The Western Wind Read online

  ‘Benedicite,’ Piers Kemp announced.

  ‘Dominus.’

  ‘A woman, Father, labouring in childbirth. The midwife says, Let me inspect your private downbelow to see if the child is coming. To which the woman replies, Best to check the other side too, my husband has often used that road.’

  ‘Confiteor,’ I said with a sigh.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I say Dominus, and you say Confiteor.’

  ‘That you do, that I do.’

  When I saw Kemp that morning on his way up to Townshend’s, I’d wondered when he might appear; he was never one to miss out on a pardon. A wiry bachelor with a bent grin and fast-disappearing hair. He’d worked for Townshend longer than my time in this parish, since he was a boy, grinding the corn down at Townshend’s mill. Every day he did that; every day his hairline retreated further from his forehead.

  ‘Do you have a confession?’

  ‘I have quite a confession,’ he whispered, his loose, wide mouth suddenly at the grille.

  ‘Then please.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of a woman with the head of a pig?’

  ‘Not – ’

  ‘But with the body of a sleek young girl, as fuckable as they come.’

  Words crowded at the top of my chest but didn’t organise themselves into anything worth saying, so I slouched in silence, back aching, elbows burrowed into knees.

  ‘Then again,’ he said, ‘I suppose lovely young girls with pigs’ heads aren’t really your speciality, Father.’

  ‘I’m not sure they’re anyone’s,’ I said.

  ‘Ha!’ A single eruption of laughter – and then without laughter and once more low and lascivious, ‘They’re my speciality now.’

  I felt for Piers Kemp. Some said he was the most cheerful man in England, with a quick smile that could cheat the devil, but I’d seen the other side of that smile and it was disappointed, wary and tired. He had only two she-goats for company and he liked to amuse children by lifting the goats onto their hind legs and causing them to dance. And it did amuse children, though the goats’ cold lizard-eyes always held a look of startled dismay.

  ‘This pig-girl I know was born to a good family, believe it or not,’ he said. ‘Father with a human head and mother with a human head, with not a snout between them. They said her mother died of disappointment when that little piglet snuffled forth between her legs. Her father was trying to sell her off in marriage, so he didn’t have to bear the sight of her any more – and she’d been around many a man before she reached me, my poor girl. She was sold to a captain first, and the captain took one look at her and asked for her to be sent away. Then she was presented to a doctor, this time with a sack on her head, and the doctor became glinty-eyed and interested and got ready with his money – but when the sack came off, he was disgusted and put it back on. Another, this time a poet, who had no money, took it on himself to try her out for free. He undressed her and laid her down with the sack still on her head and was happy with what he saw, because her body was milk and honey, with long, round thighs and an enticing deep cavern, but when he went to take her she squealed, as pigs do when they haven’t been paid for. And what do you think this poet did?’

  I sighed again.

  ‘This squeamish poet jumped up from the bed and claimed a poem had come upon him, which he had to go and write down. You’ll guess, Father, that he left and never went back.’

  And I put my head in my hands and wondered what it was like to be Piers Kemp. Did he find a still pond, and tell these stories to the audience of his own face?

  ‘Word got round that there was a little village called Oakham,’ he was saying, ‘where anybody could go, no matter how unwanted in life. A village of scrags and outcasts. So they took this foul beauty there – though nobody seemed to know where Oakham was, and they ended up in Wales before they found it after two weeks of looking. When they got there and asked if any men were keen to marry, they were told there was a miller, a poor miller who hadn’t yet found time in all his milling to have a wife and was handsome enough, but not that picky – and her father was desperate to sell her by now. So the miller – who you’ll have judged as being me – paid five shillings for her, which is the price of a pig with a bit added on, probably with the money his priest – that’s you – gave him to mill his corn, Father. When the miller took the sack from her head she was, yes, as vile as a January morning. But he shrugged and thought to himself, Well, never mind, I don’t mind a bit of grunting.’ He leant in once more to the grille, his wide chin and long hairless jaw bright against the shadow. ‘And besides, all are alike in the night.’

