The Western Wind Read online

  The sniff I gave, snatched up through the nose, was like the ones I often heard on the other side of the oak screen – defiant, but helpless.

  ‘Resolve, Reve. Do you understand? If times get worse here, you are going to have to be the strongest of all men. Not some man hiding at his table eating a goose and hoping for the best. Not some man waiting for a rural dean to help him. I say this for the good of Oakham, not for my own good. Why should I care what kind of man you are? But there are close to a hundred people depending on you. Compromise will get you nowhere. Some difficult decisions have to be made in this world. Can you stand up and make them?’

  I got up, not easily, from the chair. I nodded, though I didn’t know if it was a nod of consent to his question or simply a gesture of parting.

  Bring in the goose, I thought. But when I stood to, I thought instead: leave it outside. Surely the foxes or dogs will get it if it’s left outside – and if they don’t get it, it’s the Lord’s way of telling me it’s mine to eat. But of course the foxes and dogs will have it. I hoped for that, then felt hungry at the thought of it gone. I ate some milky, humid cheese.

  I went outside to see if the church was in darkness; some lights still glowed. I crossed the churchyard unevenly. The night was wet, close and cloudy, bruised by thunder that had rolled around it for most of two hours but had cleared nothing. Inside, Janet Grant was over in the north aisle snuffing out candles.

  ‘Father,’ she said.

  ‘Let me help.’

  As she worked from north-east towards the door, I worked the opposite way, snuffing the candles one by one. It always surprised me how much light a flame threw, and how bleak and deep the darkness that replaced it. And how a small, steady flame could cast such a prancing shadow.

  I went from light to light in silence, while Janet Grant did the same. At the door we met with only the light of the tallow she held, and the one candle that burnt through to morning. This world that advances on us was shrunk to a flame stuttering in the black of her eye. This hurly-burly world, what was it suddenly but the fennel and goaty staleness of her breath, and a waxy umber that stopped and gave way to giddying dark before it even reached the door.

  I fumbled and opened the latch and let us into the porch, then fumbled again at the second door. We went into the sodden night. The door shut heavy behind us.

  ‘Sleep sound, Janet,’ I said.

  And she returned, ‘Sleep sound, Father.’

  Day 1

  The previous day, Shrove (also Egg) Saturday

  Burning

  ‘JOHN. JOHN!’

  A banging at the door; I rolled over in bed, glue-eyed. One eye managed to open, but only one. The other was gummed in groggy sleep. The more willing eye saw that it was either night or the thick, dark night-side of morning.

  ‘Let me in, John.’

  It was Thomas Newman; I’d know that voice even five fathoms under sleep, though its usual melody was flat.

  ‘John, please.’

  He pushed at the door (which was never locked and would barely close or open in its rain-swollenness). I shut my eyes and burrowed my head down into the covers. Anyway it was cold. My head registered a searing pain and my eyes, my eyeballs – they felt like stones being ground underfoot. Cropsick. Too much of Hikson’s brew at the wedding yesterday. Newman was by then in the room with the door closed behind him; he was a voice in the dark an arm’s length from my bed.

  ‘John, wake up, get up. I need something.’

  I need something. As if we didn’t all need something.

  ‘I know you’re awake. I need the final sacrament. I need you to get up.’

  I need the final sacrament! Only Thomas Newman could be cocksure enough to ask for the final sacrament, as a blacksmith asks to be handed his swage.

  In the burrows of my covers, behind those painful orbs that I used to know as my eyes, his face appeared to me from the evening before – fresh, imperturbable, fixed on an unseen hope.

  ‘Look, you can do it here. I can kneel here – you don’t even need to get up. You just need to hear my confession. I can go to the church and get the oil, the host. I’ll bring them. No need to get up.’

  He’ll wake Annie, I thought, and then remembered that for the first time in many years my sister wasn’t sleeping in the next room, but had gone and was married. My body froze in a cold and impotent fury. Did Newman think the holy oil and the host in its pyx were his for the taking? Was the altar his table? Here was the man who’d claimed his lute was as good a path to God as any priest could be. So go and kneel to your lute for the final sacrament, I thought; ask your lute to anoint your forehead and drive out your demons. Why wake me?

