The Western Wind Read online

  ‘But I didn’t, did I?’ Carter said, and now passion had turned to stridency. ‘I didn’t make up for anything in the end. He paid for my wedding, he hoped we’d repay him, I expect, by bringing a son or daughter into the world, though he never said it. But me and Cat don’t seem able to bring a son nor daughter into this world.’

  ‘It’s as God wills, and that tragedy is yours, not Newman’s,’ I said, no longer whispering, either, but quiet. ‘Any child you had could never have replaced his own.’

  ‘Not replace, make up for. Make up for. That’s what I as good as promised that day in the pig stall, and he gave me all a person could and I didn’t make up for anything. Now he’s in the river, dead and drowned.’

  ‘And is that your fault?’

  ‘It’s nobody else’s.’

  I’d been leaning forward, pressing my own thumb against the hump of the etched-in camel, thinking how strange a creature it was; did the camel gestate her young in that hump? I leant back again, dissatisfied. How little we know.

  ‘When my mother died,’ I said, ‘I was filled with grief, and then with guilt. What did I do? Did I drive her away, to the other world? Guilt often follows sadness. Who can say why? Perhaps if we imagine we were part of the cause of the death, we can do something to reverse it.’

  Carter’s hand went to his head again, ruffling that thick, fair hair. He sniffed in the way people do when they’ve come to the end of a bout of tears.

  ‘The gossip going round is that Mr Townshend did it,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t listen to gossip, Herry.’

  ‘I heard it’s the dean’s suspicion.’

  ‘The dean’s just trying out notions, is all, to see how they fit.’

  ‘But Mr Townshend would be the last person in England to do it.’

  ‘As the dean will find out,’ I said. ‘Give him time.’

  There was worry in Carter’s voice now that the grief had abated, and a thread of it was in me too, though I didn’t give it away. I didn’t know what to make of the dean, how well he meant, how dogged he was. He’d been with us less than twenty-four hours; it seemed soon to be choosing suspects. And besides, he wasn’t supposed to be choosing suspects; he was supposed to be on our side.

  ‘Herry, pray the Paternoster and the Confiteor as many times a day as you can. Try hard with your wife to conceive. Be pure and strong through Lent, and by Easter you’ll be ready for the host, for new beginnings. The Lord will wash you clean.’

  ‘And I should fix the church porch where it’s leaking.’

  ‘It’s not for you to – ’

  ‘It troubled, Tom, that leak. I’ll fix it today.’

  I looked up and sighed. Then I spoke to him in a whisper that was sharper than before, and with my mouth nearer the grille. ‘One last thing, Herry – take care what you say. You know that our dean’s around, and he’s intent on finding a story to go with this death. You mustn’t go around saying that it was your fault. You’ll find yourself – ’

  I was going to say without a head; I spared Carter the notion, and myself the trouble. In any case it wasn’t true, they wouldn’t show him the mercy of a beheading.

  ‘Tell me it’s going to be alright, Father.’

  ‘If you do as I say, it’s going to be alright.’

  He raised his voice. ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I beseech blessed Mary ever-virgin, blessed Michael the Archangel, blessed John the Baptist, blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and all the saints to pray for me to the Lord our God, Dominum Deum nostrum. Amen.’

  ‘Amen, Herry Carter.’

  ‘I’ll go and fix the porch right now.’

  ‘Go then.’

  Another sniff, defiant this time, and his young, restless body was already released to the light and cold.

  Others look at the fields sloping off up towards the east boundary and think: this is my field, that’s yours. Newman looked at them and thought: they could all be mine. Others eye the skies that they know go eventually to Europe, and think: what’s that got to do with me? Only this bit of sky matters, the bit that’s raining or sunning on me. Newman thought: if the sky makes it so easily to Europe, why not me? If this bit’s raining on me, why not go to that bit?