  Still slouched forward, I found I was tapping my top teeth. I turned my thoughts to his absolution. It would take a lot of Hail Marys for him to repent his lust and lies – a higher number than he could count to. But my imagination wasn’t with his absolution, it was with his lover sitting in the corner of his house with her hands resting primly on the fine silk dress her father had sold her in, looking down at the white moons of her rounded nails, smelling, with her great snout, the violet scent she wore, the smell of sweet humility, and glimpsing – in longing? in dread? – the mess of straw and blankets that Kemp called a bed. Later, she would lie on that bed and her inhuman squeal would rend the quiet of the village. Pain or pleasure, we couldn’t know. People would come to know us by her; Oakham, home of the squealing pig-woman.

  ‘Go before you tell more lies,’ I said. ‘And fill your shoes with stones from now til the start of Lent, to persuade you to think twice about lying again. Pray the Rosary morning and night.’

  Piers Kemp sprung from his knees with a Yes, Father, gladly, Father, thank you, Father; a woodpecker cackled past the south window.

  A village of scrags and outcasts. Oakham: Beastville, Pigtown, Nobridge. The village that came to no good; the only village for tens of miles around that doesn’t trade wool, doesn’t make cloth, doesn’t have the skill to build a bridge.

  Here’s the village we pass by, with its singing milkmaids; we call it Cheesechurn, Milkpasture, Cowudder. Its lord is as pudgy and spineless as the cheese he makes. Its people are vagrants who were ousted from their own villages and are in most respects desperate. Its richest man was whisked off down the river and drowned. And here is its priest: young John Reve, roosting in the dark. For all that he’s overseen by Christ, he’s led his people to no further illumination. And he stinks of goose and burps goose, no matter how he tries not to.

  Was ridicule the cost of kindness? Because we’d been kind in Oakham, so much so that God made note. In these recent decades of ours, when endless furlongs of cropland have been taken from villagers and given over to sheep pasture or rabbit warren, and crops pulled up and grass sown, a man might have gone staggering dispossessed from his home, suddenly landless, and where would he stagger? He’d stagger our way, because he’d followed roadside rumours of a place that would have him. Here he’d come with nothing but a brass pot, a horsehair rope, a plough chase (no plough, no horse), a packet of peas, a hen, a wife and four children, and this village would take him in, and give him land.

  Townshend’s grandfather – who’d no belief in sheep – took in as many of these families as wanted to come. Wasteland was shown the plough, heath and woodland too; all of the parish was ploughed up for crops. He gave incomers six months free tenancy, then six months half-rent, while they got themselves going. By the end of that, Oakham had more land for crops than anywhere around, and good land too, I’m told. The Townshends became richer by it, but that wasn’t to say there was no kind motive; there was more welcome here, for anyone, no matter, than anywhere else in the world. There were no folk less offput by a man’s bad breath or a woman’s limp or a child’s filth than those in Oakham. God saw the truth of that, because he gave fifteen good harvests in a row, and he gave us places where wheat would grow where we’d once only been able to grow rye or maslin. We built this bigger church for him, and dedicated it to the Virgin, and let the timber one in the
woods go.

  Harvests fail eventually, though. Always they do. We had nothing else to fall back on – little pasture, little wool, no fulling mills, our only watermill was all for corn, and the little wool we had was still fulled by foot. Foreigners had come to like an English shirt on their backs, but we had no skills at making those – we had no specialist spinners, weavers, tenterers, teasers, dyers, they were busy elsewhere. Even if we’d started, it was too late; our neighbours had already dressed the whole of Europe. Oakham was all crop, and balanced on the fates of the weather. By the time the manor came to Oliver Townshend the weather had done its worst too many times. He tried to warren some of the land for rabbits; trees downed for bracken and pillow mounds – I remember that the first time I saw him he was sending his dog at the rabbits, and singing ‘Blow Thy Horn, Hunter!’ with false optimism. Rabbits were not going to save us then any more than cheese does now; Townshend knew it too. He sung anyway, and loud enough that all rabbits in these isles would hear and scarper.

