The Haunted Storm Read online

  *

  That was one plan. Another was: look for a job in Silminster. And what were they both? Evasions. That was clear, at least; good. But what was on hand now, at the moment, this morning, immediately, was: the world. Get closer, dig deeper, get on with it.

  So: things made sounds. Listen to them.

  He stood as still as a rock; Elizabeth sat down on the grass and looked at him as he concentrated. He heard, firstly, the crickets, and then, in order of decreasing notice ability: the sound of bees, a lark high overhead, a tractor in a distant field, the ticking of Elizabeth’s watch, and his own heartbeat. And then there were occasional sounds, such as: her hand plucking the grass, the strap of the bag falling off her shoulder, his arms brushing against his sides as he folded them.

  He carefully disassociated them from their sources, which is to say from their meanings, and tried to find what meaning, if any, was left to them.

  And immediately they took on another series of meanings. Divorced from what they were, they were free to become anything else. Thus the cricket, if he concentrated, became: an iceberg splitting from a glacier; a tree falling; a tiny electrical machine; the flight of a hummingbird, slowed down… no, he thought, those are what it sounds like; what is it?

  Because this level was one of images. Below the level of things-being-what-they-were was a level of things-being like-other-things. It was more poetic and fanciful, but only a stage more true. So: strip it away, and dig deeper. What came next?

  He still had the stick in his hand. He held it out in front of him and carefully broke it in half, with a dry creaking snap.

  The silence before the noise was not a silence but a back ground, like hills, like a landscape. And it bore the marks and signature of what had formed it. Its nature was rolling and gentle, shaped out of breathing and the circulation of the blood and the indistinct murmuring of a million insects. Time eroded it and smoothed its contours down. But to think of it as a landscape was to falsify it, and to stay in the second stage, so: it was not a landscape but a background; and nor was it really a background. It was simply there.

  And the snap of the stick came on to it like an ideogram. It emerged forcefully out of the not-silence and printed itself on time. Almost immediately its print faded, blurred, and vanished, but –

  – to go back: it brought echoes with it. And these echoes formed around it like ripples, like subsidiary ideograms, each encased in its own silence. They bore the same relation to it as an ox-bow lake bears to a river on level ground.

  And it was abrupt and sketchy, but extraordinarily whole and complete. A paradox, naturally.

  Its meanings: (1) The snapping of a stick (2) A vague and tumultuous swell of images and parallels and similarities, surging and subsiding; the poetic waters under the earth (3) The paradox. Itself / nothing. Clear/ obscure. Full / empty. Blurred / sharp. A thing / not a thing. It is this / what is it?

  It is what its meaning is; and what is that?

  It is the case, it is the world; and what is it?

  Language turned on itself in Matthew’s head and cheerfully swallowed its tail, like Ourobouros, the worm of the world. He had a feeling that it was laughing at him; but no, it was only Elizabeth.

  *

  So language didn’t come all the way with you. Its buoyancy was such that at some point it counteracted your movement downwards, and hindered you; and at that point you had to abandon it, and carry on alone.

  But language was: a tool; a weapon; a searchlight; a map; a compass; a net; a trap; an instrument for ascertaining what it was that you had caught; and a basket to bring it back in.

  So whatever it was that you met, saw, felt, grappled with, understood, defeated, captured, killed, ate, dissected, analysed, – had to be left there; and you had to come back speechless, and stupefied.

  Matthew eyed this problem coldly for a good five minutes, while Elizabeth lay on her back in the sun.

  He saw it as the world throwing him back, as glass throws back a bird trapped in a room and struggling to get out through a window. But the bird struggles to get through because it sees daylight on the other side; so was there some interior sense of his which saw an analogous daylight on the other side of the world?

  All that he could say, at the end of his cursory survey of the question, was that it did not seem unlikely.

  He wiped his forehead; he was sweating. He threw himself full length on the grass beside her, and sighed deeply, with a mixture of happiness and apprehension.

  *

  They ate their lunch high up on the moors. Just under the crest of a broad hill that lay off to the left of the track there was the outline in the grass of an ancient earthwork, the bank and the double ditch eroded now and scarcely visible in the enveloping grass. They sat in the middle of it; they could see nothing around them but the sky. Elizabeth had some sun-tan lotion with her, and she rubbed it on to her face and arms.

  *

  “Liz,” he said after they had eaten and lain back in the sun for a while, “tell me what you’re thinking these days. It’s been so long since – since I had any idea what you were thinking about… You’ve been changing, I can tell that, though. Tell me what you’re thinking now.”

  “I feel as if I’m transparent. I don’t need to talk, because I feel as if you can see right down inside me, as far as I go… I’m as clear as water, clean water. And it’s strange… but this is a sexual feeling, you see. It’s as if I’ve been half male for a long time – well, all my life – I mean I had the fierceness and hardness of a man, I was active and I lived in the intellect and not in the emotions; but that’s gone now, it’s just melted away and I’m feminine, female. That’s what’s been happening.”

  “And Liz, do you know, on the beach I didn’t know whether you were a boy or a girl! Only at moments, like when I first saw you there.”

