At Hawthorn Time

by Melissa Harrison

  ‘You, er . . .’ he began.

  ‘Hello, George. How are you?’

  ‘Very well, thank you. Yes.’

  ‘Would you like me to walk you home?’

  ‘Oh no, quite all right. Quite all right. I just wanted to mention – that chap, you know, the one who Jean saw at the allotments . . .’

  Kitty was momentarily confused. She had had a brief chat with Bill’s wife before the service, mostly about the farm that was up for sale, but hadn’t realised that George had overheard. More importantly, she’d dismissed Jean’s mention of a suspicious man as idle gossip, something Jean always loved to impart.

  ‘Jean thought someone might be sleeping rough nearby, George, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes. Now, is it a vagrant of some kind? Homeless?’

  ‘I’m not sure, George. Why, are you worried?’

  ‘I saw him as well. Or at least . . . I think I did. In my garden.’

  ‘In your garden? Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh yes, it gave me quite a start. For a moment I thought it was Margaret, you know; she had a lovely voice. Did you know my wife, or . . .?’

  ‘When was this?’ Kitty was trying hard to keep an uncharitable note of scepticism out of her voice.

  ‘Oh, she passed away . . . some time ago now.’

  ‘I’m sorry, George. I meant, when did you see the man? The one in your garden?’

  ‘Earlier on. Or perhaps – no, it was definitely today. Yes, just before the service.’

  ‘And you’re sure?’

  ‘Oh yes. Quite sure. And I was wondering, is he dangerous?’

  ‘Why – what was he doing?’

  ‘Well, this is it, you see; that’s just it. He was singing.’

  Howard was watching the motor racing when Kitty got back from church. She looked, as she came in, almost guilty, he thought; and for a moment he felt guilty himself, that he had caused his wife to feel ashamed of something so harmless as going to evensong. Perhaps if she didn’t give him a hard time about going to the pub now and then, though. Perhaps then he wouldn’t be on the back bloody foot all the time.

  ‘How was church?’ he asked, and then, ‘I’ll set the table,’ without waiting for her to answer. ‘I’m having a beer. Glass of wine?’

  ‘Just a spritzer, please. And let’s have the television off,’ Kitty called through from the kitchen. Howard pretended not to hear.

  ‘That farm sale’s on Tuesday,’ he said, making for the pantry. ‘I had a look in the parish newsletter. They’re doing the house contents too. Culverkeys, it’s called.’

  ‘Oh yes, I meant to say,’ said Kitty, something in her voice giving him pause. ‘He – it was a suicide. The farmer. Jean Drew told me.’

  Howard turned at the pantry door, came back. ‘He killed himself? Jesus. How old was he?’

  ‘Fifty-seven.’

  ‘How –’

  ‘I didn’t ask.’

  ‘No. Of course.’ Howard tried, and failed, to stop himself picturing it: a noose in the barn, a shotgun in the kitchen; one of those things they used to stun cattle. ‘Christ. Same age as me.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘Two. And an ex-wife.’

  ‘Why? I mean – why’d he do it?’

  ‘It’s a tough life, being a farmer. No money in it.’

  ‘Oh come on, they’re raking in the subsidies, all of them. Must be more to it than that.’

  Kitty sighed. ‘Maybe he missed his wife and kids, Howard. Maybe he had depression – who knows. Anyway, Jean’s worried they’ll put up a lot of houses there – she said that a while back this whole area got earmarked for development.’

  Kitty’s default position was to oppose any new building in the countryside, something Howard often needled her about. ‘The population is expanding,’ he’d say. ‘Where are people supposed to live?’ But the news about the farmer’s suicide had left him shaken, and he felt, childishly, that he wanted people to be kind to him, and that he must be kind in turn.

  ‘Let’s hope they don’t. This is a lovely village,’ he said, drawing a look of almost grateful surprise from Kitty.

  ‘Are you still going to go to the sale?’ she asked. Howard could tell she didn’t want him to, but he realised, now, that they were in accord.

