The Haunted Storm (6 page)

She heard a number of men leaving the pub near the bus shelter. One or two of them were walking down towards her, talking loudly. She grew afraid they would see her. Before she had time to move they did, and one of them pointed to her. They knew who she was. They spoke to each other, and laughed. They came past the garage staring at her and she recognised one of them. Then they went on down the road and shouted something, calling her names, and they both laughed loudly. It paralysed her.

She went back into the shadows beside the main garage building, and a lump came to her throat. The long grass wet her legs; nettles stung her. Light from a distant street lamp shone dimly on the corrugated iron, and she thought of lying down, covered with the long grass, so that she would be forgotten. Behind the garage was a field in which a rusty harrow lay abandoned, covered with grass. She wondered if
he
would know what it meant to lie down on wet grass and wish for oblivion. If only he had forced her to listen to him…

Two miles away in the darkness the well lay in the wood, with the ivy dragged suddenly from its stone coping by the hands of her father. There was a quality of rape implicit in the very existence of things, and nothing was safe from it, nothing.

Her mother opened the door of the sitting-room and looked out.

“Oh! It’s you, dear,” she said. “Where on earth have you been? Oh, look at you, you’re soaking wet; come and hang your coat in front of the fire.”

“It’s all right, mummy; don’t fuss,” said Elizabeth.

She stood in the hall, looking and feeling a little uncertain. After a second she began to take off her raincoat. She handed it to her mother, but stayed where she was, looking downwards, puzzled.

“What is it, dear? What’s the matter?” said Mrs. Cole.

“Come in, come along, there’s a dreadful draught out here. Come and get warm; you’re frozen.”

She took Elizabeth’s hand and tugged it gently, and Elizabeth followed her into the sitting room. Her mother shut the door behind them.

Chapter 3

She had not been wrong when she had said to Matthew that she discerned morality in his eyes. Matthew had known immediately what she meant, for it – what she called morality – was the one consistent force in the universe. Instinctively, he referred everything to absolutes; he always had done. It was a nervous reaction to things – a sort of shying away from the crude elementary criss-cross patchwork of motives that governed human life “under the moon” – and when he thought about it, he put it down to the fact of his Spanish ancestry, without, however, taking that idea really seriously. His father was only half Spanish, and his mother entirely English, but to think of himself as a Spaniard in England gave depth and body to his more instinctive sense of being a stranger in the world.

He was his parents’ second son. They had had a daughter, five years older than Matthew, but she had died when he was four. His elder brother he hardly knew at all, because when he was nineteen and Matthew was eleven their father, for some secret reason that Matthew was too young to guess at, had thrown him out of the house and had for bidden him ever to come back. He was never mentioned again.

Matthew, therefore, had grown up with the sense of being the last of a race, a survivor. Sometimes this feeling weighed heavily on him and made him resent his inheritance, but he was glad at other times of the identity it gave him.

His teachers at school had thought him intelligent, but lazy and vague; but his friends at university had been surprised occasionally by the intensity with which he used to regard problems they had answered for themselves years before: that of the existence of God, for instance, which Matthew would be prepared to debate for hours on end with anyone at all. At length he arrived at a temporary solution which enabled him to live without actually being compelled to talk to everyone about it, while carrying the debate further on inside his own heart. He came to regard God as an ironical ghost whose existence was in no doubt, but who had little or no effective power; and good and evil – though their shadow fell inexorably over every dilemma which con fronted him, however petty or absurd it may have been – the distinction between them was muddied now and obscure; he no longer knew, if he ever had done, precisely which of them was which – but he knew, as well or better than he knew his own name, that they held the power of life and death over his soul.

