FIVE: THE FROST HELD
The frost held. On Sunday morning the little boys lingered round the edges of the Broad Ditch on their way to chapel, and Mr. Dunnock, hurrying to the vestry, noticed Mr. Lambert’s foxhound puppy running across the ice.
“There will be skating,” he said to himself, “and I have not lived all my life in the fens for nothing. I can still show the younger men something,” and he decided to ask Anne to cut sandwiches. They would spend the morrow at Bluntisham:—a long walk, but one which would repay them with the finest stretch of ice in Huntingdonshire, and at Bluntisham Mr. Dunnock would see the best figure skaters and be seen by them.
After evening service he tapped the barometer, asking himself if it would be tempting Providence if he were to look at the skates that evening. There might be a screw missing, a strap needed, or a broken bootlace, and such little things were best attended to overnight, he reflected, trying to conceal his eagerness, for he would not be happy until he had handled his skates.
“They will be in the box-room,” he said, taking a candle with him from the hall, but in the box-room many things met his eye which reminded him of his life at Ely. It had been a wretched subordinate existence, supporting his wife and daughter on a hundred and twenty pounds a year, but as he looked back on it such things were forgotten, and it seemed to him that his life there had been a happy one, for it had been shared with the woman he loved. Setting down his candle, he turned over the Japanese screen, which he had always liked for the storks flying across it, embroidered in silver thread. His wife had intended to re-cover the screen, for the storks were tarnished, and the silver threads unravelling, but she had died before she had found a suitable piece of stuff. “She is in Heaven,” he said mechanically, and was surprised once again that the words with which he comforted others held no consolation for him.
“An old age passed together would have brought a closer understanding between us,” he said, suddenly speaking his innermost thought, which he had not admitted to himself before, for the clergyman’s tragedy was never to have had the conviction of perfect understanding or intimacy, even with his wife.
“In the middle years of life we live too much in the affairs of the day, and a child troubles the mind of its mother. So many burdens to be borne, so many duties to be fulfilled.... We were too occupied to look into each other’s hearts, and old age, the sweetest portion of life if it be filled with harmony, and the happiness of memories shared in common, old age is reserved for me only; a lonely and miserable old age. Now that I have lost Mavis, intimacy is impossible with anyone else, and I feel myself growing far away from everyone, and farthest of all from Anne. She reminds me too closely of her mother; I find it painful to be with her and I find her youth as tiresome as she finds my hasty temper.”
Mr. Dunnock told himself that such feelings must be controlled, but he had said that before, and had no faith that the strangeness which seemed to be growing upon him could be overcome. “Death will release me, and I must console myself with the hope that Mavis is waiting for me in Heaven, that she will fold me in her wings, and take me to herself without a word of reproach. When I hear the birds singing in the mornings they repeat that promise, and once or twice I have had the conviction that when I looked out of our bedroom window I should see angels perched in the branches of the trees.”
The three pairs of skates lay on a shelf, the blades had been smeared with vaseline and wrapped in greaseproof paper, but the boots were dusty, and stretched stiffly over the boxwood trees.
“Yes, yes, the skates will be all right: there will be nothing amiss with them,” for they had been greased by her hands; it was she who had laid them aside after the frost last winter a few weeks before her death.