The Western Wind Page 23

  At that, he bowed his head and looked down – maybe at his hands, which were, I imagined, crablike on his knees. But none of this was visible to me in the light we had. ‘Do you hear what I said? He pushed my head under.’

  His teeth began chattering so violently that they gnashed, and I wondered why the Lord thought up chattering as any kind of help with cold. I asked, ‘Where’s that blanket, Herry?’ I couldn’t see if it was still around him. ‘Put that blanket tight round your shoulders.’

  ‘He pushed my head under,’ Carter said, ‘and I saw death coming closer than I’ve ever seen it, and I was thrashing out of control and mortally cold, and when I came up for a breath, I saw him and I kicked him away, went under, and when I came up again I was still holding on to his shirt, but he wasn’t in it.’

  There was no sound except for the scratch of the blanket, a fumble; I could see him manoeuvring it around him, a black shadow like a wing, then a tugging of it, wool on hemp. And I imagined Newman’s shirt flailing in the current, empty of him.

  ‘I could have just let him go,’ Herry said. ‘But I kicked him away. Used both my feet. I kicked him away.’ Herry Carter raised his head then and pinned me, or so I imagined, with his look. ‘Does God see what happens underwater?’

  ‘Listen – ’

  ‘Could he have seen me kicking my feet like that into Newman’s ribs?’

  ‘The river’s fast and murky, Herry, and God isn’t always looking.’

  Which we knew to be untrue. Carter held steady with his gaze; the oval of his face marked itself out against the dark.

  ‘God saw my legs alright.’

  ‘He saw into your heart,’ I said. ‘That’s where he spends his time looking. And your heart was good.’

  ‘Good? If he saw into my heart he’ll know my intention, which was to kill Thomas Newman – not just to let him die, but to kill him.’

  ‘Only so that he might not kill you.’

  ‘Thou shalt do no murder.’

  ‘There’s murder and then there’s murder.’

  ‘Each Sunday at Mass you tell us, Thou shalt do no murder. Thou shalt not kill.’

  ‘In spite, in greed, in hate. But your heart has never been anything but full of love for that man. God sees that.’

  ‘I never heard you say, Thou shalt do no murder except with a heart full of love.’

  ‘I’m saying it now. Thou shalt have a heart full of love. And whatever action is inspired by that love, God will look kindly upon.’

  Carter slumped, head towards knees. I went to him, sat beside him, put my arm across his shoulder. He was silent as if he’d died. My forehead was dull with cropsickness and a too-deep sleep, my body top-to-toe queasy, with only one sharp sensation that arrived in the neck, like a board partitioning head and heart: shame. Tell him, I thought: tell him Newman came to you earlier that morning. That he stood there hours ago, still alive, with death preventable – or can you not?

  ‘Do you know that Newman was drowned?’ I said finally (choosing, over honesty, a swerving shot at hope). ‘For all you know, he might have drifted downstream and got out, right as rain.’

  ‘Right as rain!’ Carter managed, his shoulders jerking as if in laughter.

  ‘Well?’

  He lifted his head. ‘Well, I saw him sucked under and then I never saw him again. I got out and ran downriver along the bank and saw nothing. He certainly did not get out.’

  I didn’t doubt him. There was no getting out of that river, once it was in spate and you were in the middle of it. We’d seen cows pulled down in its tow. Newman could swim, but he wasn’t a particularly good swimmer; and besides, nothing could last long in its icy waters; and besides, he wanted to die. So why would he swim?

  ‘Herry,’ I said finally, ‘say nothing about what happened this morning.’

  No word from Herry Carter, only the back of his abundantly haired head, his wet hair that smelt of weeks of smoke and dirt.

  ‘If anybody asks, you were still in bed. You saw nothing.’

  ‘My wife knows I was not in bed,’ he muttered.

  ‘Then you must get her to share your account.’

  He swallowed. Cat Carter was as loyal and unquestioning as any wife in Europe, in this entire world; she’d back up any story he gave her.

  ‘You said you still had hold of his shirt. Where is it? Did you let it go after him into the river?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Herry?’

