In Another Country (15 page)

 

Max woke her. His hand, come in under her nightdress, rested on her left hip. Waking she struggled fearfully to recompose a world. It was their routine to meet in the kitchen, as his waking hours ended and hers began, and they might have a cup of tea together, before he went for his sleep in their bed. Why go against his habit now? Very gently, very tenderly he stroked her hip and a length of her thigh. The room was already light. Her eyes filled with tears of shame. Don't, Max, she said. Please don't. He desisted, and they lay side by side, looking up at the ceiling. Why aren't you working? she asked. I thought… he began, I wanted… You were wrong, she said. I'm leaving you. I'm taking the girls. I shall need some money. We must sell the house. He wept. She let him. Then he said: You don't know how I love you. She answered: When I thought it might be cancer and I drove ninety miles to have my tests you wouldn't come with me, you said you'd be too upset, you said you wouldn't be able to work.
—I couldn't work. All the time you were away I sat up there crying and couldn't do a thing.—You like that kind of pain. I don't like any kind. It hurt me to press the pedals in the car. The girls were sick—not once, half a dozen times—I had to keep stopping, getting out, cleaning them up. There are different kinds of suffering, said Max. You can't drive, she said. You won't learn. I hate the road, he said. I wish they'd never built it. Both saw only reiteration ahead, and were silent. Max had an apprehension of his future loneliness. He dwelled on it, his heart beat faster. He came back again, more tempted by it than ever, to the notion that in misery, guilt, icy loneliness, he might do better work. I have to suffer, he said aloud. I have to. Then I'll do good work. Your suffering stinks, she said. All suffering stinks and is a waste of time. No, he said, becoming excited, we'll sell, I'll get a cottage on my own, I'll get one further up the coast where there is no road. He saw, as something beautifully clean and purposeful, the reduction of his life to loneliness and work. His eyes shone. He sat up in the exhilaration of the idea.

Judith got out of bed and, turning away from him, dressed quickly. You are beautiful, he said. The line of your back is beautiful. And now you won't let me touch you. I'm lame, she said, and it is getting worse. Then when she was dressed she turned to him sitting up naked in their bed. He was thin and strong, fit, smooth-skinned. His face was alert and lit with the idea of loneliness and productive suffering. You'll get Ellie in, said Judith. Ellie will keep house for you and sweeten the early mornings when you coincide in bed. At least I can talk to her about my work, said Max.

The girls were still sleeping, Judith went out. Cloudless early morning, paradisal. The little bay was brimful, quiet, shining. A couple of seals had come in close. Slowly, tried by every unevenness, Judith went down to the fence. The girls got to the sand in leaps and bounds, and through the bracken, on a rough path bearing left, Ellie could lead down her horse; but for Judith the fence was the limit. There had once been a way that she could manage, with everybody helping, but a storm, magnificent to watch through their southern and western windows, had rolled the boulders differently and spoiled it. She watched the seals. In the full water, their element, they rose together, necked, vanished, and reappeared apart. It seemed pure delight, in the water and the sunny air, that sinuous rolling together at the head and the neck, and diving vertically down and levelling again through the clear blue-green, like dancing. Max swam some mornings, she knew that. They met at the kitchen table, there was salt on his skin, his hair was wet, he drank a cup of tea with her and went to bed.

She turned away. The house in the one green field was sunlit. The first romantic adventure of the place, their work at it together, always with music and sharp thirsts and hungers, their love and mutual aid, woke in her now like temptation. The field had sprouted its pale and magenta orchids. The others, the common little flowers, Judith said them aloud as though teaching the children: eyebright, bedstraw, milkwort, tormentil. Visible south of the house was the road which Max detested. It was narrow, pale, insignificant, but seemed to Judith a brave idea, a brave undertaking, getting away south around a difficult coast. Behind the road, east, was the moor—moor and bog and mountain, that she could as easily have flown over as walked. But she knew: there were lichens in it with red and lively tips, there was cotton grass as soft as the children's hair when she cut it the first time and kept two curls of it among her jewellry; and in places where the shielings had once been, in spring the bracken unfurled more sweetly than she could bear to remember. At the back of everything were the high mountains, scraped raw, grey as ash in certain lights, pinkish, violet or red in others.

And so on and so on. Stars and the frozen waterfalls in winter, the sunsets all year round. Was she to live off beautiful phenomena, and bring the girls up addicted to them? Like nausea, always like nausea however often she felt it, there rose in her again the need for the necessary strength. She clenched her fists and set off up the rough slope back to the sleeping house. Then the white horse came.

