settle, the child would settle. She would lie there, reaching for breath; wondering what dream out of the dark world he had lived in had come back to claim him or he had gone to meet; which in the open, unguarded state you fell into when consciousness lapsed might have the power to cross from one head to another, to her husband’s familiar one on the pillow beside her, where he slept on his back with his mouth open and his fists lightly clenched above his collarbone, or into the fair head of one or other of the children where a pallet shifted with a rustling of shucks.
The stretch of smothering darkness that followed was longer than any stretch of daylight, and space too lost all dimensions. Getting up in the pitch blackness, she would set her foot to the ground, and, with one hand held in front, set off unsteadily for where the water butt stood, ten paces off beside the door. It was like crossing a continent, step by step, with the darkness infinitely expanding ahead and no visible marker on either side. At last her knuckles knocked against wood, she found the dipper, her lips touched a familiar coolness that was like light in her skull.
After such nights, the way back to normality was through habit: matchflare, the worrying of flame out of chips, six mugs unhooked and set down on the table, children, with the puffiness of sleep still on them, not yet come in from the dreams they had been off in, coaxed back to their daylight selves. Little Meg smelling of milk and eager still to cling on, Janet chewing the end of her plait, Lachlan with something distant, almost combative in his look, as if the smoky hut with its familiar objects and smells was not what he had beenexpecting or was willing for the moment to accept; Jock, as always, finding it hard to get started, elbows on the table, head, all blond tufts, in his swollen hands, the bared neck showing its wrinkles, coarse and pitiable. He would have to shuffle along the form to make room for the girls. He did it without speaking. The girls accepted it. They were used to his glooms. ‘Lachlan,’ she would say for the second time, but low, not to draw her husband’s attention.
The boy, slowly pulling on his pants, would make a face and pretend not to hear. If he held back long enough, he thought, Gemmy would offer to go and split the wood she needed. He would get off.
‘Naw Gemmy,’ she insisted. Gemmy with his doited look would be stumbling about in a light-headed way, eager at an instant for any task she might have for him, all headlong incompetence, and with no hint of the dark places to which the night might have taken him. ‘That’s Lachlan’s job. Lachlan! If I hae to speak to ye again –’
Jock would raise his head, and Gemmy, hearing the iron in her voice, and fearing the blows that might come – not to him – would hop about in an agony of distress. ‘For the Lord’s sake, Gemmy,’ she would tell him, ‘be still noo and drink yer tea.’
She was establishing the precarious order that in just a moment now would make the day lurch and move forward on its ordinary course. ‘Come on, lad,’ she urged, her tone a little easier, ‘stir yersel’ and fetch ma wuid.’
8
I T WAS George Abbot’s custom in the late afternoon to go out with a book, usually a French one, since he was keen, even here where he had no opportunity of practising it, to keep up his proficiency in the tongue. The slim volume in his pocket, its scrolled lettering upheld by putti, represented escape from his own nature and the humiliations and mean insufficiencies of his schoolmaster’s existence, but even more importantly, kept open in him, by employing the talents that would be adequate to it, the hope of a kinder future.
He had several favourite retreats. There, the book on his knee and his boots in the dust, he would sit – always alert for ants – in the peppery scent and dull blaze of a tropic afternoon; but his head would be in another place altogether (call it Paris)
The stretch of smothering darkness that followed was longer than any stretch of daylight, and space too lost all dimensions. Getting up in the pitch blackness, she would set her foot to the ground, and, with one hand held in front, set off unsteadily for where the water butt stood, ten paces off beside the door. It was like crossing a continent, step by step, with the darkness infinitely expanding ahead and no visible marker on either side. At last her knuckles knocked against wood, she found the dipper, her lips touched a familiar coolness that was like light in her skull.
After such nights, the way back to normality was through habit: matchflare, the worrying of flame out of chips, six mugs unhooked and set down on the table, children, with the puffiness of sleep still on them, not yet come in from the dreams they had been off in, coaxed back to their daylight selves. Little Meg smelling of milk and eager still to cling on, Janet chewing the end of her plait, Lachlan with something distant, almost combative in his look, as if the smoky hut with its familiar objects and smells was not what he had beenexpecting or was willing for the moment to accept; Jock, as always, finding it hard to get started, elbows on the table, head, all blond tufts, in his swollen hands, the bared neck showing its wrinkles, coarse and pitiable. He would have to shuffle along the form to make room for the girls. He did it without speaking. The girls accepted it. They were used to his glooms. ‘Lachlan,’ she would say for the second time, but low, not to draw her husband’s attention.
The boy, slowly pulling on his pants, would make a face and pretend not to hear. If he held back long enough, he thought, Gemmy would offer to go and split the wood she needed. He would get off.
‘Naw Gemmy,’ she insisted. Gemmy with his doited look would be stumbling about in a light-headed way, eager at an instant for any task she might have for him, all headlong incompetence, and with no hint of the dark places to which the night might have taken him. ‘That’s Lachlan’s job. Lachlan! If I hae to speak to ye again –’
Jock would raise his head, and Gemmy, hearing the iron in her voice, and fearing the blows that might come – not to him – would hop about in an agony of distress. ‘For the Lord’s sake, Gemmy,’ she would tell him, ‘be still noo and drink yer tea.’
She was establishing the precarious order that in just a moment now would make the day lurch and move forward on its ordinary course. ‘Come on, lad,’ she urged, her tone a little easier, ‘stir yersel’ and fetch ma wuid.’
8
I T WAS George Abbot’s custom in the late afternoon to go out with a book, usually a French one, since he was keen, even here where he had no opportunity of practising it, to keep up his proficiency in the tongue. The slim volume in his pocket, its scrolled lettering upheld by putti, represented escape from his own nature and the humiliations and mean insufficiencies of his schoolmaster’s existence, but even more importantly, kept open in him, by employing the talents that would be adequate to it, the hope of a kinder future.
He had several favourite retreats. There, the book on his knee and his boots in the dust, he would sit – always alert for ants – in the peppery scent and dull blaze of a tropic afternoon; but his head would be in another place altogether (call it Paris)
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