Funderland

by Nigel Jarrett

  Funderland

  Nigel Jarrett

  CONTENTS

  Title page

  Dedication

  Funderland

  Dr Fritz

  Watching the Birdie

  Nomad

  Unfinished Symphony

  A Point of Dishonour

  In the Beginning

  Hotel de la Paix

  The Lister Building

  Uncle Kaiser

  Grasmere

  Mrs Kuroda on Penyfan

  Snow at Christmas

  Ornithology

  Cherry Hill

  Coker’s Mule

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Ann

  Funderland

  While Carol was out, a gypsy woman came to the front door. Dale was walking from the kitchen to the bottom of the stairs when he noticed her standing there, the sunlight from behind shaping her silhouette.

  It frightened him. He hadn’t seen a gypsy since childhood and, like some phantom from way back, this one took a step across the threshold uninvited. Before he could protest, she offered him a lavender posy from a basket. ‘How much?’ he asked, slightly flummoxed and rummaging in his back pocket for change.

  ‘A pound, sir,’ she said. He took the flowers, gave her the coin and ushered her backwards. She was soon on her way.

  Carol is downstairs, humming to herself and placing tins and jars on the kitchen table with audible thumps. Through the bedroom window and beyond the road, he can see a large bird, possibly a heron, stalled in flight against the wind, which is making an ocean of the meadow. Two months ago, huddled over the computer screen, they found the cottage on the internet. She laid a hand on his shoulder as he was scrolling the information, a nurse overdoing the comfort routine.

  ‘Where are the flowers from?’ she shouts up the stairs.

  ‘A gypsy,’ he calls back. ‘Honestly. You must have passed her on the road.’

  ‘Not I,’ she says. ‘Did she tell your fortune?’

  He can remember when such a conversation with Rose would have bobbed on undercurrents of suspicion and distrust. But Rose is dead and her death has cleansed his memories of her. Of Johnny, too. Carol was always the odd one out, working a double shift when the three of them went to the seaside that time, just for a laugh.

  ‘I thought we’d have tuna salad for lunch,’ Carol announces when he comes downstairs with what is now just a faint limp. ‘There’s a brilliant little supermarket in the village. I got you a paper – the Telegraph. It’s all they had.’

  Again he hears the words coming from Rose, with their hint of reproof, the implication that she was the one who always had to choose, always had to discover the important things.

  It is almost two years since the accident. He has vivid dreams. Rose and Johnny, brother and sister, are in the front seat as the car is ratcheted upwards through white timber thickets to the U-turn at the top of the ride. He is behind, watching the dripping water from underneath them as it flies off in the breeze like a necklace ripped from someone’s throat. They had all been young teenagers when they last rode the dipper, but he remembered what would happen at the top, how the chain lifting them skywards would coil back on itself and send them freewheeling into the turning semicircle, and how at the start of its unaided forward motion its nose would peck slightly to give it a boost before the full downward whoosh into the water. Except that this time, as it bore right, he felt the car being pulled from below, and to the accompaniment of splintering wood – he would always remember that sound – they began falling backwards, down through shattering spars and uprights until the car became wedged, somehow pinned by gravity, into a corner from where he could see Johnny and Rose plummeting like rag dolls to their deaths. There was a minor shift when the car dropped another six feet, as if Providence were trying to shake him free, but it came to nothing. Having been granted the best view, he was the leading witness at the inquest and the public inquiry. In a wheelchair, suffering a kind of shock-induced paralysis, he led the procession to the graves with Carol, Johnny’s wife, at his side. As handfuls of soil thudded on the coffin lids and a breeze blew, he caught a whiff of her perfume.

  They have been in close contact with each other since the accident. They have had lots to do, much weight to bear and no children to stifle any self-pity or be of practical help. They were together when the inquiry report absolving the fairground owners from blame arrived, and watched the TV item devoted to it. They had given no interviews. When the newsreader moved on to a piece about a factory strike, the whole episode seemed to close. Carol shared with other relatives the care Dale needed before he could walk again. After eighteen months the accident seemed like an event they had to forget because so many others had.

  Renting the cottage was Carol’s idea. Dale was tempted to raise the issue of what family and friends would think but resisted. They seemed to be all for it, as it turned out, perhaps because Carol was a nurse. She had told him at the inquest that they should always be available for each other. At the time, this sounded trite to him and he was glad to be able to reassure her whenever her guilt at being absent on the afternoon of the accident turned to tears, by convincing her that his own survival, hanging for all he was worth in agony up there where the wind cut into his face, often made him want to climb some other helter-skelter and throw himself off.

