I went on. Forio gathered speed, fairly thundering down the slope. I didn’t think I could ever stop him; I didn’t want to. We breasted a blackthorn hedge, fairly flying.
‘Marnie!’ There was the beat of hooves behind me; Mark was following.
I gave Forio his head. He’d been winded when he got to the fox but in half an hour he’d recovered, and he was strung up with all the excitement. He’d never gone so fast. But Mark wasn’t far behind. He was coaxing or whipping some extra speed out of his brown horse.
We were still going downhill. There was a lane on ahead with an open gate this side with a line of willows behind. Somehow I slid or slithered through the gate, hooves striking sparks, there was no gate on the other side but the hedge was low; anyway I couldn’t have stopped Forio there. We took it and over into the next field. Mark followed and had somehow gained. I heard him shout: ‘Marnie!’ again.
I let Forio go across the next field. It was as if not just Mark but all the things he stood for were after me, as I’d fancied they could be.
The next hedge was higher than any so far; and in the sort of flickering way these things come to you I saw that the willows were alongside a river or stream. I couldn’t see whether there was room to land in between, but I knew Forio was going to try and I knew I was going to let him. Mark shouted behind me again and then we took off.
Half over I knew we were for it. The other side was a good four feet lower on to stones and sand, with a twist bringing the river almost up to the wall. Forio saw his danger and seemed to try to check; he’d have landed square but the height did it; he came down on his forelegs and went right over; I went up, and while I was falling I saw Mark somersaulting after me.
I just missed the river, crumpled backwards into the low willow branches, came head down on the ground but gently, breaking and bending branches, and my hat took the worst. I just hadn’t any breath. That was the only bad thing at first. You had to gasp and strain to stay alive. Then I heard something or someone screaming. I tried to claw myself round and sit up. Mark nowhere. Mark’s horse in the river up to its hocks, shaking itself, unhurt. Forio was still down. The noise, that unbearable noise was coming from Forio.
He was trying to get up but he couldn’t. He was wriggling and fighting to get up but he couldn’t. I pulled myself up and fell down again, got up again, staggered towards him. Then I saw Mark. He was lying very still. I ran towards Forio. He was lying there and rolling his eyes like a mad horse and the foam was flecking out of his mouth; and as I got to him I saw one of his front legs. Something white was sticking out through the skin.
I went up to him and knelt beside him and tried to unfasten his bridle. His mouth bit at me in a sort of agony, and I thought of that dog that had been run over in Plymouth, that mongrel that had bitten right through my sleeve. I got his bridle off somehow; someone else was making a noise and it was me; I was crying out loud as if I was hurt; I looked back and saw Mark hadn’t moved. His head was down, almost flat in the mud. I got to my feet again and stared, and it was like being pulled both ways by ropes, like that torture they’d had in the Middle Ages, being pulled apart; but it wasn’t my body that had to suffer. If only Forio would stop that terrible whinnying scream; and he kept trying to get up. Mark was dead perhaps; and Forio was alive and needed me. If I could hold his head, comfort him somehow, hold him till help came; Mark didn’t need me, Mark was dead; Oh Jesus help me; help me to comfort my old friend. I was on my knees and I was crawling towards Mark.
He wasn’t dead. The mud was plastered all down one side of his face and in his mouth. I tore his scarf or stock or whatever it’s called and began to wipe the mud away from his mouth. He could only just breathe; in fact he was suffocating because the mud had got up his nose too.
‘Gawd, you’re ’urt!’ said a voice. ‘I thought you’d took a almighty tumble!’
A man, a farmer or something. ‘Get help!’ I screamed.
‘Let me see,’ he said. He slithered down the wall, looked at Forio. ‘Gawd what a mess, whatever made you come that way?’
‘Stop him screaming!’ I said. ‘For Christ’s sake stop him screaming. Go and get an ambulance! Telephone!’
Pointing to Mark: ‘Is ’e all right? ’E looks pretty bad. Something broken?’
‘I don’t know; I can’t leave him. Look after my horse! Go for help! Don’t ask questions.’
