In the Springtime of the Year (12 page)

She did not go so often to the graveyard. Something else was over. She came instead to Helm Bottom and sat on the tree, remembered. For only by remembering might she piece the pattern together and understand it. Until now, she had only seen it in flashes, as though a light had been turned on to a picture, but turned off again, at once, before she had had a clear view of it.

7

FOR TWO HOURS
each afternoon, Godmother Fry used to sleep, on the low couch in her sitting room, and then Ruth had gone out alone, to explore all of this new countryside which pleased her, because it was so unlike home. At home, the fields were flat and often, in spring or winter, colourless under water or ice; there were few trees and only thin, streaky hedges, and the sky seemed to be not only above but on all sides, like a great, bleak dome.

Here, everything had shape, and so many contrasts, in the dips and rises, the high narrow ridge and the secret pockets of woodland, here, hedges were tall, with steep, grassy banks leading up to them, and when you came to a gap or a gateway, you looked over pastures or thick corn, towards the beech woods on the far slope, or else further, to the smoky, lilac hills.

It was June. Hot. But the trees were still a fresh, sappy green, and the hay was full of clover. Traveller’s joy and the white, bell flowers of convolvulus were thrown over all the hedges and trailed down like ragged clothes set out to dry, the fields were set about with
ox-eye
daisies and corn-marigold. Every day, Ruth picked handfuls of different flowers, white and mauve and butter yellow, and carried them back for her Godmother, and could never accept that wild plants would not thrive indoors, she arranged them faithfully, in bowls and jugs of water, only to find them the next morning, drooping and crumpled, for lack of something vital to them. But still she picked them, went scrambling up the banks, for white mouse-ear and the hidden beautiful heart’s-ease, tangling her skirt in the thorn hedges and slipping, now and then, down into some dry ditch, covered over by the long grass.

She walked and walked, under the speedwell-blue sky, and everything was amazing, rare, she had never been so happy, and there was something more, just below the surface of things, some expectancy. She was nineteen, she was free, and she remembered again and again, like touching wood, that her father had married Ellen, after all the years during which he had clung on to Ruth, through anxiety and loneliness, stifling her and chaining her down, and all the time calling it love. And so it was, a kind of love, but not a good kind. If he had not married Ellen, she wondered what she would have done, how tried to break away, for she was not resourceful, or courageous.

But it was all right, it was all right. And so, she crossed fields and went along the river bank, she lay on the short, dry grass of the ridge and heard the larks
which
spiralled up and above her head, and was, at last, alive, a person and full of hope.

If the early afternoon sun was too hot, she walked in the woods, feeling like some sea-creature in the watery green light.

And this Friday, when she saw Ben in the clearing, at the heart of Ditcher’s Copse, she realised that he was the one who had watched her as she came out of the church that Sunday, and whose face she had remembered, without knowing why.

He was sitting on the ground, with a lunch bag open beside him, and she hesitated, afraid perhaps, though not of him. He turned round hearing her.

Now, it was this sight of him which came back to her most clearly. In her memories of him in other places, later on, even when she had been closest to him, she could not recall his face, she woke in terror at night, trying and trying to bring it into view, but it was always a blur, so familiar and yet apparently already forgotten.

But this was never forgotten.

For her own part, she had never been surprised at what happened. She was only nineteen, she had known no men, outside of the circle of her father’s friends and relatives, because he had discouraged any others, seeing them as threats to himself.

Here, she was newly set free, given full possession of herself for the first time in her life. And so, meeting Ben, she loved him. She was grateful that it had been
Ben
, because she had been so open to love and might have met anyone and been made unhappy, and would not have been able to defend herself against it.

But it was Ben’s love for her, just as immediate, which never ceased to surprise her, because he was older, twenty-seven, an independent man, he must have known others, and she did not set any particular store by herself. Her father had once said, ‘You’ll never make a beauty,’ and she had accepted that. When she asked him, Ben had said no, there had never been anyone he wanted to know well, until now.

