Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  He knew I was there, he was a man who could hear the tread of the deer and the rabbit, who could hear the leaves unfurl and the cuckoo sleep, but he did not turn around – for he was a gentleman, remember – but continued with his exhibition of himself. And I was most pleased with what I saw. Sir Francis was no picture, he had nor flesh on his bones nor hairs on his head and his breath was rank and his farting more so. Naked, we are equal before God, they say, but I think Master Kavanagh would have seemed more noble than my husband.

  I watched my son, who was a sickly thing, tainted with my lord Francis’s thin, bad blood, playing hoopla on the lawn. Maybe my husband had fathered something more robust on the Lady Margaret. She sat weeping by the fish pond, the great mound of her belly shaking with her grief. My lord had ordered her to a nunnery.

  I saw him in the kitchens when I went to speak to the cook, for I had some say in my kitchens still, if nowhere else. He was sitting at the big scrubbed table eating bread and cheese. He was hardly ever seen in the great house, he had his own rough cot in the forest where, I had heard said, the deer would come to his door and feed from his hand. But that was probably rumour too.

  I blushed. He blushed. We blushed. We were caught in the cook’s disapproval. ‘Manners,’ she said to him and hit him on the back of the head with a clout and he stumbled to his feet and laughed, then bowed and said, ‘Lady?’

  I had never been this deep in the wood, never trod on this path before. Though I knew where it led. It led to great danger. It led to the little house in the heart of the forest. The forest paths were deep in leaves, like gold.

  The fire was dead and the ashes were cold. Half a stale loaf was on the table, a rotten apple, a burnt-down candle. It was like a still life of what must come to us all, when we will dance with death and have our foot finally stilled. I shivered in the cold air.

  But then his little dog came bounding over the threshold and he himself filled the doorway, silhouetted against blue October sky.

  He did not bow. I thought he would say that I should not be there but he said nothing, only entered his own house as if it were a stranger’s, delicately, with trepidation, like a half-tamed deer. So that I had to encourage him and hold out my hand. And so he moved closer and stood before me, closer than he had ever been before, so close I could see the new-shaved bristle on his chin, the greenness of his eyes, the fleck of hazel that seemed gold. ‘Well, Master Kavanagh,’ I said, rather sternly, for my nerves were somewhat frayed, ‘here we are.’

  ‘Here we are indeed, my lady,’ he said, which was a very long sentence for him. And he took a step closer, which brought him very close indeed, so I took a step back and so we jigged prettily for a while until I had nowhere to go, for I was pushed up against the table. I could feel the heat coming from his body, see the sharpness of his eye-tooth and the fine shape of his top lip.

  First the burnt-out candle went flying with a great clatter and then the rotten apple went rolling to the far corner of the room. And heaven only knows what happened to the loaf of bread. Then there was no more speaking, only the exquisite moans and dreadful sighs that must accompany such violent delights.

  * * *

  Lady Margaret was with us no longer, hanged herself from a tree in my lord’s apple orchard with rope from the stables. A gardener found her, dangling like a common felon, in the early light of morning, the babe already still in her womb. I locked myself in my room and wept fierce tears all morning and would answer to no-one, until Master Shakespeare wore me down, knocking at my door to tell me he was going and I replied that he may go to hell for all I care, but eventually I opened the door to him. He kissed my hand and said there was nothing to keep him at Fairfax Manor now and I told him he was right for there was no future for any of us in that accursed house.

  He was leaving with the actors who had been with us and at whose words our poor Lady Margaret had both laughed and cried such a little time ago. These players were acquainted with our Master Shakespeare from his previous life and it was ‘Our Will’ this and ‘Our Will’ that and he was more than happy to join their baggage carts. I wished him well, though he was something of a weasel. He had already left wife and children and now he was leaving us. ‘You must do likewise, madam,’ he whispered, as he brushed my hand with his lips and I nodded my head and smiled for my husband had entered the room.

  I had to walk through the forest at night to reach his little cottage the night that we left and there were many times I was feart to death, not by those things that I could see, but by those I could not.

