The Black Mountains (65 page)

She had met him in the churchyard. She had been on her knees in the sweet-smelling grass, putting her finger into the pot of flowers that stood on the small, fresh mound to test the level of the water. She heard his footsteps on the path, but she was too lost in her thoughts to take much notice.

“Excuse me, but if you want a jug to refill the vase, there's one in the vestry.”

She looked up, startled, seeing him through a haze of tears, and unable to speak for the knot in her throat.

“I … I'm sorry …” He was confused now, guilty at having intruded on her grief.

“It's all right.” With an effort she swallowed the tears. “ This is … my little girl's grave, you see.”

“I'm sorry,” he said again, and suddenly she was almost as full of pity for him as for herself. He had only meant to be helpful. He couldn't have known Florrie had been dead just a few weeks. There was no stone yet to mark her grave, and Charlotte didn't know if there ever would be. James's money hardly went around to cover necessities, and they were still struggling after the expense of the funeral.

It was only after the young man had gone and she had left the churchyard on her way to meet Jim and Dolly from school that she wondered who he was and how he had known about the jug in the vestry. She wasn't a churchgoer, her family had been Baptists, and when she had married James she had gone along to the Methodist Chapel with him. But in a town the size of Hillsbridge, she knew most people by sight if not by name, and she was curious about him.

She mentioned him to Peggy when she collected Fred—Peggy looked after him when Charlotte went to tend the grave because she was afraid people would object to him running about in the churchyard—and Peggy thought she knew who the young man was.

“That's Rector Archer's nephew, I expect, here for a holiday. His people are out abroad somewhere, but he had to come home with one of those tropical illnesses, I heard.” Peggy seemed to know everything!

Charlotte did not give much thought to the Rector's nephew. There was not much time in her life for thinking. But a few days later, when she went to the churchyard with some fresh flowers for Florrie's grave, he was there again, sitting under the tree with an artist's easel and painting.

They nodded to one another, shyly, and as she crossed the grass to the tap to fill her vase with water, her heart was thudding and there was a strange expectancy in her mingled with her sadness for her child.

On the way back she glanced at his painting. It was quite good, the trees in blossom above the deep, gravestone-sprinkled grass and the occasional splash of colour from a bank of flowers. But she said nothing.

While she was arranging the flowers, he came over and stood behind her, and this time she knew he was there. There was a fine-honed, tingling awareness in her that she could not place, except that it was bound up, somehow, with this young man, and it seemed a lifetime before he spoke.

“You come here a lot.”

“Yes,” she said. “ I'd stay here all the time if I could. But I've got other children at home.”

“Have you?” He sounded surprised.

“Three,” she told him. “I love them all, but …”

“They don't make up for losing her,” he said, and his words seemed to touch the heart of her pain.

She looked back at the small, flower-decked mound. There were no tears in her eyes now, only the dry ache. “She was fifteen months old, and so pretty! She could talk … well, say a few words, anyway …” She broke off, embarrassed suddenly. “ But you don't want to hear my troubles.”

“I don't mind,” he said. “I've got plenty of time.”

She looked at him in surprise. Plenty of time? Who in the world had plenty of time? As if he had read her mind, he smiled unexpectedly, his face lighting up. “ I've been in India since I left school. My father's with the diplomatic corps. But I had this fever, and I had to come home. I'm going to Oxford in the autumn, so I've got the summer to kill.”

She nodded, and as their eyes met, it was there again, the spark of sympathy, the fusion of two personalities that transcends age and class.

At once she felt alarm. “I must go.”

“I may see you again. I'm not much of an artist. It'll take me a long while to finish this painting.”

It was a week before she dared go to the churchyard again, a week when she could not get him out of her thoughts. But Florrie's grave had to be tended, and besides … If she was truthful, she wanted to see him again, very much.

