THE FIRE IN THE WOOD

I

On the edge of a pine wood in Hampshire there is a little concrete box which dates from the time when such architecture was still fashionable and rare. It looks a little forlorn and posturing now, but inside it is comfortable enough. My story begins on a grey afternoon in April, when a young woman let herself out of this house and started to walk up the path through the trees. She was going to meet an old friend of her mother’s. Mrs Tuke drove over once a month at least to see Mary and take her back to tea, but she would never come quite all the way. If she stopped at the top of the hill and waited for Mary to climb up to her, she told herself that she had been wise and not wasted her petrol.

As Mary walked over the uneven rain-washed path, she felt pleasantly tired and at ease. She had been working all morning on one of her needlework pictures. Into this one she had stitched real shells, coins, fossils, beads, buttons, sequins, fur, feathers, beetles’ wings, skeleton leaves and human hair. She was always looking out for new things to use. Once she had worked in a gruesome eagle’s claw off an old brooch; another time she had found some sheep’s teeth in a field and taken them home for dragon’s fangs. Mary often chose to do fierce beasts. This morning she had made flashing eyes for her lion out of two old steel beads—their facets caught the light and glinted hungrily—then she had worked its tongue in the glossiest, flossiest crimson silk, so that it looked almost dripping with saliva. She had finished by doing a little to the rocks and groves in the background.

The thought of romantic landscape brought Mary back from her picture to the Scots pines and rhododendrons all round her. She knew the history of this wood and always took pleasure in the artificiality that lay just under its present tangled wildness. The local great lady of early-Victorian times had designed it to surround her new stone mansion, which was to have risen from the levelled site at the top of the hill. But something had happened and the house was never even begun. So the pink serpentine paths, the artfully planted trees and shrubs encircled nothing. Every year the pines had grown taller, the rhododendrons more dense, the paths less visible. Bracken crept over the ground, and the seeds of other trees planted themselves.

In some places the rhododendrons had bulged across the paths, blocking them entirely; in others they had sprung up, then joined black, sticky witches’ arms and fingers, twisting and gripping together until long tunnels were formed where all the light was green and cobwebs hung down to madden human faces. Some lone bushes had climbed twenty feet into the air, as if determined to pour down their leaves in a hard and glittering cascade.

But if the rhododendrons were gross, almost threatening in their growth, the pines that rose out of them were splendid; they were great pythons, their serpent scales all mauve, brown-pink and silky in the sun. There was no sun now, but Mary always imagined the trees glinting and iridescent, at their most beautiful. She paused for a moment, leaning her face against one of the trunks and gazing up to where the grey-blue pine needles frisked and frolicked like mad pom-poms or bottle-brushes. She felt a little drugged and swimming, as if she could never stop gazing on, on, beyond the needles into the limitless grey of the sky; then she was seized with the strange conviction that the tree might suddenly collapse into itself, like a giant telescope, sucking her into the ground with it.…

It was the smell of smoke that broke the spell. At first it came to her faintly and she thought nothing of it, it had only been enough to bring her eyes down to the earth again. She walked on quickly, anxious not to keep Mrs Tuke waiting.

Just before she reached the point where two paths crossed, she smelt the smoke again; this time it was stronger, it stung her nostrils a little, but she was still unperturbed. She thought of forest fires and put the thought away from her comfortably; she was lazy and dreamy from work and from staring into the sky. She would soon have to turn to the right down one of the green tunnels which led to the road. On her other side a thick bank of rhododendrons hid everything behind it.

Mary stood still when she came to the crossway; she had heard a snap and crackle of flames, and, above her, whales and cornucopias of white smoke were bellying out of the branches. With a sudden excitement she ignored her green tunnel and ran through the opening on the left.

She was in a little clearing; straight before her blazed a great fire, and behind it stood a man with a fork. He was young. His rough smoky hair crowded down to his eyes. He wore an old striped collarless shirt, unbuttoned and tucked in, so that a V of brown chest reached almost to his worn cord breeches. These were held up by a thick, cracked leather belt, polished with long use. The heavy brass clasp kept flashing in the light from the flames. Mary could just see that it had some device on it. Everything about the man held her, she seemed unable to take her eyes from him. His whole body was so covered with little smears of mud and charcoal, little bits of moss, twig and leaf, that she found it easy to imagine him rising out of the ground itself.

‘Well,’ he said at last, staring back at her through the shimmering air above the flames, ‘good afternoon.’

His voice was startlingly northern. He was mocking her, mimicking a genteel politeness to shame her for staring. Under the dry tangle of hair his dark eyes glowed hot and truculent. He threw on more rhododendron branches and pine needles. The dark oily leaves, despairing and surrendering utterly, sucked up the fire in one demoniac rush. The needles spat like squibs. His image was broken by the sudden leaping of the flames. The dancing, quaking features looked even more lowering than before; the mouth was so pouting that Mary almost expected to see the wet inner side of his lip.

‘Hullo!’ she gulped, flashing out a vivid smile and leaning forward, as if in her anxious friendliness she would do all she could to make it easy for him to criticise or gibe.

The man leant on his fork, hunching his shoulders so that they looked too powerful and heavy for his legs in the tight-fitting breeches. Mary thought of Sindbad carrying the Old Man of the Sea. The slender legs were Sindbad’s, the shaggy head and glowering eyes belonged to the Old Man crouching on his back.

‘You’re burning the branches?’ she ventured, aware of her own inanity, yet feeling that she must speak.

‘Aye, I’m finishing up for the day; burning the rubbish.’

The vowels all changed, the singing, flowing tones were like a lullaby to Mary—she had never been to the north. But what had happened to the man? She had expected him to sneer at her obviousness. He was still withdrawn and careful, but there was no more attack in his voice. Perhaps her lack of assurance had softened him, even made him a little contemptuous of her.

‘All the straight ones are coming down,’ he volunteered, turning to look at the three felled pines which threaded in and out of the crushed bushes.

For the first time Mary was able to take in what lay beyond the man. The long pines lopped of all their branches made her think of primitive bronze needles, lost by some long-dead giant woman. Although to walk in the wood was one of her everyday delights, she found that she could only regret the trees dispassionately, as if their destruction were inevitable, a law of God—not her affair. She wondered why she felt no resentment against the woodman, and made herself exclaim with shocked surprise, ‘Do you mean all the straight trees through all the wood?’

‘Aye,’ said the man, ‘that’s right.’

He was looking at her with a faintly puzzled amusement. She might have been a pigmy at a fair, or a grotesque little dog. Mary was about to harden herself against this affronting look, when she saw his eyes dodge away from her uncertainly, almost fearfully. He began to skewer branches on his fork, until gradually his face grew calm again. Now he was patient and far away, like a man quietly enduring the extraction of a thorn, or the dressing of a wound.

Suddenly a motor-horn blared out. It continued to blare; for Mrs Tuke was deaf and harsh sounds gave her no pain. She would never believe that gentle ones would be heard.

‘Oh! I must go,’ said Mary, starting guiltily, like a child caught playing truant.

The man looked up at her.

‘Happen somebody’s impatient-like.’

He gave an amused unconcerned little grin and turned back to his work.

In her perturbation Mary began to run.

Soon she was leaning through the car window and kissing Mrs Tuke’s soft amazing cheek, all crazed with tiny lines, like the crackle on porcelain. The brown reproachful monkey eyes looked up at her.

‘My dear, I thought you had forgotten.’

‘I do hope I haven’t kept you too long,’ Mary panted; ‘but I’ve just been talking to the man who’s cutting down the trees; he says all the straight ones are to come down.’

Her voice was excited.

Mrs Tuke’s eyebrows went up.

‘Oh, but how dreadful!’ she said. ‘Aren’t you terribly upset? You love the wood so much. It’s no good; it doesn’t do to love anything; if one does, the thing is sure to be destroyed.’

There was deep monkey melancholy in her voice, bitter, hopeless and lazy.

Mary got into the car beside Mrs Tuke. She turned to smile at the companion Miss Martin, who all this time had been sitting in the middle of the back seat, holding herself aloof, so that she could welcome Mary, uninterrupted and in her own way, after Mrs Tuke had finished.

