“I hate this place,” he said, stepping into the kitchen. There was no reply. He called, “Emma?”
“In here.” Her voice was weak, but Munday was reassured by it. She was in the living room, stretched out on a chair, her hand over her eyes. She said, “I don’t know what came over me. I had to sit down.”
“Have a glass of sherry,” said Munday. He peeled the plastic from the bottle top. “I’m going to have one myself and then ring the vicar about that talk.”
“Didn’t you say Silvano was coming down one weekend from London?”
“Yes,” said Munday. “One weekend.”
“Give your talk then. You could exhibit him—they might never have seen a real African before.”
“I’m not in the mood for that.”
“Bad joke, I suppose,” said Emma. “I’m feeling awful, I must say.”
“But Til show him around, you bet I will. And the first place I take him will be The Yew Tree. I want to see what these local people have to say for themselves when Silvano walks in. You know how very English he is.”
“They’ll laugh at him,” said Emma. “They’ll laugh at you, too. That myth about these African students being frightfully English, with their silly faces and their five-syllable names—as if Englishness were simply a case of smoking a pipe and wearing a suit and subscribing to the New Statesman and saying ‘bloody.’ And taking taxis—they all take taxis. Who pays for it all? English people, of course, to flatter themselves that they’re being imitated. I remember Silvano, with that book he used to carry around the village. How he used to struggle so to pronounce the simple English word ‘situation. How did he say it? ‘Stoowation,’ something like that.”
“You’re ranting,” said Munday. “You always rant when you’re under the weather.”
“They’ll gape at him,” said Emma. “Not that I blame them, but they’ll make unpleasant remarks.”
“You don’t want him to come?”
“I’d like to save him the embarrassment. They’ll be cruel.”
“Let them try,” said Munday. He handed Emma her glass of sherry. “They tried that with me this evening. Bloody cheek.” He told Emma about the driver, repeating the man’s sentence, “We’ll have you and the missus over some time,” and it sounded acutely offensive to him now. Then he told her about the farm boy with the injured arm.
“Oh, dear,” said Emma.
‘Trying to take the piss out of me. They didn’t reckon I’d stand up to them,” said Munday, and coldly he spoke the reply he felt had withered them all. He said, “I don’t give a damn.”
But he was angry, remembering; and the little scene in the pub, like the vicar’s visit, forty minutes in the ten days they had been there, grew out of proportion and would be turned from an incident into an event, something (he knew this as he described it to Emma with exaggerations and additions) they would never stop discussing. And he wondered if what remained of his life would be these few public moments endlessly rehearsed in private.
“You’d better ring the vicar,” said Emma.
“I will when I finish this.” Munday was topping up his sherry.
Emma held her glass to her throat. She sat forward and stared at the fire, and the flames lighted her face, the brightness adding years to her age and giving the long wisps of hair which had fallen loose around her ears and neck an unruly look. Munday was alarmed by the intensity of concentration on her flickering face, the deranged hair, and her unusual jumping shadow on the wall behind her. She stayed like this, studying the fire for several minutes, not drinking from the slender glass, not moving, and it took this long for Munday to realize that it was the fire, flaring and changing so, that changed her expression.
To break the silence he said, “I’d better ring the vicar.”
She said, “Alfred, I—” She was speaking to the fire. “—I’ve had an awful fright.”
“If it’s half as bad as that business in the pub, those impertinent—”
“No,” she said. She held herself motionless and spoke in a deadened voice. Still her shadow leaped. “Don’t say anything now. But when I finish I want you to tell me it’s nothing—my imagination. Please tell me I didn’t see it.”
“Emma, what are you talking about?”
“I’ll tell you, but first I want you to promise me that it’s nothing at all.”
“Good God—”
“Alfred.” Her voice was urgent, and now she turned, putting half her face in shadow; the other half, waxen with terror, still flickered.
“I promise.”
“When you went for the walk I thought I’d better take in the washing while it was still light. You know how windy it is, and the sheets were flapping and making that cracking sound. I had an armful of them and the trees were blowing too. I’ve never heard such noises in England, I never realized—”
“You’ve never lived in the country before.”
“Don’t,” said Emma. “It wasn’t only the wind. I heard someone calling—someone lost. It sounds silly, I know, but I thought it was, well, a woman in a tree. And the sheets were flying up—I couldn’t catch them. I dropped some clothespegs. It seems such a small thing, dropping clothespegs, but it worried me horribly because I could see how frightened I was and the things I was doing. I was hurrying, and I knew why: someone was watching me—that voice. It seemed awfully dark where I was, but everywhere else was light, not daylight, but that sort of silver twilight you get here. I heard the back door slam and I thought, Oh God, I’m locked out. I panicked and started to run across the garden and I suppose I was looking for a window to break. That’s when I saw her.”
“Who, Emma? Where?”
“It was a woman.” Emma’s voice became very small, and without force the whisper seemed to stay in her mouth. “She was standing in our bedroom, at that upper window. In a blue and gray dress, peering out with such a white face. She wasn’t looking at me— she was looking at the wind and the fields, down where you had gone for your walk.”
Munday’s legs went cold and the backs of his arms prickled. He said, “What woman?”
“I can’t go in, I thought. I hadn’t picked up all the washing—half of it was still on the line, behind me, making that flapping, jike sails lifting and filling with wind. I felt she had caught me there in that wind, and I kept thinking, It's her house. I don’t know how long it took because the sheets were all twisted and flying at the window. But when I untwisted them I looked up and she was gone. Now tell me.”