The Dust That Falls from Dreams (27 page)

O
ut by the side of the house, on a freezing day, the Reverend Captain Fairhead, dressed in his officer’s warm, was watching with interest as two dozen bags of coal were borne from Freemantle’s large cart by four men who were themselves as black as the coal that they carried, as were the enormous dray horses which stamped and snorted in the shafts, their breath hanging like plumes of smoke in the frozen air. The coal dust had been worn and compressed into the coalmen’s leather aprons and jerkins, their caps, the felt of their donkey jackets, and into the skin of their hands and faces. Shining and gleaming, the coalmen were like creatures from another universe. Not for the first time, Fairhead felt a kind of gratitude that he had been born to a lighter fate.

He bowed his head for a second, though, when he remembered how backbreaking it had been to be at one end of a stretcher, struggling through mire, or attempting to carry a wounded man over one’s shoulders. ‘I have something in common with them after all,’ he thought. Fairhead remembered how intense physical labour can keep you more than warm on an icy day. He saw how much they enjoyed tipping the coal down the chute into the cellar. They always stood for a second and watched it go. It went down with a wonderful rumble on the wooden boards, and arrived at the bottom with a satisfying soft crash. He wondered what kind of life the coalmen could have at home. Perhaps they left their clothes at the door, stepped naked into their houses, and stood in a tub while their wives went back and forth with jugs of hot water. Perhaps they spent their evenings and Sundays as white as the lamb.

Fairhead became aware of someone standing beside him, and he turned his head. ‘I love it when the coal comes,’ said Rosie. ‘When you’re inside the house you don’t expect it, and when it starts, my first thought is “Oh no, it’s an earthquake!” ’

‘I was thinking about the lives of these people, these coalmen,’ said Fairhead. ‘I was trying to imagine it.’

‘I often look at people with what seem to be intolerable lives, and then I can’t help but notice that they’re really quite happy. Just as happy as us, anyway.’

‘Are you happy, Rosie? I can’t help noticing that you and Daniel have become constant companions. Moving pictures, skating, art exhibitions, smoking concerts, dancing…Do we have grounds for hope?’

‘Hope?’

‘Come, Rosie, I’m sure you catch my drift.’

‘Well, I wanted to ask you about it. I want your opinion. As a man of God. Shall we go inside? It’s perishing.’

They gave up their coats to Millicent, and sat either side of the drawing-room fire, shivering now that they were warming up a little.

Rosie said, ‘I won’t beat about the bush. The thing is…Daniel has asked me to marry him. Several times. He is very insistent.’

‘I take it from what you say that you haven’t accepted him?’

‘No. Not…I’m very doubtful. I’m in two minds. It’s not like you and Sophie…’

‘But you do get on terribly well. Let’s come straight to the point, shall we? Do you love him enough to marry him?’

Rosie hung her head. ‘This is what I don’t know.’

Fairhead leaned forward, pressing his fingertips together. ‘Look, Rosie, I don’t have any experience to speak of. But one thing I do suspect is that you should not marry someone if you are not dedicated to their happiness rather than your own. Are you willing to dedicate yourself to his happiness? And are you sure that he will be more interested in your happiness than in his own?’

‘I’m certain he would be a good husband,’ said Rosie sincerely, ‘and that’s what makes it so tempting. But I do know myself. I might very well say that I will always put his happiness before mine, but will I, when it comes down to it? I don’t trust myself, the way I would have done with Ash.’

Fairhead nodded, and said, ‘Go on.’

‘The thing is, I had thought of him as my husband since I was
about, what? About twelve years old? We got engaged with a curtain ring. I promised I’d love him forever, even beyond death, and there’d never be anyone else, and, you know, how can I put it? It feels as though my heart is closed, and will always be closed. And there’s another thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘You know how important my faith is to me?’

‘How could I not? It puts mine to shame, in every way.’

‘Well, Daniel has no faith.’