She was much more carefully dressed than Mrs Tuke. Instead of a knitted beret, rather like an egg-cosy, she wore a correct and tasteful hat. She came from Bradford, and under the refinement in her voice Mary was pleased to catch faint echoes of the woodman’s vowel sounds. She wanted Miss Martin to go on talking so that she could think of the woodman saying, ‘Happen somebody’s impatient-like,’ or ‘Aye, that’s right.’ She even liked to remember his gibing ‘Good afternoon.’

And all the time she saw him standing there, gazing at her through the flames, his eyes smoky, sullen, questioning.

It was almost dark before Mary felt that she had stayed long enough with Mrs Tuke. She had tried several times to suggest leaving, but always Mrs Tuke’s sad eyes had looked out at her and stopped the words. The eyes must have changed so much less than the withered face; they were bright, quick-moving, sometimes melting into sudden sweetness, sometimes diminishing into faraway unfeeling bird’s points. Now, when Mary made the darkness an excuse, the eyes showed bitterness for a moment, then resigned themselves.

‘Yes, perhaps we ought to start,’ said Mrs Tuke; ‘you have that dark walk through the wood before you.’

This was what Mary had been longing for all through tea. She had thought of it through every subject. She wondered if her abstraction had been noticed. Miss Martin, she felt sure, noticed everything.

As soon as she had kissed Mrs Tuke once again and left her on the edge of the wood, Mary went straight to the place where the fire had been. She knew that she would find no man there, but she wanted to run her foot through the velvety ash, look into the apricot heart, so lovely, still stirring, falling, crumbling, like a dying salamander.

The wood was so still that she could follow the sound of Mrs Tuke’s engine until it faded from a cat’s purr into nothingness. She looked round at the torn rhododendrons and fallen pines. In the darkness white scars, where the branches had been lopped, glimmered all up the sides of the trunks. It was as if each tree had many blind eyes with marble lids.

Mary noticed how cleanly, how close to the ground the pines had been sawn. She went up to one of the low smooth bases and touched it with her finger. With a shock she felt stickiness. It was oozing its turpentine, its blood.

In that moment the scene became an execution in a dream for her. Here was the great white neck with the severed head beside it; and there were the dying embers where the instruments of torture had been heated. The bushes had been torn and trampled by the eager mob. But now they were all gone, and she had come at night to sew the poor head on to the shoulders again, to wash the mud and spittle from the lips and close the eyes.…

Mary jumped to her feet, frightened by her own fantasy. All over the wood silence and darkness coiled under the leaves, gathered there to skulk and swell. Soon the whole countryside would be overwhelmed. Mary turned to go home, and a heavy bird flapped screaming out of a bush above her. She bowed her head, walking very delicately and quickly in the middle of the path. She would disturb no other more terrifying thing, if she could help it.

II

Mrs Legatt with the tea-tray woke her in the morning. Mary looked up through narrowed eyes and saw that, as usual, Mrs Legatt’s gaze was fixed far beyond her; it was as if she were forever calculating difficult sums in her head, and so had no time for faces or scenery. She had looked after Mary for the last three or four years, indeed ever since Mary had come of age and had a house of her own. Her two aunts had not liked the thought of Mary living by herself. They told Mrs Legatt to keep a careful watch over her health and her spirits, explaining that Mary had been a very delicate child, and, in their opinion, rather a morbid one, inclined to shut herself away from companions of her own age.

Mrs Legatt had smiled and appeared to listen to the aunts, but it is doubtful if, from the first day of their meeting, she had ever looked closely at Mary, or studied anything about her. She cooked well, was not over house-proud but adequate; in the times between her work she floated in her own private dream.

When Mrs Legatt had left the sleeping-porch, Mary sat up and sipped her tea. The large doors were folded back so that the whole of one side of the porch was open to the wood. The air was cold, making the chatter of the birds seem even more piercing than it was; beyond the chatter Mary could hear other noises. Children were laughing, shouting to each other excitedly; then there was a mysterious swish and crack, and a dull tremble in the earth. She knew that the woodman was already at work.

She wanted to jump out of bed at once and run to watch him, but she made herself write in her diary until breakfast, then she bathed, dressed, collected her drawing things together, and went down the outside staircase, which jutted from the house like a clumsy flying-buttress or a swimming-bath chute.

Very soon she was under the trees, climbing up to the place where the fire had been. The children’s voices came to her as if bounding and rebounding off the trunks. The whole wood seemed to be shaking with excitement. Once she heard the bright ring of metal on metal, and this made her hurry more than all the other noises.

When Mary came to the clearing of yesterday, she was amazed to see how it had changed. It was now a wide space where hard light poured down on saplings which looked too weak to bear it. Great trunks lay on the ground; everywhere were crushed and mangled rhododendrons. Children ran about, delighting in this ruin. Some had boxes on wheels in which they piled the fat white satisfying chips and smaller branches; others just laughed, tumbled, screamed or chased each other. Beyond them Mary saw the woodman, stripped of his shirt, kneeling on the ground beside an older, less powerfully built man. They were sawing through a pine so close to the ground that the blade almost skimmed the peat and pine needles. They took and gave the saw with a lovely and laborious rhythm. Mary guessed that they were father and son.

Every now and then the older man wiped his hand across his mouth and sat back on his haunches. While he rested for the few moments, there seemed a bitter patience in his kneeling, in the bowing of his head. Was he telling himself that he was a fool to do work that was now too hard? Was he grumbling against the world? The son’s patience seemed perfect and unquestioning.

Before she should be noticed, Mary crouched down by a torn bush and started to draw. She contrived some sort of indication of the thighs and tucked-up legs, but when she tried to catch a position of the young man’s rippling shoulders and swinging arms, she felt helpless, frustrated by her lack of skill and quickness. She found herself marvelling at the brownness of his skin so early in the year, at the curve and flow of all his muscles. Once again her eyes became fixed on the worn brass clasp winking and glinting like some great eye or jewel in his stomach.

But now the children were drawing nearer and nearer, moving up behind the protection of their handcarts and baskets. Mary scowled at them and bent lower over her drawing, but they were not to be discouraged. Soon they were all round her, peering over her shoulders, pressing against her arms. They smelt of their clothes and food and of themselves. Wood smoke and pine-needle smell had caught in their hair. Their heavy serious breathing was only broken by little sniffs, coughs and gurglings inside. The first one to speak pointed with turpentine-blackened finger at the drawing and exclaimed, ‘Coo! Isn’t it good?’ His voice sounded artificial, self-conscious.

Mary gave up trying to draw and sat back, waiting for the tree to fall. In those waiting moments the children behind her were plain and bare, shorn of all their pretences.

At the point when the sawing became most difficult and the men most concentrated, one of the smallest children broke away from the group and started to do a sort of sleep-walking dance right under the tree. The child was dressed all in soft dirty blue—blue combination suit, blue cap tied down over its ears with a blue woollen scarf. Its tiny wax face was divided by a stream of blackened snot. It talked to itself and sang and waved its arms. Dancing there under the tall pine, it looked unnaturally minute. It might have been a goblin or dwarf.

As soon as the young woodman saw it, he called out angrily, ‘Who’s bloody looking after that kid? It’ll get killed.’

He snatched it up in his arms and turned to the children and Mary. Nobody claimed it, so Mary felt bound to go forward and take it from him. Its arms and legs hung down like a stiff doll’s. Mary put it on the ground and held one of its hands. The man’s look was too full; he was recognising her, linking her with the child and condemning her neglect.

‘Is it a little boy or a little girl?’ he asked. ‘It’s dressed so funny.’

‘I don’t know, it’s not mine,’ said Mary hurriedly; ‘I just thought I’d keep it out of your way.’

‘What’s its name?’ the man asked the children.

After a pause one of the older boys called out, ‘It hasn’t got a name. It lives with Mrs Wooler; and it’s a little boy.’ He spoke contemptously, as if all the world should know these facts about a child who, in any case, was not worth a thought.

‘Well, why don’t you keep it by you?’ the man demanded.

‘None of us looks after it; it follered us up here,’ the boy explained sulkily.

Mary led the child back, feeling burdened with it in some dim way, because it had no name. She wondered if it was an orphan put out to foster parents. She thought of all the years of neglect before it.

