The Reconciliation

The train pulls away, gathers speed and disappears from view,
leaving her on the platform. She looks around at the greenery: trees
hanging still over the old slate-roofed station building; ferns growing
in clumps along the base of the white wooden fence. The sign saying
"Wythall". There is no sound except the hiss of wind through leaves and
grass in the fields around. Helen gives her ticket to the uniformed
inspector waiting at the barrier, walks through the empty ticket office
and out into the road.

The London train - one of only two available that day - got her in
earlier than she would have liked. She had hoped to get in late
afternoon, imagining a scene unfolding at dusk: the approach, the
explanation, the reconciliation. Maybe better this way, she thinks:
more time to look around before going up to the house and less time to
sit in London, stewing, having second thoughts. The time for second
thoughts has passed.

Now, as she stands looking along the lane washed with late August sun,
she breathes the air again, memories flipping through her mind like
pages of an old photo album. She knows what she has to do: atone for
her mistake; prove her instincts right and her mother's wrong. Recover
lost years. She hesitates for a moment before shouldering her bag and
starting up the lane to the village.

Little has changed: grass on the village green glows vivid emerald in
sunlight; cottages huddle behind hedgerows; a dog, dusty brown, lifts
its head to stare briefly from the shade of the war memorial as she
passes. Wythall lies locked in its summer reverie - just as it was when
she packed and hurried to the station five years ago. Maybe Wythall
hasn't changed, she thinks, but I have. Outside, her tangled mop of
hair has given way to a shaped bob that emphasises the order of her
face: sharp cheekbones, eyes almost feline, symmetry. She straightens
and walks faster; the girl in her is long gone. Now, without thinking
of her destination, she passes the green, the Duke's Head, the granite
trough trickling water down its mossy flank, and walks towards St.
Mary's. She's got time.

***

Helen first came to Wythall five summers before, swapping London's
disjointed throb for the measured calm of a dozing Sussex
village.

'Well, all sorts of distractions, Mum,' she'd said, her voicing rising.
'You just don't know what it's like.'

'Christ, Helen!' Her mother folded her arms into an uncompromising
knot. 'You're nearly thirty, for Christ's sake! Look how you've flitted
like a bird from one thing to the next,' she'd said. 'You just need to
calm down. Forget about...' She wiped her nose quickly with a balled
tissue. 'Forget about men. Forget about your? projects. Find something
and stick with it.'

Jesus, thought Helen, that again. She stood tight-lipped, staring at
her feet on the kitchen tiles and took a deep breath, letting the words
wash over her. Her writing, Mum meant, of course. Her love of
literature - and her writing. She herself always felt a bit
self-conscious about it; blokes in the pub recoiling momentarily from
their pints: 'a writer?' wide-eyed, as though she had said "trapeze
artist" or something, 'Blimey!' But she had always loved it. Wuthering
Heights, Emma - they were all in her now, in her mind, in her writing.
Jane Eyre. Her mother always called it a pipedream; a romantic folly.
She should get a job. Or a husband. And there again - again - her
mother had turned out right - about James. 'Flaky,' she'd said when
she'd first met him, shaking her head as they stood behind the door,
his steps receding down the garden path. He hadn't shaken her hand
quite right, or hadn't looked her fully in the eye. Or he'd forgotten
to bring bloody flowers. And Mum had been right, in the end. Of course.
Helen recognised he was part of the reason she was leaving: running
away from him and the part of herself that was attracted to men like
him. Running from that, but to what?

Margaret Prentice was a friend of Helen's mother who had offered to put
her up in the village while she found somewhere more permanent, 'or
came back home. Bloody grew up?' her mother had said under her breath,
'?but thanks, Margaret. Really.' Margaret looked at her new arrival as
they sat in her kitchen. Pretty, she thought, in a slightly little way:
shortish hair black against pale skin, a little pinched look around the
mouth like a kitten. 'I don't know. It's terribly quiet here,' she said
to Helen, pouring hot water into a giant ceramic teapot. 'I can't
imagine what you're wanting to do exactly. All the young people have
gone up to London now.'

'I know,' Helen nodded. 'That's why I'm here, really. For the
quiet.'

Within a few days she had found the old Lodge, a rundown one-bedroom
building in sandstone, crouching in the shadow of The Grange - the
once-grand house to which the Lodge had been attached, years ago,
before all the land was sold off.

