Jamie used to help Mr Maddock out now and again; Harry would let him drive the shooting brake sometimes, which was probably where his love of cars had begun. He remembered the keeper’s imprecations about not flattening the crops; remembered, too, the smell of blood on the night air from the warm, stiffening rabbits slung into the cage on the back. That smell was tied up, now, with what had happened to his granddad: the mysterious thing that had branded him invisibly and that Jamie – lucky, soft, with his indoor job and his computer games – would never understand. He had wondered then how it was that Harry knew, and not him; and whether his grandfather would ever speak to him about it.
Back at the house he dropped the paper in his grandfather’s lap and sat down in the other armchair. The old man leafed through it, listlessly, then turned to the classifieds at the back.
‘I see Culverkeys is being broken up.’
‘You’ve seen the ad?’
‘Someone’s set to make a mint. It’s wrong, I say.’
His grandfather had spent his married life working for a firm that made household appliances, first on the line and then in the office, but before the war he’d been a farmhand. He’d once shown Jamie an old black-and-white photograph in which two huge Suffolk Punches strained towards the camera, the single-furrow plough behind them guided by a boy no more than fourteen. ‘Recognise it?’ he’d asked, tapping the photograph. A huge oak was just visible in the field behind the plough. ‘That’s the Batch, on Culverkeys. I first learned to plough there, with my old man. Always thought I’d go back, you know? After the war. But it was a different world by then: women doing men’s work, tractors all over. And I had the TB to get over, of course.’
‘So d’you think they’ll build on Culverkeys?’ Jamie asked his grandfather now.
‘Build on it, dig it up. There’s no money in farming any more.’
‘Is that why he killed himself – Mr Harland? He couldn’t make it pay?’
‘Who knows, boy. Who knows. But I saw a farm sale once, when I was a lad. There was terrible shame in it for the farmer to lose his land, terrible shame. And Philip was never the same after the wife left – or so I heard. I was surprised he carried on for as long as he did – it can’t have been easy, just with hired hands. And they say it was always her as did the books.’
‘Maybe he thought she’d come back.’
‘Maybe. But I’ll tell you something, lad: that place goes back a long way – they’re one of the oldest families around here, the Harlands. You’ll find them in the churchyard, dozens of the buggers, and the war memorial, too, of course. That’s why I was surprised about the crematorium. They should’ve buried him in his parish church, where he was baptised. God forgives all, or so they say.’
‘The farm’ll go to Alex’s mum now, won’t it – to his wife?’
‘I doubt it – she’s not a Harland any more, not if they got a divorce. But we’ll see. We’ll see what the bloody lawyers do now, eh?’
‘I have to go now, anyway, Granddad,’ said Jamie. ‘See you next week.’
‘Take an apple with you,’ called the old man as the door swung shut.
That evening, after he got back from his shift, Jamie slipped his jacket on and went out. ‘I’m just going for a quick pint,’ he called from the hallway. His father, watching TV with his mum, held up a hand in acknowledgement. But instead of turning up Hill View towards the Green Man Jamie forced his way through the grown-over gap in the hedge at the end of the cul-de-sac. It was the first time he’d set foot on Culverkeys since Alex had left.
Jamie could remember when the field in which he stood had been two fields, Hope’s Piece and Lower Hope, both designated set-aside and so left unmown. The grass in June had grown chest-high – although of course he had been smaller then – and was purple with wild marjoram and pyramid orchids and alive with butterflies. There was no set-aside any more, though, and looking at the huge field now you couldn’t tell where the old hedgeline had even been.
At the top of the field was a copse, planted generations ago as cover for foxes and to improve the country for the hunt. Not long before Alex had left, the two of them had discovered a pair of goshawks nesting there. Jamie had made Alex swear to protect the chicks, when they hatched out, and they had taken turns to check on the nest using a heavy old pair of binoculars Alex had found in the farmhouse. It had been their secret, the last they would ever have together, and Jamie had tried not to think about it since.
