The Line Between Us (13 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I remembered the first snow that winter, the valley revealing itself differently, as if it had rolled over in the night exposing the whiteness of its underside. I fetched a spade to clear a path through the Herbar to the front door and I shovelled a few yards then I glanced up and for a moment I was so enchanted by the shapeliness of the landscape, the drifts forming in soft curves, that I couldn’t help myself, the boy in me took a hold and I threw my spade to one side without thinking and fell backwards into the snow. Barbs of ice penetrated between the neck of my coat and my skin and I shuddered with the wonder of it: the torn veil of my breath against the blue sky. I started laughing and I couldn’t stop, swooping my arms and legs up and down, making angels’ wings so that I didn’t hear your footsteps until you were almost on top of me.

“Miss Ella –” I stopped mid-swoop and the narrow ridge of snow that I’d been carving toppled down onto me and you laughed too, and you leaned over without thinking, with your hand outstretched to haul me to my feet, before your laughter died. You tucked your hand into your pocket. You were wearing jodhpurs and boots and a short fur jacket with an enormous collar pulled up right over your ears and there were flakes of snow like gypsophila in your hair. Distracted, I watched a single petal of it melt, then came to, and began to clamber to my feet.

“I was clearing the path –”

“On your back? Very novel.”

“It’s difficult to resist, miss. Don’t you think?”

You turned to regard the cleft of the valley, widening to meet the scattering of clouds on the distant hills. “You’re covered in snow,” you said, glancing at me and you flicked at my shoulder, hesitating a moment, then brushing again with a longer, more proprietorial sweep. I thought of the thinness of your leather glove, the protection it afforded.

“Will you walk with me?”

“What about the path?” I said, eyeing the spade.

“You can clear the way for me,” you said. “I’ll go mad if I have to stay cooped up in the house all day.”

I nodded, and neither of us moved. “Where do you want to go? To the village?”

You shook your head.

“Or –?”

“Not the village, no.”

“You’ll get cold, standing here like this …”

“Why don’t we walk to Withy End?”

“That’s miles –” I looked at the spade and the obliterated path again, feeling uneasy.

“I’ll settle it with Samuelson,” you said carelessly.

I hunched into my coat. I could feel the chill in the material from where I had been lying down. “Alright then.” We stood facing one another, measuring what we saw against what we remembered.

“You haven’t changed,” you said.

“Oh, but I have –”

“Not really. Not like me …”

“You’ve had your hair cut.”

You gave a funny, rueful smile, tugging at a strand of it, twining it round. “Yes,” you said. “Yes, I have.”

“My feet are blocks of ice,” I said, after a beat or two. “Shall we get going?”

We set off, half-wading, half-climbing through the submerged nut tunnel, which had icicles hanging from its twisted branches. I went first, tamping down the snow for you and you followed in my footsteps until we reached the unmarked passage through the wildflower meadow. You stopped and looked back at the house and gave a little shiver.

“Are you cold?” I said, fearing you were tired already, or that you’d changed your mind.

“No. Keep going.”

On we went until we reached a row of silver birches on the fringes of the tree line. We were panting with the effort and I paused beneath the nearest one to catch my breath. “How have you changed?” I asked, staring at the peeling lesions in the whitened bark.

“I think silver birches are my favourite tree,” you said, leaning against the trunk of one a few feet further off. You stripped off your gloves and slipped your cigarette case and lighter from a pocket in your jacket. “Do you want one?”

I shook my head, but I took one and put it in my mouth and lit it for you. “There,” I said, handing it to you, wondering if you still smoked with the same ferocious speed.

You stood there, one foot against the tree, your knee bent, drawing on your cigarette. A dusting of snow fell from a high twig as you exhaled, mingling with the smoke. “Someone I was … fond of … got married,” you said lightly, “while I was away.” You smiled one of your learnt smiles with its finishing school veneer. “I think perhaps that changed … something.”

My pulse was hammering and I stared intently at the lipstick traces on the cork tip of your cigarette until I was the master of myself. I thought of what Brown said, about fond not being worth the paper it was written on. Not this fond, though. I’m lost, I thought. I’m lost, and I turned to you, ready to –

“She seems very nice, your wife,” you said, taking a last drag and throwing your cigarette into the snow. There was a sharp hiss and then silence as it was extinguished, a silence that extended around us, accumulating into drifts.

“She’s a gentle soul,” I said, in the end.

“Yes …” It was a single word, but it covered all that we had spoken and had not spoken. It was a pitiful word. A bitter little word.

We stood looking at one another, taut with stilled momentum. I would have given anything to have taken you in my arms. Steeling myself, I ducked my head, glancing out from beneath the trees to the top of the ridge. “Weather’s drawing in,” I said quietly.

“It is, isn’t it?” You didn’t move. You took a breath to say something else and then thought better of it. Instead, you put one of your gloves back on and then the other, slipping the leather into place a finger at a time and it burned me to be watching you. “If I’d known that you would …” you said in a whisper so soft I wasn’t sure I’d heard you right.

“Ella –?”

You lifted you face to look at me and you held my gaze and you held it and held it. Then in that same thin breath of a voice you said sadly, “It’s Miss Ella, to you,” so that I knew you were reminding me of the paraffin stove and the dust in the air from the sacking and the first sight we had of one another, and of the way it must be.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I remembered when the thaw set in some time after that, coming home one evening when work was done, heeling my way out of my boots by the back door and washing my hands and face and neck under the tap in the kitchen, and then towelling myself dry.

“Where’s Jenny?” I asked Ma, who was sitting by the kitchen table darning in the drone of yellow light shed by the gas lamp in the bracket overhead. I was still smarting from the cold water and gave my head and shoulders an extra rub.

