In the Springtime of the Year Read Free

there, only to draw herself back from it in dread. When she imagined all that it would mean, her heart pounded, she had to clutch on to a chair or the wall to steady herself. She dare not do it, go there, find him, and ask the questions, listen, discover. For, once she had discovered, none of it could ever again be forgotten.
    The pile of sewing, sent down by Mrs. Rydal, lay beside her chair. They were always small, fussy jobs, tedious and unrewarding, jobs no one else would do. She would have liked the chance to make something new, a dress or some petticoats, but even if they felt she could manage it now, they would not ask her; she was the girl who did the mending not the making.
    It did not engross her, and so she went over and over the same things in her mind, while her hands patched the elbows of shirts and darned socks, shortened or lengthened hems. Much of the time, it seemed to her that the garments were only fit to be thrown away, the material was almost past repairing. Yet the Rydals owned half the villages and woods for miles around, they could not be poor. It was poor people who darned and redarned, and made up a sheet out of two old ones, sides to middle. If she had had the choice, she would have refused the work, but she had to live, and the only other way to make money would have been to sell the cottage. It was hers, bought with the money Godmother Fry had left her, they had been proud, she and Ben both, that they were not tenants. Leaving here she could not contemplate because it was all she had left to cling to, it was Ben, it was life to her, familiar. She dreaded change, new places. And so, she did the sewing, and ironing, too. One of the men brought parcels over from Ridge Farm, and she herself walked back with them and, as often as not, tried to leave them somewhere, to slip into the kitchen when it was empty, and leave again at once, to avoid meeting anyone, having to talk.
    People around here were lucky, they said, to have Rydal for an employer or a landlord, he paid good enough wages and kept the houses in repair – though he worked the men hard. Ben had worked hard, but that had only been his nature, he had hated to be idle, could never rest, even at home in the evenings, though he had been up and out at half past six, and not home again until seven – or later, in the summer.
    ‘Sit down,’ she had said sometimes, ‘just sit down with me.’ And he would do so, to please her, but after a few moments, he was restless, he would lean over and start to fiddle with the fire, re-arranging the logs, getting up a draught, and then remember some job to be done. Well, she had not minded. It was the way he was. And he had been there, hadn’t he, there with her, even when he was digging in the garden or mending the roof of the shed, she had been able to hear him, to catch sight of him from the window. He had been there.
    She looked down at the clothes. A jacket with the collar frayed, a skirt missing two buttons. Nothing.
    The room had gone cooler. The lamp threw its shadows. And if she did not begin to work now, did not find her needle and thread, she would just sit for hours, until she was tired enough to go to bed, sit without moving, her hands in her lap, staring ahead. It seemed now that not just half a year, but half of her life had gone by like that – except that it was not life, it was not anything, except time passing, and the thoughts which passed to and fro like shuttles, the same pictures she saw in her mind, the same words remembered.
    She began to sew. She said, I am getting better, and I am doing it by myself for that was the most vital thing of all, if she was going to recover somehow, she should do it without help. Though there were days when she did not believe that anything had changed after all, days which were worse than those at the beginning, because she was no longer shocked or numb now, and so she knew, that it was true and would go on being true, and it was on those days that,