Cold Hand in Mine Page 5

  That, indeed, was why it had been possible to employ her, when a woman requiring the open market rate would have been out of the question; but at this moment it struck Rosa for the first time that Mrs Du Quesne's cheapness was like the cheapness of the house: slightly unnatural. Unaccustomed cheapness is something that takes much explanation in the world around us. It occurred to Rosa that perhaps she, Rosa, was beginning to regret having come at all, and that all these new difficulties and apprehensions were, as Dennis used to say, "projections". Nothing had been more familiar to Rosa than the sensation of early regret for almost every step she had ever taken; but this time she had thought that she had evaded the demon, even though perhaps by also managing to evade herself, for nearly a whole year. Where just now Rosa had undoubtedly been frightened, the notion that her external alarums had emanated, as so often, from inside her, left her merely depressed.

  She looked at her reflection, though only in the glass of the sitting-room window. The light was just right for the purpose, and even the grime helped to define her image. Certainly it was all the definition she wanted. She had always found life to move by contraries, usually petty ones, though sometimes not; and, as often before when she had been depressed, now found herself surprised that she looked as well as she did. She had long ago learned that it was when she had been feeling more confident that the sight of her appearance came always as something of a shock. Life evens things up or down; in small matters and in large (even though Rosa would have hesitated to distinguish between the two). Now she felt quite pleased. Her figure was still noticeably good, or at least well proportioned; and the thick, chunky sweater was in her right style. Even her face was still pretty, she thought, beneath the grey hair. At least she had the decency to keep her grey hair short: but then there had been a man who positively liked, and chose, short grey hair — though that, for better or for worse, had been when her own hair was neither, but carroty and rather long. Still, long grey hair always looked greasy and witch-like; and at once she thought anew of Mrs Du Quesne, though Mrs Du Quesne's hair was not grey at all, but quite black. And my skin is amazingly good for my age, Rosa thought to herself. (She had long ago made a decision to defer talking to herself for as long as she could.) She attempted a smile, though she knew it could only be a bitter one, at least for the most part. But it proved to be not so much a bitter smile, as a timid and frightened smile. She was smiling like a shaky adolescent. And then the image in the dirty window lost shape and identity. Rosa turned away, once more depressed.

  She took down her coat from one of the pegs at the back of the door on to the lane and set out for a walk. It was a respectable and even an expensive coat. Rosa still spent far more on clothes than on "the home" — or, indeed, on anything else that was in the least optional. And they were ladylike, conventional clothes that she picked, though simpler than the convention, because she had taste. Though her adult life had so far divided into two phases, neither of them especially ladylike, she had felt from first to last that her appearance must always show what she really was. And now that she had entered upon a third phase, this limbo at La Wide, she divined that her appearance was almost all she was left with. It was something that need never fail her while she had two pennies to rub together, and had mercifully little to do with the quite independent aspect of her naked body, provided that she did not allow her grey hair to grow long and greasy, or her hands to go too far in the direction of, say, Mrs Du Quesne's hands. With determination, she would be able to do something with her appearance until the last day came . . . She twisted her mind away from the thought of the morning's conversation.

  Rosa was winding her way along the cliff path, high and narrow above the autumnal billows (they are as grey as hair, thought Rosa); steeply up and vertiginously down, both billows and path. Rosa walked not fast but steadily: the cliff path ran for many miles, and was exceedingly wild and beautiful, recalling what the cliff paths of England were, the coastguard paths, well within living memory. The ascents and descents, beyond either the powers or the will of the ordinary visitor, meant little to Rosa; but then the beauty and the wildness meant little to her either, and the windblown cliff flora, the jagged, streaky geology, nothing at all. All these different things entered her awareness only vaguely. Almost every day, she went slowly on and on, in her good clothes; passing others, persons from the car parks behind, and men with guns, without acknowledgement of any kind, without one half-step aside, assuredly without a smile. "She looks just like a ghost," the women said, not understanding that she might conceivably have been one. "Didn't she look pale?" enquired other women rhetorically of their bored husbands. Rosa was one whom the weather affected little. "She looks like a mad-woman," the bored husbands would sometimes reply. "Perhaps she's searching for something," a girl might interpose more sympathetically. And the crushing answer would come: "Most likely searching for her wits".