  ‘It’s over there.’ This, muffled.

  ‘Where?’ I got up, went towards the door. I found it on the floor – it was easy to identify, a sopping heap. I put my hand to it but didn’t pick it up.

  ‘You need to get rid of this,’ I said.

  He lifted his head.

  ‘How will you explain having his shirt?’ I hissed, though I hadn’t meant to. ‘How will you explain it?’

  ‘Easy, the truth. I’ll just say I murdered him.’

  ‘Take it away now, before it gets light, hide it somewhere. Later, we’ll burn it or bury it. For now, just hide it where it won’t be found.’

  So Herry was going to sit agog as if what I asked was madness, when the madness was in doing nothing but sitting agog.

  ‘You’d like to be hanged?’ I said.

  Debate there in his body, which hovered between the choices of slump and stand. His shoulders said yes, why not be hanged? But his feet, two dark keen shapes on the floor, said no, not hanged. One slid forward to be ready to walk. I picked up the shirt and wrung it over the bucket.

  ‘Bury it,’ I said.

  He came to his feet, juddery.

  ‘And tell nobody.’

  I urged the clump of shirt into his hands and he drew it fully up against his stomach.

  ‘Do you have plenty of wood, will your wife have a fire?’

  He nodded, shaking with cold and barely fit to speak.

  ‘Then go and get dry and warm, don’t delay. Warm clothes, something to eat – and say nothing. Say nothing, do nothing. Cease knowing what you know.’

  I went to the wood pile and hoarded two logs under my arm for my own fire, and took two more. Behind me, Carter left. Dear God, I said to my empty house, and God replied only: queasy priest. A bruising rebuke; I busied myself in its wake. Char cloth, flint, fire striker. Get the fire burning strong. There wasn’t anything I could think of but the sight of a burning flame and the feel of its warmth. I snicked the fire striker repeatedly against the flint, impatient. I’d light the fire and then, once the fire was lit, breakfast. My hands shook with – was it fear? Regret? Despair? Because, now what? Light fire, breakfast. And having food, let us be therewith content.

  Eat we must

  BOILED BEEF. PLENTY of it left over from the wedding. A bit of rye bread to gnaw on, better for breakfast than for supper, else you go to bed indigested and stone-stomached. Sinner’s bread we call it here, because why else would you eat it if you weren’t doing penance; God gave us wheat for good reason. But the rye bread was left over from the wedding too, so I ate at the table with the noise of rain abating and fog bearing in.

  The rye from today travelled to my stomach, met the rye from yesterday and sat on it. The beef was tender, though, and a solace that went easily down. I drank some watery wine. The puddle by the door, which Newman’s shirt had made, was mostly dry by now, just a dark patch in the dirt. I stared at it, and it was only after staring for several long moments that I noticed how the piece of beef in my mouth remained tucked unchewed, forlorn, between tongue and tooth.

  I went to Annie’s room and dragged out her chest, and a sack of things that clanged – her plate, bowl, spoon and fork, I supposed. Her brass pot, her ewer. When I carried the sack to the door a box fell out, the wooden box our father had made for her ninth or tenth birthday, which she’d covered with shells.

  I opened the box and in it were her needles, reels, snips, awl, lucet, scissors and a bundle of dull thread. Once the box was in the sack again, I tied the strings tighter and put the sack on
the chest, ready for the cart to come. I put her chair with those things, as she’d asked. Could her husband not provide her with a chair? Had our times really come to that, when a woman was supposed to bring her own chair and table into a marriage? And what next? Would she bring with her a door and window? Her roofing?

  I sat on the chair that remained. Here, Shrove Saturday, come round so soon in the flip of a year; and look how the day had started. With my sister gone and Thomas Newman drowned. Run to the river and find him, said all areas of my being except for the area that had sense – the heart. Knock on doors, rouse a search. The heart drew up its knees and bid wait. Waiting might make us too late. The heart claimed to know that it was already too late, and remained stoic. The heart drew lines between love and fear, and in its constant travel between the two it knew all there was to know. It grew stubborn and heavy in my chest until the beef and bread I’d eaten could find no way past. I tidied away the crumbs and wiped my fork and plate with a square of cleaning linen.

