The Parson (Peter Owen Modern Classic) (3 page)

All solid reality was now contained by the room, the world outside obliterated by this nebulous whiteness steaming up from the creek. In a sudden childish fantasy Oswald saw it as a screen, behind which the hidden rocks, the flowers, the water, were working to help him attain his dream, that undefined shimmering thing, out of reach, but nearer than it had been, no longer utterly inaccessible.

His mouth softened and lost its sternness. Suddenly he looked younger, boyish, again. Now he was as he should have been all the time, with a more natural confidence, and something altogether warm and winning about him. Feeling happier than for a long time, he leaned back, stretching out his long legs, fully relaxed in his chair for the first time since he’d sat down there.

His natural warmth, which the army trouble had almost suppressed, was restored to him. Now he saw his mother’s face as pathetic instead of provoking, and was filled with compassion for her. Eager to show her how much he still loved her, he said with an affectionate smile, ‘It looks as if we’re here for the night.’

For the night ...?’ She was sitting with her back to the window, and had anyhow been far away in some daydream of her own, from which she returned in confusion, not understanding.

‘Look out of the window.’

Instead of doing as she was told, she gazed fixedly at him, astonished by the change, recognizing the humorous, playful look and voice of the past. Her heart began beating fast in joyful excitement. Her beloved son seemed suddenly to have come back to her as he used to be, in his true self, as he hadn’t been since his return. But, even as she looked fondly into his face, where the old, easy, smiling charm had replaced irritation and sternness, in the background was the hurting fear that he might revert to what he had seemed before. So, controlling herself, she looked over her shoulder. And at once the rolling whiteness outside put her into a nervous flutter.

‘Fog! Why didn’t you tell me sooner? But I ought to have guessed from the way it suddenly turned cold ... We’ll have to hurry back before it gets any worse ...’

Already, while still speaking, she had collected her modest possessions, and now she quickly stood up, her anxious eyes looking down at Oswald, lounging in his chair, smiling, and clearly not intending to move an inch.

‘It’s quite bad enough for me as it is,’ he answered her lightly, ‘so you might just as well sit down again.’

‘But Vera’s expecting us back to dinner ... She’ll be wondering ...’

‘Then you’d better ring up and explain.’

He leaned back, smilingly assuming from some mysterious reservoir of forgotten disguises the mischievous sly look, with which, as a little boy, he had always charmed her, and which he knew she still couldn’t resist.

‘It may clear in a minute,’ she weakly protested, wanting to be reassured, not about the weather, but that he was indeed the one who’d seemed unaccountably lost to her.

‘It may, or it may not.’ He was consulting his watch. ‘We couldn’t get back in daylight, possibly. And I’m not risking fog-pockets up on the moors in the dark – not even for you.’

Playful, engaging, casual, he refused to be serious, yet wasfixed in his masculine will to stay. The affectionate, teasing voice tugged at her heart. But she had been so hunt, she understood so little, she was afraid to believe in the magical transformation, saying at random, ‘You really think it would be dangerous?’

Stretched out there, immovable as a rock, relaxed and solemnly teasing, he replied, ‘I do’, disguising his impatience. Knowing the pathetic cause of her hesitation, he gazed at her gently, deliberately charming her to accept her own happiness, all irritation gone out of him and forgotten.

‘Very well. I’ll go and telephone Vera.’ With a little ecstatic sigh the mother surrendered finally, incapable of further resistance. By some miracle her darling had been restored to her, all the more precious because he had seemed lost. As she crossed the room she looked back several times, hardly able to let him out of her sight, in case he again disappeared. She idolized him, absolutely, he could do no wrong; therefore the past unhappiness must be her fault, though she didn’t see how ...

*

At last the door closed behind her, and Oswald was free to give his whole attention to the lovely pale face, framed by smooth dark hair, of which, all the time, he had been intensely aware, establishing, while he talked to his mother, a curious silent understanding with the unknown woman. Though seeming to take no notice of Rejane, he had known, through his acute consciousness of her, that she was listening to their conversation – it was almost as if she had been included in it. So it now seemed quite natural that she should ask, ‘Is it really dangerous to drive in this?’ With a slightly foreign gesture that he found charming, she indicated the fog, as she got up and went to stand at the window.

