ago. There was nothing to come for. Except when, as now, he was trying to escape from himself.

Once or twice he sat down, not so much to rest as to think; but as soon as he began to think he was up and off again. As the night progressed so the sky lightened, and now and then the moon appeared, veiled and warped and wasted with age. The cliff edges became sharper, like the faces of old men as the flesh shrinks from them. In some of the smaller, darker coves seaweed slithered on the rocks and stank of the sea's decay.

It was hours before he turned about and began the long tramp back. By now it was a question of making his tired body take over from his tired mind. Or accommodate his conscious thinking to ideas only of muscular effort. Back on the beach at last, he lengthened his stride to beat the tide as it came in. He rounded the Wheal Leisure cliffs with water splashing above his knees.

Day was just creeping up into the sky as he si
ghted Nampara. It came reluctantl
y, like someone drawing back the curtains in a shrouded room. Fine rain was beginning to fall. He found his way over the familiar stile, into the garden, past the lilac tree, and let himself
into the house. He moved silentl
y into the parlour, chilled with the sea water clammy about his legs and thinking some remnants of the fire might still be warm.

The fire was still in, though low, and as he crouched before it someone stirred in his armchair. He started and then saw who it was.

He said: 'I
told
you. You should have gone to bed.'

She said: 'Why should I?'

They stayed in silence for a time, while he put pieces of coal on the fire and then used the bellows to blow it up. 'Are you cold?' he asked. 'Yes. Are you?'

He nodded and went to open the curtains. The sickly daylight showed that she had not undressed but had a blanket over her knees and a wrap round her shoulders.

'Let mc get you some breakfast.'

He shook his head. 'You have something.'

'No, no; I'm not hungry.' She stirred. 'You're wet.'

'No matter. I'll change in a while.' He poured himself a glass of brandy to try to take the stale taste of other brandy from his mouth. He offered her one but she refused.

'Have you been walking all night?'

'Yes. I th
ink these boots
are
nearly through.' He pulled them off, crouched again by the fire. She watched the warmer light play on his features. The brandy went down, burning deep. He made a face, and shivered. 'Have you been asleep?'

'Sort of.'

'But waiting.'

'Waiting.
’

He subsided against the back of the other chair. 'This is the end of the century, you know. It seems - appropriate. In a few weeks it will be eighteen hundred.'

'I know.'

'For perhaps very good reasons, it seems just now to be the end of more than
the
century to mc. It seems to be the end of life as we've known it.'

'Because of - Elizabeth's death?
’

He baulked at the word. 'Not altogether. Though that, of course' 'Do you want to talk about it now?" 'No - if you don't mind.' There was silence.

She said: 'Well, the end of the century docs not mean the end of our lives, Ross.'

'Oh
...
it's a fit of the deepest depression I am in. It will look different in a month or two. I'll recover by and by.' 'There's no hurry.'

He shovelled more coal on, and a puff of smoke blew into the room.

She said: 'Go and sleep before
the
children wake.' 'No. I want to talk to you,
Demelza
. What I've been thinking. Not long ago you lost someone you - loved. It - bites deep.' 'Yes,' she said. 'It bites deep.'

'Yet
...'
He reached for the brandy and then
put it in the fireplace untaste
d. 'Though I once loved Elizabeth, it's been the
memory
of that love that bit deepest tonight. Sometime this month or next I shall be forty. So there's always hurry. It is the memory - and
the
fear - of the loss of
all
love
that
bites deepest.'

'I don't quite see what you mean.'

'Well, in some ways my grief is a selfish grief. Perhaps that's what Sam preaches. One can attain no goodness without subduing the self.'

'And do you wish to do that?'

'It's not what one wishes, it's what one should do.'

'Self
...'
said
Demelza
. 'Is there no difference between self and selfishness? Is there no difference between - appreciating all the good
things of life and - and explori
ng the good things for one's own advantage? I think so.'

He stared at her with
her dark hair falling carelessly about her shoulders, and under the wrap her canary silk frock, and her hands never quite still, and her breast rising and falling, and the dark vivid intelligence in her eyes.

He said: 'What I have seen last night - makes me sick at heart -sick for all the charm and beauty that is lost - in Elizabeth. But most of all it makes me afraid.'

'Afraid, Ross? What of?
’

'Of losing you, I suppose.'

'There's littl
e chance.'

'I don't mean to another man - though that was bad enough. I mean just of losing you physically, as a person, as a companion, as a human presence being beside me and with me all my life.'

Her heart opened to him. 'Ross,' she said, 'there's no
chance.
Unless you throw mc out.'

'It's not a chance, it's a
certainty,'
he said. 'Seeing Elizabeth like that
...
We are at the end of a century, at the end of an era
...'

'It's just a date.'

'No, it isn't. Not for us. Not for anybody; but especially not for us. It's - it's a watershed. We have come
up
so far; now we look down.' 'We look onwards, surely.'

'Onwards and down. D'you realize there will come a time, there will
have
to come a time, when I shall never hear your voice again, or you mine? It may be sentimental to say so, but this - this fact is something I find intolerable, unthinkable, beyond bearing
...'

Demelza moved from her chair suddenly, knelt to the fire and picked up the bellows and began to work them. It was to disguise the tears that had lurched to the edge of her lashes. She realized that he had reached some ultimate darkness of the soul, that he struggled in deep waters, and that perhaps only she could stretch out a hand.

'Ross, you mustn't be afraid. It's not like you. Tisn't in your nature.'

'Perhaps one's nature changes as one grows older.' 'It mustn't.'

He watched her. 'Aren't you ever afraid?'

'Yes. Oh, yes. Maybe every moment of the day if I allowed myself to think. But you can't
live,
not that way, if you think like that. I'm here. You're here. The children are upstairs. That's all that matters at this moment,
at
th
is time. The - the blood is in my veins. It's in yours. Our hearts beat. Our eyes see. Our ears hear. We smell and talk and feel.'

She turned and squatted beside him on the carpet, and he put
his arm round her, staring sightl
essly into the dark.

She said: 'And we're together. Isn't that important?'

'Even when it is like it was in London?'

'That mustn't ever be again.'

'No,' he said. 'That mustn't ever be again.'

'Of course there has to be an end,' she said. 'Of course. For that is what everyone has faced since the world began. And that is - what do you call it? - intolerable. It's intolerable! So you must not think of it. You must not face it. Because it is a - certainty it has to be forgotten. One cannot - must not - fear a certainty. All we know is this moment, and this moment, Ross, we are
alive!
We
are. We
are. The past is over, gone. What is to come doesn't exist yet. That's tomorrow! It's only now that can ever be, at any one moment. And at this moment,
now,
we
are
alive - and together. We can't ask more. There isn't any more to ask.'