The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories Read online

  Without surprise, as if it were something that had happened very often before, she began to ferry him back again. On that return journey he noticed the great strength of her thick legs and arms, straining on the rope. Her jaw had the square set of a boat broad and clumsy in the bows. Most of the lines of her face ran vertical, like dry seams opened by weather. Her mouth was thin and fine but not bitter, fixed with a kind of dry smile that she did not know was there.

  It began to rain as they went together across the yard. The wind sprang up across the dykes in a sudden dirty burst, and the ferry rocked on the slopping water, banging the chain.

  ‘I’ll give you the back room,’ she said. ‘If there’s a mite o’ wind you’ll hear things slapping about all night.’

  ‘You think it’ll set in?’ he said, ‘the rain?’

  ‘The wind’s about right,’ she said. ‘It’s bin raining off and on for two days now.’

  She took him straight through the small front passage and up the narrow varnished stairs. It was growing darker every moment. Suddenly, as he followed her, he got for an instant the impression of a movement behind him. He turned round and saw at the foot of the stairs a thin pale woman of sixty or so watching him. As he saw her she began to move away, slowly but dead silent. She had in her hands a candle that was not lighted, and for a moment he thought she had the air of someone who resented something but had forgotten what it was.

  He went up into his room. The brass bedstead shone cold in the wintry light. The big woman ran her great brown hands across the white quilt, smoothing it, saying she hoped it was all right for him. ‘And what about your tea? You’d like something to eat now?’ He said he would, and she said she would cook whatever she could, eggs and ham or fish if she had it. ‘Sometimes we get a boat coming up from Lynn and they drop in with a little sea-fish. But gen’lly we don’t see nobody much, only weekends.’

  She went out of the room, but from the passage outside she called back: ‘You can go down and sit in the parlour. There’s a fire there. The bar ain’t properly open till six.’

  Rain beat desolately on the windows while he unpacked his things. Looking out, he saw it raking the air far across the endlessly flat landscape of already blackened earth. The bones of willow-trees alone broke the skyline, and stacks of brown reed the empty desolation of fields bound everywhere by dark lines of water.

  Going downstairs, he found the parlour by the glow of the fire coming through the open door. He went in, and was startled to see the thin pale woman sitting by the fire, her hands in her lap, her head turned away from him.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said.

  She did not answer; as far as he could tell she did not move at all.

  ‘Wretched weather,’ he said.

  She coughed slightly into her hands, once or twice, dryly, almost without a sound. Then she drew in her breath, as if to cough again, but nothing happened. Her body retracted slowly and her hands fell into her lap. He saw then that they were long, bony, inanimate hands, beside which the hands of the other woman now seemed exceeding powerful. For some time he stood there waiting for her to do or say something, but nothing happened and at last he went out of the room.

  He stood for a time in the darkening bar, looking seawards through the heavy rain. By the time the voice of the other woman called that his tea was ready he could no longer see even the nearer fields; he could see the ferry rocking and slapping against the bank and the water of the river wildly broken by the bullet hail of rain, but the pub seemed now to be standing on the edge of a vast dark plain that had no end.

  He thought as he went in for his tea that no one would come in there that night, and for a long time he was right. He ate his meal of eggs and ham and sausages slowly, by lamplight, alone except at the beginning of it, when for a few moments the big woman stood by, telling him how there was no fish, that the boats had not been by all day. ‘I don’t know whether you see the papers,’ she said, ‘but the water’s pretty high on the Level. It’ll be a high tide to-night with the wind where it is too. We had a big break across here two year back.’

  ‘How far away?’ he said. ‘How big?’

  ‘Three or four mile down. Big enough to flood a farm or two out. We had everybody working at it as could work. Had seven feet of water here in the cellars.’

  ‘I remember reading about it,’ he said. ‘It was bad.’

  ‘It was bad, but you get used to it. You’re born with your feet in water here. You live on water and you die on water.’

