Cobweb Walking, page 10
Five minutes later I heard dragging steps and Drisco shouting. He beat on the shelter door for ten minutes at least, and his wives and children joined him, and they all cried and implored to be let inside. And Daddy sat with his head in his hands, and did not make a sound. Then there came a silence for a while, with only the whimpering of Drisco’s children occasionally breaking it. Until Drisco returned with the ditch digger.
The roar of the arriving digger drowned the voices of Drisco’s crying kids and whimpering wives. The roar of the ditch digger and the thunderous sound as it crashed again and again at the entrance to the fall-out shelter drowned the sound of The Sister screaming, drowned the sound of our mugs and bottles shattering on the shelter floor. The gigantic thudding of the ditch digger driven by Drisco broke our eggs, and cracked our concrete floor.
And for a long time after they had all gone away, Daddy still sat, his head in his hands. Then at last he whispered, “Sometimes the right thing to do is the most difficult in the world.”
Looking through the hayloft chink now, it seemed impossible that all that din and action, all that shouting, crying and screaming had taken place at Druid’s Clearing only three weeks ago. The squat dark oaks seemed to guard their secret heart as though nothing had disturbed them since the last human sacrifice two thousand years ago.
Chapter 8
The clearing seems to enjoy the sacrifices, I thought, and found myself whispering aloud to the Fairy Queen, “I have given you a sacrifice. Won’t you speak to me now? I have given you nearly everything I have got. Won’t you live in me again?” But she kept her soft red lips tight closed, and her eyes were not on me at all.
Once the Fairy Queen had looked at me from every living eye, had spoken to me from every throat, had allowed her fragrance to linger in my nostrils everywhere. I had felt her touch running through me like perfumed wine, I had heard her song from every star and molecule, and now she never spoke to me at all. I could have almost cried with the longing to hear her again, and reprimanded myself sharply with, “Longing again! It’s all this longing that’s keeping her away.” But even then I could not think what to do about it, or how to stop longing. I felt very disappointed, because I had thought that it was because of Cora that I had lost the Fairy Queen. But now Cora had gone, and the Fairy Queen still did not come to me.
During the night the barn owl hooted several times, and his voice did not sound lovely as it had done when I was young. His perch smelled bad, and I felt depressed at the sound of his beak scrunching through the ribs of mice.
By morning frost had glittered the world, and breathing was so cold it made my throat raw. I thought that when I went inside the house this morning I should get myself a heavy jacket. The clothes I was wearing were too thin. I had not realised how awfully cold it was going to be, sleeping in the hay loft.
I shivered and hugged myself, and thought of that woollen jacket, sky blue, fleecy soft, made for me by Maggie. I remembered her trying it on me, her voice sharp and muffled with a mouthful of pins. “Keep still can’t you, Morgan. I’ll be pricking you if you wriggle so.” I could not wear anything bought in a shop because of my shoulders. Once Daddy bought me a doll’s dress, because it was so pretty, pastel pink muslin with tiny white flowers. But if I got one arm in, then the other sleeve hung half way down my ribs, and it had been much too tight across the bend in my back.
I would get a blanket too, I thought, and let Maggie wonder who took it. I stretched my stiff and freezing legs, and longed for the moment when Billy went inside for breakfast. I put my eye back to the chink, but the luminosity around Druid’s Clearing had gone, and nothing was to be seen but the dark oaks. There was no sound. I strained my ears, but there was nothing until a pheasant shrieked suddenly. And then I thought I heard the faintest sound of a child weeping.
That morning, after breakfast, Billy and Maggie went out together.
I could not believe my good fortune as I saw them set off up the hill, along the path to the village. Maggie carried a large black shopping bag, and Billy wore his best overcoat and peaked cap, so that he looked, as Daddy used to say, like a real country gentleman. As they passed under the hay loft I heard Billy say, “But suppose Mr Basil comes back while we’re there. Do you think we should give it a skip for this year?”