  “Oh, Matthew don’t misunderstand, will you – but that pact we made; it was the male part of me that made it. That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

  They both fell silent for a few moments. Then she went on:

  “I was afraid to say, really, because I didn’t know what your – well, I didn’t know – well, what your instinct was, really…”

  He laughed gently. “Did you think I was homosexual?”

  “No, no! Of course not. But you might not have wanted me, not sexually, I mean.”

  “Of course I did. But in some way – then – it had to be withheld. It’s as if my will lived off tension, sexual tension in particular, and if I evoked sexual tension on purpose, then my will would grow. And I think it does. But then it turns on itself after a while; it starts to eat you, instead, and you have to give it its head.”

  “And has it got to that stage yet?”

  She sounded so childlike, so inadvertently nervous, that he could not help smiling; and suddenly a wave of excitement and tenderness mingled rose in his heart, and he leant across and kissed her. She responded warmly, and they lay side by side, with her head on his shoulder.

  “And I think I might have been wrong about matter and spirit… you remember what I said on the beach? I didn’t know whether I hated it, matter, or yearned for it. But all at once about a month ago it all began to change. I think it had something to do with my mother; and it’s something to do with the summer as well, and with – everything. It is everything. It just fell into place. Or as if I’d been giving the world artificial respiration, and labouring at it for years, and been on the point of giving up when the whole thing just – started… breathing, all by itself at last, and I could rest. And it’s still only struggling, really, it’s only half-alive as yet, but it’s started at least, and I feel as if it were my child, my flesh, sometimes.”

  He kissed her gently again, on the eyes and the cheeks. He smelt the sun-tan lotion on her face, and underneath it he smelt the scent of her flesh, hot and obscure; and then he buried his face in the thick grass beside her head, and smelt the sweetness of it and that of the cool brown earth. And the structu
re of smelling was the same as that of sound, with the same paradox at the heart of it. And Elizabeth?

  Yes, she was right.

  There was a nerve of happiness throbbing now in his breast, like the eternal cricket. And when he tried to press closer and look at it, it threw him back as enigmatically as everything else did; and so did the deep green of the grass, and the blue sky.

  *

  The sun-covered hillside was thronged with ghosts. Matthew sat on the shallow bank of the earthwork and looked at them; they moved indistinctly all around him. The air of the place, the air of the whole world, was rich enough to support not only the living but also the dead, and those that had no life at all yet, if only they printed themselves on it with sufficient force.

  The force needed was equal to that which the tiniest midge exerted to stay in the air. A butterfly had a hundred times as much, and a lark, a thousand. There was a butterfly near him now, a cabbage-white, its negligent, graceful flight tracing in the air the outline of a piece of ruffled lace. Matthew sat absolutely still; once he brushed the sweat off his forehead.

  *

  “Matthew,” she said uneasily, after sometime had passed; “I don’t know whether I ought to think – but I can’t help it – supposing Alan was the murderer?”

  “Do you think he could be?” he said carefully. “What makes you think that?” His heart was beating fast.

  “He was in the village the night the second girl was murdered. He came to see my father. And he left before it happened. I know, because we met daddy on the way back from the rehearsal, and only a few minutes later we saw the police on their way there…”

  “But why Alan? Christ, he wouldn’t do that, you know he wouldn’t; for God’s sake! I could have done it just as easily –” he spoke abruptly and passionately. The doubt and torment of weeks was in his voice. Liz knew nothing of it, nothing, and he had meant to tell her nothing. He doubted whether he’d be able to stop himself now. “You see, I was there too, Liz. You know they held a dance that night in the youth club; well, I went there with Robert Parrish, from the farm, and I had my headache –”

  He stopped; it was agony to hear himself blurting it out like this, angry and confused. She began to say something, but he held his hand up to silence her.

  “I fainted, you see, outside the dance, and when I came to I was right up at the other end of the field. I could have killed her. I could have done it so easily. And the more I think about it, the more likely it seems that I did.

  “And the first murder happened on the night I arrived in Silminster; and I had the headache then, as well, and I couldn’t come on to Barton as I’d planned; and I suppose I found my way to a boarding-house and got a room, because that’s where I woke up in the morning, and I couldn’t remember a single thing about it… I could have come to Barton in the evening, without knowing it, and killed her, and then gone back; and thinking about it’s made me half mad…”

  “Why haven’t you said about it before?” she sat up, and put her hand on his cheek. “But I’ll tell you something. Oh, if only I’d told you when I wanted to, the very next day… yes, I know you were there in the field that night, because I heard you! I know you didn’t murder her, Matthew, because – it was right down near the bottom of the field. You see, Mrs. Ryder offered mummy and me a lift home from the W.I. hall, but we said we’d walk; and we’d just got to that part of the field that’s opposite the youth club, right down the end of the field, and we heard you, and someone else, and you were talking, behind the hedge but – yes – the point is that while you were talking, or just a second afterwards while you were still there, we heard the girl screaming, as – oh, it’s horrible! – as she was being murdered. And then we heard footsteps, as if you were running up in that direction. But it’s such a long way up – it’s about five or six hundred yards… But you see, you didn’t do it! You’ve got an alibi, Matthew, and a witness! “

  He was staggered. He wanted to ask a hundred questions, but he didn’t even know what they were; his first impulse, in the face of this amazing testimony of hers, was to shake it, to question it, to take it to pieces.

