HUMAN CROQUET
Kate Atkinson
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Also by KATE ATKINSON
BEGINNING
STREETS OF TREES
PRESENT
SOMETHING WEIRD
WHAT’S WRONG?
PAST
HALF-DAY CLOSING
PRESENT
LEAVES OF LIGHT
A BABY!
PLEASE LOOK AFTER ME
PAST
BACKWARD PEOPLE
PRESENT
EXPERIMENTS WITH ALIENS
PAST
THE FRUIT OF THIS COUNTRIE
PRESENT
EXPERIMENTS WITH ALIENS (Contd.)
THE ART OF SUCCESSFUL ENTERTAINING
KILLING TIME
PRESENT
MAYBE
THERE IS ANOTHER WORLD BUT IT IS THIS ONE
PAST
THE BONNY BONNY ROAD
NO BABY!
PRESENT
THIS GREEN AND LAUGHING WORLD
PAST
THE ORIGINAL SIN
FUTURE
STREETS OF TREES
A GOOD GAME FOR A PARTY
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HUMAN CROQUET
A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552996198
First published in Great Britain
in 1997 by Doubleday
a division of Transworld Publishers
Black Swan edition published 1998
Copyright © Kate Atkinson 1997
The extract and illustration on pp 443–5 are taken from The Home Entertainer edited by Sid Hedges, (Odhams Press). The publishers and author have made every effort to trace the copyright owner and would be pleased to hear from the author and/or artist or their respective estates.
Kate Atkinson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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12 14 16 18 20 19 17 15 13
For my mother,
Myra Christiana Keech
What the critics wrote about
Human Croquet
‘Vivid and intriguing … fizzles and crackles along …
a tour de force’
Independent
‘Huge, exhilarating, loving and detailed eruption of a novel…
an utterly intoxicating display of novelistic elan … big and joyous,
literary and accessible … storytelling at its buoyant best’
Scotsman
‘A triumph to follow up Behind the Scenes with this – astonishing …
clearly an unlimited talent’
Margaret Forster
‘Wonderful … she is an extraordinary writer – earthy and funny,
yet mysterious’
Deborah Moggach
‘There’s a laugh on every second page, often a laugh out loud,
and Shakespeare makes a personal appearance’
Daily Telegraph
‘A novel which will dazzle readers for years to come’
Hilary Mantel, London Review of Books
‘Atkinson’s passion for England and Engiishness is an unfashionable
and pleasant surprise. Shakespeare’s her hero but I think Chaucer
might give her a wave’
Spectator
‘The author’s voice remains irresistible, her dialogue wry and
imagery fluent’
Time Out
‘A literary tour de force’
San Francisco Chronicle
‘Kate Atkinson won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize for
her first novel … Can she produce something as original, readable
and funny as her first book? Human Croquet proves triumphantly that
she can’
Irish Examiner
‘A belly-laugh a page … Atkinson is a gifted storyteller’
New Statesman
‘Atkinson’s wit and her genius for character put a varnish of delight
on the solid carpentry of her ideas. Her novels are remarkable both
in and of themselves, and as evidence of an important emerging
body of work from a brilliant and profoundly original writer’
Daily Express
‘No matter what category Human Croquet is ultimately slotted into
by the literary establishment – magical post-modern metafiction?
post-magical realism? post-modern magicalism? – it offers further
proof that Kate Atkinson is off and running in quite a fantastic
direction of her own devising … What makes it so successful is
that it really doesn’t matter if a reader recognizes every gesture in
Atkinson’s literary high-wire act, because the multitude of characters
are defined with such vivid specificity that they – and what happens
to them – matter the most’
New York Times Book Review
‘With just two novels, Atkinson has added new colour to the
British literary landscape’
Guardian
Also by
KATE
ATKINSON
Behind the Scenes
at the Museum
A surprising, tragicomic and subversive family saga
set in York, Kate Atkinson’s prizewinning first novel,
like all her novels, has a mystery at its heart.
‘Little short of a masterpiece’
Daily Mail
Emotionally Weird
Set in Dundee, this clever, comic novel depicts student life
in all its wild chaos, and a girl’s poignant quest for her father.
‘Achingly funny … executed with wit and mischief
Meera Syal
Not the End of the World
Kate Atkinson’s first collection of short
stories – playful and profound.
<
br /> ‘Moving and funny, and crammed with incidental wisdom’
Sunday Times
Featuring Jackson Brodie:
Case Histories
The first novel to feature Jackson Brodie, the former police detective,
who finds himself investigating three separate cold murder cases in
Cambridge, while still haunted by a tragedy in his own past.
