She closed her eyes. Her skin was taut and pale with exhaustion. Ruth thought, how can people be like that, turn their own children out, not even listen or forgive? That is not how anyone should be.
She said, ‘I’m glad you thought to come here. It was the right thing.’
‘I don’t want you to pity me. I don’t want you to let me stay here out of duty. Because I am Ben’s sister. You needn’t think that’s any use.’
‘No.’
‘I’ll find somewhere to go. I’ll manage. When I can think.’
‘You should stay here.’
‘You don’t like me.’
‘I don’t know you,’ Ruth said, and that was the truth. ‘I have never known you.’
‘Did you ever want to? Try to?’
‘No.’
‘You had Ben. You didn’t think about anything else at all.’
‘No.’
‘Oh, I don’t blame you for that. You needn’t think I blame you.’
She began to cry, then, though quite silently, letting the tears run down and dry on her cheeks, and Ruth only sat on beside her, saying nothing, she spread out her hands to the fire and gazed into it. But she thought, how many tears? Oh God, how many tears have there been? How much unhappiness and despair and exhaustion and anger and loneliness and misunderstanding? For it seemed at this moment that all the people she had ever known in her life had been weeping, all the days and nights of the past months had been full of nothing but tears.
And will it go on like this? Oh, for how much longer will it go on?
*
She made up a bed in the small room, and Alice went to it early, worn out. Ruth sat on by the fire for over an hour, until she was sure that Alice must have gone to sleep. There were no sounds within the house, except for the shifting of the logs, the spurts and sparks of the flames. Yet it felt quite different, another person was here, and her presence seemed to fill every corner of every room.
Ruth knew that what she must do now was as much for herself as for Alice, it was the only possible step, and she was the only person who could take it. She could not stay here, quite alone, not caring for anything else, did not even want that any longer. It was wrong. That was no way to live. Somehow, all the quarrels and unspoken hostilities had to be healed over, and forgotten, and she was as much to blame for them as any one, perhaps more.
She took her coat and went out. The wind was still high now, blowing hard at her from behind, almost lifting her off the ground. The trees were straining and tossing about, like ships caught in a storm. The last, sweet-rotten death-smells of autumn were being driven out, to make way for the first, cold, clear airs of winter. In the woods, the leaves would be falling and piling up in drifts like dry snow, tomorrow, the sky would show in neat patches through the network of bare branches.
There was no moon. But she was used to all these paths and lanes at night, she could have walked through any of the fields or copses and found her way easily, would know every step, even if she had been blind.
At the corner of Foss Lane, she stopped, to get back her breath, and her courage, and half-hoped, now, that they would already have gone to bed, and she would have an excuse to turn back. For she was afraid of them, did not know what she might say, how to begin. They might have been people who spoke another language, so great was the distance between them.
She said, they are the same, they are human beings, have the same feelings and miseries, are lonely, growing older. They are the same. Were they?
There was a light showing behind the closed curtains. She pressed her arms hard against her sides, and began to walk slowly towards the house. She said, ‘Help me, please help me.’ And it was Ben she was talking to, she was still half-helpless without him, could never be certain if what she did or said was right.
‘Help me.’
The wind came thundering down the narrow street.
Walking into that room, behind Arthur Bryce, she remembered how it had been the first time, with Ben, and how she had felt, and it might have been a hundred years ago, she was so changed. But they were not. Dora Bryce looked at her, without interest. Did not speak.
The room was very hot, a fire banked high up in the grate, the furniture crowded in upon her, and she smelled the airless smell, and saw again those black figures who had perched on all the chairs like crows, staring at her in silent judgment, on the morning of Ben’s funeral.
No, she did not blame Alice for wanting to get out of this house, going no matter where.
Arthur Bryce pushed a chair towards her, too close to the fire, but she took it, and sat on the very edge and her throat closed up, her tongue felt swollen and dry. ‘Help me.’
In the end, he spoke, he said, ‘There’s a wind. A bit of a wind tonight.’
‘Yes.’ And then went on quickly, looking at Dora Bryce, said, ‘I came to tell you about Alice. That she’s all right. She’s at the cottage. I thought…’
‘I won’t have her name spoken in this house. I’ll thank you not to come here, reminding us, bringing it all up again. It’s done with. She’s shamed us, and how do you think I feel?’
‘Please. Listen …’ Ruth was calm now, she would not be angry. There had been enough of that.
‘What have you come here for, all of a sudden?’
‘I wanted … I know I should have come long before. To say I was sorry. I wanted to do something – say something to you.’
‘What is there to say?’
‘Dora …?
But she turned and looked at her husband in scorn, and he fell silent again, hunched down further into his chair, easily defeated.
‘You’ve never had time for us.’
‘I wanted to change things. To try. And to tell you that Alice can stay with me, you can see her there. If that’s what she wants.’