  We went on his black pony for the grooms would have been disturbed if I had saddled my fine dappled mare. It pained me more to leave my dappled grey than it did to leave my son, for he was a boy in his father’s image, only weaker. I was already carrying Robert Kavanagh’s child in my belly and I cared to take nothing of my husband’s with me. But I would take my dog. For he was a very good dog.

  We left under the cover of the cloak of darkness but my husband was canny and had us followed and would have killed us with his arrows but he was not the great shot that he always liked to think himself. He would have to make do with a fine plump deer instead.

  I ripped his not-so-pretty jewel from my neck and flung it through the trees and I felt Master Kavanagh flinch a little for that jewel would have paid our way into the unknown, but no matter. And the last time I saw my lord Francis, he was scrabbling in the leaves for his precious trinket. I would have taken all my fine silks off as well and gone from him as naked as Eve, but the leaves were already dropping from the trees and I would not freeze of the cold.

  Robert Kavanagh put his arms around me and we trotted quickly on our way, our dogs bounding on ahead. He was my shelter and my safety, he was as strong as a great oak and as gentle as my hound. If you had known the full troubled history of my life, you would have sped me on my journey with many a blessing. A great happiness seized me at that moment, as if I had been given a vision of paradise.

  ‘And where will we go, Master Kavanagh?’ I asked him, when we reached the northern edge of the forest. And he turned in the saddle and smiled at me, showing his good teeth and replied, ‘The future, my lady, we shall ride into the future.’

  FUTURE

  STREETS OF TREES

  The whirligig of time spins on. The world grows older. People live their lives, each life filling all the time available and yet – on the grand, cosmic scale – taking up less time than the tick of the clock.

  Audrey became one of the first women to be ordained in the Church of England. She married a teacher with a beard and had three children. Her parish was a run-down area of Liverpool where she occasionally did a small amount of good (which is probably the best we can hope for). All three of her children, when they were babies, looked like variations on Arden’s imaginary doorstep baby. Perhaps that baby was a kind of ideal baby.

  Audrey grew into being a mystic and a universalist, believing that every man, woman and child, every animal and plant, was a revered example of the unity of creation. And in this, we must presume, she was correct.

  Six months pregnant, Carmen died, along with Bash, in a car crash in 1962.

  Eunice married an engineer but never had her two children. She worked as a geologist for an oil company, digging down into the history of the earth, but then her life took a quite different turn and eventually she became an MP for the Liberal Democrats. She died of lung cancer when she was fifty-two and her funeral was surprisingly warm-hearted and generous. I missed her.

  Hilary became a solicitor, married a doctor, had two children, divorced the doctor, married a journalist, had another child (born with a slight mental handicap), became a barrister, divorced the journalist, became human. Became my friend.

  To the gods, looking down on earth, our lives might seem this simple.

  Charles went to America and ended up on the West Coast working in the movies as a director of cheap science-fiction films, reviled by the critics and hopelessly unsuccessful at the box of
fice but, as time went by, he came to have a cult following and by the time he was in his sixties he was in constant demand for retrospectives and chat shows and lecture tours and even had a television mini-series made about his life. Charles had a succession of beautiful blond wives and beautiful blond children and enjoyed his life enormously.

  Debbie and Gordon were middling happy for the rest of their lives. Their baby, Renee, my sister, grew up to be a perfectly normal, cheerful person and ended up working as the senior secretary in Hilary’s practice.

  * * *

  I can tell you something about Malcolm Lovat. When he drove off into his own future he went all the way across Europe and then back again. He worked in Paris as a hospital porter, stayed in Hamburg, lived with a woman in West Berlin and then moved to Corfu where he lived for a year in a commune of artists.

  Eventually he came back to England, to London, and got involved in the music scene, becoming the manager of a group of teenagers from Hull with good teeth and hair and hardly any musical skill who went all the way to the top. By then Malcolm had got into wild excesses of drink and drugs.