  Carol is an inventive cook, the salad looking as though it took hours to prepare.

  ‘Nice?’ she asks, as he tucks in.

  He nods approvingly with his mouth full. He can see on the worktop that she has also bought desserts: teaspoons balance on two flask-shaped cartons of something or other like the prelude to a ritual.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asks.

  He nods again and smiles. She reaches across and squeezes his hand.

  ‘We ought to book if we are eating out tonight,’ she says. ‘There’s that place down the road – or do you want to keep that till last?’

  ‘We’ll try it tonight,’ he replies, and they look at each other, recognising the unspoken feeling they now share of something awful spoiling the run-up to a special occasion.

  After lunch, Carol steps on to the patio in the garden to phone, sliding the French window behind her. She is standing with her back to him, laughing now and again as though she is making a personal call before speaking to the restaurant, something she forgot but hasn’t told him about and wants to keep from him, but not too obviously. From a distance, involved in a conversation that doesn’t concern him, she appears different. The wind gets up and her free hand holds her skirt modestly in place at the back. But then it begins playing with her hair, which flutters uncontrollably. Dale knows that people are always saying that she is a beauty, and she is, but for a moment it has a strange revelatory quality for him, not to be suppressed. He notices the skirt, some flouncy, sky-blue material, and her lemon blouse, with its short puffball sleeves. All the commotion around her reminds him of something wild, in a wild place by the sea, but he puts this down to the memory of the gypsy woman and how it is colouring his imagination.

  ‘Done,’ she says, returning to the kitchen. ‘No problem. Two seats for seven-thirty. A couple of hours. All we have to do now is take out a bank loan!’

  He waits for her to explain that the chef or the person at the end of the line was a wag, but she adds nothing, except to say she is ready for a walk through the fields to the cove. There were two pictures of it on the PC screen when they booked, one obviously taken from the patio and the other from well down the path with the cottage imagined in the distance, like something in the process of receding completely from view, about to be lost for ever.

  The description of the cottage as ‘secluded’ is accurate, because the
building is old but appears marooned. A newly-whitewashed cube beside the sea yet backed by farmland, it has none of the paraphernalia – lobster pots, disused ploughs – associated with either. Dale wonders about its origins.

  ‘Surf or turf?’ he ponders after a while, as the field begins abandoning itself to the dunes.

  ‘Oh – fish for me, I think, with a nice glass of crisp white wine,’ she says.

  He laughs: ‘I meant the occupation of whoever lived here first, before people like us took holidays!’

  Dale recalls how he and Rose saw the short-lived confusion when talking at cross-purposes in their early days as proof of a love so strong that it admitted no serious regression. But such a blissful state, he thinks, was so soon under threat because it was an accommodation, and being misunderstood became a fault of memory rather than a source of amusement, as it was now with Carol. When his feet begin treading the sand, he experiences one of the time lapses that the doctors have warned him about, a kind of stuttering of motion, as though there are several tenths-of-a-second that his brain, or a damaged part of it, has edited out in series. He feels like some extraterrestrial voyager in a sci-fi film, mechanically recording the alien scene in front of him. Just before it ends, Carol wanders into the frame from the left, like a stranger, a desirable earthling.

  She pulls a face, seemingly stuck for an explanation of something, but before she can offer an opinion about the cottage’s history, she turns to see a black dog bounding towards them. Beyond it, a woman is shouting at them or at the dog, it’s not clear which. Then they catch a reassurance shredded by the wind, but a reassurance nevertheless, delivered in a posh, high-pitched voice – ‘It’s all right. She won’t hurt you. She’s a real softie. Don’t worry!’ Though the dog is not barking but wagging its tail as it draws closer, Carol faces it full square, both her arms outstretched, as if to protect Dale from what he knows she believes is an unpredictable breed. (Carol’s sister, three years her junior, still bears a tiny scar on her nose where as an infant she was bitten by such a dog, a bull terrier.) The animal circles them twice before running off along the strand, its detour completed, while down beside the waves, its owner signals an apology before reaching for a piece of driftwood and throwing it for the dog to chase, away from them.

  ‘Thanks,’ Dale says, returning an extended scene to the level of intimacy.

