The Scent of Water (21 page)

“Where is it, Jean?”

“Over there. I can’t go back.”

Mary took her out into the ferny court and made her sit on the seat there. Then she went back into the storeroom to the far end where the mirror lay smashed on the floor. There it was, an old chest of dark oak with the lid up. Even before she got near it Mary’s heart gave a lurch. Then, coming near, she saw what had horrified Jean. On the inside of the lid, carved with a rather too realistic cleverness, was a skull, and near it, very small, the initials W.H. The front of the chest was carved with interlaced strappings forming a cross in the center. Even before she stepped forward and shut down the lid Mary knew what she would see on top. A bird with spread wings. Her knees were giving way and she sat down on a Victorian piano stool opposite the chest. How was it that it had not been bought? It was a bit knocked about, and the new panels that had replaced broken ones had possibly destroyed much of its value, but even so it was a wonderful thing. Probably prospective buyers had thought that skull unlucky. Where had Cousin Mary got it from?

She went back to Jean, who was still white and shaky. “I love the glass,” she lied, for she had not even looked at it. “I want to arrange about having it mended. Would you rather wait outside in the car?”

Jean nodded and Mary took her out to the car. Then she went back to the shop. It was her fortunate day, for the owner had come back. They argued over prices and it astonished him that such a knowledgeable woman should give in so easily. She produced her checkbook then and there and the chest and the mirror were hers, to be sent to her when the mirror had been mended.

They had brought tea with them, for Jean did not like the noise and confusion of tearooms. It was while they were having it at the edge of a wood that Mary said, “Jean, that wasn’t a coffin, it was an oak chest.”

“A coffin
is
an oak chest,” said Jean sensibly. “And it’s the one she tried to put me in.”

“Who? Not my cousin Mary Lindsay?”

“Yes, but don’t call her Mary Lindsay. I can’t bear you to have the same name as her.”

“She was a good woman, Jean. She was only peculiar sometimes because she was ill.”

“It’s more wicked than peculiar to try to put live people in coffins.”

“If that’s what she did it was both wicked
and
peculiar, but I am quite sure you are making a mistake. Won’t you tell me about it?”

“No,” said Jean obstinately, and she had to put her cup down because her hands were shaking.

“Jean, you must tell me,” said Mary. “I am very sorry but you must tell me at once.”

She had already discovered that when Jean was in one of her obstinate moods she would not yield to persuasion but if commanded she obeyed at once with a sweet and touching reasonableness. She did now, folding her hands like a chidden child.

“It was not long after we came. I hadn’t seen Miss Lindsay but I was frightened of her because people said she was odd. And I am terrified of odd people because I’m afraid of getting like them.”

“Oddness isn’t catching. One doesn’t catch things unless there are germs attached.”

“There are germs attached to anything you’re frightened of,” said Jean with a return of obstinacy.

“Go on telling me about the chest,” commanded Mary.

“We hadn’t been at Appleshaw long and I was on my way to visit the cottages in Ash Lane. James said I must. And I had to pass The Laurels. I was always frightened of that door in the wall because once when it was open it looked like the grave of Lazarus yawning in the rock. I tried to walk past it quickly but my feet dragged and I couldn’t. And then the door flew open and she ran out like a spider; you know that horrible way spiders run as soon as a fly or a bee touches a thread of their web.”

“Yes. Go on.”

“She ran out so fast, a skinny old woman in a long black dress, and she gripped my wrist. Her fingers were so thin but they were strong. She spoke to me but I was too terrified to understand what she said, except that I was to go inside and see something. She pulled me up that passage, and the leaves were whispery and dim, and the hall beyond dark. Only the flowers on the coffin were bright and pretty, but she took them away with her free hand and lifted the lid of the coffin and there underneath was that skull.”

“What did you do then?” asked Mary.

“I tried to pull my hand away but she held on and I knew she was going to put me in the coffin. I cried out, I think, and somehow I got away and out of the house. I don’t remember how. I only know I got out.”

“And you went home?”

“Oh no, I went on to visit in Ash Lane.”

