At Hawthorn Time

by Melissa Harrison

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Oh, after the war, lad. Edith was only a girl before the war, you know; six years younger than me, she was. But it made men and women of us all . . .’ His voice tailed off for a moment. ‘Anyway, she – well,’ he chuckled, recollecting himself. ‘You wouldn’t credit it. Not that she was one of those good-time girls, you understand.’

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘She said we should get married straight away, rent a little house near her mother, but I wanted to do it properly. I worked hard and I saved it up: four hundred and fifty pounds, that house, have I ever told you that? It was a lot of money in those days.’

  Lodeshill was only a mile or so away. Jack wondered if the old man would be able to find his house all right, and if he should take him all the way to the door. Whether he could risk being seen. He had the sense of something having been decided, although he couldn’t have said what.

  ‘I used to think about all this in Changi, you know,’ the old man continued, gesturing weakly. ‘The fields, the birdsong. Whether the may was out. If it was haying weather.’

  ‘Changi? Is that . . . was that a prison camp?’

  ‘Singapore. I was just a boy, really. Twenty-three. I had a great friend there, Stan. Chorley lad, he was. They took him away one day, to build a railway, they said. I never saw him again.’

  Stan. Oddly, Jack felt his eyes fill with tears.

  ‘I used to imagine I was ploughing the Batch, you know? With a team. Lovely animals, Suffolks. Up and down. I’d do it over and over, all in my mind. Getting a straight furrow, steering round that big oak. Kept me sane.’

  ‘You were a farmer, before the war?’

  ‘A farmhand, lad. I’ve told you that.’

  ‘And when you got home did you ever do it?’

  ‘What, plough the Batch? No. When I got back there was no call for horses any more. Anyhow, Edith was proud of me going into manufacturing, bettering myself. When I was made foreman she cooked me a steak dinner and she made sure all the neighbours knew.’

  ‘But you missed it.’

  ‘Now and again. Never told Edith.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’d’ve had no truck with foolish notions, she had the children to bring up. Anyhow, you can’t turn back the clock.’

  ‘That’s true enough.’

  ‘I had to put food on the table, lad. I just had to get on with it. Oh, it’s all different now – kids come out of school wanting what they call a career these days, but we were just glad to have honest work.’

  ‘And did you ever see anyone again from when you were in Singapore? From the war?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you talk to anyone about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What was there to talk about, lad? It was all in the past. Best forgotten.’

  ‘And did you? Forget, I mean?’

  ‘Oh, you never forget something like Changi. Not really.’

  They walked in silence for a while, Jack keeping his arm lightly around James Hirons’ back to save his pride. He thought about the old man’s life: a unique landscape of memories, parts of it sunlit and open, parts shadowy and unvisited, all of which would soon be – was being – lost.

  ‘I’d like to see it one more time, though. Before I go.’

  ‘The field you ploughed?’

  ‘The Batch.’

  ‘Is that where you were going?’

  ‘Going?’

  ‘Just now. Is that why you came out?’

  ‘No, I was – I’ve been –’ and he patted his jacket pockets and then turned to Jack, a look of sudden distress on his face. ‘Who are you, anyway? What’s this all about?’

  ‘I’m just going to get you home, Mr Hirons, that’s all. To your wife. Edith, was it?’

  ‘I’m not bloody doolally, you know. Not yet.’ He shook off Jack’s arm, drew himself up a little taller. Jack glimpsed, for a moment, the man he had once been.

  ‘I know you’re not.’

  ‘Well, why are you talking about my wife, then?’ the old man asked. ‘Edith isn’t at home. She’s dead.’

  When Kitty awoke it was still dark, but she knew without turning over that the bed beside her was empty. With a sick lurch she remembered their argument; remembered, too, that the children were coming today. She got up and drew the curtain aside: yes, the Audi was gone.

  ‘Please, just . . . let it be OK,’ she said, sitting back down on the edge of the bed with her eyes closed and her nails digging into her palms.

  She thought about what Howard knew and didn’t know, and about the person he thought she was: passionless and critical; a painter of whimsy; a religious convert. She was none of those things, not really. She was someone entirely different, someone he had never really seen.

  She wondered who had told him about the affair, and how much he knew. Dear God, all those years and he hadn’t said anything; decades of ordinary family life, when she’d thought she was the only one with secrets. Poor Howard. No wonder he drank.

  But they would have to talk about it now, wouldn’t they? ‘Please,’ she whispered again, her head bowed over her knees, her hands cold and clenched. The kids would both be with them in only a few hours.