  He was standing by my bed, shaking as if a wind were at work on him, and his breathing was caught. He must have had no light to see by, except for the night lantern that burnt by my door; no candlelight of his made a rosy umber through my eyelids. For the first time I noticed the rushing of rain against the house. Then I heard him lower himself, I supposed he’d come to kneel.

  ‘The trouble with feigning sleep is that the oblivion of it is ruined by the effort to seem oblivious. And you are a bad actor.’ This last he whispered straight into my ear.

  My breath pooled stale in the cocoon of blanket; Newman was right, it was too uneven and shallow for a sleeper. It was scattered by the fast beating of my heart. He must have been able to hear my lungs on the cusp of bursting.

  ‘Please, John. With your permission, might I go and get the things for sacrament and bring them here?’ He waited for me to answer. He clapped his hands to his thighs. ‘Why, John? Aren’t we friends?’

  Poisoned and sick is how I was; Hikson must have put something mean-tempered in the wedding brew. When Newman’s voice came next, it shot softly in a burst of colour like a well-fletched arrow from the darkness, straight towards me.

  ‘When my daughter died of the sweating sickness,’ he was saying, ‘I took up all my grief and turned it in my hands over and over until it resembled love, and I gave that love to my wife. We had eight days of this love. I hadn’t properly loved her before then, since I wasn’t a warm husband, and nor was she a warm wife. We had eight days of discovering we needed one another, and then she too became ill and died. I’m not convinced by this life. This life we’re given. I’ve lived as well, adventurously and kindly as I can and I’ve found the kindness returned, but all the same I don’t find much to hope for. This life, John – I’m suspicious of its logic, if it has any. You tell me it does and I believe you. But I’m willing to gamble this life away, in the trust that the next will be better. You tell me it’s better, and I believe you. You tell me there’s a place set up for me already in heaven, which you yourself have negotiated for me through pardons on account of my good doings, and I believe you. What harm can it be to take myself there?’

  I pinned my body to the bed. Newman added, as if we were in conversation, ‘My death will look like an accident, a drowning, there’ll be no harm done. You know about the deeds; I want to die without trouble to this village and these people, and I beseech you to guide Townshend to take care of their needs. You’ll do it. You’re a good man.’ A pause, and then: ‘Let me die by the word of the church and of God. I want to die.’

  The muscle and bone and bloody sinew that stewed in a soup inside my skin quickened itself as if for action, but as I was about to sit up and speak to Newman (tell him not to consider what he was considering, that his life was precious), that tide of blood and will seemed stopped by my skin itself. Then all I could feel was the coldness of my skin and the pain in my head, and the betrayal from the night before, which had provoked a rage I’d never known. I’m not a man of business, John, I’m a man of the spirit, he’d said. I’m a man of the spirit. As if to say: You, John, are not.

  His hand landed on my arm and grasped it. ‘I need the last sacrament. I can’t die without being shriven.’

  I gave nothing. He waited with his hand there. The bones in my jaw ached for want of spe
aking, of sitting up and telling him the plain truth: If you’re such a man of the spirit and I’m such a man of business, then it should be me coming to you for the sacrament.

  My heartbeat was a bird flinging itself around a closed room. His fingers flexed, then loosened. Still I gave nothing, until the hand relaxed and he lifted it away. He stood and loomed lengthily. The rain was drum and fiddle, beating and skittering. It touched me that he should keep standing there, hoping – but that was the kind of man he was, patient and determined. It took all I had not to sit up and put my hand out to his, and to hear his gentle word: Benedicite, and to offer him mine: Dominus. He stood without moving and I lay without moving, and the battle between us was waged with our eyes – his which refused to leave me, and mine which refused to open.

  At last there was a gathering of breath and motion and the darkness was scrambled; he was somewhere in the room but I couldn’t tell where, not until the candle by the door was extinguished (by draught or breath?) and the door itself creaked open and was shoved closed.