In a wide arc, around the perimeter of the field, from hiding behind the house, he came down at full tilt, the rough ground never hindering him. Admiration, her instant first feeling, ran over rapidly into terror at his mastery and power, as he came down the slope and between her and the fence, through that small gap, passed with a streaming mane, and mounted again, and again went behind the house. She was left trembling at the rush, the din, the smell of the horse that had circled her, doing as it liked. Get home, was her only thought, get in and lock the door. If she was small against the mountains and the magnificent sunsets of Acha, that smallness was philosophical, an attitude of mind; but against the horse in common reality she was as fragile as a sparrow's skull. She made for the house, sobbing with fear, cursing her hips, and the horse came down again, set at her, as it seemed, full on, and swerved and passed and gathered himself up the slope, with all the lazy energy in creation to dispose of. A reasoning voice in Judith said: he is the image of strength, he is showing you what he can do, he can pass to right or left as he pleases, swish you with his tail for fun, without malice, he is young, he means nothing bad. But she tried to run, feeling she would break apart in terror if he came again, she tried and failed, she fell, her left hip came out.

Fainting on the pain, even as she went under she said: this has happened before, I know what to do; but when she came up again, out of a drowning sickness of pain, when she came up without any strength of voice to call for help from the sleeping house, the horse stood over her. He was the bodily apparition of every dread: the dread of utter weakness, of total disability, of the shame and helplessness of being lame, the dread of dependence, the dread of a cancer in a length of bone, and other terrors too, even deeper, in her blood, in the family, in the generations, in her race, the dread of them coming back; and on these she went under again, in more terror than pain, as the long white head of the horse, his swelling eyes, the black shafts in his nose, pushed down at her. One hoof raised gently on her chest would have crushed the life out of her, but it was the face, the orange tongue, the froth on the black lips, all her terror was concentrated there, on the steady face, she saw its strangeness as an utter difference, as a thing incomprehensible, a gap made in her apprehension of the world, and into that gap, as into a rent in nature, came nothing but blank terror that would never end. So she saw the horse, lying crippled under him.

Then not so. Then suddenly not so. On her back in a field as helpless as a flung sheep under the hooded crows, suddenly, and increasingly, it was not so. She saw that his liquid eyes were beset by insects, a vein in his left shoulder pulsed and twitched, and he dipped his long head down and with a clumsy gentleness knocked at her cheek, knocked and snorted softly, nuzzled and knocked, insisting. He trailed his fringe and sticky mane across her face, and raised his head in a long upward indication of how she might rise, and down again, nudging at her face and trailing the coarse hair until she understood and fastened a hand in it and gently, backing and lifting, he drew her up and she sat, tilting off her useless hip. So far so good. An inkling of triumph was in her now. She had a basis. She had done it before. Again the horse bowed his head. She twisted in both hands now, into the sticky, coarse, grey-white hair and hauled and he lifted and she rose and held against him in a queer
déhanchement
, all on the right. Last time it was the car, last time she had dragged herself ten yards up the rutted uncarriageable track, from among her spilled shopping back to the car, and heaved herself up bodily against its warm bonnet, and had then done there what she did now, pressing her face against the horse's throbbing flank, against her pain, did it again, shoved in the hip, ball into socket back where it belonged, and clung on to him patiently standing still, against the nausea and the pain.

Clinging to his mane, one step at a time, feeling the working of his near leg at the shoulder, its power held in to walk with her, she got home up the hill. At the door he left her, and resumed his lunatic courses down and around the field.

Judith opened the door. Megan was in the kitchen making tea. Her look was adult and officious. Dad's upset, she said. I'm making him some tea. Yes, said Judith, do that. And from the door to a chair, from chair to table, from table to a corner of the stove she got through to the sofa in the living room, and lay down. She saw before her, stacked like mountains, great but not unprecedented trials of her strength.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Shieling

 

 

 

T
hey invented a place. It was far away from here, indeed from anywhere, high up, at the limits, like a shieling. He particularly liked the word ‘­shieling'. A bare place, as far up the valley as you could go and the house itself very simple. In reality such dwellings, the shielings, are only for habitation in the summer, the brief summer; but theirs they allowed themselves to proof almost snugly against the winter months. In winter, the long winter, this place of their invention would be needed most. So he fitted a chimney that drew remarkably well and built a hearth out of the rough stones that were lying around. There was little fuel, of course—a few almost petrified roots very hard to saw—so when they climbed to this place at the top of the valley they always carried a billet or two of firewood in their packs. He liked the word ‘billet', in that usage.

