The Western Wind Read online

  To me, odd logic seemed an odd logic, since if it was odd it was hardly logical. Back when her mind was bright, I might have put that idea to her.

  ‘We were talking about nothing,’ I said. ‘He’d come in to pray at his altar as he always did. Nothing more.’

  He’d prayed before the painting of Mary, made a joke about me looking guilty, standing there with the taper. I’d said, You make a handsome couple, you and Mary. Then he made his reply about how she settled for the browbeaten cuckold Joseph instead, and that was the size of it. To think that was the last time I saw him, the last discussion I had with him, about so little, nearing nothing.

  ‘Are you any better?’ I asked.

  ‘Today I feel different,’ she said. ‘I’d say cured.’

  So then I broke a rule the priest’s manual clearly gave: Don’t look at the penitent, turn your gaze. Their hearts will open in the place your gaze vacated. When I looked at the grille, where her face was turned three-quarters my way, I saw she was far from cured. Her eyes were dark and large and sunken, and her expression was plucky and tinged with lunacy. Still, if she felt distress she hid it, and her voice was the even and soft voice of her old self.

  ‘I slept most of the day yesterday. On Friday night, when Tom took me home, he made me a broth, disgusting enough but it made me sleep all night and most of Saturday, until that little man woke me up.’

  The dean. Sarah must have been the last person Newman was with, given that he was drowned by Saturday morning; the dean would’ve taken great interest in that. Hers had been the first door the dean had knocked on, only to learn nothing except that he needed to knock on several more doors before he could properly think of himself as a sheriff.

  ‘Was the dean kind with you?’ I asked.

  ‘He was very kind, he gave me some of the leftover broth in a cup, he sat in the far corner, he explained that it was alright, he knew I didn’t murder Thomas Newman. I had no idea that I might have. I didn’t even know he was dead.’

  I’d looked away from her again by now. I was emphatic in dodging her gaze. Instead I studied the besmirched black of my own lap. She was curiously calm about that death, but she was curiously calm about all things in that moment, as if her illness had bewitched or drugged her. On my looking away, she too moved away and sank to a low kneel on the cushion where I could no longer see her.

  ‘You need to pray hard for your health, Sarah,’ I said. ‘With me, now. Virgin most faithful.’

  ‘Virgo fidelis.’

  ‘Mirror of justice.’

  ‘Speculum iustitiae.’

  ‘Seat of wisdom.’

  ‘Sedes sapientiae.’

  ‘Cause of our joy.’

  ‘Causa nostrae laetitiae.’

  ‘Mystical rose.’

  ‘You’ve missed some, Father.’

  ‘All the same, mystical rose.’

  ‘Rosa mystica.’

  ‘Morning star.’

  ‘Stella matutina.’

  ‘Health of the sick.’

  ‘Salus infirmorum.’

  ‘Refuge of sinners.’

  ‘Refugium peccatorum.’

  ‘Comfort of the afflicted.’

  ‘Consolatrix afflictorum.’

  ‘Grant, I beseech thee, O Lord God,’ I said, and she knew to join with me, so that we said in chorus, ‘unto us Thy servants, that we may rejoice in continual health of mind and body.’

  And she, the last part alone: ‘Perpetua mentis et corporis sanitate gaudere.’

  Her Latin was sure, her memory perfect, even in the distress of inexplicable sickness. Prayers were carved into her very bone; she was faithful to the marrow. There – she and Annie by the bulrushes in summer, unhooking a fyke net from the rushes where the river ran rich, slow and muddy; they were bold thieves. In the morning sun the eels they took from the net were bolts of light flashing in their hands. Arms aloft, some smaller eels thrown back into the river. They were calling and toiling like men, as busy as foxes at a chicken coop, as bright and fast as morning, as avid as soldiers at war.

  ‘Perpetua mentis et corporis sanitate gaudere,’ she chanted. ‘May we rejoice in continual health of mind and body. Per Christum Dominum Nostrum.’

  A day or two or so after Newman and I had talked on the river bank about time, when he’d thrown the yew into the water – the day we’d first spoken of building a bridge – I’d found myself rambling at my sister. Why can’t time go backwards as well as forward? If time’s not a river but a circle, and if you can travel round a circle one way or another and end up where you started, why can’t it go this way and that?