He scratched his head and then went scrambling up to the hedge again. I began to drag Mark out of the mud. He was right out, and as pale as paper, and perhaps he was going to die after all; and I knew what was going to happen to Forio; I knew, and if I thought of it I should die too, and for some reason until they came it was important to stay alive.
I dragged Mark as far as the stones, and I was panting and groaning myself, and I didn’t look round, but thank Christ Forio had gone a bit quieter. I unfastened Mark’s collar and dragged my torn coat off and put it under his head; and then there was a noise I thought I’d never want to hear again, the thud of hooves. I left Mark there and stood up and hung on to a branch of a tree and was sick, and then I looked at Forio again, being quieter as if he knew he’d never walk again; and Rex said over the wall: ‘My God, what a mess. Jack, go for a doctor!’
‘Somebody’s gone,’ I said, and wanted to faint and couldn’t. Now that ‘they’ were here I did so badly, badly want to faint over and lose myself, faint and be just another body for them to look after; but I wasn’t helped that way. I stood there and saw it and watched it all, to the bitter and terrible inevitable end. After all it was my fault so perhaps it was right that I should.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I watched Forio being shot, and I went in the ambulance with Mark to the hospital and I was treated for bruises and shock and then sent home. It was easy really. Everybody said, poor girl, her horse bolted, she’s terribly brave, I do hope Mark will be all right; darling, the best thing for you is to go straight to bed. You have someone at home? Don’t worry about Mark, he’s in the best possible hands, I’m sure he’ll be better in the morning. The surgeon said: ‘We really can’t tell you yet, Mrs Rutland; it’s severe concussion. His arm has been set, but he hasn’t broken anything else. By tomorrow morning we shall be much better able to judge.’
So I went home. And nobody blamed me at all.
I went home, and bubbles of pain and grief and sheer hurt kept rising and bursting in my heart. And Mrs Leonard who’d been sent for from the village came up and fussed, and then Mrs Rutland rang up. Mrs Rutland behaved exactly the way all the mothers must have done in all the wars England has ever fought, when they hear their son has been wounded and want to comfort an anxious daughter-in-law, even though they are really much more anxious themselves. She did it just right, and you couldn’t fault her. And you couldn’t fault me either. After all, how could I possibly be to blame? My horse too, she said, as an afterthought. It really was an appalling piece of misfortune. And I thought of those men, how brutal and cruel they’d been to a fox and how gentle and kind they were over a horse.
That night I wondered where I could hang myself. But Mrs Leonard stayed with me all night and never gave me a chance.
Next morning the reaction set in. I was black and blue all down one side and could hardly move my shoulder or my hip. And I slept. I slept as if I’d been short of sleep for a year. The doctor came once but I’ll swear he gave me nothing. Maybe it was the shock.
Sometimes I’d wake out of a black cloud of sleep, and there’d be pain waiting for me somewhere like a sort of illness just round the corner of my mind. But it wasn’t the pains of my wrenched shoulder and bruised back; it went much, much deeper than that. It was like the part of your heart that beat, the part of your brain that reasoned, as if there was something wrong at the hinge. I’d wake sometimes and feel this awful hurt and look at the clock and see it was five past three, and then I’d sink off gratefully into a long deep sleep. Then after it I’d wake with a start and see it was only ten past three, and the hinge would s
till be creaking and I’d look down a long dark corridor of empty echoing horror to the end of my life.
I drank something every now and then when Mrs Leonard brought it, and just about dusk I looked up and saw Mrs Rutland was there and I said like asking the time: ‘How’s Mark?’ And she said: ‘He’s holding his own.’
I ought to have asked more but I drifted off again and had an insane jumble of dreams about Mother and Forio and how Mother said he had to be shot because it wasn’t respectable to keep a horse in Cuthbert Avenue. Then I was suddenly in court and seemed to be both judge and prisoner in one, defending and condemning myself. Dr Roman was there testifying that I was unfit to plead. Once or twice during the day I tried to get out of bed, but each time the pain in my body woke me up, and I lay back panting and staring.