  She left him to eat alone and when he saw her again, in the bar, it was as he had expected. She too was alone; no one at all had come in. The continuous crash of rain from far across the immense flat space of land on all sides struck the house with a force that shattered them both, at intervals, into silence. Small tin oil-lamps lighted with a deep yellow glow the varnished walls of the little bar, and the scales of a twenty-pound pike shone with savage beauty in a glass case above the low back-room door. As he looked at this pike, meaning to ask her who had caught it and when, he noticed something else. The spirit bottles on the bar shelves were marked with many small horizontal white lines: the chalk marks of successive drinks. He asked her then if it was a tied house or a free house, and she said, rather proudly but a little wearily too he thought, ‘A free house. We own it. We’ve kept the ferry for thirty years.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Me and my sister.’

  ‘Was it your sister,’ he said, ‘that was sitting in the parlour?’

  ‘That was her.’

  ‘I spoke to her,’ he said, ‘but she didn’t seem to hear me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re not much alike,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’

  Directly afterwards the door opened and the wind battered into the bar a man in a heavy reefer jacket and high gum-boots. Behind the bar the woman reached for the whisky. ‘Evening,’ Dave,’ she said.

  ‘Evenin’, evenin’,’ he said. He looked at Richardson. ‘Evenin’.’

  ‘Evening,’ Richardson said. ‘Have it on me. And you,’ he said to the woman. ‘Let’s all have one.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. No thanks.’ She poured two whiskies and set them on the bar. ‘What’s it like Dave?’

  ‘Water’s riz a foot,’ he said. ‘And still rising. Busted the bank a bit on th’ old river. I just bin up there. Fast as they bung it up one place it starts in another. They’ll want all the help they can get.’

  ‘You’ll be getting water in the cellar again,’ Richardson said.

  The woman did not answer. The man set the empty whisky glass on the bar, looking at Richardson. ‘Another? I got to go.’

  Richardson said thanks, and they had another whisky. ‘You’re going back to help?’ Richardson said.

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘Any good if I came?’

  ‘You don’t want to go, sir,’ the woman said. ‘Slopping about in that Fen clay up to your eyes. You be ruled by me, don’t you go sir. Don’t you go.’

  She seemed almost frightened: not for him, but for herself, as if not wanting to be alone.

  ‘I’d like to go,’ he said. ‘I won’t get any fishing anyway.’

  ‘But it’s a dirty night. You’d be better here. There’s nothing like a dirty Fenland night.’

  ‘I’ll just go up and look,’ he said. ‘I’ll go up for an hour and come back. What time do you close up?’

  ‘Ten, sir,’ she said. ‘But I’ll be up until you come.’

  It was strange, he thought, that she had suddenly begun calling him sir. He went upstairs to his room and put on his mackintosh and his fishing boots and sou-wester. As he came back through the passage behind the bar he saw a light shining upward from the open door of the cellar. He passed quickly, and did not see if anyone was there. In the bar the big woman watched him go without another word except a low ‘Good night.’

  Outside, the rain struck with a succession of heavy blasts across the yard above the jetty, sma
shing the ferry with eternal melancholy janglings of the chain against the wooden piles. He groped his way to the car, blinded by darkness, calling the other man. The reply was snatched up and hammered away by the lash of wind, but finally he reached the car and got in, switching on the headlights. In the interior calmness he heard the voice of the other man now shouting beyond the black glass of the windows and saw a pair of yellow gesticulating hands, the voice and hands both like those of a person trapped and trying to escape. He opened the side-window of the car and shouted ‘Get in!’

  ‘You won’t get far with a car,’ the man shouted. ‘There’ll be water on the road.’

  ‘Never mind, we’ll try. Go as far as we can. How far is it?’

  ‘Two mile or more.’

  ‘All right. Get in.’ He started the car and switched on the wind-screen wipers, peering ahead through the arc of smoothed black glass. ‘Keep a look out for water.’