‘The best mystery of the decade’
Stephen King
One Good Turn
Jackson Brodie, in Edinburgh during the Festival,
is drawn into a vortex of crimes and mysteries,
each containing a kernel of the next,
like a set of nesting Russian dolls.
‘The most fun I’ve had with a novel this year’
Ian Rankin
When Will There Be Good News?
A six-year-old girl witnesses an appalling crime.
Thirty years later, Jackson Brodie is on a fatal journey
that will hurtle him into its aftermath.
‘Genius … insightful, often funny, life-affirming’
Sunday Telegraph
This green and laughing world he sees
Waters and plains, and waving trees,
The skim of birds and the blue-doming skies
‘Ode for the Spring of 1814’, Leigh Hunt
BEGINNING
STREETS OF TREES
Call me Isobel. (It’s my name.) This is my history. Where shall I begin?
Before the beginning is the void and the void belongs in neither time nor space and is therefore beyond our imagination.
Nothing will come of nothing, unless it’s the beginning of the world. This is how it begins, with the word and the word is life. The void is transformed by a gigantic firecracker allowing time to dawn and imagination to begin.
The first nuclei arrive – hydrogen and helium – followed, a few million years later, by their atoms and eventually, millions more years later, the molecules form. Aeons pass. The clouds of gas in space begin to condense into galaxies and stars, including our own Sun. In 1650, Archbishop James Ussher, in his Annals of the World, calculates that God made Heaven and Earth on the evening of Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC. Other people are less specific and date it to some four and a half billion years ago.
Then the trees come. Forests of giant ferns wave in the warm damp swamps of the Carboniferous Era. The first conifers appear and the great coal fields are laid down. Everywhere you look, flies are being trapped in drops of amber – which are the tears of poor Phaeton’s sisters, who were turned by grief into black poplars (populus nigra). The flowering and the broad-leaved trees make their first appearance and eventually the trees crawl out of the swamps on to the dry land.
Here, where this story takes place (in the grim north), here was once forest, oceans of forest, the great Forest of Lythe. Ancient forest, an impenetrable thicket of Scots pine, birch and aspen, of English elm and wych elm, common hazel, oak and holly, the forest which once covered England and to which, if left alone, it might one day return. The forest has the world to itself for a long time.
Chop. The stone and flint tools signalled the end of the beginning, the beginning of the end. The alchemy of copper and tin made new bronze axes that shaved more trees from the earth. Then came iron (the great destroyer) and the iron axes cut the forest down faster than it could grow back and the iron ploughshares dug up the land that was once forest.
The woodcutters coppiced and pollarded and chopped away at the ash and the beech, the oak, the hornbeam and the tangled thorns. The miners dug and smelted while the charcoal-burners piled their stacks high. Soon you could hardly move in the forest for bodgers and cloggers, hoop-makers and wattle-hurdlers. Wild boars rooted and domestic pigs snuffled, geese clacked and wolves howled and deer were startled at every turning in the path. Chop! Trees were transformed into other things – into clogs and winepresses, carts and tools, houses and furniture. The English forests sailed the oceans of the world and found new lands full of wilderness and more forests waiting to be cut down.
But there was a secret mystery at the heart of the heart of the forest. When the forest was cut down, where did the mystery go? Some say there were fairies in the forest – angry, bad-tempered creatures (the unwashed children of Eve), ill-met by moonlight, who loitered with intent on banks of wild thyme listening furiously to the encroaching axes. Where did they go when the forest no longer existed? And what about the wolves? What happened to them? (Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.)
The small village of Lythe emerged from the shrinking forest, a straggle of cottages and a church with a square clocktower. Its inhabitants tramped back and forward with their eggs and capons and occasionally their virtue to Glebelands, the nearest town, only two miles away – a thriving marketplace and a hotbed of glovers and butchers, blacksmiths and vintners, rogues and recusants.
In 1580, or thereabouts, a stranger rode into Lythe, one Francis Fairfax, as dark and swarthy of countenance as a Moor. Francis Fairfax, lately ennobled by the Queen, was in receipt, from the Queen’s own hand, of a great swathe of land north of the village, on the edge of what remained of the forest. Here he built himself Fairfax Manor, a modern house of brick and plaster and timbers from his newly owned forest oaks.
This Francis was a soldier and an adventurer. He had even made the great grey ocean crossing and seen the newfoundlands and virgin territories with their three-headed monsters and feathered savages. Some said he was the Queen’s own spy, crossing the Channel on her secret business as frequently as others crossed Glebelands Green Moor.
