The Scent of Water (27 page)

She was dusting the oak chest in the hall when Mr. Baker came prophetically tramping through from the kitchen and stood beside her. Wordlessly he proffered a bunch of Christmas roses from his garden. Though he said nothing he held them out with both hands as though showing her their incomparable beauty, and suddenly the years swung back and beside her was a lanky redheaded child showing her his conker. For a moment she could not speak, then she thanked him and spoke of the beauty of the flowers. “I will put them in the silver tankard here on the oak chest,” she said.

Mr. Baker’s Adam’s apple worked mightily and then he said, “Glad to see this chest back in its place again. Funny how you found it.”

“Mr. Baker, there’s a little thing I want to give you,” said Mary. “Please will you come into the parlor.”

He followed her to the table in the window and watched while she took the glass shade off the little things. She picked up the dwarf with the red cap and gave it to him and said, “I want you to have it. I think my cousin Miss Lindsay would have wanted you to have it.”

She watched him, wondering if he would once again refuse the gift, but this time he seemed to feel differently about it, for a broad grin creased his face and taking the dwarf he sat the tiny creature on his huge palm. It was beautifully carved and she saw he was delighting in its workmanship; and also that he was remembering his first meeting with the dwarf.

“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” he said, using the phrase he would have used in his boyhood, and pocketed the dwarf. “I wish you the compliments of the season.” And he tramped out of the parlor. Mary could understand why he felt, now, that he could take it. He and she as children had felt the collection of the little things to be something secure and eternal, and therefore not to be pulled apart. Edith had not felt that nor did he, now. Nothing today was secure. The urge to share what one had quickly, while one had it, was imperative.

Her other visitor was Paul. She was in the kitchen garden hanging out dishcloths and the door leading to Ash Lane was open. Something warm, soft and strong pressed against her knee and looking down she saw it was Bess, and Paul was with Bess.

“She saw you through the door and brought me in,” said Paul.

“Come into the kitchen where it’s warm,” said Mary. “I’m alone for five minutes. Mrs. Hepplewhite has gone to the post office.”

“It might be ten minutes,” said Paul hopefully. “In the week before Christmas there can be as many as six people at a time in the Appleshaw P.O. It can be quite a serious congestion. What a pungent Christmas smell!” There were mince pies in the oven and a pot of chrysanthemums on the dresser. “Are you happy, Mary?”

“Why do you ask me that?”

“Because I want you to be.”

“That means,” said Mary smiling, “that you are happy yourself.”

“It would be a poor show if life seemed good to me and not to my friends, wouldn’t it? I don’t think just now I could put up with that.”

“Does success seem so good to you, Paul?”

“Not in all ways. I miss things. I miss the lonely struggling; it took one deep. And the fruit of it crowned with success looks to me rather as your statue in the garden would look with a silly hat on his head, a bit meretricious. But I like the money. I want it for Val and the baby. And I like it that people now want my work. But I don’t like them knowing so much about me through what I write, for it makes me feel naked. I want it both ways, of course, to be wanted and anonymous at the same time. But on balance it’s good. And it’s better still that Val is well and wants her baby. And it’s Christmas at Appleshaw. It’s extraordinary that with the world in the state it’s in one can, so to speak, climb inside Christmas at Appleshaw and for a week or so be allowed to forget it. Appleshaw even more than most country places has the scent of water in its air.”

“The scent of water?” asked Mary.

“I don’t mean that literally. ‘For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.’ There’s one thing blindness did for me, gave me a braille Bible. My father gave me one. If I’d kept my sight I’d never have read the Bible as I have, for I haven’t many braille books.”

“What is the scent of water?”

“Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew. Mary, it is most alarming, the way you make me talk. I don’t talk to anyone else as I do to you. I’d be ashamed to.”

Mary was suddenly aware of wealth and when he asked her again, “Well, are you happy?” she replied with absolute truth, “Yes, I am.”

Mrs. Hepplewhite was heard talking to Tania in the hall. He laughed, kissed Mary briefly and yielded to Bess’s tug upon her harness. Bess could not stand Tania and towed him rapidly out of the back door.

“Darling,” said Mrs. Hepplewhite, entering from the hall, “you promised to read me
The Winter’s Tale
and you never have.”