  But he battled, did Newman, with the instinct to be his own man and the will to be God’s servant. The battle was everywhere in his body – in long legs well capable of striding, but rarely did; in a slight carriage ballasted with a pair of muscly fighter’s shoulders; in a cool eye betrayed by a twitch. He’d a staglike way of standing (difficult to explain why, but if you’ve seen a stag, you’ll see how the trees or clearing or mountain stand back from it and grant it space); yet a stag past its rutting days. A stag that’s equally hind. An uncolourful, bloodless face with striking, scooping cheekbones, and on those cheekbones a lacing of very fine and broken redness: proof that the blood did try to urge, and then dissipated. A face gone prematurely rugged with the effort of wanting what it feared – since Newman wanted to find his own ways to God, and feared his own ways to God, in case they didn’t lead there. And feared, above all things, being separated from God, who keeps company with his dead wife and child.

  Twelfth Night, this January just passed, Newman, not long back from his pilgrimage to Rome, installed on the other side of the little dark box – because he confessed whenever and as often as he could. What had he seen on his travels? The whole world on wagons and carracks, he said. Sarplars of wool on mules’ backs, the stench of lanolin from wool sacks – ewe and mud and milk and muck in the throat. Sacks going this way, tin going that, traders here, pilgrims there. Tallow, goat-skins, salt, hops, silver, cotton, wax, silk, pewter, wood, pitch, potash, soap, spices, cows, paper, grain, stone, glass, armour, fustian, wine, sugar, latten, coal. Iron as plentiful as the stones on the ground and brass abounding from the hills. Spanish olive oil, as golden-green as those young grain fields; silk from Sicily; Indian pepper, ginger, cardamom, nutmeg; dried rhubarb and galingale from eastern China; aloes from the lands around the Red Sea; cloves that are violent on the tongue; brocades and great noble tapes-tries; Syrian ash in Venetian glass and scented soap; Asian elephant tusks and unicorn horns that change hands in Alexandria and go to Paris for carving; Indian emeralds, rubies, sapphires, diamonds, lapis lazuli from the Oxus, Persian pearls and turquoise.

  A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey, I said, which was from the scriptures, and pounced upon by Newman. To only know the world from the scriptures! Wasn’t it an insult to the Lord to ignore the lands he’d made, the colours he’d pained himself to imagine and mix, in preference for some words in vulgate? Only somebody with a mind like a rock could go on with the idea that we on our little island are separate from those other places – that great world is rainbow threads woven into our greys and greens. Where did this leather belt come from? he asked me, of a belt I couldn’t see. Not English goats, but Norwegian ones. And the flour for making bread that feeds our great cities? From Baltic grain, high up in the north. And the ironwork on our new weathervane? Spanish iron. Our little land is flecked with foreignness, the Lord wants our colourful mingling.

  (Myself wondering how it was that Newman knew so much about what the Lord wanted, and having the peculiar sensation that his words coming through the grille were moths disintegrating.)

  Not only that, he said. It’s not only things that you find when you venture out of Oakham, down to the ports, out to the sea, cutting out across the tides to Europe – not only things, which are after all fatuous, but matters of the intellect too, the soul. Did I know that music, being of the air, has a perfect resonance with the air in the ear and the air of the human spirit – that music might therefore bring us direct to the Lord and heal us? So they said in Florence and Rome. (I did not know, I said, and smothered a yawn, which wasn’t boredom or tiredness, but defence, since nowhere in this dealing with the Lord is the priest, and yet there Newman was nevertheless, confiding in his priest.
) And that, he said, man has been able to take the sprawling and nebulous mystery of time and harness it on a clock face, minute by minute, hour by hour.

  And that, abroad, a vision had been seized of us men and women as beautiful. Not tormented sacks of sinful flesh, but fine creatures – that Pietà he’d hung at his altar, for instance, where the Christ, though crucified, was otherwise like any man in his prime, his thighs muscled and his chest firm, and Mary’s milky eyes screaming with a mother’s love, a real mother, a mother like his or mine.