Some also said that he had a beautiful child wife, herself already with child, locked away in the attics of Fairfax Manor. Others said the woman in the attics was not his child wife but his mad wife. There was even a rumour that his attics were full of dead wives, all of them hanging from butcher’s hooks. There were even those who said (this even more unlikely) that he was the Queen’s lover and that the great Gloriana had borne him a clandestine child which was being raised in Fairfax Manor. In the attics, naturally.
It is fact, not rumour, that the Queen stayed at Fairfax Manor in the course of escaping an outbreak of plague in London, sometime in the summer of 1582, and was observed admiring the butter-yellow quince and flourishing medlar trees and dining on the results of a splendid early morning deer hunt.
Fairfax Manor was famous for the thrill of its deer chases, the softness of its goose-feather mattresses, the excellence of its kitchens, the ingenuity of its entertainments. Sir Francis became a famous patron of poets and aspiring playwrights. Some say that Shakespeare himself spent time at Fairfax Manor. Keen supporters of this explanation of Shakespeare’s famous lost years – of which there are several, mostly mad – point to the evidence of the initials “WS” carved into the bark of the great Lady Oak and still visible to the keen eye to this day. Detractors of this theory point out that another member of the Fairfax household, his son’s tutor, a Walter Stukesly, can claim the same initials.
Perhaps Master Stukesly was the author of the magnificent masque (The Masque of Adonis) which Sir Francis ordered up for the Queen’s entertainment during her midsummer visit to Lythe. We can imagine the theatricals being performed, using the great forest as a backdrop, the lamps glimmering in the trees, the many mechanical devices used in the telling of the tragic tale, the youthful Adonis dying in the arms of a young boy Venus under the Lady Oak – a young, handsome oak much of an age with Francis Fairfax that once stood at the heart of the heart of the forest and now guarded its entrance.
It was not long after the Queen’s departure from Lythe that Francis’s wife first appeared, a real one made of flesh and blood and not kept in the attics, but none the less an enigmatic creature whose beginning and end were veiled in mystery. She arrived, they said, at the door of Fairfax Manor one wild, storm-driven night, dressed in neither shoes nor hose nor petticoat, dressed in nothing in fact but her silk-so
ft skin – yet with not a drop of rain on her, nor one red hair on her head blown out of its place.
She came, she said, from an even grimmer north and her name was Mary (like the dreaded Caledonian queen herself). She did not persist in her nakedness and allowed herself to be clothed in silks and furs and velvets and clasped in jewels by an eager Sir Francis. On her wedding morning Sir Francis presented her with the famous Fairfax jewel – much sought after by metal detectors and historians – well documented in Sir Thomas A’hearne’s famous Travels around England but not seen for nearly four hundred years. (For the record, a gold lozenge locket, studded with emeralds and pearls and opening to reveal a miniature Dance of Death believed by some to have been painted by Nicholas Hilliard, in homage to his mentor, Holbein.)
The new Lady Fairfax favoured green – kirtle and petticoats and stomacher, as green as the vert that hides the deer from the hunter. Only her cambric shift was white – this piece of information being offered by the midwife brought in from Glebelands for the arrival of the Fairfax firstborn. Onlyborn. It was, she reported when she had been returned to town, a perfectly normal baby (a boy) but Sir Francis was a madman who insisted that the poor midwife had her eyes bound in every room but the birth-chamber and who swore her to secrecy about what she saw that night. Whatever it was that the poor woman did see was never broadcast for she was conveniently struck by lightning as she raised a tankard of ale to wet the baby’s head.
Lady Fairfax, it was reported, was strangely fond of wandering into the forest dressed in her green damasks and silks, her hound Finn her only companion. Sometimes she could be found sitting under the green guardianship of the Lady Oak, singing an unbearably sweet song about her home, like a Ruth amid alien green. More than once, Sir Francis’s game steward had frightened himself half to death by mistaking her for a timid hart, bolting away from him in a flash of green. What if one day he were to shoot off an arrow into her fair green breast?
Then she vanished – as instantly and mysteriously as she had once arrived. Sir Francis returned home from a day’s hunting with a fine plump doe shot through the heart and found her gone. A kitchen maid, an ignorant girl, claimed she saw Lady Fairfax disappearing from underneath the Lady Oak, fading away until her green brocade dress was indistinguishable from the surrounding trees. As Lady Fairfax had grown dimmer, the girl reported, she had placed a dreadful curse on the Fairfaxes, past and future, and her monstrous shrieks had echoed in the air long after she herself was invisible. The cook clattered the girl about her head with a porringer for her fanciful notions.
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