‘Yes, it can be dangerous on the moor.’ Oswald stood up too and approached her. ‘It’s easy to miss a turning, or to get off the road altogether.’

To his delight, everything seemed easy and natural. And, as he came to stand at her side, with the dramatic effect of a curtain going up for their special benefit, the dense whiteness parted outside, momentarily revealing a strange grey world of ghost vegetation, quenched and unearthly, every cold leaf and petal running with moisture as if under water, before it descended again.

‘How long will it last?’

Not noticing the frown that accompanied the question, Oswald said cheerfully, ‘No one can tell you that – another two minutes, perhaps. Perhaps another two days.’

‘One might really be stuck here for two whole days? ... Not able to get away?’

Now he had to meet Rejane’s incredulous indignant look; a look almost of consternation, the mere notion of being detained forcibly by something she couldn’t control being intolerable to her self-willed nature, which, since childhood, had known no restraint or coercion.

Taken aback and uncomprehending, he made some vague reply, out of his depth suddenly, his confidence abruptly shattered. In all his life no woman had ever moved him like this one, who had brought his dream into the room. But she was receding visibly, and anxiety seized him: he had only these few flying seconds, before his mother returned, in which to establish a bridge to the lovely stranger. Hearing her say, as if following her own thoughts to a conclusion, ‘That settles it. I
shall go on
the next boat’, he was really alarmed, exclaiming, ‘Oh, but you mustn’t!’ horrified by the prospect of losing the wonderful being he’d only just found, watching her nervously, while she murmured, as if to herself, ‘I should never have come here at all.’

‘My mother said you weren’t the sort of person to come to the moors.’

Why did he have to waste time on such a futile remark, when there wasn’t a second to lose? However, to his immense relief, it seemed to recall her attention.

‘Did she say that? How strange ...’

Though Rejane clearly saw more in the words than he did, he dismissed his mother with ‘She’s good at fortune-telling and all that ...’, continuing hastily, ‘You can’t have seen much, with all this rain, can you?’ Without giving her time to answer, he went straight on: ‘Some parts of the moor are magnificent, it’s got a beauty of its own – out of this world. But visitors hardly ever see the best places because they’re so hard to get at. But I shouldn’t think you’d mind that. I wouldn’t expect you to like things that were too easy.’ The last words were prompted by a sense of urgency; but, having spoken them, he looked at her doubtfully – had he introduced the personal note too soon? He gazed intently into her face as if in search of a revelation.

Rejane looked back at him with her unchanging, almost black eyes, in which no expression was legible, although she was watching him with a new interest. Strange how he suddenly seemed to have come alive, thrown off some repressive burden. This sudden emergence of intensity and imagination, in conjunction with his solid, manly good looks, was surprising and totally unforeseen. His face, animated now, had that touch of seriousness that had so captivated the army wives – she too found it attractive.

‘What have you seen so far?’ he was meanwhile asking, encouraged by her attentive regard. ‘Isap Tor, I suppose, and the Five Falcons and Roko. All very nice and neat, tidied up for the summer tourists, but not the real moor at all.’ Loneliness had intensified his feeling for the countryside round his home, so that it was easy for him to speak of the moor without any self-consciousness. ‘I could show you wonderful places that are sheer magic. But you wouldn’t be able to drive there because there aren’t any roads – just heather and bracken and rock and the sea creeping in where you least expect it. In the old legends the sea is always at war with the tors, trying to undermine them. But those towers of rock won’t fall until the last judgement. They’ll always be standing there like besieged fortresses, never falling, old as the earth itself, fixed in their places like the sky and the waters under the earth.’

He had a very agreeable soft voice, almost a singer’s voice in its delicate, slow inflections; and now it had unconsciously assumed a slight singsong lilt, imitated from the local storytellers of his childhood. Suddenly he heard it, heard what he was saying, and stopped, slightly embarrassed, as he always was by the sensitive, imaginative self he kept battened down out of sight beneath layers of masculine toughness, only fully aware of it when, as now, it had dangerously exposed itself.

