The Scent of Water (22 page)

“I fear I have noticed little apart from the general dilapidation,” he said, “brought to my attention by the churchwardens. They have it in mind to replace this chest by a cupboard, a more convenient receptacle for the hymnbooks and such odds and ends as accumulate from time to time in a vestry.”

“And what are you going to do with the chest?”

“There is a room in the tower where we occasionally deposit such derelict furnishings as we have no further use for. Brownlow, that’s the people’s warden, is averse to throwing things away. They might, he thinks, come in useful at some future date.”

I made a mental note to visit the room in the tower as soon as possible, and I did some quick arithmetic in my head and then I said, “Mr. Carroway, may I give the cupboard to the church? I would like to do that as a thank offering because my health has improved so much since I came to live here.”

At first he was courteously hesitant, wondering if he ought to accept my offer, but he was very pleased and when I assured him I could well afford it he agreed that I should give the cupboard. Then I asked if I might buy the chest from the church because it was just what I wanted in my hall, and at this he was horrified because of its dilapidated state, but I persisted and he said he would discuss the matter with the churchwardens.

Well, in the end I got it. The cupboard was installed and Mr. Entwistle borrowed the squire’s gardener’s handcart and fetched the chest. Jenny wouldn’t have it in the house for a moment, because of the woodworm, so Entwistle and I took it right away to Nightingale Wood, to Mr. Abraham Baker the bodger, who is a woodcarver as well as a bodger and can do anything with wood. It was one of those early November mornings that are as beautiful as any in spring. There was gold everywhere, drifts of it on the elm tree, flakes of gold under our feet, gold dust on the hedges, liquid gold in the refracted falling light. For the sun today broke through pale and luminous clouds. It was a gentle day with no wind. Entwistle trundled the cart with the chest in it and I walked beside him. He whistled sometimes, answering the robins, and sometimes we laughed and talked together. But we could be silent when we wished, for we are good friends.

The wood, when we reached it, was almost frightening. Trees look taller in the autumn than at other times and the beeches towered to such a height that their red-gold seemed to lift and lift and have no ending. Yet in spite of the glory above, many leaves had already fallen and lay drifted about the silver trunks and the low darkness of the hollies. The bramble leaves, tipped with fire, seemed to leap out of the golden wash like flights of birds or butterflies. The smell of the wet leaves and moss was sad and strange yet marvelous to me.

We came to Fox Barton, the ruined farmhouse where Abraham Baker has his workshop. I love the place and hate to see it falling to pieces. The ceilings have gone long ago and soon I am afraid the plaster garlands in the parlor will fall to pieces with the damp. Abraham Baker’s grandfather, a farmer, lived here as a young man but when he married, his wife couldn’t stand the loneliness and the ghosts and he sold it. The man he sold it to, a recluse reputed by Mr. Entwistle to be very odd, lived alone in it for many years and then he couldn’t stand it either and he went to America. He had not kept it in repair and it was so dilapidated that no one else wanted to live there, and so Abraham Baker’s father quietly moved in and used it as his workshop, for he was a bodger too.

Abraham was hard at work when we went in, a giant of a man with a grim seamed face and a long gray beard that he buttons inside his shirt when he is at work lest it get caught in the lathe. This keeps him with his chin permanently tucked down and his great broken nose much in evidence. His son Joshua was with him today, a strange lanky child with bright red hair, terribly shy. Abraham is not shy but he does not speak unless it is necessary. He did not speak while I told him about the chest and asked him if he could repair it for me and get rid of the woodworm. But when I had finished and Entwistle showed him the chest he suddenly stopped work. He came over and looked at the carving and ran his huge hands over it. Then he lifted the lid and smiled with delight at the sight of the skull. I had never seen him smile before and it was a remarkable sight, for his smile is huge as himself, an enormous mouth registering delight. “Why does it please you so much?” I asked.

“Fine bit of carving,” he said. “And hidden-like. Folks don’t do hidden work so much these days.”

