The Scent of Water (17 page)

“I’m not often here at this time,” explained Paul. “I pub-crawl before supper most days, after supper is my working time. But work’s not going well at the moment.” Then he quickly changed the subject, for he seldom talked of his work, and never to comparative strangers. Why should he do so now, to this man of all others whom he suspected of upsetting Valerie? His suspicion might be mere fancy, but when Charles Adams was at Appleshaw Valerie was exhausted and excited, more than usually resentful of him, her small deceptions more obvious and heartless as though she put them out like a smoke screen. He had avoided Charles, hating his fears and hating himself for having them, trying not to believe them and yet aware that they were there quite independently of anything in himself, for he was not a jealous man. And here he was speaking to this man of his work.

Because he was connected with it. This was the man in his book. He had seen him standing at the bottom of his bed and had identified himself with him, as though he were every man. As though he were sighted he could see the dark face and the apple tree fallen in the orchard. Since he was this man, the protagonist, he did not need to be told that war had helped to fell him, the first or the second or both, for if it had not been so he would not have been the protagonist. Strange, difficult love stirred in Paul, hard like the birth pangs of this book that would not come alive, and pity, because this man, felled, had been apparently unable to bear fruit. Yet it was laid upon me to bear fruit, thought Paul, and it must have been laid upon him. It always is. There’s something he does and goes on doing that corresponds with my writing. I’d like to find out what it is, for if you understand people you’re of use to them whether you can do anything tangible for them or not. Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see.

With the surface of his mind he was talking to Charles about nothing while the other thing was going on at a deeper level. And a third part of him looked on and laughed. You crazy fool. What would normal people think if they knew what went on in a writer’s mind below the surface? They’d think him even more around the bend than they had previously supposed if they could see the witches’ cauldron of images and memories boiling up from the subconscious, impressions whirling in from without, ideas and insights bursting up like bubbles and gone again before they can be seized. And the hopelessness of the business, the whole infuriating, exhausting, fascinating business of grabbing something out of the turmoil and imposing upon it some faint shadow or rumor of the order, pattern and rhythm of the world.

Damn it that I’ve got to like him so much, thought Charles. And Valerie’s got no use for him. She’s a fool. And I’m a fool that I have got into this mess with her and he’s a fool to have married her. She’s one of those sticky women, not a moth but a burr. They’ve no pride, these stickers. Another woman, a woman of the type that brought the parents home, would be gone at a touch. Why do I always attract the stickers?

“Who’s the new woman?” he asked Paul. “I forgot to ask my parents. Tall, wears her clothes well. Must have been a smasher when she was young. Easy on the eye even now.”

Paul told him, set down his empty glass and turned to go. Rage was boiling in him at the man’s tone, and with it dismay. He had been seeing a good deal of Mary lately, but why this rage? The thought of Charles and Valerie together had made him grieve, but not boil.

“Stop a minute,” said Charles with an urgency that Paul could not refuse. He stopped and turned, Bess with him. The feel of her head under his hand steadied him. Bess was always a steadying influence. “Will you come a walk with me one day?”

Paul was silent a moment and then agreed. “Wednesday?” he asked.

“No, not Wednesday. Friday? Two-thirty?”

“Yes,” said Paul. “Good night.”

He went out and Charles turned around to order another drink with a sigh of relief. Randall was attractive yet uncomfortable company at one and the same time. Even though he could not see, it was easier to have another drink in his absence.

T
HE small gilt clock on the mantelpiece struck the half-hour. “Half-past twelve, Edith,” said Mary, and closed her book.

“That clock’s fast,” said Edith.

“There’s the church clock striking now,” said Mary, smiling. “There’s no gainsaying that. Pack up now, Edith. You’ve worked well this morning.”

“It wasn’t work,” said Edith. “Not Shakespeare. Math is work but not Shakespeare or history. I like words and people from right back in the past. I like old things, like the tree in Nightingale Wood, the one by the ruins of Fox Barton, where the well is.”

