Читать книгу Encounters - Barbara Erskine - Страница 13

There was a brittle splintering as her foot slipped on the ridges of the cart track and the ice shivered delicately across the ruts in a labyrinth of crystal slivers. She hadn’t been concentrating; she had been gazing into the distance where on either side of her the fields stretched like dull brown hessian towards the hedges. In the summer, when she had been here before, they had been a ripe, rich gold; somehow she had not expected them to have changed so much.

With a little shiver Jacie dug her hands deeper into her pockets and walked doggedly on. She had to get there before the mist-shrouded sun disappeared behind the hills and left her in the cold darkness. She almost wished now that she hadn’t come at all. Perhaps it was a mistake to come back – to try and recapture those memories which haunted her. She hesitated for the first time, but already in front of her she could see the dark outline of the ruined arches rising starkly from the earth amongst the bare winter trees and irresistibly she was drawn on.

She stood for a while in the shadows, feeling the wind teasing her hair from the scarf around her head, gazing down at the patch of rimed grass where her feet and Brian’s had stood, so close together. It had been like another lifetime then, in the summer, that time when she was almost happy.

She shrugged suddenly, shaking the loosened hair out of her eyes and pulled her collar up closer. The cool sun had gone now and night was coming faster than she had expected, moaning softly in the wind amongst the crumbling stones, darkening the fields. Suddenly, irrationally, she was afraid. She glanced over her shoulder, pressing back against the green damp of the stones, smelling their dankness, listening as she had that last time to the story they seemed to cry out of sorrow and pain. Her heart was beating fast somewhere high in the back of her throat and she pressed herself into the corner of the walls which had once formed the nuns’ chapter house. It was then, glancing sideways, forcing herself to be calm, that she saw the web.

The spider had thrown its net across the corner between the rough stones, a hexagonal of perfect diamanté, glittering with frost even in the near dark. Jacie raised her hand in wonder and then swallowing a sob of relief held back, remembering the summer. Was it the same determined little creature which had returned and made good the wreck of its web which her clumsy fingers had torn into ashy fragments that last day? The sticky silken threads had been caught up and retied. She gazed at it until the dusk faded into darkness and she could no longer see even the frosty outlines of the shape. Would it be the same for her? Could the wreck of her own happiness be made good too? Would he come back to her and rescue her from herself again? Pressing her hands deep in her pockets she gave the dark corner where the web hung one last look, then she turned and slipping and stumbling in the dark she began to run back down the track towards the farm.

Ever since her childhood Jacie had felt different from other people. Partly, she now accepted, it was the way she was; partly it had been her mother’s fault for not understanding.

‘Jacie Stacey

Her silly vest is lacy!’ the children at school had sung, dancing around her as they changed for gym and the teacher had sent a note home to her mother: ‘If Jane could wear something a little less elaborate … broderie anglaise is not really suitable for school wear …’

Jacie had looked up fearfully as her mother tore open the envelope, waiting for the explosion she was sure would come; somehow feeling herself to blame for the unacceptability of the trimming on her liberty bodice. There was an explosion, but not of anger; it was of laughter. Her pretty unpredictable mother had hugged her. ‘Oh darling, I must buy you woolly vests and make you a conformist,’ she had gurgled delightedly and Jacie had breathed a sigh of relief. She wanted nothing more than to conform in a woolly vest. It embarrassed her when her mother tried to make her different; it embarrassed her when her mother laughed and talked with the other mothers at collecting time and pulled her pigtails, saying, ‘this one is mine’. All she wanted was to disappear and be wholly invisible. The more her mother drew attention to her and made her pretty – and she was pretty, there was no getting away from that – the more she hated it. If a teacher looked at her she trembled.

Later it had been the same. As she grew up she had hidden away from the other girls her own age, taking refuge in drawing which she found was the only way to express her feelings. She would hide in her bedroom, ignoring her mother’s pleas to come out, endlessly sketching the roof tops and the trees which she could see from her window and putting into the strokes of her pencil all the pent-up emotion which she felt but did not understand.