I told him about the hidden carvings in cathedrals, marvelous work hidden from all knowledge but that of its makers and God. He nodded and told me there was a carving like that in Appleshaw church, on the right-hand side of the door leading to the tower. “I ain’t one for churchgoing,” he said, “but I go at harvest to see the veges. The wife, she always sends a vegetable marrow for the font and I always sits at the back of the church where I can see the marrow, and one year I tipped me ’ead back an’ give it quite a crack on that there carving. I ’ad a look at it later. Well, you can look at it for yourself if you’ve a mind. Cost you a pretty penny to have this repaired. Look at this ’ere.” Some of the carving on the front of the chest, riddled with worm, came away in his hands and a trickle of wood dust fell to the floor like water.

“I don’t care what it costs,” I said recklessly. “If you have to carve fresh panels I shan’t mind. Is the lid all right?”

“Naught wrong with he,” said Abraham. He had lifted the lid again and was holding it with one huge hand covering the bird and the other the skull, the circle surrounding each hand, and I thought suddenly of the hands of the Creator holding life and death. And then I thought of the hands of the man who had carved the lid holding the finished thing, and thinking it was good, and in my mind he was identified with Abraham.

Something touched me and it was the nudging elbow of the lanky Joshua. He was standing by me holding something in his hand. He glanced solemnly up through the mat of red hair that hung down over his eyes, smiled and opened his hand. Inside was a treasure that he had, a large conker carved with his initials J.B. “What you doin’ of, nudging the lady?” roared Abraham suddenly, and aimed a good-humored blow at one of Joshua’s protruding ears. The child ducked expertly under the workbench and hopped up behind it, grinning, his shyness suddenly gone, and all the way home I remembered how he had shown me his conker.

That was weeks ago and it is nearly Christmas and this morning the chest came home. Abraham has an old pony and cart and he and Joshua brought it. They carried it in with Entwistle’s help and put it in the hall against the wall and we all stood and gazed. It was a day of frosty sunshine and the chest, now oiled and shining, seemed to gather all the light to itself. Mr. Baker had done a marvelous job and the two new panels he had carved himself were scarcely distinguishable from the original work. I did not try to distinguish them since Mr. Baker and the first craftsman were one man in my mind. I tried hard to thank him but it was difficult to find the words.

Something touched me and again it was the elbow of the child Joshua. He had nothing to show me this time, he just wanted to smile at me. But I realized I had something to show him, and leaving the other two talking I took his hand and led him into the parlor. Lady Royston’s gift of the blue glass tea set gave me the idea of making a collection of tiny treasures and I have quite a number of them now, under a glass case on a table in the parlor window. People have found out about my collection and they bring me things for it. Doctor Partridge brings me something whenever I am ill and I am sorry now that I said he did not know much about sick people, for he knows they like presents. I showed my little things to Joshua and watched his face and I think my enjoyment of his face just about matched his enjoyment of my little things. I gave him one of them, a dwarf with a red cap. He held it in his hand for a moment or two and then shook his head and gave it back. I understood how he felt, that it belonged here with the others. To take one away was like taking a jewel out of a crown.

We went back into the hall and Abraham was standing there alone with his hat in his hand. He’s so tall that his head nearly touched the rafters of the ceiling. I asked him how much I owed him for the chest and he handed me a bit of dirty paper. When I had read what was on it I gasped, for he had not charged me nearly enough for all that labor. “It’s not enough, Mr. Baker,” I said.

He seemed to grow even taller as he told me with great dignity that he had enjoyed the work. I realized that I could not argue the point without wounding him, so we shook hands with mutual respect, and I went to the door in the garden wall and watched him and his son drive away in the funny little cart.

And now it is the dead of night and as I can’t sleep I am writing this in bed. In my mind’s eye I can see Abraham’s huge hands holding the skull and the bird together as though they are one thing. To me they are the symbol of so much, body and soul, time and eternity, death and life beyond death, even of the two halves of my own life, the sick times and the times of respite. The chest is a fitting thing to have in an infirmary chapel. It might have been carved by the infirmarian himself.