  Driving away from the ferry, travelling for a time in low gear, not nervous but simply tense, not yet used to the light, he felt on both sides of the narrow dyked road a great solidity of darkness out of which wind and rain hammered with heavy violence on the car, beating it like a drum. In this atmosphere there was not much he could say. He slowed down once or twice, imagining he saw water lying ahead, but the man beside him would say, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right. You won’t git no water here. I’ll tell you when you’ll git water.’ He saw a light: a moment later a house floated past like a white-washed boat, swiftly drifting away. And then something about the solitary house reminded him of the pub, solitary too by the river edge, and the big woman back there leaning her muscular and yet uneasy body on the bar, suddenly calling him sir and not wanting him to go. It reminded him too of the other woman sitting alone in the parlour, not speaking, thin, strange, inanimate and yet in a way alert. It reminded him of the light in the cellar.

  ‘They’ll be flooded out at the pub,’ he said, ‘won’t they, if this keeps on?’

  ‘Ah! they’ll cop out. They always cop out. Did y’ever see the flood marks in the cellar? Y’ ought to look at ’em. Plenty o’ times six or seven feet o’ water down there.’

  Richardson did not speak again. Ahead, now, he could see lights and as they sprang increasingly out of the darkness the man at his side shouted.

  ‘Water!’

  Richardson stopped the car. Flowing like a stream, clay-coloured water came up to the front wheels. The man got out, and in the beam of the headlights Richardson saw him wading ahead, calf-deep in water. Presently he came back. ‘All right. Go on now. But steady.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Twenty or thirty yards. It’s the water from the break. You can see the lights on the Level.’

  They came slowly through the water, drove on a short distance and then stopped. They got out of the car and began to walk towards the lights. Sounds of human voices, disembodied, remote, irregularly driven across the short intervening space of darkness, became louder and more living as Richardson saw the shape of the Level, vaguely marked out by lights, a wall of earth rising thirty or forty feet above the black flat land.

  It was some time later, when his eyes became used to the darkness, that he saw what was happening. Figures of men, working in the light of oil-lamps and here and there by an inspection-lamp plugged by a lead to a standing car, swarmed darkly on and about the bank like stooping ants, sucked down into heavy postures of determination by the clay they cut and shovelled and carried. He saw sometimes the steel gleam of a spade as it carved the clay that in turn caught the yellow glow of lamplight; he saw it piled on barrows and wheeled away on the plank-lines and at last effaced by the dark torrent of ceaseless rain. He watched for a time the men coming and going out of the darkness. Then he walked up the road to the point where it bridged the Level. The wind was strong and cold. On the far side he could see for a few yards the ripple of flood-water beaten up by wind and rain, but beyond that nothing. Solid, like a wall of black clay, the darkness shut out whatever lay beyond the ripple of water.

  Up there, and again when he came down to the lower point of the road, he began to be aware of the smell of water. It was cold and powerful, and with it rose the sour dead odour of clay. It seemed to rise out of the earth; it rose straight into his nostrils, biting them. He gulped it into his mouth in icy gasps of rain.

  After a time he got hold of a spade and began working. At the first stroke or two of the spade the great force of suction pulled at his heart. He realized he was not used to it and made a great effort, stooping and gripping the spade with all his power. And still, even then, the clay and the water under the clay sucked at the muscles of his arms and chest and heart and even the muscles of his neck. It caught at his boots; his feet were held in a trap. For a moment he suffered a spasm of childlike terror, feeling as if something unknown and limitless and powerful were sucking him down. He felt the sudden lifting of the clay, at last, like the tearing away of a piece of his own flesh. He was struck by shock and pain, and then by a shudder of relief, followed by a blank of stupidity.

  He worked on for a long time like this, bravely and clumsily carving the grey sour clay out of the darkness, stupid, sucked down, not thinking. The clay he cut and loaded was carried away into the rain along the plank-lines to some point of danger he never saw. Farther beyond still the tide was rising. The land and the water and the darkness and himself were part of a great conflict. The rain stood like a cold sweat on his face. When he wiped it away with his hands his fingers left on his flesh the colder smeared impression of the clay.

