Dark Companions (25 page)

“Can I be heard all over the village?” She seemed dismayed. “Oh, you heard me as you were passing. I’m afraid I don’t play very well—I wish I had the courage to perform for an audience, then I might make myself play better.”

“Why, you play—” “Marvellously, beautifully, magnificently” might expose my feelings about her too soon. “You play quite well,” I said.

“Thank you very much.” I thought she must be thanking me for distracting her. “Are you very knowledgeable about music?”

“Oh, yes.” At once I wished I hadn’t said that, but if I had denied it my compliment would have been rendered meaningless. “I particularly like Strauss—Richard Strauss, obviously. And Mozart, of course. And Beethoven, especially Beethoven,” I babbled. “Beethoven is—” God knows what I might have said if my father hadn’t taken Rebecca away.

He’d saved me from one kind of agony only to afflict me with worse. When the drill began, my hands became spastic claws which struggled to cover my ears. Good God, what was he doing to her? I stumbled about the house like a parody of an expectant father outside a delivery room.

When she emerged she looked as bad as I’d feared. Her face was white as china, and I had the impression that she was barely able to walk. “Come and sit down,” I blurted, not minding my father’s surprised but relieved grin behind her: I was developing—not before time, he seemed to say. “Would you like some tea or something?” I said.

“No, thank you. I must get home,” she said, nervous as Cinderella.

Just in time I realised that I had another chance. I was tempted not to take it, but my father was watching. “I’d better see you home,” I said.

Halfway down the hedged path which led, after several diversions, to the green, she stumbled and I dared to take her arm. The leaves of the hedges were plated with light and pricked with rainbows from last night’s rain; everything smelled moist and growing. I was too entranced by walking with Rebecca to speak.

The path bent sharply around Mr Ince’s garden. Beyond the clipped lawn and the birdbath on its pedestal, the trees from which he carved his puppets crowded about the cottage. I hadn’t realised how thick they had grown; I couldn’t even see the shed in which he kept the barrow on which he wheeled his theatre, the ramshackle van he used for longer tours. Mr Ince stood still as a tree before the cottage; birds were pecking crumbs from his hands, the sleeves of his old jacket looked stained with droppings. Rebecca glanced aside, wrinkling her nose.

We’d reached the square, and I had let go of her arm as soon as we’d come in sight of people, before I realised that if we were to meet again except by chance, I would have to speak. Perhaps I would summon up the courage on the way to her house—but she halted in front of the antique shop. “Thank you so much,” she said.

“I thought you said you were going home.”

“I meant here.” As I turned away, detesting my bashfulness, she said “Do you go to many concerts?”

“Yes, in Manchester. Sometimes in Liverpool.” I was edging away from her, not caring how rude I seemed, when suddenly I wondered if she was as glad to find someone like herself as I had been. Staring anywhere but at her, I mumbled “Would you like to go to one sometime?”

“Well, I haven’t much spare time. I’m making costumes for the pageant.” A good excuse, I thought bitterly, walking away. “But I’d love to go,” she said. “Will you find out what’s on and tell me tomorrow?”

I would have dashed home at once and back to the shop with the information, except that it might have been fatal to show how I felt. For hours I wandered around the outskirts of the village, blinded by my good luck. When I reached home I didn’t mind my parents’ knowing grins. It was only when I woke next morning that I wondered how all this could possibly be happening to me.

But we went to a concert in Manchester, and that was only the beginning. Soon we were strolling hand in hand through the village, and I hoped everyone noticed. Everything—the church rummage sales where I bought Rabelais and Boccaccio, afternoon teas in Mrs Winder’s Olde English Tea Shoppe, the Sunday cricket match in which our team beat the next village—was our backdrop. One evening we sat beside the green, which was spread with a sheet of moonlight, and told each other our dreams. Both of us dreamed of touring the world, she to play for audiences, I because I was famished for newness. After that, even when I wasn’t with her, I felt drugged by our closeness.

Our first disagreement—quite minor, it seemed at the time—was about Mr Ince.That evening I’d played her a record of Mahler’s Third. As we strolled towards her house, we were content to be quiet together for a while. The hedges that walled the path were quivering in breezes; overhead, clouds flooded by. The dimness merged our surroundings like a spoiled painting, and I had almost passed Mr Ince’s cottage before I saw the theatre.

