by Xan Brooks
Who travels the roads that connect these westerly villages? Locals, in the main, because this is a closed and intimate country. The roads link the villages in much the same way as a corridor and a staircase will link the chambers of a house, and the inhabitants wave and tip their hats as they pass. When they encounter a stranger they are understandably surprised.
For all that, she is aware the land has turned more frantic and troubled. The news tells of uprisings and unemployment and migrant labour on the move and this surely accounts for the increase in foreign visitors. If work dries up and people are moved on, it follows that those people will venture further afield. If she were in their shoes, she would do the same thing. And so she tries to receive these strangers with kindness even though she has no work to offer and not a great deal to spare. They are only passing through, after all. The road leads them in and it carries them out again.
Also, she admits that the strangers are fascinating. She has grown so used to living in the same small village amid the same old faces that the sound of an accent (a Gloucestershire burr, northern country vowels) is oddly exciting. She wonders at the origins of these people and what has brought them so far and what they hope to find in this place that they could not find in their own. Most arrive at the door with a show of politeness that is no doubt genuine but nonetheless feels worn thin from overuse. But she has met some who have struck her as either angry or sly – and still others who seem broken and defeated. She doesn’t think much to the long-term prospects of this last group – and yet it is to these people whom she tends to give most generously so they must, at that, be onto something.
The most outlandish of all are the spiritualists. Most likely they can be counted as the most desperate as well. Sometimes they refer to themselves as seers, or mystics, or mediums. They claim to possess supernatural powers. They boast that they can commune with the dead, like the one who called on Margaret, who then – infuriatingly – batted the fellow on to her. She had prepared a ham sandwich and poured him some tea and, mainly by dint of her airy disinterest, was able to squire him to the door before he could begin his routine.
Tap, tap, goes the door. The neighbour’s dog redoubles its yelping. The woman replaces her sewing and removes her spectacles.
Last April a travelling troupe called the Family Fantastic played for one night in the village hall. The father and son performed conjuring tricks while the elderly mother provided accompaniment on the upright piano, except that the tricks all went wrong and the father and son eventually came to blows. An awkward, slapstick fist-fight that she had initially assumed must be part of the act until she saw that the old man’s nose had been bloodied and the son began weeping and several spectators (Jim among them) had to intervene. At this point she had wondered whether the Family Fantastic was really a family at all, and yet apparently they were, because Jim had eventually been able to escort them backstage and there the younger man was inconsolable and kept saying, “Father, I’m sorry.”
What a thing, what an evening, the Family Fantastic. And so, yes, she has witnessed her fair share of ragamuffins and chancers over the past however-many months, but perhaps none has been quite so abject as the specimen who taps at her door this Monday mid-morning. “I’m a spiritualist,” the creature declares.
Audrey looks her up and down and laughs. “How nice,” she says drily. “We haven’t had one of you in these parts for a least a week now.”
Tall as a reed and as pale as a lily. A gentleman’s topcoat pulled over a filthy party dress. Mud-spattered nylons torn up the shin and then a wound like a mouth below the right knee. The girl is not much more than a child, perhaps sixteen, at a push. But she has the wary, semi-feral air of a vagrant who has spent too long out of doors.
Audrey Winter shakes her head and resists the urge to shut the door. She says, “Come on, then. The least I can do is put something on that leg.”
In the low cottage kitchen she has the girl remove her nylons. She applies a dab of soap to the flannel and rearranges the chairs so that they face one another. The wound is infected, that’s immediately clear. But the surrounding veins appear normal, which means that the blood is not poisoned. When Audrey leans in to apply the flannel, her forehead connects with something small and hard and she notes this pitiful creature is wearing a scarab pendant, horned and unsightly, strung on a chain about her dirty neck.
She says, “And what’s your name, little spiritualist?”
“Lucy.”
“No,” says Audrey. “That’ll never do. We ought to call you something like Zenobia, or the Great Miss Ingenious. No one’s going to take counsel from a seer called Lucy.” She gestures at the pendant. “Can you get that thing out of the way for me, please?”
“The amulet,” says the girl. “The amulet allows me to speak with the dead.” But she makes this boast with a misery so acute that it’s almost comical. It is as though the girl realises what a cheap lie she is having to tell, and is mortified by the charade.
Audrey nods. “Ah, I see, an amulet, well that does explain it. But try to get it away from my face while I look at your leg.”
The dog keeps on barking. The girl sits rigidly on the chair. She gives off a damp farmyard smell with an undertow of smoke. She does not thank Audrey for attending to her leg. It seems it is all she can do to acknowledge her presence.
When the wound bleeds afresh, Audrey dabs it dry with a towel. She splashes on disinfectant and hunts in the cupboard for gauze. She knows she has gauze somewhere; Jim cut his hand on the chisel not three weeks before. She shuffles items on the shelf before she locates it near the back.
She says, “I suppose you’re probably hungry as well,” and then instantly regrets it because there is something about this child that she does not care for; something blank and unwholesome. It would have been better to have simply slammed the door when she still had the chance.
