In the Springtime of the Year (19 page)

She said, ‘What is it? Oh, what is it?’

Though her voice was scarcely more than a whisper.

For a moment after he looked up, she knew that he did not see her, did not know where he was or why. His eyes stared, and they were swollen and red, his face was trammelled with lines of tears. He looked strange,
and
old, though he was not old. He was not wearing his clerical collar and his neck looked white and dead, as flesh which had never before been exposed to the daylight. He began to shudder, and then shook his head violently. And looked up at Ruth again. He was kneeling, but in silence now. She went up to him. Knelt down.

‘I heard you. I was by the stream and I heard you … what is it?’

He continued to watch her face blankly, and made no effort either to speak, or to wipe his eyes and face. He was huddled up like an animal or a child in great pain. The thin rain was falling without making any sound, but his hair and the shoulders of his coat were beaded with it. Ruth thought, we prayed for rain and here, at last, is an end to the dryness and the endless shining of the sun. She reached out and touched the man’s sleeve.

‘Shall you come home? It’s raining. It’s only six o’clock in the morning. Shall I go home with you?’

And, hearing herself, she realised that she was saying those things which other people had once said to her, and they had made her angry, but now she understood how the words and questions had had to be spoken out, for they were offerings, attempts to share and soften her grief. And she had rejected them.

‘What are you doing here? You? Why are you here?’ He spoke harshly.

‘I – I often come. I wake up and come out to walk.
It’s
quiet. I usually come here, into the wood. And I heard you. Are you ill?’

He shivered again.

‘Did you hear what I was saying?’

‘No. It wasn’t clear. You were crying out but I couldn’t tell the words.’

‘Crying out. Yes. I was …’

He was very quiet now, and there was no expression in his voice. The rain was falling more heavily, pattering down through the leaves.

‘You shouldn’t sit here. It’s wet. Not here.’

‘No.’ But he did not move. He said, ‘My daughter is dead. Yesterday she was ill, and today she is dead. Today she is dead.’

His daughter. She remembered that Carter had told her, a few weeks ago -when was it? – of the birth of a second child to the curate’s wife. And there was the other, small girl, perhaps three years old, with very clear, pale skin. Ruth did not even know her name.

‘My daughter is dead.’

And then he struggled to his feet and stood and shouted out, so that the whole wood rang with it, he raved like a man demented.

‘She is dead, and where are you now, God, where is all your love and goodness, when she was in pain and there was nothing to ease it, and now she is dead, and what do you know of it, what do you care? What have I got left? Why didn’t you kill me, why not me?
Wouldn’t
I have been glad of it? But my child is dead and I …’

The shouting faltered and ceased. He looked up, through the canopy of fading leaves, to the patches of sky. Ruth thought, something will happen to him, he will be struck down. A tree will fall. The sky will fall. And she felt a moment of pure terror, fear for the man and fear of him.

Nothing happened. The rain fell. And Ratheman began to weep again, covering his face with his hands.

‘God forgive me,’ he said, ‘Oh, God forgive me.’

Ruth stood up then and took his arm gently, and he did not resist. She led him down through the slope of the woods and across the meadow and out into the lane, and all the way back to the village, and the rain came steadily down from a dirty sky, soaking her clothes through to the skin. He followed her like a child, walking blindly, still weeping. She knew that she must help him. She prayed.

13

THERE WERE NO
lights on and the house was silent. Ruth stood just behind Thomas Ratheman in the dark, wood-panelled hall and the rain dripped from her hair down on to her shoulders and from the hem of her dress on to the floor. She had never been here before, she scarcely knew these people, and what should she do now, go or stay? Ratheman seemed not to be aware of her presence at all.

A draught blew under the front door. And then, from upstairs somewhere, the hungry, demanding cry of a baby.

She said, ‘You should take off your wet things.’

He turned and stared at her, looked puzzled.

‘Your wife – is she upstairs or…?’

But she realised that he had not taken in what she said, and still did not know where he had been or why, what had happened.

He walked away from her, opened a door and closed it behind him, and then there was silence again, apart from the distant crying.