  In any case it wouldn’t be long before Janet Grant did her morning rounds and found Thomas Newman’s house empty, and then the cat, as they said, would be out of the bag. So I did as my heart said, and waited.

  As it was, Robert Tunley brought the news, not Janet Grant. He came oafing up the road at his own top speed in his fine miniver-collared coat, which he got from nobody knew where and wore for everybody knew what. Hollering, ‘Man in the river down at Odd Mill!’ Waving his arm through the pelting rain. ‘Man in river before the Odd Mill oxbow!’

  It was still barely dusk but the birds were now singing, songs so piercing I wondered if it was that which was bursting the clouds. Much of Oakham came out of their doors.

  ‘Tunley!’ I called, because he’d run past my house, New Cross-wards. He didn’t hear. He was shouting for all men and women to join a search at the river. I can’t say there was overwhelming interest in the notion, not with the rain and the meagre light and the lack of care for a drowned stranger. They’d have been more motivated if it had been an Oakham cow that’d gone in.

  But then Janet Grant came upwards from Old Cross, looking puzzled and troubled, saying to me that she’d knocked on Newman’s door on her rounds and had no answer. I told her she might well speak to Tunley, and I pointed up the road. She hurried over to him, shawl-headed against the rain, and asked what the fuss was for. That was when the two items of news, taken together, raised alarm. Could the person in the river have been Newman? they asked Tunley, and Tunley replied yes. It seemed to be a man. In the brief wild shuck of the body, it seemed not to be a small man; it seemed long of limb – although maybe that was just an illusion of speed and chaos. At the very least it seemed not to be a woman or child. And though it was quite dark at that hour, Tunley’s view was close-up as he made it home along the bank (after a night of his own wild shucking amid miniver with a widow from Cooper’s Ash who liked to be rid of him before the sun let her see the extent of his gut, and let him see the extent of her age; none of this he divulged to the village, but he’d divulged it to me in the past).

  So a search began. The firm half of the village bolted or trotted or walked down towards the river at Odd Mill, and the more infirm stayed back to light fires and start breakfast and wax eggs as Egg Saturday gifts, since the day must go on.

  I made my way too. A priest doesn’t call, and he doesn’t run (cassock-bound, he can’t), he just scuttles forward like an old man even when he’s young, and he wonders, if he’s really in the body of Christ, why he’s so unable to do such a simple thing as move his legs at speed. I was alone; the rest of the search was up ahead, scattering into the light of a gloomily breaking day, Herry Carter not among them. For which I was glad – he needed to get warm – and apprehensive. What would people think of his absence? That he had no cause to search? That he knew it was pointless?

  Some forty or more villagers went the half-mile down to the Odd Mill oxbow, which is where I caught them. There was no sign of a drowned person. The fog was rolling up the fields towards the village, and the river, impeded by the oxbow, travelled at a slow, muscular surge like the straining hind leg of a beast at the plough. Trees had fallen where a wet winter had worn at the banks; plenty of places for a body to get caught, but nothing was there. We followed it round to the next oxbow at Burn Wood. Here the river coiled back on itself so sharply that the neck of its meander was far narrower than the river itself – a piece of ground no more than four strides wide. The loop of land within its meander was almost an island, which we now stood on, teetering at the bank, shouting into the river, ‘Newman! Thomas Newman!’, as if he’d emerge from the water from a swim.

  But our calls went unanswered. A certain excitement grew. Chatter and a chorus of voices: It might have been an animal Tunley saw, not a man. No, it was a man, did you ever see Tunley flustered over nothing? Newman might be out on his fields, might be out shooting, might be out walking. In this rain? No, that’s not like Thomas Newman. Might be asleep in his bed – did Janet Grant check or did she just knock on the door? Ha, if he’s asleep in his bed and I’m out wading in rain and shit and mud, I’ll kill him myself. Tom Newman drowned! Doesn’t seem right. He can’t be drowned. He must be. Father? Is he drowned, Father? How would Father Reve know if he’s drowned, he was asleep like the rest of us.

