The Book of Fires. Jane Borodale

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      ‘You can only taunt a man’s cock,’ he mutters thickly, ‘for so long.’ And with that he leaves me there, and takes his empty jug back to the barrel for more. Though he has his back to me I can hear his coarse bellowing laughter even as I am doubled up and retching on to the damp grass outside the barn door.

      An owl hoots.

      ‘Oh, God,’ I say beneath my breath, ‘what have I done?’ There is a shuffle of footsteps and Mrs Peart the cordwainer’s wife is looming over me. Her shape casts a long, flickering shadow on to the path, on to the shifting fog out there, with the firelight behind her.

      ‘Don’t drink so swift,’ she croaks in sympathy, when she sees who it is. She must have heard me whimpering. Mrs Peart who always smells as if she were stuffed entirely full of loose tobacco, and with her fingers as yellowed as parsnips.

      ‘It’s a fearsome brew this year they have, fearsome strong,’ she says, staring out at the night. ‘It will have done some men a deal of damage come a few hours’ time.’ She puts her pipe back in the gap between her teeth to go on smoking. ‘Let’s pray that nobody sets hisself on fire this year at least,’ she says, and gives a dirty chuckle. ‘After all, Mr Tuke still has those scars.’ She pats my shoulder a little in mindful, unsteady friendliness and then she ambles back into the revelry.

      ‘What shall I do?’ I whisper when she is gone, but the night says nothing. There is just the fog out there, shifting its uneasy formless bulk about, obscuring any sight of stars.

      At the door of the barn I hesitate and turn around. I cannot see John Glincy now. My mother is there, through the smoke on the other side of the barn, her foot tapping in time with the drum. There is a warm smell of sweat and new rushes on the floor and the smoulder of wood on the fire, which has settled into a steady blaze, large branches cut and dragged down from the copse where the beeches fell in the great storm. Hester is lying awake across her lap, her little legs kicking at the air. I cannot see my mother’s face; there are people in front of her. As I turn away a huge burst of laughter comes out of their mouths like a red explosion. It rings in my ears as I hurry away, the sudden quiet and the cold outside making me deaf for a moment like a clamp over the ears. Nothing feels right.

      The flares along the misty path outside have burnt down almost to the quick. I step back along the dark lane, my hand up before my face, and I think my trouble over; the twist and tangle of my life like a wattle fence, holding itself together with to-ing and fro-ing, and yet having some order in a certain direction, and making a boundary between one state and another. And somehow it helps to think of my troubles interwoven like this. As I walk homeward, I become quite clear in the resolve I’ve made.

      At the empty house I tie some things inside a piece of oilcloth, in haste lest someone should have followed me home. The house feels desolate and fixed suddenly in time, with things strewn about just as we left them, like an ordinary day. I cannot choose this moment to depart, of course, as all of drunken Washington would be engaged in searching for me as soon as my absence from the cottage were discovered. They would think me murdered or ravaged, or both. I must wait until the break of morning and slip out then. I carry the bundle in readiness out of the house, taking it a short way down the lane through the fog. The fog is wet and penetrating everything. The entrance to an empty field looms up suddenly upon my left, and I push the bundle under the hedge behind the gate-post. If I didn’t feel so sad and muddled it would be almost ridiculous, hiding my belongings under a bush like a vagrant or a criminal.

      ‘I am going to London,’ I say into the mist, to try my idea out. My voice is like the voice of someone else, it sounds thin and flat in the dark field. This is how felons feel, I remind myself. They feel small and lonely, as they should. I have stolen money from a corpse. The short tubes of stubble crunch under my soles. I stand still, with my hand to the gate-post for a long time and breathe in the cold smell of night in the cropped field, hear the small sounds of night creatures finding their way along the new hedgerow. There is a dripping as the mist collects in droplets on the underside of things; on the limbs of trees, on twigs and leaves. Each drop gathers water slowly to itself, becomes fat with heaviness, then falls pat on to the dead leaves below. I find this dripping strangely comforting, as though it were the noise of the earth nourishing itself. As I turn back and step out blindly to the lane, the cry of a wood owl quavers out of the copse behind me.

      That night I hardly sleep for fear of waking late, or for fear of shouting something in my sleep. The straw ticking is lumpy beneath me and I turn and turn, trying to lie easily. Once the others have come home, filling the air with the reek of stale beer breath even when their chatter has ceased, I turn my face to the wall. And then I dream horrible dreams about my shape; my body going thin and stretched out for miles and miles across a brightly lit landscape, till I am nothing but an empty skin. Then I dream I am solid once more and curled under one of the ancient grassy mounds at the top of the hill, piles of flinty soil pressing me flat into the darkness, growing dry as the old bones the Wiston hounds uncovered there and dragged about, two years ago, after a week of strong rain had weakened the tamp of the soil and caused a collapse on the south side of the barrow that is exposed to the wind from the sea.

      Of course when I wake I am none of these things.

      Already a pale quantity of light has begun to seep through the patterned calico hung across the casement; a piece of the dress my mother wore at my uncle’s wedding when I was tiny. I did not mean to sleep so long. There is a sour smell in the room as I rise, take up my cloak and boots and pick my way across the creaking boards. I’m sure the anxious hammering my heart is making must be loud enough to wake them all. I pull the leather strap and open the door on to the stairs.

      Down in the kitchen my father is asleep in a sideways position on the settle with his boots still on and the hem of his overcoat pushing ashes on the hearth into a ridge. His head is thrown backwards and his mouth has dropped open, and a crackling, wet breath is rising out of it slowly into the silence of the room. I turn my eyes away as I creep past him in an agony of caution, and my feet in their woollen stockings make no sound at all on the smooth clay floor. My mother turns over in bed in the back chamber, and I see that Hester begins to stir and suck at her fist in the truckle bed beside her. I dare not cross the room to kiss her white face quiet, and her dark eyes watch me to the door.

      I touch my stays where the coins are. Out here the fog has weakened and gone and the chill air is thin and rushing to my head. I am dizzy with escape, with stealing away. With an effort I do not run as I walk down the short path and turn out on to the lane. Above me the stars are fading pinpricks in the blue sky. I can just make out that the Plough points to the North Star, as it always does. I think of the city of London, vast to the north over the next line of Downs. The sky is huge, and when I look back over my shoulder I see the house looms pale behind me in the early light.

      I look back again, and my heart almost stops when I see a glimmer of movement at an upstairs window.

      I wait for the casement to be flung open and someone to cry out, ‘Agnes! Where are you going? Get back this minute!’ But there is nothing but stillness. It was a trick of the light or the dark, reflected. Nobody knows I am gone and I feel bleak with sadness as I turn away again between the dark passage of the hedges. The rutted lane makes me stumble.

      I am ashamed. How Lil will sob and sob when she finds that I am gone, and then she will rage at me for weeks and then she will slowly forget. When I pull my bundle out from under the elder it is sopping with dew from the night, and it makes a cold wet patch on the front of my clothes.

      No smoke rises from the huddle of dwellings around the green, only from Mr Reekes the baker’s chimney at the end of the village. His smoke is white and curling, spooling upwards towards the dwindling stars as though his morning fire were freshly lit. I cannot smell the baking of loaves, the hour is too early even for that. СКАЧАТЬ