‘You were waiting?’

‘Yes. It’s best to wait.’

Their first conversation she remembered so well because she had gone over it for hours in her room at Godmother Fry’s that night, and all the following days, it was like a poem learned by heart in childhood, and so it came back to her easily, she could hear their voices in her head, and smell the woodland smell around them.

‘You’re Miss Fry’s Goddaughter.’ And he had smiled, at once, at her startled look. ‘Oh, don’t you know how it is? Everyone knows everything here. And tells.’

Oh.’ She would have said, ‘I don’t know you,’ but could not.

‘Have you come to live here?’

‘Only – I don’t know. For a while. Perhaps until the autumn. I don’t know.’

‘Miss Fry is a good, true person.’ It should have sounded strange – from anyone else it would have sounded strange, but this was Ben’s way, she was used to it from the beginning. And it was right, her Godmother was so, a ‘good, true person’.

Ben said what he thought or felt, and expected it to be accepted, there was no duplicity in him, and because she had no experience of how men behaved towards women, of the possible devices of human evasion, of flattery and pretence, she believed him, when he said, ‘I hope you stay here.’ Though often, later, Ben’s directness was to startle her, cause her to draw back and consider. Other people were no longer startled, they accepted from Ben things which no one else would say to them.

Suddenly, she had felt no anxiety in talking to him, it was the easiest thing, she told him about her father and Ellen, about home, and how she liked it here, what she did every day, where she had been, and he listened, sitting very still, not fidgeting with anything. Remembering that, she thought, he sat still that first time, and on the night before he died, he was eased of his usual restless need to be up and working, occupying his hands. And the two occasions formed the beginning and the end of a complete circle, a small circle, but one within which she seemed to have spent the whole of her life. He had got up, to go on with his work, and she had walked away, up the slope between the beeches,
thinking
of what he had said, how he looked, and only when she came out into the sunlit lane did she stop, realising that he had not asked her name, though she knew his. She wished that she might go back and tell him.

*

The days lengthened, moving towards midsummer, spun out like fine, golden threads, and Godmother Fry watched her, seeing the change, though she said nothing. Until the Sunday, when he came to the house, and by then, he knew her name, and wanted to take her to Cantlow Hill, with a picnic. Then, everything had fallen into place, and she was not surprised at it, only felt more than ever in possession of herself and of the world.

Cantlow Hill. It was six miles away but she was good at walking.

‘There,’ he had said, and pointed to the small stone church at the top, surrounded by sweet-chestnut trees, which spread out long fingers of shade. They went up the close-turfed hill, between sheep, which cantered away at the sight of them, bleating anxious calls to one another, and the calls echoed and were taken up all around them. The air was dry and fragrant with hay-dust, and just ahead, it danced and shimmered with the reflected heat.

She saw Ben every day for the next three weeks,
but
it was that first time, at Cantlow Hill, which she brought back to mind over and over again.

She had kept glancing at him and each time, she expected him to have vanished. When she looked away again, down the hill to where the fields and woods and the flat beige ribbon of road lay, and Cantlow village, rose-red under the sun, everything seemed to have changed, everything was somehow caught up in her happiness. She loved everything she saw, for itself and because it existed in the same world as Ben.

He took her inside the church, where it was as cool as a dairy, and there was a curious, sandy light. It was a very plain church. He showed her the carvings of animals and birds that ran round the tops of all the stone pillars, and the wall paintings of the Virgin and Child, just showing flaky blue and cream, by the altar. The pews were of pale wood, and there were no coloured windows, no embroidered hangings or kneelers, and so the shapes of the archways and pillars and roof were clear. And the outside world was set in the frame of the porch, like a picture, vividly green and blazing with sunlight, the band of the sky vibrating faintly at the edge. From far away, they heard the sheep cries and from the churchyard, blackbirds and the churr of wood pigeons.