“But weren’t you dithery at the cottages?”

“Indeed I was. I couldn’t say anything. But I had to go. James had told me to go.”

“You didn’t go to The Laurels again?”

“Not till I came to call on you. James didn’t tell me to, not till he told me to visit you. He did Miss Lindsay himself. Parish-visited her, I mean.”

“Jean, she didn’t want to put you in the chest. She wanted to show you her treasures. It was her way of welcoming you to Appleshaw. What she said to you at the door was, ‘Come in and see my little things.’ She had a lovely collection of tiny treasures. I’ll show them to you one day. And she wanted you to see her marvelous old chest. She thought of it as an altar, not a coffin.”

“An altar?”

“The hall used to be the chapel of the monks’ infirmary. Your brother will tell you this. I have her diary and I read in it only a few weeks ago that she was hoping to find a chest or table to put against the wall where the altar used to be.”

“Poor old lady!” said Jean after a silence. “Do you think she was hurt that I ran away?”

“If she was, it’s all over long ago.”

“Nothing is ever over,” said Jean. “You thread things on your life and think you’ve finished with them, but you haven’t because it’s like beads on a string and they come around again. And when something bad you’ve done to a person comes around again it’s horrible, for if the person is dead there’s nothing you can do.”

“I have thought lately that sometimes there is,” said Mary. “When it comes around again, then if it is possible, give what you failed to give before to someone else. You will have made reparation, for we are all one person.”

“People only? Or all of us?” Jean’s hand, with a gesture calm and serene for such an agitated person, seemed to indicate the birds calling in the wood behind them, the sheep in a high field on the skyline and the cats at home.

“Scientists say we are all of one substance,” said Mary. “The Bible says we come from the one God and await the one redemption.”

“I’m always full of reverence when I look at my hens,” said Jean.

It seemed to Mary that the whole world laughed with her, and in her rather alarmingly visual memory the image of the skull was subtly changed. In a lesser degree the carving had shocked her, too. The mockery of a skull’s grin always shocked her and she had wondered how Cousin Mary had tolerated it, hidden in the hall, and why she had wanted to show it to Jean, apparently with affection. But seeing it now in her mind’s eye the mockery was gone. It was merely amused, as though to those still in possession of a skull death could show only the profile of the hard bones, yet laughed to think how differently he appeared to those upon his other side.

Mary sat up late that night with the diary. She had been reading it slowly and steadily, passing with Cousin Mary through the first few years at Appleshaw, years of alternate illness and respite, so much at one with her cousin that she seemed to be learning with her how to accept the first with hope and the second with wonder and gratitude. Cousin Mary hoped her journey through periods of dark and light was like that of a Swiss train toiling up the mountainside, in and out of tunnels but always a little farther up the hill at each emergence. But she could only hope that this was so. She did not feel it. It seemed to her that she did not advance at all and that what she was learning now was only to hold on. The Red Queen in
Alice Through the Looking Glass
, she remembered, had had to run fast merely to stay where she was, but doubtless she had run in hope, disdaining despair; and hope, Cousin Mary discovered, when deliberately opposed to despair, was one of the tough virtues.

And when respite came could there be anything more marvelous than the sunburst of light? What was life like, Cousin Mary wondered, for those who seem to live more or less always on an even keel? For them too there must be the swing of the pendulum, for nothing living could escape it, but the self-pity of her youth began to leave her as she considered their relative joys, only so far up because it had been only so far down, in comparison to her sunbursts. They would never reconcile her to the abyss, nor was it right that they should since the abyss was evil, but the somber backcloth increased joy to the point where wonder and thankfulness merged into a clarity of sight that transfigured every greeting of her day. She opened her window in the morning and saw a spider’s web sparkling with light and was aware of miracle. Sitting in the conservatory with her sewing she knew suddenly that the sun was out behind the vine leaves and that she was enclosed within green-gold light as in a seashell. She dropped her sewing in her lap and was motionless for an hour while the light lay on her eyelids and her gratitude knew no bounds. Standing inside the willow tree she looked up and a thrush was there, so close to her that she could learn by heart the gleaming diapason of his breast, the sleek folding of the wing feathers, the piercing bright glance going through her like lightning. They were alone in the world, he and she, and presently he was alone and she was only a pair of eyes of which she was no longer aware. He did not fly away until some sound disturbed him, for the creatures were not afraid of her while she walked in light though they feared her in darkness. Once she held up her finger to a butterfly and it alighted there, and though it soon flew away again, her finger wore the sensation of airy lightness like a jewel until nightfall. She grudged herself to sleep on the moonlit nights, for she could not bear to lose a moment of the moon’s serene companionship. These and other greetings she recorded in her diary.