Mary was delighted. One of the joys of being with children was that in their company one recaptured the sense of the strange and the flavor of the unknown. “The tree in the Nightingale Wood . . . the ruins of Fox Barton, where the well is.” The place was far removed in green shade, moss-scented and cool. “Is Nightingale Wood the one beyond the Dog and Duck?” she asked.

“Yes, but Fox Barton is at the other end of it. The way to Fox Barton is down Ash Lane. You know Ash Lane because the door in your vegetable garden leads into it.” It was the door through which Mrs. Baker came and went but Mary had been so busy that she had actually never explored beyond it. “Let’s not do indoor lessons this afternoon. Let’s go to Fox Barton and do nature study.”

“My car’s in dock today,” said Mary.

“But we don’t need to drive there!” said Edith with a touch of scorn. “We can walk.”

Mary’s heart quailed, for she was no walker. She was urban-minded and car-legged. But Edith’s face, flushed with joy and already so changed, could not be refused. “Very well,” she said. “But it must be a real lesson walk. I’ve got a botany book and we’ll take that. And we’ll take our tea.”

Edith slipped off her chair. “I’ll be back at two. We’d better start early, for it’s quite a long walk to Fox Barton.”

She climbed over the windowsill into the conservatory and vanished, for she journeyed to and from her lessons by way of the garden and the mulberry tree rather than the road. Mary pressed her fingers to her temples. She was suffering nowadays from a habitual slight headache. It had been an effort to start teaching again and the young, both human and feline, had such boundless energy. She glanced at Tiger where he lay sleeping in a patch of sunlight on the floor, but she dared do no more than glance, for contemplation of his slumbers sometimes ended them. Even with the brief glance one eye opened with a blue glint and the orange tip of his tail twitched ominously. Mary beat a hasty retreat to the kitchen. Just a boiled egg, she thought, while she packed the picnic tea, and several cups of black coffee. Then she’d have time to put her feet up before they started.

Edith was back at ten to two, wearing her blue jeans and her blue sweater, and armed with a rucksack. Mary, whom the act of putting her feet up had sent into exhausted slumber, had barely recovered consciousness, but Edith packed the tea into the rucksack and they set out. As they walked under the apple trees in the kitchen garden to the door in the wall Mary did not tell Edith that she had not yet found time to open it and go through it to what lay beyond. Edith would have gone beyond before she had been at The Laurels an hour. Mary was ashamed of the procrastination of her advancing years and was ashamed that she was not confessing her shame. It was an inwardly humbled woman who preceded Edith into Ash Lane with confident grace, as though she did it every day. And of this too she was ashamed.

Ash Lane was narrow and deeply sunken between steep banks crowned with hollies and hawthorns, with a big ash tree not far from Mary’s gate. As it went only to the woods, the hedges had not been cut down and the trees arched overhead. Ancient and bird-haunted, the place imposed a silence and Edith spoke only to point out to Mary treasures that she might have missed, the rose color of a chaffinch’s breast in the branches over their heads, a butterfly, long-stalked toadstools of pale lavender growing among the wet mosses in the ditch and trails of creamy wild roses and honeysuckle. Now and again there was a break in the trees upon each side, a window that showed a glimpse of sunlit fields and far blue hills, and once the left-hand hedge ended altogether in wooden palings with beyond a group of thatched cottages and gardens full of flowers. “The middle one is Mrs. Baker’s,” said Edith. But Mary had known it was by the sparkling cleanliness of its windows and the perfection of its garden. She would have liked to have gone in to see if Mrs. Baker was there but Edith was striding on and she had to keep up with her. But she was less tired than she had expected, the cool beauty of the lane affecting her like a drink of water. She was almost surprised when she found tall trees on either side, the softness of beech mast beneath her feet and in her ears the ringing call of birds in a high wood.

The track was not lost in the wood, though the low-growing hollies and brambles crowded in upon it, for the trees themselves did not press in. It remained a lane and looked as though it was trodden daily, for here and there were the prints of enormous feet. A troll, thought Mary; they looked too big for a mere man. They went on until Edith said, “There’s Fox Barton,” and Mary could see it half-hidden and half-revealed by the great beech stems, standing in a clearing in the woods.

