Strange Stories Page 4

  Til walk with you to the top of the clough,’ he said.

  She shook her head. ‘It’s not there I live.’

  ‘Where then? ’ he asked at once.

  ‘Not that way at all.’

  ‘Will you get there?’

  She nodded: in exactly what spirit it was hard to say.

  He refrained from inquiring how she would explain the absence of specimens for her father. Two or three stones dragged from the walls of the house they were in, might serve the purpose in any case, he thought: outside and inside were almost equally mossed, lichened, adorned, encumbered.

  ‘Goodnight, Nell. We’ll meet tomorrow morning. Here.’ He really had to go. Harriet was made anxious by the slightest irregularity, and when she became anxious, she became frenzied. His present irregularity was by no means slight already; assuredly not slight by Harriet’s standards.

  To his great relief, Nell nodded again. She had still not put on his sweater.

  ‘In a few days’ time, we’ll go to London. We’ll be together always.’ He could hardly believe his own ears listening to his own voice saying such things. After all this time! After Elizabeth! After so much inner peace and convinced adoration and asking for nothing more! After the fearful illness!

  They parted with kisses but with little drama. Nell sped off into what the map depicted as virtual void.

  ‘All the same,’ Stephen reflected, ‘I must look at the map again. I’ll try to borrow Harewood’s dividers.’

  He pushed back through the heather, rejoicing in his sense of direction, among so many other things to rejoice about, and began lumbering down the track homewards. The light was now so poor that he walked faster and faster; faster even than he had ascended. In the end, he was running uncontrollably.

  ***

  Therefore, his heart was already pounding when he discovered that the rectory was in confusion; though, at the rectory, even confusion had a slightly wan quality.

  During the afternoon, Harriet had had a seizure of some kind, and during the evening had been taken off in a public ambulance.

  ‘What time did it happen? ’ asked Stephen. He knew from all too much experience that it was the kind of thing that people did ask.

  ‘I don’t really know, Stephen,’ replied Harewood. ‘I was in my specimens room reading the Journal, and I fear that a considerable time may have passed before I came upon her. I was too distressed to look at my watch even then. Besides, between ourselves, my watch loses rather badly.’

  Though Stephen tried to help in some way, the improvised evening meal was upsetting. Harriet had planned rissoles sauted in ghee, but neither of the men really knew how to cook with ghee. The home-made Congress Pudding was nothing less than nauseous. Very probably, some decisive final touches had been omitted.

  ‘You see how it is, young Stephen,’ said Harewood, after they had munched miserably but briefly. ‘The prognosis cannot be described as hopeful. I may have to give up the living.’

  ‘You can’t possibly do that, Harewood, whatever happens. There is Father’s memory to think about. I’m sure I should think about him more often myself.’ Stephen’s thoughts were, in fact, upon quite specially different topics.

  ‘I don’t wish to go, I assure you, Stephen. I’ve been very happy here.’

  The statement surprised Stephen, but was of course thoroughly welcome and appropriate.

  ‘There is always prayer, Harewood.’

  ‘Yes, Stephen, indeed. I may well have been remiss. That might explain much.’

  They had been unable to discover where Harriet hid the coffee, so sat for moments in reverent and reflective silence, one on either side of the bleak table: a gift from the nearest branch of the Free India League.

  Stephen embarked upon a tentative demarche. ‘I need hardly say that I don’t want to leave you in the lurch.’

  ‘It speaks for itself that there can be no question of that.’

  Stephen drew in a quantity of air. ‘To put it absolutely plainly. I feel that for a spell you would be better off at this time without me around to clutter up the place and make endless demands.’

  For a second time within hours, Stephen recognized quite clearly that his line of procedure could well be seen as coldblooded; but, for a second time, he was acting under extreme compulsion - compulsion more extreme than he had expected ever again to encounter, at least on the hither side of the Styx.

  ‘I should never deem you to be doing that, young Stephen. Blood is at all times, even the most embarrassing times, thicker than water. It was Cardinal Newman, by the way, who first said that; a prelate of a different soteriology.’

  Stephen simply did not believe it, but he said nothing. Harewood often came forward with such assertions, but they were almost invariably erroneous. Stephen sometimes doubted whether Harewood could be completely relied upon even in the context of his private speciality, the lichens.

  ‘I think I had better leave tomorrow morning and so reduce the load for a span. I am sure Doreen will appreciate it.’Doreen was the intermittent help; a little brash, where in former days no doubt she would have been a little simple. Stephen had always supposed that brashness might make it more possible to serve Harriet. Doreen had been deserted, childless, by her young husband; but there had been a proper divorce. Harewood was supposed to be taking a keen interest in Doreen, who was no longer in her absolutely first youth.

  ‘You will be rather more dependent upon Doreen for a time,’ added Stephen.

  ‘I suppose that may well be,’ said Harewood. Stephen fancied that his brother almost smiled. He quite saw that he might have thought so because of the ideas in his own mind, at which he himself was smiling continuously.

