I met her a second time one evening in the oak wood. I had the fire going there; in fact, it was her fire I had taken over, as she had taken it over from some previous tender of the flame; I see a line of us, with our flints and pitchforks, stretching back to the time of the druids. She came wandering through the trees with her head down, in that distracted way she had, weaving a little, as if she were searching for something on the ground. I confess I was not greatly pleased to see her; a good bonfire, like so many things for me in those days, from sex to tea, was best enjoyed in solitude. She did not look at me, and even when she had drifted to a stop by the fire I was not sure if she was fully aware of me. She wore Wellingtons and a crooked skirt and a battered hat that surely had seen duty on the veldt. The evening was grey and greyly warm. We stood gazing into the flames. Then she cast a thoughtful, sideways glance at my feet and invited me to come to her house and take tea. I was too surprised to refuse.
Her kitchen smelled of cooking fat and bottled gas and old water. I sat warily at the bare deal table and watched her. She reminded me of a piece of polished bone, or a stick of driftwood, thinned and hardened by the action of the years. I looked for her marks on the room, the impress of her solitary life here, but could find none. Plain chairs, plain pots, plain delft on the dresser. On a nail above my head hung one of Mr Tighe’s advertising calendars with a photo on it of an outmoded bathing beauty. My attention was caught briefly by an electric Sacred Heart lamp on a wooden socket fixed to the wall, pink as an iced lolly and tremulously aglow, but when she saw me looking at it she smiled drily and shook her head: it had been here, she said, when she came to the house, and she had not known how to disconnect it.
We ate in ruminant silence. The slow day died and the sun went down in the kitchen window in a gradual catastrophe of reds and golds. As the dusk advanced we talked desultorily of this and that. It was not exactly a conversation, more a sort of laborious, intermittent batting; we were like a pair of decrepit tennis players having a game at close of day, lobbing slow balls high up to and fro through the darkening air. The name Dickie kept coming up, and Mrs Vanden grew almost animated: Dickie was this, and Dickie had done that, and oh, Dickie did have such a fine seat on a horse. I took it she was speaking of her late husband, but when my mistake became apparent an awkward silence fell and she looked at me directly, for the first time, it seemed, with those blank, impenetrable eyes, and it was as if I had come to a stumbling stop on the very lip of a precipice with nothing before me but the vast and depthless sky. No, she said, Dickie was her daughter, her only child, dead this twenty years. I was flustered, and could think of nothing to say, and looked down in confusion at my plate. I ask myself now, did I miss a real opportunity on that occasion? For what? Well, I might for instance have found out all sorts of things about her and her travels with the intrepid Mr Vanden. Perhaps I might even have let my own dead walk abroad for a bit, they who are as palpably present to me as Dickie the phantom horsewoman was to her. But the moment passed and already it was night, and I stood up fumblingly from the table and thanked her and hurried off down the hill through the immense, soft darkness.
How courtly we were, how correctly we conducted ourselves. I think that even if she had been fifty years younger there would have been no more between us than there was. And yet I believe that what there was was much. Does that make sense? There are certain people who seem to know me better than I know myself. To some, I realise, this would be an uncomfortable intrusion on their privacy and their sense of themselves, and it is true, there were occasions when in her presence I was acutely conscious of the pressure upon me of the sagging and unmanageable weight of all she must have known about me and did not say; mostly, though, I felt, well, lightened, somehow, as if I had been given permission to set down for a moment my burden — the burden of my self, that is — and stand breathing, unrequired briefly, in some calm, wide place. There was nothing filial in all of this, and certainly, I am sure of it, nothing maternal — no mother of mine was ever remotely like Mrs Vanden, apart from the Dutch blood — yet there was in it something that must have been very like that tentative, unspoken complicity, that feeling of basking in the knowledge of a secret agreement, that I am told exists between sons and mothers. This is perilous territory, I know; any minute now Bigfoot will come clumping on to the scene, with his sockets streaming. But I don’t care, you can do all the cheap psychologising you want, I will still say that I felt when I was with her that I was protected, shielded somehow from at least some of the things that the world had it in mind to do to me; the smaller things, the quotidian inflictions. It is what I had always wanted, someone strong and mute and unknowable behind whose skirts I could hide. Wait, that’s a surprise; do I mean that? Sometimes my pen just goes prattling along all by itself and the strangest things come out, things I did not know I was aware of, or of which I would prefer not to be made aware, or not to hear expressed, anyway. Mute, now, unknowable: is that what I really want, a sort of statue, one of those big Mooreish pieces, all scooped-out hollows and cuppable curves, faceless and tightly swathed, like a bronze mummy (oops! — what a treacherously ambiguous medium our language is)? I was content, at any rate, to be adrift in Mrs Vanden’s company, if that is what it can be called, incurious as to the nature of her inner life, her thoughts, her opinions, if she had any. I should berate myself for my selfishness, I suppose, my incurable solipsism, yet I cannot do it, with any conviction. I have the notion — I hesitate to speak of it, really, knowing how it will sound — that what we achieved, that what we began to achieve, Mrs V. and I, was a new or at least rare form of relation, one that, I realise, I had been aiming for for longer than I can remember. I do not know what to call it, how to describe it; words such as reticent, respectful, calm, these do not begin to suffice. There are men, I know, who prowl the world in search of an ideal woman, one who will indulge their darkest desires and slake for them the hot, half-formed urgings of the blood; I am like that, except that what I lust after is not some sly-eyed wanton but a being made up of stillnesses; not inert, not lifeless, only quiet, like me — yes, quiet, I am quiet, in spite of all this gabble — a pale pool in a shaded glade in which I might bathe my poor throbbing brow and cool its shamefaced fires (I know, I know: the pool, and the lover leaning over it, I too caught that echo). Forgiveness, I suppose; it all seems to come down to that, in the end, though I hate these big words. Forgiveness not for the things I have done, but for the thing that I am. That is the toughest one to absolve: what they used to call, if I remember rightly, a reserved sin.
Anyway, one day a couple of weeks after our first meeting I went up to the cottage and she did not answer my knock, though the door stood open as always, and when, with my heart in my mouth, I had climbed the stairs to what I knew was her bedroom, I found her lying neatly on her back in the narrow bed with the blanket pulled to her chin and her eyes open and all filmed over and a cocky fly strolling across her cold forehead. At first, in my surprise and numbed dismay, I had the crazy thought that it was not she at all, but an effigy of herself she had left behind her to fool me while she made good her escape. (I was not too far off the mark, I suppose.) The fly on her forehead stopped and wrung its hands as if in energetic dismay and then flew off in a bored sort of way, and I leaned over her and closed her eyes — now there is a creepy sensation — and quietly withdrew. I discovered that I was holding my breath. At the front door I debated with myself whether or not to shut it, but decided in the end to leave it open, since that was her way; besides, it is the practice in these parts, when someone dies, for the house to be left open to all-comers. Do I imagine it, or did the goat give me a soulful, commiserating look as I walked off down the path?