‘Yes, you’re two of a kind, you’ve neither of you had any thought for others.’
‘That’s not …’ But she checked herself at once. ‘We should be friends. Oh, where is the point in all this, where will it end? Why should we go on, not liking one another, not seeing one another? Not even trying. At least we can try.’
Dora Bryce only looked away from her again, and at the fire.
Ruth said desperately, ‘For Ben. Shouldn’t we think of being friends for his sake? He was your son and my husband. We’ve gone through the same things, haven’t we? We’ve felt the same, because he is dead? Why hasn’t that brought us together? It should, it should.’
‘How do you know what I’ve felt. You don’t know anything. I carried him, I gave birth to him, I reared him. What can you know about all of that?’
‘Nothing. No. But…’
‘You none of you know.’
‘Others have been hurt,’ Arthur Bryce said slowly, ‘there’s ways of being hurt and other ways. But it’s the same in the end.’
Ruth thought of the night he had come up to the churchyard to see the grave-dressing, how there had been a closeness between them then, a sharing of love and grief. There was no bitterness between Arthur Bryce and herself, though they knew one another hardly at all.
‘Alice …’
‘Haven’t I told you, haven’t you heard? She’s gone. She’s brought it upon herself, and I won’t have her spoken of.’
‘But she’s unhappy. She is frightened.’
‘You didn’t hear the things she said, to my face, what she called me, here, in this room last night. What have I done to deserve that?’
‘Other people have made the same mistake. And she is the one who has to have the baby, on her own. She didn’t know what she was saying to you.’
‘She knew. And she knows what I said. And I meant it. Every word of it.’
‘But you are her mother.’
‘I’m not proud of that.’
Ruth wanted to weep at her own helplessness, she felt as though she were battering with her fists and tearing with her fingers at some great, barred and bolted door.
‘Won’t you ever see
her? Won’t you help her?’
‘I’ve said all I have to say.’
‘And me? What about me? Can’t you forgive me, whatever I’ve done, try to like me… try… I was Ben’s wife.’
Silence. The fire blazed up. Ruth was faint with the heat, and the effort she had made, and hurt, too, because she had come here, summoned up all her courage, had truly wanted to like, and be liked, and bury what was past, to bring them together, all of them. She had failed. There was nothing more she could do. She did not speak to Dora Bryce again.
The wind was wilder, it was very cold, but she welcomed it, after the heat and anger and tension in that room. Arthur Bryce touched her arm as she opened the gate.
‘She’s not herself. She’s upset. It’s hard for her, she’d always hoped such a lot, wanted such a lot for the girl. It’s hard.’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t hold it against her.’
She turned and looked at him. She thought, and he loves her. He still loves her, no matter what she does or says.
‘What about you?’ she asked him. ‘Do you want to see Alice? Have her come home?’
He shook his head. ‘She’s made her mistake. She’ll pay for it. She’ll go through enough.’
‘And needs people, doesn’t she? Needs you and her mother – all of us.’
‘In time,’ he said, glancing back at the house, ‘give it time. It’ll settle down. Things do. In time.’
‘You know where to come, if you want to see her.’
‘You’re a good girl, Ruth.’ He pressed her arm. ‘I was glad for him – Ben. Did I ever say it? You’re a good girl.’
She would have replied, told him that things were well between them, at least, but he left her and shambled back to the house, and only half-raised a hand to her, before closing the door.
‘Well, I have tried,’ she said, ‘I have done what I could.’ And set off, back through the lanes and out of the village, in the darkness and the wind.
*
Jo lay flat on his stomach on top of the ridge. There had been the wind, and then rain, and all the colours had been washed out of the world and rinsed away. It was dry today, dry and still and clear. The bare fields dropped away and then rose again, and in the far distance they were like a haze of smoke. The sky was milk-white. He looked over to where the beech woods spread out, in ranks and rows like an army of iron-clad soldiers, waiting to move forwards and take over the land. Two magpies went winging away above his head, black and white.
Through the nights of the gales, he had lain awake and felt his bed rising and falling on the wind, had heard the shifting of the trees like the waves of a sea. He had said, I will go away. And dreamed of it.
Now, it was not the same. All that morning, he had been walking through the woods, gone down to where the river ran, gleaming like metal, between its banks. He had listened to the shush of his own footsteps as he waded through the soft piles of dead leaves, had touched the cold bark of ash and larch and beech trees and felt a twig crack under him, brittle as bone. He had stood in Helm Bottom and smelled the frost and fungus and sensed the presence of dozens of sleeping animals in holes and sets and hidden lairs all about him. And then he had come up here, and it was like being on the roof of the world. The sheep calls came to him from far away. There was so much space, now, so much room to breathe. He felt like a god here, able to see so far.
