The Western Wind Page 25

  Desire

  NEAR OLD CROSS, through fog, the death bell chimed three flat, watery clangs. Janet Grant, ever faithful, would ring it through the village, up to New Cross, and out all the way to the parish bounds and back.

  I went past Old Cross towards the outwoods. Newman’s was the only house that far down and was bigger than most of the rest, easily as big as mine. It had once been the manse when the old wooden church was there, long before our days. Newman had been rebuilding; he’d slept where the last priest had slept and lost his wits, through loneliness they said. Behind his house, on the wood’s edge, stretched an enclosure of pigpens and horse stalls and runs for his geese and hens, with a paddock behind for horses – and it was here that the dean’s mare was led by Agnes Prye. By the pigpen, fiddler John Green was praying to Newman’s sow. Little Jane Smith clutching a hen and muttering, Show mercy on the soul of Mr Newman, place him in the region of peace and light. Outside the horse stalls, Fisker was hanging stones with holes driven through, so the devil could be lured in and disappear (though I feared the devil wasn’t so easily tricked).

  Hanging a cross outside Newman’s door, the wife of Bodger Philip. Inside, the Tunley girls and Cat Carter laying clean, dry straw and rushes on the floor, into which they scattered some tired pressed violets left over from summer. Adam Lewys’s wife, back-achingly incumbent with child, arranging Newman’s primer and prayer books along the shelf by his bed, while her husband restocked the fire as you’d do for the newly dead if you had a corpse to lie before it. Robert Guy, the reeve, humourless and diligent as ever while he collected up fresh food into a cloth bag – milk, cheese, apples, a bowl of fish rissoles (still cookable), a leek (not firm), a pile of stubby parsnips (not washed) – and humourlessly, diligently, emptied them out again when I told him the rural dean would be staying and might like to have them. I asked Cat Carter to make the bed anew, Adam Lewys to bring some of the wedding beef and boar, his wife to bring some stew.

  In the short interval alone, while Cat Carter had gone for bedding, Lewys and his wife for food, and Guy and the Tunleys back home, I lit the fuming pot stuffed with bay leaves and thyme, and brought the same taper to the wall lights all around. I was disbelieving that it was the house of someone dead. And what if he wasn’t – how could we know? It could be a trick Newman was playing, not that he had an ounce of trickery in him, but life is strange, death stranger. In this house of his I encountered a voice which might have been his, but might have been the devil’s, and I hoped wasn’t the Lord’s: Newman came to you for help and you didn’t even open your eyes. This man is dead for want of you opening your eyes.

  To which I felt I must object. When there was so much in this life to regret, lament, blame and fear, did it make sense to expend righteousness by reproaching a priest – tired to the core – for keeping his eyes closed? Was there such evil in keeping closed those very instruments the Lord made lids for? For the Lord hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and hath closed your eyes.

  But then what about the bands of muscle that could and did, a thousand times a day, lift my eyelids without effort, a movement that the Lord had no stake in, one that, in his infinite busyness, he left to each man to make for himself. Maybe I chose not to open my eyes out of convenience to myself, or out of spite for Newman, or out of hatred of a kind. For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart.

  I went to Newman’s bed, which he’d got out of only hours before. His pillow was barely dented. I lay my knuckles in that dent and pushed it down, because I couldn’t abide that a whole life should make such a faint impact. There, a bowl, nice and deep. And yet – how weak a man must I appear to God, to be bending reverent and sentimental over the pillow of someone who’d shown no reverence to me; preserving his existence in the world when his words had all but annulled mine. You are not a man of the spirit, he’d said. Grief in that, a notion of loss so great it had left me speechless that morning. So I flattened the dent away, cool and sober, and busied myself. Only to find grief in that too, as if my hands had just destroyed the last remnant of him.