The man had knelt down and begun to saw again. In a few minutes there was a delicate quiver at the base of the tree. The men jumped back swiftly. For an instant the pine seemed to hold its breath with the little crowd; then it swivelled and swung down, like a huge guardsman fainting on parade. The pine needles whipped through the air, making the rushing, swishing noise. Branches cracked against other trees. When the trunk smashed on to the ground, a dumb thump ran under the earth, rising up to hurt the soles of the feet. The children jumped up and down and screamed. After the tension of waiting, all their actions were extravagant. Some let out long dramatic sighs, others made whistling noises of amazement. The quick ones darted forward to seize the best chips. There was a scramble round the men, who were already hacking off the branches with their axes.

Mary still held the nameless child’s hand; but now she let go musingly. The child at once began its dance again, mouthing its own words and song notes. Was it too young to talk intelligibly? Or was it an idiot child? It blew small bubbles on its lips, utterly happy in its isolation from the other children and the world.

Mary watched until it disappeared between the saplings. The child had both attracted and repelled her, so that she was confused, more than ordinarily uncertain of herself. To forget the child and its fate, she turned quickly to see what the men were doing. They were measuring the tree. The son called out and the father wrote in a dirty red notebook, then marked the base.

The children were all quarrelling and scrambling for the chips, so Mary decided to do some quick drawings while she was free of them. She got something down, but part of her regretted the lines, wished that the paper was still blank. The lines were not interesting enough to make up for the loss of pure whiteness. She had spoilt what was there, not made something new.

While she brooded in this way, her eyes were down on the paper so that at first she was unaware of the melting away of the children. When she looked up, only a few stragglers were left. All the rest had gone back to their dinners. The men had made a little pyramid of their axes and the saw, and were pulling black dented tins and old beer bottles from the bracken. The father walked off and settled himself against a trunk, but the son stretched up and took a swig from his bottle of cold tea. His back was arched; he slapped his chest and stomach with satisfaction and said, ‘Ah!’

Then he looked at Mary tucked up against her bush. She was pretending to be busy with her last drawing, afraid that he would ask her what she was doing, mock her with his mimic politeness; but he said, ‘When I’m having my dinner, I’ll keep still and you can do my photo lying down.’

‘But won’t you mind keeping still?’ Mary asked, taken aback.

‘I won’t mind if you don’t,’ he said. ‘You’re doing the work.’

He lay down where he was and started to eat his bacon sandwich and his bread and cheese. He had propped himself on one elbow, with the bottle and the food spread out before him, making an interesting arrangement. Mary began at once to draw. She wanted to please him, to repay him for his trouble, but she was afraid that her sketch would be formless and dead. In her anxiety, her hand began to shake a little.

Suddenly the father called out, ‘Is she doing yer, Jim?’ as if the whole affair were a great joke. He startled Mary; his amusement made her uneasy, but perhaps she was grateful for it too. She had expected glum heaviness; now both the men seemed tolerant. What had happened to the young one’s smoking eyes and the sullen mouth of yesterday? To her they had been such an important part of him that she felt this calm sleepy man posing for her was a different person. She could not yet fit the sides of his nature together; and so her mind was fixed on him. She felt a vague alarm, being uncertain of his next mood.

When the dinner hour was over, Mary made herself hold out the drawing to the two men. The father said, ‘Aye, that’s good! She’s got yer, Jim,’ but the young one just smiled and nodded. As soon as the father moved away to fetch the axes, Mary found herself speaking hurriedly and urgently.

‘I’d like to do a painting, but I couldn’t do it here, with all the children.’

There was a pause. Mary was afraid of the emptiness between them. Then she heard him saying smoothly, ‘I could come along after work for a bit, if you like. Do you want me with my axe?’

He smiled, as if posing with his axe were rather ridiculous, but woman’s whims should be indulged.

Mary darted a look at him; then bobbed her head; like a small bird eating.

‘I live very near,’ she said. ‘I’ll come to show you the way. What time?’

‘Five,’ he said, grinning.

She gave another little nod, then gathered up her things and hurried back to her own lunch. She wanted to get away from the man so that she could think of him more clearly. She wanted to picture his rough stiff hair, his changing eyes and tawny skin. She wanted to see him sitting for her still as stone, the burnished axe-head gleaming like white fire.

III

Mary told Mrs Legatt that the woodman was coming to sit, and asked her to prepare a good tea. Mrs Legatt looked at her as directly as she ever looked at anyone.

‘It’s not often you want to do portraits from the flesh,’ she said in her rather strange, chanting tones; ‘you like to make things up, or do those fancy needlework horrors; I can’t say I’d want one in a house of mine, if I had one.’

‘You’d rather I tried to paint a straightforward portrait then?’ Mary asked, wanting to talk about the woodman.

‘Well, that depends on what he’s like; it’s no good trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, you know.’

Conversation with Mrs Legatt was always like this; after a plain statement, a warning, a proverb, she would slip away or lapse into silence. With her there was no continuation, no further step.

Mary turned her mind to her paints, her easel and her board. She would have everything ready, so that no time should be lost when the man came.

Just before five she went into the wood to bring him back. She found him alone at the far end of the waste; he was wiping down the axes and the saw with an oily rag.

‘It’s quieter now,’ he said, smiling half at her, half to himself; ‘all the kids gone to their tea, and my dad’s just taken the motor-cycle combination. It’s a good thing I came on my push-bike this morning—sometimes I do, so we can go hoam separate—I must have known you’d be doing my picture.’

Here he gave his old mocking grin, but with a subtle difference: it was tamed, and Mary felt no uneasiness. She watched him finish his job, then thrust the saw, the iron wedges and one of the axes into a clump of dead and sprouting bracken. He pulled the fronds this way and that to mask his hiding-place.

‘Do you always do that?’ asked Mary, recapturing a little of her childhood excitement over anything buried or hidden.

‘Aye, it saves taking ’em back,’ he said; ‘nobody’ll tamper with ’em there.’

Mary thought that she would always like listening to his voice; the north-country stress and intonation would suddenly strike her again, just when she imagined that she had grown used to it.

She saw him go towards a bush and pull out a roughly painted grass-green bicycle. Instead of the usual slim seat, it had a thick broad clumsy saddle. The effect, for some reason, was embarrassing to Mary. Did she think of the bicycle as a spare athlete burdened and humiliated by a grotesquely swollen behind? Jim noticed her quick glance away and said, ‘It looks a bit funny, but it’s much more cum-fort-able for long journeys like. Those little ones fair cut you in half. I got it off my dad’s old motor-bike.’

He started to walk beside her, the axe on his shoulder, a greasy army satchel swinging from his arm. With his other hand he grasped the handlebars in the middle, forcing the bicycle over the difficult ground. His size and his burdens made Mary feel rather trivial; she might have been a whippet pettishly following a too serious-minded master. Anxiety gathered to sweep over her; Jim was now her guest. She tried to think of something to say.

She felt easier when they were standing together in the little polished hall, so rigid and still after the swaying tangle of the wood. Jim looked about him with gentle inquisitiveness; he seemed to be thinking, ‘So she lives in this quite different sort of house!’ Perhaps he was a little bewildered, but his trustfulness eased Mary.

She took him up the shining artificial stone stairs, glancing back once in time to see him hesitate, then withdraw his hand from the polished copper rail, as if he had decided that it was too glistening to touch. At the top of the stairs they passed the open bathroom door. Jim at once asked if he could wash, and Mary went to the linen-cupboard to find him a clean towel; but he protested that he was much too dirty to use it, so she left him with her own used one. She went into her workroom and drew the little table up to the stove for tea.

When Jim came out of the bathroom, his mat of hair was sleek and wet, although tufts here and there were already breaking away from the smooth surface. His nose looked bigger and his eyes had lost some of their tarry gleam. For a moment Mary felt dashed, deprived of something; then, without effort, her idea of him broadened to accept this more commonplace indoor appearance.

Mrs Legatt, bringing in the tea-tray, gave Jim a casual sidelong glance, as if he were quite the most usual thing to find in Mary’s room—and yet perhaps not quite the most usual. Mrs Legatt’s filmy glances always left this doubt in the mind. Was she really only dreaming, brooding on her wrongs, counting her blessings? Or was she storing the sights and sounds around her for another day? She put down the tray without a word and Mary began at once to pour out the tea and pass toast to her guest.