The girl sounds like a cockney. She is coarse and unschooled. She says she has travelled a great distance with a message from her husband and Audrey can’t help herself; the information makes her laugh. She replies that her husband left for work not quite two hours ago. She can’t imagine his message can’t wait until he comes home for his tea.
“Not that husband, miss. Your other husband.”
“Of course, silly me.” But when she stoops to bandage the leg of this urchin, the woman is aware she is pulling the strapping too tight, as though the gauze is a ligature and the leg the girl’s throat. Anything to choke that nonsense talk of dead husbands. She pays a stranger a kindness and this is how she is thanked, with a slippery scam, with this casual cruelty. Begging would be better. There’s an honesty to begging.
“He said that he loved you,” the girl goes on. “He said he always loved you. And I thought you should know.”
Audrey clenches her jaw. Her fingers work at the bandage. “Did Margaret send you?”
The girl shakes her head.
“Well, I think she did.” Because it now occurs that she has seen this foul creature before, fairly recently, although she cannot pin down the exact circumstance. Most likely she has been working the neighbourhood and finally landed on Margaret, who told her all about Bram. She resolves to confront Margaret about this as soon as she’s able.
“And you charge money for this? For the muck and drivel you spout.”
But the question seems to stump the visitor. She makes no reply.
“There,” says Audrey. “All done.” She sticks a piece of adhesive to hold the bandage in place and takes a final look at this pitiful child, this poor little bitch, this horrible thing.
She says, “Lucy. Zenobia. Whatever you’re called.”
“Lucy.”
“Lucy, fair enough. Excuse me for saying you’re not cut out for this trade. You’re no good at it and you look an absolute fright. Honestly child, find some new line of work.”
For a moment she thinks
that her words have hit home. The girl gets up from the chair and flexes her leg as though preparing to leave. But no, hard luck, it is not to be. Staring hard at the ground, the girl begins to speak very quickly, flatly, like a mediocre student reading aloud from a book.
She says, “Your husband was Bram Connors and he was shot down in the war. His plane crashed and he was burned and he lost an arm because it got caught up in some wire. But he didn’t die in the crash because he walked a good way after that. He walked a long way until he came to a farm and there was a lake at the farm that was full of dead men. He looked into the water at all the dead men and he thought, ‘Maybe this is the right place. I shall climb into the water and then I can rest’.”
“All right. Stop this.”
“His name was Bram Connors and he said he always loved you.”
“All right, good to hear. Out you go now.”
She says, “On the day after your wedding you both went out along the quarry train track. There was a drunk old man on the track. You both saved his life.”
“Lucy,” she begins – and is then brought up short. And strangely, what jumps through her mind is the memory of her accident with her friend Jean’s electric fire. Of all the things to think of in that instant: Jean’s electric fire, her pride and joy, which had been purchased as a Christmas present by her jolly solicitor husband. The contraption plugged into a wall socket at Jean’s grand house in the town. Its metal tubing threw off gusts of dry heat. But the appliance was faulty; it did not always work. And then, when Audrey had stooped to tighten the connection with a screwdriver, some spark leapt from the point where the tubing met the frame. The current had thrown her across the room. She landed on her back with her faculties scrambled. How curious that she would remember that moment right now.
“Lucy.”
Finally the girl risks a glance up from the floor. It is a nervous, appraising glance, but there is something else below the surface – something knotted and wounded and oddly furious. She says, “Sir Lancelot Coombs, I think that was it. The Scarecrow gave him a coat, maybe a coat like this one, but the man didn’t know because he was drunk. Sir Lancelot Coombs, that’s what you both called him. He had been cheated out of his rightful inheritance. Something about a racehorse, I can’t really remember. You both saved his life but the man never knew. Only the two of you knew.”
Outside in the yard, that endless barking. Listen for too long and it sends a person insane.
Audrey clears a frog from her throat. “What scarecrow? There wasn’t a scarecrow.”
“Bram, I mean. I didn’t mean to say scarecrow.”
“But still,” Audrey says. “You couldn’t know about that.”
The girl shoots her another of those knotted, scalding looks.
On and on the barking goes. It will never stop. Audrey attempts a smile and says, “You know, I’m really going to have to go and attend to that dog”. She puts a hand on the chair-back to steady herself, turns as if to make good her escape and then abruptly wheels back to where the girl is still standing.
“And you think that this helps me? Is this a proper way to behave?” Her voice lifts but still sounds oddly distant to her ears. She believes that if the dog barks one more time, she may simply start screaming.
Except that now, unaccountably, it is the girl who is struggling to order her thoughts. She pauses and gulps and stares down at the floor. In that awful flat voice, she says, “I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m not saying he was a good man. Don’t think I’m here to say that. I would never say that. Because he wasn’t a good man. He did a lot of bad things, like the Mench and all that, and he really hurt people. But I don’t think he hurt you, I think he loved you. Or maybe he did hurt you, but really not very much.” Another pause, a further gulp. “Probably the worst thing that he did was not coming home when he should.”
Audrey laughs raggedly. “I imagine that was somewhat beyond his control.”
“Yes, maybe. Maybe it was. But I still think that he probably could have tried a bit harder.”
