In the Springtime of the Year Read Online Free PDF Page A

Colt had wished, for someone else to come, to relieve him of the responsibility for her. He was never easy with other people, except children now and then. He had only seen Ruth at odd times, walking somewhere about, and nodded to her.
    Inside his head, he heard over and over again, the creak and crash of the falling elm, and then the silence that had come over the whole wood. He saw himself bending down to the young man’s body and knowing at once, knowing without having to touch. And it had been nobody’s fault. Not his, not Ben’s. An accident. Pointless. Done with.
    It made him anxious to watch her, leaning a little towards the fire, not crying. But, because there was nothing else that he could do, he stayed with her, in the silence.
    *
    She lost count of how many people came up to the cottage that night, there seemed to be no end to them, all the long evening, no end to the sound of footsteps and the respectful knocks upon the door, the set faces – older and younger men, Mrs. Rydal and Carter’s wife, and Alice Bryce. But they all seemed to be a great distance away from her, even as they filled up the small room, she heard what they said as though it came from down a long tunnel.
    ‘Come back with us. You shouldn’t stop here. It’s the shock. You don’t know what you’re doing. It’s not right to be on your own after this. It isn’t what Ben would have wanted for you.’
    She was appalled that they should think to know better than she did what he would want, and would have told them not to mention him at all, except that she knew, within her, that it did not matter, for she had Ben, all to herself, now, they could never reach him.
    ‘I’m staying here. I’m all right.
Please
.’
    She had not moved from the chair by the fire. Potter had long since gone.
    ‘I’m all right.’
    It exhausted her, it was like trying to make the deaf or the mad understand what she was saying.
    Alice Bryce sat at the table, her face turned away from Ruth. Alice, almost as tall as Ben, and like him, in feature, though not in colouring or manner, nor at all in the person she was.
    Proud, they had always said that of Ruth. But it was Alice who was proud, of her own beauty and grace of movement, and proud because of the way Dora Bryce had brought her up, the things she had made her believe about herself.
    ‘You’ll be what I never had the chance to be. I won’t live to see you waste your life, throw yourself away on a man with no prospects, and stuck in a place like this, never having enough, never doing what you could have done. You’re going to be somebody.’
    She was wearing a dark blue dress, high up to her neck, and it suited her, showed off her hair and the sheen of her fair skin. Whatever money there was over, at Foss Lane, went on clothes for Alice.
    ‘Go back,’ Ruth said again. ‘Go back home.’
    For she needed more than anything to be alone with this vivid, certain awareness of Ben, all these people who came here were shutting him out, keeping him away from her.
    ‘They had to get mother to bed. The doctor had to come, give her something to make her sleep. She couldn’t have come up here with me.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Don’t you care about us? What we feel? He didn’t only belong to you. Don’t you know what it was like for her, having them come to tell her like that?’
    Ruth got up and went into the kitchen, and saw that the moon had risen and the light of it was shining on to the rose-quartz, which was still where Ben had left it, on the kitchen table. And something seemed to come from it and its beauty, so that, looking at it, she could take hold of herself again, and so forgive Alice for what she had said. She wanted to stay in the quiet, cold kitchen alone. While she was there, she did not feel so detached from everything; she held the knowledge that Ben was dead and yet here, with her, steadily in the front of her mind. She was not shocked or sick or afraid. Everything in the world was in pace. The