  ‘No. I – it doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘No, I can see that,’ she replied with a nod.

  Howard disappeared into the pantry and returned with a bottle of wine. ‘I hope not everyone feels the same, though,’ he said, rummaging in a drawer for the corkscrew; ‘I mean, the family will need people to bid on all that stuff.’

  ‘Yes, but – we’re incomers,’ said Kitty, articulating the thought with some difficulty. ‘It would be like – like souvenir-hunting, to go over there and carry things off. It’s one thing the other farmers buying things they need, and even strangers coming, people who have no idea at all about what happened. But for us – I don’t know. It’s just – it’s not our place.’

  13

  Garlic mustard. Brimstone butterflies. Crab apples in bud.

  The swallows that nested in the eaves of Manor Lodge bore the same genes as the ones who had built the first mud cups there nearly 150 years before; the swallows at the rectory went back even further. Every April they arrived in the village from Africa, lining up like musical notes on the telephone wires and swooping for beakfuls of mud from the banks of the dew pond on Culverkeys Farm to repair their nests. When they had first moved in Howard had complained about them shitting on the Audi, but Kitty said they brought happiness to a home. Now they just parked the cars a little further from the side wall.

  Jamie stood on the drive and watched them circling the church spire and flickering over the rooftops. The swallows were part of the village; more so, even, than he was. What if the new owners of Culverkeys had the dew pond filled in?

  He’d spent the morning at the farm sale, skulking at the back where nobody could see him. The turnout hadn’t been that good, and he heard the auctioneers conferring about whether to delay the start a little; there was something, too, about a potential telephone bidder who couldn’t be contacted. But at around half eleven they had gone ahead, one of the auctioneers getting up on the case tractor to take the bids. Both tractors made their reserves, as did the quads and the milking parlour; all the feed and some of the machinery went, including an antique winnowing machine and a chaff-cutter, both bought by a specialist dealer. The bids made by the taciturn farmers were barely discernable – or not to Jamie, anyway. Much remained unsold.

  When the sale moved on to the house contents, arranged on the drive, the farmers drifted away; the twenty or so people who remained ranged from curious locals to car booters to a few bored-looking dealers. The oval dining table was sold separately to the chairs. The pictures went for a few pounds each.

  After the sale Jamie couldn’t wait to get away from the village, so he raced the bike around the lanes and along the Boundway for a while before his shift. He kept picturing the farmhouse’s once-familiar rooms, silent and pillaged now, and wondering which one Alex’s father had killed himself in.

  That night, after work, he stopped in at the Green Man before going home. He wanted to know if there was any news about the farm.

  When he was a little boy the Green Man had been much busier. He used to go there with his dad of an evening and they always sat at the same table; he’d have a Coke and some Skips and listen to the grown-ups talk. There used to be a dog there, a mangy Alsatian; it often lay under one of the bench seats and he’d crawl under there and give it crisps. He could still remember the feel of its fur under his hand: rough and soft at the same time. He’d liked the smell it left on his skin.

  There was nobody in the pub back then that they didn’t know. Everyone was either from Lodeshill or Crowmere, or had come with someone who was. It had its own characters and hierarchies: those whose opinion carried the most weight, those who were usually shouted down. Those who were always,
whatever they said, mocked.

  The Green Man’s codes of behaviour were arcane and out of date, and although they were implicitly understood within the protected ecosystem of the pub they bore little relation to the shifting mores of the world outside. Women were tolerated as long as they didn’t offer too many opinions, or try to join in with the banter. A slightly aggressive heterosexuality was the dominant note, and just as in school the aim of much of the conversation was simply to confirm and reconfirm the rightness, the normality of the regulars’ opinions. It was a closed, inward-looking group, suspicious of change and suspicious of any kind of difference, and although it was utterly stifling Jamie had always believed that one day he’d be part of it.

