The Western Wind Read online

  Eat we must

  WE MUST, AND I was past hunger. But for another hour I went back to confession because I didn’t want my parish to think the dean had turned my mind against them – that, while they were waiting in line to confess, I was going around their houses furtively looking to incriminate them.

  At some time past three I gave my mid-afternoon prayers and took one rosary from the nail on the wall to show the first confession was finished. The second and third would be short, there being other entertainment; once it got dark, my competitors were beer and carolling and shadowy groping, which I was no match for.

  I emptied the pillar sconces of Annie’s wedding flowers, which were anyway dying. The small witch-hazel frills had wilted and some had fallen. Lent tomorrow – the church must change from bride to widow. From the vestry I took the purple Lenten altar cloths, and the plain cross, which I propped in place. I took the darkest of the cloths, which was the deep hue of blackberry juice, and draped it over the cross.

  Next, the wedding gifts and trinkets – a poorly tied bow of straw, two painted stones, which must have been there to designate bride and groom, another stone with a faint glint of tin running through it, and a square of green velvet initialled with an embroidered red A & J. Slightly apart from those, a child’s wooden doll, which could only have been left by Newman: a wish for healthy children. I folded them into an old altar cloth and put them in the vestry.

  I went outside; it was bright to the brink of blindness, the light so sheer, new, cold and fresh. I dropped the wedding flowers around the side of the church. Townshend’s fields were empty now – the three behind the church, the three sloping up to the manor, the two just north of New Cross. Nobody was working. Those, and the grazing meadows at West Fields, were all Townshend had left – and admittedly they were the best, but they weren’t much; the rest was Newman’s. The arable fields spreading out for hundreds of furlongs, then the rough meadows that went beyond our gaze, right up to the parish boundary three miles away. Acre by acre, year by year, Newman had bought the land from Townshend; if it hadn’t been for that, Townshend and his wife would have had to leave the manor. They were clinging on. In the empty, white light their little fields looked like boats becalmed at sea.

  Some boys were climbing the oak in the churchyard; I walked to the lychgate where I could see the road. The village games and processions. There was otherliness; the sun was stealing colour and the wind was stealing sound, and I thought I was seeing a hundred unearthly things kicking balls. Then came the smell of food frying – eggs, meat, old winter cabbage and trenches of fried bread. The smell of spiced beer, cups of metheglin giving out the sweetness of honey, the hot lushness of pancakes.

  And then sound: the tinkling of tambourines, a pipe, drumming on goat-hide, clapping, singing, shouting, cheering, the frantic squawks of fighting cocks. Colour came back to the world. I could just see the crowd where the road bent at New Cross. The main revelry was always at New Cross, which they garlanded with winter ivy. They picked Our Lady’s Bells, if they were still blooming in the woods, or Star of Bethlehem, or whatever new spring flowers had grown, and made a garland also for Christ’s head. They tied a block of wood to his feet, which he might rest his weight on, and wrapped a shawl of wool around his shoulders for warmth and comfort. Smoke rose from there, the communal pancake fire they’d made.

  The four boys in the churchyard by the young oak were raucous with laughter over something. At first I thought they were climbing the tree, or preparing to climb it, but they had their backs to it – not climbing at all, but lolling around it. One of them, I was sure, was Ralf Drake. The game of campball was shifting fitfully up and down the road outside the church, the one stretch of road that was cobbled, and slimed enough with winter wet so as to be as good as ice underfoot. All the young men of the parish were out, some of the older, some girls too, trying to test their small feet against that lifeless, reluctant bag of pig bladder. I didn’t know how they kicked it anywhere – it was always the labourers who could, the ploughmen especially, who spent their days moving and turning and lifting waterlogged earth. When I walked past and through their game to the other side of the road I saw the dean, standing at a short distance, watching those boys at the oak. Watching Ralf Drake.

  The campballers scuffed that bulging bladder towards me and whistled and bantered. I did try to kick it back; it got lost under my skirts and it came to little Sal Prye to get it out, who was always quick and plucky. Too plucky perhaps, the way he went straight in without much in the way of asking.