Not that they ever did climb to it, not in the flesh. It was a place for our thoughts and dreams to go to, she said. A sort of safe house for them. Not for us in the flesh. Why the need for such a place? She asked me did I understand the word ‘dejection'? I replied that I did. Well, she said, when he saw me in my state of dejection, or more especially when he had to leave me in that state, he begged me to try to lift my spirits by imagining a place where it would be easier to breathe and where my voice, which in the dejected state seemed to sink far into my chest, might revive and come forth again. Will you be there too? she asked. Will we be quiet? He said he would, of course he would, sometimes at least they would be there together and, yes, they would be quiet. He said it would do her good to imagine herself in a high and remote place where the air was a joy to breathe and him there with her, sometimes at least, quietly. In fact he was the least restful of men, could never sit still, must always be anxiously ordering things, in a pre-emptive sort of way. You don't trust your life, do you? she said. Which means you don't trust us. Often, when I think of you, of your anxiety, I get so nervous, for you, for us both, I would almost rather be in the state of dejection, where I don't feel anything much. This hurt him, like a reproach, and he answered back, to hurt her too, that whenever he dreamed of her it did him more harm than good. When he told me how he dreamed of me, she said, what night dreams and day dreams he had of me, I was very hurt. He saw me taking somebody else's arm and turning away. He saw himself coming to my house and getting no answer and standing there on the step like any hawker. It hurt me terribly, she said. I was all the more dejected. Why could we never be a reassuring place for our thoughts and dreams of one another?

In the shieling, she said, we had only the necessary things: a bed, a table, two chairs, the few things wanted for living there a while. Even books, we had very few, nine at the most, that was the rule, if we added one, we must take one away. In truth the shieling was a sparsely furnished place. And it seems they were never there for long, not even in thinking and dreaming did they absent themselves for long. Nor did they allow themselves to be there together very often. I said I'd have thought it would do them most good to imagine climbing to the shieling, opening it up, making it homely again, together. She blushed like a girl, agreeing. Nonetheless, she said, the times when they dreamed or thought themselves there together were few, mostly each went alone, the long and arduous climb, the opening up, the settling in, was solitary. And I wondered how that could help, did it not rather make things worse, to climb in thoughts and dreams to their shared invention, and be solitary in it? But she said no, certainly not for her and she truly believed not for him either, did being in the shieling alone, she without him, he without her, make their situation worse.

The virtue of the place lay in its being their invention, in their having made it so clear on all the senses, everything so solid, necessary, useful and to hand. Therein lay the virtue of the place, she said. And she added that she loved the word ‘virtue', when it had that sense. How she smiled, how her face lit up when she confessed to me in a rush of words that even in the busy city where they were obliged to meet, in all the noise and trample of other people and in all the anxiety of clocks and timetables, if they began to dwell on the exact shape and colouring of a particular hearth stone in their shieling, on the wooden handle of a knife and its cheerful mismatch with the bone handle of a fork, dwelling on those and any dozen other concrete facts, they could abstract themselves completely and were as happy as children in the details of their invention. ‘Dwelling on' is a lovely expression, don't you think? Dwelling on and in: the indwelling virtue of the place.

So either might sit down at the table with or without a fire and sleep alone and wake in the bed alone, and still there was virtue in it, great power to help. And at the table, moving aside the plate and the glass, he wrote a note or quite a long letter for her, or she for him, to find, having climbed alone, pushed open the door and paused, before stepping in. Or laid a book on the table from the frugal library (whose contents changed according to mood and need) and put a slip of paper in it, to mark a particular page, and a scribbled word: Read this. Tell me what you think.

Sometimes instead of a note or a book she left him a picture, either on the table or stuck above the hearth. She was good at art and might have drawn and painted him an abode as complex and intriguing as the castles and palaces on hilltops in the background of Renaissance paintings: delightful winding roads that climbed to safety on snow or blue sky, distracting the mind from the foreground martyrdoms, allowing it rest and peace. But all she ever did for him, knowing his mind and his desires, was the place of their shared invention, each time with some alteration that she knew he would notice and trusted he would approve: a rowan by the front door instead of a hawthorn; harebells in the window, not heather. Once she added a small knoll, to one side and a little forward of the shieling, on land they thought of as theirs, and laid steps up it, so they would have a vantage point. He was glad of that and wondered how they had ever managed without.

