The Night Following (17 page)

Maybe it was because of the baby and all the extra weight, or maybe it was simple fatigue, but when they were packed up and ready to move off Evelyn had stiffened up so much she could hardly stand straight.

“Oh, wait, let’s not go yet!”she said, rubbing her back, trying to make light of it.

Daphne understood. “Oh, all right, let’s have another ciggie,”she said, passing round her packet while Evelyn sank back onto the ground.

“I should’ve brought a hip flask,”Paul said, clicking his tongue. “A nip in you would do the trick.”

Evelyn immediately thought of Stan. Was he up here on the hill, too, taking nips from a flask? Would he be content with just nips?

Now, down below them on the path, folk were filing through the sheep gate and on up to William Clough. It was boggy either side of the path, so everybody slowed up and went through single file, and Evelyn thought to herself that even though it was too far away for her to make out faces, she would know Stan if she saw him. He always had on his red scarf these days and he was a big, tall devil. What with that and his way of stooping so his head poked forward, she’d know him even from that distance.

She explained to Daphne and Paul that she would only hold them up if she went any farther. They were content enough to go on without her once she had reassured them that she would be fine on her own. All she knew, she told them, was that she couldn’t go back into that wind stinging her eyes the way it did. She would stop here and mind the picnic things. They would get on faster with nothing to carry, and if Paul left her enough matches she would have tea waiting for them when they got back.

   Dusting, because it was the quietest, became my favorite task. While the floor was creaking softly above me I would sweep a cloth over surfaces, lifting and setting down Ruth’s things, reaching behind objects and into crevices. I drew my hand across the veneers and ornaments and slipcovers of her life, and by their contours learned her ways. At 27 Cardigan Avenue she was both visionary and manager: Capability Ruth, the romantic yet practical arranger of all the miniature landscapes of her house. I could hear her scolding Arthur, telling him how upset she was about the mess everywhere. She imposed a kind of foursquare, insistent balance; she liked a vista of furniture receding into well-angled, decorous forms against warm-hued walls, she liked to frame windows in drapes tied back like garlands. Her taste veered toward the chintzy: nature improved upon and improbably floral so as to invoke stasis and order. Her cushions lay on the sofa as plump and peaceful as solid little cherubs from a pastorale, asleep on a bank. Her floors were predominantly green and gold, somewhat bleached and shady in the light of the moon. I imagined she liked carpets to remind her of moss and sand.

When I cleaned the composed and satisfied arrangements of Ruth’s downstairs rooms I moved carefully and quickly among the lamps and vases and dishes on side tables. Their settled roundness seemed slightly to reproach me for my angular, darting manner. And when my work was accomplished I took my leave like a verger, turning at the threshold for a last look, to watch emptiness flow back into the space I had disturbed. Knowing I had done all I could, I was content to leave the room to guard its own frail shadows, as though my parting gift were to stop the clocks and arrest Ruth’s hazy idyll in the dark where it could rest undisturbed. No new stark encounter on a deserted road under windblown trees could violate it now; I was keeping it safe from any further brash and irreverent tests of its flimsiness.

And oh, the repetition! Arthur would undo all my work in minutes and not even notice. Whenever I put a room to rights after one of his foraging raids on cupboards or drawers or shelves, I knew that I would probably find it all upside down again the next night. Sometimes I would stifle a sigh when I came across the kitchen or bathroom filthy again, but I didn’t really mind. The endless round of these tasks released me into a ritual both seemly and devotional, and as elevating as meditation.

I think that my grandmother found a similar, steadying comfort in housework and the mild tyranny of its routines. Perhaps housekeeping, for her, was a mundane anchoring force in a life made unstable by my mother’s erratic ways, though my grandmother herself would never have expressed it like that. All she might have said, with a sigh and a smile, was that she didn’t suppose the floor was going to wash itself.

She rolled her two main responsibilities—housekeeping and me—into one, setting about chores with her face tipped up smiling and her hands going like feelers around her, chivvying me along in the role of little helper. By touch and with great care she washed and rinsed and wrung laundry through the mangle; she hung out, folded, smoothed, and ironed our clothes and linen, and sorted it into piles for me to put away. She scrubbed floors and sinks, she dusted and polished. She timed an egg by singing four verses of “Abide With Me”while I, sometimes singing along, watched the trickle of colored sand slip through the neck of the timer; she was never off by more than a few seconds. The rising gurgle of boiling water going into the teapot told her when she had filled it to its limit. She kept her white stick by the top of the stairs leading down to the shop; indoors she measured the distances between obstacles in counted steps.