  When the dean came, I was fetching in a bucket of water to pour into the pot above the fire, ready for warming when he wanted his nightly wash (for I heard deans washed nightly, even rural ones). He inspected the house with approval, tried the give of the bed with his hand, looked gratefully at the hearth, assessed the parsnips and was glad to know that stew was on its way. As for the apples, there were five of them and he didn’t want any, said they griped his stomach; so he wrapped them in the cloth and gave them to me with such generosity you might have thought they were his to give. He thanked me for everything, patted my arm.

  By the time I left, the house was warmish and smelt of meadows.

  ‘Man is a foul thing, little and poor, a stinking slime, and after that a sackful of dung and, at the last, meat to the worms. In his final hour he lies with a shooting head and rattling lungs and gaping mouth and veins beating, his fingers cooling, his back aching, his breath thinning and death coming. His teeth grin grimly in a bony head, maggots make breakfast of his eyes. Man is weak and fruitless, a clothed cadaver clutching at his worldly things, a skeleton that will one day clack for want of blood and flesh; a festering mound of skin and nail, and after that an unlubricated heap of bone. Is man the master of his life? Does he own the moments that make it up? No, those moments are God’s, to add to or subtract as he wills. Man is a sinner whose life speeds him day by day towards a tomb, not a master of his body but a slave to it; his red lips will turn black and his eyes will fog over and his feet will stiffen and his tongue will slacken and his ears hiss with death.’

  Amen, they said, as they trailed up the nave with gifts for the dead. I saw Carter’s face blank with sorrow and lips shaping the same repeated words, Mea culpa, while all others persisted, Amen.

  The ledge of Newman’s altar filled with lucky pennies and small velvet socks and gloves to adorn the statue of Mary at Easter, and scraps of silk to cover her grieving eyes on Good Friday, and a key to help Christ unlock the gates of heaven; and things of nature, like acorn halves that resembled the chalice, and stones shaped (if you worked the imagination) like the dove or the mother and child, and berries splashed red by the blood of Christ, and twigs that were the branch of the Tree of Knowledge, and almond-shaped leaves that were Mary’s womb, and sheaves of wheat that were her son’s earthly form, and ivy cuttings and flattened violets and the furry backs of dead bees, and a cup of milk, a cup of ale, a piece of bread, four painted eggs, a packet of seeds, a bolt of velvet, a tin ring, a pair of dice, a lock of hair, a back tooth, a toenail, to help Newman on.

  ‘First we believe, and only then do we seek to understand.’

  Sarah nodded. She’d knocked on my door only moments after I myself arrived through it, and she stood by the fire pit, though the fire wasn’t going strong. I was trying to revive it; better to throw attention on the fire than on the sight of her, grey and partway to skeleton. It was the subtle twist at the left side of her mouth that haunted the edges of my vision. The more I tried to dismiss it, the more grotesque it became. Was it pain? Her fingers, when she passed me kindling, were twisted likewise.

  ‘How long do we have to believe for,’ she said, ‘before we can understand?’

  The dry kindling managed a new, small, thrusting flame. I shook my head minutely.

  ‘I was well,’ she said, ‘do you remember how I was? So full of health I might have vaulted over a cow, I might have lifted Robert Tunley over my shoulder and carried him to Fox Hole. And now I’m dying.’

  ‘Not dying,’ I said.

  ‘Rotting.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I want to understand why.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I didn’t know; whatever she’d done, the punishment surely was too much. A divine balance, I’d
already told her. The Lord is asking you to make amends for something. She said there was nothing she’d done to make amends for. Our sins can be invisible even to us, I’d said. Then help me understand, was her reply. My reply was silence; I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

  I cut her some beef and gave her one of the spiced buns from Annie’s wedding cake. I took one myself. Now that there was only one chair, I offered it to her and I sat on the edge of the bed. We ate, I fast and hungrily, she hardly at all – but still, she tried. It was the willingness to thrive that mattered, even if the body itself was beyond thriving.

  ‘Silence from the birds,’ I said, nodding towards the window where fog and an early dusk pressed in. ‘Though it’s supposedly their day to find a mate.’ Meaning the day of St Valentine. Coy and private they were in this business, then, for there was no song and no heckling call and no beating of wings that I could hear. ‘So much for that,’ I said, unable to bear the quiet.

