In the Springtime of Year by Susan Hill

Author:Susan Hill [Hill, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780140041101
Publisher: Penguin (UK)
Published: 1975-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

8

RUTH SAW THE man first from the window. She had been up for half an hour, perhaps more, had washed and dressed; and then done nothing but stand here, looking out, too tired to think or feel, drugged with the night’s heavy sleep.

It had stopped raining but the sky above the sagging trees was dough-coloured. She had not wanted to wake, for what could she do with another day, how might she drag herself through eight or ten hours, struggling against remembering too much and falling into despair, or giving in and weeping uselessly, sickening herself. She had taken to going to bed earlier, at seven or eight o’clock, longing for the oblivion which always came to her.

The man was old and dirty and pushed a handcart with one lop-sided wheel. He came over the track, looking down, but making directly towards the cottage and at first she thought that someone was again trying to see her, to pry, under the pretence of bringing her this or that, and she shrank back from the window.

But he was not from the village, she had never seen him before. As he came nearer, she noticed that the cart was half-full, though she could not tell with what, and loosely covered with a tattered sheet of sacking or canvas. Then he was one of the travelling men, selling pots and pans and brushes. She wanted nothing, she would have opened the window and called to him to go away. But she did not, it seemed impossible for her to exert herself even as much as that. And so he came on, leaving the hand cart at the gate and trudging down the path and around to the back door. Well, he would go away, as they all did, she had only to wait.

But after his second or third knocking, she went down, suddenly wanting to have the sight, even for a moment, of another human face, to be in touch again with the real world, outside of herself. Jo had not come yet today.

He was not old, not really, only dirty, with a thin face and stiff limbs. She thought, he does not know me or anything about me, he does not know about Ben. But he must, everyone must know – how could there be a person in the world who did not?

He had begun to speak as she opened the door, a stream of words, pattered off like a rhyme, spoken dozens of times each day.

‘Old clothes, shoes, pots, pans, vases, plates, watches or clocks, working or not, silver, coins, medals, knives, scissors, ornaments, fire-irons, coal-scuttles, blankets, brass …’

‘All that?’

‘Any of that, any …’

‘How? On that cart? How can you have all of that to sell?’

He pulled off his cap and set it back on his head in a single movement, but there was time for her to see that the hair was growing only here and there, in tufts and patches, anyhow, and with scaly, bald places between, like the pelt of an animal with mange.

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