They came to the edge of the clearing and stood gazing, Edith as silent as Mary, for every time she saw Fox Barton it was as though she saw it for the first time. It was a small house, built of the same silver-gray stone as the church, with narrow mullioned lancet windows and a steep stone-tiled roof. There was no glass in the windows, though iron bars had been fixed across the lower ones, but there was a stout oak door, left slightly open, and the place still had a look of great strength, like a rock in the woods. Moss and lichen patched the roof and where the walls were free of ivy, ferns grew in the crevices of the stones. There were a few stunted apple trees in the clearing, and rose briers running wild, remains of a garden that had been here once, and there was a huge old thorn tree beside a well. It did not need the small stone cross over one gable to tell Mary that Fox Barton had once been a barn, or perhaps a guest house, belonging to the abbey. She would have known because her mind instantly linked it with the lime avenue. Here there had been another entrance to the domain of the abbey. The old deep lane was as old as the abbey church.

“Can we go inside?” she asked Edith.

“I’m sure Mr. Baker wouldn’t mind.”

“Mr. Baker?”

“This is where Mr. Baker bodges. He makes his chair legs here. He can’t be here today because it’s all silent.”

“Then we won’t go in.”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”

“We won’t go in,” said Mary firmly. “We’ll have our tea under the thorn tree by the well and perhaps he will come back and ask us in.” Not a troll, she thought, but Mr. Baker. Does Paul ever come here? The thought that he should do so brought with it a sense of joy, for already this place had her in its grip, and her friendship with Paul was now of the type that takes it hard if love of places, books and people cannot be shared. A short while ago she had rather shyly asked him if she might read his poems. He had not seemed to mind and had given them to her. She had found them well written, full of anger and compassion but free of either despair or illusion, and they had carried her some way toward the understanding of him that it seemed to her so imperative that she should have. For love alone doesn’t go far enough, she told herself. It must be charged with understanding. That’s where I failed before.

She was looking at the thorn tree, and suddenly dismay struck through her, like a flash of lightning striking through the trees of the cool summer wood. God help me, she thought, remembering the happiness of their recent meetings and seeing them suddenly irradiated with this new and marvelous light. Not now. Not at my age. Not now, at fifty, to love as I could not love when I was younger. You fool of a woman! Just to think such a thing could be possible shows what a fool you are. It’s not possible. This is a place that goes to one’s head, that’s all. It goes to one’s head.

“I’m awfully hungry,” said Edith.

“Forgive me,” said Mary. If the child had not spoken she believed she would have stood here struck by lightning indefinitely.

Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finish’d joy and moan;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

The words, flashing into her mind, were a salutary reminder that she was growing old. Yet as she led the way to the well under the thorn tree she did not feel it.

She and Edith sat on the grass beside the well and spread out their picnic tea. As they ate they were silent at first, for a robin sang in the thorn tree over their heads and when they looked up they could see his pulsing throat. In the wood a woodpecker was laughing and wood doves were cooing. The way by which they had come was hidden from them by the angle of the house and the great trees stood all about the clearing, walling them in with the impenetrable magic of legend. They could see aisles in the wood, sun-shot leaves, green ferns and brambles, but they no longer believed they could move among these things in their bodies. All of them that could enter that wood was there now. Only their grosser part sat beside the well and would live here, they supposed, forever, since for their bodies there was no way out through this wood. The prospect was not disturbing.

“If we lived here always we could eat the apples and drink the well water,” said Edith.

“The well,” said Mary, and she got up to look at it. When she leaned on the parapet and looked down, a cool breath came up into her face, for it was spring water, living water. Its surface mirrored her face and a few white clouds behind her head reshaping themselves in the blue of the sky, but in broken ripples that were the faint stir of its life.

“If you put your hand down you’ll find the holes in the wall where they used to keep their butter in hot weather,” said Edith. “Mr. Baker showed them to us once when we came here with Mother.”

Mary slipped her hand down through the ferns that grew inside and found the small square apertures. It moved her strangely to think how many women’s fingers had groped through the ferns, as hers were doing, feeling for their hidden treasure. It surprised her to find the little doorless larders empty now. The cool breath of the living water, the scent of it, increased the sense of shame that had been with her all the afternoon. She turned around and sat down on the parapet facing Edith.