Though she resisted, I turned back. The striped booth faced the cottage; I had to crane over the hedge to distinguish the stage. My first hallucinatory glimpse had been accurate. On the dark stage, beneath miniature curtains that fluttered in the wind, Punch and Judy were performing.

They weren’t squabbling now. Indeed, they made no sound at all. They seemed to be dancing: bowing to each other, twirling gracefully though their flapping costumes tugged at them, retreating a few precise steps then gliding together again. Perhaps the dimness helped smooth their movements, made them appear more lifelike, as it did their faces. Their only audience was the trees that loomed above the cottage, shifting restlessly and hissing, dissatisfied giants.

“Come on, Jim,” Rebecca was murmuring urgently. “I should be home by now.”

“Wait just a minute.” There was some aspect of the pirouetting figures I wanted to define. Once I’d seen Mr Ince gazing wistfully at birds that splashed in the birdbath, then sailed away on the wind. Did he wish he could create movements as tiny and perfect as theirs? But tonight’s rehearsal didn’t look much like that; in an obscure way I was reminded of a dance of trees.

“I’m going, Jim. We’ve been staying out too late. My parents will be angry again.”

Again? It was the first I’d heard of it, and it seemed far less important than the puppets that were dancing just for us. “You want to watch this, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.” She pulled away violently. She must be frightened of her parents, surely—not of the puppets. But good God, we were adults: I was eighteen, she was twenty.

I caught up with her in the middle of the green. She was very tense; for a moment I thought she would flinch away. Instead she said in a tone which offered both consolation and, vulnerably, trust: “I want you to come home tomorrow night and hear me play.”

By the next evening I was nervous. Until recently I’d hardly noticed her parents. Now I sometimes encountered them when I met Rebecca at their shop, where they were guardedly polite to me; I was sure they didn’t like me very much. I cut myself while shaving, and had to waste five minutes dabbing at myself. If I had visited the antique shop in that state, heaven knows what I would have broken.

Mr Ince was sitting in a homemade chair as I hurried past his garden. He was staring into the entangled dimness beneath the trees. A large figure he had begun to carve lay abandoned at his feet. Stumps of branches protruded from the faceless head, like boils.

I was shocked by how much he had aged. Had this been a gradual process that I’d been too preoccupied to notice? He looked drained, exhausted, past caring about the large figure he had agreed to carve for the pageant. My passing must have roused him, for he swayed to his feet and dragged chair and figure into the cottage, beneath the dark wings of the trees.

When I reached Rebecca’s my carefully combed hair was snatching at my face, my armpits were prickly from hurrying. Her father gazed at me as though I were a salesman whose unwelcomeness he was too polite to show. He said nothing as he ushered me down the oak-panelled hall, which was barnacled with horse brasses.

If he and his wife tried to make me feel at home, in the large stony room where the panels of the walls were as heavy and dark as the piano, it was only for the sake of Rebecca, whose strain was painfully apparent. She seemed afraid to venture near me—because of her parents or because, like an examiner, I’d come to hear her play? She wore a severe black dress, a musician’s uniform. Together with everything else, it robbed me of all sense of the times we’d shared.

Eventually her father sat down at the piano. As soon as she tucked the violin beneath her chin she seemed to forget everything except the technical problems of the music. It was as though she and her father were helping each other with tasks set by Mozart and Beethoven; I felt she would never be enough at her ease to let the music flow. Of course, at the end of each piece I applauded wildly.

I drank a lot of sherry in an attempt to calm my nerves; her mother’s lips grew more pursed each time she refilled my glass. Mostly to show that I was quite at home, I sang fragments of Verdi in the bathroom, and perhaps that prompted Rebecca’s mother to ask me “What are you doing in the pageant?”

Though Rebecca had tried to coax me into participating, I’d managed to avoid the whole thing, in which her parents were heavily involved. “I hadn’t really thought,” I mumbled.

“We have a song for you.” She sat waiting for me to stand up and take the music from her. “Rebecca will accompany you.”

“I thought you didn’t like to play for audiences,” I said to Rebecca.

