The Western Wind Page 27

  If I was the bow and the arrow, that which harboured God, and that which shot towards him, couldn’t I not only ask for him to come to me, but go to him myself? Be the bearer of the sign, and not only the one requesting it? I could take Thomas Newman’s shirt and, on the Lord’s behalf, hang it on those rushes in order to symbolise the deliverance of his soul, out of the river, into the arms of his people, offered up to God. A meek and peaceable deliverance, a deliverable deliverance – one, unlike the more ostentatious and unpredictable wind, I could guarantee to occur while the dean was here.

  I found I was drawing circles on my palms with my thumbs; I was agitated and wishful, suddenly excited. As for the wind from the west, I’d wait for that too, and when it came, it would be proof that he still believed in me. That would not be a sign for the dean, but a sign for me; a pact, if God made such things.

  And what else was possible besides? If the shirt was found, why not a sighting of the body, to banish the villagers’ fear of a soul suspended? They needed to be rid of this fear of ghosts and half-deads and devil forms, for if they weren’t, they’d become superstitious and hysterical and give the dean much to deride. The body couldn’t be buried, but it could be seen, or purportedly seen, a thrashed and mangled bag of river-swollen flesh no more ghostly than a hock of ham. If seen at the same time as the shirt in the rushes, it could be known that the soul had escaped and transcended its earthly torment.

  It couldn’t be me who claimed to find the body, though; what would make the dean believe me? It had to be someone else, who seemed to the dean with nothing to gain or lose – and that person could only be Herry Carter. So I’d go to him and explain: you need to dig up Newman’s shirt, you need to go to the river and hang it on the rushes; you’ll say you were down there to see about a tree that’s fallen, and while there you saw Newman’s body pinned up against by the thrust of the current; then you need to run to tell me. Together we’ll go, I with the host and the holy oil, just in case. When we get there, the body will be gone, of course, but then you’ll find the shirt, a sad and miraculous sign. We’ll run back to the village together.

  And Carter will argue – he’ll say, I won’t do it, it’s a deceit, the body won’t be gone because it was never really there, how can I lie, how can I claim to find a shirt that I myself put there, I won’t do it. I’ll tell him: a piece of theatre is of no harm if it’s towards a holy end – think of the Miracle Plays they put on (though Oakham has never), think how they elevate our Lord and his works. This is our miracle to perform, you see? We’ll act it out together, you just come to me when you’ve done what I ask with the shirt. Do it soon, but not tomorrow, not too soon else the dean will wonder at the coincidence of asking for a sign, and the sign being instantly given. But do it by Shrove Tuesday, before the dean leaves.

  Carter would argue; he’d say, I won’t do it. And I’d say, For the good of Oakham, the dean needs a sign. Carter would reply, The dean needs a sign from God, not from us, and if we’ve done no wrong, God will help, don’t you trust him? To which there was no answer I could give with full dignity, since God, unlike Carter, knew that not only had Newman committed the sin of self-murder, but I’d refused to save him, shrive him or stop him. No, I might have answered – I cannot fully trust God.

  But a priest can’t answer this way to his people, so I’d have to distract from his question with a new motivation: do you want to be forgiven for your part in Newman’s death and have the chance to atone? Well then, this is your atonement; do this unquestioningly for me. Carter would argue, and he’d finally concede. He’d argue with the righteousness of grief, but he’d concede with the pain of guilt.

  I hurried back across the road to my croft, took his belt from behind the pail, went at a brisk walk to his house and knocked on his door with the side of my fist, a dull, low knock that might not be heard by the houses around. He answered with his wife behind him.

  ‘I need to talk to you, Herry,’ I whispered. ‘Let me in.’

  Carter didn’t argue. He looked at his belt – which I set on the table – with a moment of horror. Then he looked at me with suspicion when I explained what I needed him to do; then, when I’d finished, he looked at me with contempt. Lastly I spoke to him about forgiveness and atonement, and his contempt turned to desperation, and he agreed. It was all the worse for this lack of argument, since without having to persuade him, I found myself momentarily less convinced. His wife said nothing, but rinsed the belt clean, hung it by the fire to dry and brought us warm milk.

