It was no great distance from the church to Ruth's house. She would have walked it, had she not needed the car to transport her own vacuum cleaner to push over the vestry carpet. She gave a little snort as she struggled to wedge the unwieldy old machine across the back seat. Carpet indeed! It was hardly worthy of the name. It was just a layer of backing threads with traces of blue and red wool marking a lost pattern. It had been down there in her father's day and probably in his predecessor's. There was little chance of it ever being replaced now. Perhaps she and Hester ought just to roll it up and burn it.
But she knew they wouldn't. The vestry carpet symbolised, for her, Lower Stovey and its resistance to change. Some people liked being stuck in a time-warp. Ruth didn't. She saw it as a rejection of enlightenment and hope. Bit by bit, far from being preserved, they were being eroded away to nothing of any real meaning. Perhaps they'd turn into a community like Brigadoon, only coming to life once in a hundred years. Sometimes, when in philosophical mood, she wondered whether they all existed, or only dreamed they existed, like the Chinese sage and the
butterfly her father had told her about when she was a child. Am I a man dreaming I am a butterfly? Or a butterfly dreaming I am a man? But Ruth knew she was real, Lower Stovey was real. It existed because the woods existed. Nothing that was the cause of such torment could be anything less than reality.
She drove the short distance at a sedate pace, turning into the drive at the side of the Old Forge. She stopped, got out and dragged out the vacuum cleaner again, leaving it standing like a solitary sentinel on the path while she put her car away. She intended to carry it indoors, but somehow, after closing the garage door and lugging the vacuum cleaner as far as the back door, she abandoned it once more to walk to the far end of her tidy garden and stare over the hedge at distant Stovey Woods. She often found herself doing this. The woods exerted a horrid fascination over her. She felt their pull. On rainy days like this they looked nearer. Their dark mass nestled in a dip in the landscape. Like a sump, Ruth thought, into which everything bad, everything nauseous, everything shameful had drained.
Beneath her feet, the ground was wet and grass trailed watery fingers around her ankles. Everything had a fresh-washed look and was cool after the recent stifling heat. It smelled different, too. Damp earth. Sodden leafmould. Churchyard smells. Smells of the grave.
âRuth? What are you doing?'
She jumped at the sound of the voice and turned guiltily. It seemed to be her day for having people jump out of the greenery at her. Hester had emerged from the further side of a privet hedge where she'd been working unseen. Her arms were filled with red rhubarb stalks and their huge dark green leaves like a grotesque bouquet.
âI've pulled these because they've grown so big. After all this rain there will be more tomorrow. I've been thinking I might make rhubarb and ginger jam. Not with this lot, though. I'll make a pudding with this.'
Ruth was relieved to hear it. They had more jam of all varieties than they could possibly eat as it was. Making jam was one of the things which Hester did to show her gratitude for being allowed to live here with Ruth. Theirs was a long friendship. They'd been students together as young girls, sitting up half the night to discuss obscure authors, dishing the university gossip, planning stupendous futures. And this is how we've ended up, thought Ruth. The pair of us, stuck out here in this neck of the woods, with teaching careers behind us and in front of us, what?
What, indeed? Before Billy Twelvetrees had arrived with his disconcerting piece of news, she would have said nothing lay ahead but a humdrum retirement. It had been enlivened to date by occasional outings to Oxford for old times' sake or to Cheltenham for the National Hunt racing fixtures. They were modest gamblers, really only flutterers, but they enjoyed looking at the horses and mixing with the crowds of Irish visitors who always thronged the spring festival. The buzz of excitement was infectious. They rarely went to London. Its roads were clogged with traffic and fumes, its pavements peopled with hurrying pedestrians, pale of face, blank of eye, stressed of manner. The joy of the racing crowd was totally absent. If London crowds were aware of anything it was time's winged chariot. Ruth and Hester had reached the stage of their lives when they no longer had to make time their master.
They hadn't always shared a home, she and Hester, but they'd kept in touch throughout their careers. Hester hadn't married. Ruth had married late. It was the death of her husband which had brought Hester to Lower Stovey, at first just to stay for a few weeks and keep her company. It had been during a summer. Hester was still teaching at the time and her school on holiday. But she'd longed to take early retirement. She'd had enough. So somehow it had been agreed that Hester would give in her notice when she returned to her school and at the end of the following term return to Lower Stovey for an unspecified period until she sorted herself out. The sorting out had resolved into a permanent niche at the Old Forge.
Occasionally, Hester would say with a nervous giggle, âReally, Ruth, it's about time you chucked me out!'
Ruth could always read the fear in her eyes when she said it. She knew what Hester wanted was reassurance and she always gave it.
âNonsense, what should I do without you?'
Relief would surge into Hester's plain, weather-beaten face and that evening she'd cook some complicated dish as a thank you. She was a very good cook. Ruth, a slap-dash worker in the kitchen whose sponges left the oven as flat as biscuits and whose pastry required a breadknife to cut it, appreciated that Hester had taken over the cooking. It was just that Hester didn't always know when to stop. French sauces and savoury curries, followed by confections of cream or meringue, were all very well but sometimes Ruth did long for sausage and mash or good old beans on toast.
âCrumble would be nice,' she said now.
Hester beamed at her. âThen crumble it shall be. I'll just
chop the leaves off and chuck them on the compost heap. They're poisonous, you know.' She shook a stick of rhubarb topped with its umbrella of a leaf at Ruth.
âRhubarb?'
âNot the sticks. Just the leaves. You mustn't eat the leaves.'
âWho'd want to?' asked Ruth logically.
âYou'd be surprised what people do,' returned Hester in a sinister voice. âDo you remember that awful row there was a couple of years ago at the garden show when someone entered rhubarb as a fruit and someone else objected and said it was a vegetable. Then the first person, who was it? I do believe it was Evie at the pub. She said how could it be a vegetable when you ate it for a pudding? I think they solved the problem by putting it in a class on its own in the end.'