She threw herself into renovating. Junk-filled rooms were cleared;
broken old furniture, newspapers and clothes dumped outside and carted
away; mouldy carpets stripped, cut, rolled up and left by the bins,
bound with twine. Helen yanked paper-dry bracken from the overgrown
garden and piled it crackling on a bonfire. She paused to catch her
breath and push her hair behind her ears. Hands on hips, she surveyed
her work as smoke curled, bulked and lifted into the air. Only when
everything was done, cleaned and ordered did she open her notebook and
sit down to write.

In the small, self-contained tranquillity of her new life, she
punctuated her days with walks along empty lanes around the village.
She would turn off the narrow road winding up to Apsley, and cut
through fields of stubble to enter a dark tunnel of forest, rich pine
smells hovering over the mottled floor, needles crunching underfoot,
climbing higher and higher to burst into a dazzling world of light and
clouds at the top. The view took in the sweep of the Downs encompassing
Wythall, Apsley and half a dozen other villages buried in trees; nests
of green punctured by grey church spires. There was no sound, save the
chiming of a distant church bell, the whine of an occasional jet high
overhead, winking silver in the sun as it started its descent into
Gatwick, and the rush of wind through trees. Helen felt at peace.

St. Mary's stood, strange and separate from the village, half-hidden -
as though ashamed of its face - behind a bank of cypresses, by the
crumbling walls of the old rectory. She stopped at the low porch. A
faded paper notice said the church was 'deconsecrated.' Helen tried to
make out the time on a slate sundial overhead - fugit irreparabile
tempus chiselled on its face - but clouds blurred the shadow. She
turned the iron ring on the studded oak door and stepped into the damp
sandstone cool inside.

***

Now, five years on, St. Mary's looks unchanged. Helen turns slowly on
her heel as she looks up at the roof, oak ribs arching overhead, black
against a snowy wash behind. Pillars of Bath stone; simple oak pews
with oxblood cushions, cracked with age; brass plaques hazed through
neglect; burgundy carpet - all sit monumental and eternal in the chill
air in front of the empty altar. Underfoot, gravestones worn to a waxy
sheen by the passage of feet and time; forgotten local men and women
now erased. There is the font with its heavy wooden cover and lock,
'there to prevent locals stealing holy water and using it for darker
purposes' she remembers him saying, eyes wide in feigned awe. She runs
a finger along the dusty pattern of intersecting arches carved in
soapstone and she senses him for the first time; his presence a weight
in the air - and she sees that she must do this. No one understood. She
even tried to explain to Mum that this was her last chance at
happiness, and why. But how would Mum understand? Her mother who had
lived thirty years cowering from Helen's monstrous father, how could
she understand about happiness? Helen feels the mass of certainty and
sits down on a pew.

***

Once over the novelty of a new town, Helen came to feel more at home,
and - despite herself - made an effort to get to know some of the local
ladies, mainly through Margaret's introductions. And the ladies in turn
overcame their natural wariness around outsiders - and a bohemian
outsider at that - and came to see her as charming, confident,
different. Couldn't do any harm, either. 'Not with so many bachelor
farmers around here,' she said later to Helen, with an exaggerated
wink. Helen looked away.

Ian Murray sought her out at the Prentices' garden party. Margaret had
forewarned her, 'If he likes you, be careful. He's got form.' Form
enough, Helen learnt, to break up his own marriage and - it was said -
one or two others besides.

'A writer in our midst,' he said, approaching her in the garden, a
glass of wine in each hand. 'I've heard about you.' He looked at her,
his gaze half questioning, half ironic. She said she'd heard about him,
too. He raised his eyebrows and pulled a face and they both laughed.
She knew he lived up at The Grange, among a ramshackle assortment of
outbuildings, separated from his wife - 'poisonous Penny,' Margaret had
said with a disapproving look - who had moved to Apsley. Not bloody far
enough, Margaret had muttered.

They drank wine and he talked about village life, 'Such as it is.'
Helen could see he had something about him. He was over forty, sandy
brown hair pressed down reluctantly for the occasion, greying at the
sides. He folded his long frame into a wicker chair and spent the
afternoon shifting his legs from one unsuccessful angle to the next,
hands darting about as he made his points. She looked and
listened.

'Margaret is the soul of the village. Its heart too,' he said, looking
across at their hostess as he talked. 'A real force of nature in the
parish.' Helen would do well to spend time with her. Talking, he said,
of the parish (later she was struck by how he had no qualms about
asking such a thing of a virtual stranger) if Helen could devote any
time, any time at all, to helping out with his history of the parish
church - St. Mary's - he would be most grateful. 'A lasting record,' he
said. 'Something permanent, before it's all crumbled and lost.'