  Yet by the time he bought his first legal pint the Green Man was struggling. It wasn’t just that the Bricklayer’s in Crowmere had been done up, although that hadn’t helped. His parents drank in front of the telly most evenings now, because it was cheaper – and they weren’t the only ones. Some people said the pub should start doing proper food, that that was what customers wanted these days. Get a good chef in, build up a reputation, pull in people from the rest of the county – maybe further, even. But Jamie knew what his grandfather would have said to that, and he was probably right.

  He took a deep breath and pushed open the door to the public bar. There were perhaps a dozen people there; more than he had expected, although it was far from full. Perhaps it was to do with the sale; maybe people wanted to discuss it, wanted to find out, like him, what was coming for the village.

  For a few weeks after Philip Harland had killed himself the talk had all been of his death – whether something could or should have been done differently, and what exactly he had meant by the act – but two months on it was rarely spoken of directly, although it would be many more until it was fully absorbed into the fabric of their communal life.

  ‘Pint please,’ Jamie told Jim the landlord, digging in his jeans pocket for a fiver. Jim lived over the pub with a girl who had been a couple of years above Jamie at school; she’d been the local catch for a while, in the pub most nights all made up and with her hair bleached and straightened, but now she just looked like anyone. Jim’s wife – better at business than him by far – had left long ago.

  Jim put the pint down on a beer towel and rang up the sale without speaking. Jamie took a sip and looked around. ‘Few people in,’ he said.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Farm sale today, I suppose.’

  ‘You go, did you?’

  ‘No, I . . . Have you heard how it went?’

  Jim shook his head. ‘Could have been better. Though whatever’s left’ll get taken away soon enough, I suppose.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Who knows, lad. Why don’t you ask Harry? You know what gamekeepers are like. Ears to the ground. Speaking of which, I don’t know if you want to make a few extra bob this year, but Nigel Gaster over there says he’s about to start on his asparagus.’

  ‘Thanks, Jim.’ Jamie picked up his pint and took it carefully to a table. Harry, roaring with laughter at a table with Bill Drew and a couple of farmers, looked too far into his Scotch to be easily approachable. Jamie took a swallow of his pint and waited.

  It had been an OK shift at work. Not too busy, which was good – although the day didn’t go as fast if you were idle. And the blonde girl in the site office had smiled at him; Megan, she was called. He’d heard Lee say it.

  ‘Me and Megan and a few of the others are going to the Vault on Friday night,’ he’d said. They were on a fag break; Jamie didn’t smoke, but he sometimes went outside with the smokers anyway. ‘You in, Dicko?’ Jamie had grinned and nodded, and Megan, shoulders up against the breeze, had smiled and blown out smoke. He’d been out for drinks with Lee a few times; he was a couple of years older, but he seemed sound enough. And he’d had a beer with Dave, the transport clerk, once; although Dave was older, more of a grown-up really. He probably wouldn’t be coming out on Friday.

  Now Jamie sipped his pint and thought about the Corsa. He’d talked about it once or twice at work; they knew he was working on a car, and that it was a bit special. What if he were to take it out on Friday? It wasn’t finished yet, not really, but it was taxed and insured. An image came to him, dog-eared with use: the Corsa, full of friends and laughter, roaring away from the village down the Boundway, himself in the driving seat: James Dixon – not Dicko, or even Jamie any more. He held on to the picture for a moment before letting it go, like a coin touched for luck in a pocket. It would happen, it would be like that one day.

  It wasn’t long until last orders were called. When Harry Maddock got up and went to the bar Jamie drained the last of his pint and went to stand beside him.

  ‘Harry.’

  ‘Evening, lad.’ Harry signalled to Jim for the same again, his elbow on the bar, a note between his fingers. ‘Drink?’

  ‘Oh, no thanks. Work tomorrow.’

  ‘Work? You don’t know you’re born. I’m out rabbiting after this. Want to come?’

  Jamie shook his head. ‘Where’s your assistant?’

  ‘Don’t know where the bugger is – his phone’s switched off. Hold on there a sec.’

  ‘OK.’