Ruth smiled at her. It wasn't only being relieved of the cooking chore which made it nice to have Hester there. She shared the running costs of the house and the car, both of which were useful. She was someone to talk to of an evening in the relaxed manner of old friends. Ruth was fond of Hester and, though it referred to a time she tried to forget, she owed her a debt which could never be repaid. She'd left the Old Forge to Hester in her will in case she pre-deceased her friend. It seemed only fair and anyway, there was no one else, was there? No one else to leave anything to.
âWhat are you looking at?' asked Hester, clumping towards her in her sensible shoes. Her baggy corduroy trousers, damp-stained at the hems, flapped around her ankles.
âAt Stovey Woods.'
There was a moment's silence. Hester asked gruffly, âWhy?'
âOld Billy Twelvetrees came into the church and told me the
police had gone up there. It seems someone found some bones.'
âAnimal,' said Hester.
âNo, human.'
âOld Billy's got it wrong.'
Ruth shook her head. âThere was some sort of policeman and his girlfriend who'd come to look over the old vicarage. The woman came into the church and later the man came to join us and told us human bones had been found. Old Billy overheard him, worse luck.'
Hester came closer and said fiercely, âThey'll be historical. You know how ancient the old drovers' road is. It runs slap through the woods. Some animal, digging around, has dug up a medieval peasant or old gypsy burial, you'll see.'
Ruth turned towards her and smiled again. âYes, Hester, you're probably right. I couldn't help but wonder, you know, just for the moment, whether they might have found Simon.'
They stared at one another. Then Hester rallied and said, âNonsense.'
âHe has to be somewhere, doesn't he?' Ruth replied.
âHe doesn't have to be in bally Stovey Woods!'
They'd had this argument before. Ruth abandoned it, not because she admitted Hester might be right, but because she knew she, Ruth, was and she didn't need Hester or anyone else to agree.
They were walking back to the house. Ruth let Hester proceed her into the kitchen and watched her run the tap over the rhubarb stalks.
âYou wouldn't think they needed any more washing after that rain,' Hester said in an attempt, Ruth knew, to turn the conversation away from the grim discovery.
It would take more than that to wipe it from Ruth's mind. But thinking of Billy Twelvetrees, she suggested, âIf you do make jam with the rest of the rhubarb, why don't you give a couple of jars to Dilys or drop them by old Billy's place when you're passing? I'm sure the old fellow would like some.'
It had been a spur of the moment suggestion and it left her feeling she was somehow trying to buy the old man off, which was stupid. Or was it?
âOh God,' she burst out and put her hands over her face.
âCome on!' Hester was there, comforting, awkward and sincere, patting her with wet hands. âThe chances of these wretched bones being â being
his
, are a million to one. You don't even know â no one knows â where
he
is.'
âI've always known where he was,' said Ruth, taking her hands from her face. âHe's been in Stovey Woods, all this time, waiting for us to find him and now, someone has. You'll see.'
The discovery of the bones meant there was something Ruth had to do. Something she should have done years ago. She left Hester happily turning the rhubarb into crumble for lunch, their main meal of the day. Ruth slipped into her bedroom and took a small rosewood box from the recesses of her wardrobe.
It was a pretty little object, a Victorian traveller's companion, originally with various compartments to hold the necessary ointments, panaceas and other medical necessities of the day. It had belonged to her father and it must have been he, she supposed, who'd removed the internal compartments, leaving the stripped box to be used as a receptacle for papers. He'd kept bills and receipts relating to the fabric of the church in it. She set it on her bed and retrieved the key which she kept under a vase
on her mantelshelf. She unlocked it and opened it by the brass handle on the middle of the lid. A familiar faint odour rose into her nostrils compounded of memories of its original use, a tang of sal volatile, a heavier sickly whiff which might, she supposed, have been laudanum, the sweetness of lavender oil, sharpness of peppermint and an exotic hint of oil of cloves. It still held papers, envelopes, worn by much fingering, yellowing a little.
Ruth took them out and spread them on the duvet cover. The sight of the handwriting in which the words
Miss Ruth Pattinson
were scrawled caused a hard lump to form somewhere in her midriff. It wasn't grief that she felt, that had died long ago. It wasn't anger, that had died too. The effort of keeping its flames burning had been too much. So, was it shame? Or just something as mundane as embarrassment? Never underestimate embarrassment as an emotion, she thought ruefully. More actions had been undertaken â or failed to be taken â because of it, than many a better respected motive.
Her fingers moved as if of their own impulse, picking up the nearest envelope, slipping the letter from inside. The pain in her midriff grew worse. How eagerly she'd torn open the envelope the first time, all those years ago. How desperate to read its contents, interpreting every word as a word of love and devotion, believing its casual assurances that she was the only girl he cared about. In her own mind, then, these shallow efforts had ranked with the great love-letters of history.
âStupid, stupid, stupid!' she whispered.
Not stupid, not back then. Just naive and in love and wanting something so much she'd convinced herself it was real. For a long time now she'd read these words for what they really were, spur of the moment declarations inspired by hormones, not love.
A young man's words, a young man at heart still a boy, wanting to be in a man's world but loath to quit the freedoms of youth, to accept the responsiblities a man's world brought with it. In addition, a young man deeply flawed, selfish and spoiled.
There were takers and givers in this life, so her mother had once told her. There'd been a streak of cynicism in the late Mrs Pattinson, perhaps derived from long years with an unworldly husband for ever trying to see the best in his unpromising flock. Ruth knew her mother had been right in this. Ruth had been a giver but he â oh, he had been a taker, all right.