The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

by William Nicholson

  When they’re close Toby calls out a command in an army-style voice.

  ‘Squad! Prepare to charge!’

  He starts to windmill his arms. The others do likewise.

  ‘Charge!’ yells Toby. ‘Shit or die!’

  The four boys whoop and holler over the tummocks of grass, thrashing the air with their arms, and the cows scatter, cantering away, braying in fear. As they go they hoist their tails high, and cow shit comes plopping from their bottoms, plop-plop-plop.

  A great roaring and down the farm road comes a mud-coloured Landrover at tremendous speed, its wheels spitting dirt and stones. Before the boys realize what is happening the vehicle has juddered to a stop and a small mud-coloured man has hurled himself upon them and seized the nearest boy. This happens to be Jack. He holds Jack by his shoulder with one iron and hurting hand and in his other hand he brandishes a steely gleaming double-barrelled shotgun.

  ‘You little bastards!’ he says. ‘You bloody little bastards!’

  He stabs his gun up into the air. The other three have gone still. They stare back at him in utter silence. He’s so angry and dirty, his eyes so mad and shining, his hair so wild, he paralyses them with fear. They have never met him before but he is familiar to all of them. He is the Dogman. His dogs are in the Landrover even now. Jack can hear them whining.

  ‘I should shoot you,’ he says. His voice makes a scary bubbling sound in his throat like he can’t swallow. ‘The law’s on my side. Maybe I will.’

  He moves a finger and they hear a clicky noise come from his immense gun. Richard Adderley has gone chalk white.

  ‘Please,’ he says. His voice is very small, just a whimper.

  ‘Please,’ echoes the Dogman. ‘Please what? Please spare your nasty little life so you can grow up to be a stockbroker? We don’t need any more bloody stockbrokers! Why don’t I put you out of your misery now!’

  He points the muzzle of the shotgun at the sky and pulls the trigger. The explosion is cataclysmic, terrifying. It echoes round the trees, round the meadow. Jack feels his heart hammering.

  ‘Now get off my land!’

  They turn and run. Run and run. Stung by nettles, scraped by barbed-wire, back through the wood to the Drowning Pond, on up the track, to stop at last, white-faced and gasping, by the laurels. Here they stand, bent with hands on thighs, getting back their breath, exchanging looks, already starting to turn the experience into an anecdote.

  ‘What a saddo! Did you see his hair?’

  ‘He would have killed us.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘He’s a wacko. I’m telling you. Everyone says so.’

  ‘Hey, Richard. Did you think he was going to shoot you?’

  ‘No. Maybe for a moment. No.’

  ‘I loved him.’ This is Toby Clore. ‘We don’t need any more bloody stockbrokers!’

  Jack looks at Toby Clore with admiration untinged by comprehension. You can never tell which line Toby’s going to take.

  ‘Dogman rules!’ says Toby. ‘Why don’t I put you out of your misery now!’ He mimes firing a shotgun at the clouds. ‘Boom! So did Jack wet his pants?’

  ‘No,’ says Jack.

  ‘Good for you, Jacko.’

  They hear the bop of a bat on a cricket ball, followed by a thin cheer. Underhill’s score goes up to seventeen. A lifetime has gone by, Jack has been through fire and water, almost to the gates of hell itself, and the First Eleven has scored four more runs.

  14

  Old Mrs Dickinson is taking her rest when her daughter rings the first time. Not that she’s old, the seventies are young these days, but she lives alone and can please herself. The rest lasts no more than an hour, but somehow it’s always in this hour that things go wrong. Not even a proper siesta, not in bed, only sitting in her usual armchair by the fire, but she does go to sleep. This afternoon on waking she sees the answerphone light winking, but in the same moment she hears the sound of the lawnmower outside and knows with a terrible certainty that Victor is mowing the daffodils. Every year they have this same battle, and every year he forgets or ignores her instructions.

  She clasps the ends of the chair’s arms, braces her frail frame, and pulls. Two pulls and she’s rising. The trick is to get the momentum going, that way you can lock the lower limbs in place before gravity strikes back. Arthritis is so time-consuming. So many little stratagems to do what used to be instinctive. Some parts of the body give up sooner than others, and in her case it’s the joints. The mind still untouched, praise God.