  I last saw him in a pub in Fulham, in 1967, when he was very drunk and morbid but none the less, when he suggested I stay the night at his place I did, because that was 1967 and in 1967 I slept with anyone.

  He was completely different, of course – I suppose he’d become the person he used to have to hide inside himself.

  In bed, in his staggeringly untidy garden flat in Chelsea, his limbs were marble, his flesh was ice. Sex with Malcolm Lovat was like the dance of death. ‘I always wanted you,’ he whispered, ‘I just never knew how to tell you.’ Of course, it was too late then. ‘We’re so alike,’ he sighed. But I don’t think we were, not really.

  He died six months later in circumstances so squalid that the inquest became a cause ceéleèbre. Afterwards, I carried him around with me in a small secret place inside me (the heart, which was the same place I kept my mother). Just because you can’t see someone doesn’t mean they’re not there.

  Vinny lasted the whole century, outliving both Gordon and Debbie, lingering on in Arden with the support of a succession of home helps. She celebrated the millennium and a hundred years of Vinnyhood by turning into a cat – small, tortoiseshell and disappearing into the night. Probably. I came back to nurse her at the end and somehow stayed on. It was my house after all.

  I was successful by then – I wrote historical romances, (under my own name – an appropriate kind of name) – and Arden was a good place to work in. I turned the dining-room into a study and hired a man to clear the garden and trim the hedges so that I had a view of the Lady Oak. The tree didn’t last long into the twenty-first century, succumbing to some kind of terminal rot. I watched them chop it down, although they didn’t chop – but lopped all its arms off and then sliced through its trunk with huge whining chainsaws. I watched its death and wept.

  My daughter, Imogen, came up to stay with me and then joined a self-styled tribe of tree people who were camped out in Boscrambe Woods preparing to fight the road contractors who were building the Glebelands Outer Ring Road. I drove out there sometimes, taking food parcels, video cameras, e-mail, anything else they wanted. When the time for the final battle drew nearer I lay in bed at night fretting over my aerial child hanging high up in the trees, climbing on webs and suspended by harnesses like some grubby Peter Pan. She was arrested several times and was finally bound over to keep the peace and when she refused was sent to prison for a while.

  By that time, the contractors had moved in and trees that had stood for hundreds of years were felled in an afternoon. Not long after they’d started clearing the first trees someone spotted a long bone poking through the soil in the shovel of a JCB. The forensic pathologists eventually recovered nearly a whole skeleton from the spot that must have once been in the heart of the heart of the forest. A woman who died a long time ago, they said, too long for them to be able to say how she died, everything but the bones had decomposed and foxes had disturbed the body. Imagine – small animals eating the flesh, pulling at the bones, the eyelids closed by drifting leaves.

  Hilary, who was having an affair with one of the forensic pathologists, told me that they had found a gold ring still circling one of the fingers. She said the ring was set with diamonds and emeralds and inscribed with the words ‘To EF with all my love, G’ and that that made her feel very sad somehow.

  I believe my mother had such a ring but I knew she couldn’t be the forgotten body in the wood for I never thought of her as dead, and anyway she had made herself manifest to me not long before. I was standing in the queue in Tesco’s and the woman in front of me – in her late twenties, immaculately dressed in a tweed suit, narrow belted at the waist, high-heeled shoes and seamed stockings, black hair in a French pleat and makeup like an actress. She was just paying as I lifted out a plastic bag of fruit to put on the conveyer belt when the bag burst suddenly and the fruit went tumbling everywhere. We both bent down and scrabbled around picking up the apples – Red Delicious, waxed and polished so that they didn’t look at all real. I was so near to the woman that I could smell her grown-up scent – Arpege and tobacco. My own perfume by then. She stood up, teetering slightly on her heels, and handed me the last apple and she said, There you are, darling.

  And then she was gone and I knew there was no point in saying anything to the check-out girl about her because some things are known only to ourselves.

  Other lost things were also found – the Fairfax jewel, so long sought after, was discovered not far from the unknown woman’s body and took pride of place in the Glebelands Museum.

