In the Springtime of the Year Read Online Free PDF

clock ticked. They thought that she had not taken it in, they had all waited for her to collapse and begin to scream again, to depend upon them.
    ‘You’re not normal.’
    Alice had said that, Ben’s sister, sitting in the other room, Alice, who had no possible idea of how, in this one day, Ruth had utterly changed. From the moment of buying the piece of quartz at Thefton and the revelation of a new world in the sunlight as she had walked home up the hill, from then on, everything formed a pattern , as regular and beautiful as that of the crystal. A pattern only she could see.
    Alice. She must go back, must speak to Alice again. Not to explain to her, no. But try and be kind, at least, to this girl who had never liked or accepted her. For none of them had been given what had come to her, the understanding of the pattern, completed at four o’clock, with Ben’s dying. Whatever happened afterwards, she would not lose that knowledge, it might be all that, in the end, could save her.
    ‘I’ll make a drink for you?’
    Alice stared. ‘You haven’t understood, have you? You’re going about like someone asleep. Ben’s dead. He is
dead
.’
    And she beat her hands suddenly, down on the table.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You don’t know, you haven’t believed it yet.’
    ‘There’s tea. Or cocoa. I bought some cocoa at the market.’
    ‘Don’t you …’
    But then, she got up quickly, looked round for her coat. It was late now, past midnight. Nobody else had come.
    ‘You said you wanted to be left. All right, I’ll leave you. You don’t need anything from me. Any of us. You never have.’
    Ruth stood in the doorway, feeling sorry for Alice, and yet far away from her again, a world distant.
    She said, ‘There’s a moon. You’ll be able to see down the hill. You’ll be all right.’
    A log toppled over in the grate and the sparks splattered up, and then fell again, like a firework.
    ‘There was a message,’ Alice’s voice was hard ‘Is he to be brought here, when they’ve done, or come to Foss Lane? You’re the one to say.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter.’
    ‘Which?’
    ‘Your mother…
    ‘She wants him home.’
    ‘Then let her.’
    For she did not want a coffin here, she did not want the body, she had all she wanted, Ben with her, and the house full of him, as he had been alive in it.
    ‘It would be easiest.’
    The words would hardly come out of her mouth, she was suddenly stupid with tiredness.
    ‘From there. It’s nearer.’
    At the front door, Alice turned.
    ‘You’re not even crying. You’ve not even feeling enough to cry.’
    Ruth went back to her chair, and slept at once, and the fire slipped down and darkened and died within the grate, so that when Jo came to her, just after six the next morning, the room was cold and without any comfort, in the first, thin light.
    They would never have sent him up here, he must have made his own decision to come, and then, nothing would have stopped him. When she opened her eyes, he was there, a few feet away, looking at her anxiously.
    ‘Jo …’
    She moved, and all the muscles down her neck and back were aching, her left arm had gone numb, where she had leaned upon it.
    The room looked the same, everything in its familiar place, and that surprised her for a moment, she had somehow expected it to be altogether changed.
    ‘Jo,’ she said again, and with pleasure, for he was the only person she wanted to be with – when she saw him, relief flooded her, because he would not try to make her do anything against her wishes, and there would be no need for explanations.
    ‘You didn’t go to bed.’
    ‘But I did sleep. I didn’t think I’d want to … I couldn’t get upstairs, I was so tired.’
    She remembered the exhaustion, so great that her thoughts were incoherent, she had not known what she was doing.
    ‘You wouldn’t have been comfortable.’
    ‘It didn’t matter.’
    They were silent, for a moment, looking at each other. But not because they were either