We
were walking together deep in the countryside. It was a bright, but chilly,
autumn day. The wind was blowing, twisting the dead leaves into the air. We both
were wearing thick heavy coats and scarves. I wished I had a hat.
Helen's
hand was deep inside the pocket of my coat, her arm wrapped around mine. I
turned to look at her and she smiled at me. I noticed she had a few dead leaves
sticking to her hair. I picked them off with my free hand. I was about to drop
them.
"No."
Helen took the leaves from me and put them in her coat pocket. "I want to
keep them."
We
trudged up to the top of the hill. The wind was stronger up there. Helen had to
keep one hand up to her face to keep her hair from whipping into her eyes. From
up there we could see out over the forest, spread out like a green sheet thrown
over the hillsides, and the small village seeming almost insignificant from
that height
"Let's
go back down, out of this wind, Martin, " she said, turning away without
looking at me. She walked on in front of me, looking down at her feet as she
stepped carefully down the steep path. I hurried to catch up with her.
"What's
the matter?" I said.
"You
know," she said, not looking up.
I
stopped walking. "But what can I do?"
Helen
stopped a few feet in front of me; she turned and looked back up the hill at
me. "You can choose. Choose...? Shit! I'm not something in a shop, you
know. I'm me! A person. You shouldn't have the power of choice over people -
it's disgusting really." She looked away from me, over towards the woods
on her right, staring hard. She brushed her eyes roughly with the sleeve of her
coat.
"I
can't walk out. Just leave," I said.
"Why
not? You strolled into my life. Why can't you walk out of hers?"
"I
have obligations. I owe her something, something more than a sudden empty space
in her life."
"But
what about me?" Helen said quietly. She turned away from me and ran
towards the trees.
She was
sitting on the ground with her back against a tree when I found her. I knelt
down in front of her and took her hand.
"You're
cold," I said. She nodded without looking up at me. "You always used
to say you didn't want me to leave her. You said you wanted to be independent,
free. You said you didn't want to live with anyone ever again."
"I've
changed my mind. I don't like waking up in the night and finding no-one there,
not anymore." She turned her hand so it was holding mine. She looked at my
hand as though she was trying to read something in its palm.
"I
had my palm read once," she said. "The gypsy said I was going to be
happy. But I think she only said what people expected her to say. I don't think
lines on someone's hand can mean anything. Do you, Martin?"
I
shook my head. Helen pulled me towards her, she kissed me on the lips and I sat
down beside her. I put my arm around her shoulders.
"I
want to wake up next to you," she said. "Every day."
"Are
you sure?"
"Yes....
No.... How should I know? It just feels right, that's all. That is all we can
ever know, isn't it?"
"Do
people ever really change?" I said. "I don't know if Claire and I
have changed, moved away from each other, or whether we have not changed at all
and so become bored with each other. I think that if people do change, it
happens so slowly that it is unnoticeable."
"Does
it matter?" Helen said.
"I
don't know. I just like to try to understand why and how things happen, that's
all."
"What
is there to understand? You don't - you say - love her anymore. You say she
doesn't love you. Wouldn't you rather be with me? You used to say that one day
we would be together."
"Yes,
of course I want to be with you. But it is just not that simple."
Helen
stood up and walked away. I sighed and followed her. For a moment or two, as I
followed her down the steep path, I wondered what it would be like, waking up
next to Helen each morning - every morning - for the rest of our lives.
In the
beginning, several months before, her unpredictability, her mood-swings, her
sheer vibrancy had seemed so exciting. It was a stark contrast to the staid
routine that my life with Claire had become. But, watching Helen as she
scrambled down that path, I was starting to regret it all. I wished I'd acted
differently that first time, when the new village schoolteacher had dropped
into my second-hand bookshop.
It had
happened with almost cliched inevitability. A young, idealistic, enthusiastic
teacher arrives at a sleepy village, deep in the countryside. At first, her
enthusiasm for her new job is enough to sustain her, but when the inevitable
inertia, the simple endless day to day slog, begins to wear her down, she has
no place to turn. She has nothing except her growing friendship with the owner
of the village bookshop. He is the only one adult she has met in the village
that she feels she has anything in common with, any rapport.
It
began last summer, during the long school holiday. Helen began hanging around
in the shop, just half-hearted browsing at first. I used to watch her leafing
through the books, the almost sensual way she would delicately turn the -
sometimes fragile - pages like a mother sweeping the hair out of her child's
eyes.
Then
she started helping out. My main trade is by post - rare books ordered through
my web site. She used to love to help me sort out the books. She enjoyed
packing them like the delicate objects they were into the well-padded boxes
ready for shipment all around the world.
But it
wasn't until about six months ago that we first kissed. Spring in the air and
all that, I suppose. By that time, I had reluctantly given up on my vague
half-fantasies about the good-looking teacher in her mid-twenties falling in
love with the forty-two year old balding bookshop owner. So when she leant
forward over the box she was taping up and kissed me I... well... I just stood
there, not quite believing it had happened and half-expecting to be woken by
the alarm clock.
