‘Oh, Cousin Geillis! No, I haven’t.’
‘Then come along. We’ll go down to the river. I’ve brought a picnic with me. Leave those flowers, you can get them when we come back.’
I don’t remember that I ever asked her how she had come, or how she had found me. I suppose I still took her kind of magic for granted. She even knew, without telling, that we were not allowed to go to the river in the normal way. Nobody saw us. We crossed the hockey pitches and walked along the banks of the river under the oak trees. Beyond their shadow was a long, sunny curve of water meadow where, once, a bank or causeway had been built to keep the river back in flood-time. We sat there, while below us, as if it were a matter of course, a kingfisher flashed down from a dead branch, caught a fish, and vanished with it into his hole in the sandy bank.
‘Do you remember the ladybird,’ asked Cousin Geillis, ‘and Mrs Tiggywinkle?’
‘Coccinella,’ I said demurely, ‘and Erinaceus europœus? Of course I do.’
She laughed. ‘Poor child. But you were a quick study. And I gather you’ve been a quick study ever since. Those drawings you were doing were quite beautiful. How old are you now?’
‘Nearly fourteen. I do School Cert. next year.’
‘And then? What are you planning to do with yourself, Gilly?’ (I should say here that when I reached my teens I discarded the childish spelling of Jilly, though my name was pronounced in the same way.) ‘Do you know yet?’ asked my cousin.
‘Not really. University, Mummy says, and then teach, but—’
‘But?’
‘I’m not sure that I want to. What I’d really like is to be an artist.’
I believe that for me at that age ‘being an artist’ meant a kind of picturesque independence in a well-lighted garret, with a dash of Paris and Burlington House thrown in. Most importantly, it meant having my own place, garret or otherwise, and being alone when I wanted to. I longed to go to an art school, but there was no way my parents could have afforded it, and since Cousin Geillis was already paying for most of my schooling, I could hardly tell her so. Nor, even if she had paid for me, or (as my teacher seemed to think was possible) I had secured a scholarship, would my mother have let me go. She had made that clear. So I knew I would have to go with the tide, earn a University place, teach if I had to, perhaps some day meet someone …
‘If that’s what you really want to do, then what’s to stop you?’ asked Cousin Geillis briskly. ‘You have the talent. No need to be modest. You must know it.’
‘Well, yes, but you see—’ I bit my lip and stopped.
She read my thoughts unerringly. ‘And don’t give me any nonsense about “not having the chance” or the “luck”! Let me tell you something. The only luck you have in this life is the talent you’re born with. The rest is up to you.’
‘Yes, Cousin Geillis.’
Her eyes twinkled. ‘All right. End of sermon. Have a sandwich, and let’s talk of something else, shall we?’
‘Yes, please.’ I accepted both offers with relief. The sandwich was a new roll, bulging with scrambled egg and cress, a wonderful change from school meals. ‘Tell me about the places you’ve been to. Have you really been right round the world?’
So while we ate the picnic she had brought she told me about the places she had seen, so vividly that now, when I remember that day, I can see some of those exotic landscapes as clearly as the river bank with the Eden flowing below us, and the kingfisher flashing to and from his bough.
The chime of the church clock, striking five, floated across the hockey pitches. Soon it would be time to go. We gathered up the picnic debris and stuffed it back into Cousin Geillis’s holdall. Interlude over. Back to school. Back, in fact, to earth.
‘It’s a bit like that other time, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘You just coming out of nowhere, and a lovely afternoon, and then ordinary things again. Like a fairy godmother. Once when I was little, at the convent, I pretended you were a fairy godmother, and as a matter of fact, I still think you are. It’s such a nice thing to have! And you did say one thing that I’ve always remembered. When the dragonfly climbed out of the pond and flew away. Do you remember that?’
‘I do indeed. What about it?’
‘I asked you if you were a witch, and you said you could sometimes make things happen. What did you mean? Was it true?’