  Perry jumps off his chair where he too has been having his rest, and detecting her intention to go outside, begins to yap. This is a mistake.

  ‘Be quiet, Perry! Stop that! Shut up! I can’t stand it!’

  The little dog, hearing what sounds to him like an answering series of excited barks, works himself up into a frenzy of yapping. The old lady becomes maddened by the noise. She reaches for her stick and strikes the dog on one flank.

  ‘I said SHUT UP!’

  The dog cowers and bleats. The old lady is overcome with remorse. But now she’s up from her chair she can’t bend down again to fondle the miserable beast, so she heads on towards the back door. She experiences a resurgence of anger at Perry for inducing in her this spasm of guilt.

  ‘Well, what do you expect when you make a racket like that? What do you expect? It’s more than flesh and blood can bear. I’ve told you time and again, but you just don’t listen. You know you don’t, Perry. You’re a very bad dog.’

  As soon as she steps out into the back garden she can see that most of the daffodil leaves are gone.

  ‘Victor!’

  She shouts as loud as she can, but it’s no use. When the mower engine is running the great booby hears nothing.

  ‘Victor! VICTOR!’

  She struggles slowly across the cut lawn to the apple trees, and plants herself in the path of the machine. As the mower lumbers round and heads towards her, he sees her at last. He registers surprise, but it takes several seconds for the discovery of her presence to translate into the decision to stop the mower. As the old lady knows all too well, for Victor the act of mowing has an irresistible fascination. He regards the mower as a species of wild animal, a bull perhaps, that is powerful and only partly under control.

  ‘Mrs Dickson!’ His voice heavy with disapproval. The mower must never be stopped in mid-mow. ‘Mrs Dickson!’ In all the eleven years he has worked for her he has never got her name right.

  The old lady points. She speaks with what she intends to be calm authority, but it comes out as a peevish shriek.

  ‘You have mowed the daffodils!’

  He turns to look, and turns slowly back. Victor is in his seventies also.

  ‘No,’ he says, respectful but unyielding. ‘The daffs have been over since April.’

  ‘The leaves, Victor! The leaves! They must be left until they wither!’

  Victor looks at her with watery but unrepentant eyes.

  ‘If I leave the grass another week, it’s too long for the machine. All this rain we’ve been having.’

  ‘If you cut the daffodil leaves too soon, the bulbs won’t grow, and we’ll have no daffodils next spring.’

  ‘Plenty of daffs. No shortage of daffs.’

  It’s enough to make a saint scream. Mrs Dickinson is no saint.

  ‘Victor, I asked you not to cut the orchard till July. Now, I did. I want you to admit it.’

  ‘By July the grass is too long for the machine.’

  ‘Did I or did I not ask you to leave the orchard till July?’

  ‘You asked me to keep your garden tidy, Mrs Dickson. I’m doing my best.’

  This is Victor’s sanction, the veiled threat he dangles over her head. If she nags him further he will deliver the next level of warning, which goes, ‘If you don’t like the way I do things maybe you should find someone else who is more to your liking.’ Mrs Dickinson is helpless in the face of this quiet intransigence. Gardeners are impossible to find these days
. Victor knows the garden well and he keeps it looking neat. But why must he destroy the daffodils?

  ‘I know you’re doing your best, Victor. But you see, daffodil bulbs are fed through their leaves. If you cut the leaves too early, the bulbs starve, and we get no flowers in the spring. That is why we don’t mow the grass where the daffodils grow until July. Not May. July.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  Is that assent or dismissal?

  ‘So you do understand, don’t you, Victor?’

  ‘I better get on. The rain’ll be back soon enough.’

  Unreassured, powerless, thwarted, Mrs Dickinson makes her careful way back to the house, planning each footfall lest the ground prove treacherous. The important thing is not to fall over. If you fall over, you can’t always get up.

  As she enters the house she becomes aware that the phone is ringing. She knows at once, by that sympathetic magic that is common in the lives of lonely people, that it is her daughter Elizabeth calling to ask her to pick up her granddaughter Alice from school.