  I shrugged, solemn. Others had run on past the Burn Wood oxbow, westwards where the river began to straighten on its way to West Fields. If the body had got that far, we’d never find it now. In the commotion I left. I walked back upstream a good quarter-mile to the bridge, alone at this point and wholly drenched. I stood at the bank by the fallen bridge where I knew Newman to have gone in. I whispered to myself: Look at it. The river pushing at its banks, the useless abutments, the deep cow-hoofed sludge, the perfect uncertainty as to where river met land. An accidental drowning here was plausible; no, near-inevitable. It was a wonder nobody had before.

  I tried my foot on the mud. Yes, like ice. Anybody standing there would’ve slipped. There were rain-filled wells in the mud, those of a large-booted person, and there, perhaps, evidence of skidding and slipping, two narrower, longer tracks not deep enough to be made by anything that lingered – just there where the river met the bank. Though it was difficult to tell in the mess of mud and water.

  It was only as I was about to leave – and as I was thinking that we needed to call for the rural dean straight away, and show him this scene if he wanted to see it, and let him conclude an accident – that I saw in the mud a length of rope. I braved the deepest sludge to retrieve it, holding the broken abutment myself. The rope was the length and width of a belt – not Newman’s because his belt was leather. No, it was Carter’s. I’d seen him wear it every day for the last few years. I picked it up and wrapped it round my fist.

  Thank you, I said, and squinted into a thickening fog. If anybody else had found Carter’s belt, then what? Thank you, Lord, I said again.

  Then the cart arrived with two men driving it, men from Bourne, who loaded it with my sister’s things. How empty the room, full with emptiness, so brimful with it that it felt there wasn’t space enough for me to stand inside its awful fattening hollow; sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, I said aloud, and the words dropped like a stone on tin, and the room seemed to shove me outside, where the searchers were arriving back from the river.

  I washed the piece of rope in the water pail at the side of my house. I tucked the rope out of sight behind the pail, rinsed my hands, came to the front of the house. John Hadlo was striding head-bowed up the road, shoulders locked down against the rain. ‘Search has failed,’ he said when he came past. The failure seemed to have removed his heart from its warm cavity.

  I asked him to find a boy who could take one of Newman’s horses and ride to Bruton, to persuade someone at Bruton to send a message to Wells, telling the rural dean there’d been a death in Oakham and asking him to come that day if he could. Hadlo received the word ‘death’ with a wince. But he was dutiful, and he nodded.

 
; I watched the men take Annie’s things away. They covered the cart with pig-skins to keep off the rain, and while they did, a boy from the barns harnessed Newman’s liveliest horse. The boy and men set off in tandem, one heading for Bruton, the other for Bourne.

  Little dark box

  WHEN ANNIE TOLD me she was going to be married, I took the news in two ways at once: with shock, which was utter, and expectation, also utter. It’s possible to be both surprised and unsurprised in the same moment, and to know something could never happen and is also inevitable.

  That was how it was when Carter spoke those words to me in the dark of my house: Thomas Newman has drowned himself, gone under. It occurred to me that of course he had, because he’d been recently in my room telling me passionately he was going to do as much – and it also occurred to me that it couldn’t be true, because he’d been recently in my room talking passionately. I claimed I didn’t understand precisely what Carter had said, but of course I did. What I didn’t understand was how I could know and not know, and be shocked and unshocked, and be struck by grief while also feeling something innermost harden in an instant, something that perceived the dreadful inconvenience of his loss, but not the woe of it. Like walking two opposite paths at once, as those riders to Bruton and Bourne – one taking, one bringing. Both at once.

  I didn’t expect the dean to come with any rush, what with so much on his hands. It didn’t matter to me if he came. If he finally arrived halfway through Lent looking distracted and duty-bound, and stayed for half an hour, it would have been enough. What importance was Oakham to him? What magnitude a little death there? I’d heard about his overworked, under-compensated, overlooked, under-recognised deanship. His no-nonsense holiness. A death is but another piece of paper to be signed in a life beset by pieces of paper. Why would this one trouble him?