  Sarah had put down the remains of her spiced bun and was staring, hands folded, into her lap. I was glad to have her face in shadow so that I didn’t see the warped mouth and sharp cheekbones and sunken eyes. Her eyes were too dark, too large, all pupil. They brought to me the devilry of a full black moon on a white sky, which is, they said, what the end of the world would hold. There was only her forehead and the strong line of her nose, the nose of a queen. It had always looked misplaced on her roundish young face, and now disease had misled her face into a brutal kind of womanhood, which was queenly all over, and had a troubling beauty. Or had before the warping, the twisting.

  ‘Sarah,’ I said, and went to take her hands. I touched the warped mouth. Love comes in ways not known or understood. First we believe, and only then do we seek to understand. Two years I’d been in love with her, two years, and those bruising and thankless, which no doubt they were supposed to be. The Lord doesn’t set us easy tests and temptations. He won’t ask, Are you ready to be in love? He won’t give warning that this girl, your sister’s friend who’s also to you a kind of sister, will suddenly develop an ankle you can’t take your eye from, and make you see that ankle every time you try to invoke Mary or the saints.

  He’ll just put her in front of you one evening, with your sister there as normal, and change her in front of your eyes. Her tucked-in babyish chin will transform into the chin of a woman concentrating. Her childish wrists will become articulated and strong as they flex. Her little kicking girlish toe will be lost to you and abruptly replaced by a foot made of splendid bones, and her pressed-together knees by muscular legs made for hours of pacing and rocking to calm a child.

  When the Lord tests us he doesn’t give warning – no, he throws the ball to see how you catch. So when he chose to transform Sarah’s chin and wrists and ankles into instruments of seduction, and to both sweeten and ennoble her face at once, and lace her words with invitation, I promised him: I won’t touch her. As I didn’t. Instead I thought all those things a man is built to think, and for almost two years acted on none. But one day, this last November, on the day of celebration of the bridge being finished, she came to my house when she knew Annie was at the barn carousing with the others, and she sat me on one chair and herself on the other (in the blessed days when my chairs numbered two), opened her shawl and let it drop behind, released her hair from its coif, lifted the tunic up over her head and laid it on her lap, tugged her worn blue dress down to the waist where it bundled around the girdle, and showed me her upper self in full nudity.

  You’ll think I gaped or stuttered like a choirboy. I didn’t; I quietly stopped breathing and then I nodded. I’ve seen you looking at me, she said. Poor John Reve – I wanted to give you what it was you wanted to see.

  I was surprised by lack of surprise. I felt I’d known all along the secret shape of her. I remembered Tunley comparing a bosom to young pears, dropping sweetly yet weightless; shoulders that were downy peaches. I knew it was nonsense – a man refers to fruit when he’s trying to clean up the images of his desire, which have no resemblance to fruit. When I saw Sarah there was only a grit of wanting and remorse and need in my throat that I could have choked on. I could have swiped the ewer aside just to smash something.

  I only nodded and looked, knowing that this was the next stage of God’s testing of me. First he put a woman in front of me and filled me with a love for her that had no grounds, no past and no escape. When I resisted indulging that love, he had her take her clothes down and show all that was stark, sickening and beautiful about a woman. Curves that he’d made and that I could barely comprehend, even when seeing them. Curves moving downwards and inwards and outwards like nothing else in nature.

  No man should go his whole life without seeing a woman, she said. Even a priest. Here; look all you will.

  Little did she know that she wasn’t the first I’d seen, nor that she was the long-delayed answer to the pleas I made many years ago. When my affair with the married woman ended, I’d asked for punishment for what I’d done, and for encouragement to be a priest, and I should have known that these might not come immediately, but would come. At last, they’d come. The punishment of his temptation and baiting, and the encouragement of his love. I’d heard of tests like it, when God subjected a priest to that which he could never have; they said that the sharper and more prolonged the temptation, the more jealous God’s love. The more jealous his love, the more demanding. The more demanding, the more he expected of that priest, because he knew the priest was capable.