“Billy, we’ve gone to the Village Hall party every Christmas and I’m not going to miss it out this year for anyone or anything … not unless I’m laid up in my bed and can’t walk. You stay here if you like, but I’m going anyway. It’s Mr Basil’s fault. He should have told you when he was coming back. Anyway, he knows we go to the party. He’ll guess that’s where we are.”
Her black shopping bag bulged with tinsel-wrapped Christmas presents. Christmas! I thought. But surely not. There are still weeks to go before Christmas. Then I remembered we had been in the shelter for nearly three weeks. I counted up on my fingers, while their footsteps receded across the farm yard. I did not know which day this was, for I had lost count long ago. But I saw that Christmas could be in a week or two, and remembered that the village party was always a couple of weeks before Christmas.
“We don’t need a fairy for our tree, we’ve got a lovely little fairy already,” Daddy used to say, smiling at me, and he bought me the little pink and white doll’s dress thinking that it would be a suitable fairy costume. I was sorry about that dress. It was so pretty and Maggie didn’t have the knack of making me pretty clothes. Everything she made was serviceable, warm, sensible, long-lasting. But certainly not pretty. She would have said that prettiness was not at all necessary. “As long as you are clean and tidy, Morgan, that will do.”
I could think of all she would say if she could see me now, and felt a laugh rise up, as I struggled to my feet to make use of my unexpected freedom. The first thing I would do, after having seen Primrose, would be to have a wonderful wash and a change in my own darling home. Now I would be looking nice when George came. I leapt down the steps, ran over the yard, and felt as though not only my body had been cold and cramped for many hours, but my spirit too.
I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw Primrose grazing peacefully in the field at the back of Billy’s bungalow. She gazed at me with her dark warm eyes, and I thought she seemed pleased, though not at all surprised to see me, while Shep roared threats of love at the end of his rope. Primrose’s udder was small, and wrinkled, and I thought that the long period without being milked must have dried her. But her body was swelling out again with another calf, so it would not be all that long before she was in milk once more.
I patted Shep, who changed instantly into a fawning enthusiastic friend, and then I went racing off down the path towards home. Shep took up his former attitude as soon as I reached the gate, straining at the very end of his rope, leaping with aggression, barking loud enough to wake the dead.
I had been running lightly, my mind almost carefree, until that phrase leapt into it. And at once I couldn’t run. My legs became heavy, slow. My head felt tight as though a band pressed round it. I entered my home still oppressed by the memory of the phrase, wake the dead.
I whispered, as I crept through the little window into the downstairs loo, “I must be very careful not to wake the dead.” I had left this little window open when I went home yesterday morning, and was relieved to see that Maggie had not discovered it, and closed it. The downstairs loo smelled of gumboots and umbrellas, a lavendery smell from the soap on the wash basin, and some other smell I could never quite define. This loo had always smelled like that ever since I could remember. I had brought Daddy in here once when I was little, and, holding his hand tightly so that he could not escape until he had solved the problem, told him, “Go on, sniff harder. Of course you can smell it! I can easily, and you’re big.”
I had learned later that being big was not an advantage at all when it came to matters of the senses. Not one person, no matter how much bigger they were, could smell, hear, see, or feel half as acutely as I could. But now that I was big my senses had become rough so that I could no longer hear subtle sounds. I began to fear that the Fairy Queen was singing and singing to me, and wondering why I did not listen. Perhaps she talked to me over and over and I did not hear. I stood very still in the middle of my home, trying to make the bumping of my heart be still, so that I could hear her. But the only sound was the harsh cawing of rooks mourning the death of their elms.
Perhaps, I thought, it is this burning sense of loss that makes me unable to hear the Fairy Queen. Perhaps it is this pain that hurts my chest worse than the pumping of the fall-out shelter air system that has made me lose contact with her. She lives inside Silence, I thought, and my body, with its hurts, and its sorrow, and its badness, has become too noisy to understand silence any more. Then I felt more pain than ever because I knew that the Queen of Silence could not possibly have anything to do with me any more, now that I had become so rough.