  From there, and paying no heed to the dean, who paid no heed to me, I set off for Old Cross, which admittedly had no cross. Newman’s first gift to Oakham had been a new stone cross at the village’s northerly end, and since then the old rotted wooden one had been weathered to a stump. Now there was just the maypole, rising skewed from the rutted road.

  I saw nobody but the miller Piers Kemp, hobbling his pained way back from Newman’s house with his shoes filled with stones. It didn’t often please me to see my Oakhamers do their penance, to know the stones in their shoes were there on my command, to know they hobbled at my will. Mercy seemed a strange thing to me, taking as it did such outwardly unmerciful forms. All the same, he raised a hand in jaunty greeting, said he’d just delivered bread for the dean.

  And there it was, the maypole with Newman’s shirt atop, tied by a sleeve. In the brisk wind it had dried damp and was flapping without elegance, banging open and closed as if there were a man convulsing inside. If the villagers had seen it, they’d said nothing. It seemed to me an unnecessary cruelty to fly Newman’s torn shirt. There was something in the way the loose sleeve kept extending as if the arm were pointing to the west, to all things evil, unlucky, ungodly. As if to say, Newman has gone that way.

  A brash prayer, hastily assembled: Lord, turn the wind to blow from the west. I know it isn’t for me to ask. But I ask. Let that sleeve unfurl eastwards to all that’s good, lucky, godly. Let the wind open and fill it and (like a heart full of love, like a flower bending lightwards) direct it, Lord, to you.

  A warm day in summer, four years gone. Newman and I were walking by the river when a man and two women on foot, with a lopsided and shambly cart, passed along the opposite bank. Farsiders, we called those travellers we saw on the other bank – and the man had called to us, ‘What is this place?’

  Newman had called back, ‘Oakham!’ And then, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Rome first, Santiago de Compostela after, France then, on the way home.’

  ‘A long way.’

  ‘Shorter if your place had a bridge.’

  They were gone soon enough, beyond the oaks that gave us our name, upriver with no trace but the briefly trampled grass, which would soon spring back. Newman bent to pick up a weighty old knot of yew from the bank and hurled it in the river. And I saw that yew roll away downstream, clumsy in the shallows, but inexorable, and I said a thing that came from old thoughts and conversations, and maybe from our languid mood that hot day, and from the sight of those travellers here and gone.

  ‘That wood isn’t coming back,’ is what I said.

  Newman stood hand on hip, one foot kicked forward, squinting.

  ‘But the seasons come back, don’t they,’ I pressed, ‘they come back every year. We’re flooded, we’re parched, we’re thirsty, we’ve enough, we’ve nothing, it’s winter then spring, it’s Lent and Holy Week, it’s the summer bonfires, Rogation, Embertide, Corpus Christi. The sun is high, the sun is low, the wheat is green, then gold, then gone. And no year is more tired than the last – have you noticed that? No year is old or tired.’

  He looked at me; at the river; at the clouds; at me. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s true. No year is old or tired.’

  ‘The river of time, isn’t that what they call it?’ I said. ‘But it’s no river at all. Time comes back on itself always new. That piece of yew in the river will never come back.’

  Newman was upright and firm as a birch
at the edge of the bank, and he looked outwards with a private gaze. ‘Time’s more a circle than a river,’ he said, though I couldn’t tell if he’d just come to that point of understanding or if he’d had it for years.

  ‘Yes – yes.’

  And it was; this endless watermill of days, these rounds of seasons, so clear to me then that it felt as if the world itself – the river, the ham, the woods and skies – were gently curved and motherly, and that we were all healthily round with the recurrence of time.

  It occurred to me to say to him then, If time’s more a circle than a river, what stops it going back? Can’t wheels go this-wise and that-wise? I didn’t say it, because I knew already his response, for which I had no response: if time can go that-wise as well as this-wise, why couldn’t God bring back his wife and child? And there was nothing I wanted to say or do to provoke in Newman a fresh feeling of loss; it was something to do with the way he’d called across the river to those pilgrims that single word, so emphatic and loyal: Oakham! Something in that word had made him fiercely brotherly – it was us together, the guardians and champions of this village.

