Chapter 5 #3
He began to unbutton his waistcoat and I did the same with clumsy fingers.
I removed my neck-cloth and paused, but Jem was pulling his shirt over his head and unlacing his boots.
I did not want to get left behind so I began to hurry as well, and soon I was undressing as if the woods were on fire and my life depended upon getting into the water as quickly as possible.
It felt strange to stand naked in the woods and I could not help glancing over my shoulder, still half expecting to see Lady Catherine herself marching down the slope with horrified disapproval writ across her face.
But Jem was already stepping gingerly into the brook, and wading to the deepest part.
His bulk was white in the dappled shade, only his hands and face burnt nut-brown by the sun.
He knelt, then plunged forwards, submerging briefly.
He rose with a dog-like shake of the head, then crouched there, only his head and shoulders above the level of the water, hair shining with wet.
“Cold!” He was puffing and grinning. “Good though. Deeper than it looks.”
I followed his path into the water, first wading, then kneeling, then allowing myself to fall forwards into the water.
He had stirred up debris from the bottom and old leaves and twigs brushed my face and the sudden cold made my nerves shout and quiver.
I surfaced, gasping and spluttering, and he clasped my wrist and pulled me to the head of the pool where there were willow roots to cling onto.
“There.” He shook his head again to get the wet hair out of his eyes. “Prime, eh?”
“Yes. Prime.”
I let myself stretch out the length of the pool next to him.
Above us, midges danced, and the smell of green things and flowers and leaf mould was everywhere, as if all the perfumes of the year from spring to winter were distilled into the brook.
As it flowed, the water caressed me in places I did not often think of; the small of my back, my fundament, the tops of my thighs.
Beside me, he turned, and let his face rest under the water for a moment. He lifted it, opened his eyes. “Ho, that’s good! That’ll wash away the heat.”
“Yes.”
“Glad you got in now, ain’t you?”
I nodded.
“You always hemmed and hawed and you was always glad. Remember?”
“I suppose I did.”
“Not as big as that old eel pond though, is it?”
“This is better. It’s ours .”
He smiled. “Yours.”
“You found it.”
“Ours, then,” he conceded, for it had always been our fancy as boys that discovery led to some private understanding of ownership, though only between the two of us, for we had known well that nothing was truly ours.
Presently, in some silent accord, we left the water. I put on my still-warm shirt and drawers and breeches and we sat at the side of the pond to let ourselves dry. My skin felt smooth and clean and the air so warm it was a caress upon my brow and my bare calves and feet.
I felt languid, but at the same time as if I could walk twenty miles and still have heart for twenty more. It was a sensation I had not experienced for many years. In fact, the last time I had felt this way had also been with Jem.
“I missed you,” I said, “When I came home from school and you were gone.”
“Aye. Sorry. Missed you too.”
“Couldn’t you have waited? To say goodbye?”
“Don’t know as how I could.”
“Oh.” I picked at my stockings, crestfallen.
It had been such an awful homecoming. I had paid my respects to my father and acquitted myself as best I could at the interview that followed, in which his unhappiness at how much money I had spent had featured greatly, though I had paid only for those services that had been absolutely necessary and I had tried to assure him of that fact.
Once he had dismissed me, I had run out of the house to find Jem, and the gardener had told me, with a shrug, that the poor fellow had run away to sea. I had been so bereft that I had felt that Jem had died. Or perhaps that I had. I had wept for days.
“It were like this,” he said, and then fell silent for so long I thought he had decided not to speak further.
The dead leaves in the pool that had been stirred up by our bathing gradually sank or were carried away by the current.
He said, “Look, you were gone off to school. And I thought you’d come back and…
and…realise. And I couldn’t have that. So, I thought, you’d gone off to be a man so I should do the same. So, I went. And that’s how it was.”
“But, Jem, what should I realise?”
He glanced at me and looked down. “About me.”
“I don’t…”
“You’re gentry . Your Pa was the parson. And me…” he gave a short laugh. “I were nothing. Gardener’s boy. No prospects. Didn’t know my letters. Still don’t. Ain’t brave. Face all anyhow.” He touched his lip.
