I walked through one field and into the next. Rabbits ran at our arrival, a dozen or more scattering in all directions, the whites of their tails moving targets.
Butler barked and made a half-hearted attempt to chase one, but experience seemed to tell him that they could only be caught at close quarters or when stranded out in the middle of an open pasture, and rabbits rarely stray far from the safety of their shadowed sanctuaries. Instead he looked at them with brief disdain, as if the chasing of such common creatures – what we called coney back at home – were beneath him.
Heading uphill and inland, the next field led to a lower section of the holloway that I had walked in on.
Here I smelled something strong, and searched the ground for a sign: there it was, off to one side, a pocked patch of hollow holes where the soil was at its softest, and in each was a stool, the colour of anthracite, some coiled and others old and standing to attention, but all with a sheen as if preserved beneath a shining lacquer. The badgers’ latrine, it was host to a smattering of deposits polished deep in the innards of this indigenous dawn-stalker as enduring and English as the single oak tree or the scurrying hedgehog.
Butters trotted on, panting, and both of us wore a halo of flies about our hot heads.
Suddenly there was an explosion of movement up ahead as something crashed through a tight gap in the hedge, and a flash of rusted red blurred across the path. For a second I saw a deer, bounding up the near-vertical dirt bank like a convict up an escape ladder and into the copse that ran along beside us. Then it was gone. All that remained in its wake were a few falling leaves and the tiniest twist of fur snagged on a wire. I unhooked it and held it to the light, a rough knot of russet strands.
The lane was shaded and I sat for a while opposite the deep dug-out mounds of the badgers’ sett. Behind them an impenetrable nettle patch provided good cover for further badger exits.
I stooped to the entrance of one of the holes and looked down into the cool portal that wound away beneath a tangle of overhanging roots, a helter-skelter slide into a nether world. Leaning in deeper, I pressed my head and shoulders into the hole. Badgers were nearby, docile and dormant. I could feel their presence as they no doubt could sense the proximity of an imposter crossing the single beam of light that penetrated their ancient ante-bunkers. I inhaled the smell of damp soil, of unseen England.
Further up, the sunken track ended abruptly where it met one of the back lanes, so I turned to face the sea once again and felt a tightening of excitement to see the full stretch of the coastal reach carving a craggy wall through the incandescent water, more expansive than ever.
I followed this rutted route for a while until I lost perspective, yawing far from any imagined directional line, then climbed over a stone wall and crossed a meadow that ran alongside a stream. The water was my guide, drawing me downhill, and I paused to let Butler lap at the slow-trickling rill before pushing through shrubs until I landed, stumbling and quite surprised, on the track that led back to Dulcie’s hidden corner. Looking back, I had tracked an invisible circle across this hillside, and was grateful for the stone trough into which I dipped first my head and then my bare feet, one and then the other, the cold bite striking a note up through my legs and right to my very centre. I walked back barefoot, socks rolled into boots, boots in hand, head dripping water that tasted as fresh as the new season.
I worked all afternoon, hacking away at more of the stubborn weeds. I worked much longer than intended, locked into a rhythm of swinging and hacking, swinging and hacking, as the insects buzzed around me and the birds sang on, pausing only to drink great gulps of iced water flavoured with sugar and lemon, which Dulcie brought out for me.
As the day wore on, my hands, wrists, arms and bare torso became dotted with bramble nicks and scratches that looked like cryptic Morse code messages etched into my reddening skin. High afternoon became low-skulking evening and I stopped to survey the passage I had cleared through the grass, pleased at the headway I had made, though it still only represented the tiniest fraction of the meadow being tamed in any way. I did not trim the branches that obscured Dulcie’s sea view.
Instead I walked deep down into the grass meadow and lay there for a few moments, listening to the thrum and rustle of it, and feeling the sun draw starburst patterns across my closed eyelids.
V
With only the thick lush grass around me and the sky above, I woke from a short deep nap. Shirtless, I lay confused for a few moments.
The past few weeks had been disorientating and not for the first time I briefly struggled to remember where I was exactly. Rarely had I done my ablutions in the same place twice, and I had long felt myself adrift from the binding timetable of school.