He wondered when the last time was that anyone had come this way. The farm had felt like forbidden territory after Alex had gone; he’d been cast out by Mr Harland, and by fear. But being there again was bringing it all back, as he’d known it would: the landscape of his childhood, its grassy uplands and shadowy thickets. He had believed it lost to him somehow, but of course it had been there all this while.
The air was cooling, the stars bright above, and Jamie hunched his shoulders and jammed his fists into his pockets as he walked. Far away to his right he could just about make out the farmhouse, crouched within the dark huddle of its outbuildings, and beyond that, Great Reave and Five Acres, where the heifers had been until a few weeks ago.
Slowly, he crossed the field’s gentle flank to where a silvery disc spoke of the wet winter they’d had. It was the last place on the farm to hold the snow, a slab of white that remained long after the other fields had warmed up. He wondered if the new owners would know this; whether they’d care. Whether the fields would even be fields any more.
9
Avens, dog’s mercury, harebells, vetch. Otter spoor by the river.
It wasn’t the first time Jack had woken up covered in birds. He gave a start and was surrounded by the whirr of pinions, the breeze from their wings fanning his face as a dozen or so birds exploded from his body up into the branches of the little wood in which he lay.
For a moment he froze, willing them to return; but as his eyes adjusted to the low evening sun he saw that there was someone standing over him, their shadow reaching across his sleeping bag. He leaned up on one elbow, shading his eyes, his heart lurching in his chest. But only the trees’ long shadows lay black on the ground.
The birds seemed to have melted away, too, like a dream that disappears before you can snatch at it. Corn buntings, he thought for some reason; not that you saw them in numbers any more – or ever would again, probably. He lay back down for a moment, unseeing eyes fixed somewhere beyond the branches. In the police cells they woke you every hour to check you weren’t dead.
The wood he had camped in was young, having sprung up in the 1960s in the no-man’s-land between a power station and a golf course on Connorville’s scrappy outskirts. Myxomatosis had devastated the local rabbit population in ’53, ’54, and without their nibbling teeth far more saplings had survived their first few years than usual; on the golf course the greenkeeper kept them down, and the land around the cooling towers was managed, but in the area between the two a few hundred trees had quietly set down roots. Now the wood was almost established, though it had yet to be marked on maps or given a name. Jack liked it for its opportunism, and for the stray golf balls that dotted the ground. They worked on him like conkers, and he couldn’t help but pick them up and walk with them for a while.
And there was something else, too: in places like this he felt invisible in a way that he rarely did in the proper countryside with its signposted walks and intelligible views. Places like this, in the shadow of a power station, were far from picturesque, and they were somehow wilder for it. Hardly anyone went there except for lovers and local children, who sensed that these ungovernable scraps of land were somehow outside the law. Jack had lost count of the tepee-like dens, stained mattresses and secret camps he had stumbled on in such places over the years. He always left them untouched.
His own childhood was almost entirely lost to him now. It had lingered on in his memory for a little while like a contrail in a clear sky, growing fainter and fainter, until now, when he thought about the past, he
thought less of his own and more of the line of men who had gone before him, a dim procession out of some dark history, their future uncertain.
Nearly dusk. Jack sat up slowly, working the knots out of his neck and shoulders. Was he actually being looked for? Maybe, maybe not. He was supposed to be on a doorstep curfew, required to sleep every night at the hostel in London for the next two months. But he could no more survive in a city than a swallow could live underwater.
He’d spent much of the day trying to find a lane marked by a line of oaks with double trunks that he’d heard about from a gypsy family he’d travelled with years back. They’d told him their forefathers buried children with an acorn in each hand, and that this lane marked a succession of stillbirths born to one woman many years before. Now he was in the area he’d wanted to see the twinned trees and pay his respects, but although he knew it was somewhere nearby he couldn’t find it. When he’d heard a distant siren he’d decided to slip away and find somewhere to rest for a few hours.
