The Western Wind Read online

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘And don’t think of your hand as a leaf brushing against a bud. Your hand is your hand, at the service of your heart.’ And other parts, I thought. ‘Not a blameless leaf.’

  ‘I’ll never think of it like that again.’

  ‘And avoid this woman at all costs. The punishment for coveting a married woman is far greater than an unmarried one.’

  He offered a mumbled ‘Yes.’

  ‘For touching her chest, you need to come each day for a fortnight and light a candle beneath the Pietà – our Pietà – and say your Ave.’

  Our Pietà being quite different from Newman’s, which hung audacious and bright as a kingfisher at Newman’s own altar. He wouldn’t like this, the boys from the barns never liked fiddling with lights and pictures of the Pietà any more than they liked joining the chorus of ‘I sing of a maiden’; these were women’s things.

  ‘And you can do something for me – take wood, bread, milk and eggs to Sarah Spenser’s house, she’s unwell. Bacon too, if you can. Take some candles from the vestry. Ask for clean bedclothes to go there, and make sure the fire’s lit. If there’s water in the house, sweep it out.’ I thought, uneasily, of the vomit I’d swept up there the day before. ‘Clean up – anything that needs cleaning. See that she has water. I’ll have Janet Grant pay for it all later.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Be comforted that you’re given a pardon of another forty days for coming to confession before Lent. You did right to confess. Come back to me if the desire builds and you need to confess it again.’

  I didn’t expect to hear gratitude when he replied, ‘Thank you, Father.’ He wasn’t one of those boys who came to confession more than he was obliged, and not one who was likely to rush back with a heavy conscience. But when he thanked me it was as if with relief that he knew he could return. He brought his face to the grille to get sight of me or meet my eye. Yes, a wolfish face, lean and dark and sharp-eyed. Ralf Drake. When he stood and pulled back the curtain he lingered strangely. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought he was having an epiphany or a moment of ecstasy, as men and women do before an image of Mary or the saints. Then he gave an odd, short laugh, and he left.

  Why did he linger, why did he laugh? Because he was awkward, I’m sure of it – because the married woman he was in love with was my sister. He meant for me to know, since she was the only one in the village to be recently married – she’d married on Friday, as he said, to a limp old shite from a far place. (And, well, there were some things in that assessment I agreed with.) She now lived in Bourne with this husband, John Endall, whose surname I could only think of as describing her fate, and who owned twenty acres of grazing meadow there. Our boy from the barns might never see her again except in passing, if she were to visit. He won’t dance with her again.

  What is it to be in love with a woman? Is it just to love her hair, her thighs, her this part? Or to worship her unduly – her hair comb, her footprint, her spoon, her smell, her shadow, the water she washes in? If a drop of rain touches her neck, is it love to worship not only her neck but the raindrop? Is it a spell, a trick, mere lust trussed up? Is it love if it drives you to act, or if it drives you to resist? I was told in my ordination that love can be a test that feels like a gift, and sometimes a gift that feels like a test, and only a priest can know the difference. But what did I know? Perhaps in love the hand does become a leaf; my sister’s chest, to that possessed hand, a bud. Perhaps I was asking Ralf Drake to rid himself of the trickery of lust when really what he experienced was the transformation of love. Maybe his dung-darkened hands did become a leaf in her presence. Yes, there are transformations in the work of the heart. I wanted to call Ralf Drake back and ask him: Is love salvation or witchery? For I don’t know.

  Little dark box

  ROBERT TUNLEY. NOBODY else filled the small gap between screen and curtain as bulkily, with the breath whooshing out as the body went down. The bell chimed one. I strained to hear sounds from outside – a citole perhaps, nakers, John Green’s pipe calling the worms from the ground, that cheery chirrup of the fiddle like a drunken songthrush, and the notion of quick-footed dancing that goes with it. But I heard nothing except the single wind-swollen chime of the bell.

  ‘What’s happening out there?’ I asked, before Tunley could begin offloading his sins. ‘Are there celebrations yet?’