This time there was no danger, apparently; Rejane was looking at him with evident interest. But his practical self had come uppermost, and, determined to persuade her before his mother interrupted them, he said coaxingly, ‘Do stay a bit longer and let me show you something of the real moor.’

She’d already made up her mind to stay, but she said nothing yet. It amused her to watch the delicacy with which, not presuming to touch her, by way of emphasis he laid the tips of his fingers gently on the book she was holding. And his northern voice was fascinating when he was being intense, with its queer singing undertone and extraordinary flexibility; unimagined depths of softness were in it now, almost a coo. She smiled to herself faintly, though she still said nothing.

Her silence was beginning to seem hopeful to him. Now, suddenly, in the midst of his pleasant excited feelings, came one so singularly inappropriate that it distracted him for the length of time he took to wonder why in heaven’s name a danger signal should have gone up in his mind, as if warning him not to go any further. He forgot about it at once, and went on with his pleading: ‘Don’t be frightened away by the fog. Look, it’s lifting already!’

The world outside was in fact reappearing, though minus a dimension, as if made of water, frequented only by the ghosts of things as they were under the sun. Looking back at Rejane, he hoped wildly that she would say yes. The calm magnolia-mask of her face did not change, nor did her jewel-dark eyes, their fluttering fans of lashes long and soft as a sable paintbrush. Unkindly keeping him in suspense, only at the very last, when they’d both heard his mother’s approaching step, she gave him a slight, smiling nod.

Unconscious of any unkindness, he was overwhelmed by a wonderful thrill of joy he could hardly conceal, and in a warm, vibrant voice said to the old woman coming into the room, ‘You must help me describe our moors – we can’t have people going off without appreciating them, can we?’

His mother was a little bewildered by these rapid developments. She’d have liked to keep the son she adored to herself, for a time at least. But whatever he wanted was right, and she wanted it too. Though slightly overawed by the beauty and obvious wealth of this new acquaintance, she was ready to make friends, accepting Rejane as she’d have accepted a Hottentot, had Oswald wished it; for he was her idol, and his will was law.

2

S
O
the improbable relationship started between the young officer and the guest at The Hope Deferred, the unworldly devoted mother hovering very much in the background. The young man was supremely happy. The situation was just what he wanted, exactly what seemed needed for his happiness. At last he could get rid of that awful sense of being isolated and injured. His dream at last took a definite shape and he knew what he wanted, which, of course, was Rejane.

As if the forces of nature really were on his side, there was no more fog or rain, no more thundery heat, but a long sequence of brisk, bright autumn days, just the weather he liked best, when the moors looked their best. And, as this fine weather seemed sent to compensate for the bad summer, Oswald believed that his former unlucky period had been succeeded by one more fortunate, when virtue would be rewarded instead of penalized, according to what he’d been taught.

Uplifted by a mixture of pride, happiness and excitement, he drove Rejane to lunch at his home. He was aware, as he had not been for a long time, of the sheer joy of being alive, and of the beauty of the day and of the world. It gave him intense pleasure to drive through the pale, thin, autumn sunshine, with her sitting beside him, as serene and lovely as the sky itself, talking as easily as if they’d been old friends. It seemed to him that everyone they passed on the road – most of them people he’d known all his life – must be envying him and admiring his companion.

Out of his pride a more elusive feeling grew up which he couldn’t have named. It made him regard her rather as though she were a royal princess who had been entrusted to his care. When, after gazing at the enormous view, floating in floods of luminous sunshine, she exclaimed, ‘How lovely it is here!’, at the same time lightly touching his arm, a tremor of deep emotion went through him. He longed to press her hand to his lips, but found that he derived even more satisfaction from
not
doing so, proud to feel himself trusted, looking at her with respect and profound devotion. At the same time, something impelled him to wonder how much of the beautiful day would be left to him if she were not there. He realized suddenly, almost with alarm, that his own heightened enjoyment was due to her presence, and to the unspoken intimacy that seemed to be growing between them.