The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (19 page)

As the winter went on, and the four people were more and more confined indoors, the division in the house became an enormous gap. The two women passed each other on the stairs with glances of antagonism, not speaking. When Benjy's father walked out to preach on Sundays he walked slowly and brokenly, with the steps of an old man. Only Benjy appeared not to be upset. Preoccupied with his hens, it was as if the emotions of normal people never penetrated beyond
his plump hairy face and the eyes that looked so harmless and simple still.

But in the end it was Benjy who made the decision.

‘Mum and Dad,' he said, ‘it would be a lot better if you went somewheres else to live.'

‘Benjy,' they said.

‘A lot better,' he said. ‘This is our house now. We want it. I bought the house and I want it now.'

‘Benjy.'

‘I bought it and I want it,' Benjy said again. ‘I want you to go.'

‘Benjy, we can't go,' his mother said. ‘We got nowhere to go. We got nowhere.'

‘You got to get out!' Benjy shouted.

As he shouted they realized, more fully than at any time in their lives, that Benjy was really not right in his head. His simple blue eyes were shot suddenly with a wild expression of insane anger. They not only knew that Benjy was a simple-minded man who was not fully responsible for his actions, but for the first time, struck by this wild-eyed burst of anger, they were frightened of Benjy too.

‘All right,' they said, ‘we'll find some way to go.'

It was little more than a week later when Benjy drove his mother and father down into the town. He now had a small Ford van and as he drove the van, with his mother and father on the driving seat, he
showed no sign of normal emotion. It was clear that he did not understand the meaning of affection, or of bewilderment, or despair. He felt and spoke and thought only in the simplest terms, with the cruel simplicity of a child.

‘You'll be better by yourselves in lodgings,' he said. ‘You'll be better by yourselves.'

They did not answer. They sat with faces made completely immobile by a kind of stupefied resignation very near to grief. They listened silently and, because for forty years they had believed Benjy to be not right in his head, they made allowances for the last time.

Down in the town the car stopped in a street filled entirely with houses. Benjy did not get out of the van. His father's and mother's belongings had already gone on and now they alighted empty-handed. As they stood on the pavement Benjy spoke a few words to them, looked at them with unmoved simple eyes and then drove away.

When the van had gone they stood alone on the pavement, looking at the ground. They stood as if they had alighted in a strange place, were not sure of themselves, and did not know what to do.

Once they had had the earth. Now it was not possible to tell, from their downcast and silent faces, whether they altogether realized that it, too, had gone.

He inquired at the station if they knew anyone named Edwards, but at first they did not know. Then a second porter came and stood thoughtfully looking up the empty single track, where the bright spring evening sun flashed on the metals and on the slanting sallow trees that broke with grey and silver the bare monotony of the cutting beyond the coal-yards.

‘Y'see there's so many folks name Edwards.'

‘Yes, I know that.'

‘Same all round. At Hardwick it's nothing but Baxters. Over at Stanford they're all Drages or Bowens. Here it's all Edwardses.'

Hanson began to wish he hadn't come.

‘But wait a minute,' he said. ‘You might know them if I tell you who the woman was before she was married. Her name was Claridge.'

‘Ah well,' the porter said. ‘Well. Now I know who you mean. Now I know. You mean Clem Edwards. Got a milk-round. Comes round in a three-wheeler. That's who you mean.'

‘Where do they live?' Hanson said. ‘I haven't got much time.'

‘Well, without you go across fields it's a dinkin long
way round. Place called Ash Trees. It's no naughty walk if you go round by road.'

‘Which way do I go by field?'

The porter began to tell him the field way, pointing an arm over the tracks. Hanson turned to look and felt the north-east wind slice his face from across the low flat land, cutting away the thin warmth of the sun. When the porter had finished Hanson said, ‘Does that give me time to get back for the 7.47?'

‘Just about,' the porter said. ‘Only it's 7.53 now. Been altered.'