She was silent. Then she reached into the holdall and brought out something about the size of a tennis ball, wrapped in black velvet. Holding it in her palm, she unwrapped it, letting the velvet fall away until the object lay exposed, a ball certainly, but not a tennis ball or indeed like any ball I had ever seen. It looked like glass, but not ordinary glass, and I knew straight away what it was. A crystal ball. A small reflecting world of misty green and gold, where the breeze in the boughs threw shadow and shine, and the sun on the water made sparks that dazzled the eyes.
My cousin was speaking. ‘Whether I can make things happen or not I do not know. But I do sometimes see what is going to happen, and then whatever one does appears as its cause.’ She smiled faintly. ‘A prerequisite for prophetic power?’
I did not understand her. I ploughed on. ‘You mean you see things in that crystal?’
‘In that, and in other ways.’
‘Then it’s true it can be done?’
‘Oh, yes, it’s true.’
I stared, fascinated, at the globe in her hand. ‘Cousin Geillis, could you – could you look now, and see what’s going to happen?’
A direct look, grave and gentle. ‘You mean to you, don’t you? That’s what everyone means when they talk of “the future”. It’s a very narrow channel, the future.’
‘I’m sorry. It was only – you did ask me what I was going to do when I grow up, and I wasn’t sure—’
‘Don’t be sorry.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘We’re all alike. I’ve peered down my own channel already.’
‘Have you?’ I suppose I was naïvely surprised that anyone so advanced in years should have any future worth longing for. Life, for anyone of Cousin Geillis’s age, was all in the past.
She had read me with ease. She was laughing. ‘Well? Wouldn’t you want to know when it was all going to end for you?’
‘N – no. No!’
‘You can’t choose, you know. When you look, you may see what’s near at hand, or you may see right to the very end. Would you want to do that?’
‘I don’t really know. Would you?’
‘I have done. That’s enough of mine, would you like to look for yours?’
The globe in her hand was flickering with light and dark from the flow of the river. I hesitated. ‘How? Just look, do you mean?’
‘That’s all. Don’t be scared, you’ll probably see nothing except what’s there of the world right round us now. Here, take it.’ She put the crystal, still lying in its velvet, into my cupped palms. ‘Now empty your mind as best you can, and look. Without hope, without fear, without memory, and without guile. Just look.’
I looked.
My own face, small and distorted. The running light of the river. A flash of blue, the kingfisher. A shoal of black streaks, like tadpoles, but I knew from the screaming in the sky that they were swifts, skimming the treetops. Another shoal, white, sailing, tilting, silent as a snow storm: a flight of doves or pigeons, wheeling and dipping, like a cloud of snow in an old-fashioned paperweight. Then crystal, grey as mist, reflecting my eyes and the crimson of my school blazer and the tiny trees behind me.
I looked up, blinking. The sky was empty.
‘Well?’ she asked.
‘Nothing. Only what you said, the world that’s here, the trees and the river and the swifts and that flock of pigeons.’ I looked about me. ‘Where did they go? Where are they?’
‘In the crystal.’
I sat up straight, and pushed the hair back from my forehead. ‘Are you saying they weren’t real? But they were! Look, there they are again!’ as the swifts tore past above us, shrilling like bosuns’ whistles.
‘Oh, they’re real enough. But not the pigeons,’ said Cousin Geillis, reaching to take the crystal from me.
‘Do you honestly mean there wasn’t a flock of them flying over? White ones and grey, quite low?’
‘That’s what I mean.’
‘Then,’ I drew a breath, ‘I did see something?’
‘It seems so.’
I took another, longer breath, and let it go on a sigh. ‘But why? And what does it mean?’
She was wrapping the crystal and tucking it carefully away into the holdall. She took her time over the answer. ‘Only that you have just told me what I wanted to know. That you are your mother’s daughter, and, for want of a better term, my godchild.’
And that, in spite of my eager questions, was all that she would say.
