The Scent of Water (10 page)

“Come this way,” I said. “Around by the greenhouse. I’ll say good-bye to Mother for you.” We went into the house through the side door and when we were in the hall he said to me, “I think I had an umbrella. I feared thunder.” He had brought a baggy old umbrella tied with string and while he was fumbling to get it out of the stand he said to me, “It’s safe there, you know.”

I said, “The umbrella?” and he answered, “No, no, no! Your reason. It’s the only place where anything is safe. And when you’re dead it’s only what’s there you’ll have. Nothing else.”

He had a round clerical hat, dusty and green with age. He put it on, gripped his umbrella in his left hand and held out his right to me. I held it and it was dry and rough and hot. “My dear,” he said, “I will pray for you every day of my life until I die.”

Then he abruptly let go of my hand, turned his back on me and stumbled down the steps that led from the front door to the drive. At the bottom he turned around again and looking into his face I noticed that when he was neither eager nor alarmed his eyes had the most extraordinary quietness in them. “My dear,” he said, “love, your God, is a trinity. There are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these, ‘Lord have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.’ Not difficult to remember. If in times of distress you hold to these you will do well.” Then he lifted his hat and turned around again. I stood at the door and watched him go. He had a queer wavering sort of walk. He did not look back.

I went to the garden, for I knew Mother would be vexed with me if I didn’t go back to her guests, though I didn’t want to. I walked soundlessly over the long porch to two women who were standing in admiration before one of Mother’s rosebushes, which was full of bloom. But they weren’t looking at it. “Horrible old man!” one of them was saying. “Anyone can see he drinks. What was the Vicar thinking of to have him here? Better to have left us with no one. In and out of asylums for most of his life, I’m told.”

I stood quite still. He hadn’t told me. He’d stood aside, speaking only of God and me. I wanted to run after him but when I moved they saw me, and the one who had spoken blushed crimson and I had to go forward and speak to them and pretend I hadn’t heard.

And now it’s night and I am in my room and writing down everything he said before I forget it. He said so little and he explained nothing. He couldn’t. But it has come into my mind that what he couldn’t explain is that treasure hid in a field in the old story. If one were to spend a lifetime digging for the treasure, and in this time of one’s life not find it, one wouldn’t have wasted the time. There would be less far to dig in the next time. Only one must possess the field, whatever it costs to buy it, and it has again come into my mind that fields are quiet places. And so I’ve got to have that home in the country with Jenny. My old man had the quietness within himself and I’ll never know how he came by it. Perhaps for him outward quietness isn’t necessary, but for me it is. I’ve never got on with Father and Mother. I’ve always been the one of their children they cared for least, and now I’ve brought this trouble upon them. Once the tussle is over, it will be as much a relief to them as to me if we can live apart. I’ll start fighting again tomorrow.

The beautiful handwriting broke off and did not begin again for another three months. The date was October 14th and under the heading Cousin Mary had written:

The Laurels, Appleshaw. My first night here and I can’t sleep I’m so happy. I’ll sit up in bed and write a little. Fighting Father and Mother nearly cost me another breakdown but I managed to keep saying the three words of the three prayers and though they didn’t mean a thing to me I kept my head above water and I brought the doctor around to my side. He told Father to let me do what I liked.

It was Jenny who found this house. She has a cousin, a Mr. Postlethwaite, who lives here, and he told her about it. She came down to see it, by herself without telling anybody, and she liked it. So when I was well enough she and Mother and I came down to see it and Mother thought it was awful but I knew it was home.

And so here we are, and Mr. Postlethwaite is going to keep the garden in order and carry the coals for Jenny, and find someone to scrub the floors. But all the rest Jenny will do. She’s always been a lady’s maid and now she’ll be doing everything. She’s given up so much for me and there are times when I feel miserably guilty, and then at other times I realize that looking after me is as necessary for her as learning to be quiet and to dig are necessary for me. We just have to do it.

