The Parson (Peter Owen Modern Classic) (7 page)

Holding out her hands to the pile of logs blazing in the wide fireplace, Rejane gave the map a perfunctory glance. And, in spite of the heat of the fire, she suddenly shivered again, as she had on the moor, feeling the hostility of the frozen north, exclaiming, ‘Heavens, how cold it is tonight!’

Always obliging, Oswald hastily threw on some more logs without being distracted from his argument. While swarms of sparks fled up the chimney, he told her that the castle was already considered unsafe; tourists were warned that they went there at their own risk – one of these days the whole ancient edifice would sink under the waves, ceaselessly eroding its foundations.

All the more reason, Rejane lightly answered, for her to see it while this was still possible. Her momentary chill forgotten, she stood in the firelight, smiling and adamant, not to be deflected from her purpose, which was no mere whim but a calculated design: by keeping him fully occupied throughout her last day, she would prevent any inconvenient display of emotion.

The young man was confused by the contrast between her outward serenity and good humour, and the emanation he felt of something ruthless opposing him from within her, demolishing each objection he raised, a radiation of implacable will, which crushed all his protests stone dead, finally crushing him too and forcing him to surrender.

As if she’d been waiting just for this, as soon as he’d given in she seemed to withdraw and become inaccessible, already gone from him in spirit. He was aware the whole time that they would have only one more evening together and, paralysed by the thought, it was hard for him to keep up an ordinary conversation. She did nothing to help him. The silences grew longer and longer. Remoteness seemed to gather about her like snow, as though, in the warm room, snow were falling and hiding her from him. The illusion even affected his vision, so that he couldn’t see her distinctly.

Unable to bear any more of the coldness and distance that was in the air, although it was still quite early, he got up to go, saying he had a headache, which was the truth. She seemed nowhere near him when he said good-night, her large lustrous eyes looking through him to something else, the smile on her lovely face not for him.

Now he felt he couldn’t leave without some sign of recognition. Lingering miserably, he asked her to be ready when he came the next day. They’d have to start early if they were to get back at a reasonable hour.

But she still seemed not there for him, somehow, with an inward, mysterious, smiling look on her face that froze him and sent him home sick at heart.

4

O
SWALD
felt better when he woke in the morning; most of his blurred impressions of the previous night seemed sheer imagination. Dressing quickly, he left the house before breakfast, and, munching an apple picked up on the way, went out to the car.

His main concern was to elude his mother and sister, who had lately begun to complain of his continual absence, and had already protested against the Bannenberg trip. Last night his headache had come in useful, enabling him to avoid argument by going to bed. Now he could but hope to slip away unobserved.

However, he had no chance to do so before his mother rushed out of the house in her dressing-gown – a distraught, dishevelled figure, pathetic and slightly absurd – imploring him not to go to Bannenberg. She’d had ‘a warning’ dining the night, a dream or a premonition. He could hardly understand what she was saying, as, incoherent with agitation, she came stumbling up to him, tripping over the long dressing-gown.

Oswald frowned disapprovingly. He always discouraged her psychic tendencies, both because he considered them undignified and because they reminded him of certain imaginative traits he’d inherited which were unsuited to a cavalryman. As a rule, she was easily crushed. Now, by ignoring his severity, as he steered her back into the house, she forced him to realize how strong her conviction of coming disaster must be. He couldn’t possibly leave her in this state. Common humanity required him to stay with her, at least for a few minutes, especially after the way he’d been neglecting her lately.

Feeling exasperated and victimized, he tried to calm her by saying he was far too experienced a driver to get into difficulties, whatever the road was like. But her fears were of a less concrete nature, she refused to be pacified, continuing to pour out a flood of confused pleading and protest; which he didn’t even attempt to understand now, merely uttering random reassurances at intervals.