Now he took a notebook out of his pack, unwound the rubber band that clasped a biro to it and tried to write down some of the things he’d seen that day in case they might make a ballad or a poem, but the rhythms wouldn’t come. Instead, he flicked back through its pages: scribbled observations, metaphors, flights of near-visionary fancy. ‘Half mad,’ he muttered to himself. ‘More’n half.’
Before putting his boots on he checked his socks and trouser turn-ups for ticks, rolled up his sleeping bag and stashed it away. Then he shouldered his pack and made his way out of the wood towards the cooling towers. There was a river on the other side of the golf course where mayflies would probably be emerging; if there weren’t too many fishermen around he had a good chance of a couple of brown trout.
Behind him, bats began to hunt the clearing where he had slept as the red sun slipped slowly behind the trees.
Not far away, in Ardleton, the television’s cold light was flickering across the seamed landscape of James Albert Hirons’ face. He sat looking past it, unseeing; thinking instead of the lurcher puppy that Edith had taken in rather than see drowned in a bucket. Tess, Edith had called her; she had such soft ears, that dog, and he smiled now to remember them. She’d had a kennel in the garden, but when she got old and her back legs began to go he’d relented and folded up a blanket for her by the range. One clear, ice-bound winter night not long after Gillian had started school Tess had kept asking and asking to go outside, but every time he opened the back door she just dragged herself to the flower bed, out of the way, and lay down. Three times he’d carried her back in, knowing but refusing to know what was happening; she’d died in the kitchen the next day.
And he thought about when he and Gillian’s boy used to go dipping in the ponds and canals for old iron. How the lad had loved it; it was funny the things that fascinated you as a child. He probably didn’t even remember it now, great lanky beanpole that he was. Still, it had done the child good to get him out of that house from time to time. Not that his father wasn’t a good man, but Gillian had them all wrapped around her little finger with those nerves of hers.
She’d always been needy, though, all the way through her childhood: always crying or poorly, something wrong with her every day, it had seemed. It wasn’t him she’d got it from – after all, you couldn’t have behaved like that in Changi, you wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.
He’d had a friend in the camp, Stan, a Lincolnshire lad a few years younger than he was. One day they were all moved, without warning, from their attap huts to the prison itself. The stone cells were tiny and crawling with rats and lice, and when the guard locked the door behind them Stan had broken down and sobbed. He’d never forgotten how the other two men in the cell had turned away, pretending not to see, as though Stan’s distress was contemptible – or even worse, contagious.
After a while the old man slept and dreamed he was a little boy again, stumbling behind his father who was sowing, his right hand, brown from the sun, broadcasting seeds from a hopper at his chest evenly onto Culverkeys’ warm soil. He craned to see past his legs to the big tree ahead – and when he did he saw that the sun would soon go down behind its branches. ‘We must go home,’ he said, suddenly afraid; ‘Dadda, night’s coming.’ But his father, deaf and half blinded by the Great War, strode on; and James saw that he was sowing mung beans, not barley, and that above him shone not the Plough but the Southern Cross. And then he heard the clanking sound of the harrow coming up fast behind, and he woke up in his chair, his father long gone, Edith and Tess too, the television stark and loud in the corner and his old heart frightened in his chest.
10
Herb Robert. Bracken unfurling. Snakeshead fritillaries.
Chris arrived just before lunch on Saturday, announced by the crunch of his Mini’s wheels on the gravel drive. It was a blustery, rainy May morning, the sunshine, when it came, blindingly bright on the wet roads before the sky darkened and another shower blew in.
‘No thanks,’ said Howard, as he always did, pretending to shut the door on his son where he stood on the mat, only to open it again and usher him in with a grin and a mock bow.
‘Where’s Mum?’
‘Oh, she’ll be down in a minute, I’m sure. She’s got a bit of a headache. Said she was going to have a nap.’
While Chris took his coat off and hung it on the newel post, Howard took his son’s bag to the study, where he would sleep. As always when the kids visited he would be back in the master bedroom, with Kitty, something he had mixed feelings about.