She had never thought, never stopped to think for a moment that there could ever be any man in her life but James. He had been her first love, and she had assumed, naively, that it would go on forever. The first glow faded with the babies and the endless round of work, but she was almost too tired to notice it had gone. Sometimes, she listened to James snoring softly beside her when their love making was done and wondered why she no longer felt the restless desire of their early times. But the sense of loss was only a vague, sad ache, nothing more.

It was only after Florrie died that the dissatisfaction was fanned to something close to hatred. Grief, then, was new to her, raw and terrifying in its intensity, and it took her in a hundred different ways. Sometimes she wished she could be alone and do nothing but think about Florrie, at other times she threw herself into everything she did with a vigour that almost disgusted her. And sometimes she wanted to talk about the baby she had lost, remembering all her little ways, until the tears came hot and searing, to heal for a little while at least. But James was curiously reluctant to talk about Florrie. When she began to reminisce and weep, he would get up and leave her, going out into the garden to dig, or hoe, or just wander, and it seemed to Charlotte he simply did not care.

Years afterwards, she realized she had been wrong—he cared very much, and it was displays of emotion he could not deal with. But at the time she was too young and too hurt to understand, and it seemed to her that she was alone just when she most needed support. And it was into this mood of grief and desperate loneliness that he came—John, nephew of the Rector.

To her, he was everything James was not, gentle with the gentleness of breeding, sensitive and caring, yet somehow removed from the brutal reality of her own life. If tragedy touched his world, it would wear velvet gloves—or so she thought—and she yearned towards the illusion, just as she tingled with awareness at the unexplainable chemistry that sparked between them.

Why did he find her attractive? She did not know. She was too bemused to know what he saw when he looked at her—her face pale but proud with chin held high, thick honey-coloured hair above the high collared black of her blouse. Suffering had given her a fine edge of poignancy that was somehow highlighted by her dignity, and in her he saw all the knowledge and experience he lacked. To him, the fact that she had borne four children and lost one gave to her the same aura of romance that his rosy world lent him in her eyes, and the fact that she came from a different, unfamiliar background, lent spice to the association. If she had been plain, with a thickened body, he would have given her pity and nothing more. But she was pretty in a compelling and unusual way, and the initial attraction blossomed into obsession.

Week after week they met, and talked, and the meetings warmed them both. They had no intention of letting it go further. But they reckoned without the strength of their feelings.

It happened on an afternoon in June when the air was heavy with the scent of the roses that grew wild along the churchyard wall. They walked up the path between the graves towards the wicket gate that led to the meadow beyond, talking all the time to cover their awareness of one another and delay the moment when it would be too late to turn back.

At the gate they stopped for a moment, glancing back with conscious embarrassment to the churchyard. There was no one there to see them, and they stood quite still, looking at one another. Then they moved slowly through the gate and into the meadow as if drawn by invisible strings.

The first touch was like flint on flint, burning and sending shivers of anticipation rippling through them. As their hands fumbled for one another, gentle at first, and afraid, the breath caught in Charlotte's throat. But the hiatus was brief, and she sobbed softly as he pulled her to him. As one, they sank into the deep grass. Kneeling, their eager lips sought and found each other, exploring with tenderness, then urgency. Desire mounted, sweetened by the sense of the unreal. The grass was prickly behind Charlotte's neck, but she scarcely noticed.

It was there, the excitement she had thought to find only with James, the elusive, wonderful excitement. And a feeling of the lost mingling with the forbidden, pain and sadness and wonder. His body was young and hard, his sun-warmed flesh was good against hers. And in her nostrils was the heady scent of the roses, wafting her away to another place and another time where there was no heartbreak, no endless work and worry, no small coffin beneath a mound of cold earth …

When it was over, the shame began. Even before she had straightened her clothes it was there, spoiling what had been so perfect, embarrassing and frightening her. And she knew it was the same for him. He was embarrassed, too, and in awe of what he had done to her, a married woman and a miner's wife. The closeness that had been between them since they had met was gone, evaporated as if it had never been, and in its place was guilt, ugly and disfiguring.