‘You’ll grow out of it, darling. It’s a phase. I was shy at your age,’ her mother reassured her time and again, but Jacie could see the puzzled hurt in her mother’s eyes and knew in her heart that her mother had never felt the way she did. She had never known the agony of not belonging and, worse, of not wanting to belong in spite of the ache of rejection, as first schoolgirls and then college contemporaries formed close circles which seemed to exclude her.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ she asked in anguish, talking in the end in desperation to the same apple tree in the garden which she had addressed so often as a child. She received no reply.

Once she began working it was perhaps a little better. She gained confidence because she was good at her job. She was a designer; sometimes freelance, sometimes working for long periods for one firm and always, when she moved on, they were sorry to lose her. She was deft, competent and quietly efficient and managed to blend mutely with the grey carpet and beige wall, only occasionally being subjected to agonizing blush-making notice. Once or twice she went out with the men she met in these offices, but her terror and the rigid formality of her shoulders held them at bay. They never asked her a second time although long ago she had realized, catching sight of herself unexpectedly in a mirror, that she had inherited her mother’s beauty.

There was one man she had liked a little; the partner in charge of her department at the last job but one. He was a rugged solidly built man with strangely flecked Irish eyes and enough shy charm to lull her into allowing a lunch hour break to drift on into the early afternoon, and they had gone for a walk in the park. They had stood side by side at the edge of the lake, watching the grey froth which lapped at the tarmac path beneath their feet.

‘I like it here; it’s so quiet.’ She glanced up at him shyly with the half smile he found so intriguing glimpsed over the rim of her drawing board. Then avoiding his eyes she looked back towards the ducks, glossy in the plumage of early spring.

‘I like quiet places too.’ His voice took on a deeper note than usual as he moved little by little until, almost imperceptibly their elbows brushed. He had sensed her isolation; he did not want to hurry her.

‘You can still hear the roar of traffic though,’ he went on almost in a whisper. ‘I’d like to show you somewhere really quiet. Why don’t we take a drive down to the country at the weekend? Perhaps have lunch at a pub somewhere?’ He too had been staring hard at the ducks as he spoke but now he turned to look at her. He found she was looking straight at him, her eyes wide, the pupils pin points in the light of the sun. Her face had drained of colour.

‘It’s awfully nice of you, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly.’

‘Why not?’

She shook her head emphatically. ‘You hardly know me. You’d be bored. I’m not …’ She was floundering unhappily. ‘I couldn’t. I’m sorry. I’m going to see my mother.’

She had drawn away, every muscle tense suddenly, resenting and fearing the brush of his elbow, the intimacy of his glance.

‘Hey, I didn’t mean –’ he found to his embarrassment that he was blushing too, disconcerted by her reaction. But already she was walking back across the grass, her shoulders squared beneath her coat.

‘We’re late for work,’ she called behind her with a tight apologetic smile and she almost ran in the direction of the park gates.

Later in the week she half hoped, half feared that he might ask again, but although his smile was just as friendly and his good morning relaxed and warm, he saw to it that they never found themselves alone together again.

And so the years passed. Time brought in the end a kind of serenity. Her shyness crossed the invisible road which turns it to reserve and she ceased to mind when her rejection of people led inevitably to their rejection of her. Or if she minded, she buried the hurt so deep that even she no longer noticed. Only her mother reminded her, and so now she seldom saw her mother.

Sketching, still her only passion, gave her the excuse for long lonely holidays in lonely places. There was one farmhouse in particular on a moor among the hills where she found solace and quiet dour friendship from the farmer and his wife. Once or twice a year, sometimes for long periods when she had saved enough, she made her way there, laden with sketchbooks and easel, to sit in the wiry heather with the wind teasing her hair and no companions save the sudden bulge-eyed hare and the distant wheeling, wheedling buzzards. It was a contented, restful time, for while she was there she forgot her inadequacies and her loneliness and found refuge and total confidence in her art and with the quiet couple with whom she stayed.