‘This for us?’ he said, returning from the study with a bottle of Malbec in one hand. ‘Shall we?’
‘Oh, just a beer for me, Dad,’ said Chris.
‘Right you are. How’s everything?’
While Howard poured the drinks, Chris began to tell him about the last month: a driver had left, problems with the IT system, and his continuing efforts to woo a new client, an electrical retailer with stores all over the south-west. It wasn’t a move Howard would have made, but then, he wasn’t running the firm any more.
‘There’s no money in the south-west, son,’ he’d said when Chris first told him of the plan. ‘It’s all poverty down there, they’re on EU grants, they’re not buying bloody flatscreens. By all means go ahead, but don’t bank on them surviving long.’
‘Most of it’s web-based, though, Dad,’ Chris had said. ‘Doesn’t matter where the actual stores are any more. People know the laptop they want, they read the reviews online; if this lot can do it at the best price people order it. Doesn’t matter where they are, or how well established, as long as it’s mainland UK.’
Maybe he was right. It seemed a saturated market to Howard, electrical; but then what did he know? And it had been part of Chris’s business plan when he took over: twenty new UK clients to fund the container warehouse in Felixstowe he’d leased. The risk of it still made Howard’s heart lurch sometimes, especially the way the country was going; but it wasn’t his business any more.
‘We need to offer proper freight handling if we don’t want to be crowded out,’ Chris had said; and he was probably right. ‘If we can hold goods off the ship and get them out direct we can pull in bigger clients. We need to be scaling up, Dad. People aren’t just going to stop wanting stuff all of a sudden. Someone has to get it to them; it might as well be us.’
‘What about fuel – have you found another supplier?’ Howard asked now. There was a diesel tank in the yard that was topped up by a tanker every week, but the cost had been climbing steadily.
‘One or two are coming in a bit under, but there’s no guarantee they won’t go up too,’ Chris said. ‘I’m not sure it’s worth changing. Plus we get good credit right now; it could take ages to build up a relationship with someone new.’
Howard nodded, held his peace. He would have changed supplier, more than once if necessary, kept the cost down month on month. But then, he hadn’t been looking so far ahead; he’d been content for the firm to earn him a good income and
pay the wages of his office staff and drivers. Old-fashioned, he knew. But still.
After lunch the three of them put on outdoor shoes and went out for a stroll. He and Kitty had gone for quite a few walks when they’d first moved to the village, but after a couple of months the habit had fallen away. Yet when the children visited it was a way to offer them something, a last remnant of family as well as a look at the countryside neither of them had on their own doorsteps.
Chris walked in the middle; Howard put his hands in his pockets and thought about how they used to take him to the park when he was a toddler and swing him between them. It was as though his muscles still retained the memory of the little boy’s weight, as though his hands could still feel the terrifying delicacy of his son’s hand and wrist as between them they lofted him over puddles to his squeals of delight.
They passed the church with its massive yew, jumbled gravestones and simple war memorial marked with eleven names, and took the lane that led off past the vicarage onto the fields. Stiles from one field to the next were marked by yellow arrows; Howard thought of what Kitty had said the week before and wondered if perhaps this was one of her ancient paths, centuries old. If it was it didn’t look like much.
In the distance the grey hulk of Babb Hill dominated the skyline; moving dots beneath the summit were either kites or hang-gliders, it was hard to tell. ‘Blue remembered hills,’ said Howard. It was one of the only lines of poetry he knew.
The fields were mostly just grass, still wet and heavy with the morning’s dew. Every so often a tiny, pale moth would flutter uselessly before their approaching feet, and from one paddock a pair of horses regarded the three of them briefly before dipping their heads again as they crossed the top of the pasture and took the stile into the next field.
‘I’ve been reading about one of the local legends,’ said Kitty. She walked with her head down, almost shyly offering the topic to the two men. She had been quiet over lunch, Howard thought, but she seemed fine now.
At Hawthorn Time Page 6
