A Particular Place Page 16

  ‘Tell me about your childhood,’ he said, eager to add more strokes to the portrait. ‘It can’t have been bad all the time because you have a real capacity for enjoyment.’

  She put one hand into the stream, letting the water cool her wrist while she thought about this. ‘You don’t think the capacity for enjoyment can be acquired?’

  ‘I would like to think so. But my observations tell me that it is a gift of childhood.’

  Above them the sky was cloudless and the larks were singing. ‘What can I add to what they are saying?’ she asked.

  ‘I want to hear your song.’

  ‘A simple song. When I was a child I was as excited by high moorland as some folk are by their first glimpse of the sea, the taste of salt on their lips and all that. As I climbed towards it and saw the light changing, I could smell freedom. The moors don’t make big statements or issue challenges like mountains. They just wipe out all constrictions. This is the only place where I can breathe deeply. I suppose the sea does the same thing for some people, but it is alien territory and you can’t walk on it – at least, most of us can’t. But you can lie flat on your tummy and feel yourself a living part of moorland. When things were going well with us – which meant we had our chins above the pig swill – I had an old pony. And when he had to go, there were kind people who let me exercise their ponies. Those were the best times – the only times I have ever been pure in heart were on a pony’s back with miles of moorland around me.’

  They were both silent. She listened to the larks while he, looking with narrowed eyes to where ponies grazed near an outcrop of rock, tried to conjure up a figure riding with young, mutinous face and hair streaming like a Valkyrie.

  ‘Did you know my mother?’ he asked, excited by the image. ‘She often came to stay with Hester.’ He thought of his mother as a contemporary of Norah’s because she had died when she was only forty.

  Norah, visualizing a person of Hester’s age, shook her head. ‘I didn’t come to town much until I joined the choir. That was when I met Hester. I’ve heard her speak of her sister but I don’t ever remember meeting her.’ She turned to look at him over one hunched shoulder. ‘But you? You must have come often, too?’

  ‘No. Hester only had the one spare room which my father found cramped enough without the added discomfort of a bed made up for me in the sitting-room. We only came the once, he and I.’ There was a pause while each played with the notion of a youthful meeting and wondered how it might have changed their lives.

  When eventually they started to walk, Norah said, ‘Tell me about your childhood.’

  He had lived on the Ashdown Forest. The day had started with a walk across the forest to school and had drawn to a close with the walk home. At weekends he and his parents walked the dog in the afternoon. He had loved and grown to need that sense of space and freedom which the forest gave and the slow pattern which the walks made of his life. In the evenings in summer his parents had worked in the garden and he had gone to play in the forest with friends or, later, to sit in his bedroom doing his homework as the sun went down in a blaze which seemed to set the trees alight. In winter they had sat round the log fire, often in the dark.

  ‘It seems now that those were the most precious moments of my life,’ he said, ‘those walks, those drowsy firelit evenings.’

  ‘They seemed to go on and on for ever – the good things in childhood,’ she responded. ‘My pony whirled me off into eternity. Don’t you still have fires, though? I always light a fire in the evenings.’

  Valentine did not like the dust which fires caused or the subsequent clearing out of the grate which he so often failed to attend to. Fires were a thing of the past in their household. He was disturbed to find himself making comparisons; but not sufficiently disturbed to prevent his being aware, as he walked beside Norah, of many lost joys coming back to him. ‘And at the end of walks there would be piled toast and hot strong tea.’

  ‘Not at my homecoming.’ The response was sharp this time. ‘Bread and dripping if I was on time, and the switch taken from behind the door if I was late.’

  He was silent. ‘There I go again,’ she said. ‘You thought I was a contrary piece, didn’t you, when we got onto the subject of women priests at that meeting? Admit it!’

  ‘I expect I was a bit contrary, too. It’s a subject I am uneasy about.’

  ‘Can you tell me why?’