There was an appalled and wounded silence, which I tried to ignore by glaring at the music, an Elizabethan ballad. “Shall I play it for you?” Rebecca said.

“Can’t he sight-read?” Her father made me sound no longer worth noticing. She played the melody for me, and I managed to follow it through the staves. “Now you sing it, James,” her mother said.

Could she tell I disliked my full name, because it made me sound like a butler? When at last I finished, and the throbbing of my red-hot face began to lessen, she said “You’ll need a lot of practice.” She sounded almost accusing, though I had never claimed to be a musician.

After an awkward half hour, during which Rebecca’s parents and I confirmed we had nothing in common, I said that I thought I’d better go. “Oh, Rebecca is going to be very busy. She may not see you before the pageant. She’ll need to make you a costume.” To Rebecca, with an emphasis I thought vindictive, she said “I’ve invited Alan for his fitting tomorrow. I expect you’ll want him to stay for dinner.”

Though Rebecca tried to say goodbye at the door, I made her walk along the tree-lined drive. As soon as we were out of earshot of the house I demanded “Who’s Alan?”

“Just the son of some friends of theirs.” She halted me and squeezed my hand. “They’re trying to match us, but you mustn’t worry. He and I are friends, that’s all. It’s you I want.” Gripping my shoulders hard and gazing into my eyes, she said “I’ve always done what they want, but not over this.”

Her lingering kiss convinced me more than her words, yet before I reached home I was wondering how, if she had always obeyed her parents, she could be sure of changing now. Was love enough? I felt like Mr Ince’s cottage, brooding darkly in its cage of trees.

I saw little of her during the next week, though her mother spent five minutes brusquely measuring me in the shop. If her parents answered the phone, she was in the bath, or too busy to be called, or not at home. Once she suggested that I could sit with her while she worked, but that would have entailed suffering her parents. I preferred to go to Liverpool or Manchester; somehow the violence I felt towards her parents seemed appropriate to city streets.

The night before the pageant, her mother summoned me to try on my costume. Since Rebecca was watching eagerly, I had to conceal my dismay. In the doublet and hose I felt less like an actor than a transvestite. The following day I felt even worse.

Almost the whole of the village was there, either trudging in procession towards the green or lining the square and the main street to watch. Perhaps all this was meant to celebrate the village anniversary, yet I suspected the pageant of trying to show that the village was an enclave of craftsmanship and culture, not just the site of the fair that would be opening next week.

Rebecca clearly enjoyed wearing her crinoline. I thought of how seldom I’d touched her, how she seemed happiest concealing her body. Alan, a burly fellow several years older than I, was wearing doublet and hose. Worse still, her mother had made us walk together behind Rebecca, like rival suitors. His round face resembled a football I would have loved to kick.

When we took our places on the green, and he began to declaim an Elizabethan description of the village, I realised that he belonged to the village repertory company. No wonder he was so good at posing, I thought bitterly: no wonder he looked so convincing in drag. He was rewarded with an outburst of applause—and then it was my turn.

Though at least I had Rebecca, whereas he had been alone, I didn’t do as well. I’d been practicing last night and the whole of this morning, but her father had refused to let me rehearse with her; he said it would be less genuine. Did he want me to embarrass her? When I sang, my voice in the middle of the green sounded thinner than a bird’s. Children tittered, at me or at Rebecca, who was strumming her violin like a lute.

At the end, which was received by a drizzle of applause, Rebecca told me “You were super. So were you,” she said to Alan, and doled out a kiss to each of us.

I was furious. I hardly spoke to her for the rest of the day, except to complain that the pageant was pretentious, trivial, a waste of time. When the festivities began, I drank pint after pint of beer from the table which Mr Blundell of the Acorn kept replenishing; then I loitered near Alan in the hope that he would say something to which I could take exception, so that I could knock him down. When at last I grew tired of loitering, I found that Rebecca had gone.

I wandered until it grew dark. Trudging home, I thought for a moment that Mr Ince had come back; as usual, he’d gone touring in his van once the fair was due on the green. No, he must still be away, for the cottage was dark and grass sprawled over the garden path—but then what had I heard in the cottage? It had sounded rather like brooms falling over in a cupboard, then falling again. No doubt branches were tapping the cottage; I really didn’t care.