Free In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill

death and known that it was good. If he had ever doubted immortality, he could not doubt it now. Awe had come over him, and a kind of reverence, he had knelt and been, for a while, paralysed, for the whole wood was filled with this momentous thing, this parting of body and soul. And when he had put out a hand and touched Ben Bryce’s arm, felt his wrist and the thick bone, and the hairs covering the flesh, it had been like an electric shock, some impulse, whose meaning he did not fully understand, had passed into him. And it had not left him, he felt it still.
    Standing at the very back of the small church during the funeral, he had known it again, though the shock of the death had come fully upon him by then, the numb sense of disbelief, and there was grief, too, for himself, for Ruth, for all of them, at this loss.
    He shook his head. There had been a door through which he had passed and now, on the other side of it, he tried to come to terms with what he found, with his altered self.
    He lived alone, had done so for thirty years, and he was content; he was not a thinking man. Now, he could do nothing save think.
    The dog was snuffling at the crack under the door, and then it came back to Potter, whined softly, so that the man got up, they went out into the raw, grey evening . They walked down through the beech woods and Low Field, up on to the ridge, and over the other side. Nothing moved, nothing had colour, the sky looked sour.
    It seemed to him that things would not be the same again, with him, or with the rest of the village, their world had tilted, and they must get accustomed to it, for there would be no going back.
    He stayed out until dark, and, returning, he saw a light in Ruth Bryce’s window, and paused, looking at it, distressed for her, but knowing that he could not go near, because he would be rejected, he carried upon him the taint of her husband’s dying. He did not know what would happen to her. He felt fear.
    In the house at Foss Lane, it was as though a dank fog had crept into every room and settled there, and all night and all day, there was the sound of Dora Bryce’s weeping. She lay in bed, or else got up and sat huddled near the grate, and her eyes and lips were swollen and stained with the salt of her tears. When she spoke, it was only to herself, the same, bitter, repeated words.
    ‘Why should it happen to me? What have I done to deserve it? What harm did he ever do? How shall I live, how shall I live? How can he be dead?’
    And, after a time, it embarrassed or irritated them and they gave up trying to console or quieten her. Arthur Bryce stood about, a large man with a damaged arm and shoulder, helpless, his own grief buried far within him, never articulated; and Jo retreated, out into the woods or over beyond the ridge, walked alone, before going to Ruth, to do her work for her, and to give and receive comfort.
    It was Alice who lost her temper, for she realised, now, how much she loathed this house, and wanted to be free from it, she felt stifled and unnerved in the close atmosphere of self-pity and bitterness generated by her mother, and she had nothing with which to occupy herself, nowhere to go.
    In the middle of the evening, she got up suddenly, went and stood over her mother and shook her arm. Dora Bryce rocked herself to and fro, like a creature in pain.
    ‘Stop that! Stop that, mother, how do you think we can bear to hear you, crying and crying, and complaining? Don’t you think we feel, too? Don’t you think all of us feel, but what good are you doing? What help is it?’
    Her mother stared up at her and saw the girl’s face, angry, proud and without pity.
    ‘It does no good, does it? Will it alter things? Will it bring him back? Haven’t you any dignity, any pride in yourself?’
    She was disgusted, not only by the endless crying, but because her mother would not bother with herself, would not wash or brush out her hair or change her clothes, and the cooking and work about