The clock has just struck two and I am thinking, as I often do, that in monasteries all over the world monks are saying their night offices as once they did here in the church across the way. The sick in this house would not have been able to get so far and the infirmarian would not have left them, but he would have gone to the infirmary chapel, with any monks who were well enough to leave their beds and any who were here to help him with the sick. I feel quite sure about this, and I know the words of many of the prayers and Psalms they would have used. I asked Mr. Carroway what they would have been and he didn’t know, but he was ashamed he didn’t know and he found out for me. Sometimes I say one or two of the Psalms myself and imagine I am saying them verse by verse with the infirmarian. I know which I shall say tonight, the Fifty-fourth. “An offering of a free heart will I give Thee, and praise Thy name, O Lord, because it is so comfortable.”

A
UGUST came, and Joanna and Roger and the children went to the sea for a fortnight, and while they were away Catherine came to stay with Mary. She was not fond of children and Mary chose the moment of their absence to ask her, for the three were increasingly with her. Or rather with the garden, which they had taken as theirs again. Whenever she saw a small figure upon the wall behind the copse she went indoors, and Rose and Jeremy did not seek her out until they were hungry and wanted ginger biscuits out of the tin on the kitchen dresser. Edith sought her out often, for love’s sake, even though lessons had ended for a while. When the Talbots came back again, Paul went to stay with them while Valerie went for a holiday in Switzerland with her mother. She thought she did not want to go, for it left Paul with only the Talbots’ garden wall between himself and Mary. But he insisted and she went; she found herself continually giving way to him nowadays. She was not at all well and he took advantage of her lassitude to bully her, or so she told Joanna as she helped her pack. “You want to go to Switzerland,” said Joanna briefly.

For Mary the three weeks of Valerie’s absence went like a flash and yet seemed three centuries. The weather was fine again and Paul asked if he might work under her willow tree. He wanted to teach himself, he said, not to work by night only, for late hours disturbed Valerie.

“The children come into the garden,” Mary warned him.

“They won’t be as bad as Joanna’s Hoover. You don’t appear to have a Hoover, Mary.”

“Neither Mrs. Baker nor I are mechanically minded.”

“Thank God for that.”

“Why do you think under the willow tree would be a good place to work?”

“I’m aware of those cool bending branches and their shadows as though it were night. ‘Dear night, this world’s defeat.’ Night gives one the freedom of the cloister.”

“I’m asking about it because if you want to work under the willow tree you must ask Edith’s permission. It’s her place.”

“I’ll ask her,” said Paul.

Edith said he might. She was flattered that a book should be written in her place and established herself and Kipling’s
Just So Stories
, that Mary had given her for her birthday, in the green shade of the conservatory. Mary, sitting at her desk and reading the earlier typed chapters of Paul’s book, looked up often, delighting in the sight of her dark head beyond the open window. She was as absorbed in her book as the man under the willow tree in his, and Mary was so absorbed in both readers that she seemed to have them in her blood. The man, the woman and the child. But not her man or her child. And yet they were hers, in her veins. No, not her veins, that were only the highroads of her body. They walked the roads of an inner hidden country and in that country they were her own.

Sitting at her desk one morning she remembered the day she had come here, and the sense of penetration she had had, reminding her of the Indian boxes one within the other and the small gold one at the center. And she remembered being in this room as a child and trying to make herself small enough to get inside Queen Mab’s coach; and then being in this room at evening, waiting to read the diary, and feeling herself at the heart. Life was full of these intuitions that one must get smaller, go further in. The golden box was so deeply within that it was hard to find, yet it contained an entire country and was, she supposed, the only luggage one could take with one if there was anywhere to go beyond death. For much of her life she had believed there wasn’t, yet in this place she had had so many intuitions of a door. The lime trees in the avenue, guarding the abbey gateway that could no longer be seen yet was still there. The door in her own garden wall that had seemed to her as a child to be the entrance into the inner world of a picture. And often in dreams she had opened a familiar door and found beyond not what she was expecting but something so beyond description that it could not be accurately remembered on waking, though it held one all the following day like light. Dreams were all nonsense, people said, but she had come to believe there was sometimes a true thread woven through the muddle. Have I come to believe there is a door? she asked. She had just finished a chapter of Paul’s book and closed the cover that contained it. Her hands folded upon it she asked the question again. Have I? She felt the beginning of a great astonishment, cut short by a child’s voice.