  He drank, slouched and listless, and was left with a milky upper lip, which his wife wordlessly wiped clean with the cuff of her sleeve. ‘No one’ll ever believe us,’ he said, without concern. ‘All we’ll do is make things suspect – a shirt and body washing up all of a sudden, three days after that body’s gone in, when by that time the body would’ve got much further than West Fields. Who’ll believe us?’

  That last wasn’t a question but a dismissal, which I dismissed. ‘A body washing downstream to West Fields would have to navigate the Odd Mill and Burn Wood oxbows,’ I said, ‘and would get impeded at any pass – not to mention the new impediment of that fallen tree.’

  Against which a body could wash up and stay pinned with all the reasonableness of science. I told him he had to put his faith in our scheme, which, being theatre, enacted the truth – the truth being that Newman’s body was somewhere mangled, and his soul was on its way to heaven. What was Carter’s look? I can only say desperate, and within that, relief at being given a chance to atone, and within that relief, more desperation that a bit of make-believe wasn’t enough.

  ‘So you’ll come to me, Herry Carter,’ I said, ‘Monday or Tuesday, you’ll come and find me early, before dawn, and you’ll say you’ve seen a man washed up against that felled tree.’ I lifted his chin where it had dropped. ‘You’ll come and find me, Herry, and you’ll say what?’

  As drab and unenthusiastic as a waterless fish: ‘There’s a man washed up, drowned.’

  ‘The better you act it, the less an act it becomes, the more it resembles the truth, the better a sign it’ll be. The truer a sign, as if really from God.’ To which I added, ‘The more complete your atonement.’

  ‘A drowned man in the river at West Fields, Father.’

  ‘Washed up – ’

  ‘Like an old rag.’

  I put my hand on his shoulder, which still felt chilled from his morning in the river. Cat Carter was at his other side, her hand at that shoulder. She didn’t look at me, only at him. I saw us then, me and Carter, some days hence, caught in a moment that was more than a charade. It was a moment of manufactured hope, one in which Newman was there, available to be saved – neither alive nor dead, a forehead ready to receive the holy oil, a mouth open for the host, time arrested, or reversed. We’d take the oil, the host, our hearts expectant and legs urgent. And we two would run.

  Later I sat on the step by the altar with the bell chiming nine and the village asleep. I might have expected Newman to walk in, living, or undead, defiant in any case. It felt to me that he’d been dead for ever, and not only this one day – it felt like there wasn’t a time before his death.

  I got up and blew out each of the wall lights, until the church was dark except for my one candle. Oliver Townshend found me thus, alone in near-darkness on the altar steps. The rain was a scit-scatter across the windows, which at first I’d mistaken for mice. He came in light-footed, that’s how I knew it was him – that and the squat and solid shape that was nobody else in Oakham. Everybody but Tunley was thriftily made, only the Townshends were different. Cecily was slender but broad in the beam, and her husband was compact and as if a fillet of pure boneless meat. Yet cat-footed, his toes tending outwards when he walked. He tapped a smooth path to the altar and sat by me. He put down his lantern.

  ‘Pews,’ he said, holding his back, ‘are what we need. Did you know they even have them at Bourne now?’

  ‘Windows, pews, a bridge, a trade. What don’t we
need?’

  ‘It’s late, are you planning to sleep here, Reve?’

  He smelt all homely of cloves and smoke and cooked pork. He asked, ‘Don’t tell me it was you who invited that pestilent rural dean?’

  ‘Fine, I won’t tell you.’

  ‘What in God’s name did you do it for?’

  ‘He’s a decent man.’

  ‘As decent as a bout of the pox.’

  Hours ago I’d have argued against that; now I said nothing. I didn’t know if our rural dean was decent or not. His manner towards me had turned – he’d thought I was a man worth standing by, then he’d begun to wonder if I wasn’t; but did that make him indecent? Or did it make me?

  ‘He’s just been up to see me,’ Townshend said, ‘asking about what land I own, and what land Newman owns, and when Newman bought my land, and how it was procured, and why. He drank a half-bottle of my wine. He even asked if he could see the plans and deeds.’