‘He doesn’t not have faith. I mean, he’s an agnostic, not an atheist. He has perfectly defensible philosophical doubts. It would be strange not to, after such a terrible war. I’ve had some very interesting conversations with him.’

‘I don’t think I could live with someone who doesn’t share my faith.’

‘Did Ashbridge have faith like yours?’

Rosie blushed and looked a little horrified. At length she admitted, ‘I honestly don’t know. We never really talked about it much. He called it my “weakness”, and teased me about it. And back then, before the war, it wasn’t so important. We lived in a nice golden cocoon, didn’t we?’

‘Mmm, yes, it was lovely being Edwardian,’ said Fairhead. ‘That was our little golden age.’ He stood and looked down at her sympathetically. He picked the poker out of its stand and rattled at the coals in the grate. ‘Listen, my dear, you should not count very much on my advice. My certainties are really very small, when it comes down to it. But first of all come and look at the Bible with me, will you?’

They went into the morning room, and Fairhead turned to the Book of Romans. He loved the smell of the expensive slightly damp paper, and the elaborate red-and-gold illuminated lettering at the beginnings of the chapters.

‘Here it is,’ he said, pointing with his forefinger. ‘Read that.’

Rosie read: ‘ “For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.” ’

She took this in, and then turned to look at him. ‘But I promised.’

‘Knowing him as I did, I’m prepared to bet that he told you to find happiness with another if he was killed.’

‘Yes, I think he did,’ confessed Rosie, ‘but I didn’t want to hear it, and now I think that maybe I didn’t. What I remember is the promise to love beyond death, forever.’

‘But of course you can love him forever. I’m certain you will. But you can’t love him as a husband when he’s dead. You know, life isn’t a romantic poem, Rosie. You’re alive here. We believe he is alive somewhere else. But this is where you must live.

‘And I must tell you what St John the Divine said. He said that God is love. He said that therefore anyone who loves is of God.

‘Now, Daniel loves his mother. He loves animals and children. When we go down to the Tarn he throws sticks for dogs he’s never met before, and he goes down on his knees to play clapping games with little ones, and lets them ride on his back while he pretends to be a horse. He loves your sisters, and Gaskell too, that’s plain. He loves your father. He loves his friends and his dead comrades, and he still loves his brothers and his father who died so long ago. He adores you, Rosie, it’s absolutely obvious, and it isn’t very much distempered by commonplace desire, as far as I can see. He doesn’t importune you, does he? Rosie, a man who loves so much and so liberally may not know God. But Daniel is of God. And if I were you I’d talk it over with Ottilie. She is much the wisest of us all, don’t you think?’

O
n a cold and windy day in late winter, not long after Rosie’s conversation with Fairhead, she and Daniel, muffled up in heavy coats and scarves, sat on a bench and looked out over the water. ‘Why do coots have white foreheads?’ asked Rosie.

‘Because they hope to join the Band of the Royal Marines,’ said Daniel. ‘And I have a question: why are moorhens called “moorhens” when they don’t live in moorland, and they aren’t hens?’

‘They got thrown off the moorlands at the time of the enclosures,’ said Rosie. ‘By wicked landlords.’

‘That must be it. What shall we do on Saturday evening?’

‘Let’s go and see the new Charlie Chaplin. Mama went to see it and hated it. She didn’t think it was funny at all, so I expect it’s hilarious. And on Sunday there’s a church parade of Boy Scouts going down Court Road, so I’m going to turn out and be appreciative. I expect you’ll be going to your mother’s on Sunday, won’t you?’

‘Yes, that’s the plan, but do let’s see the Chaplin on Saturday. You know, I never did join the Boy Scouts. I wanted to at first, because I always longed for a sheath knife. Then I got one anyway, so there was no longer any point. I could make dens and camps and cook up tins of beans any time I wanted, with Archie. Once we made a walkway that connected about six trees, fifteen feet up. I did have a copy of the Scouts’ Manual. It fell to bits from so much reading.’