  ‘Is that how you open confession these days, Reve?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know you were a man for convention.’

  ‘You’re the first priest I’ve met who admits he didn’t know something.’

  I looked down into my lap and smiled; Tunley gave a muffled laugh that didn’t get further up than his throat, which was a shame because he has a laugh so thick and warm you could rug a horse with it. ‘To answer you, I’d say there’s some celebrating,’ he said. ‘Up at New Cross. Some drinking and senseless shouting at sparrows anyway, if that’s what you call celebrations.’

  ‘I don’t know what sensible shouting at sparrows would be like.’

  ‘Then that’s two things you don’t know today.’

  Tunley made a sound somewhere between a yawn and a groan. I knew how he was kneeling, heavy and round-backed with his hands linked in the fold between his thighs and belly. His eyes would be dancing in his heavy, pale face.

  ‘Will you join them, at New Cross?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, no,’ he said. ‘The leg’s sore. I’ll sit at home and curse the Lord for giving us another Lent to endure.’

  He reeled off the Ave spontaneously and silver-tongued. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Just the sound of it drove me deep within myself to somewhere at once dark and light – Tunley should have found work in the church, the way his voice could do that. Then, without even a clearing of the throat, he said, ‘You know Mary Grant’s dog, the black one, I killed it. Last night.’

  Even this was songlike, and the words rose from the enormity of his belly. Nobody knew how he managed to be fat. Envy the man who’s fat in autumn, and distrust the one who’s fat in spring, so they say. Well, Tunley was fat and envied and distrusted all year.

  ‘Mary Grant’s dog?’ was my pointless query, given that he’d said it plainly already.

  ‘That’s right, Reve, Mary Grant’s dog.’

  The dog, of course, the one Carter and I saw on the track that morning. Was it? When I thought about it, I didn’t know what Mary Grant’s dog was – or had been – like. I hadn’t seen it for years. It was a surprise I remembered how Mary herself looked, given how often she came to Mass – something like her daughter, I suppose, who I see every day. Though Janet Grant is sweeter-looking, that I do know.

  ‘How did you kill it?’ I asked. You started with the easy question, and that softened the path to the harder one: the why, the what for.

  ‘A bit of monkshood in its food.’

  ‘Monkshood?’ Then I murmured, ‘That’s no good way to die.’

  ‘I’ve yet to find a way that is.’

  That poor dog. I considered its last moments, back arched and retching, its ribs opening and closing like a dying butterfly.

  ‘You do know that Mary Grant’s dog was her sole companion?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Tell me why you did it.’

  ‘It barked and yowled and I could never sleep.’

  ‘It’s in a dog’s nature to bark and yowl – ’

  ‘It’s in a man’s nature to sleep.’

  I said, looking up into the rafters as I did when frustrated, ‘We can’t kill a creature for doing what’s in its nature.’

  That dog lying there with its tongue a dry pink petal, and Mary an old woman. Utterly friendless, if you discounted her daughter, who seemed more driven by duty than love.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s not in a dog’s nature,’ Tunley replied, over-brimming. ‘To be tied outside in all weathers without freedo
m and left to yowl like a bloodthirsty beast all day and night while its master – or mistress, in this case – sits on her bony arse and whinges. While her only neighbour – her good neighbour, who brings wood and starts her fires and mends her roof – is sent into tension as tight as a flail and starts yowling in his own head and losing sleep to madness. Killing the dog was a mercy to us all. If it hadn’t been the dog, it would have been Mary herself. So I don’t come asking for forgiveness so much as thanks.’

  ‘You’re ripe, to come to confession and ask for thanks.’

  ‘Ripe I am, Reve – all the women say so.’

  ‘And cruel. You’ve left an old woman desperate.’

  ‘She was desperate anyway, the brash old sow.’