  Some moments came and went. How many? Enough for something leaden to pass down my legs into my feet, and for a sudden heat to inflame my soles, as if, in the absence of a well-apprised head, it was my feet that were doing the thinking. For what priest let one of his parish go to death unshriven? What would he be, to do that? I came nauseous to those feet, those lumps of conscience, wrapped myself in a blanket and discovered, as I unlatched the door, that my whole body was now alive with conscience, and the rage had ebbed out of reach. I ran down towards Old Cross in a drizzle that seeped from lifeless air.

  Up ahead, in the dissipating dark, was Newman, going towards his house – not towards the river, but home. I followed enough to watch him cross the threshold of the door, and I stood long enough in the woods to know he hadn’t come straight back out but had stayed inside. The smoke plumed so soothingly from his chimney, the air smelt of oak. It had passed, his moment of whim and spleen, he’d changed his mind – of course he had, because no man who still had hold of his senses would die willingly without being shriven.

  I was a priest in his nightgown and blanket in the rain, shoes unfastened, and cropsick, and shivering. But I assured myself: you did not let Newman down, John Reve, far from it – you dissuaded him from death by refusing to grant his passage there. Who could say you let him down?

  My trusted feet were cold with relief. They took me home.

  I must have had sleep of some haphazard sort, and while asleep I must have worried about the loss of the candle flame by the door, and dreamt about lighting the fire, because when I woke I was sure it would be burning steady and that I could reach my hands towards it. It was the sound of the door opening that woke me and brought me upright. No fire, no flames. A cold, dark dawn, and Carter standing before me, with teeth chattering and the reek of the river.

  Get up,’ he said.

  I sat with Carter’s cold hands on my arms; he was soaked, and some wet part of him dripped onto my wrist – his sleeve, or hair? Weak daylight fell in, but it was grey and mundane. Newman was here, I thought, and though it occurred to me as if a dream, I knew it wasn’t. The moment I caught the smell of the river on Herry Carter I knew what news he had for me, and still I sat in bed, blank-faced, and must have stared through him, because he brought his face up to mine and repeated, ‘Get up!’

  ‘I – ’

  ‘Thomas Newman has just drowned himself at the bridge. Gone under. I saw him.’ Carter prodded at his eyes with two splayed fingers, then he was rendered down into sobbing with his face in the blanket.

  I scrambled up and pulled on my alb. I don’t know that I understood precisely what he’d said, even though I’d anticipated him saying it – I only got into my alb and found the cold pinching at my skin. These endless winter nights with their dark dawns and morning moons. Enemy of bare flesh. Herry Carter was a shape made clear only by the sound of sobs. ‘Me,’ he said, ‘it was me.’

  I stood away from him and didn’t expend effort to light any candles. ‘What was you?’

  ‘Me who forced him to drown.’

  ‘You’re not thinking straight – come on, sit here.’

  The table had two chairs. I pulled one out. He scowled and stayed kneeling by the bed.

  ‘He went there to drown himself,’ he said, ‘of all the depraved things, to drown himself. Tom Newman, of all the men. And I tried to stop him, and we tussled and he tried to push me under, so I fought and somehow – ’ Carter’s face and fist clenched at once. ‘He tried to push me under.’ Then deformed in tears and disbelief. ‘He tried to push me under.’

  ‘So you fought back and it was him who ended up under?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to do it.’

  I sat in the chair Carter had refused, while he knelt in fust and shadow with the whites of his eyes trembling and his hands milky in half-prayer.

  ‘It’s before dawn, Herry, why were you even by the river?’

  Herry Carter came to his feet, then sat lumpily on the edge of the bed with his elbows dug into his knees. Sorrowful sighing. He ran his hands against one another like he was trying to get a spark, then clasped them and chewed at a thumbnail.

  ‘I don’t sleep much these days, my wife’s twitchy and restless in bed, except she can sleep through her twitches and I can’t. The rain was coming down like someone was throwing buckets. I couldn’t sleep, I tried my best.’ He bit off a sliver of nail and spat it elsewhere. ‘I got up and found myself going down to the river. The floods – I worry about the sheep down on that ham. Had anxieties that they were drowning.’