  ‘Couldn’t he?’

  Townshend must have found the question naïve, because he blew it away, ‘Ffff’, and lightly slapped his own knee.

  ‘He’s trying to find out what he can so he’s ready with answers, that’s all. If he gets questioned by higher authorities, he needs to have something to tell them. Try to trust him.’

  ‘I don’t trust him.’ Townshend turned to me. His shadow was flung monstrous behind him, his head the size of an oxen’s. ‘He’s scuttling around with something to prove,’ he said. ‘Before he leaves here, one of us is going to pay for Newman’s death. One of us will be up in flames, it’ll probably be me.’

  The enormous shadow of Townshend’s hand, floating northwards in the direction of the barn, was a frivolous shadow-animal children make; a bird taking flight, a hare leaping. The hand itself was small and soft in contrast. Just then I thought I could grab that hand, hold it and confess to him my sin over Newman’s death – not that he could forgive it as a holy man, but he could hear it, and I could that way get it out of my heart.

  ‘I’m telling you, Reve, he’ll stop at nothing. We even have a barn full of good dry rushes waiting for the pyre.’

  ‘You have the dean wrong,’ I said. ‘Whatever he is, he’s not a tyrant or one for throwing folk on a pyre for sport.’

  ‘I have bad feelings about him.’

  Don’t be a fool, I thought. But he was a fool, with his old silk stockings snug around his thighs, a de-feathered and dusty brimmed hat, his ridiculous shoulders that he’d padded, it seemed, when he heard the dean was in town, and the tatty puffed sleeves he’d dug from some dark cupboard in the same hurry. If the abbey at Bruton decided in earnest to make Oakham into their grange, what use would Townshend be, with his puffs and pads and silken thighs?

  The candle flame flickered, though, so as to give an orangey light to that round thigh, and I couldn’t but think of a pyre, now he’d said it, nor ignore the idea of his thigh applied to it. I had for an alarming instant the notion of him strapped to that pyre on Ash Wednesday at the dean’s will – for the dean had hardly been in Oakham half an hour before he cast a suspicious glance at Townshend. Newman dead, Townshend dead, and Oakham a doomed village in the hands of a priest with unconfessed sins. What then would I do, but go to a travelling friar and confess what I’d done? I’d give the account backwards in my attempt to deliver Townshend from death and leave him in some way alive. Here, in the flesh, his silk thighs still hopeful of their future.

  Of course I couldn’t confess to Townshend, nor could he save me. Only the reverse was ever true. If my projection, which was ridiculous and born only of fear, ever looked likely to come to pass, I could save him – that was what a priest did for the lord of his parish. I squeezed his hand briefly, though not wholeheartedly.

  ‘Be comforted, Townshend,’ I said. ‘If it came to pyres or nooses, I’d sooner climb up and sacrifice myself before I saw a single of my parish die.’

  Townshend turned his face to me, and while I expected a nonsense, or a notional word of thanks for a sacrifice we knew would never be made, his grey eyes were instead distinctly moist and grateful, and he took my hands. The candle, in its holder in one of those grasped hands, spilled a pool of wax on my thumb. I let it cool and set without a wince.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you. I never doubt you. What’s Oakham with no John Reve? You’re every man, every woman and child, I’ve said it to my wife many times – we may be struggling but we have our priest, and any parish with a priest like John Reve will be looked on kindly by God. You hold the soul of every animal in Oakham, every tree and flower, every furlong of soil. You’re God’s word to us and his wish, you’re next to Jesus.’

  At this I did wince. No, not next to Jesus. Perhaps I didn’t mean it about the giving of my life? (What a thin but sharp line between a gesture and an offer.) Townshend kissed my thumb where the wax had set, took his lantern and stood up to leave. The lantern’s light bobbed evenly away before his thick silhouette. I’d sooner climb up and sacrifice myself before I saw a single of my parish die.

  What a thing to say, if it was said with meaning. I didn’t know if I meant it. It didn’t matter; it would never come to be.

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  First published by Jonathan Cape in 2018

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