“We’ll read it tonight,” said Mary.

After supper they sat in the lamplit parlor with Tania and Tiger dozing before the fire, and talk gave way to the quietness engendered by good poetry perfectly read. Mrs. Hepplewhite could make little of it but she was aware that in likening her to the Hermione of the story Mary was paying her a compliment, and after all the years of struggling so inadequately in Fred’s victorious wake that brought respite. Mary thought her adequate and she could relax the tension. She folded her hands in her lap and tried not to fall asleep, or alternatively not to let her thoughts wander to Fred. When she had seen him the other day he had kissed her. To her great relief he had not seemed changed except for being strangely quiet. Quiet. She started awake again to find the room as quiet as Fred. And so was the night. The snow had not come yet but outside was the windless stillness of frost under the moon and stars. While Mary was reading of the Rosemary and rue that keep seeming and savor all the winter long they heard the carol singers outside. The air of “The Holly and the Ivy” did not seem to break the quiet at all, merely to thread through it, and when later the bells began practicing for Christmas Mary’s reading kept them as a triumphant background to Hermione’s restoration.

After she had said good night to Mrs. Hepplewhite in her room, Mary went back to the parlor, for she was not sleepy. Sitting before the fire she thought there was a great deal of happiness in the village just now, with Paul’s success and Valerie’s expected baby, the Adams’s joy in their television set and a few other like happenings. And, as Paul had said, in spite of outer darkness, at Christmas one was justified in trying to get inside it. With the bells quiet again she fancied she heard the air of “The Holly and the Ivy” floating disembodied around the village, echoing the music of centuries of past Christmases. Cousin Mary had heard it in that way on her first Christmas here, which for her too had been happy.

There was only one more installment of the diary and now seemed as good a time as any in which to read it. She knew what she was going to find even before she turned the page.

She has come [wrote Cousin Mary]. She has actually been with me here, in her home that I am making for her. We have been together here and though I cried when she went away this has still been the happiest day of my life. It was strange how I saw the announcement of her birth eight years ago. I never look at the births, marriages and deaths column but that day, picking up the paper casually, my eye was caught by a familiar name and there she was, Mary Angela Lindsay, the daughter of my cousin Arthur Lennox whom I used to play with when we were children. His parents went abroad and I did not see him again but we had been so fond of each other that I never forgot him, and I doubt if he forgot me. The thought came to me that in calling his daughter Mary he was remembering our childhood. I wrote to him to congratulate him and said how much I would like to see the child. He wrote back politely, after the lapse of a few weeks, but made no reference to my seeing the baby. At first I was hurt and then I remembered that he was a busy doctor and my sister had told me his wife did not like our family and that he had been very much absorbed into hers. Twice during the following three years I asked if little Mary could be brought to see me but I wrote to her mother, thinking it right to do that, and each time she wrote back making some excuse. I realized of course that she and Arthur knew about my illness and I thought that they did not want the child to come. I was heartbroken but I accepted what I imagined to be their ruling. It made no difference to the fact that Mary was my child. I knew she was. But just lately I have been so much better that I wrote once more, to Arthur this time, and I reminded him of our times together in our childhood and I actually said I wondered if he had remembered me when he called his daughter Mary. This time he replied at once, in so friendly a way that I am afraid I wondered if his wife had showed him the previous letters. And only a fortnight later, two days ago, he came with Mary.

She is a marvelous child, gentle, very intelligent, with clear-cut features unusually delicate for a child of that age. I think she will be a beautiful woman. At first I could see that she was frightened of me but she was not frightened of the house. Though she said little I saw that she loved it, and at lunchtime I saw her eyes go often to the window, looking at the garden. After lunch Arthur went for a walk and I took her into the parlor to show her the little things, her little things. It was then she ceased to be afraid of me. She loved them, and of course the ones she loved best were the blue glass tea set and Queen Mab in her coach. When she was holding the little queen, absorbed in her, I looked from the fairy face to the child’s and they were so alike. I longed, desperately, for Ambrose. Next time she comes, I thought, he must see her. I would have given her the tea set and the little queen, for she wanted them badly and they are hers, but she refused to take them. I did not force them on her, for they will be safer here and it won’t be long, I hope, before it is all hers. I say I hope, for I am very tired of being ill. Thinking it would not be long I thought I would tell her that I had made this home for her, but just as I was beginning to tell her the door opened and her father came in. It was teatime already. The afternoon had gone like a few minutes. Then they had to go and Mary and I both cried at parting. If Arthur had not said he would bring her again I don’t think I could have borne to say good-bye.