From that invented hillock in warm weather either might watch for the other coming, she explained, such a clear view they had down the long valley, and there she stood, or he stood, watching for the friend. How slow the approach was, how long a time elapsed between the first sighting and the first embrace; but that interlude, though the feelings lifted as the climber inch by inch drew near, that long space of time had no anxiety in it, not the least, it was all sureness, confidence, step by step, minute by minute, becoming ever more precisely flesh and blood and bone, a confirmed familiarity, the person as trustworthy as the place itself. And there again, she said, looking at me very closely to be sure I had understood, in that too the virtue of our invention was proven. I was helped alone and I was helped when I thought of myself on our vantage point watching his slow arrival.

When they were together in the shieling—only ever for two or three days at the very most—then of course they made love; but when she told me this she said how much she, and he too, for that matter, preferred to say ‘we slept together.' She was pedantically anxious that I should understand her in this and that I should not deduce anything false out of her distinctions. I understood that she wanted me to know that the pleasure they had given one another, the love they had made, was intense, and her body and soul would never forget it; but I also understood that in the whole invention their thinking and dreaming of sleeping together had even greater virtue, was even better able to help. That was what she dwelled on in her dejections, and what she urged him to dwell on in his constant anxiety and restlessness. She said to him: I am someone you can go to sleep with. And if you wake in the night you will hear me breathing quietly in my sleep. Think of that. Your hand will be on my breast. You will feel how contented my heart is. Dwell on that.

There was more, much more. You must remember that their shieling was an invented place; and an invention, even one confined to simplicity, austerity, necessity, might be elaborated forever by two people who have a vital interest in it. She spoke of the deep contentment there was in sitting face to face at the table, writing. How one looked up for a word and with a shock saw the other likewise listening and waiting. And this happened alone in the place, she said, as often and as easily as when they thought or dreamed themselves there together. Then the subject took hold of her, the words came tumbling forth from her like the stream they had to climb to reach the shieling of their invention. More and more she found to say—and how I encouraged her!—on the subject of a place so simple, so bare in its appointment and decoration, so frugal in its amenities. All her girlhood awoke in her when she told me what was there, what might have been there, how free they were, within the strict forms laid on their desires, to add and subtract, to change and to innovate, and all their doing, saying, sleeping and dreaming in that place I felt it binding me to her, as her listener, forever. For example, she said, there was a window at the back of the house. Through it we could see the stony ground, the screes either side, the lingering snow, the gap, the col, the windy exit from our valley over into the next.

Their place reminded me of many places, needless to say. I located it easily in three or four different lands; felt I had been there; felt I might go there again; but on the one occasion when I asked her would she name the place, her looks froze against me, as against an indecency. I blushed in shame, I begged her forgiveness. After a while she forgave me by resuming her voice. Forgiveness was a part of the place, she said. ‘Forgive and Forget' might have been an inscription over our door. I believe it was for a while. We imagined several, and swapped them. My favourite was ‘Let be.' I don't like forgetting. I like to think we could remember and forgive. But I especially love the words ‘Let be.' The gesture of the shieling was that, therein lay its great good. I mean, she said, the hand raised in greeting, open to show peace and welcome, but also, because of who we were, because of what we were like, it was the hand and the fingers that will be raised and extended to touch the lips of the friend when he or she is full of doubt and fear and the words better never said, not needing to be said, are rushing into utterance and the hand very gently stops them: There is no need, let be.

I think she could see that my indecent asking after a name for the place still grieved me, because of her own accord she added something more (and other) than I had asked for. Once I did come to such a place, she said. By accident really, by folly and passive drifting and failure to watch my step. I was with somebody who was very fond of me and I liked him well enough or I should never have been there with him, I suppose. We were walking, it was his idea, he said he knew a place he was sure I would like, it would lift my spirits, he said. I doubted it, I very much doubted it, but I had no energy in me to say no. I had lost the cure of my own soul. We were climbing and came out of a forest and quite suddenly—I had not paid attention—there was a wide valley stretching away and above us, narrowing to a col. I seemed to be dreaming, I let myself trek in a dream by waterfalls and by rowan trees, a long long climb, in silence, like the wraith of myself following a man I liked well enough and who I knew was very fond of me. She paused, she looked at me with more trouble in her face than I could bear to witness. I put up my hand, I extended my fingers, gently, gently to stop her voice. Then she shrugged and said, I'm sure you can guess the rest. We came to the ruins of a shieling, the stones of it were tumbled down and all around. It was a shieling at the very limit of tractable land, where the bare rock began. How I wept to see it. I turned away. I left him standing there in his poor ignorance. I made back down the valley on my own. I was inconsolable. Still am in fact.