  There was no point going back to bed; she wouldn’t sleep. She got up and put on trousers and a shirt and went downstairs. In the kitchen she switched the kettle on, but as the water slowly heated and its rumble increased the house grew close around her and she knew it wasn’t where she wanted to be. Before it boiled she had picked up her keys and pulled the front door to behind her, the young swallows in the eaves above her shifting uneasily in their mud cups.

  The church was cool and empty, its roof timbers with their carved bosses lost in shadow, the air it held within it very still. She sat down in one of the back pews. It was a moment of comfort, that was all, a way to step outside the confines of her life for a few minutes. To try to see the way ahead.

  ‘Please God, help me,’ she whispered under her breath. It was all she could manage for now.

  If only she knew what she wanted; if only she could tell. Other people seemed to be able to: look at Claire. She’d known when both her marriages were over – at least that was the way she told it. But perhaps all anyone could do was make a blind choice and then justify it to themselves afterwards. Maybe there was never any real way to be certain what was right – or what the future held.

  Including for her. She kept telling herself she was imagining it, but once or twice recently she’d felt briefly dizzy, as if she were floating.

  ‘You’ll need Howard on side if the news isn’t good,’ Claire had said to her on the phone. ‘Kitty dear, don’t leave telling him for too long.’

  But it wasn’t that simple. There were two conversations they needed to have, she saw now: one about the past, and one about the future. And her appointment didn’t come into either; it shouldn’t, she owed Howard that much. If their marriage was over, if he wanted to go back to London, she would give him that chance – without any illness of hers hanging over him. After all, if something happened to Howard she wasn’t sure she could face nursing him for the rest of her life.

  No; if there was anything wrong – which she still couldn’t really believe – then she would cope with it alone. It would be her penance for the choices she’d made.

  Around the corner on Hill View Jamie was pulling the tarp off the Corsa. It wasn’t far, but he’d need the car to bring his grandfather back – if, please fucking God, he was right.

  The engine roared into life. Jamie felt it in his body, the blood surging around his veins. He’d dreamed about this moment many times, but not like this. Those images, so long treasured, were of no use to him now.

  He backed out of the drive and dug his mobile from his pocket.

  ‘Dad? It’s me.’ He transferred the phone to his other hand and put his seat belt on, changing quickly up through the gears as he left the village behind. ‘I know where
Granddad is. I think he’s gone to the Batch – will you tell Mum? On Culverkeys. Tell her I’m taking the Corsa. I’m on my way there now.’

  Then he threw the phone onto the passenger seat beside him, turned onto the Boundway in the rising dawn light and accelerated down the long, straight road between its sleeping fields, driving forwards, as we all do, towards the known and the unknown, and into everything that was to come.

  EPILOGUE

  It was mid-morning when they finally cleared the two cars from the carriageway, though you, having outlived your usefulness as a witness, were allowed to leave well before that. It was turning into beautiful day: the sky was an untroubled blue overhead, the spring air warm, with a light breeze. A cuckoo spoke its own name from a spinney nearby.

  Through all the passing centuries I have loved that sound.

  One of the police officers bagged up the stray phone and CDs lost from the cars, and someone else swept up the glass and the fragments of sheared metal from the road, though the tyre marks remained to mark the place. A handful of coins were left, too, spilled from who knew which vehicle; for someone to have collected them all up, one by one, had probably felt wrong. They’ll work their way down into the earth in time.

  The smell of cut grass hung over the scene for a little while after everyone left. The wheels of the smaller car had torn up the verge when it swerved to avoid the Audi turning onto the Boundway from Babb Hill – or so you’d guessed when you first arrived. The stout hawthorn hedge had flipped the Corsa with its brash paint job onto its roof.

  That hedge was laid by a local man between the wars – though this is not something you know.

  I can see it all from where I am. You’re still shaking as you get back into your car, execute a slow three-point turn and drive away from the flashing lights and fluorescent jackets, back the way you came. You join the motorway, but you only stay on until the service station; then you park up in the half-empty car park, and although it’s still early you take out your mobile phone and call the people you love.

  I can tell you’ve never been involved in anything like this before, never understood how a hideous new reality can yaw out from the everyday without warning, swallowing the future whole. ‘One fatality,’ you’d heard one of the policemen say as you left.

  You’d hesitated; for a moment you wanted to turn back and ask who: the young lad in the upside-down Corsa, veiled in blood? The middle- aged man in the Audi, utterly still? Or the ragged man on the tarmac, his body twisted and crushed? You took my hand for a moment as I lay there, and your simple act of kindness almost pulled me back. I am so grateful for that.