Funnily
enough, no-one in the village seemed to regard it as a remote possibility
either. There had been one or two looks when Helen first started hanging around
my shop. But the idea of the sexy young schoolteacher and the bookshop owner
having an affair was so obviously absurd that even village gossip could not
sustain it.
Anyway,
any such notion received its deathblow through Claire's absolute conviction
that Helen had far more sense, more of a life, to consider an affair with
someone like me. "That girl's got far too much about her to want to bother
with someone as dull as ditch water as my Martin," Claire had said when
interrogated by the Farnborough-Jones sisters in the butchers one Tuesday
morning in early April.
"No,
it is because you are like you are," Helen had said to me when I asked her
the inevitable "Why me?"
"I'm
so fed up with the egotistical selfishness of young blokes. So tired of men who
only want to be the hero in the film of their own life," she said sadly.
She was sitting naked in the wicker chair by her bed, smoking a joint.
"You seem so... so calm." She watched the smoke curling up towards
the ceiling for a moment. I had the sense, the feeling that there was some
pain, some memory. When she turned back I could see the beginning of a tear in
her eye. She swallowed, then smiled. "That's what I like about being in
your shop, the calm, the peacefulness. I always feel there is something solid,
safe, secure about being surrounded by books. So much silent wisdom."
"But
you're still young," I said. "You should be out grabbing life by the
balls, instead of getting stuck in this backwater with a dull old stick like
me."
She
stubbed out the joint and stood up. "No, come back to bed. I want to take
you by the balls."
I was
bought back out of my reverie by the realisation she had taken the wrong path
down the hillside.
"Helen!
Helen! Stop! Wait!" I called; I could see her coat, the dark brown
sheepskin, through the trees and the flash of her blonde hair. But she did not
wait. I tried running, but slipped on the wet leaves. By the time I had
struggled to my feet she was out of sight. I ran after her, wiping the mud from
my hands onto my coat.
I had
almost caught up with her. I caught a flash of blonde hair through the trees. I
sighed with relief. But then I heard her scream as she dropped from view.
The
story I had heard, when I was a child, was that during WW2 a German bomber had
crashed into the side of the hill. It had been on its way to the industrial
heart of the midlands with a full bomb load. As far as I know, it is a true
story. But whether it was the cause of the, almost cliff-like, sheer drop that
makes up most of the south side of the hill, or not, I have no idea.
I
crept forward, towards the edge, slowly. I've never been very good at heights at
the best of times. But the thought of looking over the edge and seeing Helen a
hundred and fifty feet or so below....
At
first, I could not make out what I was seeing. The mud-covered fingers holding
onto the edge of the cliff didn't seem - somehow - quite human. But when I
realised what they were, I knelt down, wrapping my left arm around a nearby
tree trunk.
"Hang
on, it's me. I'm here. Helen?"
"Martin?
Oh shit... fuck.... Help me!"
I
leant out over the edge, grabbing her arm around the wrist. "I've got
you," I said. She was heavy, so heavy, staring up into my eyes, pleading,
desperate. I was having trouble holding on to her, I could feel her slipping
through my fingers. I knew that this was it, the deciding moment. When I had
saved her, I would have no choice. I would have to leave Claire and go with
Helen. This act of rescue would bind us together far more deeply than any mere
marriage vow.
"Hell.
Oh God! Come on, I've got you."
At
first, I didn't recognise the voice. I could not move. I was just staring at my
empty hand stretched out over the edge of the drop. I knew if I stopped
focussing on my empty hand and looked down, I would be able to see where Helen
had fallen.
"No,
don't look. Come here. Sit against this tree. Here, drink some of this."
It was Brian, the landlord of the Goose and Chickens. He pressed the flask of
brandy against my mouth. I swallowed, choked and coughed.
"I
saw everything," he said. "I saw exactly what happened. Drink some
more. I've got my mobile."
I sat
against the tree, sipping the brandy. Usually I don't touch spirits, but I was
incongruously wondering if I would get the chance of another drink before they
sent me away to prison, and just what was the difference between manslaughter
and murder.
"Hello,
Ian? No I don't care if you're off-duty. No, shut up! This is serious. There's
been a... an incident. I'm up on Barrow Hill. That new teacher from the school,
Miss... Thomas, yes... Helen. No." He glanced down, over the edge of the
drop. "No... there's no chance, no hope at all. She... at the bottom of
the sheer drop. No, Martin...from the bookshop...." Brian looked over at
me as he spoke. "Yes. No, he was holding her by the arm... I saw
everything... all of it... he nearly managed to save her.... Yes, a bloody
hero, he deserves a medal. He nearly got himself killed trying to save her.
Five minutes? I'll wait here for you here then. I think Martin is in shock
anyway."
I
opened my mouth, trying to say something.
"No,
you drink that. Best thing for shock, brandy. Anyway, you deserve it. A bloody
hero, that's what you are. A bloody hero."
END
5