  Rosa had thus walked for miles along the cliff path almost each day during all but a year, but now she soon began to feel tired and settled herself on a rough bench. She sat staring out to sea for possibly half an hour; letting the heavy waves erode her misery and break up her despair. Then a figure in black appeared on the path in the opposite direction to that from which she had come. A tall elderly man struggled forward against the wind. As he drew near, Rosa saw that he was in clerical dress, without an overcoat, and with his big black hat in his hand. His white hair was sparse and windblown. He stopped in front of Rosa and she looked up. Her first thought was: a sensitive face.

  "Good afternoon," said the man. "I believe you are Mrs Hughes."

  "Yes," said Rosa. "I am."

  "You have bought the little house at the place where they change the porters? At least I assume that you have bought it."

  "Yes," said Rosa. "I admit it."

  "You are seeking peace?"

  "Aren't we all?" The cheap words had sprung to her lips on some volition of their own.

  "Yes, Mrs Hughes. Indeed, we all are. Indeed."

  Rosa said nothing. She felt that any words she could find would be likewise unworthy of her; would show her in an unjust light. It was a long time since she had conversed with any "educated person".

  "Perhaps I might sit beside you for a moment?"

  Rosa nodded and, as one does, drew the skirt of her coat more closely to her.

  "And what was your life before you came here? If you care to speak of it, of course."

  "For the last eight years, I was a secretary. Then the manager sent for me and told me I was past being a secretary with that company, but that he had arranged for me to be transferred to the handling side. I said No."

  "I am sure you were wise," said the man. "And what happened to you before the last eight years?" Both of them were staring straight ahead across the pulsing, empty sea.

  "Before that I was seeing more of life."

  "Did you prefer that?"

  "No," replied Rosa. "I disliked both times," and, when he said nothing, she spoke again. "Who are you?"

  "I am the curate in charge of your parish. I too am retired, but I come here every autumn in order to permit your rector to rest. He is very elderly, even more so than I am, and, alas very infirm indeed, as I expect you know."

  "No," said Rosa, once more defiant, as always when confronted with any kind of official demand. "I don't go to church."

  "Possibly not," said the man. "But then you have no need to."

  "I wonder how you know," said Rosa, cheaper than ever, and misunderstanding.

  "You already live in a holy place."

  "What's that?" asked Rosa, her heart in a sudden vice.

  "I myself should not dare to live there."

  "Tell me," said Rosa, with all the stolidity she could muster. "What exactly is there that I should be afraid of?"

  "It is not a matter of anything to fear in the usual sense. It is a spiritual matter."

  "As how? I don't know about such things."

  "Oh," he said. "Where were you educated?"


  "In a convent," she replied, more quietly. "But I've long ago forgotten everything I was taught."

  He replied in a murmur, as if to himself. "I can hear the beating of your heart."

  But having said that, he said nothing more, while Rosa sat waiting, almost peacefully, for whatever might befall.

  "I come here daily," he said in the end. "I like to contemplate the immensity. There is a lack of immensity in the world. Do you find that also?"

  "Yes," said Rosa. "I suppose I do. But I don't look very much for it. I don't look very much for anything."

  "It is perhaps odd," he continued, "that we have not met until now. I believe that you too walk along the cliff."

  "Yes," said Rosa. "And I may have passed you without noticing. I do that often."

  "I think I should have noticed you" he said, as if seriously thinking about it.

  Rosa noticed that upon the grey sea was now the beginning of a black shadow.

  "This," she remarked, "is when my mother would have said 'The days are drawing in'."

  "Yes," he replied. "Soon we shall have to light the lamp before tea-time."

  A sea bird descended from the blackening clouds, screaming and searching.