  But you didn’t go back and ask. It wasn’t your story, and who could blame you for wanting it to be over now?

  After you finish talking on the phone you see that you have blood on your hands and on the cuffs of your jumper, and you get out of your car and walk slowly to the strip-lit toilets in the service station where your face is white in the mirror, your eyes wide. Someone else’s blood on you: for the first time, you look faint.

  You have a coffee in the food hall because suddenly it’s worse and you don’t want to get back in the car. It’s still early, and not all the little shops they have in there are open yet, but some of the other tables have people sitting at them: a few solitary men; an old couple; a woman with two small children, one of whom is crying hopelessly and repetitively. You feel so far away from it all, as though you are in another world. Briefly, you picture starting up a conversation, although they’re all total strangers, just in order to say it out loud and make it real and make them part of it too: I came across a terrible car accident an hour ago and I think one of the people in it died.

  You don’t do that. You finish your coffee and you go to the toilets again and try once more to wash my blood from your clothes, and then you walk back to your car. You switch on that satellite thing you have and get it to work out a new route; then you put on the car radio for company and find the local news. There is no mention of any road accident yet, just something about an agricultural show and something about a housing development and something about a missing pensioner turning up safe and well in a village church somewhere. Because not everything is ending, although it can feel like that sometimes.

  From where I am I can see, as at last you drive away, that the tyres of your car are stuck here and there with fragments of glass, and that there are tiny, bruised hawthorn petals in the treads.

  It is the last thing I see before I let go.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you…

  …to my agent, Jenny Hewson, and my editor, Alexa von Hirschberg, both of whom helped shape this novel; and to my copyeditor, Katherine Fry, who showed me that it’s possible to love semi-colons too much.

  …to Kathy Belden in Bloomsbury’s New York office, whose support has meant a great deal; and to all the brilliant team at Bloomsbury UK.

  …to Lucie Murtagh, whose lovely illustrations brought Jack’s notebooks to life; and to David Mann for giving the book its beautiful cover.

  …to the continuously inspiring Pete Rogers. You know the score.

  …to the wise women: Julia Tracey (juliatracey-counselling.co.uk) and Martha Crawford (www.subtextconsultation.com).

  …to Peter Francis and Stephen Moss, who took the time to read and comment on this manuscript.

  …to Jeff Barratt and the Caught By The River massive: see you at the bar!

  …to Jo and Tom Ridge, for lending me a slice of village life.

  …to Steve Harris of On The Air Vintage Technology.

  …to Twitter, and all the helpful souls who sail in her: in particular Fiona Baker, Pete Ledbury, Andrew Pimbley, Tim Reid, Gail Robertson, Alan Simpson, Karl Wareham, Gaz Weetman and John Wilson.

  And thank you to Ant and Scout, who are home.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Melissa Harrison’s debut novel Clay won the Portsmouth First Fiction Award, was selected for Amazon’s ‘Rising Stars’ programme and chosen by Ali Smith as a Book of the Year for 2013. A freelance writer, occasional photographer and columnist for The Times, the Weekend FT and the Guardian, she lives in south London.

  @M_Z_Harrison

  Also available by Melissa Harrison

  Clay

  Eight-year-old TC skips school to explore the city’s overgrown, forgotten corners. Sophia, seventy-eight, watches with concern as he slips past her window, through the little park she loves. She’s writing to her granddaughter, Daisy, whose privileged upbringing means she exists in a different world from TC – though the two children live less than a mile apart.

  Jozef spends his days doing house clearances, his nights working in a takeaway. He can’t forget the farm he left behind in Poland, its woods and fields still a part of him, although he is a thousand miles away. When he meets TC he finds a kindred spirit: both lonely, both looking for something, both lost.

  ‘Among the 2013 debuts, I was taken with Melissa Harrison’s Clay. Most reviewers seem to have mistaken it for realism, whereas Harrison, a nature writer if ever there was one, is reaching after something else – a communal style (reminiscent of that of Nan Shepherd a century ago) with a formal determination to meet shared needs. It’s beautifully written and doesn’t compromise’

  Ali Smith, New Statesman Books of the Year

  ‘Instantly beautiful in its calm and wise tone’

  Robert Macfarlane

  ‘Heartfelt, elegaic ... Lovingly observed’

  Sunday Times

  www.bloomsbury.com/MelissaHarrison

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  First published in Great Britain 2015

  This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © 2015 by Melissa Harrison

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All artwork © Lucie Murtagh

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