By the scent and slant of the wind on Mondays she could judge how long to leave the washing to hang out in the backyard, and if I was good and quick and pegged up the handkerchiefs for her before I left for school, she might play our wet ghosts game, tiptoeing invisibly along on the other side of the line and keeping me guessing which of the vast, obscuring sheets she was hiding behind. No matter how I gazed I was never able to tell if this one or that twitched from a touch of the breeze, from a flick of her hand, or from the breathy sigh of a ghost. I hardly dared peep underneath for a glimpse of her splayed feet in the black shoes, for what if they were elsewhere and
not
planted behind the sheet that at any moment would suddenly balloon out at me? And what did it mean, the thrill and horror of the sheet’s absolute stillness; had she, like my great-uncle, gone with the ghosts at last, and become one herself? She kept me waiting, and waiting. And when I would be almost faint with dread, a wail would float from the other side of the sheet and one whole wet square would swell with the dome of her head and flap forward against her outstretched arms. Then I would lunge at her, squealing to be caught in a damp cottony hug.

One Monday she didn’t put the washing out at all. When I got home from school she told me there was grit in the wind that day. The wind was blowing from the wrong direction, carrying smoke and dust from the railway and bringing soot down the chimney. She said this as if she didn’t care. The weather, it seemed, had blown away all her briskness and left her dreamy and vague, or perhaps it was rather that the wind had brought something else to her attention. She closed the windows and told me to find the tin of polish and a duster and give the sitting room an extra going-round while she washed the kitchen floor.

I heard her sighing as she reached for a bucket and ran the tap. The wind had made me contrary, too, in the way that the wrong weather upsets young animals; suddenly I was full of a skittish, supple anger. I dug my thumb into the tin, climbed on a stool, and smeared a lump of polish along the top of the picture rail. When I got down I waved the duster a few times, then I wandered away, past the room where my mother was spending a second day in bed with a stash of bottles under the covers, up to the dull quiet of my room in the attic. I sat on my bed until I felt blank. When I came down my grandmother was smiling but her eyes were as cold as pearls. The spell of dreaminess brought on by the weather was broken. Whatever the wind had brought, she had washed it along and out of the day.

“I gave you a job to do.”

Anger gusted inside me again. “I did it.”

“It’s still dusty in here.”

“How do you know?”She didn’t reply. The lavender and beeswax air lay over us like a coat. “You can smell I’ve done it!”

She moved across to her chair and sat down. “I can see you didn’t.”

“No, you can’t! How can you?”

She was still smiling. “Aye, well, miss. I see what I see.”

“But you
can’t
see!”

“Even so. There are colors. Everything’s got its color.”

“But
you
can’t see them,”I told her. “You can’t see anything.”

“Maybe, aye. Maybe not things. Not as such. But I get the colors for things. They go roaming about,”she said, drawing her palm across the side of her head, “in here.”

“How you can see the colors of things but not the things? That’s daft!”

“Don’t you be cheeky. Colors
for
things, I said, not
of
things. There are colors for things. And you did not dust this room.”

“All right then, what’s the color for dust? There isn’t one!”I took a deep, brave breath and announced, “You’re just talking
daft
!”

“Maybe there isn’t,”she said matter-of-factly, “but there’s a color for big fibs.”She fished with one hand for the bag of knitting on the floor under her chair and pulled it onto her lap. “Yes, and there’s a color for a girl who cheeks her grandma. Now be a good girl and get us a cup of tea. And don’t bang the kettle.”