It was not an easy meal. Jim leant forward in his chair and ate slowly; Mary pressed things on him and strained to find words. She was glad when she had him on a stool near the great blank panes of the window. He had rested the axe across his knees in a way that she liked. His hair was growing drier and rougher every minute. She squeezed out her colours and began.

There was silence in the workroom for some time. Mary painted intently, noticing nothing until the thick creamy mess on her board became unmanageable.

‘I’ve put too much paint on,’ she said, looking up and smiling ruefully. Then she saw that Jim was as still as a frozen man. In his broad throat a vein pulsed thickly. One flap of his open shirt trembled, as if a little wind blew only on that part of him. His grip on the axe had tightened until all his knuckles were white, like bare bones.

‘Shall we rest now?’ said Mary softly, afraid of the effect of her words on him.

His eyes flickered, then came back from far away, a look of awkwardness, even of pain, flashing across them; he was aware of self again.

‘I’ve never known anyone sit quite so still,’ said Mary.

Jim smiled, losing some of the tenseness that had turned him into a caricature of himself.

‘Aw, it’s easy work sitting still.’ He leant forward a little. ‘May I have a look?’

The question was shy and gentle. Mary swung the picture round, hating to show it, but feeling that he had a right to look.

‘My!’ he said with quiet unconsidered admiration. ‘But I’m afraid it’s a bit too handsome.’

‘It’s only a beginning; I’ve hardly got anything down yet,’ said Mary hurriedly.

Jim laughed. ‘You mean you’ll make it more rough, get it more like me later?’

The blood flushed up into Mary’s cheeks; she bent low over her palette and began to scrape vigorously with the knife.

Jim looked out of the window. The light was failing rapidly; already the barn and squat tower on the far hill had been changed into some mysterious Gothic-revival church shrouded in blue mists.

‘I must go,’ he said; ‘I’ve got a twenty-mile bike tide in front o’ me.’

Mary looked blankly at him, hating to think of this journey added to all the strain of his long hard day.

‘I don’t always bike it,’ he reassured her; ‘I told you; sometimes I come in my dad’s sidecar, but other times we want to be independent-like.’

‘You shouldn’t have sat to me for so long,’ said Mary; ‘I had no idea you had far to go. I thought you lived quite near.’

‘It’s not far; I can do it easy,’ Jim said scornfully; but Mary knew that, in spite of all his strength and vigour, he wished that the ride were not before him.

She got up at once and offered him the biscuits, then she poured out two cups of cold tea; they stood by the stove, eating and gulping hurriedly. There was silence, but less awkwardness between them. Still munching a biscuit, she led the way down the flying-buttress stairs to the road.

Jim swung his leg over his bicycle, then settled himself in the ribald seat, with the toe of one foot on the ground. He turned to her: ‘I’ll come again tomorrow then?’ The words were half a question, half a statement.

Mary nodded impatiently, longing for him to start while there was still some light. She watched him crouch over the handlebars, turn into the road, and disappear. Cocked up in the saddle, with head and shoulders down, he looked formidable and inhuman, reminding her of a piston-rod or an ancient battering-ram.

She started to walk back to the workroom, taking slow steps, thinking of the woodman speeding through the dusk, all his stiff hair blown flat. She climbed up the stairs, opened the glass door; and the first thing she saw was his axe, where he had left it, by his stool. In the half-light its diamond flash had melted to a moonstone glimmering. She knelt down, then lifted it and felt along the blade with one finger. She experienced the delicate, dangerous bite of the metal. It was almost as if her finger could not leave the magnet of the edge until it had been slit and she had tasted the sour blood. She put her cheek to the cold steel cheek; she pressed her nose flat against it, while tingling silver wires seemed to dart up to her brain. She remained for some moments in this strange kowtow. Then she shouldered the axe, took up her torch, and went back into the darkening wood.

After a little searching, she found Jim’s hiding-place. The torch suddenly glinted on the ugly shark’s grin of the saw. Mary laid Jim’s axe to sleep with the other tools in the bracken, pulling the fronds across again as she had seen him do.

IV

Jim came the next afternoon, and the next; and the next, until Mrs Legatt grew used to making tea into a larger, more satisfying meal. She would look at Mary’s picture and say, ‘Yes, I think it’s progressing very well; if only you don’t lose that “natural” look.’

About Jim himself she said very little. Once she remarked on his quietness and politeness; another time she exclaimed, ‘That’s a terrible long journey after a hard day’s work. What a pity he doesn’t live nearer!’

It may have been on the fifth or the sixth afternoon that Jim came in later than usual and Mary saw at once from his sober look that he was really tired. Although there were still great blank spaces in their understanding, they knew some part of each other by now. Mary let him in and took him upstairs, almost without saying a word. She turned on the taps in the basin, pushing the thick dirty towel that he liked towards him. He bent to wash; then she saw that his hair was full of tiny twigs, papery fragments of burnt leaf, and little curling beards of lichen. Before she had thought clearly, she had picked up her comb and run it through his stubborn thatch. A shower of little pieces fluttered down to the blackened water in the basin. Jim looked up, his face glowing and slippery and dripping. He laughed, spluttering a little water over her.

‘Quite a natural-history museum,’ he said with a return to his lofty, sarcastic manner. Afraid that she had offended him, Mary offered him the comb, as if giving up a badge of office; but he had turned back to the basin and was scrubbing his face with the towel. Later he took the comb and whipped the wet clots and tails from his forehead, grooving them into the still-dry hair.

They went into the workroom and sat down by the stove. Jim had brought fat creamy chips in a sack; now he fed some to the flames, and the heat glowed on their faces.

Mrs Legatt came in carrying muffins, heavy and soggy, with something good about them. They spread them thickly with jam and sipped the steaming tea from great breakfast-cups which Mrs Legatt always used now, out of respect for Jim’s sex.

When the tea was cooler and Jim drank deep, half his face seemed swallowed up in the white moon of the cup. Over the rim his eyes glowed, shifted, melted, surrendering to the comforting heat.

They lay back against the cushions. Jim filled his pipe, and began to roll a cigarette out of the same damp dark tobacco. He licked the paper delicately, then twirled it quickly down and offered the weeping cylinder to Mary.

‘Hope you don’t mind my spit,’ he said, laughingly, apologetically; ‘better tuck those ends in, if you can.’

But Mary had taken up her scissors and was snipping off the odd strands of tobacco. She wondered why she was so delighted with Jim’s crumpled cigarette.

Soon smoke was wreathing out of their mouths, flowing up to make a soft octopus above their heads. It hovered there, stretching out tentacles, merging, twining, melting, vainly trying to reach into the corners of the room.

Looking down at the length of Jim’s body on the sofa, Mary thought that he looked like Gulliver. His knees were higher than his head; he was pinned down by his tiredness, just as Gulliver had been trussed and strapped across with the Lilliputians’ spider-thread ropes. She saw him with the eyes of a Lilliputian. He was some giant of enormous size and weight. And his skin was not skin; it was too tough, too permanent. It was the finest book calf, tanned to last for centuries.

Why was Jim always reminding her of the pictures in her nursery books? Sindbad, Gulliver, even Rip Van Winkle, when his hair was full of the woods, his hands black as peat, and his wellingtons caked with mud and grass and moss. Was it because of his clear outlines, his separation from her? Did these give him the legendary quality? He was a woodman, and woodmen were linked with charcoal burners, with bears, wild boar, Robin Hood and venison pasties.

‘How brown you are!’ she murmured, to explain the fixity of her gaze.

‘Aw, that’s because I take my shirt off,’ Jim said. ‘My dad doesn’t hold with it; he says I look like a savage and one day I’ll get sunstroke and that’ll teach me. He says I ought to wear woollen vest, shirt and waistcoat same as him; but I like to feel free. What’s the sense o’ getting more hot an’ mucky than you need?’

Jim knocked out his pipe and stood up; his sense of duty not allowing him to idle any longer. He took up the pose, waiting for Mary to go to her easel and begin.

As usual Jim sat with Spartan steadfastness. Mary tried to think only of her painting, but it was impossible for her to ignore his signs of strain for long. The vein in his throat throbbed more heavily than ever; the shirt flap trembled all the time.

