The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [93]
Philip had not been included in the party, and had not expected to be. He had taken some bread and cheese and set out in the strangely unseasonal weather on a long ramble. He walked to his favourite Marsh church, the diminutive, brick-built church of St. Thomas Becket, near Fairfield. Philip thought of this church as his own particular church; he knew little about Thomas Becket, and did not know that the church was built on Becket lands. He had never seen a church so isolated. It stood amongst water-meadows, stretching flat and far, on which for miles the fat sheep busily cropped the salty grass. There was no road leading to it, and from it no village, no high road could be seen, only the marshes and the weather. The marshes often flooded in the winter, and then the church appeared to float mysteriously on sheets of floodwater, reflected in the dark-bright surface on calm days, blustered and beaten by howling winds and spray on stormy ones. Philip made his way from tuft to tuft of the marsh grass, for it was sodden underfoot and water welled up between tussocks. When he got to the church, he looked around at the endless sky, the flat horizon, the apparently endless sheep-studded meadows, and felt peaceful. He didn’t think exactly in language. He noticed things. The dabbing movement of a duck. The awkwardly beautiful, almost crippled look of the trailing legs of a flapping heron. Fish squirming in mud. Patterns made by the wind.
He sat for a long time on a stone in the churchyard, not even thinking. Time was so slow, there was no reason ever to stand up, or to move on.
A figure appeared on the Fairfield path, at the limit of vision. A woman in silhouette, in a skirt, with her hair bound in a scarf, and what looked like a small suitcase in her hand. She stopped to lean on a gate, and then walked a little way, and then sank to the ground, like a kind of hummock, and stayed down. Philip stood up, and set off across the marsh, feeling that this other person, who now shared the emptiness with him, was both an intruder and perhaps in need of help.
It took him some time to reach her. During his striding, leaping, occasionally bogged approach, she did not stir.
She appeared to have fainted or died. She had crumpled quite compact, her body in a ball, her face on her outstretched hand, the cardboard suitcase on the wet dust, within reach. Philip knelt down. He did not want her to be dead. He took her shoulder, and turned her face slightly towards him. The face was grimy, the lips slightly cracked, the eyes closed. Her nostrils and lips trembled: she was breathing. A breeze tugged at the edges of her gipsy-scarf, which was more animated than she was. She was wearing a felted coat, bunched over a grey skirt. Her ankles were swollen, and her shoes cracked and dusty. She had walked a long way.
Philip squatted beside her amongst the wayside grass, and took her hand, which seemed the politest thing to do. He bent over, and said in her ear, gently,
“Can I help?” and then, “How do you feel?”
She trembled a little and stirred, and opened her eyes, briefly, staring out past Philip’s occluded head at the sunlight. What she said, however, was his name.
“Philip Warren.”
Philip stiffened.
“I’m looking for Philip Warren,” she said. “I keep getting lost.”
Philip pushed back the scarf and the hair from her face, rearranged her features in his mind’s eye and saw she was his sister Elsie. Elsie, a year older than Philip, was the sister he loved, had found it hardest to leave. He said
“Elsie. It’s me. I am Philip.”
“I can’t see your face because of the sun. I got lost. I walked and walked and walked, and there were no people or places. What are you doing out here?”
Philip