She had been going there for three years before she found the abbey. So often her footsteps retraced automatically the same paths through the heather and close-cropped tangled bilberries, taking her to landmarks of her own invention, that she rarely explored more distant valleys and dips in the rolling moors. There the fields, bright with ripening corn, encroached on the wildness of the landscape, reaching out to tame it with the richness of the fertile farms and thick growing woodlands. The ruins were hidden in a wooded valley of ancient trees, guarded by nettles and fierce sprays of thorn and bramble at the end of a cart track through the fields, and there she first met Brian.

She stumbled on him, almost literally, not seeing him until it was too late to turn and flee as he lay sprawled behind a low wall, field glasses pressed to his eyes, focused on a high fir growing out of the very stones themselves, or so it seemed. He turned furiously on her, mouthing silent curses and pulled her unceremoniously down beside him before turning once more to his watching. He never looked at her.

She lay trembling, her face pressed into the sweet grass, not daring to move although a nettle brushed her bare leg. Only when the great golden and russet bird which he had been watching lazily raised its wings and flew unperturbed away through the wood did he sit up and smile at her, obviously suddenly conscious of the formalities.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said, his deep voice softened slightly by the gentle lilt of the hills. ‘She’s nearly hatching her eggs you see and it would be a terrible crime if she were to desert the nest now. I’ve been watching her since she first laid.’ He had a gentle quiet about him that reassured the scaredness within Jacie and allowed her to pull herself up to her knees, straightening her jacket and pushing the hair and grass and bracken tips from her eyes. The movement angered the nettle and she flinched as it rasped her skin.

‘Hey, you’ve been stung – and it’s my fault, I’m sorry.’ His gaze had missed nothing and she sat wondering as hardly seeming to search for it his hand reached instinctively for some dock and soothed it against her skin.

‘Do you know about birds?’ he went on, as gently he replaced his salve with a fresh leaf. ‘That was a kite. They’re pretty rare round here and very timid.’

Jacie found herself smiling at him, reassured. ‘I don’t really know very much, but I sketch birds sometimes.’ Her glance went to the sketchbook lying in the grass where it had fallen with tumbled pages. He reached for it and slowly turned them, pausing here and there to look longer and nod. He came to sketches of birds – buzzards cleaving the sky on their arched golden wings; curlews, a pheasant – and she saw his face soften into something which was almost a smile.

‘You’ve a good eye,’ he said quietly and she found herself smiling, ridiculously pleased by his admission.

She was almost disappointed when he said suddenly, ‘You’d best go now, before the other bird comes to sit his turn on the eggs,’ but obediently she had taken back her sketchbook and half wriggled, half crept away from the ruins. Preoccupied again with his glasses he had not even raised his hand to say goodbye.

But he had found her two days later on the moor. And he smiled for the first time properly, his eyes matching the wash of ultramarine sky she was laying on the heavy-grained paper and for the first time in her life she was completely unembarrassed and at her ease with a man. The faint golden blush which he detected on her skin was put there by the wind and the green moorland sun, not by her realization that he was looking no longer at her picture but at her face. He had seen at once the beautiful eyes she had inherited from her mother.

It was then that he calmly asked her her name and told her that his was Brian. He stopped and picked up a discarded sketchbook from the heather and flipped through the pages. Then he set it down without comment, sitting easily beside her on an outcrop of slaty rock, one knee updrawn, clasped by his strong sun-burned hands. He watched as she bent once more to her paints, unselfconsciously continuing to work on the landscape. Their silence was companionable, uncommitted and she took his attention and lack of comment as a quiet compliment on the competence of her work.

She saw him several times after that; sometimes in the distance when he would lift a hand and stride on, making no effort to come over to talk and sometimes they would meet and would smile and walk together, falling naturally in step and talking of plants and birds and painting and sometimes of farming, but never of themselves. She thought he must be a farmer of some kind, but she never asked and he never told her what he did.

Nor did she see at first the quiet contentment in his face when he glanced in her direction as they walked together down the mossy tracks. When, almost imperceptibly, their hands touched she didn’t draw away.