For most of his childhood he had been neither happy nor unhappy, but quiet and withdrawn, almost as if he were resting after violent action; he seemed to his parents not young at all, but an old man with the body of a boy. Not that he was wise beyond his years, or even dignified, as some children are, but he had an air, even in his earliest years, of remoteness and abstraction, which at first worried and then amused his parents. It was because he had always been conscious of something between him and the world, a veil over things. and had grown up thinking that it was natural – that everyone felt it – while still remaining uncomfortably aware of it. He had only spoken about it two or three times. Once, when he was nine years old, he had a fantasy that the surface of everything, including his own skin, was covered in an invisible jelly-like grease nine or so inches thick, and in order to touch anything he had to scrape his hands together first to clear them and then scoop it away from the place he wanted to touch. As soon as he took his hands away it grew again. His mother used to watch his hands moving in their strange ritual and wonder what he was doing, but she said nothing, thinking it was a game. Then one day he came to her in distress; he was almost crying, and his hands were moving here and there, sweeping back and forth, rubbing his chest, scraping the edge of the table. He couldn’t tell her what the matter was. He knew she wouldn’t understand, but it was too horrible to hold back.

“What is it, darling? What is it, tell me,” she said, sensing that something really was wrong.

But he couldn’t tell her. He tried to, but because it had been in his head for so long, unshared, he had no way of explaining it. His mother was calm, and she comforted him, and presently his panic died away; but for a long time after wards the compulsive movements of his hands showed her that the mysterious grease he had talked about so clumsily, with tears in his eyes, still grew like moss on the surface of things.

Sometimes however the veil was suddenly torn away, and he seemed to see the world not with his own eyes but with the eyes of an angel or a god: the bark of a tree, when he was eleven, burst into eloquent flame in front of him, and burned in its own colours without being consumed, leaving him weak and rapturous. And another time he woke up on a wintry morning to find the sun shining through a fern pattern of frost on his window, irradiating his bedroom with a miraculous forest of brightness that grew and grew as he lay there, and entered his body and shone inside his chest and all his limbs, so that he was conscious of light filling him from his head down to the tips of his toes. It felt spicy, fresh, and immeasurably clean and good, and it had a sound too, like the rustling whisper and tinkle of innumerable frozen silver bells. He lay there still and afraid to breathe, thinking quite literally that he had died and been taken to heaven. At times like this it seemed as if the light of another sun shone on the world, inconceivably strange and distant, just as the ordinary sun sometimes burst through a bank of clouds at sunset and lavished all its colour on one solitary house or tree; but the circuit of the other sun was mental and spiritual, and subject to no laws that could be understood on earth.

Thus Matthew had grown up, half in the world and half out of it, not knowing where he belonged. And it was when he was most confused that he took refuge in the family identity which otherwise meant little to him. He saw himself as a reincarnation of that other Cortez, plundering the world and pausing to stare in awe at some new interior ocean; but such fanciful visions had little to do with the actual family he knew. His father’s relatives were mostly stern and overbearing, although his grandmother could be kind; he did not feel easy with them. On his mother’s side, however, he had a relative for whom he felt nothing short of devotion: and this was his uncle, Harry Locke.

He was really the uncle of Matthew’s mother; when her parents had died in her childhood he and his wife had brought her up with their own children. Harry Locke had been a builder, and his firm had prospered and become one of the largest in the west country. Since his wife’s death twelve years before, he had retired and become a lay preacher. He was rich, but almost accidentally rich, as if his wealth had come to him instinctively, for he had no apparent shrewdness or cunning; his business had grown as a result of his own diligence and honesty, as a bird’s nest grows because of certain qualities in the bird.

Between Harry Locke and Matthew there was a bond of great love. Matthew had found that he could talk to his great-uncle with no fear or shame, and Harry’s religion, though it was naive and even childish, appealed to him strongly sometimes. Harry was an evangelical Christian, and he preached at chapels and revival meetings all over the west country, gaining as time went by a local reputation as a powerful and eloquent preacher. Matthew had no great respect for Harry’s colleagues and fellow-preachers, and in general felt little but contempt for the banalities they preached; but his objections were blunted and turned aside in the case of his uncle by a strange kind of moral force, as uncompromising as light, which emanated from the old man when he preached and which had the power of moving even a hostile or indifferent audience.