In the dying days of that summer, she helped him with the church
records, scribbling into the night, hunched over papers, drinking tea
and logging details of St. Mary's; the exterior, interior detail,
windows. While she resented slightly the time lost to her and her work,
she enjoyed her days with him; the steadiness and confidence he exuded,
his slightly awkward, old-fashioned manner. She wondered if this
steadiness was what her mother had in mind for her; she wondered if it
was steadiness at all.

The trees fell bare; knots of empty nests black in the branches against
the grey evening sky. Helen buried herself in the job, yet found
herself distracted: by the play of veins and tendons on the back of his
hands on the table between them; by his habit of leaning on an elbow to
write, fingers splayed in his hair. Her stomach turned when they
accidentally touched. And when eventually he held her forearms and
pushed her against the table and breathed, 'Helen' in her ear, she felt
something give way inside, a tiny knot untied.

Helen changed, and was happy to change. She felt herself take on the
rhythms of the country. She rose in the wintry dark, her mind fresh and
clear, at first setting down thoughts in an unstructured form but then,
slowly, feeling the bones of a story start to knit into shape. Ian was
in London most weeks, and in any case, he insisted - his hand on her
arm - they had to be very discreet. St. Mary's became their favoured
rendezvous, since both had a reason to be there and no one else
did.

The sideways stares in the Post Office, the quick dry glances
half-nodded in the street, she ignored them all and focussed instead on
the different self she saw in the mirror; for the first time in her
life she was not simply living for the moment and it showed - to her,
at least. Ian seemed to hold out a future for her: he believed in her
and she believed in him - in a way that she had never believed in
James. That - James - had been delusion, she saw that now. She felt a
sheet of time stretching out ahead of her, until she woke one day with
a rolling queasiness and a taste of metal on her tongue. She borrowed
Margaret's car and drove to a chemist in Hove. She did the test the
following morning, peering in the half-light. Two red dots on the
indicator stared back at her.

Gazing at the cold fireplace for hours, Helen sat curled in an
armchair, her jumper stretched over her knees. Thoughts rolled through
her mind like pebbles. She remembered Emily Watts who had been smuggled
out of school - pregnant, they said, and sent to Coventry. From
nowhere, a memory came to her: of her finding a bird's egg cracked open
in the road under a tree, and examining the tiny corpse with a stick:
its outsized pink head and blind little eyes like blood blisters;
yellow beak like plastic. She prodded it and its head rolled on its
spindly neck. And she remembered the sneer on James's face as he had
told her that - Yes, he had thought about it - and No, she couldn't
move in - and guess what? it was over between them anyway. She couldn't
go through that again. She had no roots in Wythall, just a dream. A
pipedream.

She stood, straightened her jumper and caught up bundles of paper from
the table - diagrams, notes, sketches, everything - and crushed them
into the empty grate. Leaning forward, she struck a match, then paused
and thought and watched the flame dwindle in her fingers and die.
She turned and started up the stairs. In ten minutes she was on her way
to the station.

***

Walking towards The Grange for the first time in years, Helen wonders
how it will have changed. She sees the house again in her mind, its
ramshackle grey bulk, empty windows staring across at trees. She
imagines his face at the door, stunned at first, when she rings the
bell. Shock, then relief. Joy. Tears.

Pausing at the gate, she rehearses her lines again in her head.

'I wanted to say I was sorry,' or

'I wanted you to know you've got a beautiful daughter.'

Her feet rasp on gravel and she feels her pulse in her head. She moves
to the silent grass verge, and slows as she approaches the house, front
porch and window frames freshly white. She hears voices: a child's cry
over to her left. Helen stops and crosses the drive, towards the hidden
orchard. Standing on tiptoe to look over the hedge, she sees him. He is
kneeling on a tartan blanket talking softly to a small boy - three,
four years old? - with his arms straight on the child's shoulders. The
boy - barefoot and in shorts, his head bowed as though in shame - is
nodding as his father speaks, without looking up at him. A younger girl
is sitting crying straight-legged on the grass behind him, her mother
stooping to wipe tears from her face. Helen whispers No. Poisonous
Penny.

Helen knows then. All she wants is this: the quiet dropping of the
light in a garden in summer; midges whirling in last patches of sun;
tired children moving towards bed; and the balance of a man and a
woman. For a moment she stands frozen by the hedge as the images
shimmer in front of her eyes. She looks at the family again, and at
their house standing silently behind her. She turns back along the
drive and starts walking towards the station.

The End