Outside the window were two trees – just skeletons, no leaves; all through the bright afternoon they nodded and leered at me. Then I saw the river again where we fell, and the water was a snake crawling slimy over the sheets of the bed. It wasn’t till the Friday about noon, pretty well forty-eight hours after the accident, that I woke up with my mind really clear, absolutely clear, just like a glass that’s been emptied and polished, and knew there was an appointment I’d missed today. The Flandre had sailed without me.
From then on a few things began to move normally. I couldn’t sleep then for the pain in my shoulder and back, and I couldn’t even close my eyes because of Forio. The minute I closed my eyes I saw him again. Perhaps it isn’t any good describing everything as it happened, the way my thoughts went; but some time later there was Mrs Rutland in the room again, and I said again: ‘How’s Mark?’
‘About the same. He isn’t conscious yet.’
‘What do they say?’
‘They say we can only wait.’ She came into the room; her hair was untidy. ‘And you?’
‘Oh, yes. I’m better now.’
‘Can you eat a little lunch?’
‘No. No thanks. I’m better without.’
That evening Mark came round and Mrs Rutland got back from the hospital more hopeful. The doctors said he wasn’t out of danger yet, but they thought it was going to be all right.
‘The first thing he said was, where were you, Marnie, and it seemed to help him a lot when I told him you weren’t badly hurt.’
The next day I got up while Mrs Rutland was out, and managed to dress and hobble round the house. My back and hip were like somebody’d painted thunderclouds on them, but a lot of the pain was going. The pain in my body, that is. Mrs Leonard found me out in the stable and tried to get me back to bed, but I wasn’t going. I stayed in the stable all morning, just sitting there, until Mrs Rutland came back, and then I limped in and had lunch with her. Mrs Rutland said she’d promised to drive me in to see Mark as soon as I was well. I said I’d go the following day. I couldn’t very well say anything else. Before dinner that evening I had to go into his bedroom for something, and his keys were there in the corner of the top drawer of his dressing-table . . .
At dinner Mrs Rutland said: ‘These flowers are from the gardener, Richards. He brought them for you and he seemed specially anxious to make it clear that they were out of his own garden.’
Two daffodils, some wallflowers, a few violets.
‘And a blind man came yesterday with a bunch of grapes. He said they were with love. Do you know a blind man?’
‘Yes.’
We ate nothing much for a long while. Any other time I’d have felt screwed up inside at the thought of having a meal alone with her, but now there wasn’t room for any of that. What had happened sat square in my middle like a stone ju-ju; you just didn’t see round.
After a time she said: ‘This reminds me of a meal I once had with Estelle. D’you mind my talking of Estelle?’
‘No . . .’
‘Mark was away, in Wales on business for the firm. Mark’s father had been dead about eighteen months. I’d just sold our house, the family house, and most of the furniture, and was moving to the flat in London. And suddenly I got this terrible conviction that I couldn’t go on. I suddenly felt as if I’d wrenched up my last roots; and that, on top of George’s death and my other son being lost in the war, was more than I could bear. I couldn’t live in London, I couldn’t go on living anywhere. All I wanted was some warm and comfortable place to die. I asked myself to dinner with Estelle because I had to have company at any price, and some sort of sympathy and understanding if I could get it.’
It was too dark in the room; I wished I’d switched on the table lamps. That curtain ring needed fixing; Mrs Leonard never remembered. Mrs Rutland’s fingers were small and pointed, not at all like Mark’s; she moved them along the edge of the table.
‘Did Estelle give it you?’
‘I never asked for it in so many words. When I got here I realized there are some pits of the soul that have to be climbed out of by oneself or not at all. This was one of them. You can’t ask for understanding at twenty-five of the awful loneliness that can strike you thirty years later.’
She went on talking, and I watched and listened, thinking perhaps Estelle never had that loneliness, yet she must have had when she knew she was going to die.
‘It isn’t a question of age,’ I said.
‘What?’ She’d gone on to something else.