  It was coming towards lunchtime, and we’d taken to pensive standing, so I tried to nudge him out of thought and into appetite (for he was a man who saw food as a tedious necessity, a man who was prone to sighing Eat we must when a bowl of stew was set before him, and eating with enough gratitude, but no zeal). ‘Back,’ I said. ‘Annie’s doing us lunch.’ Bread and butter-milk, curds, honey, quince, a first ripe fig or two.

  But Newman stood his ground and scrutinised the river as though there were a spectacle to see, so I looked too, into the scene of his imagination, and knew full well what he saw, because in that moment I saw with his eyes. He bent again and this time collected a stone, which he sent with a great windmilling hurl beyond the far bank, whipping at the top leaves of an oak and landing invisibly.

  ‘That stone’s been further than most of this village,’ he said, and in that close brotherliness he turned to me and asked the very thing I’d been about to ask him. ‘Do you think those folks who just passed through were right, John, about a bridge?’

  ‘I think – ’

  ‘We could build one.’

  ‘Across this river.’

  ‘Across this very river.’

  ‘Why not – it seems high time.’

  ‘Gone high time.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Indoors was chillier and darker than out, and it stank of cooked goose. The fire pit was a mound of cold ash. Goose-fat bespattered. They think Annie and I are peculiar for throwing water on the fire each night before sleep, but I tend to think they’re peculiar for preferring to burn in their beds. Once you’ve lost your mother to fire, you never feel the same way about going to bed with a flame still live.

  I lit two candles at the table for cheer, and to see what I had. The last time I’d eaten was the evening before, when I’d finished the goose. Nineteen hours without food, and now ravenousness that had grown in the wake of yesterday’s rare feast – the highest waves make the deepest barrels, after all. My bones felt hollow. There was a piece of bread, one last apple, some milk – I ate and drank it all, and an egg, which I broke into the dregs of the milk and gulped down. Not a meal that inflamed me, I must say. To think what that egg might have been capable of. A fritter, beaten with the milk and flour with some apple chopped in; a simple feast, fried and eaten with bread and fat; or a pancake with the fried apple on top with honey, or a soft scrambled cloud of it with butter and bacon, and the milk warmed. Sorry fantasies, and short. There was no time to light a fire. And there was no bacon, and even if there had been, my fasting from meat had begun that morning – and eat we must.

  No time either, now, to go down to the birch copse and see Mary Grant’s dog. I didn’t even know what I’d do with it if I went. But that copse had always been a strange place to us in Oakham, the winds talkative through the trees and the shadows especially quick and flitting. In the summer we’d hang the birch branches with swatches of horse tails and coloured festoons – some dyed plaits of hemp and linen, some velvet offcuts from Cecily Townshend’s marigold dress. The festoons would see off the spirits, so some said, though I wasn’t sure myself of that kind of magic, and now I felt for Mary Grant’s hapless dog and wanted it buried in more wholesome ground.

  If my sister had still been there I’d have asked her, What shall we do with that dog? And she’d have said straight away, Do this thing, do that. Strange not to have her at hand any more to share things with or ask things of. To do those tasks she’d always done. My discarded cassock in the corner awaited her expert hands and warm water. The pot awaited our two spoons that always came to friendly blows in the stew; quibbles over a piece of grayling or dace, more spirited battles over a piece of precious trout. How could it be that four days before I’d had both her and Newman, and now I had neither? A grief redoubled within my ribs. Annie, my sister and only blood. Her new husband called her Anne, and though she never said so herself, I think that was the reason she married him (none of us could find any other). It made her feel womanly, I suppose; no longer a child.

  I cleared away the crumbs and broken eggshell. Then a clack at the door, which made me crush the eggshell in my hand, a rapid hail of clacks – when I opened the door there were a few stones at the step and five or six boys running down towards the west track, away from the village. One of them stopped and turned round, and he looked at me for a few breaths as if he wanted to leave his group and come back this way.