‘It’s a pity the Pals got broken up, isn’t it?’ said Rosie. ‘Such a shame that your father died, and you had to move. It went very quiet after you and Archie left. No one flying over the wall any more like Sunny Jim, and staging fights with sticks, and making bows and arrows. It was such a lovely childhood, all of us in our little false paradise.’

‘It wasn’t false! That was real, and it all did happen. And you still had the Pendennis boys after we left.’

‘I know. But Ottilie did so love Archie, didn’t she? And I was terribly fond of you.’

‘Ash was the one, though.’

‘Yes, Ash was the one.’

‘Such a shame.’

There was the sound of people crying out, not fifty yards away, and the two of them were jerked out of their reminiscences. It appeared that a woman was getting very agitated on the bankside, and calling out to someone in the water. It was not a person, however.

‘There seems to be a dog stuck out in the water,’ said Daniel.

‘Oh dear, perhaps we’d better see if we can help.’

Daniel rose and ran the fifty yards. He saw that there was indeed a large black retriever in the water, apparently unable to keep itself up, and beginning to drown. A woman of about thirty, accompanied by a small boy, was calling, ‘Sheba! Sheba! Come on, girl! Come on! Oh, come on. Please come on! Swim! Swim!’

The little boy was in tears, and the woman was clearly desperate. Daniel bent down and untied the laces of his shoes, kicking them off. Then he removed his coat, jacket, shirt and socks but left his vest. The others watched him in amazement and hope. He sat on the bank and lowered himself into the water, exclaimed at the coldness of it, and struck out. The dog was fifteen yards out, and by now struggling so feebly that Daniel was only just in time to stop it going under altogether. ‘Come on, girl,’ he said, grabbing its collar and trying to work out how he was going to get it back to the bankside. There was no bottom beneath his feet, and that it made it all immeasurably difficult. The dog struggled hopelessly, and Daniel managed to get it almost onto his chest so that he could swim backwards with it. He felt so weighed down by the water in his trousers that he wondered whether he would make it back himself. At last his feet found the bottom, and he felt its horrible slimy mud squelching up between his toes. He picked the dog up and waded to the edge, depositing it on the bank, and scrambling out himself by holding onto a wooden post that had been driven in near the edge. As he came out he was
overwhelmed by cold, made much worse by the sharp wind, and could not control either his shivering or the chattering of his teeth.

‘Thanks, mister,’ said the little boy. ‘I was only throwing sticks. She loves fetching sticks, doesn’t she, Mum?’

By now Rosie and Daniel were kneeling at the dog’s side. It was very old, perhaps fourteen, and its muzzle was entirely silvered over. It was breathing jerkily and its eyes were glazing over.

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Daniel, ‘but she’s obviously dying. I really don’t think there’s anything we can do.’

‘I’m sure she’s had a heart attack or a stroke,’ said Rosie. ‘They often happen at the same time. It might be both.’ She stood up and addressed the distraught woman. ‘I think you should just take the opportunity to say goodbye. While you still can.’

‘What can I do? What can I do? I can’t leave her here, can I? I can’t just leave a dead dog at the Tarn, can I?’

The little boy knelt by the dog, and put his arms around its neck, saying, ‘Don’t die, girl, don’t die, please don’t die.’

‘Do you live nearby,’ asked Daniel, ‘and do you have a garden?’

‘We’ve got a tiny one, and we’re in Chapel Farm Road.’

‘That’s very near,’ said Rosie.

‘Look,’ said Daniel, ‘I’ll go back to The Grampians. You wait here and see Sheba off. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ With this sat down on the grass and put his shoes and socks back on.

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Rosie.

‘I’m going to run back because that’s the only way I’m ever going to get warm again, and I’m coming back with the AC.’ He put his shirt on over his wet vest, rose up, still shivering, and sprinted away.

‘Gracious me,’ said the woman. ‘That’s…I mean…what can you say?…What a wonderful man, wouldn’t you think?’