I gave up at length, and went back to something she had said earlier. ‘You said you had looked at your own future. Did you see it?’
‘I didn’t need to see that in the crystal.’ We were walking back now, skirting the edge of the hockey field. She paused and looked up, but I got the impression that she was looking clear through the branches of the trees to something way beyond, and shining. ‘A little more travelling here and there, and learning a little more, I hope. Did you know I was a herbalist? I collect when I travel, and there’s always something new to learn in the out-of-the-way places. Then home.’ She looked down at me. ‘I have a home now. I saw the house, and it seemed made for me, so I took it on. Some day you will see it.’
Not ‘you must’, but ‘you will’.
‘What’s it like?’ I asked.
‘A good house, deep in the woods, with a garden all around it and a river flowing past it. Fruit trees, and flowers planted for the bees. A place to grow my herbs. Silence in winter, and in summer nothing but the birds. Lonely as the grave, and every bit as restful.’
To me, at that age, rest was not something I wanted, and the grave was so far off as to be unimaginable. But there was one essential for any worldly heaven. I asked eagerly: ‘Will you keep animals?’
She gave me a sidelong look. ‘Still? You poor child. Well, I’ll tell you one thing I did see in the crystal, Geillis my dear.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You and I,’ said Cousin Geillis, ‘and for all I know the doves and the hedgehogs and the tadpoles and your poor lost dog and all, will live there together one day.’
We had reached the door that led through a high wall into the school grounds. With my hand on the knob I said, without looking at her: ‘I didn’t think such things ever really happened. The “happy ever after” things; I mean.’
‘They don’t,’ she said gently. ‘Not for ever. Happiness changes as you change. It’s in yourself. But I will be there just as long as you need me, which won’t be for ever, or even, perhaps, for very long.’ She reached over my shoulder and pushed the door open. ‘Go along now, and don’t forget your things in the summer-house. I won’t come in. I’m going to Langwathby to get a train. Goodbye.’
The door shut between us.
4
I did not after all get a degree, but my mother never knew it. At the end of my first year at Durham University she died. My father was with me; he had travelled by bus into Durham to attend a meeting in the Chapter House, and afterwards we went home together, to find the local policeman at the door and a few people in the road, watching.
It transpired that my mother had gone with the car to visit an old lady at the far side of the Deanery. On the way back she met with an accident. Another car came fast out of a side road, and smashed head on into her offside door. She was a good driver, but she cannot have had a chance. The side road was no more than a farm track, and traffic would hardly be expected on it. The driver of the other car was the farmer’s young son, who had only recently passed his driving test, and was going far too fast. It was thought that he pressed the throttle instead of the brake, but that was only a guess. He was killed instantly.
Through all that followed, the inquests, the visits to the bereaved farmer and his wife (my father saw their comfort as his first duty), the funerals, both taken by my father, with a brief talk for the bereaved, he moved with an air of sweet and gentle abstraction. He ate what I put before him, went into his study, from which no sound of his typewriter came, went across to the church, came back, sat in his study alone, went to bed.
The morning after the funeral he did not appear. I found him still in bed and, for the first time that I remembered, disinclined to get up. Delayed shock, said the doctor, when I sent for him, but I knew that it was more than that. My mother had been the spring that drove him. Now it had snapped.
Of course it meant the end for me of any thought of a degree and training for a job away from home. Even if my father could have afforded to pay a housekeeper, nothing of the sort could be thought of until he was well again. I wrote straight away to the University authorities, conscious only of a shamefaced feeling of thankfulness that it was my father I was called upon to care for, though to tell the truth I doubt if my mother, similarly bereaved, would have needed or even wanted me to stay at home with her.
But now at home I had to stay. The green years had gone, it seemed in a flash, and sometimes, in moments of weary frustration, it seemed for ever. The Cumberland hills and lakes, still in those days lapped in Wordsworthian calm, the glories of Durham, with its islanded towers and trees, and the precious solitude in which one could shut oneself away and study, these I could have now only for memory. I was back in the wilderness, trapped by the ugly brick houses, the towering, smoking black of the pit heap; and beyond those, almost to the edge of the county, and right down to the sea, the starved and meagre landscapes of the coalfield.
