In the Springtime of the Year (20 page)

‘Yes.’

‘And tomorrow I have to carry her in a coffin and lay her in the ground. How can I do that? How can I let her go?’

‘You must.’

His face crumpled, as though she had struck a blow to it, he turned away from her, and bent down over the bed, and began to sob again, but loudly now, out of anger and resentment.

Ruth left him, for there was nothing at all that she could say to help him.

She went back to the kitchen, and began to wash the baby’s clothes, and outside the window, the sun shone on to the grass and a blackbird hopped and hopped about, its feathers glistening like washed coal.

*

Ruth was sitting alone in the rocking chair, beside the kitchen window, when he came looking for her.

She wanted to go home now, to be alone again, for this week with the Rathemans had tired her out. There had been the work, her body ached at the end of each day, even though Carter’s wife had come in two mornings, to help with the cleaning. But it was their
grief
and distress which had exhausted her most of all, she felt as though they had sucked her down into it, asked her to share it with them, at times, even, to carry it for them altogether, and she was not ready, her own misery and bewilderment and loss were still upon her, she was still trying to work out her own salvation.

She needed the empty cottage, and time and space for her own thoughts, the slow process of her own recovery, though she felt ashamed of this selfishness.

She had not been to the child’s funeral, but stayed with Miriam Ratheman, who had lain in her bed all the day, and was either still and silent, or asleep, or else sitting up, talking in odd fragmented sentences, scarcely pausing for breath, and making no sense, her eyes intent all the time upon Ruth’s face.

From the window, Ruth had watched the curate leave the house, carrying the coffin in his arms. How must that have felt to him? She had said again, God help them. But did not know how it might be.

Now, he said, ‘They’re asleep. They are both asleep and I feel as if I shall never sleep again. I wanted the doctor to see her, but she won’t have anyone. I don’t know if she is really ill, if she’s out of her mind. I can’t tell. I can’t do anything for her.’

‘Could any doctor help her?’

For it seemed to Ruth that what had been true for her would be so for Ratheman and his wife, that they had to make the journey through their own grief, and there was no medicine which could ever help them.

‘I came to thank you,’ he said.

‘There’s no need.’

‘I must thank you.’

He had been speaking formally, politely, but now, suddenly, he shouted out at her, ‘What are you doing this for? Why are you here with us? Haven’t you seen enough of death and suffering?’

Yes, she thought, yes. But did not answer him. After a moment, he sat down heavily on one of the upright wooden chairs.

He said, ‘I should leave here. I should resign from Holy Orders and go away from this place. What right have I to stay now?’

‘Because your child died?’

‘Because she has died and now I know that everything I believed in and lived for has died with her. Because my life is a lie. I am a lie. How can I visit them, people sick, people dying and in distress, needing truth, what have I to say to them? How can I take services in the church and preach and pray and know that it is all a lie? I used to know what words to say, but there are no words, and there is no help for anyone. I think of how I went to people and talked to them, about death and goodness and consolation, and I feel ashamed, I knew nothing, I had never felt what they felt. I read books and learned lessons and thought I understood. But it was a lie. How can I stay here?’

Ruth said slowly, ‘Things change. They seem different. After a time, they are different.’

Though these were only words, too, and she did not know how he could follow her meaning, because it was so unclear even to herself.

‘But it was the same for you. I know it. You shut yourself away, you wouldn’t see me, or anyone, and at his funeral, you didn’t weep. I saw you in the churchyard at night, lying beside his grave, and what were you thinking then? What could anyone have said to you? I saw well enough how it was, and now I know myself. I blamed you. I don’t blame you now.’

‘But there were some days … after he died … some days, it was easier. There were things I seemed to understand.’

He shook his head violently.

‘How could there be anything to understand? There was no meaning to it. Your husband was young and fit, and a good man, he was happy, you were happy, and then he was dead, and now my child is dead, and there is only cruelty, there is no purpose in any of it. It means nothing.’

Ruth rubbed the cloth of her skirt between her fingers, afraid of the violence of his despair, and the bitterness in his voice, and shocked, too, for she had thought that a priest must surely know more, be able to understand and explain more than any other person.