‘Let’s stop now and go back to the stove,’ she said at last; ‘I’ve done quite a lot; besides, it’s getting too dark.’

Jim put his axe down, then slowly rose to his feet, stretching arms up like a man forcing with all his might against a collapsing ceiling. Behind him the light was being sucked down under the hill, sucked all away; and gunmetal clouds were surging into boneless mountain peaks. Against this wild background Mary watched his black shape. He was lowering his arms, stretching them out level with his shoulders. Now he had become a monstrous bat, escaped from some land of terrors and ghosts.

As he walked towards her over the polished floor, his wellingtons squelched, letting out little sighing puffs of air.

‘Take those things off and warm your feet; they must be quite cold and clammy after all this time.’

Mary was too anxious, too urgent, clutching at anything to ease his tiredness.

‘But I’ve got to go at once. My! It’s late. Just look how black it’s getting!’

Before Mary could say anything the heavy curtain between workroom and landing was drawn back and Mrs Legatt came in for the tea-tray.

‘We have the camp-bed, you know,’ she said gravely, as if stressing a profound truth which Mary in her frivolity had lost sight of.

For a moment Mary was nonplussed. She did not care for Mrs Legatt’s sudden passages from complete indifference to meddling. They were rare; for that reason all the more disconcerting. Was she prompted by caprice? Did she speak just for the sake of creating a little situation? But before any awkwardness could grow, Mary said, ‘Yes, why bother to go home? You’ll only have to pedal all the way back here tomorrow morning; and you’re tired. If you stay, you’ll feel fresh. All we have to do is to put the camp-bed up.’

Jim looked at Mary, at Mrs Legatt, out of the window, down at his feet. Mary wished she could know his thoughts. Perhaps he felt trapped; or was he shamefaced because he thought that some remark had been misunderstood and twisted into a hint?

‘Thanks very much,’ he said at last, ‘but I wonder what the wife’ll think.’

He spoke with the jovial guilt of the stage husband, turning ‘the wife’ into nothing but a music-hall joke.

‘You will stay then?’ asked Mary, still uncertain. Jim bowed his head and Mrs Legatt slid out of the room with the tray. They both breathed more easily. Suddenly Jim sat down on the sofa and started to pull off his wellingtons.

‘Oh, good,’ said Mary at this sign.

While Jim tugged at one boot, she crouched down and began to coax the other off.

‘You’ve no call to do that,’ Jim said, uncomfortably; ‘you’ll get all mucky.’

‘I can easily wash,’ said Mary, bending lower. Her long short hair fell forward, sweeping the boot. She tossed it back, at the same time jerking off the boot. She had it in her hands, close to her face; she could smell the rubber and the mud. She rocked on her tucked up legs, her mouth a little open as though crooning a lullaby.

‘Eh, you look that funny with my old boot,’ said Jim; ‘did it come off sudden an’ take you unawares?’

Mary looked at him; her eyes were laughing. She put down the boot, then tucked herself up in the other corner of the sofa. Soon the smell of cooking vegetables came floating up the stairs, seeping round the thick edges of the padded curtain. Mary felt glad, knowing that Mrs Legatt had not waited to be told, was at this moment doing her best to provide something that would not fall too far short of her idea of a hearty meal.

As they sat there together on the sofa, Mary suddenly found that Jim was talking. When she asked a question, he did more than give his usual ‘yes’ or ‘no’; he even began to tell her things without prompting, things she could know nothing of, because they happened long ago.

‘When I was a lad in Yorkshire, me and my pal used to go rabbiting with my dog. Once we were in the grounds of the big house and someone jumped out at us from a thicket; and, do you know, it was the lord himself!’

Jim paused, still awed by this memory of the scene.

‘He was swearing and cursing, carrying on at us something crazy. All on a sudden he caught hold of my pal Dick and gave him one with his walking-stick. Dick was yelling, but the lord had him by the collar and went on basting him. I could do nothing, so I ran away.’

Jim looked full at Mary, smiling to hide the little bit of shame that still remained.

‘After that, Dick wouldn’t go with me nor talk to me; but what could I do? Not likely I could take on the old lord, and me only ten—besides some people said he was a bit daft-like, though not so as you could always notice.’

Mary leant forward to throw more chips and coal into the stove. The shimmering orange cave was transformed into a little volcano in eruption; the coal fumed, shooting out tiny jets of gas, the wood snapped and bubbled, and white clouds rose. Jim, looking at the wood, was reminded of his trade.

‘It took me two years to learn from my dad,’ he said; ‘and then I messed up a lot of axes. It’s a proper job to do it well; it may look easy.’

‘It looks anything but easy,’ Mary said. ‘I’ve never seen any other trunks sawn off flat with the ground as you and your father do them.’

‘Ah, that’s how you can tell a good woodman.’

Jim enjoyed her little tribute. He paused to fill and light his pipe again; when the match flared, Mary saw his eyes shining contentedly. Except for the stove’s glow, they were quite in darkness now; the wild boneless peaks had been blotted out, leaving the window nothing but an oblong of heavy, sooty blue.

‘Tell me some more,’ said Mary. There was silence while Jim thought.

‘Once we lived in a caravan and it hadn’t any windows. It was all black, when you shut the door. There was bunks round the wall and quite a big old kitchen stove. When my mum cooked, all the smoke hung about, till you couldn’t hardly breathe. We used to go from place to place, wherever we had a job; me and Dad would cut the trees, and Mum would come afterwards clearing the ground, burning the leaves and branches, like you saw me doing the first day we met. But now we’ve got a house, and Mum doesn’t come out so much; she likes to look after the home. Sometimes she fancies a change though, then she gives a hand at the end of a job.’

Jim was looking at Mary. She could see the shape of his head turned towards her, the fire glowing on one flat cheek. He was all hollows and planes, a boulder drilled and scoured by centuries of weather.

He put out his hand a very little way towards her, then drew it back. ‘But you, you—I’ve never known anyone like you before; you treat me more like a brother than anything else—and me only a rough chap you saw in the wood last week.’

Mary stirred uneasily in her corner. How glad she was that Jim could not see her face! His voice had changed—he was urgent and faltering, a little ashamed of putting his feeling into words. She tried to think of the right easy laughing thing to say; then it seemed so false, so trashy to hedge herself about with lightness, that she said nothing at all, only stared through the darkness at him. She could just see the soft glint of one eye and the sliding up and down of the Adam’s apple in his throat. ‘It’s like a bobbing float on the river,’ she thought. Why was Jim gulping? And why was his head held back stiffly just at that angle which is seen in sleep-walkers and blind people? He put out his hand again, increasing the impression. This time he let it hover above her shoulder, never touching her, but making her feel that at any moment the tingling flesh under his grasp might be drawn up to the waiting fingertips.

‘I think I shall have to stroke you,’ he said at last, as if there were no help for it, no other way out. The voice was changed again; it was a child’s voice now, soft and dreamy, with that ruthless concentration that acknowledges no other interest in the world.

Very gently he lowered his hand to the sleeve of her jersey. Mary could feel his hard palm grating over the wool; sometimes a strand caught in a piece of rough skin and was snapped. Her teeth were set on edge, but she could not move; she sat becalmed, waiting for the next stroke.

Jim began to run his fingers over her hair, starting at the top of her head, descending each wave and curl until he reached the nape of the neck. There he seemed to love the projecting bone with the pads of his fingers; he smoothed it and touched it gingerly. It was as if he were playing with a very pretty cat which yet held some hint of malice in its twitching tail.

But malice was far away from Mary. She was melted by the flowing motion of Jim’s hand; she was a candle guttering into a subterranean pool; above her arched the sweating cave roof, livid, veined, amazing. A little door in her throat seemed to open then shut capriciously and terrifyingly.

‘I want everything about him,’ she thought; ‘his breath, his skin, his teeth, his bones, his hair.’ So she jumped up and broke away. Jim, who had caught at her hand, had to follow to the head of the flying-buttress staircase.

‘We’d better get your bed in before it’s too late,’ she said, every word a disc of thirsty plaster in her mouth. She licked and bit her dry lips, regardless of the colour on them. Hunger was everything, was the world, but just behind it lurked Fear, although Fear was only a grey shape, a dirty fingernail, a stream of blackened snot pouring down an orphan’s waxen face.