  When I was clearing out after Vinny had gone I found a whole box of photographs – photographs not just of the Widow and her family and her ancestors, but of Charles and Gordon and me – and Eliza, a treasure trove of Eliza. An Eliza forever young, forever beautiful, squinting against the sun or laughing in the back garden. I wept for days over my newly found mother. Although in some ways the photographs made her even more unreachable and mysterious, it was, none the less, a relief to have tangible proof of her existence in this world.

  Time carried on its thievish progress towards eternity. Imogen became a mother, and so I became a grand-mother. Mrs Baxter met a mysterious end, the only person who truly disappeared – walking, they say, into the side of a green hill one day. Some say that at the moment she vanished she was transformed into the Queen of Elfland and wore a dress of finest green and a crown of glittering gold. But that was just rumour.

  The world carried on spinning. So many stories to be told, so little time.

  How does the world end? In fire? With a great star falling from heaven? Imagine – the comet Wormwood ploughing through the night sky at 40,000 miles an hour on its apocalyptic journey to Earth, burning like a billion suns as it falls. Nearer and nearer. The mayhem that must follow – the hail and fire mixed with blood, the massive earthquake at the impact site, the crater a hundred miles wide, the rocks vaporized, the thunderings and lightnings, the molten rocks flung into the atmosphere and raining down on earth, a third part of the trees burnt up, and all the green grass, the great mountain that falls, burning with fire, into the sea, the sea turning into blood while the debris from the impact spreads across the skies, so that the sun and the air are darkened, extinguishing the moon and putting out all the stars. Imagine.

  Or in ice? With no cataclysm, only slow decay, the stars burning out, the black holes sucking in everything around them and the slow gravitational dance of death stretching the elastic universe further and further apart. A slush of sub-atomic particles. Pea-soup.

  Or in green? Imagine the wood at the end of time. A great green ocean of peace. A riot of trees, birch, Scots pine and aspen, English elm and wych elm, hazel, oak and holly, bird cherry, crab apple and hornbeam, the ash and the beech and the field maple. The blackthorn, the Guelder rose and twined all about – ivy, mistletoe and the pale honeysuckle where the dormouse nests.

  The fores
t will be full of flowers, snowdrops and primroses, bluebells and cowslips with pearls hanging in their ears. Woodruff and herb Robert will grow, columbine, lords and ladies, Solomon’s seal and the heart-leaved valerian, enchanter’s nightshade and ox-slip, love-in-idleness and the common dog violet.

  On the forest floor the insects work hard – click beetles and the robber flies, weevils and hornets, slugs and snails, the spiders and the patient earthworms. And the invisible life, the amoeba and bacteria cleaning up and recycling.

  The sound in the world now is birdsong – the joyful treble of the mistle thrush announcing spring, the chaffinch singing for joy, the beautiful trilling of the wood warblers. Blackbirds and robins, soft wood pigeons and pied flycatchers, the long-eared owl and the greater spotted woodpecker, the world belongs to them now.

  And also to the voles and the badgers, the squirrels and the bats, the hedgehogs and the deer and the little foxes that play untroubled by hound or man.

  And, finally, the wolves come back.

  Here and there in the green and gold of the sunlit wood flicker the fragile purple emperor, the white admiral, and the Duke of Burgundy fritillary. Soft moss and ferny green and the splash of toad and frog in the dark ponds in the cool glades. The song thrush in the trees spins his threads of song three times. Lilies of the valley and heart’s tongue fern crowd the shade. The tiny wren bird hops from branch to branch and the pearl-bordered fritillary kisses the strawberry and the wild thyme. The smell of sweet musk roses and eglantine.

  Autumn must come. Et in arcadia ego. The surreal, sprouting landscape of the fungi takes over – the pennybun caps, King Alfred’s cakes and Jew’s ears, stink-horns and witches butter. Everything is mould. Angels’ wings sprout from the rotten conifers and elf caps run riot on the oak stumps. The last powdered Quakers and Kentish glories visit the night. The soft hoo-hooo of the owl fades. The leaves fall, drifting down like feathers. The nights draw in.