It was a large house, and old, and the carpet on the
staircase
ahead of her was worn away in patches here and there. Ben had told her how poor a curate could be, but she was shocked, all the same, by the shabbiness and the air of neglect about this place. It might have belonged to old, old people who kept half the rooms shut up and empty, and could not pay for servants or very much coal; there seemed to be no light or life here.

The baby went on crying, so that, in the end, she made her way slowly up the stairs and along a corridor, calling out Mrs. Ratheman’s name as she went. There was no reply, nor any when she knocked twice on the door of the room from which the crying came. She went inside.

The curtains were half-drawn back and the windows smeared with rain, so that for a moment she could not see very clearly inside. She stood, holding on to the door handle, and twisting it nervously.

‘What is it?’

She was lying in bed, propped on a pillow, with her fair hair in plaits over her shoulders. Mrs. Ratheman. A young woman, perhaps not much older than Ruth, but with eyes and mouth strained and drawn downwards by exhaustion and shock. Ruth remembered someone saying that, since the birth of the second child, she had never been completely well. Now, she looked at Ruth without surprise or much interest.

‘What is it?’

From a cot beside her bed, the crying grew louder,
and
the mother turned her head on the pillow and looked down, but did not speak to the baby or attempt to pick it up.

Ruth took a step further into the room. But she wished that she had not come here at all, for what could she do or say? What did this woman think of her?

‘It cries. It cries so much. I can’t bear the way it always cries.’

‘Can I get something for her? Or lift her up?’

‘It cries all the time. Isobel never cried. Hardly ever. Do you know, all day yesterday, when she was so ill, she didn’t cry at all? And now she’s dead and can’t cry. You knew she was dead? Isobel?’

‘Yes, I met your husband. I was out walking in the wood and… and he was there. He told me. I brought him home.’

‘You’re Ben Bryce’s widow.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you come here?’

‘To see … I thought Mr. Ratheman should come home. It was raining. It didn’t seem right for him to be wandering about, he was so upset, and … I thought there might be something I could do.’

‘What can you do?’

‘Nothing,’ Ruth said quietly, ‘nothing.’

‘No. You’d know that. There’s nothing anyone can do.’

‘Perhaps…’

‘What?’

‘I could make a meal – or see to the baby. I could help.’

‘Why should you?’

‘But perhaps you’d rather I went away. You won’t want strangers.’

‘Where has my husband gone?’

‘He’s downstairs. He went into one of the rooms.’

‘He cried, do you know that? All last night. He didn’t go to bed, he didn’t undress. He sat in that chair and wept and couldn’t find anything to say to help himself, and I couldn’t help him. But I didn’t weep. I should be the one to weep, but I didn’t. They cry, my husband and the baby. Isobel never cried, not even when she was very small, do you know that?’

‘You told me.’

But the young woman went on, talking very rapidly, as though afraid of what might happen if she stopped, afraid of silence.

‘When she was a baby, and she was hungry, she just opened her eyes; she whimpered sometimes, when her gums were sore, but I could pick her up and talk to her, and then she stopped, it was easy to make her quiet and sleep. And yesterday…’

She shifted about in the bed, stirred her arms and legs so that the faded pink quilt slipped a little to one side.

‘She said, “My head hurts, my head hurts.” But she didn’t cry, not at all. I wouldn’t have known that she
was
ill. Not really ill. It was Tom – he knew. She was more his child, she was close to him, and he knew. Her eyes looked strange, she kept putting her hand over them. She said, “My head hurts.” And she was so hot, you could put your hands over her cot and feel the heat coming from her. That was when the doctor came. But she was dying, he said so, she had a brain fever – something, nobody could help her, it was nobody’s fault. I couldn’t bear it, sitting there, watching her, waiting for her to die, I didn’t stay. He stayed. He sat by her all day, and the baby cried and cried. It always cries. But Isobel didn’t cry and then she died. One minute she was alive and breathing and then she was dead. Nobody could help her. It was nobody’s fault.’