  Typical Tunley; for him, confession wasn’t about forgiveness so much as the avoidance of any need to be forgiven. You tell it and it’s out, it’s finished. He’s a big man and he says the devil has plenty of room in him to hide. So he shows everything he does to the daylight before the devil finds it. It means that I know more about him than I might need – his trips to Bourne for all-night loving and sweating with the two women he seems to have impressed there: one married, one widowed. No other man in the village has better success with women than him. Is it his musical voice, the songs he sings them, the long, plump kisses on their necks? (He’s described these to me in such detail I might as well have been kissed by him myself.) His over-generous endowment between the legs? (This, too, he’s helped me envisage.) I once asked my sister if she knew what it was about Tunley, if women liked a man who carried the fat of two – did it feel like a bargain? She had nothing to say, only a smile.

  ‘Poison was better than a knife,’ Tunley said, as if something had moved him to defend himself. ‘I’m not so canny at stabbing and I would have been sorry to look the creature in the eye and do that.’

  It struck me that I saw that dog in the first hours of its life, a small, wet thing that smelt of malt, its eyes barely open. It was lowered into my palms, this breathing bag of meat.

  I tried to share this with Tunley. ‘The day Mary Grant found that dog, up on the track to Oak Hill, she brought it to me – not a day old and the only one alive of its litter. She came to ask me if I could smother it, with the Lord’s blessing. I persuaded her to keep it – that must have been six or seven years ago.’

  ‘And it’s been howling ever since.’

  ‘And now it’s stopped.’

  ‘And for this we thank the Lord,’ he said.

  I asked him then, ‘Did it die where it ate?’

  ‘They take themselves off somewhere.’ There was distinct uninterest in his tone, and a hint of impatience now that he’d said what he needed to. ‘I poisoned it where it was tied, then untied it and let it die where it wanted.’

  ‘Do you know where it died?’

  ‘Can’t say that I do.’

  ‘Could it have made it to the birch copse, down on the way to West Fields?’

  ‘Could have – monkshood takes a few hours to kill you. And it had seven years of bounding to catch up on, wretched beast. Probably the best few hours of its life.’

  ‘Well, there’s a dead dog down at the copse.’

  ‘Then you wouldn’t need to be much good at arithmetic to put those two things together.’

  If I’d told him that I thought I’d seen something running down the road the night before, it would have only been to think with my mouth. Tunley didn’t need to know and he wouldn’t have cared. But til that moment I hadn’t thought of the black thing that had flickered past me through the night rain. I’d been spooked, had designated it a ghost and had run. To think it was only Mary Grant’s dog with a bit of monkshood in its gut.

  ‘You’re quiet, Reve, have you died?’

  ‘If I have,’ I said, ‘it’s much like life.’ He laughed, and I said, ‘It’s a long way down to the copse, from you out at the brook.’

  ‘Tell me about it. It’s a long way to anywhere from the brook.’

  A long way, a wet way, since the brook fills and spills after rain and the people in the only two houses on the other side of it, Robert Tunley and Mary Grant, have that to wade through. Tunley does it even with his bad leg, but we don’t see Mary Grant for weeks on end. Being kept busy by Tunley, people say with a wink, though the idea – his pillowy lips on her rack of ribs – is enough to make most wish they hadn’t.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘and now I’ll be off. I’ve a lot to do today, Reve, much as I’d love to keep talking about the what and where and how long of a dying dog.’

  He tells a priest at Shrovetide that he has a lot to do. The wonder of Tunley is his boundless self-regard. I too had things to do, and to establish – the what and the where and the how long. Absolution isn’t a throwaway thing to be aimed at a vague target. It needs all the precision of shooting a bird out of the sky. His penance depended on increments of intent – whether the killing was mainly to put himself out of his misery, and only slightly to put the dog out of its misery, or vice versa; and whether, and how much, it was to harm or punish Mary Grant, and if it was, how long that intent had been brewing, how thought-out and with how much malice, how the poison was chosen – for speed or drama of death. Whether, how much, how long, why. I went to draw these questions out as an archer his bow and arrow. But Tunley had already stood up with heaving breath and was parting the curtain. He hadn’t even waited for forgiveness; it’s occurred to me more than once that he uses me like a privy – comes in, sheds what corrupts him and goes.

