Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

1915

The Last Will and Testament of Arthur Shearly Cripps

I desire to be buried without a coffin or monument on the hill Makirri Maure on the farm Muckle Neuk. The farms of Money Putt and Maronda Mashanu shall be preserved as mission locations, free of any rent or labour tax to native tenants residing thereon.

CODICIL

I the Reverend Arthur Shearly Cripps, do hereby give and bequeath to Mrs Ada Neeves of Icklesham. Rye. Sussex. England free and unencumbered by any death duties, or should the said Ada Neeves predecease me, then to her husband, or in the event of his death, to her children in equal shares the sum of £25 Sterling.

Signed with his own initials when he was blind.

In the church at Icklesham. At her organ practice. Was that the first time he had seen her? Was that the first time they met? No, he doubts it. They must have met before. At services, in the village, when Reverend Churton took him on a round of the farms to introduce him.

‘May I introduce Mr Cripps, our new deacon?’ Then aside, usually to the man of the house, ‘A graduate of Oxford, and a blue to boot, you know?’

So no, not the first time they had met. But now, remembering, more than fifty years later, he thinks of it as the first. He remembers the light through the five frames of the chancel window. The way it fell over her where she played at the organ. And her singing…No, he doesn’t. He remembers she was singing, but he does not remember her singing. That has gone now. Now, in this rondavel, blind, he lives in a world of sound but he is deaf to the sounds of the past. Words, songs, they all pass so briefly. So few burn or brand on memory. But she was singing, he knows that. At the top of her voice, thinking she was alone. But she wasn’t alone. He was watching her, one hand still on the iron handle of the porch door.

Ada Sargent. But of course he didn’t know her name then. Just that he had disturbed her at her practice, and that he was as shocked as she was by their sudden meeting. By the silence in the church after the organ’s last note and by the other’s face, surprised, wide-eyed, staring at him through the frame of the chancel archway, the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments laid in the wall above them.

Then they had spoken, introduced themselves. He probably made apologies for disturbing her, he can’t remember. He knows she called him ‘sir’ and the sound of that word on her lips made a hollow in his chest. He didn’t want her to call him sir , he wanted to be close to her, even then, and that word sir did nothing but set them apart. But that is all. He can remember little else of what they said.

She was beautiful. Seventeen years old. He can’t see her young face now, but he knows she was beautiful. Blue eyes like his and blond hair; skin the colour of the ivory she kept her fingers on, as if to let go of those keys would mean disaster.

He’d left her to her practise that morning. Gone and busied himself in the vestry. But in the end he had just sat there, in the darkness, listening to her play and sing to herself, trying to decide whether to go out and speak to her again. He hadn’t; there had been no need.

Falling in love with her had been so easy. It happened over that summer, and again he can’t remember how: the words, the expressions, even their first kiss. All he knows is that there were words, expressions and kisses. He knows they happened but not how. He knows he had been happy, but not how. Perhaps it is always this way. Perhaps to be able to recall happiness in all its sensation would be too painful, even at the distance of fifty years. But it frustrates him that he cannot recall, relive, just remember. Vaguely, softly: a dull ache rather than the sharp stab he desires.

He had been lonely in Icklesham. It was his first posting, deacon at the town’s stocky Norman church. He liked the country, the low thorn hedges, the patchwork of arable land, the off-set roofs of the oast houses. The pearl-white sky that bore the light of the sea and the way the gulls came squalling in to the freshly ploughed fields, spattering the brown with their white like dashes of milk spilt across a table.

He had done some good walking there. To the hospital in Rye, along country lanes stumbling upon obscure peasants’ cottages, stone boxes with straw lids (not unlike his own rondavel, he realises). And he had enjoyed the work too. But he had been lonely, he remembers that. And that is why she had been so perfect, penetrating his solitude with her beauty and her smile.

To her, he supposed, he must have appeared quite exotic. Educated, a Trinity man. But to him, it was she who was exotic. And to think he had accepted so easily the matching of her love with his! As if it would always be that way. Only the young can meet such fortune with casual ease, he knows that now. Only the young can be unsurprised by love. If he had known then, when he was young, what he knows now, old, then maybe it would have been different. Maybe it would have happened differently and maybe his remembering would not be so painful, a dull ache, throbbing behind his blind eyes and beating in time with his heart.

She liked him to read to her, he remembers that.

‘ Beauty is truth and truth beauty — that is allye know on earth, and all ye need to know ’

A book’s shadow across his face which he takes away, letting the sun into his eyes which he shuts. Flashes of orange motes on the inside of his eyelids, the sound of a river beyond his feet and her hairpins, digging into his skin beneath his shirt as she rolls her head to look at the sky.

He lies on his back, the grass tickling the back of his neck with his arms out, palms up. The heat of the day collects in his hands until he feels as though he is holding two glowing balls of sunlight, an orb of warmth in each, tingling in the bowls of his fingers.

♦

They talked about his grave, Keats’ grave. How they would visit it together one day. She’d said she would be able to tell it was a poet’s grave, she’d sense the words in the soil. Then his hand on her head, stroking down towards her temple, the heat of the sun in her hair. His other hand, free of the book now, on her chest. Her skin beneath her blouse and her heartbeat beneath her skin, distant, as if arriving in her body from deep in the ground.

♦

The sun is lower, the light less dazzling in his eyes. The buzz, stop, buzz of bluebottles over the picnic and the sound of her tearing blades of grass, scattering them in the wind. Rooks, cawing in the branches of a tree. Then a watch, his watch, opening the silver case, opening the day to time which runs on and on like the river below them.

♦

And then she is by the river and he is watching her bend to its water, washing her hands. It divides about her wrists and she lets out a sigh of shock at its coldness. Then she is shaking her hands above the water, the droplets catching the last of the sun as they fall.

And his happiness is fragile inside him, humming, laced with a fear of its ending; a thin ice of joy grown across the cavity of his ribs.

She dwells with beauty — beauty that must die;

And joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching pleasure nigh.

And as she turns from the river, the sun’s light corposant about her shadowed body, he decides he will take joy’s hand from his lips and he will ask her to marry him.

She walks back towards him and holds out her hand. He speaks and she replies. Her mouth moves, the lips move, but he hears nothing. Already the image is fading. He cannot remember what he said or what she said; the sounds have gone and now the vision has too. Only feeling remains, the memory of sensation: the cooling of the breeze, the imprint of the grass on his arms, the river’s coldness resonating in her hands, lapidary, like marble over her skin.