“I’ve finished it. I’ve read my favorite three times.” It was Edith in the conservatory.

“What is your favorite?” asked Mary.

“The kangaroo who kept on running.”

“Why do you like that one best?”

“I like the kangaroo. He didn’t want to go on running but he
had
to. He
had
to grow his hind legs.”

“Well, I know I have to go across to the church to look at the carved corbel on the right-hand side of the door that leads to the tower. Would you like to come with me?”

Edith jumped up eagerly. “Climb out through the window,” she commanded.

As they crossed the lawn, their footfall they thought light as dew, a curtain of willow was pulled back and Paul asked, “Mary, did you finish Chapter Ten? Is it all right?”

“No,” said Mary. “Edith and I will only be gone a few minutes and when I get back I’ll tell you what I think is wrong.”

“And will you read my letter to me? I had one this morning but I didn’t want to ask Joanna. It’s her washing day.”

“Yes, I will.”

“Mother gets het up on her washing day,” said Edith as she and Mary crossed the green to the church. “Why do you want to look at that corbel?”

“It is beautifully carved. In church at a service one cannot see things properly and I thought we could look at it together.”

“Good,” said Edith. “I don’t like it that next week it will be all of us.” For it had turned out as Mary had thought it would and next week she would be running a dame’s school; for Rose needed coaching in a few subjects and in case Jeremy should feel left out he was coming along too. “And I don’t want to go back to school in the autumn.”

“But you must. You’re well now.”

They were walking through the churchyard and Edith kicked savagely at a stone in the path. “You’re getting as bad as Mother. It’s always must, must, must.”

“Then say ‘have,’ like the kangaroo. You have to go back. It’s asked of you.”

“What do you mean, it’s asked of me?”

“You know quite well what I mean.”

Edith sighed and abandoned her ill temper, for she did know. She’d had to tell about the little things.

It was cool in the church and they slipped into a seat and sat down gratefully. There’s more to the coolness of an old church than thick walls keeping out the heat, thought Mary, there’s the coolness of history. Looking back from the claustrophobic congestion and satanic noise of the modern world, the past appeared so uncluttered and quiet. Piers Plowman saw all the people of the world sitting in a field, a mere handful, a gatheration of starlings, and beyond the field what spaciousness and peace. The old church held that as well as the spaciousness of an undreamed-of future. The Norman arches of the nave, washed with the pale green light that came through the high small windows, narrowed to the distant glimmer of the chancel. The only stained glass the church possessed was in the east window. It was old, with deep jewel colors of blue and crimson that spilled down onto the altar. Peering under the darkness of the arches one could see the Victorian marble memorial tablets surmounted by urns, angels and coats of arms, and a tomb with an iron railing around it where a knight lay on his bier with his rusty iron sword chained to the railing.

“Is this where you sit when you come in the evenings?” asked Edith.

“Yes,” said Mary. “I sit here with Miss Anderson.” It was a seat at the back of the church and next to a pillar. Jean, sitting beside the pillar, could almost hide herself behind it. “Where do you sit in the mornings?”

“Over there by the knight. Jeremy likes it there.”

“He likes the knight?”

“It’s the mouse he likes, a particular mouse that is his mouse. The mice nest behind the knight. Rose likes it there too because she can see her hat in the brass eagle. We only wear hats on Sundays so a hat is special. What did you say we’d come here for?”

“To see the carved corbel beside the door to the tower. Let’s go and look at it.”

Behind the font two steps led up to the door to the tower, small and low under its stout little Norman arch. The corbels seemed to Mary to be of later date. The one to the left bore a coat of arms of three bees and a cross-handled sword, the one to the right showed the head and shoulders of a monk. The features were worn but something about them, the fact that one eyebrow was higher than the other, the ways the ears stuck out, was highly individual. “I think it was a portrait,” Mary said to Edith.

“Of himself?” asked Edith.

“Perhaps. The old craftsmen did portray themselves sometimes.”