In the course of these futile exchanges, time was slipping past. He saw that he would inevitably be late in getting to the hotel; and the idea of Rejane waiting for him, doubtless becoming indignant because he didn’t turn up, drove him nearly frantic. Unconsciously he fixed his eyes on the door; and his mother, noticing this, suddenly clutched his sleeve, as if afraid he might make a dash for it.

At her touch, his extreme impatience turned into anger: he almost hated her for delaying him with this absurd rigmarole. And where was Vera? Why didn’t she come to his rescue?

As if answering him, his sister hurried into the room, glanced nervously from one of them to the other, and stopped just inside the door.

I
must
go, Mother.’ Oswald shook off the hand clutching his arm, strode across to the door, and, as he passed Vera, muttered furiously, ‘Why can’t you look after her properly? It’s your job.’

A kind of hiatus ensued in his mind, he seemed to gape incredulously at the sound of his own angry voice. Never before in his life had he spoken to any woman in that enraged brutal tone. It was horrifying that his mother and sister should be the first to hear it. Appalled by his own behaviour, he thought, Nobody would be likely to call me The Parson now, wondering what had become of his former gentleness and consideration.

He raced all the way to the hotel, to find Rejane, as he’d expected, in a very bad temper because, after asking her specially to be ready, he’d kept her waiting so long. She wouldn’t listen to his apologies or explanations, forcing him to endure her reproaches, as he’d endured his mother’s, as they started off on the long trip, which seemed to him to have begun under the worst possible auspices.

*

Though he sat bolt upright behind the wheel, the athletic young man gave the impression of supporting with difficulty some tremendous weight. Vaguely, he supposed it was knowing he must sustain the effort of driving fast the whole way on this bad road which was oppressing him, like his headache of the previous evening, though less as a physical pain than an obscure sort of unease at the back of his thoughts.

Even when Rejane recovered her usual good humour, which she soon did, sulking not being one of her faults, Oswald couldn’t throw off this weight of uneasiness, which made it hard for him to respond. Her smiles were, in fact, rather painful to him. How could she be so gay when tomorrow they had to part? They stopped to eat their picnic lunch by the roadside; and he couldn’t help thinking that she looked heartless, basking there in the sun, her fur coat thrown back, calmly eating a devilled egg. Though she didn’t want to move, he refused to linger, and, as soon as they’d finished, insisted on setting off again, aware all the time of the miles still to be driven.

Helplessly, he felt her displeasure. He could do nothing about it. He knew he was a dull companion but found nothing to say, overwhelmed by an accumulation of pressures. He couldn’t get rid of the feeling of having too much to carry – the entire responsibility for the trip as well as his distress over their coming separation, his guilt feeling about his mother, and the unacknowledged effect of her superstitious fears.

Clouds appeared, quickly covering the sky. It became evident to him that, before the end of the day, there would be a storm. What infernal luck that the weather should change exactly now. He was seized by a violent sense of the injustice of life, the hostility of the whole world. He’d always tried all his life to do what was right and fair, yet even the weather now had to add to his difficulties. It was too much. All at once, war seemed to have been declared between him and the entire world, where everything was leagued against him.

The cliff road could be really dangerous in a storm – they ought to go back. But to say so would make Rejane only more determined to go on. It was no use arguing, she would always defeat him. Glancing at her face, he seemed to detect there signs of self-will not noticed before.

With sudden horror, he realized that he was including her with the alien hostile world, organized against him. And the idea already seemed to have destroyed his former uncritical respect and love, so that he continued, half against his will, to identify her with the general hostility that was piling up great fire-edged fortresses of cloud in the sky. His face grew more and more sombre as he drove on, in almost complete silence, in the slowly darkening light, which gradually assumed a coppery tinge, ominous-seeming after the weeks of sunshine.