They were between the rose trees now; against the night sky the thorny stems looked like great hairy spiders’ legs hopelessly tangled.

The car in the garage was a sleeping tortoise, the folded camp-bed in the corner a giant’s Swiss roll of poor quality.

‘Stop making everything something else!’ implored Mary; ‘stop saying, stop doing, stop thinking!’

She had brought no torch; they fumbled in the dark, running their hands along ledges silky with dust, feeling the sickly cream of oil beneath their feet.

‘Ay, d’you know, I’ve got no shoes on?’ laughed Jim. At last he had the bed firmly under his arm. As he passed, he banged the projecting car mirror and swore, almost with the same breath apologising to Mary.

They were in the open again, walking apart, like two campers who have come to the end of a long empty day and have only a long empty night to look forward to.

‘We are utter strangers,’ Mary thought; ‘if we were not, I would not be looking at him, would not be wanting the sight and the smell and the sound of him. He would be my friend; there would be no fear—and so I should be free again to think my own thoughts. How is it that something as tiny as fear—for fear is a bee’s tongue, a fly’s dropping—can overshadow the world? Why do I hug my fear to myself, afraid to let fear go?’

At the foot of the stairs Mary turned to Jim, offering help with the bed. He stood still, looking up at her on the second step, saying nothing. Suddenly he dropped the bed and gripped her in his arms. He had her against the wall of the house. On the other side of the concrete, in almost exactly the same position, Mrs Legatt was busily cooking the supper. Mary clung to this thought, picturing every detail of the electric stove, the pots, the pans, the wooden spoons, the thickly winking bubbles in the soup. Perhaps as Mrs Legatt bent low to stir, one of her hairs might fall into the soup. This had been known to happen, although Mrs Legatt would never admit it, the very mention of a hair made her furious.…

‘Hair, hair, why am I thinking of hair? I can feel his hair on my face, hard prickly stubble hair on my cheek, mouse-soft brush of lashes near my eyes. If I could put up my hand, I could even feel the hair along his arms, at his throat, and on his head—all different; but I cannot move, my arms are pinioned and I feel his belt clasp biting into me, his bony knee against my thigh. His face is all soft with warm dew; his polished face is melting in his own soft steaming breath. It is like fine stretched rubber, like Scottish bap-cakes damp from the oven; and I have heard those cakes called ‘baby’s bottoms’ too; the girls at school would always call them this. If I turned my head, what would I see? I would look down the devouring blackness of his throat into his very guts. In the crimson darkness I would see everything working, striving, forcing; it would be like the engine-room of a mighty ship. I would be surrounded with wild blind energy; I would be a tiny beetle amongst the towering machines.’

Mary did turn her face, and her teeth struck against his; for a moment she felt the flame-like flicker of his tongue. She made a useless little jerk away, then the imprisoned hands dropped to her sides again. Jim seemed to grip her with perfect inhumanity. She might have been a ladder he had to scale. His rough raw breathing mounted all the time.

Suddenly a little shudder seemed to pass through Jim, clutching him at the end in a moment of utter stillness. Mary felt the stillness spreading out all round them; then all at once Jim drooped, seemed almost to lie against her for support. She had the whole weight of him, not taut and springing any more, but like a sleeping man hanging about her neck. Quite dazed by his change, but feeling that she must lead now, Mary took his arms from her shoulders and made towards the staircase, shaking back her hair, rippling out her arms, slapping her skirt roughly, to rid herself of the dazed, bruised feeling. Jim still lay against the wall. He gave one sigh, full of sleep and resignation at waking and beginning all over again; then he too slapped his clothes, hitched up his breeches and rolled his shoulders under the cotton shirt. Obediently he followed her, remembering first to pick up the camp-bed from the sprouting bulbs where it had fallen.

In the lighted workroom they did not look at each other; Mrs Legatt had already brought the supper and left it by the stove. Their little earthenware pots of soup steamed patiently; tempting onion breath rose up from the wide brown mouth of the casserole.

‘Do you like stew?’ asked Mary with awkward jauntiness.

‘Oh, aye,’ said Jim, and there was silence again.

Only afterwards, when they began to put up the camp-bed and Mary thought that Jim was about to pinch his fingers, did constraint disappear. She called out a sharp warning and immediately felt easier. Jim smiled down at his hands saying, ‘It’d take a lot to hurt them; they’re used to all kinds of treatment.’ He glanced quickly at Mary’s very different ones. Later, on the sofa once again, he held out his palm, broad and flat, cut with little black rivers and streams, humped with shallow pink-brown hills. He frowned over the puzzling map. Mary put out her own palm. ‘Have you ever had your fortune told?’

Jim shook his head, but brought her hand close to his, as if he would tell them together. He glanced from one to the other several times, sometimes following a line with his finger, or touching a cushion delicately; then he turned both hands over and felt the skin on Mary’s and on his own. He examined carefully the white half-moons of her unbroken, unblackened nails.

‘What a difference!’ he whistled, putting her hand into his, so that it gleamed like a thin silvery-grey fish on a wooden platter. ‘Look how dainty!’

Mary, embarrassed by the adjective, made to withdraw her hand. Jim closed his over it. ‘Two or three of those could get lost easy in this leg o’ mutton.’

‘I often wonder,’ he added musingly.

‘You often wonder what?’ asked Mary.

‘Well—well, what it’s like to be a woman.’

Slow difficult red pushed its way to the brown surface of his cheeks. ‘I’ve never told nobody but you, because it sounds so daft-like; but when I’m lying in bed on my back, maybe can’t go to sleep at night, I keep thinking—what’s it like to be a woman? What’s it like to have a great man messing you about? What’s it like to have a baby?’

‘Ah, that is something I can’t tell you; you see, I haven’t tried yet.’

‘Course not,’ said Jim, shocked into propriety by her light simplicity.

Mary wished that he had not remembered to ‘respect’ her, for she had never felt so close to him, so eager to meet every thought and help it to live and flow. Would the barricades go up again now? Why was the question, that might have been so silly and ordinary, valuable to her? She supposed it was because it was so unexpected, so ‘out of character’, as some people would insist. But Jim was talking again.

‘If you could do it, change over like, just for a bit, I’d like to try, have a baby and everything.’

Mary laughed. ‘You’d certainly have to change completely; there doesn’t seem to be anything feminine about you as you are. With some people it’s much easier to imagine a transformation—they seem to fluctuate.’

Jim looked at her as if he had not quite heard or understood her words. His eyes turned up, so that white showed under them; they looked heavy and thick and slow. Only then did Mary remember his tiredness. He must have been almost falling to sleep as he asked her what it felt like to be a woman. Perhaps that was why he came near her, touched her with his unafraid simplicity.

She jumped up quickly to leave him with the camp-bed. Jim smiled gratefully and almost before she was out of the room, he was pulling the striped shirt over his head.

Mary thought of him stripping off the socks and breeches, switching out the light, jumping into bed naked. For a long time she lay awake in her porch, staring up into the sky, watching low scudding clouds cast filmy membranes between her and the upper darkness.

She heard Mrs Legatt come up the stairs, pause on the landing as if she were listening, drinking in all she could of the situation on the other side of the curtain. She passed on to the bathroom and Mary heard her scrubbing her plate, rinsing it under the tap. Soon there was the sucking windy sound of her pneumatic hairbrush. Each rhythmic stroke was punctuated by a whistling little intake of air. The air rushed in, the air rushed out, the bristles on the rubber base rose, the bristles sank; in, out, in, out, in, out—until Mary felt that she was at last being charmed into sleep.

When she awoke later, she was puzzled then alarmed by a strange bull-frog droning. In her drowsy state she tried to explain it to herself as the sound of Mrs Legatt brushing her hair; but part of her knew that this could not be true—that she could not still be brushing, nor, even if she were, could she possibly make so much noise. Then with a sudden stab she remembered Jim, knew that he was snoring. The thought of him had assailed her too violently. She felt hopeless, a little sick, drained of all love of life. Her sense of desolation made her think of a raw white dusty ruin in a desert strewn with bones. She looked out of the ruin, through the crumbling loopholes; her jaw was bound with coarse linen grave bands. She felt stifled with cloth and dust and deadness.