  "You haven't told me," said Rosa. "This thing about changing the porters. People seem to keep talking about it. It sounds rather pointless to me. And, anyway, it doesn't happen. I've been there nearly a year and it hasn't happened yet, as far as I know."

  "Perhaps you have not known what to look for and to listen for. The porters are changed very quietly. No one speaks. No one grumbles. Surely you have not been given the impression that they go by shouting, like a trade union march?"

  "I have to admit," said Rosa, taking the plunge, "that I never heard about it at all until this morning, and then only from my char, if that is what I should call her. She said the great thing was if I did hear anything, not to look for what it was."

  "It is a disturbing sight for those unaccustomed to death and the hereafter: which is most of the world around us, as I need hardly say. I think that you are one, Mrs Hughes, who could not only listen and look, but kneel and touch with impunity."

  "Do I really want to?" asked Rosa, turning to him completely for the first time.

  "Oh, yes, indeed, Mrs Hughes," he replied. "To kneel and to touch are the proper practices of the pilgrim. That must be one of the things you have temporarily forgotten."

  "As with saints and relics and so forth?"

  He smiled at her for the first time.

  "But what should I get out of it?" She blushed. "No, I don't quite mean that. What I mean is why me? Why should I be supposed to do it more than another?"

  "Because, Mrs Hughes, your whole life has been a quest for perfection. You have always been concerned only with perfection, and as in this world there is no perfection, you are sad. Sadness can be a very special — shall I say, concession?"

  "I am sure the nuns used to tell us it was a sin."

  "As with so many things, it depends upon what kind of sadness it is."

  "Do you know," said Rosa impulsively, "I'm not sure that you haven't changed my entire afternoon!"

  "Where you now live," he replied, "there was for centuries a shrine with an image; and before that, probably on the very same spot, another image, very different and yet in important ways just the same; and, before that — who knows? — perhaps the goddess herself, in propria persona, if you will permit the words. Needless to say, no one could behold the goddess herself in her grove and continue to live. That is possible only when the divine is provisionally mediated into man."

  "For a clergyman you seem to take stock in an awful lot of different gods."

  "There is only one."

  "Yes," she said. "I see that too. At least I do now. You seem to make me understand things that I never understood before. And yet you don't say anything that's in the least new."

  "Daily life is entirely a matter of the pattern men and women impose upon it: of style, as the artist calls it. And the character of that pattern is very important, as day follows day. None the less, reality lies far behind, and is unchangeable: is ritual, in fact. It was of reality, I suspect, that your charwoman was speaking — perhaps gossiping. Reality is often dangerous, so she was cautioning you to avoid it."

  "And you?"

  "I advise you to advance towards it. When you hear the faint sounds I spoke of, throw open your door and see what there is to see. Fall upon your knees and stretch out your hand, as I said. And of course be prepared for a big change; something indescribable, unpredictable."

  "I have no idea what you are talking about," said Rosa slowly.

  "Few have. My general reputation in the parish is that of a complete visionary. I am said to go around upsetting people. Not that many care one way or the other." On the instant, he rose to his feet. "But now I must return to them. I am very glad indeed to have met you, Mrs Hughes." As he could not lift his hat, he waved it vaguely around. She had a few seconds in which to examine his full face closely.

  "I understand almost nothing you have said, " Rosa repeated. "And yet you have made me feel much better. Thank you."

  She would have gone after him along the cliff path, had he proposed it, but he did not. He merely bowed slightly and strode rapidly away. For a minute or so in the dusk, she could see his long black shape flickering and capering like a scrap of burned paper blown along by the wind, but soon he was no longer visible.