  I asked her, not because she’d know an answer, but because she was supple enough of heart and thought to not throw the question out of the window. It was a question that’d troubled me those few days, because I didn’t have an answer. If time could go backwards, why didn’t it? If God could undo what was done, why didn’t he?

  We were eating stew; she didn’t stop. God moved the sun backwards ten degrees on the sundial of Ahaz, I told her, as a sign to Hezekiah that he, God, had absolute command of time. Like you have command of that spoon in your hand – you can flip it this way, that way. So why couldn’t he have brought our mother back from that fire?

  Annie stopped with the spoon near her mouth, its contents just dispatched within, a smidge of meat juice cleared neatly from her lower lip. She said nothing, so I ate to fill the silence.

  If you want to stop dead people being dead, she said at last (laying the spoon on the table and then sitting on her hands), you might as well just bring them to life in your heart. You might as well not wait for God to make a miracle.

  I told her our mother was alive in my heart.

  Listen, she said, here’s how you make her alive. There was a woman, Agnes Reve, who died in a fire; eight years before that she had a daughter; seven years before that she had a son, who became a priest. A year before that she married a labourer with narrow shoulders and no humour; for seventeen years before that she lived peacefully with her own mama and father and sisters, right back to one special June morning, or was it afternoon, when all the heavens aligned and all ill fates were defied, and she was born.

  There, Annie had said, she’s once more alive.

  I scraped my chair back somewhat huffily, swilled my empty bowl and had nothing to say in response except, forlorn: No, Annie.

  Yet as I was hearing Gil Otley, this conversation of four years earlier had come back to me. Why, suddenly? Because Newman was dead? Because Sarah was sick and dying? Because Annie was gone? Because there was nothing in the world I could do to make it otherwise. Because, in the futility of Gil Otley losing his son, why not have hope of some kind of resurrection? Because Annie was right. She was right, that there in the curved chamber of our hearts was all the circularity of time, and all the tools for its both-ways navigation. For while it happens one way, our imaginations have in them all the dexterity of turning it the other, a facility God has given us that I don’t suspect he gave a cow, nor a bat, nor an eagle. A facility he gave us that we might grasp this audaciously flexile and amenable element of time that he made, that he can turn and bend.

  As I sat in the booth, I fancied I could feel that plump roundness of my heart, and time milling inside it. The moonish cycle of seasons and days. There was a tingling in my fingers and feet and up my wrists and forearms, as if my blood was dragging contrarily up channels that were meant to go downwards. Annie was right; our imaginations do restore the dead to life. The last dialogue she and I had about our mother had begun in lament of our mother’s death, and ended with the words that stayed with me since: she was born. You could bring the dead back to life without waiting for God to provide a miracle; you could defy the reaper in your plump old heart; you could change things. You could say of any ill fate: it is no longer so.

  A body entered the booth, slow and breathless, and knelt with a few cracks to the joints, and chewed at dry gums, and breathed out long, and shifted without ease, an
d blew out another breath without appearing to have taken one in between, and then settled into a quiet but not silent repose.

  I waited for him to speak (because no doubt those cracking joints and blowing breaths were a man’s) and when he didn’t, I sat back with my head against the wall and scratched my knee and felt the tingling recede in my hands. Time stopped clean. A robin chirruped in the churchyard. Rain tink-tinked at the window. The other’s breathing lengthened. Horse hooves were distant on the cobbles. A faint waft of wintersweet. The candle at my foot threw a lame shadow as the light failed.

  Eventually I looked through the grille to find the man fast asleep. It was old Maurice Fry, in from the fields. Ancient and exhausted. Sometimes the drape of the curtain and the quiet of the church and the give of the cushion are all it takes for the already-weary. I didn’t wake him. No need, there was no one waiting. I took Cecily Townshend’s money, slipped past him and out, and went home.