Surprisingly Mrs Legatt was up at six to get the breakfast; for Jim had said that he must be in the wood early. Mary heard her moving about and, without bothering to dress properly, put on trousers and a fisherman’s jersey over her pyjamas.

She stood outside the workroom curtain and asked if she could come in. Jim was sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on his socks. The laces of his breeches were still undone, but he stuffed his legs into the Wellingtons just as they were. When he looked up, his face was brownish-pale and clouded. Mary saw that the bed was scattered with pieces of leaf and twig and moss that must have clung to his skin underneath the clothes. She was reminded of yesterday, when she combed his hair. The memory was sour, and to shake it away she went over to the stove and started to push the rake in and out vigorously. She put on more coal, shut the door and waited, crouching on the floor until the little gleam began to swell and flame.

They hurried through their porridge. Mary burnt her mouth and quickly poured cold milk into her spoon. Jim swallowed his rasher of bacon between great gulps of scalding coffee. It was not the breakfast that Mary had planned. It was eaten in haste with no thought or pleasure, and their hearts and bodies were numbed. In spite of her thick jersey a little shudder ran through Mary.

‘Eh, someone walking over your grave? These mornings are chilly-like.’

Jim looked down; his sleeves were already rolled up and goose-flesh covered his arms.

There was no time for cigarettes or Jim’s pipe. They hurried out into the wood carrying the axe between them like a baby-chair. Mary knew that it would have been more sensible to let go of the head, so that Jim could swing it on to his shoulder; but for some reason she still grasped it. She had to trot beside him in the way that had made her feel trivial. She felt guilt too, for in spite of all their hurry they were late. Already they smelt wood smoke and heard the ring of a hammer on a metal wedge.

‘Looks like my mum’s come too,’ said Jim; ‘Dad’d never go burning the rubbish yet awhile.’

Mary wanted to turn and run; she wondered what stopped her. Why had she even come out into the wood with Jim so early? Was she afraid to lose sight of him? And how would she meet the inquisitive, burrowing eyes of his father and mother?

They reached the cleared ground, passing the motor-cycle under a clump of rhododendrons. Beyond the clump a plump woman was bending to gather up an armful of small branches for her fire. As soon as she looked up and saw them, she came forward eagerly, still hugging the branches to her bosom, so that her smiling bun face glowed through the waving leaves. She was wearing her husband’s dungarees, or so Mary thought, for the square masculine garment seemed to be filled out and cushioned with jerseys and a scarf. On her head was a wool-work beret absurdly like the one Mrs Tuke so often wore; for an instant Mary was transported to that first afternoon, only a week ago, when she had come upon Jim—then she was back again, staring at his mother behind the leaves, looking for sharp suspicious eyes, but finding only a sweet smile of welcome and interest.

The woman turned to speak to Jim.

‘I came with Dad to help tidy up and see if anything had happened to you; but Dad said not to worry, you’d be all right with the lady who was doing your picture.’

Here she gave Mary another shy smile.

‘There’s no call to worry about me, Mother; I’m old enough and ugly enough to look after myself.’

Jim turned from her churlishly and looked down at his boots.

‘Well, Dad will be getting proper mad at me,’ he added at last, with a rather desperate jauntiness. Suddenly lifting his eyes to Mary’s face, he jerked out, ‘Goodbye for now,’ and stalked off through the ragged bushes.

Mary watched him go, gazing all the time at the sweaty patch between his shoulder-blades; it was like the shadow of a cloud hovering over a striped field. She heard the father call out archly, ‘Where you been, lad?’ She was reminded at once of the mother by her side.

‘I hope you didn’t worry about Jim,’ she said, anxious to make up for Jim’s gruffness, anxious to be liked herself; ‘he came in tired, then I painted till it was almost dark, so Mrs Legatt, who keeps house for me, thought he ought to put up on the camp-bed.’

Did that sound too careful? Was Mrs Legatt dragged in clumsily, unnecessarily?

‘It’s that good of you to look after our Jim,’ the woman was saying; ‘it’s too much, all that pedalling after a hard day’s work.’ She paused. ‘Father was telling me about the picture. Have you got it handy? I would like to see it—that is, if it’s quite convenient.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mary, bringing her eyes back from the distance again; ‘I live just on the edge of the wood. Won’t you come and see it now?’

‘Thank you very much.’

Jim’s mother dropped her bundle of branches and began to bank the fire. Mary, watching her, was suddenly touched and melted by the bulging figure; the mother was so eager, so friendly; and she knew almost all there was to know of Jim. Her voice was different from his; she had lost more of her northern accent, so that her native forms of speech were made to sound more purring.

When she had finished patting and poking the fire, she wiped her hands up and down the dungarees.

‘You do get in a shocking state doing this work,’ she said, smiling anxiously at Mary; ‘that’s why I wear these things,’ she held the pockets out, rather as a clown does; ‘they’re Dad’s, of course, by rights.’

They began to walk back to the house in silence. The mother was bashful and Mary kept seeing Jim’s back retreating between the trees. When they had almost reached the gate, Mary began to make excuses for her portrait, protecting it beforehand against the woman’s eyes.

‘I’m afraid it’s not very good,’ she said. ‘I haven’t painted many people; but you might just be able to recognise your son.’

The mother was not listening; she was gazing at the little square house through the thin trees.

‘Oh, my, is this your house? Isn’t it nice! I’ve only seen a road-house done like that before.’

‘Well, I’m not very fond of it outside,’ said Mary, shepherding her into the hall as quickly as she could.

The mother looked about her in silent admiration.

‘My! it’s lovely,’ she murmured at last. She looked down at the polished floor and was painfully reminded of herself.

‘I hope I’m not bringing in a lot of mess from the wood.’ She lifted her feet with the shy awkwardness of a child, then stood very still, afraid of showering leaves or twigs.

In her eagerness to make the mother feel at ease, Mary began to open cupboard doors, turn back rugs, draw curtains, to show off their colour and design. She brought out everything that might give the mother pleasure. Taking her into the kitchen, she introduced her to Mrs Legatt, who was wiping over the enamel of the stove. Mrs Legatt gave Jim’s mother one of her strange far-away looks and continued to wipe. The mother bobbed her head and said, ‘My!’ once again. She had fallen in love with the fitted kitchen cupboard and glanced back at it as Mary led her to the foot of the stairs.

In the workroom Mary moved the picture forward, hiding her head behind it so that she might miss the mother’s first expression.

‘It’s him all right,’ she heard her say with a sort of dreamy love that seemed at that moment more for the picture than the man. Mary looked round the picture and saw that the mother’s eyes were glowing; her smile held up her cheeks in firm little cushions.

‘I want to do a lot more yet, if Jim will come again,’ Mary said, heartened by the mother’s pleasure.

‘But they’ve got to start a new job tomorrow!’ the woman exclaimed. ‘Dad got word of it last night. It’s a big job in Wiltshire and he doesn’t want to miss it; that’s why I’ve come to help clear up.

She looked at Mary with real concern.

‘How’ll you get your picture finished now?’

‘But there are lots of pines still standing,’ Mary said, trying to cover her dismay.

‘Not good straight ones; there’re only four or five of them, I should say. If Dad and Jim work hard, they’ll get them done all right.’

‘You don’t think they’ll want to come back after this new job?’

‘No, Dad likes to finish things up clean and have done with them.’

Mary stopped herself from further silly questioning or hoping. She ought to have known that they were going; perhaps she really had known. Otherwise why had she come into the wood so early? Why had her eyes followed Jim’s back as though she were never to see him again?

‘Well, I’ll have to try and finish it without him,’ she said with mechanical brightness; ‘it doesn’t matter, even if I do spoil it.’

‘You won’t spoil it!’ pleaded the mother. ‘I like it so much I’d want to buy it now, if I had enough money and knew what you’d be asking.’

Her hand went to her pocket.

‘Oh! no, you must have it,’ said Mary, eager only to check her movement; ‘that is,’ she added more thoughtfully, ‘if Jim doesn’t want it himself. I suppose he ought to be asked first.’

‘They haven’t got a proper home yet; they’re living with us.’ ‘Jim is married then?’ said Mary, feeling rather bewildered.