The dull strain of exhaustion and exertion ached in my back, shoulders and neck as I stood and slowly walked through the meadow back to the cottage to locate my pack. I was aware of my joints, and my skin felt stretched tight from the glare of the sun.
An evening dip in the sea was all I could think of and then, following that, perhaps some fish and chips and an early night in amongst a clifftop thicket, or in a rocky cove, perhaps, with a good fire going and nettle tea for company. I had a taste for it now.
There was no sign of Dulcie in the garden and when I knocked on the door of the cottage there was no reply, so I walked around to the back lane and peered in through the windows. I could see my backpack and blanket roll by the kitchen door. More framed photos hung in the narrow hallway alongside a wooden African mask and some mounted deer antlers. On a shelf I saw a clutch of peacock feathers in a vase and a cluster of shells and pebbles, and beneath it a large cushion covered in coarse dog hairs that Butler slept on.
I returned to the garden and sat down in a chair to wait for her. My eyes felt heavy again.
Then Dulcie was standing there in her wide-brimmed hat, a silent silhouette with the sun behind her and a glass in each hand.
‘You have the leathered look of a proper land worker,’ she said. ‘You wear it well.’
I rubbed my eyes and stretched, squinting into the late-afternoon glare.
‘Cocktail time,’ she said.
‘I’m afraid I’m not quite finished. There’s still some clearing-up to do.’
She held out a glass to me. ‘Cocktail time.’
The drink within was light red in colour and there were cubes of apple floating in it, and ice and strawberries too.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Dulcie said as I took it from her.
‘You do?’
‘Yes. But I froze a batch last year, you see, for just such occasions.’ If Dulcie could read my mind, then evidently she saw that it was empty, for she continued: ‘The strawberries. Even with this warm spell it’s too early.’
I took a sip of the drink and it fizzed with new flavours in my mouth, sweet and sharp.
‘That’s smashing, that is. What’s in it?’
‘A bit of everything in the cupboard and then some.’
‘I thought I’d just finish off the last bit of the trimming, tidy up, and then I should probably get going.’
‘Now?’
‘Well, soon, yes.’
‘Aren’t you exhausted after all that labour?’
‘A little. I had a nap and I can walk off the aches, I’m sure. Or perhaps an evening swim.’
‘There are the tides to consider and’ – Dulcie nodded to a basket slung over one arm – ‘I’ve just been to get tea.’
‘Oh, there’s really no need.’
‘There’s never a need.’
‘I’ve only just paid off breakfast and that lovely lunch.’
Dulcie studied my face for a moment.
‘Regardless, you still need to eat. And I’m not going through this ridiculous bartering rigmarole again, as earnest as your intentions may be.’
‘I had thought maybe fish and chips.’
‘Then you thought correctly, because that’s precisely what we’re having.’
I sipp
ed my drink and chewed on an ice cube.
‘You’re being too kind.’
‘It’s a bit of fish and some chipped potatoes, Robert, and one can never be too kind. Unless of course you’re desperate to flee the grip of this old crone, in which case flee, flee to the horizon, I won’t be remotely offended, nor will Butler who will find his dog bowl rather full tonight. Though it does seem he’s rather taken to you, haven’t you – ’ She looked around. ‘Where has that beast got to?’
Searching for the dog, Dulcie removed her hat, which was as large as a sombrero, dabbed at her brow with a handkerchief and then replaced it.
‘I’ll batter it.’
‘The dog?’
Dulcie snorted, whooping with laughter. ‘The fish. The fish, you stiff plum. I have a John Dory that’s as long as my forearm and as ugly as a pug that’s done twelve rounds with Max Schmeling, but it’ll be as tasty as you like. Barton brought it up.’
I took another big swig of the drink.
‘Look,’ said Dulcie, ‘let me put a fish in you, then you can be on your way. An army marches on its belly and though you’re a sole soldier gone rogue you still need refuelling. The horizon awaits. Eat, then go to greet it.’
‘Remind me how old you are again, Robert.’
The perfectly preserved backbones of the filleted fish lay stripped of skin and flesh. I watched as a bluebottle landed on its dorsal fin, joined a moment later by a second one. What we could not consume was theirs for the picking.