I wandered from room to room of my home, trying to find comfort there, touching the old tapestries that hung on the walls, drawing my fingers over the bees-waxed oak, hunting for hope in the painted eyes of Rembrandt’s wife. She was fattish, and half naked, and she looked back at me with an old old look, that said nothing at all. I remembered Daddy telling me once that artists often heard the humming that is the sound of creation. “Some say that true art is the manifestation of silence vibrating,” Daddy had told me. I had not understood him then. Now I understood. When it was too late.
Rembrandt’s wife did not look as though she was hearing silence. The little smile that curled the corners of her mouth was because the man in the picture, who was supposed to be Rembrandt’s self, had his hand resting on her bosom. Once, in the fall-out shelter, Daddy had put his hand on Cora’s breast when it was dark, and they thought I could not see. I had heard Cora’s nipples crinkle with a crisp sound like dry leaves curling.
I put my palms against the smooth and knotted wood of our great front door, that had once held off Cromwell’s men long enough for the King to mount his servant’s horse and gallop away. You could still see the bruises in the wood, though softened now with age and weather, where the soldiers had stabbed and stabbed the door, because they could not find the King’s body into which to sink their swords.
I stepped behind the embroidered hanging that kept out the draught. It had been put there by my great-grandmother, and never taken down again. I pulled the rough, scratchy, smoke and dust-smelling cloth against my body but this time it failed to comfort me.
I remembered Cora saying, “That door hanging is stiff with dust, Basil! It must be harbouring goodness knows what germs. At least we should get it dry cleaned.” And she had shaken a corner so that dust silently poured out.
Cora never got it cleaned, and now I shrouded it round me, and nearly coughed. There was the ash dust of a hundred and fifty years in this wall hanging, and something that I thought of as the house’s very own smell. Daddy had called that “the smell of antiquity”, but I have been into other old houses, and they never smelled like ours. I told Daddy once, “Every house smells different, like every person does. I could know who was coming into the room even if my eyes were shut, just by smelling them. And the same with houses. I think, too, that the older they get the more different smells they get, people and houses. Abbie only smells of milk but Billy smells of a hundred things.”
I remember Daddy not looking very convinced, and asking, “Are you sure each person has a different smell?” His asking that had surprised me at the time, because I had thought, till that moment, that it was one of those obvious facts, like sunshine being warm.
I wandered into the dining room. There were dark patches on the dining room dresser, where the two Meissen plates had been, that had stood there ever since I was born, and long before, probably, and that had been broken by the bomb. I drew in my breath and smelled deeply all the familiar fragrances, polish and lavender, apples and oak, plaster and that other elusive spicy smell.
The house was cold, not warm and welcoming as I had always known it, and a slight smell of mustiness had begun to creep in despite Maggie opening the windows. But then I remembered that I had only three hours, perhaps, before Maggie and Billy returned, and began to gather up things that I needed for my stay in the hay loft; food, a blanket — I considered taking candles but rejected it. Daddy had got angry with me once when I was very young, for lighting a candle up there, in case I set the hay alight, and I had never done it again, for I hated Daddy to be angry with me.
Once when we had been in the shelter, Daddy had spoken sharply to me for not replying to Cora. “Don’t you hear her asking for water?” he had said fiercely.
“Oh, you want a glass of water?” I had said to Cora, as though I had not heard her the first time. And I had even tried to smile as I handed it over, though it was almost like a physical pain in my cheeks, to draw my lips back.
Cora had taken it, saying, “Thank you, dear,” and had smiled quite convincingly, but after I had wondered if she had smiled because Daddy had been cross with me on her behalf.
By the ashes of our fireplace I stood for a last few moments in my home, my loot scattered round me. We only removed the ashes once a year, in the spring. During the winter log was piled on log, and the fire never really went out. Even now the two foot deep pile of ash was warm though no fire had been burning in here for three weeks.