Ma placed the mending in her lap. It was an old jumper of Ted’s, gone through at the elbows. She took her time tucking the needle into the wool for safe keeping. “Upstairs,” she said, pulling the sleeve tight, then angling it this way and that to inspect her work. “It’s almost too far gone to rescue,” she sighed. “I don’t think this darn’s going to hold. It might need patching.”

“Ma?” I was halfway to hanging the towel back on the hook under the sink. I hesitated and then straightened up, still holding it. I folded it in half, then in half again. “What do you do when someone’s …” I said, not quite knowing where to start. “I don’t think Jenny’s very …” I sat down in the chair opposite her, tired after a hard day. I was still holding the towel and I set it down so that the hem lay with the grain of the wood, giving myself time to think, “The thing is, I’m not sure I know how to make her happy.” I glanced at her. She was still examining the darning, tilting it so that the needle caught the light. For a moment I watched the flash and glint of it. “I don’t seem to be able to.”

She regarded me with an unvarnished look, critical and astute, “Well, perhaps it’s time you had a home of your own,” she paused. “And a family of your own –”

“We’re saving. As soon as we’ve –”

“That’s what women want, most of them. It’s only natural.”

That wasn’t the whole story, I knew. “I’m worried that she’s … disappointed,” I began, wary of my own disclosure, as if saying something might make it so. “That this isn’t what she –”

“There’s always the expectation. And then there’s the reality. It takes a bit of time to make sense of how they fit together.”

“I think I’m not what she –” I blurted the words out, as near to a confession as I could manage, when what I should have said was, “She’s not what I –”

Ma cast the darning to one side, then rose from the table, picked up the towel and hung it on the hook, as though to have it out of place upset her sense of order. “It’s early days,” she said.

“Yes,” I echoed, “It’s early days.”

Sitting down again, she retrieved Ted’s jumper, then slid the needle out of the wool and resumed her mending. “These things have to be worked at,” she remarked. “They don’t happen by themselves.”

“What was it like, with you – and Dad?”

She didn’t look up from her work, not for a moment. “I always knew he wanted to be with me, more than anyone else.” Her face didn’t soften into sentimental reflection, but the set of it shifted slightly. She worked her needle through the yarn and pulled it tight, worked it through and pulled it tight, so that for a second I could see the on-going acceptance of loss, the continuum of grief in action. “We always talked. We spent what time we could together. He was my –” she was running out of wool, she tied it off and snipped it with her sewing scissors. “He was my first thing in the morning and my last thing at night.” She gave the smallest shrug, hesitating before she placed the scissors in her sewing basket. “There,” she said. She reached across and kneaded my upper arm with distracted affection, as though testing the fibre of me. “Talk to her. Spend some time with her. Take her out. Have some fun.”

I thought for a bit, casting around for something to suggest. “I could take her to the pictures. Do you think she’d like that? Next week, maybe?”

“Ask her, not me,” said Ma, shaking her head as though I hadn’t understood a single thing that she’d been saying to me. I nodded and headed for the stairs.

On the landing I hesitated. The bedroom door was closed and so I tapped on it, feeling uncomfortably like a visitor in my own home. I hovered and when she didn’t answer, I opened it and slipped inside. Jenny was sitting in the rocking chair in the corner of the room with her arms wrapped around her in a kind of solitary embrace. There was a book lying on her knee.

“Jenny?”

She turned her face a degree away from me, staring through the undrawn curtains at the encroaching night. I sat on the corner of the bed. After a moment, I rested my hand on her dress and she tensed, so I lifted some of the weight of it to be gentle, but I didn’t move it away.

“Jenny?”

I looked from one wall of the room to another, at the maps I’d pasted up there, following a single road as it looped from hill to wood, wondering where she and I would find ourselves. I glanced down at the book discarded on her lap.

“Hugh Walpole?” I said, picking it up. “That’s where it all began, with you and me. Hugh Walpole …” I turned it over. It was called
Wintersmoon
.

“Read it,” Jenny said in a stifled voice. “I’d recommend you read the opening paragraph.”

I crouched forward to be closer to her and wanting to be conciliatory, I turned to the first page.

“A fortnight ago you asked me to marry you. You said you weren’t in love with me but that you liked and respected me, that you thought we would get on well together.”

I closed the book very, very carefully.

“That’s us,” she said, and she began rocking to and fro in the chair, soothing herself, soothing herself. “That’s you and me, isn’t it?”

I stared at the cover: it was made of woven cloth and had a paper label.

“Don’t tell me that you like and respect me. Please don’t do that.”

I knelt beside her. “Until I met you I was always …” I hesitated for a long, long moment, “The one who wasn’t …” Like a penitent I bowed my head. “Nobody has ever loved me like you do,” I said, haltingly. “And that’s a fact.”

“Oh, Ifor.” She wiped her face on her sleeve although there was no sign that she was crying. She looked small and crestfallen.

Cautiously, I rested my forehead against hers and we leaned together with lowered eyes. “I mean to care for you and make a good life for us and to be a proper husband.”

“You once said that you were walking wounded,” she whispered. “I didn’t think much of it, at the time.” I put my arms around her, the jumble of her elbows between us. She picked at a button on my shirt. “Who wounded you?” she asked.

“Oh, Jenny,” I said, the two of us rocking imperceptibly for comfort, trying to find a common heart beat. “It was a nothing, a stupid dream – nothing. Nobody wounded me.” She buried her head in my shoulder and I stroked her hair. “I wounded myself.”

“Will we be alright, do you think? You and me?”

I cupped her face in my hands and read the sorrow there as if it were a poem she had found for me, the way she used to do when we were courting; all the verses of her sad uncertainty. “We must love each other,” I said and I kissed her mouth. “Then everything will be fine.”