‘I’m sixteen.’
Dulcie’s eyes widened. ‘I knew you were young, but that’s obscene. Sixteen.’
I laughed. ‘Is it?’
‘Yes. Sixteen is barely even a memory for me. Sixteen is a foreign country. Sixteen is a photograph in a suitcase left on a train bound for the Orient long ago. Some might suggest that to have so much ahead of you is utterly enviable, though if I had a chance to do it again I wouldn’t. At least not now.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, I hate to be the drop of pessimism in the unspoiled pool of youthful purity, but more war seems an inevitability. Just more male horseshit. Trust me, I resent the fact I’ve been forced to take this stance – it’s against my nature – but at least a pessimist is rarely disappointed with life. That’s pragmatism, something else I’ve come to quite late.’
‘I’m just thinking day to day,’ I said, and I meant it, for to contemplate the life that awaited me at home – six days a week at the colliery then tending to a hangover and the allotment leeks on a Sunday – or indeed what might lie ahead in the future for the wider world, left me feeling deflated within seconds.
‘A capital attitude. Let’s pretend tomorrow may never appear.’
‘It did yesterday,’ I quipped.
‘Oh, very good,’ she said. ‘Then let’s ditch the diary, burn the calendar, smash the clocks and instead pretend that today is infinite, and punctuated only by the darkening of the sky and the hooting of the owl. What I mean is, let’s cock a snook to time, for time is just another set of self-imposed arbitrary boundaries designed to capture and control. Let today run forever, Robert. Do you see what we’re doing here? We’re subverting the very thing that holds humanity together. We’re shaking off the chains. Isn’t it brilliant?’
Between us Dulcie and I had drunk another cocktail and the better part of another bottle of white wine and I felt loose and liquid of limb as I slouched in the chair, sliding ever closer to a horizontal position. The day was defeating me and I was happy to put up little resistance. But Dulcie was in full flow, an unstoppable deluge of words brought in on the tide of the mind.
‘Do you know,’ she continued, ‘I’ve been up to your neck of the woods. To the university, for a conference. I saw that horse of yours.’
‘I don’t have a horse.’
‘Of course you do: the one that stands in the marketplace.’
‘Oh,’ I replied. ‘You must mean the statue.’
‘It’s quite remarkable, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’
I didn’t go into the city much at all; that would require a bus journey in from the village and a bus journey required money, and I never had any. I had only visited the cathedral once, on a school trip. The city seemed to me a place for lecturers and students in their gowns and silly hats, and young men and women who went to the good schools and carried stacks of books beneath their arms, and who didn’t speak as I spoke, and who would soon join the academics and students at their seats of higher learning in other such cities. It was a place where clergymen dashed down cobbled streets and coxes shouted orders through loudhailers at the rowing crews who trained on the river, and tourists alighted from charabancs to stand and point at the castle, and people ate scones and drank pots of tea from chiming china cups and saucers while sitting in pretty Georgian windows, and flush-faced rugby teams celebrated their latest successes on the playing fields with pub crawls.
The only real reason to visit was for the Miners’ Gala, which we called the Big Meeting, for one Saturday in July, when all the colliery bands would gather to march and play, and we would carry the banners all the way down to the racecourse fields, where there were speeches and stalls and fairground rides, and tens of thousands of people would eat and drink and sing, and gypsy boys would strip off their tops to fight the local boys, and evening would turn to night and we’d take the long ride home, our stomachs sick with sugar and too many chips. But that was for one day a year, and I had not been since I was a child, because for the six long years of the war the Miners’ Gala had been cancelled, and this year I would miss it anyway. It seemed as if Dulcie knew my home city better than I did.
‘The horse is remarkable for a number of reasons, not least because it is green,’ she continued. ‘I’ve been around the world many times but I have never seen a green horse. I’ve seen one you could fit in a medium-sized suitcase, and one twice the height of a man, and I’ve seen hundreds of sea horses, and once rode a horse entirely Godiva-like for a bet, but I have never seen a green one cast in electroplated copper and buffed by hundreds of years of rain that has fallen from the sky of time like rusty daggers. In this instance the colour of the horse is not even the most remarkable thing about it. That honour belongs to the story that has followed it around like an immortal horsefly that, no matter how many times it is swatted by a swish of a copper tail, somehow always remains. I shall tell you it now.