  Some hours later he struggled to his car and drove back to the ferry. As he went into the lighted bar his weariness took the form of a temporary blindness. He did not know what time it was and he stood by the bar, leaning heavily on his elbows, not seeing. The clay had partially dried on his hands, contracting the skin, so that his fingers too felt dead.

  ‘I’ll have a whisky,’ he said.

  After almost half a minute he looked up to find that no one had answered him. To his surprise the bar was empty. By the clock above the bar-shelves it was seven or eight minutes to ten.

  Some moments later he heard voices. They seemed to come from somewhere in the passage behind the bar. After listening a moment he walked into the passage. He could see the light, now, coming up from the cellar; the voices were coming from there too, the voices of the two women, low, hollow, in argument, unconscious of him.

  What he saw down there at the foot of the cellar steps, in the lamplight, puzzled and startled him. Water had begun to rise already in the cellar, so that the beer-barrels seemed almost to be floating. The lamplight fell with a cloudy glow on the dark barrels, the white-washed walls and on the still water itself. It cast upward the heavy shadows of the two women, who were watching. One, the big woman, was standing on the lowest of the cellar steps, which the water had not yet reached. Her body seemed more than ever huge, anxious and in some way helpless. But it was clear that what she was really watching was not the water. He knew that she must have seen that many times before: many times, and worse, much worse. He remembered the story of the marks on the wall. What she was really watching was the other woman, and it was she, dreadfully thin, thin and worn-out and obsessed by some kind of parsimonious terror, who in turn was really watching the water. And as he stood there looking down, watching the small figure sitting on one of the pub chairs in the middle of the rising water, her feet on the rung, her body thin and frail but tight with a fanatical stubbornness, he knew that this too must have happened before, and he knew the reason for the big woman’s fear and anxiety. He knew why she had not wanted him to go.

  He moved at last, and the big woman, hearing him suddenly, turned her startled eyes upward. Seeing him, she scrambled heavily up the steps. Behind her, as if nothing had happened, the little woman did not move.

  In the bar he saw the big brown hands trembling as they drew the whisky. ‘Won’t you have one too?’ he asked her.

  ‘No. No sir, no thanks
, no thanks.’

  She tried to keep her hands still by pressing them together, and he knew she was alarmed by what he had seen.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ he said.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Nothing?’ he said.

  ‘No sir, no sir.’ She stood silent again, defensive, trembling. He took a drink of whisky, and saw that it was a minute or so past ten o’clock. She realized it too and went across the bar and proceeded to draw the heavy bolts of the door, locking it afterwards.

  ‘You’ve been working on the Level,’ she said as she came back. ‘I can see you’re tired. You’ll want some supper, won’t you?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll have anything,’ he said.

  ‘What time would you like breakfast?’ she said. She wanted him to go. He drank his whisky, hesitating. He wanted to say to her, ‘Why does she sit down there? What makes her do that?’ but somehow he couldn’t. It was after all no concern of his: what they did or felt, why even they were there, why one of them should behave in that strange silent way, watching the water.

  Then all at once she began to speak. She began to tell him why it was, in a voice unamazed, low, rather mechanical. While she spoke she kept her eyes lowered, and he felt sorry for her: the big hands flat on the bar, the heavy embarrassed face that could not lift itself, the difficult statement of painful words.

  ‘She’s got some idea that there’ll be a second Flood.’

  He did not speak. He let her go quietly on, telling him how the other woman would sit there in the cellar, not only when rain came and the water was rising, but when there was no rain, even in summer: how she would sit there waiting, watching the flood-marks on the wall, and then how she would come up into the bar, obsessed by hours of watching these marks, and begin to make the marks he had seen on the spirit-bottles behind the bar. She was afraid and had been afraid now for many years that the waters would rise and cover them in the night and sometimes, as on nights like this, nothing could make her go to bed. There was nothing so very strange in that, he thought. There were people who lived their lives under the oppression of just such fears, the fear of being drowned or burned or suffocated while they slept. What was so strange, he thought, was that they had not acted about it in the most simple, obvious way.