HUNGER
SUSAN HILL
On the second afternoon, after they had unpacked the last of the boxes, Adrian said they should go out for a walk. That, he said, was the whole point of moving here, to go out for walks.
‘Nature,’ he said. ‘You don’t just look at it, do you?’
For the time being she would have been happy to do that. She was bone-tired. Even her brain was tired. Filling the packing cases, cleaning the old flat for the people who were coming in, because that, apparently, was something else you did; travelling down, cleaning the cottage, because the people leaving had not done it for them; unpacking the boxes, putting things away. A hot poker bored into her lower back every time she moved. She had period pain. Her arms ached.
What she wanted to do was indeed to ‘just look at it’. To lie down and look at the dense, green leaves that blotted out the mould-coloured sky. The faint line of blue hills in the far distance. The jungle of garden.
‘We can get our bearings later,’ Adrian said.
Bearings.
She went in search of some painkillers. The bathroom had a sloping roof with a small square of window that let in more greenish, undersea light. The trees pressed in on them, but she supposed that in winter the light would be clear and they would see across fields to the blue hills.
‘Paula?’
He bounded up the stairs.
‘Come on. What are you doing?’
‘Looking for the Nurofen.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
She waved a hand vaguely.
‘Headache?’
‘Back. Arms. You know.’
‘You don’t need painkillers. You need a walk. Fresh air. Come on.’
She went, not being able to find the Nurofen. Maybe they were in her handbag. Maybe they were slipped in with the bed linen. Or the DVDs.
‘Come on!’
The wooden gate felt greasy after the night’s rain and the long grass trailed cold against her legs.
Adrian stood in the middle of the track and slowly stretched his arms above his head. Closed his eyes. Took a deep breath, expanding his rib cage. Released it slowly.
You look so stupid, she wanted to say. But just walked on past him.
‘AAAHHHH!’ he went again.
The cottage was at the end of the track that opened into a wider lane. There was no other house until you reached a small green at the top.
‘Do you think we’ll be snowed in?’
Adrian leaped and jumped until he reached her. His mouth was half-open, the huge white teeth grinning.
‘Hope so.’
‘What?’
He put his arm round her shoulders and pulled her in to him for a second.
‘Well, it would be fun and it’s all part of living in the country.’
‘It snows in the town.’
‘Different.’
‘How?’
‘Oh, you know – town snow melts to slush. It looks dirty.’
‘Doesn’t country snow?’
‘Not in the same way.’
Paula thought it probably did, but said nothing.
He pulled her along.
Past the houses, another lane led steeply downhill. Unsuitable for Motors.
It narrowed. Trees on either side, and more trees below. The air mushroomy.
Adrian turned to face her. His forehead was damp.
‘You’re going to love it. You could come down here every day.’
She tried to imagine that.
‘Before you start work.’
‘I start work at half past eight.’
‘But I’ll be gone by seven, and people get up early in the country.’
‘What people?’
‘Oh, everybody.’
But she liked it. Liked the great smooth tree trunks and the closeness of the air. She looked up. The sky seemed far away.
They dropped down the steep slope, clutching onto one another and suddenly Paula had a leap of the heart, as if this were some sort of mad, secret impulse, rather than a long-planned and several times almost-capsized move from suburban street to isolated village. But it had not capsized. The cottage had not been bought by someone else. They had packed up their lives and despatched them two hundred miles in a van, which had had to make three stabs at reversing down the track to their gate.
They were here, then. She slithered a couple of yards down to the point where the hard surface turned to mud.
‘What’s that?’
Adrian stood sideways, head cocked.
‘Sounds like singing.’
‘Not singing.’
It was quiet again, apart from the occasional shushing of the leaves.
‘There.’
‘Sounds like chanting.’
Paula hesitated.
‘What?’
‘Maybe we shouldn’t . . . disturb them.’
‘Disturb who?’
He went crashing on through the undergrowth. The noise stopped.
Eventually, she followed him.
There was a clearing. The ground was level, covered in leaf mould and twigs. Paula smelled burning wood.
They were a few yards away: four children, nine or ten years old down. Two girls, two boys. They were crouching or kneeling, and bending forwards to look into something from which a thin spiral of smoke was coiling.
‘What are they doing?’ She did not know why she whispered.
‘Whatever it is they shouldn’t be lighting fires in a wood,’ Adrian said. But he was whispering, too.
‘What have they got?’
They went forward a pace.
The children had started to half-sing, half-chant softly again. They had an old enamel bowl and a stick each; the bowl was balanced on a nest of twigs, which was alight and smoking feebly. Each child took a turn at stirring whatever was in the bowl, while the others watched; then another took over, on and on, stir and stir.
Paula smiled.
‘Damn silly,’ Adrian said.
‘It’s hardly alight. The sticks will be quite damp. They’re OK.’
Eventually, two of the children lifted the bowl and the oldest child banged on the sticks to extinguish the smouldering. They had a bucket and they poured a greenish liquid into it from the bowl. The two smaller children had lost interest and wandered away.
‘Great,’ Adrian turned to her, eyes bright. ‘Isn’t it? Great.’