‘Once there was a man called Raffaelle Monti. He was an Italian artist, a sculptor, born and raised in Milan, who by the 1850s had been living in England for some time. I think maybe love led him here, though I can’t be sure. This story is a jigsaw and some of the pieces marked “fact” are missing, so I’m fashioning a few new ones of my own. Anyway, this Monti chap was commissioned to sculpt a big horse to take pride of place in your market square, to commemorate something or another – a great but pointless battle, no doubt. The townsfolk had one stipulation: there had to be someone riding the horse and the figure was to be some wealthy nobleman. “I’ll build you a green horse,” said Monti. “A fucking great big one.” And he did. He built a big horse that was elegant and accurate and spellbindingly horselike. Its size and its greenness were just two of the more obvious reasons why it was a horse to start a thousand conversations. On his back rode the Marquis of Whoever, an equally elegant and accurate rendering. In 1861 the sculpture was completed and officially unveiled in the marketplace. “This horse is perfect,” Monti announced. “Perfect in all ways.” “It’s green,” said a little boy. “It’s still perfect,” replied the great sculptor. “Furthermore, if anyone can find a single anatomical fault with this horse and his noble rider, then I shall be shamed into suicide. For this is no mere work of art, this is a dream cast in iron, mounted on stone and placed where all will see it for hundreds of years to come.”’
Dulcie paused and took a sip of her drink. She was taking her time with the story. Relishing it.
‘Well. With such a challenge issued, the townsfolk w
ere soon climbing the scaffolding in order to examine the horse for themselves, while Monti just stood to one side, arms folded, sucking on a lollipop for he had recently attempted to give up smoking again. And he was right: there were no faults to be found with this great green creature that was the crowning glory of the town. Time passed. A number of weeks, maybe months. People still liked to stop and check on the horse. It had become something of a tradition for many people, as if it were on their shopping lists: go into town, buy parsnips and bread, check big green horse for anatomical inaccuracies. One day a blind man appeared and said that he would like to inspect the horse with his highly sensitive fingers. He was soon given permission and a helping hand up there. A small crowd gathered as he felt his way around the horse – its smooth underbelly and thick copper mane, its flared glorious nostrils. The crowd were getting restless. Finally the blind man climbed down and announced his verdict. “This horse has no tongue,” he said, then turned and went home. “It has no tongue!” said the locals, who had hung around, the first faint smell of blood filling their twitching nostrils. “The horse has no tongue – quick, somebody get Raffaelle Monti.” They were excited now. “He owes us a suicide,” one fellow was heard to remark. The sculptor was alerted to this development. He was not pleased – he had just accepted another commission in his home city of Milan. But a deal was a deal. Raffaelle Monti proceeded straight to the cathedral. Once there he ascended the three hundred and twenty-five steps up to the highest tower, then, as a crowd gathered below, threw himself off the top to a not-entirely-instant death below.’
‘That’s awful,’ I said.
‘Well, that would have been the end of the story but for one small thing,’ said Dulcie. ‘The horse did have a tongue. In their excitement, no one had thought to verify the blind man’s findings, least of all poor Raffaelle Monti, who in his artistically exhausted state was not thinking straight. He had been lost in the certainty of his craftsmanship. The horse had a tongue but the people refused to believe it. They had wanted imperfection so badly. The massive green horse was perfect after all, but it was too late for that. A myth was already forming, a story to be passed on, an heirloom to store in the attic of the mind. And as you know, there the statue sits today, noble and unmoving amongst the turbulence of the world around it. You yourself must have seen people sitting at the base of the sculpture, perhaps wiling away a few minutes as they think about the past, the present and maybe the future too. But sooner or later they all get up, brush down the seat of their trousers and wander off, yawning and checking the sky for the threat of incoming thunder like the hooves of a horse bigger than any dream or sculpture can imagine.’
The Offing Page 7
