In the Springtime of the Year (16 page)

PART THREE

10

BUT SHE DID
not go to see Potter the following day; it took her a week to summon up the courage, and in that time summer slipped into the beginning of autumn, as a hand into a familiar glove.

She smelled it first of all, going out of the back door that morning, to the hens, smelled autumn in the fine mist, which had condensed and fallen and lay as a heavy dew, though a few minutes later, the sun was shafting through, drying out the grass again.

Ruth took a stool and sat outside, patching the sleeve of a shirt, and heard the first apples thumping down, though the air did not stir with any breeze; looked over to the copse, and saw there a hint of yellow about the edges of the glazed treetops, as though a brush of it had been trailed lightly across. Yesterday, going over to Rydal’s farm, she had seen the last of the harvesting men, the stubble was ugly as a new-shaven head, and straw was caught in the hedgerows. Swifts and swallows gathered and wheeled and turned in drifts about the sky.

Autumn, she thought, cutting the white cotton.
And
did not want it to come, for it was another change, another season to be faced and lived through without Ben. Last autumn … But she frowned and turned the shirt, roughly, inside out, bent her head, for she would not, would not keep on, going round like a tame mouse on a wheel, remembering.

And so much of the world was green and yellow again, tarnished and dried out, they were not the fresh, sappy colours of spring. There had been so much sun, and the evening brought out clouds of gnats, to dance in a frenzy about her head, and below the branches of the fruit trees.

She did not want autumn, and winter, and the turning of the year. Yet it would be beautiful; the bracken would gradually shrivel and shrink and curl back within itself and yellow would flare up into orange and burn down again, to a darker brown, and the beech woods would change, like the colours of tobacco being slowly, slowly cured.

She thought of the sea, and of a place which might be blue and grey and lavender, of when the woods should be black again and the sun blood-red, and the hills all pillowed out with snow. For this summer had dragged its feet and time had almost stopped and she wanted to be away and knew that she could not.

But she had not thought, this past week, very much about herself. There was no point to it, she had come so far and would carry on, breathe in and out and let her heart beat and that was all. Except for the visit she
must
make, across the common to where Potter lived, the visit which might confirm or destroy utterly her view of the world.

Her birthday had come and gone, too, she was twenty. And felt a hundred or a thousand years older, all the ages it was possible for a person to be, and also, no age at all, a child damp from the tight, mucoid canal of birth.

Birth and death and resurrection, and one tunnel led into the next.

In the heart of the wood, just before dawn and in the September evenings, a tawny owl called
A-hoo
, and the voices of blackbird and thrush had dropped a tone, the vigour of spring all gone.

She looked at the neat, closely stitched patch on Rydal’s shirt and perhaps it was something achieved, something to be a little proud of.

For her birthday, Jo had brought her one of his shells, rare and heavy and curled inwards like a lip, spotted mole brown on a silver-pink skin; and a bunch of tansies and a slab of chocolate and a piece of soapstone carved in the shape of a boat. Looking at him, Ruth had known that his head was awash with the sound of a distant sea, his eyes looked upon some inner vision of masts and sails and moving water. Well then, he might go, for in another year he would finish school and he might choose to follow his great-grandfather Holmes, whose sea trunks he opened almost every day, searching among the treasures. He
might
go. She looked up, and let her hands rest on the shirt. Then, there would be no one, she would be truly alone.

So it might be.

And I am twenty, she said, and what is that, and how long may I have yet to live, so that perhaps in another twenty, or forty or fifty years, I shall not remember or recognise the person I am now? And Ben? What of Ben, how shall I meet him, if I am an old, old woman, how much will he have changed and grown and moved on? ‘Love is not altered by death.’ Yet she thought that now she might prefer it if she could believe that there would not be the terrible responsibility of another life, she might like to be blown away and dispersed like smoke on the wind. She could not choose, for what she knew, she knew. There were only questions and questions, silting up in her brain.

Questions.