‘It isn’t just a question of age. Weren’t you ever lonely as a child?’
She thought. ‘Yes. But it’s different then, isn’t it? When you’re young you have something to feed on, an inner iron ration that keeps your strength up. When you’re older, when your life is past, that’s used up, there’s only the hollow place where the nourishment has been.’
I didn’t think to ask her why tonight reminded her of that time. She changed the subject right away, as if afraid I’d think her morbid.
Presently I said: ‘Does Mark ever talk about me?’
‘You mean, do we discuss you? No, I don’t think so.’
‘Hasn’t he ever said we don’t get on well?’
‘No . . . Don’t you?’
‘Not very.’
She turned her wine glass round but didn’t look at me.
I said: ‘It’s chiefly my fault.’
‘That sounds half-way to a reconciliation.’
‘Oh, it isn’t just a quarrel. I’m afraid it goes far deeper than that.’
Mrs Leonard came in. When she had gone Mrs Rutland said: ‘I hope you’ll be able to make this up with him, Marnie, whether you feel it is your fault or his. I think it would bring him down altogether if he had another failure.’
‘Failure?’
‘Well, yes, in a sense. Isn’t death at twenty-six a failure? It’s contrary to nature anyway. It’s a failure of life and vitality, and I think Mark looked on it to some extent as a failure of love . . .’
Her eyes were on me, and I didn’t like it now; it was just coming through; they’d a liquid look, but shallow, like holding back at the last.
‘Perhaps it’s natural for me to think him an unusual man, being his mother. But I try to keep my understanding this side of idolatry; and I do see that he’s a man who all his life will be bent on taking risks – risks with the usual things perhaps, but most of all with people. He’s tremendously self-willed but also tremendously vulnerable. Estelle’s death hit him hard. To fall in love again so soon . . . It doesn’t often happen.’
I said uncomfortably: ‘Did Mark tell you he was – what he was doing about the printing works?’
She still turned her wine glass. ‘About accepting the Glastonbury offer? Yes. I persuaded him to take it.’
‘You did? Why? Didn’t the name matter?’
‘The name matters very little if you put it alongside the other things. Mark will never get on with the Holbrooks; he hasn’t the flexibility of his father. It’s much better for everybody that they should separate now.’
‘The Holbrooks won’t like it.’
‘Not the way it’s turned out, no. But only because of that. Mark di
dn’t want to do it; he said he felt responsible for the staff. But that’s what he’s been negotiating about, writing in some safeguards. As far as we can tell, no one will suffer.’
No one will suffer. I thought, it’s a sort of epitaph. No one will suffer except me, and Forio, and Mark, and my mother, and, at the next stage, his.
On the Tuesday Mrs Rutland drove me down to the hospital. I tell you, I didn’t want to go. I’d nothing to say to Mark. Except the things that couldn’t be said. Such as, I’m sorry. And, I’m going soon. Goodbye.
He was in a room to himself – private patient I suppose – with a long window, and the sun was falling on a corner of the bed. Thank God she let me go in alone. I was surprised his head wasn’t even bandaged, but that frail look that had foxed me when I first met him, it was more so than ever, he looked a stone lighter.
I didn’t know what sort of way I should be greeted, but he smiled and said: ‘Hullo, Marnie.’
‘Hullo, Mark.’ I tried not to limp on the way to the chair by the bed, and then just as I was going to sit down I remembered the nurse still standing by the door so I bent and kissed him.
‘How’re you feeling?’ He got it out first.
‘Me? Oh, I’m all right. Stiff. But you?’
‘A headache and this arm, that’s all. I want to come home.’
‘Will they let you?’
‘Not for a few days. I’m awfully sorry about Forio . . .’
‘I’m sorry about it all.’
‘But I know how much he meant to you.’
‘It’s my own fault anyway.’
‘Or mine. I shouldn’t have chased you.’
There was a pause. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘thanks for dragging me out of the mud.’
‘Who told you?’
‘I was just that much conscious. I remember you wiping the mud out of my eyes and ears.’
‘I can hardly remember what I did myself.’