  ‘And Newman was there?’

  ‘No, but then he came. Dressed up in his coat and boots. He was surprised to see me.’

  Carter stood and began pacing, also shivering. I got up, took my blanket from the bed and put it round his sodden shoulders. He was wet as water itself, and skin as cold as granite, and shoulders as blunt as a cudgel. He tugged the blanket tight to him.

  ‘At first he lingered and made light of things and said he’d come for a breath of air, to clear the wedding wine from his head. That’s what he said. He kept trying to persuade me to go back to bed. I knew there was something amiss with him, so I didn’t. We waded about in the flood looking for animals, and there was a certain amount of bleating from up-ham, but in the light we had, which was as good as no light, we couldn’t tell if animals had got themselves mired in the flood. So Newman said he’d stay til first light and check again, and we went back towards the bridge – or, I should say, what was left of the bridge – and talked about the stars, which he said were other worlds like ours, with life involved.’

  Carter sat again on the bed, and I told him, ‘You should breathe, breathe deep’, because he was shaking and his breath was frail as wool snatched on bramble.

  ‘Then Tom Newman stopped talking about the stars and said, Excuse me Herry, and went to the bank and started wading in. Like that.’

  The sobbing took up, and a whine of pain. Which in this dark, cold shuffle of bodies and words was real, and which was illusion? Newman at my bed, Carter at my bed, Newman at the river, Newman wading in, Carter standing soaked, Newman’s hand on my arm, Carter’s hand on my arm. The fletched arrow of Newman’s plea, which I now saw as a real fletched arrow, as if Newman had taken aim at me in a dream. None of it was dream, but none of it had the straightness of reality. Hadn’t Newman gone home? Not to the river – home? I assembled the blanket around Carter’s shoulders where it had fallen.

  ‘That’s when it started,’ Carter said. ‘I don’t know what happened, how can I say for sure? Just that I realised Tom Newman was walking straight into that demonic wild river and not stopping, so I went after him and he asked me to leave him alone. But we were both up to our waists even though we hadn’t properly left the bank, and we were both holding on to what’s left of the abutments, so I thought: if he really wanted to die, he wouldn’t be holding on. Isn’t that right? If he really wanted to die, he’d be in by now.’

&n
bsp; I found myself staring out the window while he spoke; the moon was paling and shivery and the day was coming for it. But the day was pale and shivery too, and not convincing, and songless.

  ‘There wasn’t much talking,’ Herry Carter said. ‘Between Newman and me. I knew what he was trying to do and I knew why, no need for words. He’d talked to me before about being reunited in heaven with his wife and child, and that his life was only to do enough good deeds to gain him entry there, the sooner the better. I knew that’s what he was up to. Those hems of his coat were filled with rocks, that I also guessed from the way his coat plunged downwards in the water where my own splayed like a skirt. I tried to pull the coat from him. He fought his way out of it as though to tell me I might as well not bother, since he’d drown anyway, it might just take longer. But I took that another way – the fact that he struggled out of his weighted coat and hung on still to the bridge, well, all that meant his heart wasn’t committed to dying. I think his coat went off and sank downstream. So then I hung to his waist with my arm that wasn’t hanging to the abutments and I yelled to him: “I’m your son, I don’t intend to let you go, we’ll go home and light a fire. We’ll be alright!” And what did he do?’

  I turned my head, and looked at Carter over my shoulder. Newman with his hems loaded with rocks, just as they were each Shrove Sunday when we came to be weighed. My heart, too, filled with rocks at the sudden thought of him gone. Out there, the moon pulling its pale breaths, away from us. ‘What did he do?’ I asked, because Carter needed me to ask.

  ‘He eyed me, did our friend Thomas Newman, amid all the chaos and noise and not knowing where our feet were, he eyed me so steady and calm that I thought he’d understood my love and what it meant, and then he let go of the bridge. I clung to him, I can’t tell you how much, until just my fingers were at his shirt and tearing it and pulling it. But you see the problem – I had no arms and he had two, and with one of them he pushed my head under.’