  Cheesechurn

  I PUT CECILY TOWNSHEND’S money in both of Annie’s forsaken shoes. The worst hiding place in the world, I then thought – a pair of shoes in an otherwise empty room. Albeit a room the dean had already that morning searched, but you could never put it past him to search it again, for the sheer pleasure of it. So, I buried those shoes in the small chest where I kept my few clothes, which was lockable. I kept with me the key, in a burse. Not a moment too soon, because before I’d finished crossing the room the dean was at the open door saying, ‘Reve, let’s walk.’

  I excused myself for a moment behind the hazel scrub while he stood in the doorway. He must have been able to hear the heavy stream of my relief; an overfull bladder is the curse of confession, I was going to say cheerily when I came out. In fact I kept quiet.

  We walked in seeping rain a short way towards Old Cross, and I thought we were aiming for Newman’s or the river. Perhaps the dean had something private he wanted to say, or wanted to amble while I betrayed what had been confessed to me. At which I’d launch forth: Paul Brackley overslept, Gil Otley dug up his dead boy’s teeth, Janet Grant saw an owl by day, Emma Prye put her left shoe on her right foot and her right shoe on her left – until his inevitable impatience urged me to be quiet. Instead he stopped where the broken axle lay in the road, and he assessed it with disappointment.

  ‘Why is this left here?’ he said.

  I told him I didn’t know.

  ‘I know. They think it’s bad luck to move an axle on a Sunday. Because it looks like a strut from the cross.’

  His raised brow told of lost hope. It asked: how do you reason with people who have the intellect of children? Then, without a word, he turned on his heel and wandered back tiptoe-ish the way we’d come, up through the village northwards. I followed.

  The milkmaids’ singing drifted across and down from the manor, and on that dull and damp day it was more sombre and needful than sweet, and lingered in the rain. ‘Not much of a day for singing,’ I remarked, and he made no acknowledgement that I’d spoken. ‘Even the cows aren’t lowing,’ I added. Nothing. We walked on. From Bodger Philip’s croft, a merciless thwacking at wood and grunts of effort. The road stank more than usually of ale. Hikson was brewing some fifty yards up from us and there was no wind to weaken the smell. It collected and mushroomed in the dampness to a sour musk that prodded the tonsils. The dean coughed, though I thought over-pointedly. When we walked past Sarah Spenser’s we saw Herry Carter go in. ‘Good old Carter,’ I said. ‘Our Samaritan.’ But I suspected that the dean would be thinking otherwise: Ah, an afternoon assignation, the village do-gooder has a quick roll with the village witch! Eve calls another man to the apple!

  Morris Hall passed with the mare that had fallen that morning with the cart, only now she was cartless and had a slight but unarguable limp in her right foreleg. She had one stack of wood strapped to her back and Morris had another stack strapped to his, to save the mare trouble. It was a tenth of what a cart might have carried, and both of them looked fed up, and Morris Hall’s attempt at a smile landed more as a snarl. Still the dean said nothing, only proceeded with his hands behind his back and eyes wandering without his face moving much, and his expression the bland indifference of someone idling through a market with no intention of buying.

  It was reaching that time to down tools and there weren’t many stoopers up in the fields, but those that remained on Townshend’s land were as filthy as if they’d been wallowing in the furrows, and looked abject even from a distance and in the coming dusk. Without turning his head, I knew he’d seen them and was thinking that Oakham’s mud was muddier than most, and Oakham’s rain wetter. Oakham’s beer mustier, Oakham’s milkmaids more melancholy. I almost believed it myself for a moment. A vision arose of a swaying sea of French barley, all honey and gold – no sludge of soil there, no spines snapping in toil, no collapsing furrows. Just a vision of effortless French golden barley at a soothing sway, the clearness of which was made up because I’d never set foot in France. Well, so much for France, I told myself, and pronounced, in the way of someone who didn’t know when to give up, ‘You might not know it now, but Oakham is golden in summer. All those fields there – golden as anything.’ I brandished an arm in their direction. Silence.

  Passing the Lewyses’ house, we caught what must surely have been the final cries of sex – such are the perils of these earth-walled houses, they let any sound in and any sound out. By now we were at the brew-house and the smell of fermenting wort was enough to wallop the throat. I looked in there, so as to turn away from the sounds of Adam Lewys’s carnal triumph across the road. Hikson was still and silent over a yeasty vat, somehow seedy-looking even when doing nothing. At our other side the lovers were gaining, not losing, stride. The milkmaids’ song was growing thready. We persisted onwards at the dean’s slow pace. I went to say something else jaunty and anodyne, but tripped on a stone or pothole that wasn’t there. He lifted his head up a touch and his chin probed the air.