‘Oh, he is wonderful,’ said Rosie. ‘He’d do anything for anyone. Let’s see what we can do for poor old Sheba.’ She took Daniel’s abandoned jacket and placed it gently over the sick animal. ‘She must be very cold.’

Twenty minutes later they heard the sound of the AC outside the Court Road gate, and Daniel reappeared, in dry clothes, carrying a rug. ‘Wretched AC!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thought it would
never start. Practically wrenched my shoulders off. How is Sheba?’

‘Almost gone,’ said Rosie.

‘So she is. Poor old thing. Let’s get her into the car. What if I put her on the back seat? Rosie can go in the back along with her, and you, madam, could perhaps sit in the front with your little boy on your knee?’

‘I want to go in the back with Sheba,’ protested the little boy.

‘Then you shall,’ said Rosie. ‘We’ll just have to squeeze.’

Daniel knelt down and scooped the retriever up in his arms, saying, ‘Rosie, my dear, could you go ahead and put the rug on the back seat? I’ll lay her down on it, and we’ll wrap her up.’

Rosie sat in the back with the dog’s head on her lap, and the little boy perched on the edge of the seat. By the time they had travelled the few hundred yards to the house, Sheba was dead.

The woman stoked up the fire and made them tea, which they drank together in her small shabby drawing room. The whole house smelled of old, damp dog, and there was a ragged blanket in front of the fireplace where Sheba used to sleep.

‘I’m not house-proud,’ said the woman suddenly. ‘I sort of don’t see the point now that it’s just me and my Bertie. I lost heart.’

‘He was killed, was he, your husband?’ asked Rosie, nodding towards a photograph on the mantelpiece of a smiling man in sailor’s uniform.

‘Jutland.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘And now the dog’s dead.’

‘Bertie’s the point, isn’t he?’ said Rosie gently. ‘He seems a very sweet little boy.’

‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. All the same, it’s hard to carry on sometimes. He’s just like his father, you know.’ Then she added, ‘He’s only seven, the poor little mite.’

‘I wanted her to live forever and ever,’ said the little boy.

‘Would you like me to help you bury her?’ asked Daniel. ‘Do you have a spade?’

Out in a derelict rose bed overgrown with clumps of grass, Daniel dug a pit four feet deep, soon striking heavy yellow clay that came out in lumps like bricks. He went back to the house
and fetched Sheba from where he had laid her on the doormat of the garden door. He called into the house.

The others stood as Daniel lowered the dog into the grave with the rug, and then let it remain there with the body.

‘Don’t you want your rug back?’ asked the woman.

‘I’m certain we can spare it,’ said Rosie.

Daniel spoke to the little boy, whose lips were working, his eyes welling with tears. ‘Say goodbye to Sheba, Bertie. Would you like to be the first one to throw some soil on her? It’s what you do when you bury someone you love, so I think you ought to go first.’ He bent down and handed Bertie a lump of the yellow clay.

Bertie solemnly let the clod fall into the grave, and then Daniel began to backfill it as the others watched. Rosie found herself crying in sympathy with Bertie and his mother, even though this was the first time she had ever met the dog.

Whilst Daniel was washing his hands in the kitchen, the woman said to Rosie, ‘I can’t thank you enough, I really can’t. Would you and your husband like to come round and have tea sometime? In a week perhaps? I can make some scones.’

‘We’re not married yet,’ said Rosie. ‘But we’d love to come round for tea, and see how you and Bertie are getting along.’

Before they left, Daniel bent down to talk to Bertie face-to-face. ‘Listen, little fellow,’ he said, ‘don’t be too sad. Sheba had a lovely life. When you get another dog, and I expect you will one day, just remember that dogs don’t live as long as we do, so you really have to make the most of every minute. Do you agree?’

Bertie nodded, and Daniel held out his hand for him to shake. ‘Brave boy, Bertie,’ he said.

On the way home in the AC Rosie wondered at herself. She had actually said ‘We’re not married yet.’ What was this ‘yet’? It was as if she had made a decision without consulting herself.