  In three months of that, which was five times of visiting, I didn’t once touch her. I didn’t even know for certain that I was in love – love being a state of voyage and adventure, and me voyaging nowhere except deeper, I hoped, into God’s approval. She’d come by, sit and face me bare-fronted as if it were a game, while my breath rucked at the back of my mouth and my hands splayed on my thighs. If I were standing while she sat, I’d be able to see the ivory white seam of her skull in the parting of her hair. It was this nakedness of head that completed the temptation – that she always took the time to remove her coif and flaunt the pinned clump of her dark hair.

  When she went on her pilgrimage she was gone for a fortnight, and in that fortnight I’d sit in front of the fire with my elbows on spread knees and my head low, and think what a particular and severe test this was. Within a week of her being gone I got taken down with a fever, became thin, imagined my fingers were the legs of mayflies, I had garlic and wormwood and scrubbed myself with myrrh; the doors of my house were open and candles lit to drive the devils out, though there weren’t any devils. Only God, raging and spiteful.

  Two or three days after I recovered she returned to Oakham, herself burning with a fever that made her mewl and strain high-pitched, and which we thought would go, as fevers do. We gave her garlic and wormwood and scrubbed her with myrrh, and a great use all that was, because the fever bit back harder.

  She fumbled now with her hooked fingers to untie the coif (from which fell hair that was lank, unbunned and had been listlessly stuffed), take down her tunic, then her dress, then her undertunic. I was still kneeling in front of her. Her poor shoulders. No pear nor peach. Nothing plumpish any more in the journey from neck to breast, but more a rack of pulled skin. She’d taken on a haphazard mottled hue, as if stained. The bosom, though, still kept for itself the spirit of life and miraculous roundness. Whatever was left in me to burn burnt most urgently then, in the sight of her ripeness mid-fall. Whatever devil was at work in her was howling through flesh that still remembered vigour and health.

  But her twisted mouth; it was there that I looked with a stumbling heart. This hopeless flame of desire had taken up a vigorous dance. I realised then, doesn’t a flame flicker at its fastest because it gasps at air before going out? With each flicker it spends itself. Hasn’t the Lord decided, at last, to bring this temptation to an end?

  ‘It must be this then,’ she said into a cold silence. ‘This has been my only sin, to come here and make you glad. It’s for this I’m dying.�
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  ‘Sarah,’ I said again, as if I couldn’t recall another word, and I was due to make a request that she dress herself, and an apology for what suffering was coming to her, in case it was coming on my behalf. Not as she thought – not that she’d disappointed God by coming here, but that her coming here was part of his plan to test me. That she was a stake in his game. He’d given me a fever so as to burn out the longing. Was his intention to transfer my burning onto her, so that she suffered in order for me not to?

  She sat opposite me without movement, bony as the devil, crooked-backed, breasts bare, stomach caved, eyes deep, hair loose and fingers bent into eternal beckoning, and when there was a curt clipping knock on the door from someone who didn’t plan to wait to be invited in, she still didn’t move. So it was that the dean walked into my house and found her half-naked; found us, I should say, since I of course was kneeling there before her nudity. Friendship fell from his face. Something patient departed.

  Superstition

  SARAH LEFT WITH her shawl wrapped tight around and her coif hastily tied, incanting to herself a prayer I couldn’t hear. A half-hour passed and dusk accrued at the end of a day that had never quite managed to be light. No sign of the dean; I’d been certain he’d come back. I put on a mantle and mud-crusted pattens and went out.

  Fog, thicker still. There were voices through it that were chattering, some debating and arguing, nothing unusual except I couldn’t hear where they were coming from, whether in the street or from inside the houses. The fog disunited sound from sound, so that a shout seemed to come from just there and a laugh from over there, and then the same laugh from far along the road. Now the strum of an instrument, now a shout, now a voice gruff and terse, now more laughing, now a woman’s coo.