  At New Cross he stopped once again, and I, beside him, privately cringed. The crucified Christ had been given his usual Shrovetide shawl to keep him warm during the hard times of Lent, and if that bout of sentiment alone wasn’t too much for the dean, then the frilled skirt fastened round Christ’s waist must have persuaded him: Oakhamers really do have the wits of children. Our good Christ looked like a clown or marionette in a street show. A harmless village joke, I wanted to say, but even I couldn’t see the point this time. I thought the dean would tear that fancy dress from Christ’s body and have harsh words for me, but again he said nothing, did nothing, even when I took the skirt off myself. I crumpled it in my palm.

  Shortly past New Cross the road bends to the right, and before the bend we heard retching coming from the thicket that lines the road, then a girl’s sobbing, then retching. She was there when we rounded the bend, it was little Jane Smith, the middle of the Smiths’ seven children. She lifted her head to look at us – her wet hair was splayed against her chin and her pale face was streaked with sweat and sick. She motioned for us to go away. Pregnant, then. Any young girl throwing her insides up into a bush is with child and unhappy about it. The dean tilted his head towards me and raised a subtle brow. Just what you need – another unwanted Oakhamer is what his travelling brow said. Though he indeed said nothing.

  The barns were the last buildings this side of the village, except for Mary Grant’s and Robert Tunley’s houses all the way out by the brook. I hoped the dean’s strange tour might end at the barns, and sure enough it did. It came to a halt near the last of the four barns, where our grain and rushes were stored and, for now, the cart that had broken that morning.

  Down the far side of the last barn was Deep Ditch, where boys like Ralf Drake shovelled waste – animal, vegetable and human. Shovelled and buried, shovelled and buried. The stench was a knee to the groin. Because the day of stinking slog was ending, the boys were – playful. That was the word I wanted to offer the dean. Better playful than defeated, surely. And though their sound was raucous and had drive
n the dean on with new and quickened interest, their game was harmless enough. It seemed to involve them lifting one of the boys above the ditch and lowering him towards it until his nose, twitching like a rabbit’s, rested on the sewage and swill. We were only yards away but they didn’t see us. The dean probably took this as proof that they weren’t only debauched, but oblivious: Oakham’s boys are lazier, deafer and blinder than most. Not to mention Oakham’s shit, which is shittier. He cleared his throat as if a whole ear of wheat were stuck in it; they swung round. The poor suspended boy dropped into the ditch with a haw like that of a donkey. The dean turned away.

  He didn’t make any motion to walk further. Then he spoke the only other words he was going to speak on this walk, spoke them loud and not to anybody in particular.

  ‘Do you know that out at Bruton and beyond you’re known as Cheesechurn, Cowudder, Milkpasture. I try to set them straight. I say, It’s Oakham. They say, Where? They think you’re all dwarves and sleep with your own mothers and sisters. I try to put them straight.’

  He shrugged sadly. Then he swivelled on his heel and walked back as we’d come, faster now and not at his ruminating stroll. The mist of rain had given me a quiet soaking. I followed. There was one thing at least that the dean didn’t know: that those copulating in the Lewyses’ house weren’t husband and wife, since Joanna Lewys would be milking at that time, and anyway far too pregnant to be that energetic under the covers. I prayed that his spiteful logic wouldn’t work that out.

  Oakham is golden in the summer, I wanted to shout as we passed the first of the barns – the barns filled with Townshend’s willing cows, cows that would be plump on clover and would slosh with milk: the creamiest of milk. Oakham is golden and plump and God-loving always, no matter what it might seem! But as we passed that barn, the dean ahead of me, a furore kicked up – one cow avidly and violently mounting another. The afflicted one’s eyes languid with sufferance. A dreadful hollow moan of protest like the sound of slaughter. Cow-at-cow; quite unnatural, said the dean’s bland contempt. He stood to behold it for the shortest of moments before walking away home.