  It was Ralf Drake again. Tall and strong and angled leanly. His pose reminded me I’d seen him at my sister’s wedding; he’d stood just that way, intent and staring, watching Annie dance. I closed the door on him and stood this side of it, and I thought he was probably still watching.

  Shrovetide pranks. Even when my father was a child they hurled stones and mud and bits of pots at doors on Shrove Tuesday; nothing changes. Egg-rolling, mud-throwing, clothes-swapping – a man in his wife’s tunic, a woman in her husband’s belt and boots. Let them run loose and untormented for a while, I couldn’t imagine any angel in heaven who’d begrudge them that. We carried so many torments, and winter was the most tormented of times – too much thinking in too much time in too much darkness.

  Before I left I rinsed the milk cup in the bucket outside and cleared away the stones. By the door there was a patch of warmth away from the wind and a pool of sun warmer than any so far this year. My feet throbbed with gratitude for it. Inside, I put the cup on the table by my knife and spoon, which I kept wedged upright in a gash in the wood made by careless sawing.

  My father once shut me outside in the rain for arranging knife and spoon upright in a similar way, as if they were bride and groom at the altar – men must be men, he said, and not play make-believe with knives and spoons. There was ploughing, sowing, dunging, marling, harvesting to do. Ewes to lamb, pigs to butcher. I stayed outside til late and then my mother brought me in. The next day I sang before breakfast, which was bad luck and also shameful whimsy. That night I didn’t go indoors at all, but spent the night in the barn. These weren’t tendencies I could stop; I spent three dozen or more nights in the barn when I was young, and the darkness moved with demons that slid up and down my skin and slurred tales of death into my ears, and left my skin raw and red, so that in the morning it was as if I’d been cooked by a heat not provided by any earthly process.

  I spat into the rinsed cup. Man of Sorrows; blessed image of Christ that I kept on the stool by the bed. I kissed the wood it was carved into and could taste his blood; I brought it to my chest and pressed his hooded eyes and dark lids against me until I could feel his hair, his lips, his swollen veins, as if his hands, which hung down overflowing and empty at once, had been given my life to hold and found it small and wanting.

  Now that Annie was gone, it occurred to me that I might never have really known what happened in her thoughts, behind that high, spacious forehead, between those two small ears – she might
have had a fondness for that man, who carried with him the stench of sewers. Her chamber was perfectly deserted, much better for me to sleep there now that she was gone, but I couldn’t bring myself to move into it. Her bowl was still on the table, scratched and dented, and her vial of ambergris on the shelf.

  The door had swelled with the rain and I couldn’t close it, only wedge it ajar. A frenzied drumming and calling came strong on the wind, a drinking chant, and the campball game in the street outside my door had grown in number and noise and violence; men fought on the ground to get hold of that pig’s bladder. I’d never known anything so illogical as that game, which had spread west, where the road became the westerly track. Fifty or sixty men were part of it by now, hurling and burling, fist over foot, leg over neck, grunting from guts. And the music! Unsweet and out of tune, where the pipes and drums were rain-warped. It was then, hurrying across the road to the church – longing to be back within it – that I saw Tunley at the far side of the haphazard throng of players; he was walking away towards New Cross and slung across his shoulders, like the heaviest of winter collars, was the dog. Its legs hung and bobbed and swung, its body seemed flat as a dead eel; I’d never seen anything more unlively, unlivelier even than something that had never been alive.

  Was it a trick of vision, or a premonition (a lurching forward on that wheel of time), that delivered to me, in a lightning strike, the notion that it was Townshend slung dead over Tunley’s shoulders – Townshend heavy and lifeless. By pure instinct I looked around for the dean, whose presence had begun to feel persistent and bitter; murderous in its bid to find a murderer. If Townshend is executed, I thought for a moment, Oakham is finished, and in the scope of that thought all sound and vim drained away and the air was cold as iron. But he was nowhere, the dean, and when I looked back at Tunley, it was only a dead dog on his shoulders, and it was towards some meadow that he was doubtless going, to give it a burial.