“I like your face.” I frowned, thinking of a hundred times he had shown courage when we were boys.
I had seen him wading in to break up dog fights and calming frightened horses and all manner of other feats.
He had not even been afraid of the gander who had belonged to the landlord at the Ship. “How can you say you’re not brave?”
He shook his head, as if to dismiss my words. “I thought things would change when you got back. Thought you’d have learned not to want to go about with the likes of me. And if you didn’t learn it at school, I thought you’d learn it at university, or after you took orders.”
I shook my head. “I learned the opposite. I learned I like no one so well as I like you.”
“Ah.” He glanced at me again. “You know, at sea, I saw some wonders. Fish what could fly and sharks with swords on their noses, but that there beats those things hollow. Still don’t understand it.”
“But we’re friends,” I protested, for I did not like his line of thinking. “It was one of the first things you said to me. Don’t you remember?”
“Don’t know as I do, but since you say it I know it must be true.”
“Yes, it is true.” I paused. “Can I tell you a story? About my time at Oxford?”
“Course.”
“I read Classics. You know, Latin and Greek. I had a tutor. Everyone does. One goes to his rooms and one talks and answers questions and so on. Anyway, in my first year, I saw my tutor with two other men: Bailey and Ashford. Bailey, I think, did not like me. He seldom addressed me if he did not have to, but Ashford was very amiable. He smiled a lot and would often walk with me afterwards, for our rooms lay in the same part of the college. And as we walked, he would tell me things, about his sister getting married and his father losing money when his bank failed, and his cousin taking ill. I never had much news of my own to impart, but I listened and responded in a manner which I felt was appropriate; asking pertinent questions, and making relevant remarks.”
“Aye.”
“Then in my second year, things changed, and I no longer saw Ashford in my tutor’s rooms. And I was sorry, because I missed him and I used to wonder how his sister was getting on in her new home, and whether his cousin had recovered, and so on.” I fell silent, lost in the memory.
“Some friends do fall by the wayside,” Jem remarked. “Pity, that.”
“No, no, that is not the end of my story. The thing is, near the end of my second year, I met him again. I had seen him about, in halls, but we had not spoken, then we ran into one another. He had been visiting a man in a room near mine and we met at my door just as I was going out. And I greeted him and asked after his sister and he looked so startled that I felt duty bound to remind him that we had shared a tutor the previous year. And he looked blank, and then his face lit up and I was happy for I could see he remembered me after all, and then he said ‘Ah, yes, Wilson, isn’t it?’ He couldn’t remember my name, you see.
Not that I should have held that against him, for a man may easily fail to recollect such minor details, but it soon became clear he didn’t really remember me at all.
He asked after my mother, for example, and of course she’d been dead for nearly twenty years, and I know I had told him that.
“Anyway, he went his way and I went mine and we never spoke again. But the thing was…I had thought—” my voice wavered and I cleared my throat to hide it, “—I had thought we were…well, not good friends, but at least friendly acquaintances. I remembered everything about him; all the details of his sister’s preferences in gloves, and the names of his father’s hounds, and…
and everything. But he had not thought of me as a friend.
Indeed, it was plain he had not thought of me at all.
If he recalled me in any way, I was simply that fellow with whom he had once shared a tutor.
Nothing more. Our talks had meant nothing to him.
And I…I own that it hurt me. Because I made no other acquaintance at university, but I thought I had made one, and then it turned out I had not even made that. ”
“Ah.” His voice was soft. “Cruel hard, that was.”
“I have no gift for friendship,” I said. “I wish I did, and I do my best, but somehow it does not happen. Except with you. Somehow, with you, it has always been easy. And I know our stations in life are different, but that has never mattered to me. Not in private.”
“Well, then.” His voice low. “Don’t matter to you, it don’t matter to me.”
I was content with that, though I felt raw at having told him my Ashford story, for the memory of my last encounter with the man ever set me writhing internally with humiliation. My hope that I had made a friend felt pathetic, even to me.
We sat a little longer and then Jem arose and I followed him out of the wilderness and back into the real world with all its bafflements and cruelties, but that night, in bed, the memory of the water, and of Jem, refreshed my limbs and my heart and I slept.