  ‘Hallo, Mum. Look, I’m tied up here for a couple more hours. Would you mind?’

  ‘Alice. School. Yes.’

  ‘I should be home by seven at the latest.’

  ‘Yes. All right. Goodbye.’

  Mrs Dickinson replaces the phone, aware that she has been short with her daughter, but what else can she say? She believes it’s wrong of Elizabeth to be up in London working when her child needs her at home. It’s not as if Alice is unaffected. You have only to look at the child to know that she’s deprived. It may be a good school she goes to, but what a child needs most is a mother. And a father, if it can be managed, but Elizabeth never even took the trouble to get married. It’s all very well saying Guy’s a bad lot and wouldn’t have married her anyway, but what’s she doing getting pregnant in the first place? And who else is going to marry a woman over thirty with a great hulk of a child? It’s not as if I didn’t warn her. But she paid no attention to me, I might as well not have spoken.

  She looks at the clock, thinking with annoyance that now she won’t have time for the farm walk that Perry so loves. She looks down at Perry. He is sitting at her feet gazing up at her with wistful longing. Now that her anger has shifted its focus onto her daughter, she has kinder feelings towards her dog.

  ‘You’re a good boy, Perry. Why shouldn’t you have your walk? But you’re not to chase the sheep.’

  Stick in hand once more, she leaves the garden by the rear gate. A well-maintained path runs along the back walls of the row of cottage gardens, and comes out onto the busy road just opposite the farm. She keeps Perry on a lead until they have crossed the road. Once on the farm track she lets him run free.

  As the poodle bounds joyously away from her, leaping from puddle to puddle in the rutted track, Aster Dickinson experiences an associate freedom; as if Perry carries with him her own questing spirit. She has done her best, but life has not been easy since Rex left her. She has raised a child all on her own, and well into her forties, and there’s a price to be paid for that. Not that she hasn’t paid the price gladly, Elizabeth being the miracle child so long hoped for, though also one must presume the reason why Rex left. So, a costly child. Elizabeth understands nothing of this, of course. The young are selfish; that is their privilege.

  On the far side of the belt of trees there is a fence, a gate, a cattle grid. Perry flattens himself to crawl under the gate, not waiting for her to open it. There are sheep in the field beyond.

  ‘Perry! Perry! Come back here!’

  He turns to look at her, his expression sorrowful. He does not want to be put on the lead. Of course he doesn’t. We would all rather be free to do whatever we like all the time. But life isn’t like that.

  ‘Come here, Perry!’

  Slowly, reluctantly, dragging his hind legs, he comes to her. She clicks the lead onto his collar ring. They walk on.

  He tugs on the lead all the way. For Mrs Dickinson the sensation seems to come from within herself, the yearning to be free as much her own impulse as the holding back. Ahead the field opens out into a great natural bowl, one of the many hollows scooped out of the lower slopes of the chalkland hills. It’s the kind of space that calls to you to reach out your arms and run and play at flying, to swoop over those rippling contours of grass. But the old lady and the dog, tethered to each other by the lead, do not run.

  By the concrete pillbox they turn back and retrace their steps.

  As she enters her own garden once more, Mrs Dickinson hears the sound of the mower and sees Victor mowing the remainder of the daffodil leaves in the orchard. A red haze of fury forms before her eyes. Perry runs on ahead to the back door of the house. She draws a long breath, preparing to confront Victor with the full force of her righteous anger, when she hears the tinny chimes of the grandfather clock in the passage strike the hour. She is already late for school. She hurries into the kitchen and picks up her outdoors bag. Perry starts to yap.

  ‘One more yap out of you,’ she says, waving her stick, ‘and I knock your brains out!’

  She reverses out of the garage at thirty miles an hour, clipping the left gate pillar with her right mudguard. This is a common occurrence. The gate pillars are awkwardly placed.

