Free In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill Page A

the house she left to be managed somehow, by Alice and Jo.
    ‘What good will it do?’
    Dora Bryce did not answer, only moved nearer the fire, trapped in the vicious circle of her own misery and resentment. She thought, now my own daughter is turning against me, and what have I left? A man who gives me no help, a man no use for anything, and a child who might not belong here. What have I left in this world? And she thought again of her first born, her son, Ben, and how he had been, and her imagination gilded him with every perfection, every virtue, it seemed to her, now, that he had been the only one of them to love her, that he had paid her constant attention, had cared, had understood, as none of the others wanted to understand. Ben.
    The sobbing rose up from her stomach and the ugly, angry noise began again. She did not notice when Alice, too, went out, that they had all left her, because they were exhausted and ashamed, they had lost patience. She said, I have had nothing in my life, no satisfaction, no fulfilment, no rewards or pleasures, I have been cheated and deceived.
    The death of her son only confirmed it, only reminded her of what she might have had, what she ought to have been.
    Now, there was nothing.
    The curate, Thomas Ratheman, leaned over the bed of his sleeping daughter, saw the fine, mauve-flushed skin of her closed eyelids, and felt all the old amazement, that she should have come from him, and now be here, a separate life. But he was troubled, he could not forget Ruth Bryce, who had hidden from him when he called, and the sight of her face, and the way she had carried herself, apart from everyone else, at the funeral.
    He thought he should go to her again, talk, help her somehow with her grief, and though he was conscientious, he did not think to do this out of duty but for love, he had come to love all these people.
    The child, Isobel, stirred, turned over and murmured in sleep and, thinking of the fallen tree, the sudden, casual death, he was afraid for her in this world, he said, nothing shall touch her, no harm shall ever come to her; even while knowing that it was not possible, not true, that she must grow and suffer and change, if she were ever to be herself and free.
    Ben Bryce had left no child for his wife’s comfort. Did she regret it? Again, the idea of going there, now, even so late in the evening, came to him urgently, and he knew why, remembering he had heard one or other of them say, in the village that morning:
    ‘She’ll do away with herself, she’ll not bear it like this, on her own, you mind.’
    He had stopped and prayed, at that moment, for Ruth to have courage and for evil not to overtake her.
    When he was a boy, a friend of his father’s, a priest too, had hanged himself from a roof beam in the barn, a year after his wife’s death; a year during which he had fought with misery and loneliness and temptation, and had failed, had succumbed, worn out and crazed by it all.
    And the same night, Ratheman’s father had woken in a sweat of fear, his head full of a dream he had had, of the friend in some appalling need and distress, and he would have dressed and gone to him, although it was seven miles away and winter, thick snow. But, standing, undecided, in the bedroom, he had listened to reason which told him that a dream was a dream and not prophetic, that the fears had sprung from some dark place in his own mind. He was a reasonable man, scholarly, faithful, unimaginative, he did not set store by his own chance emotions, or those of others, and so he had gone back to bed and the dream did not disturb him again.
    In the morning, very early, someone had come through the snow to tell him of his friend’s suicide, in the middle of the previous night. He had never ceased to blame himself and pray for forgiveness, of God and of his friend, for the rest of his life, tormented by the dream which had been a cry for help that he had not answered. That experience, that death, had aged and