They are more than themselves and when the wonder grows in me I am more than myself. Whenever I am conscious of this more than ourselves I remember the old man in the garden at home, looking at the butterflies in the buddleia tree, and how the butterflies seemed to shine on his face, or something in him shone on the butterflies, I didn’t know which. I may have imagined the light but I didn’t imagine the more than ourselves. That’s real enough, and when I am conscious of it my wonder and gratitude clap hands together and what is caught up from me is more than either. If any words come to me then they are those of the old man’s second prayer, “Thee I adore.”

After that entry there were several descriptions of village doings, in which in her good times she could sometimes take part. Tea parties, games of chess with the squire, Sunday school outings and cricket matches on the green. It was in the midst of these jottings that Mary found what she was looking for. They were decorating the church for the harvest festival and Cousin Mary was sent to the vestry by Mrs. Carroway to find a ball of string. She wrote:

She told me it would be in the chest. I didn’t know what chest and I didn’t like to ask because she was getting a little irritated; the dahlias were weak-kneed and would not stand upright. I went into the vestry and looked around and at first I couldn’t see any chest, and then I saw it in the dark corner under the north window. I went over to it and stood looking down at the closed lid, dark like water and with a greenish tinge because of the yew tree outside the window. It seemed to me that the water stirred, or that wings moved. It was only the reflection of the branches of the tree lifting in the wind but the movement caught my attention and I looked closer and saw that a bird with outspread wings was carved on the lid, like those symbols of the spirit that one sees in stained-glass windows. I lifted the lid and inside, just beneath the bird in flight, was a skull. Both were beautifully carved and were enclosed in a circle of the same size and design, so that I realized that one was not to be considered without the other. They were a unity, like a two-sided coin. The front of the chest was carved with a typically sixteenth-century design, interlaced strapwork forming a cross in the center. It was riddled with woodworm, the carvings broken in places, some of the panels cracked. Seeing it like that made me want to cry and I stood looking down at it as though it were someone I loved ill in bed. Then I suddenly remembered what I was here for and I rummaged inside it, among torn old hymnbooks, broken candlesticks and all sorts of rubbish, until I found a ball of string.

“Couldn’t you find it, dear?” Mrs. Carroway asked when I brought it to her. I apologized and finished the pulpit for her, tying the weak-kneed dahlias to the heads of the twelve apostles, and presently Mr. Carroway came along, rosy and smiling, his hands clasped behind his back, to see how we were doing.

“Very tasteful, Miss Lindsay,” he said. It wasn’t true, for I don’t know much about arranging flowers, and nor does he, but Mr. Carroway is always courteous.

“That chest in the vestry,” I said, getting up and dusting my knees. “Where did it come from?”

“Chest?” he asked.

“The one under the north window.”

“Ah yes,” he said vaguely.

“Come and see,” I said, and to his dismay I took him by the arm and led him to the vestry. I had already discovered that his interest in church history includes the fabric of the churches but not their furniture. Nor does his passion for bees extend to the flowers that are the reverse side of bees. He has a two-track mind, which is more than most of us have, but the tracks are narrow. Yet I think he was stirred when I told him I was sure the chest was sixteenth-century, and he agreed with me when I said it must once have been a treasure of the monks. He put his spectacles on and had a good look at the carvings, and he seemed a little ashamed of himself that he had not had a good look before.