  She hurtles down the street to the main road, recovering her equilibrium as she goes. Driving soothes her. The slow clumsy motion of her unaided body is replaced by a smooth and thrilling power, and her natural impatience can at last be assuaged. As a result her car, a Peugeot 305 Automatic, is dented and scraped all over, one headlight is cracked, the rear bumper is buckled, and she has long given up the unequal struggle to retain her wing mirrors. Wing mirrors are a piece of poor design. They stick out too far, even the simplest manoeuvres snap them off. She feels the car is more drivable without them.

  She bounds out onto the main road, and accelerating away from the Edenfield roundabout she reaches seventy on the straight before being forced to slow down for a farm tractor. The tractor makes a great noise but goes no faster than twenty miles an hour. Mrs Dickinson bears it for a few minutes and then can bear it no more. She swings out to overtake, sees to her surprise a silver car approaching at speed, accelerates fiercely to get past the tractor, hears the blast of the silver car’s horn, feels the slam of air as they pass within inches of each other, the silver car banging on the verge, and pulls back into her lane entirely unharmed, indeed, exhilarated. She rams down the accelerator once more, and briefly touches seventy-five miles an hour before she’s braking hard ahead of the right turn to Underhill School.

  I’ll give Alice the rest of the leg of lamb for supper, she thinks. She never gets real food at home.

  15

  Jack’s late getting out of class after last bell because old Jimmy picks him out for a little chat. You’d think he could see Jack is busting to go but Jimmy Hall lives in a universe all of his own. Carrie’s class does gym last lesson on Wednesdays which means they get let out early to change, and Jack suspects her of meaning to bag the front car seat. By law and tradition the front seat is his this afternoon. Carrie sat in the front last time so now it’s his turn. Legally there’s no argument. But Carrie is a cheat and a liar and not to be trusted.

  ‘Do you ever read the Sussex County Chronicle, Jack?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You should. Tell your parents. Good for local democracy, you know. We all need to keep informed.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘More to writing newspapers than meets the eye, Jack. No good just saying this happened, and this, and this. You have to tell a story.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Old Jimmy has no one to go home to so he hangs around after school for as long as he can and comes in at weekends, which is sad, but Jack feels no pity. He can hear the clatter of running feet in the hall and the rumble of cars in the drive.

  ‘Got to go, sir. My mother’ll be waiting.’

  ‘Off you go, Jack. Off you go.’

  Out into the crowded hall and p
ush through the scrum of blue blazers to the porch where Mrs Kilmartin stands, big as a church. Jack lets himself be carried on the wave of home-going bodies into the open air. So far no sign of Carrie. Jason Ferris’s mother is there with a new Labrador puppy on a lead, drawing a crowd. Jack hesitates by the coned-off section where they’re supposed to wait for their pick-up, checking to see if anyone else from Carrie’s class is out yet. Peter Mackie passes by and idly and for no reason at all hits him on the shoulder, hard enough to hurt.

  ‘Hey! What was that for?’

  ‘Only a joke. Can’t you take a joke? Jacko can’t take a joke.’

  Naomi Truscott comes out with her blazer on, which means Carrie’s class has been out for at least five minutes, and Carrie’s always one of the first. With a lurch of insight Jack realizes she must have gone on ahead, she’ll already be on the far side of the rhododendrons, waiting to intercept their mother’s car before he even sees it.

  He sets off down the drive at a run, and there she is, a solitary figure with a drooping head, and there’s his mother’s car drawing to a stop. Even at this distance Jack can tell Carrie is starting to cry. He is outraged. He runs as fast as he can, fuelled by his sense of the unfolding injustice. As he approaches, Carrie has the car door open and is climbing into the front seat, when she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is his turn in the front seat this afternoon.

  ‘Carrie! Get out! It’s not your turn!’

  His mother fixes him with reproachful eyes.

  ‘Please, Jack. Carrie’s upset.’

  ‘But it’s not her turn in the front!’

  ‘Oh, really. What does it matter where you sit? Now jump in the back. We’re holding up the other cars.’

  Jack is speechless with shock. How can she say it doesn’t matter where they sit? She knows as well as he does how carefully the turns have been negotiated.

  ‘Come on, Jack. Get in.’

  Jack gets in and shuts the door. Carrie looks round and for a second he glimpses her triumphant face and he can’t bear it.