  And that – so he said – some were claiming there were other ways of writing the Bible, since if you looked at the Greek, as they were doing abroad now, it yielded new ways of seeing things. For instance: no longer In the beginning was the word, but In the beginning was the conversation. I spluttered, I think. And the conversation was with God. I spluttered more. As if God is your cousin next door, I said. Yes, said Newman, as if God is your neighbour and friend. He reached the short distance to the grille, asked for my hand, which I pressed there, and which he pressed his against, briefly. John Reve, my redoubtable friend, he said. Crossed himself, and asked me to bless him.

  Nobody wants to speak badly of the dead, but I need to admit that there’ve been points along the way when I’ve lost patience with Newman for this. Let’s say you want a church built, and you say to your friend the church stonemason, I can build my own church, I don’t need you. Then in the next breath you ask the stonemason to build it for you. Doesn’t the mason have cause to be confused and to not know what’s being asked of him? If Newman had entered conversation with our great and silent master, why did he turn to me in the next breath and ask me to bless him? Couldn’t he have just asked God?

  But I did bless him, every time, like that stonemason going back day after day with his chisels and ladders and mortar. Because he was a friend? Because I loved him? Because it seemed impossible for me not to?

  (And now I have the strangeness of speaking of him in a past tongue, because he’s a day dead. Is it too soon? What is the point, Lord, of official departure?)

  ‘Father, you’ll think I’ve come just for that pardon you pinned up yesterday, but it’s a real thing I’m here for, and I don’t even want the pardon, I don’t care for it at all.’

  Our churchwarden, Janet Grant, who cared not for anything except the zealous and faithful doing of the Lord’s little works: the lighting of the church, the cleaning of the chalice, the sweeping of the chancel, the straightening of the Psalters.

  ‘On Friday late morning, Father, before your sister’s wedding, I was walking across the churchyard as I do, daily, several times a day, as you do too – and I was passing the rowan near the path, you know, where the path narrows and there’s that little clump of crocuses that have come up these last few days, and some thrushes come to – in the rowan just there, they come to perch, they eat the berries – ’

  She paused; her speech was ever thus. Spirals of deepening particulars, then pauses when she saw she’d strayed from the point.

  ‘And I saw an owl. An owl. In good daylight. It flew right above me, and I thought it might have wanted the thrushes, but I don’t know if owls have a taste for thrushes, I thought it was mice they liked.’

  ‘An owl,’ I said.

  ‘In daylight, Father.’

  Which was commonly taken as an omen of death. This was her as-yet-arrived-at point.

  ‘It scared me to see an owl fly by daylight, and when I came to check the church on Friday night, to see if all the lights were out and everything safe, I found that I locked it as I left, the church. Which I never do.’

  ‘Locked it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We agreed the church should never be locked, except in dire times.’

  ‘I thought it was dire times – there was evil about, death somewhere, and I wanted the church to be safe from it.’

  ‘You tried to guard the church from evil – ’

  ‘I know, Father.’

  ‘The church is a refuge from evil – ’

  ‘I know, Father. I did wrong.’

  I imagined she bowed her head, her head that was big for her small body. A curious sight was Janet Grant, a woman of forty with the shoulder-span and hand size of a child, and a large, pale moonish face that was young and sincere and had an eyelid that drooped, only slightly, but once noticed couldn’t be unnoticed. Her entire top gum showed, if ever she grinned.

  Her voice seemed to move a little closer to the grille; perhaps she’d looked up again, and turned towards me. ‘In the morning first thing I unlocked it, before my rounds – before you’d know. But we all know what happened then.’ Whispering now. ‘Then we learnt that Thomas Newman had died.’ A pause, and the whisper sharpened. ‘And it was such horror – because I’d seen death coming, Father, and what did I do? I locked the church; I stopped the Lord finding it. I left death to the devil.’

  ‘But – the Lord isn’t deterred by a lock.’

  She made hesitant sounds of thinking with her dry tongue before she ventured agreement. ‘The Lord can pick a lock.’

  ‘He’s the greatest locksmith there is.’

  ‘But Newman wasn’t.’