‘But you said – ’
‘No, no. It wasn’t dangerous. There was hardly a spark. No, I meant it’s great for kids, playing out in the wild like this, making up their own games.’
‘Boy Scouts?’
‘No, not Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts are organised – by adults. This is all the kids themselves. I think it’s great. It’s what they should be doing. It’s why we’ve come here, Paula.’
‘We’re not kids.’
But she could see he was impatient.
The children had trailed away, two trying to carry the bucket between them.
Adrian stretched, arms high, fingertips splayed out.
‘Don’t you think that’s what they ought to be doing? No dangerous roads, no mindless computer games, out in the fresh air.’
‘I was wondering why they aren’t at school.’
Adrian was keen on proper schooling.
‘When we have our own . . . ’
But they did not have their own.
‘It’ll be some holiday or other. Country holidays, you know. May Days and so forth.’
‘It’s the end of June.’
He turned. ‘Why do you always have to pick me up when I say anything? Why do you have to pour cold water? You agreed we should move to the country. You wanted to move here.’
Which was true.
They hauled themselves back up the muddy path.
She needed to think about it. Yes, she had agreed. Was that the same as wanting to? She wasn’t sure. She agreed to a lot of things.
She thought of lying in bed, looking at the green leaves. Grey sky. Listening to the silence.
‘You’re not the one having to get a train at seven every morning, commute for over an hour, walk at both ends, rain or shine, leave in the dark, get home in the dark.’
‘Well, in winter.’
‘You’re not the one.’
Was she the one who had wanted to move to the country? After a time they both had, but she couldn’t remember where it had begun.
You are not the one left alone here in a cottage at the end of a lane in a hamlet without anything, without a shop, a pub, a school, a bus, a . . .
Not that she needed the pub, school or bus.
Knowing nobody.
‘You’ve always said you prefer your own company.’
Had she?
‘Those kids,’ he said, taking her hand and swinging it as they went back past the row of cottages.
‘I mean, it’s a paradise, isn’t it? Running loose, perfectly safe.’
‘How do you know they’re perfectly safe?’
He swung her hand up and kissed it. Smack. His lips were damp.
‘You’re not worried about the mad axeman?’
‘No. I just wonder how you know it’s perfectly safe. I mean, why the country would be safer than the town. The city.’
Adrian gave his hyena laugh.
‘Traffic. Road rage. Paedophiles. Knife crime. Oh yes, indeed, urban life is very safe.’
‘I didn’t – ’
‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’
The Nurofen had begun to wear off. Someone was dragging her insides down at the front and boring the hot poker into her back. The headache was gone, though.
‘What do you think they were doing? Cooking something?’
Stone Soup, she remembered.
‘Making witches’ potions.’ Adrian put on a spooky voice. ‘Stirring the cauldron. Eye of newt and all that. I think it’s great. Really great. All that space. No one telling you what to do. No Nintendo.’
‘I don’t think children play Nintendo now, do they? Isn’t it something else?’
Adrian slammed the gate.
‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Why do always have to correct me? Why do you have to be right?’
‘I wasn’t . . . ’
But he had gone thundering up the uncarpeted stairs and crashing into the bathroom.
He had two more days off, during which they sorted out the furniture, the curtains, the kitchen, the linen, the lamps, the books, and Paula forgot what it was like not to ache, not to feel so tired she longed to lie on the floor and sleep without undressing. It rained. Adrian sang and whistled. The electricity failed. The oil delivery came. And every morning and afternoon he made her go out for a walk, to explore, even in the rain, because, he went on saying, that was why they had come here.
‘Fresh air. The natural world. Space. Exercise.’
And she had agreed. When they had still been living in Salisbury Road she had agreed, had longed for all of this, the greenness, the space, the silence. She did not blame him at all.
When he went back to work, she would start organising her workroom, an old lean-to conservatory at the back, with a couple of broken panes and rotting wood in the door. But hers. It had a floor of old, uneven bricks and a tortoise stove. She could see the shadows of the blue hills and the sky was soft with cloud, right above her head.
On the second morning she went for a walk alone, ambling along the track and across the field without any sense of direction or purpose. Adrian always had a purpose – to the east, to the west, to the woods, to the fields, to see a view, to reach the end of somewhere. Not having one made her feel peaceful.
On the far side of the field, beside a high hedge, she could see them again: a little cluster of children close together, arms stretched up, then backs bent, arms up and bent. Paula zigzagged quietly towards them.
They were picking unripe berries, green and small, and dropping them into a plastic tub.
‘You do know you can’t eat those?’
Two of the children turned and stared at her, but did not smile or speak.
‘Leave them till autumn. They’re OK when they’re ripe.’
One of the boys stripped a handful of the green berries and ate them, looking her straight in the eye.
‘You’ll get tummy ache.’
But after a moment, during which they merely stared at her in silence and unsmiling, she turned away.
‘Wonderful,’ Adrian would have said, ‘foraging for their own treats, not buying all that sugary junk from a shop. That’s how it should be.’
Paula wondered again why they were not in school.