“I want to tell you, Edith. Today is the first time I have been in Ash Lane. Well, I’ve been busy, so perhaps I’m not to be blamed for that, but I am to be blamed that I walked through the door as though I’d done so every day for weeks. I wanted you to think I had. I deceived you and deception is stealing because it takes away the truth. Forgive me, Edith.”

Edith was looking away from her. Could a child understand such a very feminine bit of vanity, of compunction? Suddenly Edith jumped up and came to her, flinging herself into her arms and sobbing wildly. She held the child firmly but in utter bewilderment. What had she said to provoke this primordial grief? It seemed vast and hopeless, like Eve’s in the Garden when she knew what she had done. She asked no questions but waited, and presently Edith stopped sobbing and was silent.

“What is it, Edith?” she asked at last.

“I stole them,” whispered Edith.

“You what?”

“Stole them.”

“What did you steal?”

“Queen Mab in her coach and the little blue tea set.”

“Tell me about it,” said Mary.

“When the old lady was ill I used to go and kneel in the conservatory and look at the little things. I pretended they were mine; especially Queen Mab and the blue glass tea set. And then one day Mother said the old lady had sold her oak chest. And that night I had a nightmare, and the next morning I went to see if the little things were there. They were still there and the window was open.” She stopped and began to sob again.

“And so you took Queen Mab and the tea set to keep them safe from being sold like the chest,” said Mary. “If I had been you, and nine years old, that’s just what I should have done.” Edith looked up at her astonished and speechless, her face red and blotchy with her tears, the most bedraggled-looking child Mary had ever seen. “Yes, I should. It was unthinkable that Queen Mab and the tea set should go away to some dusty shop in a town. They’d have died there. When I was your age my Cousin Mary, that’s the old lady, offered to give them to me. But I wouldn’t have them. I lived in London and I couldn’t take them from the green parlor to London.”

“Then you don’t think I’m awfully wicked?” whispered Edith. “You don’t think I’ll go to hell?”

Mary laughed. “No, I don’t. It’s like this, Edith. Why you do a thing is more important than what you do. And so stealing because you love is really better than not stealing because you don’t. Not that I am advocating stealing exactly. This question of good and evil is very complicated. Life has been very difficult for us all since Eve ate the apple. Let’s wash your face with the well water. I’ll lean over and dip my hankie in. Where are Queen Mab and the tea set now?”

“In a box inside my handkerchief case. I’m always frightened that Mother will find them and ask questions. You’re quite sure I shan’t go to hell?”

“Quite sure. What will you do with them now?”

“Bring them with me when I come to lessons tomorrow and put them back again with the other little things. And I’ll share them with Rose and Jeremy if you want me to.”

The depth of her own relief astonished Mary. “That’s a good girl! Now it’s over and you haven’t got to think of it again.”

Edith cried again in sheer relief, and then let Mary bathe her face. Then they laughed together, each aware of buoyant lightness, as though a tangled string had snapped and they floated free. It was while they were packing up the tea things that they heard a trampling in the wood.

Their minds knew who it was but for a few moments their imaginations took charge and they looked at each other, tingling with expectation. It couldn’t just be a man in a place like this. It was Behemoth, or a giant, or some old monk of the abbey who had never died, and he had a third eye, or some characteristic that lifted him above the rut of ordinary men. Yet when he came into sight, striding through the beech mast and the hollies, Mary thought that no creature of legend could have suited Nightingale Wood more perfectly than Mr. Baker. For the last of the bodgers was no ordinary man. That great lean height, the long straggling mustache, the powerful prophetic stride and the enormous trampling boots beneath which the obstructions of the wood seemed to sink into the ground, were all attributes of a figure so majestic that even Behemoth would have looked ordinary beside him. For this wood would not have been Behemoth’s own, and would have dwarfed him to the proportions of an outsider, while Mr. Baker was in his proper milieu, in the woods that were his home and his life, his kingdom and his world. Technically this wood probably belonged to Mr. Hepplewhite; in any other sense Mr. Baker held it in direct tenure from his God.