  “Who was I with?”

  “I don’t know; I didn’t recognise the other voice… it was low, and – and – sort of sweet, honey-like, persuasive; but I didn’t hear anything it said clearly, just the tone of it.”

  “And what was I saying? I don’t remember a thing of this, Liz, not anything… what did I say?”

  She told him as much as she could remember; and as she spoke, he felt the most extraordinary sensation. It was like those hints and half-memories which had plagued him before, but much sharper and more distinct: it was like seeing his own image in a mirror act and move about with a will of its own.

  Yes, it was he who’d said that, without a doubt. It was coming back now like a dream he’d totally forgotten. He sighed.

  “Thank God for that. Even though I seem to be cracked in the head…”

  He closed his eyes.

  And almost immediately he opened them again, and sprang to his feet. He beat his fist into his palm, and walked rapidly up and down.

  “Liz! That room – the one I woke up in!”

  She nodded, staring at him intently.

  “And Alan’s room – that day I went to see him and we went up to his room, and it seemed familiar, as if I’d seen it a long time ago and forgotten it – it was the same room!”

  He put his hands to his head and rocked back and forth, trying desperately to remember.

  “It’s coming back, little bits of it; it came on in the train, the headache, I mean, and I remember thinking – wondering if I’d get to Barton in time. And then, at the bus station, waiting for a bus – I lay down on the bench, that’s right – or was that later on? And then going very quickly – almost running – you know in a dream when you’re running, and you can just lift your legs up and seem to glide along without falling? I was going through the streets like that, with someone… I climbed some stairs, too. I’m almost certain about that.”

  He sat down beside her, staring out over the grass and seeing nothing.

  “Perhaps Alan met you, then,” she said. “Perhaps he saw you were ill, and took you back to his room. And when you woke up in the morning, he’d gone off to work, or something, and you couldn’t remember where you were…”

  “He’d have left a note, though, surely…”

  “Not necessarily. No, in fact, he wouldn’t, knowing Alan. And when you went there with him – did he seem to expect you to recognise it?”

  “I don’t know! Oh, Liz, it’s maddening – but of course I wasn’t looking for it, so he may have done – at any rate, he didn’t say anything.”

  They said nothing for a while; and then he lay down again, and put his head in her lap.

  “And so if you didn’t do it,” she said, “Alan can’t have done it either. Not if he was there to take you to his room.”

  “But the body wasn’t discovered till the next afternoon, though. He’d have had plenty of time to get to Barton, and do it, and go back – or go anywhere in the country, almost – by then. So it could have been him. And whether or not it was him I was talking to in the field, he was certainly in the village the second time. But no: it’s quite impossible. Alan wouldn’t, and that’s that. Quite honestly, I’d suspect your father before Alan.”

  She started, and he thought she was going to protest. But she only said: “Yes; yes, I think I would too.”

  “It’s strange – you know, it’s no clearer now. The whole thing of morality and the world – it’s just as dark. So –” he sat up, excited – “good! That’s clear, then, I was beginning to wonder if it was only my guilt that was obscuring everything: but it’s not! It’s still there!” He was speaking louder and louder, and Elizabeth moved a little away from him, smiling at his vehemence. He pounded the earth with his fists. “I still don’t know a thing about it! And I can get on with looking; oh, thank God for that! It is absolute! The questions are in
the world itself, and not in me!”

  *

  If it happened again, they decided, Elizabeth would watch him to see what he did. And they decided to go to the well, to see whether it illuminated anything.

  Matthew felt such an overwhelming rush of love for her, then, that he felt tears come to his eyes. It was the tender erotic feeling of her smile on the beach; and this time he obeyed it, and took her in his arms.

  It consisted, first, of strangeness. It was the fact that her body was unknown.

  And secondly it was the eagerness, the readiness, with which she responded.

  Most of all, however, it was the feeling that they were doing something as impersonal as the wind and the hills. There was absolutely no trace, no shred or shadow, of personality in their kisses and the movements of their hands.

  It was sex at the ideogram stage, the paradox stage, underneath the first meaning and the stage of images. There was a storm imprisoned in them, Matthew thought –

  – but again, no, he was wrong. The storm was imprisoned in matter itself. That bank, that double ditch, shook and trembled with it – on the edge of it – as completely as he did. And there was no point in denying that the sky did, and the grass, and the folded hills.

  He stopped after a minute and lay quiet and still. He had not come to a climax: he had not even entered her. They were still fully clothed.

  “I’m using you, my Liz,” he said. “I’m not concerned with your pleasure in the least. I’m feeding my will again.”

  He sat up and turned to look at her.

  “You’ll give in,” she said. “I could make you give in now if I wanted to. I could take my dress off – it wouldn’t take a moment. You think I’m in your power, Matthew, but you’re in mine! That’s the truth of it.”

  He shook his head, slowly at first, and then, seeing her smile, with more conviction.