  But is kindness enough? Open-heartedness? Tolerance? The meek shall eat and be satisfied – and yet I sometimes wonder if, for all that, God favours brightness, a spark, an aliveness that could be turned to cruelty, but which worships him instead. Does he tire of Townshend’s dimmed wits? Of mine too, for that matter, as I roost slumpily in the dark? Does God prefer a man or woman who comes with a hundred ideas, each one a sharpened arrowhead, who peers – as the eagle does – into the heart of the sun? Do those people who pass on the other side of the river, with their cartloads bound for Europe, look across the ham and say, Woe to Cheesechurn, for its one bright man has died and left a village of fools?

  Resurrection

  A RAP ON the screen, and the dean’s voice: ‘Reve.’ A throat roughly cleared.

  I came out of the booth to find him disappearing into the vestry. I took one of the rosaries from the nail, left it on the floor and followed him. Except for us, the church was an empty hush, a pewter light. No lustre, no shadow. I closed the vestry door behind me. The dean sat on a pile of blankets, a greyish shape on grey. I wished he wouldn’t, it made him half my height and difficult to do business with, but he seemed to think it gave him the authority of the relaxed; he smiled like a man stepping into a tub of warm water – feigned, I supposed, but what could I really judge of this man. Each day he became more unknown to me.

  ‘Purgatory,’ he said, softly enough. ‘What is it, do you think? A cattle market? Everyone trying to avoid being prodded into a pen by the devil? Everyone looking for the gate the angels have left open?’

  An unexpected question, with some humility, some searching in it.

  ‘I sometimes daren’t think,’ I said. ‘But perhaps it’s a more subtle place than that. A place of quiet reckoning.’

  He nodded – that too unexpected – and ran his fingertips over the piles of blankets. He continued with this stroking of the wool, and in the dimness he was woolly too, his edges picked at. I was enticed by this picture of humility, this shepherd-turned-sheep.

  ‘Hell is surely the cattle market,’ I ventured, ‘where you’re prodded, rounded up, and cry out in protest against a fate already decided. Purgatory is – a womb. If we visit a womb when we’re born, then don’t we visit another when we die? One the gateway to life, the other the gateway to the afterlife. Purgatory is the second womb. So I’m inclined to think.’

  ‘A warm rosy cloister, a hushed chamber.’

  Was he mocking me? ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘in which we gestate, quietly, wrapped in the life we’ve lived, all its sins, all its kindnesses. Then we’re born into the afterlife, hell or heaven, and God must decide which.’

  The dean pursed his lips into contemplation. The vestry’s smell – damp wool and candle tallow, soapwort and marjoram – gave our dialogue a homely, ambling air, though I had to suspect it wasn’t ambling at all, but steering towards a point just beyond my seeing.

  ‘A very charming picture,’ he said, with a face that had lost its tightening of scheming and threat. ‘Mine’s more prosaic – though I agree, a cattle market isn’t right, no. A quiet reckoning, like you said. What is purgatory for me? A room full of men and women who’ve silently emptied their purses so the Lord can assess. Have they got enough to go to heaven, or will they need to go to hell? The purses, I mean of course, are their souls.’

  ‘Your picture has its own charm.’

  ‘I think not. But it has more – flexibility than yours. If the men and women in my room don’t have enough in their purses for heaven, it might not be too late. Some others outside that room – their loved ones still living – might send gifts and offerings to compensate. To top up the fund. A nice set-up, I think, that allows for charity and a bit of last-minute making good – whereas your womb, for all its charm, is a very closed-off place.’

  I crouched on the floor, against the wall, and managed a vague nod. We rounded the bends of conversation softly, but the dean had his direction set. Exhausting for him, surely, to be always arrow in hand and out for the hunt. This talk of purgatory was, of course, to say: If Newman’s still there, in purgatory, why? When he emptied his purse in front of the Lord, why was there not enough in it? Why have Oakham’s offerings and prayers not been sufficient to help him through? Are their purses half-empty too? What shall I tell the archdeacon? (For this was his favourite line.) Must I tell him that the good man Newman seems too heavy with secret sin to get to heaven alone? That the good people of Oakham seem too impoverished of soul to help him? If Newman’s in purgatory, what are you all hiding?