Behind the monk’s head was a garland of thorny branches that hid his shoulders and it was easy for Mary to put her fingers through the lattice work of thorns and feel what was behind. Something was carved there. She withdrew her fingers and made Edith feel.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Bunches of little flowers,” said Edith. “Like hawthorn. I wish we could see them.”

“They haven’t been seen since the carving was put in its place,” said Mary. “They will never be seen. Now let’s go up to the room in the tower.”

Beyond the door was a spiral staircase and they climbed up it. The door to the tower room no longer existed and pale green light shone down to meet them. “It’s like climbing up inside a tall green reed,” said Edith.

The room, when they reached it, seemed still a dumping ground for things that no one wanted, as it had been in Cousin Mary’s day. There were some broken chairs, tin receptacles for flowers such as Mary remembered seeing years ago on graves, torn hassocks pouring out their sawdust, and kindred rubbish. The sunlight, falling through the green glass in the narrow lancet window, illumined humanity’s dislike of parting with anything that might one day come in useful; only the need for a burst hassock or a broken flowerpot had somehow not arisen and here they were still. Down below in the church the sun moved slowly over the old flagstones, as it had always done, the knight’s sword was chained to the iron railings and the mice nested behind his tomb. Over their heads in the tower the old clock ticked, ancient and remorseless. Mary’s pleasure turned to sadness. The tower, that had seemed a green reed full of sun, was peopled with anxious ghosts, and the church below rustled with them. They were being driven in and in upon the quiet places and they were afraid.

A sudden ugly clatter almost made her cry out as though it were the fall of cities, but it was only Edith knocking over a pile of the old tin flower holders that were stacked against the wall. “Sorry,” she said. “I tried to take one out that I thought would be useful and they all fell over. Look, someone’s carved their initials on the wall.”

Mary went to look. The letters W.H. were deeply carved within a rough circle. Edith traced them with her brown forefinger as though incising them more firmly on the wall, but neither she nor Mary said anything. They climbed down the turret stairs again, Edith carrying the bent tin mug she had filched for Jeremy’s paint water. On their way out Mary stopped to look again at the monk’s head. It struck her now that the encircling thorn branches made him look like a man in the stocks, yet the mouth smiled with a wry humor.

They parted on the green. Edith went home and Mary crossed her lawn toward the willow tree, in outward possession of her usual serenity but inwardly humbled and terrified. Her love for Paul now had her in a grip that frightened her. She was afraid, quite simply, of the pain, and she was also afraid of betraying it. She had lived in a difficult and dangerous world and had discovered how to manufacture the armor called for by difficult situations and how to wear it with confidence. But though she had felt deeply over many things there had never been anything like this to batten down; it was like trying to put a lid on a volcano. With her armor cracking it seemed as though the years that had gone to the making of it were falling away too, leaving her helpless as a child, with a childish and most humiliating longing to run for shelter. Only there was nowhere to run.

Unless it was to humility. As a man she now wanted Paul with human urgency, but as an artist she drew back from him. During these weeks of working together she had had hard work not to let her criticism, that he wanted and needed, be beaten down by her awe of his emerging power. She had discovered the daemon in the man and she believed that he too was discovering what it was that had driven him for so long. These last weeks they had been looking together at a calm pool, watching its waters first disturbed and then parting as the dragon with the shining scales slowly heaved itself from the depths. She had watched not only with awe but with humble withdrawal, as though he were not of her clay, and he had watched with a mounting self-absorbed excitement. There was selfishness in his excitement and she recognized it. He was not naturally selfish but all men are selfish in the grip of a daemon. That too would perhaps provide her with a sort of shelter.

Though she made no sound crossing the grass he knew she was there and lifted a branch of willow. She bent her head and went in. Bess, two chairs and the table with his tape recorder almost filled the little place yet she had a feeling of emptiness. Paul was smoking and Bess was asleep. “Have you finished the book?” she asked with surprise.

“For the first time through, that’s all. But the first time through is a profound relief, like knowing you’ve reached the turning point of an illness. Tell me what’s wrong with the chapter you’ve been reading.”

She told him and he accepted her criticism. “You know the book is good,” she said.

“I know it will be when I’ve had another go at it. But when I say good I only mean the best I can do.”

“Have you felt so confident before?”