  ‘I’m not sure of the theology yet.’ Now that she was reassured of his feeling for her she was beginning to relax and as he bent his mind to the subject, she watched, tenderly amused, seeing the child in the man as she listened. ‘But that’s not entirely the answer. It’s more personal. I feel as though a part of myself is threatened when women want to take over.’

  ‘Not many men would admit that,’ she laughed.

  ‘I don’t mean it in quite the way you probably imagine.’ He shepherded them both back to the point at issue. ‘It sometimes seems to me that in late middle life men have spent themselves – they seem puzzled, disappointed.’

  ‘Women get tired by the years, believe me!’

  ‘But I think they understand better what has happened to them. Women know themselves. Or so it seems to me. And their goals are more often within themselves.’ Beneath their feet the heathland bluebells smelt honey sweet; she breathed in the scent gratefully but he walked on unheeding. ‘Whereas men are so often strangers to themselves all their lives. They, more than women, are expected to conform to group expectations, whether sporting or drinking – and to professional and business images.’ She watched a golden plover wheel above and, eager to show it to him, touched his shoulder. He went on, his eyes on the ground, as though he must wrestle thought free of the tangled bracken. ‘Women don’t let their work take over their personalities, they seem to be better at keeping something of their own self untouched.’ His voice vibrated, rusty with emotions not often released. ‘It seems – I don’t know how to put this – that this is something they have to do for all mankind, important that it isn’t lost to the species. The feminists frighten me because I see them using men’s weapons . . .’

  ‘Adopting the worst characteristics of their oppressors?’ she said lightly.

  ‘If you wish to put it like that,’ he said huffily.

  They walked in silence for a little while, then she touched his cheek lightly with her hand. ‘I didn’t mean to mock.’

  ‘There is some quietness in women. Theirs isn’t a confrontation with life so much as an assent – for good or ill, they allow it to happen.’

  She said sadly, ‘This is what you learnt at your mother’s knee.’

  ‘We are all afraid of ourselves today. So afraid!’ he cried out passionately. ‘We have become so careful, so bland with one another. I want people to tell me what they make of this world of ours – not just repeat what the scientists and sociologists tell them. I want to know what questions they ask when they look up at the stars when they can’t sleep at night, when they sit by the dying. I want to know what people are really concerned with, deep in their hearts and at the back of their minds – not what they are programmed to care about.’ He had the wild look of the old-time actor who believes that the whole man should be used to convey strong emotion – why else was he given eyes, nostrils and mouth, shoulders and hands? ‘But we are afraid. There are so many destroyers. It is a very brave person who will any longer state a simple belief, reveal a dearly cherished love. It sometimes seems it is easier to die for the things that mean most to us than to speak of them. It’s safe to speak of the ugly things – aggression, greed, lust – but to reveal the things one treasures, or to admit one’s fears, doubts, disappointments, longings, would be to walk naked into a wasps’ nest.’

  He looked down and saw that her face was twisted in misery. His own face became gaunt with suffering. ‘I’m so sorry. I have upset you.’

  ‘I don’t know how to answer. That’s what upsets me. I don’t know what to say to you when you speak like that. Things come
out so jaggedly when I try to speak of my feelings.’

  Only a short time ago he had tried to recreate the Norah of her youth. Now, he scorned the sentimentality of his imaginings. How could that plastic marvel have compared with this face before him now, the dry skin scored by as many lines of laughter as of tiredness and anxiety, the hurt eyes still undulled by disappointment?

  ‘The fault is in me,’ he said gently. It was on the tip of his tongue to say that Valentine had this difficulty with him, but he knew that were he to say it he would be led to make an unfavourable comparison. He kissed Norah on the cheek and tasted the salt of her tears. ‘Oh, my dear, my dear, I need you so much!’

  For a time they stood silent, presenting an odd spectacle on this bright, still day, holding each other stiff as a pair of scarecrows blown together by a strong wind.