Then, once, turning to him, her face full of laughter as they talked she glimpsed suddenly the warmth in his eyes and the smile that was especially for her. Her laughter died for a moment on her lips and then she found herself smiling again, at him.

‘It’s good to have someone to walk with, Jacie,’ he said quietly. That was all. But she understood.

It puzzled Jacie that she was at ease with him. One night she sat down in the dim light of her bedroom and tilted the flower-painted plastic shade on her dressing table lamp to throw a clear unflattering light on her face and gazed earnestly at herself in the mirror. It was an old glass, black-speckled with the image distorted slightly on one side, making her temple and hair ripple and move oddly. She smiled involuntarily and was amazed at the vivacity which suddenly lit her face.

Why, she was asking herself, was she not shy and embarrassed with Brian? Why should this man be the only man with whom she had never felt afraid – save her father, who had gone away so long ago and left an aching void in her life? She leaned forward to look more closely in the mirror, remembering suddenly how he would swing her up in his arms so she could wind her legs into the small of his back and bury her face in the strength and security of his chest. Always he had been there and she had known that he always would, until the day she came home from school and found her mother crying bitterly, face down on the bed. She knew now that her father had no strength, no security to offer and that he had made her mother miserable till the day he left, but rational adult explanations could not dispel that secure safe feeling which he had engendered and which lingered in her longing.

Brian seemed to have that feeling about him too. She knew instinctively that his were the kind of hands in which a wild creature would lie without fear and so – if ever he should ask it – would she.

She shook her head wearily and picked up her hair brush. It wasn’t as though he were that much older than she either. Ten years? Probably less; automatically she ran her fingers over the tiny web of lines beneath her eyes, gently easing them flat. Then slowly she began to brush her hair.

‘I hear you were talking to Brian Dexter up on the moors yesterday,’ Mrs Finch commented as she fed Jacie scrambled eggs next morning. Who had told? The rocks? The lonely gossiping buzzards? ‘He’s a nice man, he is; but that wife of his … no better than she ought to be that one – Ann, she’s called – having an affair with young Jim Lloyd like that! Serve her right that he’s divorcing her. Divorce is too good I reckon. And he still loves her, you know; they say he still loves her. Some say he nearly went out of his mind when he found out and now he spends all his time alone on that moor, brooding. It’s a wicked, wicked shame. And he’s worth a hundred Jim Lloyds any day of the week.’

‘I didn’t know.’ Jacie was gazing fixedly at her eggs. There was a pause and then she went on quietly, ‘He never talks about himself.’ Nor of course did she.

She stared at the coffee pot as Mrs Finch picked it up, conscious of a sudden weight of sadness. It threatened her, this new intimate detail of Brian’s life. She wished she didn’t know, although it explained perhaps the nature of the bond between them now. For he too must mistrust the world, he too find himself apart …

That day, consciously, Jacie looked for him on the moors, but she didn’t find him there and she didn’t dare go back to the abbey. It belonged to Brian and his pair of kites. He would take her there in his own time to see his birds if he wanted and she must wait. For the first time since she had begun sketching the moors she found them lonely and a little melancholy as the warm summer wind rippled the heather and the green bracken and stirred the thorn bushes clinging to the scattered outcrops of rock.

He found her when he chose, which became more and more often as the weeks wore on. She never mentioned what she knew. She put the knowledge behind her as being part of his life which must never come between them, never spoil their careful impersonality. They talked though, all the time, and went for long walks across the countryside, climbing the hills and sitting on the edge of the river watching for kingfishers and laughing at the antics of the dipper as it plunged from its rock to walk beneath the water on the bed of the stream. And stealthily they went to visit the eyrie in its tall tree within the ruined walls of the abbey and Jacie saw the three ridiculous bald-fluffy heads of the young craning for their food as the parents swept down out of the sky.

They would picnic together, she and Brian, sharing her packed lunches which, though nothing was said at the farm, had mysteriously doubled in size and it seemed to Jacie that for the first time in her life she was almost happy.