*

Since the last little grim stony village they’d passed not a house, not a soul. There was only the everlasting grey moor with its lumpish tors stretching in every direction, an occasional sunbeam pointing a long, thin finger at it, ending in a spotlight of lurid brilliance. Or, from time to time, several rays would pierce the dense cloud, emerging like fansticks from one point, or coming from different parts of the sky to pass stealthily to and fro like the stilt-legs of luminous giants whose heads were hidden above the sky. Now, belts of forest began to alternate with the moorland, black, bristling fir-woods and dense huddles of bare, deciduous trees that seemed to be strangling each other, drowning in their own debris of dead leaves and entanglements of smashed limbs.

Rejane stared out at all this in silence, bored and disdainful, till a sudden nerve-shattering clatter of loose stones flying up made her comment indignantly on the state of the road.

‘What else can you expect?’ Back came Oswald’s muted musical melancholic voice. ‘It’s only made up once a year for the summer tourists. Nobody comes in the winter. There won’t be another car along here till next spring.’

‘We’ll actually be the last people to come this year?’

For some reason her original sense of northern strangeness revived at this thought and she gave him a wondering glance, which he, occupied with avoiding the ruts and potholes, failed to observe. It was all so uncivilized, so alien, so inexpressibly strange, to her: and Oswald himself was so much a part of the strangeness. His wintry blue eyes were related to the desolate landscape, filled with the weird mystic gloom she imagined as the gloom of the endless winters, when the sun went stooping across the sky, following its low arc, like a runner who must not be seen, mysteriously diffusing its tender rose through the falling snow – unexpectedly the spell of the north worked again.

Suddenly she was startled by a tremendous snapping and crackling under the wheels, as they crushed a tangle of branches blown down into the road. And now, all at once, winter seemed very near, waiting, just out of sight, like a threat in the air. Just for a second she felt a childish fear that winter would overtake her before she could get away – that she’d be caught and held her against her will in the hostile, alien north. It lasted only the barest moment; just long enough for her to recall the headland she’d seen on the map, pointing straight to the Pole, and to wish she hadn’t insisted on this expedition. Last night Oswald had been desperately anxious to dissuade her from coming – why didn’t he now suggest turning back? Before, he’d always been so quick to catch her mood and fulfil her least wish, almost before she herself had become aware of it.

Glancing at his set profile, she had the idea he kept silent now out of spite, trying to force her to say she’d had enough – which, of course, she never would. Indignantly she turned away, to look out of the window again; only to be flung against him as the car lurched, skidding wildly on what seemed the loose stones of a river-bed, rushing the steep bank on the other side. She opened her mouth in exasperated complaint. But, before she could get a word out, they reached the top, and her breath was snatched away by the wind that came charging at them, straight off the open sea.

She could only grasp, everything else forgotten, astonished by the sight of this vast, heaving mass of angry-looking water, appearing so unexpectedly, right under her nose. The road ran along the very edge of the cliff; there was nothing at all in front of her but the ocean of foam-capped rollers, dotted with rocky islets, each in its collar of foam – indomitable, even though drowned, the moorland tors kept their heads above water. Coloured like anthracite far out, the sea changed nearer the shore to peculiar acid shades of yellow and green, the waves rearing up, racing landwards, like the arched necks of horses, their wild white manes blowing back. The road was high above them most of the time. But periodically the cliff subsided, they sank to sea-level and drove on the hard white sand of the beaches which interspersed the jagged, stark, brutal rocks, where the waves towered high above
them.
Most extraordinary, it seemed to Rejane, to be looking
up
at those huge greengage-coloured monsters, pounding in like wild horses, crashing down their hoofs on the rocks with a noise like thunder, filling the air with their savage neighing and the misty fume of their breath. All her bored apprehension was blown away instantly, and replaced by exhilaration.

The waves exploded in tremendous thunder, the wind slammed and banged and battered the car, as if trying to blow it into the sea or smash it to smithereens on the rocks. While, like some magic snowstorm, thickening the misted air, pale sea-birds of many varieties rose and fell, or hung almost motionless on barely quivering wings, their fierce-looking beaks opening and shutting in ghostly screams, no sound of which pierced the louder tumult of wind and water.