She stood and folded the shirt neatly and set it down, for now, she must go, she should not put it off any longer. It was a quarter past six.

*

What she was thinking, crossing the common on the rutted path, was that she was twenty years old and knew nothing. For instance, she said, I never read books, I know nothing of what great writers have to
say
, as Jo does, and as Ben did. And perhaps they might tell me a great deal, teach me and help me, give me some more of the pieces of the puzzle of truth. Or at least I should be taken out of my own thoughts, the days and nights would not be so long. Though she felt that there was virtue to be had in simply enduring.

She remembered poems, two or three, learned at school, by heart and easily, when she was ten or eleven, and recited to her father, and to her father’s friends, because he had always wanted to display Ruth to them, he had been proud of her, she might be all that he had to show for fifty years of life.

‘Fear no more the heat of the sun,

Or the furious winter’s rages.’

She paused and the words tumbled about like stones confused together in her head, it was an effort to pick them out and lay them in order.

‘Golden lads and girls all must,

Like chimney sweepers, come to dust.’

They had been old poems that she had learned, and sad, they had made her weep, even then, though she had not understood them. She had looked out of the window across the flat fens, at sky and water and reeds, all colourless as bones, and felt close to death.

‘I will wash the ploughman’s clothes,

I will wash them clean, O,

I will wash the ploughman’s clothes,

And dry them on the dyke, O.’

And there had been a tune to that. But she did not know, even now, why it should have made her cry.

Books. But the books were gone, all those which had been Ben’s at least, shovelled into sacks and loaded on to the cart of the travelling man, and sold for money. And where was the money now? Some were left, her Godmother Fry’s books, but only a handful, a prayer book and a Bible,
The Pilgrim’s Progress
, and a book of receipts, and an English dictionary,
The Life of Mr. George Herbert
. She had never looked inside them.

‘I know nothing.’ Perhaps it did not matter.

Potter’s cottage, set at the bottom of a slight slope, was just ahead of her, the roof rose-red in the evening sun. It was a neat cottage, for a man who lived alone, with tidy grass and a tidy hedge and fresh paint on gate and door. Did he cook and clean and wash entirely for himself, did he have no friends, no visitors at all? She wondered how lonely he was, and whether he read books, or thought, or only returned from his work in the woods, to work on his own garden and walk the dog and sleep.

She stopped, and half-hid herself behind the bracken. Potter. What should she say? And suddenly, her
father
and Ellen came into her mind, a picture of them, stripping the fruit from the pear tree, and she realised how long it was since she had seen them, how little she knew of their life together now, and how greatly she herself had changed. They had written, after Ben’s death, and asked her to go home, or offered to come here to her, but she would have none of it, she would manage and bring herself through entirely alone. For the truth was that she was afraid, after all those years closed up with her father, in that comfortless house, afraid of being sucked back into the old life, as though she were a child again, so that her time with Ben would be erased and in the end, might never have been. She had broken away and must stay away, they must live without her. And he was married now, he had Ellen, so he should have no more need of her.

There was the chop-chop of a spade striking rhythmically into the earth. He was home, then, and in the garden. She would go. A line of smoke, pencil-thin, streamed up into the air over the top of the hedge, and as she drew nearer the gate, the scent of it pricked in her nostrils, and abruptly, she felt herself swung back hard into the past, and an evening last autumn, when Ben had made a bonfire and it had gusted up at him, filming his face and hair and bare arms with ash. Oh, she thought, oh, this is how it is, it is small things; a bonfire in the evening; this is what makes it so hard to bear. For what she missed now was not passion or important deeds, significant words, but the routine of
everyday
life, eating and work and sleep and talk of this and that, and the sound of footsteps about the house, the smell of wet boots on the step. Nothing could replace all of this, nothing, though she might live forever. It was not vows and fleshly love and the bearing of children that she wanted, it was so much less, and so much more.

Her hand was on the gate. Yes, the paint was fresh, smooth and rich and shining like new cream, the sun had not had time to blister and dull it down.