They ate their picnic, eggs and apples and cheese and bread, sitting on the cool grass among the gravestones, and Ruth had closed her eyes and prayed for this never to end.

*

The scents of the day hung about in the warm evening air, the sky seemed not to darken but to grow paler and paler, losing its colour, and the trees and hedges threw blackberry shadows, and every sound was separately held, like the air within a soap bubble.

They went down through the woods to a stream and picked handfuls of dark watercress, and crushed wild thyme under their feet. The water was as clear as glass and very shallow, running over silvery pebbles. Ruth lay down and put her hands in it up to the wrists, and they took on a strange phosphorescence as the water slipped between her fingers. She touched the thin, cold stalks of weed.

The light became mossy-green, and a slight, warm breeze stirred the tops of the trees, with a sound like the very distant sea.

‘Well,’ Godmother Fry had said, when she got in, ‘well!’ and had held out her hand, and brought Ruth closer to her chair, looked into her face, knowing.

8

RUTH SAW THE
man first from the window. She had been up for half an hour, perhaps more, had washed and dressed; and then done nothing but stand here, looking out, too tired to think or feel, drugged with the night’s heavy sleep.

It had stopped raining but the sky above the sagging trees was dough-coloured. She had not wanted to wake, for what could she do with another day, how might she drag herself through eight or ten hours, struggling against remembering too much and falling into despair, or giving in and weeping uselessly, sickening herself. She had taken to going to bed earlier, at seven or eight o’clock, longing for the oblivion which always came to her.

The man was old and dirty and pushed a handcart with one lop-sided wheel. He came over the track, looking down, but making directly towards the cottage and at first she thought that someone was again trying to see her, to pry, under the pretence of bringing her this or that, and she shrank back from the window.

But he was not from the village, she had never seen
him
before. As he came nearer, she noticed that the cart was half-full, though she could not tell with what, and loosely covered with a tattered sheet of sacking or canvas. Then he was one of the travelling men, selling pots and pans and brushes. She wanted nothing, she would have opened the window and called to him to go away. But she did not, it seemed impossible for her to exert herself even as much as that. And so he came on, leaving the hand cart at the gate and trudging down the path and around to the back door. Well, he would go away, as they all did, she had only to wait.

But after his second or third knocking, she went down, suddenly wanting to have the sight, even for a moment, of another human face, to be in touch again with the real world, outside of herself. Jo had not come yet today.

He was not old, not really, only dirty, with a thin face and stiff limbs. She thought, he does not know me or anything about me, he does not know about Ben. But he must, everyone must know – how could there be a person in the world who did not?

He had begun to speak as she opened the door, a stream of words, pattered off like a rhyme, spoken dozens of times each day.

‘Old clothes, shoes, pots, pans, vases, plates, watches or clocks, working or not, silver, coins, medals, knives, scissors, ornaments, fire-irons, coal-scuttles, blankets, brass …’

‘All that?’

‘Any of that, any …’

‘How? On that cart? How can you have all of that to sell?’

He pulled off his cap and set it back on his head in a single movement, but there was time for her to see that the hair was growing only here and there, in tufts and patches, anyhow, and with scaly, bald places between, like the pelt of an animal with mange.

‘To sell, young lady, anything to sell, old clothes, shoes, pots, pans…’

‘No,’ she said at once, for of course there was nothing and even if there had been, what would she be doing selling it to a travelling man?

He did not stop until he reached the end of his chant again, like a clock which had been wound up and must run right down, could not be interrupted.

Ruth looked past him, at the garden, the soil clogged after days of rain, the path sticky and red with clay. The donkey Balaam stood by the fence, head hanging down as though on a broken neck, stood as she had been standing at her window, scarcely alive.

‘I’ve nothing.’

‘Good money for your old things.’

‘There’s nothing.’

He turned away, thinking, that he’d not waste any more time here, on a young woman who looked as if she were not long married, and just setting up home, having little. It was the old who had always something to sell, the old and the very poor.