Read In the Springtime of the Year for Free Online Page B

herself, another person, looking on at this girl in the wheat-coloured blouse and skirt; it was not her own hands which pushed the little red discs from square to square. Jo played the game well, and honestly, not holding back in order to let her win, and so she did not win, not once, which did not matter. Nothing mattered.
    ‘Are you tired?’
    The two people she had been, merged together again, at the sound of his voice.
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Should I get you something to eat now?’
    ‘No.’
    But when he had made his own meal, she picked a lump of cheese off the plate, and half a tomato, and they were enough, they satisfied her, though they tasted of nothing in her mouth.
    ‘I’ll sleep here, if you want me to,’ Jo said.
    Sleep. Yes, she could sleep again. But not upstairs – she could not face that room, with the bed, and all the drawers and cupboards full of Ben’s clothes, and the smell of his hair left on the pillow. She would stay down here, sleep in the upright fireside chair again. And if she did not sleep, at least she would have the comfort of Jo’s presence in the house.
    ‘I’ll make a bed for you. In the small room.’
    ‘I can do it.’
    ‘No.’
    For she must not simply sit and sit, as though the blood was dammed up within her.
    As she opened the door of the small room, it was again as though she had come face to face with Ben. She said his name aloud. A slight breeze puffed the cotton curtain, bringing in the smell of rain-soaked bracken and turf.
    ‘Ben?’
    The sky seemed full of him too, and he was part of the breaths she drew in, but he was also standing just behind her, looking over her shoulder. She wondered why she was not afraid, not of him, but of these things which she had never believed could happen. It was not the same as remembering Ben, or picturing him in her mind, it was a knowledge, that he was there. And most of all, he was there at moments when she had not been thinking of him: as she had come into this room, she had only been wondering which sheets to put on the bed for Jo, and whether it was at all damp.
    She said, ‘Ben. I’m all right. Nothing else can happen. I can’t be hurt. You’re here, and Jo is here. It is all right.’
    Why did she speak to him? Ben was dead and gone away, was with God. But not here, in this room. Not here.
    Yet he was here. She closed the curtain and wiped the beads of rain off the ledge. And thought, only let it stay like this, only let the clock stand still and let me feel no more than I feel now, let me have this reassurance. If it stays like this, I can bear it.
    But she knew that it would not stay, that this was only a calm, to accept and be grateful for, something to hold to, before the coming of the storm.
    *
    That night, she scarcely slept at all. The exhaustion and shock had drained out of her like anaesthetic, she felt as though some great tide had thrown her up on to a beach and left her, wide awake. It was still raining. Ben had been right then, the spring had not come yet, and the two days of clear skies and sunlight seemed years away, a memory from childhood.
    She had no sense, now, of Ben’s presence in the house. She tried to recapture it, spoke to him again, but the room was empty. And now, she could not stop thinking about where they had taken him, after the accident, and what they were doing to his body.
    She imagined how it might have been, wondered what they did to prepare a man for his coffin. She had never been in contact with the events of a death. Godmother Fry had died in her sleep, the week after Ruth had returned home, and the death of her mother had been years ago, when she was only three, they had shielded her from it completely, sent her away, to cousins in Derbyshire.
    She supposed he was in the mortuary at the hospital , lying – lying where? On a bed or a stretcher? Or on a slab of marble? How did he look? Was he like Ben, or was he utterly changed, stiff and pale, like the dead piglet they had once