His uncle’s character was simple, but puzzling in the same way as the success of his business was puzzling. If you looked for intellectual subtlety, or avarice, or arrogance, or for anything like “lust of result”, you would find him empty of them. But if you watched him closely and without pre conceptions you would begin to see certain traits emerging: passive, almost negative things like patience or good temper or kindliness or calmness, quiet things, but things that earned him loyalty and love while ensuring that his personality could not, because of this very blankness and plainness, be idolised or even copied by his followers. Matthew respected his uncle because he sensed that Harry’s mildness covered a deep sense of what he called “absolutes”: the questions that plagued and worried him like dogs and which others had forgotten. But whereas Matthew was tormented by these things, Harry seemed to draw strength from them. He had tamed them, and moved among them, Matthew thought, like a master.

It was natural, then, that when Matthew needed advice and help, he should turn to his uncle. He had not seen him now for a year or so, and had forgotten the things which irritated him in Harry’s religion.

Six or seven months went by after Matthew had gone down to the beach and listened to the girl; and it had been it peaceful but sterile period. Matthew was drained of all his will and energy; he lived, emotionally, on the memory of her face dominating the darkness and her voice subduing the sound of the waves; and he wrote down all he could remember of what she had said. In the absence of any concrete evidence of her, her words were almost as effective in evoking her memory as if she had written them down herself, and then kissed the paper often so that it held her scent.

He went home and lived with his parents in London, and found a job in a factory nearby, saving all the money he earned and going for long walks by the river. It was peaceful; but when spring came, he felt the stirrings of energy and restlessness inside him, and, with them, a renewal of pain and longing. He was overcome by odd compulsions which appeared quite arbitrarily and were, for the moment, irresistible: a powerful thirst would seize him for days on end, and no matter how much water he swallowed, he could not moisten the parched dryness of his throat, and he would have to smother his food with gravy in case he choked; or, having gone to bed, he would have to get up again and dress and go outside, fearing that the house would collapse at any moment. He found a kind of protection in various talismans which he collected avidly – a twig of driftwood from the river, a triangle of blue plastic he found on the floor of the factory, a pebble, a photograph in a newspaper, a small jar made of blue glass. Because of some peculiarity in their shapes, or some intensity of emotion prevailing when he came across them, these things and half a dozen others like them gathered into themselves a formidable power and became, as far as their protective strength went, gods or guardian angels which Matthew carried around with him, or set up on his bedside table while he slept, according to each its privileges and omitting and offending none.

While he lived his solitary and precarious life his parents ignored him as benevolently as possible, letting him come and go as he pleased; but in spring they decided to go away for a fortnight, and suggested to Matthew that he, too, should have a holiday. His mother was worried about him; but she did not tell him so. Matthew was a little disturbed by the idea. He had withdrawn too far to face the prospect of going away again with equanimity, let alone excitement, but on the other hand something inside him was aching for change, that was certain. The questions were waking with the seasons, and he could not placate them for much longer. When his father mentioned it, he was taken aback, but tried not to show it.

“All right,” he said. “Yes, I could do that. I don’t really want to go anywhere, though.”

“Why don’t you go and stay with uncle Harry?” said his mother. ‘He’d love to see you. You haven’t been there for years.”

And as soon as she said that, he realised that he must go. Uncle Harry would listen to him, at least; and above all, he would not be dangerous; he would not threaten, and perhaps he would even know some of the answers. And as soon as his mind was made up, he could not wait. He gave in his notice at the factory, worked impatiently for the last week, and wrote to his uncle. His mood now was vastly changed: instead of being preserved in an accumulation of ice, he felt subterranean rivers rushing and gulfs opening beneath and around him, and soared sometimes among clouds of fretful, delirious elation. Instead of being frightened by the movement, as he had thought he would be, he was keyed up, anticipatory, excited.