I shall live and die here. Perhaps I shall never be well but this place will give me periods of respite that I would not have found in any other, and though I am able to do nothing else in this life, except only seek, my life seeming to others a
vie manquée
, yet it will not be so, because what I seek is the goodness of God that waters the dry places. And water overflows from one dry patch to another, and so you cannot be selfish in digging for it. I did not know anything of this when I began this diary and I don’t know how I know it now. Perhaps it has something to do with the old man.

It is quiet in this room. I’ve only been here a few hours and yet already I know my home so well. There are no curtains at my window, for Jenny and I have only got the barest essentials as yet. I want to get the rest very gradually, old pieces of furniture to match this old house, just the right curtains and carpets. An old house that’s come alive through the centuries is not just a shelter from the weather, it’s a living thing and can be served. I could feel the life of this house as soon as I came through the door in the garden wall. And so there are no curtains at the windows and the moonlight is shining in so brightly that I hardly need my candles, and when I lean forward I can see a sky crowded with stars behind that great tower. I’m glad I’ve come here in still, mellow October weather. The great lime avenue was thick with piled gold when we drove through it, but when the trees bent to possess us and I looked up at them I could see the blue sky through the gold leaves because though there were so many of them they were worn thin, like very old coins. The fields were blue and hazy and when we got to the village green I could smell bonfire smoke and blackberry jam boiling. The wistaria leaves are a fall of golden rain on each side of the pillared way and on the south side of the house the Virginia creeper is scarlet on the wall. Down in the coppice at the bottom of the garden there are crab apples and the haws are scarlet.

I am learning it all by heart. I expect the winter will be hard in spite of the country snow like white fox fur wrapped about the house, filling the rooms with light. The snow will melt and it will be cold and wet and I shall be ill, as I always am, with the vile asthma and bronchitis, and I shall fall into black depression, and perhaps desperation too, but it will pass and the spring will come with celandines and white violets in the lanes, and then the late spring with bluebells and campion and the wistaria coming out. And I shall learn the spring by heart, and then the summer, and I’ll learn the bells and birdsong by heart, and the way the moonlight moves on the wall and the sun lies on the floor. I’ll grow older and lose my beauty but the spring will not grow old nor the moon nor the snow. Who will live after me in this house? Who will sit in the little parlor reading by the fire? And then she will put out her lamp and come up to this room and light the candles and kneel by the bed to pray. I don’t know who she is but I loved her the moment I walked into this room, for that was a moment that was timeless. I shall have my sorrows in this house, but I will pray for her that she may reap a harvest of joy. I will pray for her every day of my life, as the old man is praying for me.

Mary closed the book. That was all she would read tonight. It was as much as she could bear. She put out the lamp and went upstairs to bed. In her room she lit the candles in the two brass candlesticks and knelt down beside the old-fashioned bed. It was only for the moment that it seemed strange to be kneeling, for those who had lived in this house during the past centuries had belonged to the years of faith and her body relaxed easily into their habitual posture. What should she say to her discarded God? Her childhood’s prayers came to her mind but they were too infantile. But the old man’s prayers were not infantile and she repeated them.

Paul, at work at this hour in his small study with Bess asleep on the floor beside him, needed no candles. It gave Valerie the horrors, when presently she looked in to say she was going up to bed, to see him sitting in the dark. “It’s so morbid,” she said. “Why can’t you put the light on just for the look of the thing?”

“Why waste electricity just for the look of the thing?”

“You waste so many things, why not the electricity?”

“What do I waste?”

“Your time for one thing. When you’re in here half the time you’re not using your typewriter at all, or your tape recorder, you’re simply sitting doing nothing.” He smiled, his slow amused smile that so maddened her, as though he had a private joke with himself from which she was shut out. “And you call that work; I believe you think you’re earning our living. Don’t stay up late. When you come up so late, and wake me just when I’ve got off, I can’t sleep again for hours. You know I can’t.”

“I’ll be quiet, Val.”

“You never are. You knock into things. Why can’t you work in the morning when other men do?”