  ‘Confess and apologise to Mary Grant,’ I said. ‘Chop her wood for the rest of the year. Bury the dog and say three Hail Marys where it died.’

  I said it all for my own benefit. Tunley had gone.

  I stared at a thumb-sized scuff in the stone of the wall in front of me, the one that looked unavoidably like a man’s upright organ. With a crude scratching I once tried to make it look like the hump of a camel, the creature of temperance, but I’d never seen a camel and my drawing was no better than a child’s, and offered no disguise.

  I had to go and see it again, the dog. At least to make sure it was carried off and buried and not left to the hawks or hobbies. I stood and kicked my feet against the wall to wake them to action, but then there were voices, some sort of agitation in the nave, and footsteps that ushered a quick scuffle-flutter towards me.

  ‘Reve.’

  I sat. Lord, I said silently. You made this man; help me with him.

  And there he was through the grille, our loud whisperer from abroad, our travelling naysayer, our passing pedant. Our little rural dean doing his sheriff duty, his Oakham prowl. Without a rush I slid the amice from my head and shunted the screen aside.

  ‘A word, Reve.’ He smiled as he said it, and he gave a courteous, shallow bow. ‘If I’m not disturbing you.’

  ‘No, no,’ I said, looking towards my lengthening queue. ‘I’ve absolutely nothing to do.’

  That urge of earlier to rush to him, to speak to him, was nowhere to be found now that he was here. Instead its opposite: to be done with him, to see his back and the back of his mare disappear out past New Cross and away. He scurried up the aisle and across the nave to the north door of the church. My queue looked away from me and I from them; I hoped they knew where my loyalties were – that is, not with him, who was conniving and meddling in our business, but with them, our parish, of which I was one. As we stepped outside, the wind whipped about with all the hostility of late winter, a last swish of the tail. Music wafted in from the direction of New Cross and I saw plumes of smoke from the vicinity of our sullen reeve’s house, Robert Guy; quite looping and dancerly plumes that carried the smell of mutton fat and bacon.

  The dean was a few paces ahead and had adopted – what was it? A little trot? I’d never seen a grown man do that. Did he have a problem with his body, something irritating his undercarriage? Otherwise I could only think it was his way of pretending to be relaxed and at ease with whatever untranquil thing it was he wanted to sa
y. I didn’t quicken my pace to catch him, in fact I dragged my feet on purpose, and eventually he waited.

  ‘I was hoping for some privacy,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve only the church walls to hear us.’

  He looked up at those fresh, soft, yellowy walls as if for assurance, which, by his frown, he didn’t get. ‘This has been a difficult few days for your parish, John,’ he said with his conspiratorial whisper. John! Just before I was Reve – people always became friendly when they wanted something and weren’t sure they’d get it. His little etched face had become lively with slander. ‘How is today’s confession?’

  ‘One laugh after another,’ I said.

  And he continued, ‘I saw one of those boys from the barns came. What did he have to say?’

  ‘That he was in love.’

  ‘Oh? Who’s the lucky woman?’

  ‘It hardly matters.’

  ‘Love always matters when there’s an unsolved death. Love is always,’ he paused, ‘an accomplice.’

  I sniffed. I sometimes felt that if I could do something suddenly enough – make a noise, a motion – a dream might be broken and the dean gone.

  ‘It was Annie, as a matter of fact. My sister. The boy Ralf Drake. Just a fleeting infatuation.’

  He let out a short Hff. Meaning what? I’d have rather told him nothing about anybody, breathed not a word of what passed in confession, but there it was, we’d agreed that I would, back when I trusted him and thought he was here to help.

  The dean had slowed to an excruciating dawdle and kept looking at me with something intense and needing. He took my wrist. ‘A word of warning,’ he said. ‘You know that if the ones with something to hide do come, they’ll tell you a fine, tall tale about something else. Which is why it falls on you to be subtle and cunning and hear what it is they’ve neglected to say.’ He inclined his neat head, and it was as though the air, shrill and pure, rushed away from him. ‘And – has Oliver Townshend been to confession?’