She began to try and tell him about the way the world had looked changed and altogether beautiful, sometimes, how, here and there, without warning, it seemed that she had been given some brief glimpse
of
the pattern of things; told him what she had felt at the funeral, and what Potter had felt, as he had knelt beside Ben’s body in the wood. And Ratheman gazed at her, and she saw that nothing she had said held any meaning for him, that she had no right at all to speak, there was no comfort for his own loss.

He said, ‘Everything is broken into pieces and no one can fit them together again. Why? Why?’

But how could she know?

‘My father was a priest, and his father, too, there was never any question about it – that it was what I would be. My father was a good man, and I thought I should be like him. Before he died, he was very ill, for months, he grew weaker and thinner, he had more and more pain, but it was so slow. He kept on, trying to work, taking the services, visiting people because they relied on him but, in the end, he couldn’t even read. And yet it took so long for him to die, even when he asked to die. I came home – I was at the university and they sent for me – I can’t forget how he looked. I didn’t recognise him. He was shrivelled, it was as though he had no flesh left, you could just see bones, showing through the skin. His skin was yellow. He looked so old. He couldn’t eat anything. My mother sat with him and gave him sips of water, that was all. And then, one night, we thought he was dying, and I sat with him. And he said, “I always believed. But now I know.” But what has happened to me? I do not believe, and I know nothing. Why do I have to live at all?’

He put his head down on to the table and was still, too tired and despairing even to weep, now.

‘And you, Ruth? What will you do, for the rest of your life?’

‘I don’t think about the rest of my life now. I used to – I would be with Ben. Now I don’t know.’

‘Why don’t you go away?’

‘Where should I go to?’

‘How can you bear it, staying there in that house, going into those woods, remembering?’

‘Going away wouldn’t make me forget.’

‘The Bryces …’

‘I don’t see them. Except Jo. The Bryces are strangers.’

‘Everyone is a stranger.’

‘But you still have your wife. And another child.’

‘I want Isobel. The only thing I want, I don’t have.’

‘No.’

‘
What will happen to me
?’

She thought, what will happen to any of us? But she was still afraid of him, as she was of his distracted wife, she felt threatened by them, for her own world was still so frail, it was as much as she could do to cling to that and hold it together.

‘I should go home tomorrow.’

‘Yes. Of course.’

But seeing the expression on his face, she was more than ever ashamed.

‘Isn’t there someone else who could be here? To
look
after you – to help your wife. Is there no one at all?’

He passed a hand over his forehead.

‘My sister … or … I don’t know. Yes. Someone. I’ll think of someone.’

I ought to stay, she thought, I have no reason for running away, I ought to help them. Oh, but she could not, she could not.

‘Will you eat something now?’

‘No.’ He stood up. ‘No.’ And went out of the kitchen. She heard the door of his study close and the key turn in the lock.

Upstairs, Miriam Ratheman and the baby were both asleep still. Ruth drew the curtains and went out.

She left the house very early the following morning. She could go into the cottage and close the door, and then she would be alone, and responsible for no one but herself, she would be free to hold on to herself, and weep again for Ben, and remember.

‘And you, Ruth? What will you do for the rest of your life?’ Well, perhaps she would only do this.

Up on the common, the air was very cold, and smelled of the first frost; the world was slipping down towards winter, to bare branches and high winds beating down the bracken, and the late mornings and long nights of dark.

14

SHE STOOD AT
the window, looking out to where the hawthorn and holly bushes were hung about with clots of berries, orange as fire, red as blood. She took a deep breath, held it within herself, let it go softly, she thought, I am myself. And saw someone passing the hedge, walking very slowly, a woman, her head, with her hair covered by a blue scarf, just visible over the tangled mesh of twigs. Who would be coming here? Ruth remembered the curate’s wife, and felt a rush of anxiety and guilt, realising clearly now that she had been very wrong, for the woman was ill, it was surely more than grief for her dead child which caused her to behave as she did, to talk wild nonsense and stare in terror ahead of her, to lie sleeping in exhaustion for hour after hour, and dread the sound of her own baby’s crying. And she had been asking, as well as she could, for some sort of help from Ruth, a way out of the trap, she wanted someone to come and heal her storming mind and sick body, and Ruth had done nothing, Ratheman did nothing, he was withdrawn into his own grief, and helplessness, preoccupied with
his
own doubts. What would they do now, alone together in that house, husband and wife and yet as far apart as people in different worlds? Who was there to go to them and take up the baby, bathe and talk to it, make it laugh?