  Her next point came rapidly, with rare directness. ‘Newman wasn’t a locksmith, and if he’d tried to come to the church before he took his own life, he wouldn’t have been able to get in and pray for his soul.’

  She fell quiet at the foot of her words. Is that what everybody thought – that Newman took his own life? Or what only she thought?

  ‘Newman wouldn’t have known to come and pray for his soul before his death,’ I said, ‘because his death was an accident he didn’t see coming.’

  ‘Forgive me, Father, but you can’t know it was an accident.’

  ‘Neither of us can know one way or the other.’

  ‘But if he drowned himself and tried to come to the church before that to pray, it was me who stood between him and God.’ She gave an incredulous laugh touched with bleak thrill: her! Her with shoulders the width of a child’s, her who stood in the way of God!

  I might have assailed her with questions: wasn’t Newman a rich man? Wasn’t he loved? Wasn’t he in good health? Rich, loved, healthy men don’t hurl themselves in a river, do they? But I remembered where I was – in the little dark box, which was for the interrogation of the other’s soul and faith, not for the interrogation of a dead man’s motives.

  ‘Your sin was to lock the church door,’ I said, ‘not to stand between a man and God. Sins are measured – you know – by intention, not effects, and your intention was to make the church safe. A pointless intention. That was your sin: to have a pointless intention. A trivial sin, which is now forgiven if you say your Creed before you sleep tonight.’

  ‘I always say my Creed before I sleep.’

  ‘It’ll be no effort then.’

  She sat in unsatisfied silence. My hands were cold; I tucked each into the opposite sleeve.

  ‘But did you think he was happy, Father?’ she said. ‘Thomas Newman, was he happy?’

  Her question seemed to me painfully innocent, my answer not worthy of it. ‘If you could tell me what happiness is, I could tell you if I thought Newman possessed it.’

  She swallowed dry. ‘I think happiness is being without any of the things that make you unhappy.’

  ‘Really? Then no one is happy.’ I thought I’d disappointed her, or taken from her optimism in some way, so I added, ‘Most, perhaps. Happiness is being without most of the things that make you unhappy.’

  ‘What sort of most? How many most? Everything minus one thing? Two things?’

  ‘More than one or two things.’

  ‘A quarter unhappy things and three-quarters happy?’

  ‘A fifth perhaps.’

  ‘A fifth.’

  ‘Or thereabouts.’

  ‘Did you think Newman was a fifth unhappy and four-fifths happy?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, though not because I had any idea.

  ‘But did
n’t you see him at Annie’s wedding?’ she asked. ‘He started out well enough, but by the end I saw him sitting on his own, or not on his own as such because people came to sit with him, but he might as well have been on his own, and he didn’t dance and he looked very remote. I wouldn’t have said he looked like four-fifths of him were happy.’

  ‘Being alone isn’t the same as being unhappy.’

  ‘I saw him when Annie danced – with her new husband. Their joy!’ She emitted the last word thinly, on a breath, as if it were a wren taking flight. ‘Sometimes when we’re joyless ourselves, seeing the joy of others can be the last straw, can’t it? Seeing others in love, when you’ve lost your own love.’

  ‘Newman lost his own love twelve years ago,’ I said, impatient. I wasn’t impatient with Janet Grant but, suddenly, with that wilted groom Endall, whose last few acts of liveliness would be to inject Annie with his weak progeny, then be too spent up to help her raise them. ‘Newman’s wife and child died twelve years ago,’ I said. ‘Show me a man, woman, boy or girl who hasn’t buried someone within the last twelve years; and if you find that lucky person, show me them again in a year or two. They’ll have buried someone by then.’

  Maybe she winced; she certainly loosed a small squeak. Her own husband was only three years in the ground, and her two children went there as infants. There were rustling sounds of her gathering herself up as if the squeak had embarrassed her. She went very quiet, I wondered if she was weeping.

  Her voice, from the quietness, came like a leaf on a branch that was only that morning bare. ‘Are you hiding something, Father?’

  Her question startled me. The least-expected words from an ever-bitten tongue.