‘Thanks,' Hanson said. ‘Thank you very much.'

He walked away up the platform and over the iron footbridge and took the gravel path that went beyond the coal-yards and the last few houses of the town. The March sunlight was sharp and low on the level fields, making the young wind-pressed shoots of corn gleam like wire. In the naked ash trees that broke the lines of the hedges thrushes were singing high up against the sun, wild and clear in the bright wind. When he looked ahead Hanson could see the path quite clearly marked out, clay-brown in the young wheat, brighter green in the pasture.

He walked about a mile and a half before coming within sight of the house. A little distance off he stopped and looked at it. It was a small farm, a square, flat-windowed house of light red brick with a roof of
blue slate that somebody had once left like a forgotten box on the flat land. He could see no ash trees, but above and beyond the outhouses and the wire fences a group of high black poplars were swinging heavily to and fro in the wind.

Coming into the farm-yard he saw a man standing under a cart-shed, watching him. He held a spanner in his hand. He was small, with the high sharp cheekbones of the district, rounded shoulders, and steady hostile eyes.

‘Want somebody?'

‘Yes,' Hanson said. ‘Can I see Mrs. Edwards?'

‘You can go and try.'

He stood weighing the spanner in his hand, hostile, intent, slightly puzzed.

‘If it's got anything to do wi' insurance we don't want none.'

‘That's all right,' Hanson said. ‘It's not that.'

He walked on across the yard towards the house, uneasy, aware of the man still watching him. About the dry earth hens' feathers were being bounced by the wind among the many dark claret poplar catkins that had fallen from the trees.

Round the corner of the house, out of sight of the figure watching him, he knocked at the back door and waited. The voices of children crying in a room upstairs broke for a moment and then began again and
in the short interval of silence he heard the beat of footsteps.

The face of the young woman who opened the door was not quite what he had expected. She stood shocked too, her dark bleak eyes beaten dead by the moment of astonishment. She stood looking at him with brief, inert silence, and then suddenly she came to herself and began to pull her stained torn pinafore over her head, ruffling her black short hair and then smoothing it, almost beating it down with her small narrow hands.

‘Arthur,' she said. ‘Arthur, whatever made you come up here?'

‘I had some time to kill at the junction,' he said. ‘I thought I'd just have time to come up on the branch. Just to see you.'

She did not speak.

‘You didn't answer my Christmas card,' he said. ‘You didn't send one.'

‘No.'

‘I wondered if you were all right.'

‘I'm all right,' she said. Unconsciously, in perplexity, she had screwed up the pinafore like a bundle of rag. ‘You'd better come in, hadn't you?'

She stood back from the door, which had dropped on its hinges and would not open any further. He went into the kitchen. A cold sour odour of milk, a
stale breath of boiled onions, met him. Milk pans, waiting to be scoured, stood about the brick floor of the kitchen and the small dairy place leading off from it. Beyond, in the living room, tea was partly laid on a deal table. Thick slices of white bread were waiting to be toasted on the hearth, where socks and napkins were drying on a line below the mantelshelf. More clothes were hanging diagonally across the lamp-darkened ceiling, by the staircase door. The wind rattled the window on the east side.

She asked him to sit down. She had dropped her pinafore in the kitchen and now stood with empty hands. If there was some slight hostility in the way she kept standing it was unconscious and he did not notice it. He looked hastily round the room, taking in the details, and saw through the windows the edges of the great poplars beating against the sky. A moment later he looked back at her and suddenly saw her, uneasy, untidy, taken unawares, as the remnant of the girl he had decided not to marry, for some trivial reason, six years before.

A child began crying upstairs before either of them could speak.

‘Is it two children you've got?' he said, knowing it quite well.

‘Two,' she said.

The child cried loudly. Outside, the cries seemed to
be reproduced in the short hollow sounds of a spanner beating on metal.

‘There's nothing wrong, is there?' he said. The crying of the child had on him an effect of nervous distraction.