She said, it is not my fault, their troubles are not mine. I did what I could. She closed her eyes.

And, opening them, she saw the young woman coming down the front path, her face swollen and pale as a mistletoe berry, and one hand held up in an odd, defensive position over her breast. But it was not Ratheman’s wife, it was Alice Bryce. Alice, who had always frightened Ruth, and repelled her, who had been scornful and distant, unsmiling. Well, she did not smile now. But she was changed, there was a vacant expression on her face, as though she had just suffered a shock, or some accident. She did not see Ruth watching her from the window. And it was a long time before she knocked, not loudly, upon the door.

Alice Bryce. Why had she come here, to break open the bubble of solitude and quietness Ruth had just settled into, to bring the smell of the past and old quarrels and resentments, to remind her that Ben had belonged to others, long before she herself had known him? She had nothing to say to Alice. So perhaps she would simply not go to the door, she would run upstairs and wait until the girl went away. Apart from Jo, the family had made no attempt to see her, nor did she want them, as far as they were concerned, she was as dead to them as
Ben
was dead, they need not concern themselves with one another. ‘Strangers,’ she had said to Ratheman.

The knocking had ceased, but Alice did not go away. Well, the day had been soured now. She would open the door.

Ben’s sister was sitting on the step, with her back to Ruth. A wind had risen, and blew in gusts over the common, shifting the tops of the trees and tossing down dead leaves. Alice turned her head. Did not get up.

She said, ‘There wasn’t anything else I could do. I was going to wait until you came back. Do you think I wanted to come here, if there’d been anywhere else?’

She looked ill, but there was all the old hostility in what she said and in the tone of her voice, the way she held herself. Yet Ruth thought that, now, she was using it as a defence.

‘I’ve been at the curate’s house. Their daughter died.’

‘Jo said.’

‘Someone had to help them.’

‘Someone usually does. In the end.’

Alice stood up and faced Ruth, looked into her face for a long time, without speaking again, so that Ruth felt as she had always done with her, and with Dora Bryce, too, uneasy and inferior, but also angry, determined not to let them break her down. They did not like her, they did not try to hide it. She wondered if one kind word had ever passed between any of them.

But something else had changed. Alice, who had been her mother’s hope and pride, the one who was allowed to sit about, who was waiting for the chance Dora Bryce had never had, Alice, on whom so much time and praise and money, though never love, had been lavished, Alice was not only tired or ill, she was untidy, and even dirty, her hair, under the cotton scarf, was dull, and the collar of her dress creased. Down her left cheek were faint, strawberry-coloured smears, as though she had been scratched or struck. So she was vulnerable, then, after all, she was not exceptional, or very beautiful or rare.

They went on looking at one another, and the wind blew, banging the gate hard. Ruth stepped back and opened the door wider, for her sister-in-law to come in.

*

The voices sought him and found him out, he could not escape from them, even though he was shut away here in his own room at the top of the house, they rang through the walls and floorboards, the shouting and the anger were more than he could bear; his mother’s voice was shrill and repetitive, as the mynah bird he had once heard, as it sat on a man’s shoulder at Thefton market. Then she wailed, as she had done through all those days and nights after Ben’s death, and Alice would interrupt her, the short, scornful
words
chopping down like knives; and below it all, the dull, patient rumble of his father, trying to keep the peace between them. Though Jo could not remember when there had ever been any real peace in this house. There was only, sometimes, an uneasy quiet which lay about the rooms, like a sea waiting to rise up again into storm.