  ‘You must do whatever you think best for all concerned, Stephen,’ said Harewood. ‘Including, of course, your sister-in- law, dear Harriet.’

  ‘I think I should go now and perhaps come back a little later.’

  ‘As you will, Stephen. I have always recognized that you have a mind trained both academically and by your work. I am a much less coordinated spirit. Oh yes, I know it well. I should rely very much upon your judgement in almost any serious matter.’

  Circumstanced as at the moment he was, Stephen almost blushed.

  But Harewood made things all right by adding, ‘Except perhaps in certain matters of the spirit which, in the nature of things, lie quite particularly between my Maker and myself alone.’

  ‘Oh, naturally,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Otherwise,’ continued Harewood, ‘and now that Harriet is unavailable - for a very short time only, we must hope - it is upon you, Stephen, that I propose to rely foremost, in many pressing concerns of this world.’

  Beyond doubt, Harewood now was not all but smiling. He was smiling nearly at full strength. He explained this immediately.

  ‘My catarrh seems very much better,’ he said. ‘I might consider setting forth in splendour one of these days. Seeking specimens, I mean.’

  Stephen plunged upon impulse.

  ‘It may seem a bit odd in the circumstances, but I should be glad to have the use of a Land-Rover. There’s a building up on the moors I should like to look at again before I go, and it’s too far to walk in the time. There’s a perfectly good track to quite near it. Is there anyone you know of in the parish who would lend me such a thing? Just for an hour or two, of course.’ Harewood responded at once. ‘You might try Tom Jarrold. I regret to say that he’s usually too drunk to drive. Indeed, one could never guarantee that his vehicle will even leave the ground.’

  Possibly it was not exactly the right reference, but what an excellent and informed parish priest Harewood was suddenly proving to be!

  Harewood had reopened the latest number of the Journal, which he had been sitting on in the chair all the time. His perusal had of course been interrupted by the afternoon’s events.

  ‘Don’t feel called upon to stop talking,’ said Harewood. ‘I can read and listen at the same time perfectly well.’

  S
tephen reflected that the attempt had not often been made when Harriet had been in the room.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything more to say at the moment. We seem to have settled everything that can be settled.’

  ‘I shall be depending upon you in many different matters, remember,’ said Harewood, but without looking up from the speckled diagrams.

  ***

  As soon as Stephen turned on the hanging light in his bedroom, he noticed the new patch on the wallpaper; if only because it was immediately above his bed. The wallpaper had always been lowering anyway. He was the more certain that the particular patch was new because, naturally, he made his own bed each morning, which involved daily confrontation with that particular surface. Of course there had always been the other such patches among the marks on the walls.

  Still, the new arrival was undoubtedly among the reasons why Stephen slept very little that night, even though, in his own estimation, he needed sleep so badly. There again, however, few do sleep in the first phase of what is felt to be a reciprocated relationship: equally fulfilling and perilous, always deceptive, and always somewhere known to be. The mixed ingredients of the last two days churned within Stephen, as in Harriet’s battered cook-pot; one rising as another fell. He was treating Harewood as he himself would not wish to be treated; and who could tell what had really led to Harriet’s collapse?

  In the end, bliss drove out bewilderment, and seemed the one thing sure, as perhaps it was.

  Later still, when daylight was all too visible through the frail curtains, Stephen half dreamed that he was lying inert on some surface he could not define and that Nell was administering water to him from a chalice. But the chalice, doubtless a consecrated object to begin with, and certainly of fairest silver from the Spanish mines, was blotched and blemished. Stephen wanted to turn away, to close his eyes properly, to expostulate, but could do none of these things. As Nell gently kissed his brow, he awoke fully with a compelling thirst. He had heard of people waking thirsty in the night, but to himself he could not remember it ever before happening. He had never lived like that.

  There was no water in the room, because the house was just sufficiently advanced to make visitors go to the bathroom. Stephen walked quietly down the passage, then hesitated. He recollected that nowadays the bathroom door opened with an appalling wrench and scream.

  It would be very wrong indeed to take the risk of waking poor Harewood, in his new isolation. Stephen crept on down the stairs towards the scullery, and there was Harewood, sleeping like the dead, not in the least sprawling, but, on the contrary, touchingly compressed and compact in the worn chair. For a moment, he looked like a schoolboy, though of course in that curtained light.

  Harewood was murmuring contentedly. ‘Turn over. No, right over. You can trust me’; then, almost ecstatically, almost like a juvenile, ‘It’s beautiful. Oh, it’s beautiful.’

  Stephen stole away to the back quarters, where both the luncheon and the supper washing-up, even the washing-up after tea, all awaited the touch of a vanished hand.

  The cold tap jerked and jarred as it always did, but when Stephen went back, Harewood was slumbering still. His self-converse was now so ideal that it had fallen into incoherence. The cheap figure on the mantel of Shiva or somebody, which Stephen had always detested, sneered animatedly.