‘It's earache,' she said. ‘I'd better go up. Take your coat off.' She looked at him with unhappy, disturbed eyes. ‘You'll have a cup of tea when I come down again?'

‘Only if it's ready,' he said. ‘Don't make it specially.'

‘It's our tea-time, now,' she said, in a dead voice.

When she had gone upstairs he sat staring at the tea-table without having taken off his coat. He tried to remember what things had been like six or seven years before, but the details were at first dead and would not revive in the oppressive ugly little room. Only the girl herself at once came back, involuntarily recalled in sudden, time-sharpened images. In those days they had both lived in the town. She was a school-teacher and belonged to one of those large, boisterous, clannish families who always stick and die together. There were five sisters and two brothers, all dark and rather self-willed, the girls very pretty, with small, proud faces. Several times a year the Claridges managed to find an excuse for a party, a coming-of-age, a wedding, New Year, in the big draughty local drill-hall. It was at one
of these parties that Hanson, attending as the local reporter, had met Kitty Claridge. He remembered what a bright, impulsive, argumentative creature she had been: how she had argued with him all that evening, with militant smiles of triumph, on the merits of some writer whose name he had long ago forgotten, how every dance had been an exhausting, fascinating affair of beauty and conflict. After that they could never see enough of each other. On summer evenings, when there was little doing on the local paper, they would hire a boat and go on the river and float downstream between the willow trees to villages beyond the town, and in time the peace of the evening would be broken by the question of his going away and working on a larger paper. It gradually became apparent that she had no ambition to live anywhere but in the small, branch-line town, with the one tired newspaper, the flat countryside parched to concrete by the spring sea-winds, and the little river with the waving willow trees; it seemed that all she wanted was to remain, even after marriage, part of the large, proud, boisterous family, as if there were no other life and she would get all the emotion and excitement and beauty she needed in their way and not his.

The end of it was that they had broken up on some such point as this, quite trivial in itself, but really part of the larger question of his also marrying the family,
which at heart he disliked intensely. He remembered that the Claridges were very affronted at the affair, and never spoke to his own family again. Shortly afterwards he got another job and gladly moved out of the circle of small-town family hatred. But with Kitty it was different. They had kept up a correspondence which after a time had dwindled down to a Christmas card: but he knew all the same that the correspondence of the mind, with its half-captured passages of warm, regretful thought, had gone on.

She had been married four or five years now. He did not know how it had come about. At the back of his mind lay the uneasy thought, dropped there by something he had heard, that the family no longer had anything to do with her. For some reason the boisterous, proud loyalty had been broken.

He was once more beginning to wonder about the oppressive little room, the isolated farm with the sea-winds striking at the poplars, and the man with the spanner outside, when she herself came downstairs again.

He was unaware of it until that moment, but the crying of the child had already ceased. For one moment the window ceased rattling, and he stood up, looking at her in the sudden silence. He wanted to say something to her: about the child, the weather, to tell her that she was not to make tea for him specially.
But for some time he did not say anything, and she came over to the fireplace and began mechanically to remove the drying clothes, folding them and pressing them into a small heap with her hands.

‘Don't move them for me,' he said.

‘No?'

In this one word it seemed to him that he heard the indirect echo of antagonism, but when he looked up at her, quite sharply, there was nothing on her face but the same look of bleak surprise. She was rather thin and he saw that she found it difficult to keep her eyes quite still. They were weak and dark with nervous pain.

After the clothes were folded she went away for a moment, into the kitchen, coming back with empty hands. She came to the fire for the kettle, to make tea, her dark head bent down. Abruptly the window rattled like a machine-gun.

‘I had an idea your husband was a mechanic,' he said. ‘How did you come up here?'

‘His chest was weak.'

She set the metal tea-pot in the hearth, afterwards turning away to the table. He looked after her and suddenly saw her come momentarily to life, setting the things on the table straight, moving cups, smoothing the cloth, her pride rising.