She sat up suddenly and shouted out at the baby, ‘Oh stop, stop, why can’t you stop? I can’t stand it – cry, cry, cry.’

Ruth crossed the room and picked the child up. It was quiet at once, and gazed up at her, its eyes dark as acorns. She sat in a chair and rocked it a little. And looked across, at the young mother, lying in the high bed. But she had turned away, on to her side, with one of the thick plaits of hair covering her face, and after a while, she slept, and so Ruth sat on, with the baby in her arms, until it slept, also, and then there was only the rain to watch as it streamed down the window.

*

She did not know exactly how it came about that she stayed with them for the whole of the following week. Nothing was said, she was not asked to be there, or to do the work, but after that first morning, when she bathed and changed the baby, and then lit the range in the kitchen and took down the shutters and cooked breakfast, they simply came to rely upon her completely, as she had relied upon Jo. She did the washing and ironing, cooked and cleaned the house, knowing that if she did not, everything would be left.

Ratheman’s wife would get up in the middle of the day, and dress and then sit, staring out of the window on to the garden. Or else, more often, she would follow Ruth about the house, talking, talking, about the dead child, Isobel, and the endless crying of the baby, repeating the same words in desperation, as though Ruth had not yet understood. And Ruth grew afraid of her, of the wild, and distant expression in her eyes and the monotonous, hysterical voice. She wondered if Miriam Ratheman had been ill even before Isobel’s death, not only in body but in her mind. She was withdrawn, even while she talked, her whole attention was focused on some point deep inside her own self, and the flood of speech was like an issue of blood she could not control, was not even aware of.

She would come to Ruth and stand helplessly in front of her, would ask, ‘Should I eat now? Should I change my dress? Is it time to bath the baby?’ and then wait like a small child to be given instructions. Ruth
became
used to it, and would reply, but it was strange, frightening, to be so depended upon.

The curate himself she scarcely saw. But what shocked her most of all was how little contact there seemed to be between husband and wife, how little they noticed each other’s existence in the house. He sat in his study, with the door locked, or else went out, walking for hours on end, to return, exhausted and pale, with his clothes damp or torn, and then he would eat whatever Ruth had cooked for him, but without seeming to know what it was. People came, and he would not see them. And so Ruth realised at last how she herself had been, and how it had seemed to others, when she had shut herself away, or spent hours in the woods, or beside Ben’s grave at night, all sense of time lost.

And, just as she had visited the grave, Ratheman would go up to the small bedroom in which his dead child lay, and sit beside her, thinking perhaps that he might somehow be given the power to bring her to life again.

Ruth had avoided that room. But on the day before the funeral, as she was drying her hands after washing up the crockery, she knew that she must go up there, now, at once, that she must see and should not run away.

As she touched the door-handle, she felt a tightness in her chest and throat, and wondered how she could breathe. But she must see. She went inside slowly.

He was sitting with his head in his hands, weeping. Ruth moved towards the bed, which was beside the window. He did not notice her. She looked down.

She thought, so this is death. This. This is Ben, and Godmother Fry, and every other person in the world who has ever lived, and breathed and then ceased to breathe. This is the body, after the spirit has left it. She put out a hand and touched the child, and the skin felt cold and smooth, like fruit. But there was peace in this room, peace and a sense of inevitability, for the small girl looked as though she had never been destined to grow and change. She had come just so far. That was all.

But how would she have felt if it had been her child, conceived by Ben and delivered out of her own body? Would not this death then have seemed to her an utterly evil thing? She could not tell. She could only look on at the grief and despair of the father, and at the mother’s madness, and understand how it was for them, know how far they had to go, and feel pity.

The young man lifted his head. He was unshaven and his flesh looked curded, as if it had even less life in it than that of the child.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why? Why do other people live, old people, sick people, bad people, when she is dead? Why don’t they die? Why?’

Ruth was silent.

‘Don’t you wonder that, too? You should, oh, you should. Why did your husband die? What sort of
justice
was that? And I prayed. I prayed for a miracle, for her to be well and live, and after she was dead, I prayed for her to be raised up again. But she is dead. She is still dead.’