  ***

  But there Nell really was; really, really was.

  In his soul, Stephen was astonished. Things do not go like that in real life, least of all in the dreaded demesne of the heart.

  However, they unloaded the Land-Rover together, as if everything were perfectly real; toiling up the heather paths with heavy loads, Nell always ahead, always as strong as he: which was really rather necessary.

  ‘I must take the Rover back. Come with me.’

  He had not for a moment supposed that she would, but she did, and with no demur.

  ‘It’s rough going,’ he said. But she merely put her brown hand on his thigh, as she sat and bumped beside him.

  They were a pair now.

  ‘It won’t take a moment while I settle with the man.’

  He was determined that it should not. It must be undesirable that the two of them be seen together in the village. Probably it was undesirable that he himself, even alone, be seen there before a long time had passed. He might perhaps steal back one distant day like Enoch Arden, and take Harewood completely by surprise, both of them now bearded, shaggily or skimpily. What by then would have become of Nell?

  They walked upwards hand in hand. Every now and then he said something amorous or amusing to her, but not very often because, as he had foreseen, the words did not come to him readily. He was bound to become more fluent as his heart reopened. She was now speaking more often than he was: not merely more shrewd, but more explicit.

  ‘I’m as close to you as that,’ she said, pointing with her free hand to a patch of rocky ground with something growing on it - growing quite profusely, almost exuberantly. She had spoken in reply to one of his questions.

  He returned the squeeze of the hand he was holding.

  ‘We’ll be like the holly and the ivy,’ she volunteered later, ‘and then we’ll be like the pebble and the shard.’

  He thought that both comparisons were, like Harewood’s comparisons, somewhat inexact, but, in her case, all the more adorable by reason of it. He kissed her.

  At first he could not see their house, though, as they neared it, his eyes seemed to wander round the entire horizon: limited in range, however, by the fact that they were mounting quite steeply. But Nell led the way through the rabbit and snake paths, first to the spring, then upwards once more; and there, needless to say, the house was. Earlier that afternoon, they had already toiled up and down several times with the baggage. The earlier occupants had been sturdy folk; men and women alike; aboriginals.

  It was somewhere near the spring that Nell, this time, made her possibly crucial declaration.

  ‘I’ve run away,’ she said, as if previously she had been afraid to speak the words. ‘Take care of me.’

  They entered.

  When they had been lugging in the food and the blankets and the cressets and the pans, he had of policy refrained from even glancing at the walls of the house; but what could it matter now? For the glorious and overwhelming moment at least? And, judging by recent experience, the moment might even prove a noticeably long moment. Time might again stand still. Time sometimes did if one had not expected it.

  Therefore, from as soon as they entered, he stared round at intervals quite brazenly, though not when Nell was looking at him, as for so much of the time she was now doing.

  The upshot was anti-climax: here was not the stark, familiar bedroom in the rectory, and Stephen realized that he had not yet acquired points, or areas, of reference and comparison. He was at liberty to deem that they might never be needed.

  Nell was ordering things, arranging things, even beginning to prepare things: all as if she had been a diplomee of a domestic college; as if she had been blessed with a dedicated mamma or aunt. After all, thought Stephen, as he watched her and intercepted her, her appearance is largely that of an ordinary modern girl.

  He loved her.

  He turned his back upon her earlier curious intimations. She had run away from it all; and had even stated as much, unasked and unprompted. Henceforth, an ordinary modern girl was what for him she should firmly be; though loyaller, tenderer, stronger than any other.

  When, in the end, languishingly they went upstairs, this time they wrapt themselves in lovely new blankets, but Stephen was in no doubt at all that still there was only the one mark on her.

  Conceivably, even, it was a slightly smaller mark.

  He would no longer detect, no longer speculate, no longer be anxious, no longer imagine. No more mortal marks and corruptions. For example, he would quite possibly never sleep in that room at the rectory again.

  ***

  Thus, for a week, he counted the good things only, as does a
sundial. They were many and the silken sequence of them seemed to extend over a lifetime. He recollected the Christian Science teaching that evil is a mere illusion. He clung to the thesis that time is no absolute.

  Nell had the knack of supplementing the food he had purchased with fauna and flora that she brought back from the moor. While, at a vague hour of the morning, he lay long among the blankets, simultaneously awake and asleep, she went forth, and never did she return empty-handed, seldom, indeed, other than laden. He was at last learning not from talk but from experience, even though from someone else’s experience, how long it really was possible to live without shops, without bureaucratically and commercially modified products, without even watered cash. All that was needed was to be alone in the right place with the right person.

  He even saw it as possible that the two of them might remain in the house indefinitely: were it not that his ‘disappearance’ would inevitably be ‘reported’ by someone, doubtless first by Arthur Thread in the office, so that his early exposure was inevitable. That, after all, was a main purpose of science: to make things of all kinds happen sooner than they otherwise would.