Dear Ruth
I’m angry, if you want to know.
You might have replied. Just a few words would have done. What’s the matter, run out of words?
Bloody words. That woman Della from your writing group. She brought the tribute. Her eyebrows shoot up and down a lot, don’t they? She says the whole bunch of them contributed but she came on her own in case presence of the others was too much. They don’t want to overwhelm me.
She’s had it written out in fancy writing and framed. Stayed ages pretending the visit was for my sake not hers, for example did I want to ‘“talk about dear Ruth”? There’s no reply to that, I said nothing, just cracked my knuckles. So just to kick us off she brings down her eyebrows and says, “Oh! Didn’t Ruth have such a sensitivity for words?!’”
They stick around, don’t they, words. They’re all over the place, only not a one from you to me.
I told her, And well she might’ve, she was still an English teacher this time two years ago. And very highly regarded, did I have to remind her how many former pupils turned up at the funeral?
At which she said “Awwwww, Arthur. Awwww, I
know
…”
Imbecile. I said, Mr. Mitchell to you, thank you very much, Della, but she ignored me.
She said she was glad I was managing to talk about you “a little,”“at last,”and she’d “hardly dared hope”the group’s tribute would help me “make the breakthrough”but she was thrilled it had. What on earth is she talking about? If I have something to say I say it, and if I don’t I don’t. Why should it bother anyone that I haven’t got things to say to the people who turn up here?
I honestly think they show up for entertainment. And I shan’t oblige.
Nobody including Della wants to hear about what’s important, ie what the driver of that car’s got coming to him.
She insisted on reading the tribute out loud, because she said it was quite powerful and she didn’t want me to be alone the first time I read it, after she’d gone. Also poetry can be such a comfort at a time like this, etc etc.
Well, prepare to be amazed, here it is:
Tribute to Ruth
Friend, knocked off your bike:
Cut down
And who’s to say not in your prime?
For sixty-one is only the counting of the years
The measuring of Time,
Time allotted by a Higher Power
That dispenses Life’s green springs and verdant summers,
Its mellow autumns and fading winters.
Friend, your gifts were many
And freely given: spread around
For the benefit of friends and family
And members of the wider community.
Neighbor, teacher, wife, friend.
Your generosity was without end.
Ruth, your name’s meaning is obscure
But your life was crystal clear, like pure
Running water.
Wise proud warrior!
Woman! Of flesh and spirit, earth and sky!
A Writer, and in this a Mother to boot——
For your poems and short stories
Are your children: the fruit
Of your creativity, given birth through
Life’s long labor in the orchard of womanhood.
As roses ramble upward through a tree, hold fast to the trunk
And blossom, so your work holds, clings to the memory of you.
Ruth, cut down like a reed,
We whom you leave behind
Can only hope it was quick, a swift
Release without pain.
Your poems and short stories full of humor and wisdom
You leave them behind, a legacy to keep
For those who stand by the grave and weep.
We will do our best without you.
And it will be hard, for friendship
Is precious, your loss so sudden.
All Death
Is cruel but Ruth, yours more than most.
So long, Writer, Woman, Friend.
Our love for you will never end.
Your inspiration will not cease.
Ruth, may you rest in peace.
From Della, Pam, Maggie, Kate, Linda, and Trish
Monkswell & District Women Writers Group
I don’t think the Poet Laureate needs to be looking over his shoulder just yet, do you? Who is the Poet Laureate these days, anyway? You’d know.
When she’d read it Della hung around waiting for me to tell her I thought they were all geniuses, eyebrows on the move again and eyes brimming.
It only rhymes, I said, here and there. We didn’t think that mattered, she says. We just wanted to express something about Ruth. After some discussion we agreed that being restricted to any particular rhyme scheme might stifle creativity.
I’m trying to get her to go when she produces the hammer.
Next she fishes in her bag and brings out a picture hook. She didn’t want to trouble me to go looking for mine, easier to bring hers from home, she says, and where would I like it? Didn’t reply, so then she says, Never mind, I expect you’d like me to decide. Most men don’t know a suitable wall from the side of an elephant when it comes to getting the right hang, most men wouldn’t notice if the Mona Lisa was upside down!
I let her stick it up under the clock on the wall behind the TV. It won’t catch my eye there, as I’m not watching TV anymore.
Arthur.
PS Fucking tribute, pardon my French.
It got to me, just knowing it was there. I took it down, couldn’t find claw hammer so pulled out hook with kitchen scissors, tore wallpaper, and left a hole. Tore a bit more paper off to see state of plaster generally, was wondering if that wall could do with a once-over. It could now. Plaster came with it. May get round to it, I like to have a job or two in the offing. Keeping it in the pipeline for now—there’s enough going on.
PPS If I hadn’t let the bloody woman in there wouldn’t be all this mess and need for redecoration, not an inconsiderable task at my age.
PPPS She said (parting shot)—Now don’t hesitate if there’s a single thing I can do. So I’m going to ask her for a contribution toward materials.