‘Oh, yes, didn’t he tell you that?’

‘Perhaps he did just mention it; I wasn’t sure if he was serious.’

‘He’s a funny lad; sometimes he’ll tell you anything, other times he’s like an oyster. Yes, he’s married all right; but I’m afraid she’s not the right woman for him. I think he knows it too now, but he won’t hardly talk to me for knowing it first, so I can’t tell properly any more what’s going on in his mind.’

‘Why isn’t she the right woman?’ Mary asked.

‘Because she’s no good,’ snapped the mother, her round sweetnatured face stiffening into ugliness. ‘But what am I thinking of?’ she added in her old gentle voice: ‘I must get back to that fire of mine at once.’

She looked at Mary wistfully.

‘I’ll come with you and help,’ Mary volunteered.

‘Oh, would you? But you mustn’t mess your clothes up helping. You just sit by the fire and talk to me. I would like that.’

The mother’s eyes went to the picture for one last look. She gathered courage to mention it again.

‘And—and you’ll really let me have Jim’s picture?’

‘Yes, if you like it.’

‘Oh, it’s lovely, lovely.’

The woman made a little movement as if to take the picture with her.

‘I’ve just got to do a little more, then when it’s dry, I’ll send it to you,’ Mary said.

‘Thank you ever so. I expect Jim told you where we live, but I’ve got it all written down here on an envelope from my sister in Sheffield, so shall I leave you that for safety?’

The woman pulled a dirty crumpled envelope from her pocket and passed it to Mary.

Mary took it smilingly but with unseeing eyes, not wanting to know either Jim’s surname or his address. Still keeping her eyes from it, she put it in a drawer.

They went out into the wood again.

Soon after Mary was settled on a log near the fire, the woman returned to the subject of Jim’s wife.

‘She had another fellow before, you know; but he went overseas. That’s why she married Jim. I think maybe the baby isn’t Jim’s at all; she had it very soon. Jim’s so soft-hearted he’d never let on though.’

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ asked Mary, trying to draw the woman from the mother to the child.

‘Well, it’s a boy, but you know, it’s not right.’

‘How “not right”?’

Mary waited, dreading the answer; she could see that the mother wanted to sink down and enjoy the depths of human trouble with her.

‘Not right in its head. It can’t even sit up properly yet; it just lies back and dribbles. And now the doctor says it won’t get any better and’ll never learn to talk; so she’s trying to get a London place to take it. She doesn’t seem to care; and I think it’s all her fault. She wouldn’t feed it you know, though the doctor said she should, and she had lots of milk. She had one of those pumps. She only thinks about herself, having a good time. She’s no good.’

Mary, sitting on her log, not allowed to help because of her clothes, had nothing to take her mind from the hideous picture of a breast pump, a whorish wife and an idiot baby. The mother’s sanity and worth counted for nothing now; they were destroyed by her hate.

The mother had stopped working and come close to her; she was bending low, looking into her eyes with painful earnestness.

‘I have a little girl that isn’t quite right too, you know. Did Jim tell you?’

Mary shook her head, unwilling to speak. The hurt reluctant look deepened in the mother’s eyes.

‘But it wasn’t my fault. She has the epilepsy. Nobody can blame me.’

The mother’s voice rose on the last words; she stared into the wood angrily, as though defying the trees and crumpled bushes to contradict her.

‘Once a month we go to visit her. We can’t have her at home because she might cut herself bad, or fall in the fire when nobody’s near. Oh, it’s terrible, her poor face and arms! All little cuts and scars. You see, when the fit’s on her, she just falls down anywhere; she doesn’t know anything till it’s over. It’s a terrible thing, terrible.’

Mary’s picture changed to a young girl falling. There she lay on the rough bricks, mad parrot screeches bursting through the spittle bubbles on her lips, her whole body shaken with violent tremors. For some reason Mary was suddenly reminded of that other scene of horror she had imagined, so long ago, last week, when she saw the glimmering white base of a pine tree and turned it into a giant’s neck left to bleed in silence after the clamour of his execution.

But the mother was still looking at her intently; there was more to come. Mary made a primitive little gesture of refusal, but it passed unnoticed.

‘D’you think they’re good to them in those hospitals? Do they treat them all right?’

The voice was urgent, entreating, uncertain; the mother was willing to be blind if she could but be blind enough.

‘I don’t know about them,’ Mary said palely, drained of all feeling, tired to weakness, only anxious now for some chance to get away.

‘Sometimes when we go to see her she’s very good, sometimes not so good. She makes a great noise; I wonder if they get angry—maybe slap her perhaps.’

‘I don’t know,’ Mary repeated desperately. She watched the bulging padded woman heap on more branches. Sizzling, whipping flames and greedy flashes were now darting through the pile. They were like lizards made of lightning. They swallowed up the black skeleton fingers and the horny polished rhododendron scales until grey robes of smoke poured from the heart. It was as if some ragged emperor imprisoned in there had shaken out the endless mole velvet of his train.

The woman did not seem to be truly aware of the flames. She fed them with no expression on her face. The hate was gone, the shame and anxiety, even the wish to keep Mary with her. The eyes were two raisins in a smooth steamed pudding.

‘I am dressed in blankness too,’ Mary thought, seeing herself on the log, her hair hanging down, her mouth set, her hands in her lap. ‘If I could escape now!’

She jumped to her feet, then stood, uncertain of her resolution to run away so rudely.

‘Oh, you don’t have to go!’ the woman exclaimed. ‘It’s a treat for me to have someone like you to talk to. I get a bit lonely with only the men all day. I’d like to show you the letter from my sister in Sheffield. Poor thing! She’s had a terrible time; her husband fell off a ladder and she’s been up days and nights waiting for the worst; but—’

‘I must go,’ Mary broke in; ‘I’ve left everything at home. I haven’t even dressed properly.’

The matter-of-fact excuse came out grotesquely, all the words too sharp and thin. She began to walk rapidly away, confirmed in her first purpose by the appeal in the mother’s eyes. She would not stay, she would not give comfort, she would not be kind and gentle; she was filled with her own trouble. She would take it into the heart of the wood where she could pour it out alone.

The mother was calling after her; she flapped her hand shamefacedly, half said goodbye and quickened her pace. She thought of the mother now as a plump Bologna sausage fitted disgustingly into a tightly quilted bag; her little woollen hat was the protruding navel at one end. ‘Children call them belly-buttons,’ she mused; ‘that’s what it is, a belly-button on a sausage.’

In her agitation she was walking nearer and nearer to Jim and his father; she looked up and saw Jim’s naked back twinkling between the pink-brown trunks only a few yards away. It rose and fell as he hacked with his glittering axe. The father was bending solemnly examining the teeth of the double saw. The children scurried in all directions, fighting for Jim’s flying chips.

She wanted to slip past them all without a word, but one of the children called out, and the father looked up.

‘Hullo! You in a hurry?’ he teased.

She never answered. She saw Jim pause and look over his shoulders; he wore the smouldering sullen look she had seen first. It was as if she had never known him. He was the stranger in the wood again. She began to run.

Late that afternoon she was still in the wood, lying now where she had tripped over a root; it had seemed so much more comfortable not to get up and force on through the bushes. She had rolled into a little hollow filled with pine needles, and the sun stroked her back; she had the pine scent close to her nose. Beyond this far ridge, where few people came, the trains shunted and whistled in the little country slum that had grown up round the station. They were great crooning beasts, hissing and soothing her to sleep.…

A child crawled through a tunnel made by dogs and appeared in the little opening. In its journey on hands and knees it had found a dead thrush with sodden feathers. It clambered to its feet and held the bird up, showing no horror at the sight and smell of death. Slowly it began to twist and arabesque round Mary, sometimes pointing at her with the bird, sometimes sweeping it up above its head and running absurdly, breaking its own solemn rhythm. Under its breath it was muttering and singing all the time.

The blue combination suit was dirtier than ever now. There were thick cakes of mud on the knees. The child’s hands were caked too, and a sort of crust had collected at the sides of its mouth where the bubbles broke.

When at last it grew tired of its dance and lulling incantation, it stood still and looked about it for a moment; then very gently it laid the dead thrush in the soft nest of Mary’s outspread hair.

She found it there, when she awoke.