  ‘Reve, tell, me, what shall I do? What shall I tell the archdeacon?’

  Ah, there it was, so soon. I dropped my head.

  ‘Do I go back and tell the archdeacon that Newman’s death was an accident?’ he said.

  Without lifting my head, I told him, since he’d asked me to tell him, ‘I think you do.’

  ‘And then the archdeacon says to me: Why was this man Thomas Newman by the river that morning? And I say – what?’

  ‘I don’t know – do we need permits now, to be by our own river? Writs from the king?’

  ‘You knew the man. Why don’t you hazard a guess?’

  I pressed my hands to the floor and brought myself to my feet. ‘Perhaps he was down there wondering what to do with the bridge.’

  ‘He wanted to rebuild the bridge, a third time?’

  ‘He was an adventurer, it pained him to see the world pass by on the far bank, as if the far bank were as unreachable to us as – another country. Just as it still pains me.’

  ‘So he was there, by the river, doing what? Dreaming? Dreaming of a wondrous bridge and a hundred pairs of feet boldly crossing it? And then, what, he – toppled in?’

  ‘No, of course no.’ The word ‘topple’ sat strangely against a thought of Newman. He was always lean and strong as a hazel; a bull couldn’t topple him. ‘How can we know what he was doing, when he was doing it alone? He might have waded into the water.’

  ‘Waded in?’

  ‘There’s no other way of seeing the bridge from underneath, and without seeing it from underneath, no way of seeing exactly what fell, what still stands or what it would take to rebuild it.’

  The dean pointed a finger into the air. ‘Ah yes – because it’d become his life’s work to build that bridge, so his mind must have been on rebuilding it.’

  ‘You keep asking me about Newman as if I had some clairvoyance with him. I don’t know what was on his mind.’

  ‘He gave a lot of money to the bridge, I understand.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All of which I should surely tell the archdeacon?’

  He was watching me with what I could only call triumph, his chin thrust up and his lips forming, almost, a smile, though one restrained by inexperience.

  ‘Well, now. And yet, according to the church records, Newman’s last donation to the church for the bridge-building efforts was last June, some eight months ago.’

  At this, he pulled a scroll fr
om his ever-giving sleeve. I could think of nothing but the deeds Newman had had written up, which were scrolled in a money box beneath his floor. The dean’s nose would’ve gone straight to that, his little hands with a little knife making short work of the seam in the mud floor, loosening the slab, prising it free – and there, a cavity with a scroll in it. Aha, the arrow flies straight to the target! Deeds? he’d say? I wonder what they say? Knowing, of course, what they said, and knowing what they said made Oliver Townshend so suspicious he was already half-dead.

  Of course, these weren’t the deeds, they were the church records; the dean had said it himself. And they were a cheap paper, where Newman’s deeds were parchment – but still, my heart gave way like a weak knee and seemed to tumble gutwards. He unrolled the document and made a theatre of reading it, as if to check a fact he plainly knew. ‘Yes, here it is, every month a donation of a crown for a year and a month, and suddenly, as of June last year, nothing.’

  He handed them to me and, nonchalant with relief that they weren’t what I’d first perceived them to be, even though I knew all along they weren’t what I perceived them to be (because the fearful heart is often lagging behind the clear-sighted eyes), I rolled them up and gave them back.

  He unrolled them, cocked a brow at me as if to say, Whatever you do, I can undo, and looked at them affectionately. ‘Your churchwarden kindly supplied them,’ he said.

  ‘As she should, there’s nothing secret.’

  ‘You’re not going to read them?’

  ‘I read them every week. It’s Janet Grant and I who keep them.’

  ‘So you know, then, that Newman hasn’t been giving money for the bridge for a long time – that he lost all interest in it.’

  ‘I know the first half. The second isn’t true.’

  ‘No? Janet Grant said it was true. Newman himself told her – he’d lost hope in the bridge, it was built in the wrong place and would keep falling down. He said he might as well throw his money directly in the river and save everyone’s efforts.’