“Lucy,” she says. “Whoever you are. How could you know about the coat and the man?”
“He told me,” she says. “And he told me he loved you and that he was sorry. It’s just he wasn’t able to come and tell you himself.”
There is so much, she thinks, that is wrong with the world. It is wrong to come upsetting people, rattling skeletons, raking over old coals. But it is also wrong to keep an animal chained up all day long. It is cruel and thoughtless; it should not be allowed. If a dog isn’t wanted, it should be allowed to go free and fend for itself. And if the Simons won’t do it, then someone else should.
Wondering whether she might be about to be sick, Audrey declares that she is stepping outside. She says that she will be gone for no more than a minute and that when she gets back she will check her purse for some money. No doubt the girl will want paying and she is welcome to whatever is there, although it may well not be much, she can’t think what’s in there. Without waiting for a reply, without even looking at the creature sitting on the chair in her kitchen, Audrey takes the side door and clambers over the low wall, past the chicken wire and into the enclosure where the dog – a spindly mongrel, mostly Border collie – has got itself hopelessly wound in its length of chain. She supposes it might bite, it must be out of its wits, but the animal welcomes her arrival with a flurry of hoarse, panting yelps; she supposes that it must recognise her. Audrey pats its quivering flank and then startles herself by planting a dry-mouthed kiss on its head.
“You’re all right,” she says. “You’re all right, don’t worry.”
It takes no time to unwind the chain and unclip the collar. After that she kicks away the chicken wire and unceremoniously hauls the dog over the back wall by the stream. “Go on,” she says. “Get.” And when the dog appears to hesitate she slaps lightly at its rear-end, as though urging on a horse, and it lopes off through the blackberry bushes and weeds without so much as a backward glance. “Don’t come back,” she calls, although she suspects that it will, if only because the foul yard is its home and it will have grown used to its chain, and even a foul home is better than no home at all. But she is still glad that she freed it and she no longer feels sick. And now, sitting on her haunches beside the sluggish village stream, she hears the sound of a motor lurching into life, something wheezing and unhealthy preparing to depart.
She rubs her dirty hands on her dress and mutters, “Go on then,” because this is surely for the best and she was dreading the prospect of completing the exchange. She thinks the girl will almost certainly have made off with her purse and if so she reckons this will be a small price to pay. But when she arrives back at the kitchen the purse is just where she left it – on the oak table, beside her sewing and spectacles. The money is in it, which means that the girl left with nothing. And all at once she feels so tired she could drop.
What became of the woman after the current jumped from the electric fire and ran up her arm? It seemed to her that she remained on the floor for a spell. Her body was fizzing and her thoughts were dislodged – and yet these effects did not last very long. After that she got up off the carpet and apologised to Jean. She said she hoped the amazing contraption was not broken for good.
Still, sometimes she worries what became of the current. That electrical voltage, precisely where had that gone? She knows it was released; she felt the uproar in her limbs. But if it had travelled elsewhere, wouldn’t she have been aware of that too? Jean’s ornate coffee table would have jumped on its hind legs. The reddish Afghan rug would have turned up at the corners. Yet they had seen nothing, felt nothing, and this has led her to wonder. Is the fierce blaze of that moment inside her even now? Maybe it is, because where else could it be? Sometimes she fancies that she can feel it bouncing in her innards, with no hope of escape. And perhaps even this is not so untoward.
Look around; it’s happening al
l over. People carry the storms of the things they once did, the people they once were. They come ambling through the village with their systems ablaze. They contain fireworks, sunbursts, holocausts. Peer closely and you might see orange cinders jumping in their eyes, like those tin grenadiers they lined up at the country fair, except that no one notices or cares because they are in the same state themselves. It’s as much as they can do to keep moving their feet and tipping their hats.
Intending to put away the clothes she has mended, Audrey climbs upstairs and stretches full-length on the bed. She believes she may close her eyes and take a deep breath or two – and this is the last thing she knows for more than three hours. She sleeps through the heavy jingle of John Cooper’s lorry and the noisy return of the Simons’ dog and is only awakened when Michael, having shrugged off his satchel and left his shoes in the hall, steals into the room and lays his hand on her cheek.
32
Above the coastal town of Lymington is a high, soft shoulder of open ground. It is a place of small windswept ponies, robust gorse bushes and the sort of buoyant, mossy grass that trampolines underfoot. In springtime the bushes bring forth bright yellow flowers that perfume the bare land all around. The gorse smells, pleasingly, of macaroons.
Here and there, away from the trails, unwanted items have been left out to rust. It’s not uncommon for ramblers to stumble across a corroded bedstead or legless ironing board, a buckled bicycle frame or the hull of an industrial mangle. If there exists an afterlife for mankind’s metal servants it can be located up here on the heath, amid the bouncing turf and the sprays of gorse.
Between two twisted bushes stands an abandoned lorry. You wouldn’t know it was there until you were hard up against it. Its tires are flat, the windscreen has been shattered and its driver-side door is rusted shut. The engine is intact and might conceivably be salvaged, assuming someone possessed the wherewithal and energy to drive out to retrieve it.
