A Kind Man
‘Susan Hill is a writer of striking versatility’
Saturday Telegraph
‘One of our finest novelists’
Sunday Times
‘Hill can evoke a setting, convey the essence of a situation and let one see into the inmost hearts of her characters in a single paragraph or sentence’
Spectator
Tommy Carr was a kind man; Eve had been able to tell that within half an hour of knowing him. There was never a day when he didn’t show her some small kindness and even after the tragic death of their young daughter, their relationship remained as strong as before. Grief takes its toll however, and it’s not surprising that by the following Christmas, Tommy is a shadow of his former self, with the look of death upon him. But what happens next is entirely unexpected, not least for the kind man… Greed, goodness, and an extraordinary miracle…
Susan Hill
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446402276
Published by Chatto & Windus 2011
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Copyright © Long Barn Books Limited 2011
Susan Hill has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Chatto & Windus
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780701185916
Fiction
Gentleman and Ladies
A Change for the Better
I’m the King of the Castle
The Albatross and Other Stories
Strange Meeting
The Bird of Night
A Bit of Singing and Dancing
In the Springtime of the Year
The Woman in Black
Mrs De Winter
The Mist in the Mirror
Air and Angels
The Service of Clouds
The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read
The Man in the Picture
The Beacon
The Small Hand
Non-Fiction
The Magic Apple Tree
Family
Howards End is on the Landing
The Simon Serrailler Crime Novels
The Various Haunts of Men
The Pure in Heart
The Risk of Darkness
The Vows of Silence
The Shadows in the Street
For Children
The Battle for Gullywith
WHEN HE
had left she lay awake, the curtains still drawn together, and prayed that it would not be fine, as it always was on this day. But she could tell even through the lined blue cotton that the sun was shining. She closed her eyes for a second, against it.
There were fields then, it was all fields, and the track led directly across them from their garden gate to where it sloped up to the peak, a dry track, sometimes brown sometimes sandy sometimes grey, according to the season and the weather, but never green and grassed over.
She looked at the peak, touched by the sun.
Then she washed and brushed her hair, coiled it up and pinned it, and at last went downstairs.
The spray of plum blossom was on the kitchen
table, thickly clotted white and set carefully in the best china jug, as usual. She touched the petals, but they were too delicate for the roughened pad of her forefinger to feel them.
The sunlight touched them as it touched the peak.
Nothing would be said.
The tin bowl of scraps and meal was on the ledge, waiting from the previous night when she had filled it, last thing before going up to bed, the chickens being her job and nothing to do with Tommy at all except for the wringing of necks. She used to do that. She had done a lot of things.
Once she had unlatched the door and stepped outside and felt the sun on her face and that the sun had a little warmth in it, she did not mind it after all and forgot she had prayed for rain and greyness. And that was as always too.
The past winter had been hard. Christmas was wild gales and then the snow had come straight after and piled up against the door and the henhouse, the fence and the gate. Tommy had had to dig himself a path out in the morning so that he could get to work, and the fields had been a foot deep in it, he had to set off an hour early just to be sure of making the time. From late grey dawns to early sunset the wind had blown at the cottage from the north-east, finding out every
hair’s-breadth crack and crevice in windows and door and roof slates, even, it sometimes felt, in the walls themselves. The range had been full all day and all night, gobbling up the fuel and yet never seeming to get warm. He had lit a fire in the front room too, but even when that had blazed up, drawn by the brisk wind down the chimney, their breath had been white as ghost-breath on the air, a yard distance from the hearth. The inside of every window was glazed with ice, the icicles hung down, gleaming crystal spikes, and the chickens’ water dish had to be hammered until the shards flew. Eve had sat huddled over the range, fringing scarves with stiff, sore fingers.
The chickens started up as she opened the door, clucking round in circles and, as she approached down the path to their pen, flapping their wings. It was difficult to empty the tin, they tried to attack it and her so vigorously, but once the first scraps were on the ground and they were pecking at them, she could step back and enjoy it. Tommy had long given up puzzling out why she liked them, gave them names, admired the gleam on their feathers and their strutting and jerky movements. ‘Only you don’t mind them in the oven or on the plate,’ he often said. But that was different, it was the way of things. It was just the killing she could no longer do. That and other things.
She stood for some time, alternately watching the fowl and looking round her, looking at the beginnings of the year’s kitchen garden taking shape, the first rows freshly dug, the bean canes he had started tying, and then beyond, at the field and the track and the sunlight on the peak.
It was all fields then.
HER NAME
had been Eve Gooch and she had lived in Water Street which ran alongside the canal. The bedroom she shared with her sister Miriam had looked onto it. Every morning when the curtains were drawn back there was the wide, black-shining water moving soundlessly past. Occasionally you saw a duck or even a swan, often a barge pulling coal or scrap metal, but otherwise there was only the dark, slick water.
She left at seven to meet three others on the corner from where they walked, arm in arm and head-scarved, across town to the pottery. Miriam went the other way to the printworks. Their mother stayed at home. Their father was dead before Miriam was four years old. She barely remembered him. Eve had a
recollection of a man with stubble beard and smelling of clean carbolic soap, a man with a loud voice but a calm way. And then he was gone.
Miriam had met hers first. John Bullard, very tall, very thin, with a long nose and an odd turn in his eye, John Bullard who spoke very little, smiled instead, or nodded or shook his head.
‘How did you ever get him to look round at you, least of all ask you out?’ Eve had said when her sister had first come home to wash all over and change into her lemon silk blouse. ‘How did he make himself understood?’
Miriam had reddened and turned her back in their small room, but later, going down the stairs in her best shoes, she had said, ‘He can be quite talkative when he likes.’
Eve and their mother had exchanged glances. ‘He can be quite talkative.’ Disbelief, the inability to apply the description to John Bullard, had united them as few things did.
Afterwards, Eve thought that she had willed Tommy Carr into her life because of her dread of being left alone with their mother when Miriam married. They were only fifteen months apart in age – Eve the elder – and she never once begrudged Miriam her husband-to-be, their house, their future,
only, without ever forming it into so many words, determined that she, would follow on.
There had been whistles and looks and quiet handholding at dances in the Victoria Hall and once, an arm round her shoulders and a quick kiss on a ride at All Hallows Fair, but no one who had taken to her, no one she had given a second glance.
John Bullard had come to tea twice a week and he and Miriam had taken over the front room, but with the door always kept ajar as their mother insisted, though Eve had no interest in prying and spying and kept to the bedroom or went out. It was late summer and still hot in the days, with soft balmy evenings, so that she could walk to the far end of the street and then cut down the snicket to the canal towpath, where there were always people strolling, couples, men on their way to and from the pubs and the Legion, children playing out late, boys fishing. She liked the sense of comradeship on these evenings, everyone belonging to the same place, working and living and playing and walking, so that they exchanged a word and a greeting whether they knew one another by name or sight or not. Because they belonged. Eve never felt this at other times. She had no real sense of where she lived, no affiliation to it. It was. She lived and worked here, always had, so always would and that was all there was to it.
But on these late-summer evenings it was different.
There was something in the air of the place that gave her small spurts of a hopefulness and promise, an excitement even, that were otherwise unfamiliar.
Miriam and John Bullard were married when the evenings had drawn in and there were the first frosts, but the day had been clear and bright with sunshine that made everything hard-edged. It had been a rush of working until well into every night to get the wedding dress and Eve’s dress finished, the sewing machine trundling for hours and the kitchen table covered with a sheet and then with the white lace and the blue satin, the tin of pins and the box of buttons and the sprays of artificial mimosa and pearls sewn onto a headband that held the veil.