If I fretted, it was briefly. I was young, I loved my father dearly, and truth to tell the relief of my mother’s death was so intense as to make a new kind of happiness. I was surprised to find how much genuine satisfaction there was in the management of the house and the parish affairs that had been her domain. The only real worry was my father’s failing health, and sometimes – not often, because youth cannot see an end to vigour and life – sometimes in the night a misgiving about my own future when he died. He must have had the same thought; he never spoke of it, but he must have known the nagging fear at the back of the clergyman’s mind; no home after the work is done. What I think he still clung to was the belief of his generation, that in time I would marry, and so be provided with a home, and what used to be called ‘an establishment’. Man-like, he never paused to wonder how, in our isolated life, any such opportunity was to occur.
There had, of course, been friendships made in my senior days at school, but it is rare that such friendships go on into adult life, and besides, though I had once or twice spent part of a school holiday at a friend’s house, the return visit to our grim and isolated vicarage was never a success. So also during my brief year at Durham: friendships, not carried over into home life, could not persist. The same went for any young men I met; they soon gave me up as too serious and too shy; ‘wrapped up in her work’ was the kindest comment; so at the end of that university year I went home heart-whole, and hardly even knowing what I had missed.
And so for a few more years. The war came, and its privations and fears and exhaustions served to drive other fears for the future from our lives. We had long since lost touch with Cousin Geillis; or rather, she had lost touch with us. I had not seen her since that strange interlude by the River Eden, and though I had written to her at intervals, she had never answered. There had been no sign from her even when my mother died, and when I wrote to the only address I knew, that of her solicitors in Salisbury, there was no reply. She might be living abroad, having been caught on one of her travels by the outbreak of war, she might even be dead. We had no way of knowing, and she gradually became one with the fading memory of the green years.
Some three years after the end of the war my father died. He died as he had lived, quietly and with more thought for others than
for himself.
After the funeral was over, and everyone had gone, I went across to the church again to lock the vestry after the officiating clergy, then walked back alone through the graveyard to the vicarage. It was August, and the path between the graves was matted with fallen grass-seeds and petals. The trees hung heavy and still in the dead air.
Some of the village women, who had helped with the funeral arrangements, were still in the vicarage kitchen making a cup of tea for themselves when the washing-up was finished. I joined them, then they finished clearing up, and went.
The house was empty, echoing, no longer mine. I sat down in the rocking-chair beside the grate where the fire slowly died from flame to ash, and for the first time realised that I was alone, that the night-time fears had materialised, that I had nothing, nowhere even to go after the new appointment had been made and the vicarage handed to its next incumbent. Before that happened I would have to sell the furniture, realise everything I could, then take myself off and start looking around for work.
Where? And what work? I was qualified, as my mother would have said crisply, to do nothing. A year at University doing botany, chemistry, geology – not enough of anything to justify even the most elementary of teaching jobs, and in the ’40s jobs of any kind were hard to get. I straightened wearily in my chair, stilling the rockers. In the morning, perhaps, I would be able to think more clearly, gather a small residue of courage. Meanwhile, before the fire died right out, I must get myself some supper. The ashes fell in the grate. Even that small sound had its echo in the emptiness.
The doorbell rang.
At the back door one of the women was waiting. She had a long envelope in her hand.
‘Oh, Miss Gilly, I forgot this. I’m that sorry. It came this morning, and what with one thing and another I clean forgot to give it to you. It’s a letter.’
I took it and thanked her. She hesitated, her eyes on my face.
‘Are you sure there’s nothing I could do? Doesn’t seem right for you to be all alone, not with your dad gone like that. Why don’t you come over the road and take a bite of supper with us?’