And he knew that he could never go away, could never be happy at sea, in other countries. This was his place, as it had been Ben’s, he belonged to the woods and ditches and copses and streams, needed to live among the calls of birds and the ferreting, scratching, rustling of the feet of squirrels and foxes and badgers, in the undergrowth, to smell the wind of winter and the sap of spring and have the heat of the summer sun warm his body.
He would not go. And there were other reasons. There was Ruth, whom he could never leave, and his mother and father, who did not understand him, but who needed him, he could see that in their eyes, because Ben was gone, and now Alice. They could not bear to lose him, too. He knew himself, knew that he was very like Ben, and so, in his own way, must take Ben’s place. In a little over a year he would leave school, and then he would go and work for Rydal, train as a forester or a gamekeeper.
He turned over on to his back and looked up at the wide, pale sky. He closed his eyes, and felt the earth as it turned, and was rocked by it.
*
The year moved to its end, and the countryside settled down into winter, the bracken and grass on the common were shrunken and dark. Some remembered, others forgot, the death of Ben Bryce. But they were all changed, in some way, the year had brushed against them all, as it passed.
Ratheman’s wife was taken to a hospital miles away, and her baby sent to be cared for by her sister, and Ratheman himself stayed on alone in the dark house, and prayed and wept, and thought, sometimes, of Ruth Bryce; and when he did so, it seemed to him that he might be able to bear it all, to accept and come through. Though he lay awake every night, and then he felt far away from any human being, and out of the reach of God, far from understanding any truth, or of receiving any hope or consolation. The nights went on forever but he could not face the day either, when it did, at last, come seeping through the curtains.
Alice Bryce would not go out, but people heard about her, just the same, and talked, and Rob Foley had another girl, Annie Peters, who worked at Rydal’s and went to the farrier’s house on Sundays, and thought that she loved him. People went on, worked, prepared for the hardness of winter, and out in his tin hut, old Moony died, one November night, and the raven sat silent, huddled into its feathers, looking at the man’s body under its blanket, and it was three weeks before he was found, by Potter, who had come out here, walking his dog. Potter looked down again, at death, and shook his head, for this time, it was a cold, lonely, comfortless thing, and who had ever bothered about old Moony?
In the house in Foss Lane, Dora Bryce would not speak of her daughter, but she thought, sitting by the hot fire every evening, felt the beginnings of interest in the unborn child. At night, sensing that she lay awake, and remembering the griefs and losses of that year, Arthur Bryce put his injured arm about her, and wished that he were a different man, so that she might gain more strength from him. Upstairs, Jo let down the lid of his great-grandfather’s trunk quietly, and tied up the straps and pushed it into the far corner of his room, behind a curtain, before he went to bed and slept.
The first ice and a hard frost came, and the water was solid in tanks and sinks, and hung down like stalactites from the taps in the yard at Rydal’s farm. But there was not yet any snow. At night, the sheep ran down to the bottom of the fields, and huddled together and their bodies were heavy and shapeless under the thick, matted fleece.
December came. It was Sunday. Ruth went out of the back door, and walked half way down the garden, to stand, just between the apple trees, in the place she had been that afternoon, when she had felt the shock at the moment of Ben’s death. Her breath smoked on the steel-cold night air, and the grass and the vegetable tops were coated with a thin frost, like powdered sugar.
She was quite alone. But not alone. She was the same person, Ruth Bryce. But not the same. She loved Ben, and wanted him, and still did not know how she might live for the rest of her life. But Ben was dead, and laid in his grave, and she would move on, from one day to the next. There was winter. There would be spring.
In her bed in the small room, Alice slept, her legs curled up and her arms resting on her rounded belly. Ruth did not know how she felt, what she thought, and perhaps they would never truly like one another, never be close. But for the time being, grief and trouble and the memory of Ben had drawn them together, they got on, well enough, passed the days, while Alice waited for the birth of her child. Jo came to see them. And once, Arthur Bryce had come, and though he had said little enough, Ruth was glad, for Alice’s sake and for her own. For she had heard about old Moony, and felt appalled, at the isolated death, that
the man had had no friends, no care. She must not let anyone in her own life come to that.
She let her hand slide down the tree trunk, and fall to her side, and shivered. And walked up the path to the house, which was no longer empty, no longer hers alone. She said, ‘Ben,’ once, cried out the name.
As she turned, in the doorway, she saw a fox slip down the garden, silent, purposeful. But the hens were locked away, safe, and the fox passed on, down through the meadow towards the dark woods.
The donkey Balaam stood, still as a statue, grey as granite, under the riding moon.
Ruth closed the door.
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Copyright © Susan Hill 1974, 2008
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First published in Great Britain in 1974 by Hamish Hamilton
First published in paperback in 1976 by Penguin Books
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