She began to notice the birds that came into the garden. While she was at her drawing board or painting at her table she kept looking up and spotting a blackbird under the bushes, a thrush on the fence, a long-tailed tit, a great tit, chaffinches. Once or twice a woodpecker swooped in, flashing scarlet and white. They did not fly up in panic. She put breadcrumbs on the step and they were gone within the hour.
At the weekend they drove to the nearest market town for groceries and she bought a bag of bird nuts and a plastic feeder. An extra loaf.
‘How is it,’ she asked Adrian, ‘on the train?’
‘Well, it’s a train. I go on it.’
‘I mean . . . how are you finding it? The commute? Do you enjoy it?’
‘Does anyone?’
He went to bed just after nine thirty and was often curt with her. But when they went out for a walk in the sunshine on Saturday he said, ‘This is what it’s all about, you know. This is it.’
‘What?’
‘Life,’ he said, raising his voice slightly. ‘This is what life is all about.’
And gradually Paula found that it was. The first surprise was how much she loved being alone for twelve hours a day; how much she resented the people pressing in on her when she went to the supermarket or into town. She moved slightly away to avoid being touched, sat in the café drinking her coffee alone, watching them and feeling as if she belonged to some other species than theirs. She did not feel hostile, just detached. Different. She lived in an invisible shell.
The cottage was quiet, apart from wind in the leaves. Rain on the leaves. Rain on the glass roof of the lean-to. A distant tractor in the fields. The postman’s van. Birdsong.
The days slid into one another and in the afternoons she sometimes felt a mist of tiredness settle on her like a cobweb, and she would sleep, on the couch or the bed, or, now that the days were warmer, on the grass. She woke gently, to lie still, not thinking, listening, watching the shadow of the leaves moving across the bedroom ceiling or the sun’s brightness on a sheet of white paper.
It was on one of the fine, warm afternoons, when she had been sleeping on the grass, that she woke more suddenly than usual, because of a different sound: a shuffle and then a half-stifled murmur. She opened her eyes and saw the children. There were only two of them this time, the tallest and the smallest. The girl was standing under the hanging bird feeder, extracting peanuts one by one and handing them down to the small boy, who put them quickly into his pocket. In between hiding them, both children were eating nuts as well. Occasionally, the girl glanced round quickly, but her hands were deft and swift and as Paula watched the nuts in the feeder went down, until it was empty.
She was going to jump up and challenge them, partly annoyed about the theft, but also with concern. Weren’t peanuts meant for birds ‘unfit for human consumption’? But almost as the thought came into her mind the children were gone, vanishing like shadows when the sun goes in, soft and swift of foot, down the path and out not through the gate but through a neat gap they had made in the hedge. The shrubby branches closed behind them and the garden was empty.
The next thought in her mind seemed urgent. She would not tell Adrian. Must no
t tell Adrian. Why was that so important?
She got up and re-filled the nut feeder and for the rest of the day was alert for the slightest sound or sight of the children. But they did not come back.
Not that day. Not the next, and then it was the weekend and they went for more energetic walks and still she did not tell him. When they were not walking or grocery shopping, Adrian slept. Paula had started to tackle the jungle that was the garden, slashing back, raking out, digging up, while he slept on. She did not mind. She liked her own company after all.
The fine weather settled in.
‘My mother wants to come,’ Adrian said.
‘She wouldn’t like it here. Yvonne likes the town. Shops. Stuff like that.’
‘Stuff like that.’
‘I just meant – what would she do all day? I’ve only done half these illustrations. I can’t leave it.’
‘She’ll come on Tuesday. You can go out with her in the afternoons, can’t you? You don’t work all day, do you?’
‘Well . . . most of it.’
She had not told him about the sleeping.
‘There you are, then. And take her for some walks. Do you both good.’
‘Be part of the natural world.’
‘Exactly! You see?’
His face was an open beam of satisfaction. He had taught her something. He liked to teach people.
‘Tuesday, but she wouldn’t get here till lunchtime. Give you a morning for work, won’t it?’
She was not taking Yvonne to the supermarket. ‘You need this. You don’t tell me you manage without that? You don’t tell me you have never bought . . . ? . . . No, Paula, you shouldn’t ever buy that brand, they force-feed Third World babies with bottle milk . . . Put it back, pure waste of money, the own-brand is fine . . . But Adrian doesn’t like sausages . . . ’
She went alone on the Monday morning. It was quiet. A few mothers with babies perched in the trolleys wheeled slowly round in pairs, chatting. Paula shopped without a list, without a system, enjoying the wander from aisle to aisle, looking at books and DVDs and make-up she would never buy, before homing in on all her usual stuff. She had coffee, filled up with petrol, bought a newspaper and chocolate from the kiosk. Sang on the way home.
Yvonne would be here tomorrow, but she had done the shopping without her.
Slowly the cottage had stopped being the cottage and become home. Things had found permanent resting places, the smell of mice had faded, the curtains hung straight. Adrian fell asleep during television programmes. She had begun to tame the garden. But whereas a house stayed as you left it, a garden ran away with you and after a week of hands burning from nettles and thumbs scratched with thorns, Paula lost heart and just mowed enough grass to sleep on. The rest ran riot.