‘You must sketch the birds for me when they’re flying,’ he murmured as they crouched side by side behind the abbey wall watching the nest.

She nodded, her fingers gripping the cold crumbling stones which sheltered them. ‘How long will it be now?’ To her, the gaping beaks and the long necks visible in the nest seemed enormous already.

‘Not long. Look! The hen bird.’ His whisper made her look automatically up, but all she noticed was the firmness of the hand he had laid upon hers on the stones of the wall.

For a moment they forgot the birds and looked at one another and she saw the unspoken emotion in his eyes. Then he had turned away and abruptly releasing her fingers he raised his field glasses once more to the tree.

It was Brian who taught her, after he had teased her for huddling habitually under a scarf, to walk fearlessly in the rain, throwing back her head to feel the cold freshness of it on her skin as he made her shake out her hair to the damp and the fresh soft-scenting drizzle. And it was in the rain that he first kissed her gently, holding her against him and kissing her again as the cool drops ran down her upturned face, before he turned sadly away.

Summer grew heavy and languid and fearfully she began to count the days which remained of her holiday, willing time to slow down. In the abbey the young tested their wings and jumped up and down on the edge of their untidy nest high in the tree. They were ready to fly – and Jacie knew she was in love. But it was a humble, sad, compassionate, half fearful love that could not declare itself and dared not hint at its existence before the pain of the man at her side who still loved his Ann with such despair.

When at last the nest was empty they went more often to the abbey, walking up the cart track through the waist high ripening corn; they explored the woody valley in which it lay and the dark stone walls which so easily evoked an echo of pure voices sadly intoning the plainsong down the centuries. Jacie loved it there in spite of – perhaps because of – its sadness. It was Brian’s place more than any other.

And there it was that she broke the spell of the summer. ‘I have to go home soon, Brian. I hate to leave, but I must. I have to go back to work.’ They were standing in the long seeding grasses in the chapter house of the nuns.

Silently he took her hand and squeezed it. ‘I’ll miss you, Jacie.’

Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Brian, I shall come back. Next year.’ And then it had happened. Her love and anguish had betrayed her and she had rushed on: ‘By then the divorce will be over and you’ll be free … I know you’ll be free. You’ll forget her one day.’

He didn’t question how she knew. He said nothing, but his face tautened with pain and she saw misery and memories where only a moment before had been clear happy laughter.

In silent despair she walked away from him then, and there in the corner of the lichen-powdered wall she saw the neat intricacies of the spider’s web looped across from stone to stone. She gazed at it for a moment and then bitterly swept her hand up through the threads, watching them snap and coalesce and cling fragmentarily to her fingers. That easy it was to break something fragile and beautiful. She could feel the childish tears welling under her eyelids. Then Brian was beside her. He said nothing, but she saw him looking at the ruin of the web and she felt desperately guilty and ashamed. She wanted to help him, to stand by him, to give him strength. But she did not know how. She wanted to be with him, but she didn’t dare remain. Instead she walked away.

That was the last time she saw him. Two days later she packed and went home, her shell once more tightly and protectively around her.

Mrs Finch sent her the notice of the divorce from the local paper. There was no editorial comment, just the bland headlines ‘Well-known local farmer divorces wife’ and a few lines giving the names and addresses of the three people involved. So few words to cover so much that had happened.

She started to write to him then. But what do you say to a man in his position, when you ache with love and dare not say it? She tore up the half-written letter slowly and regretfully and let it fell, piece by piece, into the waste paper basket.

It was Brian who wrote in the end. A short note: ‘Any chance of you getting up here in the New Year? You’d enjoy sketching the hills in the snow. The kites are still here.’ That was all.

And so she went, and walked in the early dusk down the cart track to the abbey and found the frosted web which meant so much to her. She didn’t find Brian that evening, but she didn’t worry. She knew he would be there somewhere, and perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the next day, as she sketched in the snow on the moors he would come and find her, as he always had before.