Yet though I am sure Arthur is a man of his word I am haunted by the fear that I may not see her again. And that Ambrose will never see her. I have had a growing sense of isolation lately. It is as though I stood alone in the center of a bare room and all around the walls are pictures of houses, gardens and cities. There are men and women laughing and talking inside the houses, children playing in the gardens, people hurrying up and down the streets, but the doors of the houses do not open to me, I cannot join the children at their games or walk with the busy people in the streets. They are too distant from me. It is the nightmare of the stone walls the other way around. They no longer close in, they recede. And so I am afraid that Arthur may not again bring Mary to see me.

The diary broke off there and did not begin again until six months later when there was another entry, the last in the book.

I was right, for two months ago I saw in the paper that Arthur was dead. It was a great shock to me but I managed to write to his widow to condole with her, and a month later I wrote and asked if Mary could come and stay with me. I had no answer to either letter. I understood. To Mary’s mother I am the skeleton in the family cupboard and she does not think I would be good for the child. I expect she is right but even though it is for Mary’s sake it has taken me two months of struggle to be able to accept her decision and the struggle made me ill; but now, two days after Christmas, with the house wrapped in snow like a child in a white fur cloak, I have accepted it and I am no longer ill. I am sitting in front of the parlor fire after tea and the curtains are drawn. There is the smell of burning wood and the scent of the chrysanthemums Ambrose brought me for Christmas. They are gold and cream and deep crimson, and he must have despoiled the greenhouse and infuriated the gardener. The day he brought them I could only go through the motions of gratitude, so great was my depression and so far away did he seem, but today the scent of the flowers is as close to me as though it were the lining of the white fur cloak. Both scent and silent whiteness are invisible to me yet I hold them about me closer than my own breathing.

The change, this reversal, happened to me in the middle of the carol service on Christmas Eve. Jenny had not wanted me to go to the service, indeed she had refused to take me because she did not think I was fit to go, but I fought her like a naughty child. It was the first time we had had a snowy Christmas since the first one in this house and I remembered, though far off, my dream of the cave in the rock. The old stone church was the nearest thing to a cave I could think of, indeed they were one in my mind, and I was determined to be there. So we went and I was almost crazy with eagerness to get inside, but when I got there I didn’t find what I was wanting. I didn’t find either the cave in the rock or the intimate coziness of a village church on Christmas Eve. I was in some crypt or dungeon, or in a clearing in the frozen forest, and it was dark and bitterly cold. Framed by the arches of the crypt, or the shapes of the frozen boughs, were little pictures, very bright and gay. I saw shining candles and red berries, elflike children with furry caps upon their heads and a crowd of people like a bed of tulips, but all so distant, like the scenes of microscopic busyness in the snowy background of a Dutch painting. There was music too, but so far away that it might have been harp music fingering at the thick walls outside the crypt, trying to come in, or wind at the edges of a forest. Close to me there was nothing but the icy spaces of my loneliness and a misery that no one could understand. I sat shivering with the cold, sometimes stumbling to my feet or sinking to my knees in obedience to Jenny’s hand pulling or pushing me, and far away I heard her sigh and knew that this misguided expedition was turning out just as she had feared it would. I tried to realize what I had learned in the years behind me, the flashes of understanding that had irradiated my times of respite, and to furnish the void with them, and I did remember the forgiveness and love of God waiting at the heart of all experience, and the adorable radiance of being shining out from all created forms, and the hands that gave and received. But I only remembered. None of it was real, only something I remembered imagining. I had thought before that I knew what despair meant, but I hadn’t known. I knew now, I don’t know for how long, for perhaps only a few moments. It passed and I found I was standing half turned in our pew, looking over my shoulder at William the Hunchback’s carving of himself. We were at the back of the church, where Jenny had carefully placed me in case I should disgrace her, and I could see him clearly and easily. He looked highly amused, and I turned my head away again quickly in anger and outrage, back to the emptiness.