  When eventually they walked on, hands clasped, they seemed at peace. ‘I think the part of my childhood I miss the most is those firelit evenings,’ he said. ‘Nothing can replace the intimacy of people sitting together over a fire, not feeling the need to speak. And the talk when it comes seems to well up from some deeper level; things can be said – ideas, reflections, questions answered or not answered – by firelight that don’t get said at any other time.’

  Norah’s tears had long since dried by the time Valentine came in sight.

  ‘I don’t often see you on the bus, Mrs Hoath.’ Mrs Pettifer made a rebuke of the statement.

  ‘My husband has the car.’

  Mrs Pettifer interpreted this as the opening of hostilities. ‘If I hadn’t come up before Jimmy Lander the week after my husband refused him a loan, I should never have had my licence suspended.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had had your licence suspended.’

  ‘It was in the local paper on the front page.’ Mrs Pettifer was incensed by Valentine’s indifference. ‘ “Bank manager’s wife has close encounter with market stall.” ’

  Valentine looked out of the window, entertaining a fantasy of Mrs Pettifer at the wheel of a vehicle bedecked with lace and silver-framed photographs and other bric-a-brac reminiscent of an old canal barge. The idea of Mrs Pettifer gypsying through life might well have served a modern Cervantes.

  ‘Everyone knows all about his merchandise,’ Mrs Pettifer was saying. It was apparent that it was the contents of the stall which she considered to be a matter for the law rather than the quality of her driving. ‘I kept telling them the whole lot wasn’t worth five pounds and anyway it probably fell off the back of a lorry.’ And therefore fit to be trampled over, Valentine noted – she must have sounded like a latter-day Marie Antoinette. Valentine made a mental resolution to read the local paper in future, or better still, study the courts’ lists for the coming attractions.

  The bus was climbing now, the stops more infrequent as the houses thinned out. Surely Mrs Pettifer wasn’t proposing to walk on the moors? Perhaps some such thought had occurred to Mrs Pettifer. The two women looked at each other speculatively. Mrs Pettifer said, with the air of one who has no reason to be afraid of laying down her cards, ‘I am going to my bone man. That wretched stall played havoc with my back.’

  ‘You would think he’d have a place in town.’

  ‘He is very good.’ Mrs Pettifer’s tone made it clear that nothing so mundane as a town could accommodate such a man.

  Valentine was beginning to experience some difficulty in breathing. ‘It’s stifling in this bus, isn’t it?’ She feared the clamminess of her skin might be noticeable.

  ‘Going visiting, are you?’ There were only a few houses up here and Mrs Pettifer knew the occupants of each one.

  ‘I am going for a walk.’ In fact, Valentine felt it much more likely she would faint.

  ‘The moor is no place to walk on your own, even on a clear day,’ Mrs Pettifer said, her motives not entirely solicitous.

  Valentine bent her little finger back, a method of curing faintness which had proved efficacious on similar occasions. She knew that Mrs Pettifer was probing and detested having to respond. But since the purpose of this trip was to offer satisfaction rather than gratification to the Mrs Pettifers of the town, she must needs reply, ‘I am meeting Michael. He likes long walks and I don’t. So we compromise.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Mrs Pettifer had lost interest. She levered herself into a crouching position. ‘You’ll have to give me a little push, if you don’t mind. All this jolting about has made my poor back worse.’ Valentine responded with alacrity and Mrs Pettifer shot to the roof like a Jack-in-the-box.

  The irritation caused by the woman’s presence had been nearly as effective as the finger-bending. Now that she had gone Valentine was tempted to get off the bus. Only the thought of the last uphill stretch prevented her. It was difficult enough to see it happen, this gradual dissolution of the world, without having to force her body towards the void.

  The bus stopped a little short of the plateau; the final haul she must do on her own. The knowledge of what lay ahead weighed like lead pieces strapped to her thighs. At each step her whole body seemed to pull her back as if rearing from a precipice. People, laughing and talking, passed on light feet, springing upwards like mountain goats. Above her head she knew that the sky was blue but she dared not look up and see it growing into dizzying immensity. The song of the larks was terrifying in its meaningless ecstasy, its soaring release from all things human.