“Because I’m no good in the morning. And there’s no peace in this house in the morning.” He broke off, for it was fast developing into one of their altercations. “I’m sorry, darling, but it has to be this way. One day, when I’ve written my best seller, I’ll make it all up to you.”

He was smiling at her but she wouldn’t look at him. While they had argued she had switched the light on. Now she went away deliberately leaving it burning. It gave her a secret pleasure to think that he thought he was in the dark and he wasn’t.

Paul sat for a few moments hunched forward in his chair, his hands locked together between his knees. It was almost the attitude of physical pain. Bess stirred in her sleep, turned and laid her chin on his feet. Valerie had been an enchanting and pretty girl. He was perfectly well aware of the change in her. Whenever he tried to visualize her the thin hard face slipped like a mask over the face that he remembered, and wanted to remember, and repulsed him as she herself repulsed him whenever he tried to restore again some measure of the love that had once been between them. Yet he believed it was still only a mask, not the reality as yet. If he could only get through he would find his girl still alive behind it. Would it have been all right if he had not been blinded, or if he had done what she had wanted and let himself be trained in one of the skills that blind men could practice so lucratively? But he had always wanted to write, and tried to write, even in his sighted days, and after he had been blinded he had wanted it with an obstinate intensity that had swept away every objection laid before him by parents and sensible friends, and even the pleadings of Valerie herself. He had had to do this thing, come what might, though as a naturally confident and hopeful person he had believed in himself and expected to succeed. He had never imagined that after years of hard work he would still be earning so little. Yet it made no difference. He wrote because he had to and for no other reason. It did not even occur to him to give it up for Valerie’s sake and even at this late date get himself trained for something else. Nor had he considered living in the town, as Valerie wanted, or going to bed at a reasonable hour. He always felt ill and without the quiet of the country and the night he would not have been able to write. There was possibly a streak of selfishness in his single-mindedness but though he did not much care whether he succeeded or not, he still half-believed that he would. He had a small but growing reputation as a poet, a prestige reputation of which Valerie knew nothing but which he hugged to himself with secret joy, a couple of plays were even now hovering near to production and there was the book.

It was the book which it is said every man can write, the semi-autobiographical book which is as much a record of a man’s spirit as of his life, and which he fondly imagines to be fiction from beginning to end. Paul, playwright and poet, had never even contemplated writing a novel until three months ago. A difficult poem finished at last, he had been in the usual restless, nervy, miserable condition. He had been longing to get to the end of it yet without it he had felt intolerably bereaved. And he had known he would never write another line and told himself that he never wanted to. Writing was an exhausting senseless business, a mug’s game. Yet all the while he had been feeling frantically around in his dusty mind for ideas, like a miser who has dropped his gold in the dark, with desolation growing in him all the time like a bottomless pit. He should have recognized the symptoms as the first pangs of a new poem, for they followed each other regularly in the same order whenever he was not working, but he never did recognize them.

And then suddenly in the middle of the night it had happened again, and it had been new as spring, though it had happened so many times. It had not this time been a line of verse crying out like a lost spirit for habitation, giving him no rest until word by word and sound by sound he had built up the form it wanted. Nor had it been as when a play was beginning and a vivid scene flashed before his inward eyes, men in movement, in conflict, in some dilemma from which he must rescue them or neither he nor they would know rest again. This had been a presence with him, a quiet man standing at the end of his bed. He had seen him clearly, and seen too the foot of the bed that he had never seen. The man had been dark, physically unlike himself, his fine head and strong shoulders as magnificently sculptured as those of a statue. He had been suffering but dumb; like the Polish officer who had once occupied the bed in a hospital ward next to Paul and whose anguish had been locked within himself because those about him did not know a word of his language. He had seemed to Paul to represent all the men who suffered in war and, if they lived, came home again as speechless as they had gone out. Or if they tried to speak they found the common language had no adequate words; and so their sons must suffer all over again. “I’ll try,” he had said to the man. “I’ll say it for you.” But the man’s suffering had been in no way relieved and would not be relieved until the book was finished.