In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill Page A

been up? Yes. She imagined the file of dark mourners mounting the stairs and peering down into the coffin. At Ben. Ben. How could they? How could so many people have touched him and looked at him, unasked, since the moment of his death, when she herself had not?
    But it was better. She thought, they don’t have Ben. When I last saw him, he was alive, walking up the path, at the beginning of an ordinary day, and we were happy, and that is what I want to remember, there is no strange, dead image to lie like a mask over that.
    Dora Bryce was speaking, but her head was bent, the words were muffled and distorted with tears.
    ‘There’s a bed made up for you. For tonight.’
    ‘No, I’ll go back home.’
    ‘Up there? You want to be alone up there tonight?’
    Oh God, Oh God, it was all going to begin again, she wanted to scream at them, leave me alone, leave me alone!
    ‘It’d be only right for you to stay with us this once. Today of all days.’
    Why
?
    ‘Isn’t it the least you can do?’ Alice said, her voice ringing out clear and impersonal across the room.
    Why? Why should it matter to any of them that she should stay here, under this roof, tonight? Why should it be unkind or disrespectful of her to go back to her own home?
    Nothing more was said, because there were footsteps, the men in black overcoats were coming through the doorway and passing by her, on their way upstairs. Ruth thought, I could go, I could still go up, this is the last chance. She saw that Arthur Bryce was looking at her, expecting it.
    She turned away. Saw the one car outside in the lane, and the clutch of onlookers, waiting, to stare and to follow behind the family, through the village and up to the church.
    Someone had closed the inner door, but she could still hear it, from upstairs, the dull thud-thud of the hammer.
    *
    The car moved off very slowly, with two of the undertaker’s men walking in front, and behind it, the column of mourners like black ants, and as they turned out of Foss Lane, the sun came out from behind full-bellied rain clouds. Ruth felt calm, and withdrawn from it all. She walked alone, needing no one. Jo was a pace behind her, watching, anxious. The wood of the coffin was pale as honey. It seemed to have nothing to do with Ben, because Ben was here, was all around her, was walking next to her, and occasionally, he touched her arm for comfort. She wanted to say, ‘You went away and now you have come back. Where did you go? Why? Why?’ She wondered if she was going out of her mind.
    They were waiting at the lych-gate of the flint-faced church, the rector and the curate, like magpies in black and white, and suddenly, she remembered the day she and Ben had been married, remembered walking up here, early in the morning, dressed in plain, cream wool, without a hat or gloves or flowers. It had been a brief wedding, with only half a dozen people there, and afterwards, they had gone straight to the cottage, there had been no party. That was what they both wanted, and they did not care what conclusions the village might draw from the sudden, private ceremony: and Dora Bryce had had no choice but to agree, though she blamed Ruth for it all, for turning Ben against her.
    The bell was tolling, and unconsciously, they began to walk in time with it, and everything in the world seemed to be slowing down, her own breathing and the beats of her heart, as well as the steps of the priests and the bearers, and soon, they would stop, it would all stop.
    For a moment, it did, time ceased, as the men who had set the coffin down stepped back, and everyone found a place, and the two priests waited for the tolling bell to cease. The church was full. The bell ceased. The church seethed with silence.
    Ruth was alone, beside Jo, in a pew in front of everyone else, so that she could only hear the noises of sobbing, the coughs and the shuffling feet, she did not have to look at their faces. Jo sat like a stone.
    The priest was speaking, Ruth heard the