  The moment the ground levelled out she jerked her head up, knowing that one second’s delay would lead to another and she would end up – as she had on previous occasions – lying face down on the turf. Once, long before she met Michael, she had refused to move from such a spot and had been carried away to a car by some chance hikers who thought she was insane. The elderly couple who had been her companions had thought she was petulantly intent on spoiling their pleasure.

  Now, slowly, she began to walk down the track which led across the spine of the moor. She had extreme difficulty in keeping her balance. This, no doubt, was how people felt who were made to walk the plank by pirates. Only her fate was worse because her plank appeared to go on into eternity. At least she was facing the tors, only thumb prints on the sky, but something on which to nail her eyes.

  She did not know which way Michael had gone, so she must not walk too far. Ahead there was the moorland equivalent of spaghetti junction. She sat in the middle of it, keeping her eyes on the tors and repeating the one mantra which had ever proved very effective for her, ‘I am the jewel in the lotus.’

  After an age, aeons, a century, or fifteen minutes, whichever way you were experiencing time, two dots appeared and evolved into people recognizable as Michael Hoath and Norah Kendall.

  ‘I thought it would be nice,’ she said when they were within hearing distance, ‘if we all three returned to town together. If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather we didn’t make conversation.’

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ Michael said later when they were alone at the vicarage. He was looking into the garden where the last sunlight fell on a gnarled tree worthy of William Blake, its writhing limbs displaying Jehovah in one of his arboreal manifestations. He spoke not in the tone of a penitent but as one viewing some act of Nature over which he has no control.

  ‘At least be discreet in future,’ she said.

  This had the effect of turning him from the garden towards her. She was rearranging flowers in the bowl on the table, not idly but as if fully absorbed in the business of extricating wilting foliage and snapping off dead heads.

  ‘You are very surprising,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. I surprise myself.’

  He watched as she worked, ruthlessly creating a simpler arrangement.

  ‘It’s rather like that joke about God,’ she said conversationally. ‘Not dead – alive and well and working on a less ambitious project.’ She stepped back to view her handiwork. ‘Well, it will last a few more days.’

  Behind her, she heard him walk out of the room. She went on staring steadily at the flowers, wonde
ring why she was not upstairs packing her bags. Her mind seemed quite unable to answer this question; it was much too busy posing others, as if this affair had merely served to highlight issues which had long needed attention, such as the need to work out another kind of life for herself.

  Chapter Nine

  There was a particularly violent thunderstorm on the first night of Hedda Gabler. Backstage, in the old part of the building, buckets and bowls were put out and the stage manager warned the cast, ‘Just watch where you are walking when you get your call.’ His words did not go unheeded. On a similar occasion three years ago, Leontes had fallen over a bucket and broken his leg, thus bringing the run of A Winter’s Tale to a premature end. It had been almost impossible to explain to the Director of the theatre that there were occasions when the show could not go on.

  In the newer part of the building which comprised the foyer, cloakroom and bar, windows had steamed over and there was an unpleasant smell, as if a lot of old, wet dogs had been let loose.

  Hester was in charge of front-of-house for this performance, a duty she tended to take over-seriously.

  ‘How you find the time, Hester, is a mystery to me.’

  ‘You’re hardly the one to talk about time,’ Hester replied. Her friend, Annie Cleaver, had recently been entertained at Her Majesty’s expense for a week.

  ‘Oh well, I know you need your little recreation.’

  Hester, stung by the implication that her pleasures were superficial, the more so since there was some truth in the accusation, retorted, ‘You were known to enjoy yourself before you became so heavy with purpose.’

  ‘If you knew what I have been through – and, of course, my experiences are nothing in comparison . . .’ But here Annie was swept into the foyer before she could give details of her harrowing. ‘If you can tear yourself away from your scribbling, you must come to supper one day next week,’ she called over her shoulder before her voice was drowned by a roll of thunder.