  A heavy raindrop fell upon the back of her left hand. She looked up. The sky was now really black, with a blackness that was not entirely of the oncoming night. There was nothing to do but make the best speed possible homewards. But though she scuttled along more swiftly than for a long time, she failed to glimpse the shape ahead of the man who had been speaking to her. The visibility was so poor as to make the rough path almost dangerous; and when Rosa at last re-entered La Wide, her good clothes and she herself were saturated more completely than ever before in her life, save perhaps once, that day in the Bois de Vincennes, of all places, with Dennis. People looked down their noses at the Bois de Vincennes, but when the rain began, it had proved astonishingly wild and shelterless. Then Rosa recalled that she was wrong. The man with whom she had shared a soaking had not been Dennis but Michael: vile, bloody, deceitful, dear old Mike.

  There was no electricity at La Wide. For lighting she depended upon lamps, exactly as her new acquaintance had said; and the oil supply for them had been another of the wearing nuisances which she hoped that Mrs Du Quesne would be able to deal with better than she had. At least, she, Rosa, would not have to listen to the supplier's patronizing comments upon her backward and impoverished existence. But now, before lighting a lamp, she stripped off all her clothes in the almost total darkness and flung them about the floor.

  Dennis, Michael, Oskar, Ted, Tom, Frank, Gwyn, and Elvington: those were some of the names, and what comic names they were! Rosa ignited a pair of lamps, then lined the men up in her mind. It was possibly the first time ever that she had deliberately done so, and, perhaps for that reason, some of the names had no proper faces, and certain other faces that she saw, peering and intruding from the darker areas, had no names. And after those days, during her years of respectable and responsible business life, there had been virtually no men at all; assuredly none with power over her. She took out an unused bath towel and rubbed herself vigorously. Then she put on another sweater and a pair of trousers, which she seldom wore; and over them her thick winter dressing gown. All these things felt pleasantly new, one after the other. The dressing gown she had had cleaned during the summer, so that it smelt impersonally of chemicals. The file of men had soon vanished; without even being dismissed. It was as if on their own they had marched away into life's battle and failed to return.

  What had happened to them: to them as individuals? It was another thought upon which Rosa had seldom dwelt. In almost every case, her final and consuming idea had been simply to get away, and to drag her sagging heart away also. She had
sought to avoid all thought of the man's continuing existence. And then when another man had appeared, it had been even more important not to reflect much upon the past. All she could now recollect was that Elvington, poor weak American boy, had destroyed himself with the contents of a killing bottle, though not on her account, but whole years later; and that big, fat Oskar had been actually killed, Scandinavian-style, in a fight, and a fight that was at least partly about her. Afterwards she had collapsed completely, very completely; and had had to be fetched back to England "under sedation" (and as cheaply as possible) by her half-sister, Judith. Frank was supposed to have perished in a car smash outside Bolton, where he had, at rather long last, found a job of some kind. It was her room-mate, Agnes, who had told her that, and professed herself willing to swear to it; but one could not rely upon Agnes even when she probably wished to speak the truth. Agnes had also said that Frank had been married only a week before the accident . . . All the rest of them were quite possibly still alive. Rosa wondered how many of them would reach Heaven, and how many of their respective women, and what would happen to them all then. She was still not seeing them standing in a line, as they had been doing, ten, twenty, or thirty minutes ago. Rosa had often noticed that such inner visions come upon one apparently unsolicited; soon vanish; and can by no effort be recaptured. She uncrossed her legs and said out loud: "We control nothing of importance that happens to us."

  She realized that she had not yet rubbed her hair, except to prevent it actually dripping upon her dry clothes. The new towel was soaking wet and quite unsuitable. She took out another new towel, leaving but one more on the pile. Seated on a hard chair, she rubbed away at her head, feeling active and effective. Then she had to consider what to do with two wringing wet towels, and several very humid garments. It really was not cold enough to justify the lighting of a fire. Rosa felt so full of vigour that she almost regretted this. She settled for ranging the wet objects upon strings which she stretched round the room. Fortunately, several pegs and hooks had been left behind in odd places, to which the strings could be tied; but the total effect was unconvincing, and more than a little eerie. There were new shadows, some of them vast; and intermittent small shiftings and flappings. I feel penned in by wet vampire bats, thought Rosa; but, as a matter of fact, the feeling was far more alarming than that, and far less specific.