Ours was a wonderful fire, and Daddy and I used to roast potatoes in it. Daddy would find a funny one for me, then. One shaped like a little old witch perhaps, or a huge one like a boot. “Don’t fall into it, Fairy,” he would laugh. “I’d have a hard job finding you if you got lost inside that big potato.”
Daddy and I would squat side by side on the carpet, pulling the black hot spuds from the embers, then we would dig our knives into the dish of butter on the hearth, and plunge great chunks into our slashed potatoes. With butter running down our chins, and our faces smudged with charcoal we would laugh and laugh. Maggie always seemed to come in when we were having our hot potato sessions and, although Daddy would try quickly to hide the evidence, she always knew what we were up to.
“It’s a shame to teach the child to eat so dirty!” she would tell Daddy sternly. “And hot potatoes between meals indeed! No wonder she has never got no appetite.” Those were the days when I ate so little. Maggie got even crosser when we roasted chestnuts. “No good you chucking them skins back into the fire and thinking I don’t notice, Mr Basil,” she would say. “I find bits all over the carpet next morning.”
Those lovely guzzling sessions did not stop at once when Cora came. Cora, in fact, seemed almost as keen as me on roast chestnuts, and baked potatoes. “What fun, Basil! I’ve never had a real log fire before, would you believe it?”
But somehow, after Cora came, they were never quite the same. The potatoes never tasted quite as good, and Daddy would give a potato with a funny nose, or the little fairy one, to Cora as well as me. Then, gradually, I stopped eating hot potatoes with Daddy by the fire. He would call to me, “Come on, Fairy. I’ve got the potatoes in from the garden at last, in spite of the rain. Let’s celebrate.”
“Basil, how lovely! Yum yum,” Cora would cry.
“Come on, Fairy. Don’t be silly. You can’t have all that much work to do,” Daddy would say. And Cora would say to me, “Come and join us in the hot potato feast, Morgan. I’ll help you clean out the larder later.”
Dragging out the cleaning of the larder, I would hear her say softly to my Daddy, “Don’t worry about her, Basil. She’ll soon come round.” And then after quite a short while I would hear Daddy’s happy laughter. “It’s all black, darling!” And I knew he would be wiping Cora’s nose with his hankie.
Once, in the middle of a potato-filled laugh he murmured, “She was always happy when she was little, Cora, always! I never knew her to be depressed, or cross. Now she seems miserable all the time.”
“Teenagers are like that,” Cora replied, and I heard the clatter of tongs as she removed a potato from the fire
Today I stirred the ashes with a stick, and wondered if I would ever eat potatoes from them again. I could not imagine myself sitting alone, pushing butter into potatoes, and getting it all over my chin. There did not seem much point in that, somehow.
I had been sitting here by the fire the morning Cora came home with The Sister. The week Cora had been in hospital had almost been like old times, except that Daddy went to see Cora in hospital every morning, and phoned her every evening.
“Stoke up the fire well,” Daddy had told me. “Little babies feel the cold. They need to be very warm.”
I kept putting logs on to the fire, until the flames leaped and roared up the chimney, and became so hot that Maggie, bustling through with towels no newly arrived baby could do without, said, “We aren’t going to have the wee baby for dinner, you know. It doesn’t have to be cooked,” and she almost smiled, so that I could see she was as excited about the new baby as everyone else. “You’d think it was a little sucking pig arriving, and not a child.”
The car bringing them back from the hospital arrived with shouts from Daddy, and in and out ran Maggie, Billy and Daddy bringing suitcases, parcels, teddy bears, a cradle, before the actual centre of all this attention appeared at all.
The baby looked raw, underdone, as though it should have stayed inside its mother’s stomach for a few days, if not weeks, more, and it smelled of sour milk tinged with vomit.
“The nurse told me they always bring up on the journey home,” Cora announced unworried. She was, according to Daddy, extra happy about the baby because she was old for a first time mother.
“You seem just as happy,” I told Daddy. “And you’ve had one already,” and Daddy hugged me and said, “My big good girl! There is a very special relationship between a Daddy and his eldest daughter.”