She could still go back. She would go back and never speak to him or ask questions, need never hear the truth; she might turn away, now, now, and run, he had not seen her yet. Why had she come at all?

The common was quiet under the sun and it was warm. There was only the regular chop of the spade and the smell of wood-smoke.

She pushed open the gate, went inside and slowly round to the back of the house, and felt that she must have been struck dumb. She saw Potter, his back bent and turned away from her. And realised how much she had let her own garden go wild, for here, everything was flowering and fruiting and clearly in its place, here, the hedge was trimmed and the sunflowers tall as men on stilts, a peach tree was splayed out against the wall. Michaelmas daisies were bunched and tied back, and the vegetable tops sprouted and feathered up, just watered. Here, there was riot and yet very great order. That was how Ben would have had it,
given
another year, he had worked as hard as Potter was working now, and it had all been allowed to run down to nothing, and that was her fault. She had not even bothered to follow through the little that Jo had managed to do.

He straightened up for a moment and rested one foot on the edge of the spade; not a tall man, and almost white-haired, though he was no more than fifty.

She should go back now. Or else call out, somehow bridge the distance that lay between them, which was the whole of the garden. She could not move. Through a gap she could see the tops of the beeches. Sweat was running down her neck, and clinging to her upper lip, and Potter’s shirt was dark with sweat, which had glued it to his back in patches. The sweat of fear and the sweat of work. But why should she be afraid?

She made no sound. Then, the dog Teal came out of the house and barked. Potter looked round. He saw her and called the dog back. They looked at one another, and for a long time, neither of them started forward or spoke, both waited and thought, and remembered; and did not know what was to be done.

The dog sat, obedient but making a small, whimpering noise in the throat, its body quivering. Ruth stretched out a hand and half-called to it, for this seemed a way of breaking the silence between herself and the man, and, knowing it too, Potter murmured to the dog, and it came at once, reassured, trotted quickly to her and let her stroke its head, nuzzled
against
her. Then, after a moment, it ran back down the garden. She followed it slowly.

‘Ruth Bryce,’ he said, looking her full in the face questioningly, before glancing down again, at the spade which was half-buried in crumbly soil. ‘Ruth Bryce.’

‘I – I’d wanted to come. Before this. I meant to come.’

Potter nodded. He had a curious face, the features pressed down together as though a weight lay on top of his head, there were deep lines, one below the other, and fine ones, criss-crossing his forehead like the marks on a map.

She said, ‘It’s a nice garden,’ and felt foolish. But how might she begin?

‘Yes.’ He took his foot off the spade. ‘Yes, it’s well enough.’

‘We … I haven’t done anything. It’s all – there’s so much, all the vegetables and flowers, and I don’t know about them. It looks so untidy. I haven’t done what I should to it.’

‘I’d have come. If there was anything. But I didn’t like.’

‘No.’

‘You need help, with the heavy work – the digging.’

‘Jo did some – he put up the beans. He’s done what he could.’

‘Yes.’

‘But it’s not enough. I shouldn’t have let it go.’

‘There’s time.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll find that. There’ll be time for it all. In the end.’

‘The apple trees – I don’t know what to do with those either – there isn’t any fruit. Hardly any. They’re old – Ben was going to fell them.’

‘They were neglected. Left for years.’

The dog Teal was sitting close to Ruth’s legs and she bent again and touched its black coat, she thought, perhaps I should have a dog. Perhaps it would be company. Yet she already had the donkey Balaam, and the hens and had scarcely bothered about them since the spring, only done what she must, with food and water. How could she be responsible for a dog?

Potter spoke to it. ‘We’ve a visitor. Eh? We’ve a visitor.’

The dog thumped its tail.

‘I want you to tell me,’ Ruth said quickly, before she could lose the courage and make some excuse, run away. ‘It’s – I want to know. Everything about Ben’s death. I’ve wanted to know but I couldn’t ask. Not until now. I want you to tell me.’

‘You should know, yes. If it’s what you want, you should know.’