  Jamie perched on a bar stool and watched as Harry took two halves of bitter back to his table. Bill Drew had left some time before, but the two farmers sat on.

  He hadn’t been out with Harry for a long time. After Alex had gone he hadn’t wanted to set foot on Culverkeys any more; he’d got into Grand Theft Auto and SimCity instead, stopped helping Harry out, let it drift – so when he had taken on a trainee keeper, a lad in the year above Jamie at school, he hadn’t even cared all that much. Messing about in the woods and stuff was for kids, he’d realised; and he’d had the Clio by then anyway.

  And yet, when he’d heard that Culverkeys might be built over, he had felt utterly desolate; he still did. It was stupid, but he wanted it to be there, always: untouched and unchanging. The place he had loved as a kid.

  Harry came back and leaned on the bar beside him. ‘Culverkeys auction today.’

  Jamie nodded. ‘Heard it didn’t go that well.’

  ‘Could’ve been worse. Some of the old machinery did OK. You know what they use it for these days? Bloody town sculptures, that kind of thing. Stand it outside visitor centres. See that iron turntable they had? From a horse gin, that was. You’d rig a horse to it, have it go round and round and drive machinery off it. My dad can remember being set to throw stones at the horse’s backside to stop it going to sleep. Your granddad too, no doubt. How is he, anyway?’

  ‘Oh, you know. I’ll bring him in sometime.’

  ‘You should do that. Sure you won’t give me a hand with the rabbits?’

  ‘I can’t, Harry. Sorry.’

  ‘Ah well.’

  ‘So – is it sold, then?’

  ‘Not that I know. But the lawyers are playing their cards close to their chests.’

  ‘Someone said about mining. That’s not right, is it?’

  ‘Depends who’s got the mineral rights. I doubt it. Though the Coal Board does come sniffing around from time to time. Whatever it’s called now.’

  ‘The Coal Board? You serious?’

  ‘Surface mining, lad. What do you think the landfill is, where your dad works? They were still getting coal out of that when I was a boy.’

  Jamie pictured it: a big hole scooped out of the earth, then filled in again with people’s rubbish. ‘I never realised.’

  ‘Surely your father must’ve said.’

  ‘But mining: I thought all that was ages ago.’

  ‘It’s not all wind farms, lad. Not yet. Anyway, I’ve not heard anything about coal. I reckon the land’ll be sold off piecemeal and someone’ll buy the house, make it into a family home. That’s where the money is these days.’

  When Jamie got in his dad was still up, watching telly.

  ‘Not seen much of you today,’ he said as Jamie hung his jacket up in the hal
l. ‘Did you stop in at your grandfather’s after work?’

  ‘I’ve been at the Green Man. Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just your mother’s worried about him.’

  Jamie came into the lounge and stood by his dad’s chair. ‘Worried? How come?’

  ‘She thinks something’s not right with him.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been saying that for a while. I think he’s depressed.’

  ‘His type don’t get depressed, he was in the war.’

  ‘Why does she think there’s something wrong?’

  ‘She gave him a ring today, see how he was. He kept calling her Edith.’

  ‘So? He got his names mixed up.’

  ‘He never calls her Edith. Never. Anyway, it was more than that, she says. She had to explain, and then he – he started asking after Tess.’

  ‘His dog? The one that died?’ Jamie knew his voice sounded incredulous, and he was glad it was his dad telling him and not his mum. It just seemed impossible somehow.

  His dad got up and headed into the kitchen. ‘Your mum thinks so. Anyway, she’s going to make him an appointment with his doctor. She thinks they can give him some tablets or something – though I’m not so sure.’

  ‘She didn’t tell him that, did she?’

  ‘About the GP? Why?’

  ‘He won’t go. He hates it, having things decided for him.’

  ‘Well, we’re going to have to try and make him. Being independent is one thing, and he’s done well for his age, but it’s not fair on your mother having to worry about him by herself. Your uncles all had the good sense not to live nearby, but if your granddad gets poorly, or – well. It can’t all be on her shoulders.’