She knew she would never see him again. He had no need to tell her, or to explain. And she was glad, glad that the madness was over, wanting only to get back to normality.

But normality was out of reach forever—or so it seemed. For she was pregnant, and she knew, almost from the outset, that it was his baby she was carrying.

Strangely the knowledge brought her closer to James. Now she wanted only to be with him as she had used to be with him. She still wept, but now it was for this thing that was between them. She longed to tell him what she had done, laying her head on his shoulder and unburdening her guilt, but she knew she never could. The look that would come into his eyes would be more than she could bear. And he would never forgive her—never!

Jack was born, and she treated him exactly as she treated the others, although as he grew the difference was there, too plainly for her peace of mind.

John, she never saw again. He went to Oxford, as he had told her he would, but he left Hillsbridge to stay with friends while he was waiting. Afterwards, she heard that he had followed his uncle into the church, and some years later, she heard that he had married. She wished him only happiness, although just to think of him could start an ache of regret inside her. As time passed, she thought of him less and less often, until in the end she hardly thought of him at all. He was like a figure in a dream who had never been quite real. And she changed, too, until she found it hard to believe that the grief-stricken young woman had really been herself.

But that summer's afternoon in 1920 as she lay tossing with fever he seemed to be with her as surely as he had been then, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away, and when the door opened and she saw the fair hair and fine features, she spoke his name wonderingly: “ John!”

“Mam?” He came into the room, his face puzzled, and stood beside her bed. “Mam? Are you all right?”

Her bleary eyes focused on his face, and she shifted herself with an effort. What was she thinking of?

It was Jack. Of course, it was. Why had she called him John? She never had—not since he was a baby. What had come over her?

“How did it go, Jack?” she asked.

His face creased into a grin. He crossed to the bed, sitting down on the edge and taking her hands in his.

“It's going to be all right, Mam. I'm sure it is.”

“You mean they've let him off? Then where is he?”

“No, this wasn't the court, Mam,” he said patiently. “This was the inquest. They couldn't let him off. But after what happened, today, it's almost certain they'll reduce the charge from murder to manslaughter.”

Her brain was foggy with fever, but she struggled to understand.

“What do you mean?”

“Because of what came out at the post-mortem.”

She closed her eyes. Court, inquest, post-mortem, she couldn't tell one from the other. Jack, understanding, leaned forward.

“Listen, Mam, first they have the post-mortem. That's when the doctors have a look at the body to find out the cause of death. Then they send all their findings along to the inquest. That's what we had today, a sort of inquiry into what happened.”

She jerked her head impatiently. “All right, Jack, I'm not stupid.”

“I know that. I just didn't think you understood.”

“I understand they're saying our Ted killed that Rupert Thorne. And now you're telling me he didn't.”

“No, not exactly.” Jack rubbed his jaw. “Listen now. When they opened Thorne up, they found he was suffering from a very rare condition—something they call
status lymphaticus.
Now don't ask me to explain that, but it's to do with a gland, the thymus gland, and because it's the way it is, the most trifling thing—a blow or a shock—can prove fatal. They found no other injuries on him at all, no marks of violence, no broken bones, nothing—and they reckon it was the shock of our Ted hitting him that killed him.”

“But they said he was in perfect health!” Charlotte murmured.

“That's nothing to go by, it seems,” Jack told her. “There's no way you can tell if a person is suffering from this complaint while they're alive. Nobody could have known.”

“Well, well, well!” Inwardly Charlotte was jubilant, but she felt too ill to do more than smile weakly. “So they know now it wasn't our Ted's fault. They know he didn't murder him.”

“Oh, they know that. But …” He broke off, wondering how he could explain to her that murder or not, Ted was still technically responsible for Rupert Thorne's death. “If an unlawful blow is struck, the striker must take the risk of the condition of health of the person struck,” the coroner had said.