  ‘What for?’ Carol asks. There is a slight edge to her voice, as if she has done something that has exposed a weakness.

  ‘For saving me from the jaws of death,’ he jokes, with a smile.

  She picks up something herself, a shell, and playfully throws it at him. All the way to the water’s edge, she walks apart, maintaining a distance. As the sand becomes wetter, she kicks off her flip-flops and hooks the straps over her finger. He moves behind her, still five or six yards away, watching her feet make momentarily dry prints that in seconds refill with watery sand. Unseen by her, he tries to step exactly where she has trodden. But she has a longer stride and bigger feet than his. She tips her sunglasses from the top of her head on to the bridge of her nose, like a visor, pushing them into place, and it is then that she stops and turns to face him. Though he cannot divine it, she is staring straight at him with something that might be concern or longing, her creased forehead robbed of meaning by her dark glasses, perhaps intentionally, and for the first time she links arms with him, not with any feeling of affection, for she does not draw him towards her or allow him to take any of her weight, but with an odd sort of purpose and a quickening of her pace, as though the white sound of the breakers, growing more deafening at their approach, is an ordeal through which he must pass with her help.

  Between the headlands on either side of them, the horizon has grown less distinct. A faraway storm or a local, passing squall has erased its line, its razor-edge. But, within seconds, it is back, as clear as before, re-affirming itself. He has talked to her many times since the accident about memory being like this, gathering in the background, threatening to sweep inland and – yes – ‘spoil’ everything, all the progress. He has long been beached by its horrors and come to some sort of compromise, looking at it over his shoulder, watching it blacken the distance, and she has helped haul him to safety. But there have been return journeys, many walks to the sea’s edge, since then, for confrontations with this nagging reminder which he couldn’t have faced without her at his side, her grip tightening at every shudder of his fright and reluctance. Yet he knows this is not just a process, an exercise. He can only go through it because he wants her contact, the guilt of it always struggling against the hope that she feels the same way, that inside her there is something about her affectionate readiness to help him recover that is already being subverted by what is yet unspoken.

  ‘What do you think they are thinking?’ he asks. ‘I mean, at this moment.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘You know – the others. Everyone.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t care?’

  ‘Of course I care.’

  She removes a wisp of hair that has drifted across her face. For a second, it seems to him like the act of someone who has been disheveled by exertion, an attempt to restore neatness and the appearance of order. He knows it has been hard for her, the one making amends for being protected by Fate from disaster and pain. At the same time, ahead of her probably, he reads it as something else, a response, not at all irritating, to some wind-borne harbinger of abandon, and he wants to stop strolling and embrace her, the passion of his intent enough to halt the incessant movement all around them: the slapping waves, the clouds, the woman and her dog (small figures now) disappearing into the dunes. They stop together, independently, and smile at their agreement.

  ‘We’d better go back and get ready,’ she says.

  She showers first, standing in the bath with the moveable attachment. She is a few inches taller than he is, and when it’s his turn, the drone of her hairdryer joining the sprinkling of water, he is able to stand beneath it. Her suds crowd the plughole, a remnant of her intimate presence. He bends painfully and scoops some of them on to his fingers.

  There are two bedrooms, so low-ceilinged that they have to crane forwards to look through the seaview porthole of a window in each one. When they do they are brilliantly illuminated, as if from a spotlight trained on the building from outside. Sleeping arrangements were mentioned almost immediately after the holiday idea had been agreed. They joked about it but came to no conclusion. At the moment, Dale’s clothes are hanging in the wardrobe in the room with the two singles, Carol’s in the one along the tiny landing; both suitcases and odd scattered items are in that one too, on the double-bed, with its rose-printed coverlet. When the gipsy appeared, at first unknown to him, Dale was lying on one of the singles, staring vacantly at drifting clouds. Strangely, only his room, the one he was lying in, also has the landward window, through which could be seen a distant mountain range and, closer, the stalled heron, or buzzard.

  ‘I don’t know what to wear,’ Carol says from her room, the wardrobe door creaking. He imagines her pondering, lips puckered, finger rubbing the cleft of her chin, other hand on hip.

  ‘I’m supposed to say that,’ he replies, staring at the light, colourful clothes on their wire hangers, which tap their utility message against the back panel – clothes she helped him choose. ‘Anything you wear will be right.’

  For a few seconds there is silence, and he wonders if what he’s said belongs to the class of endearments they now sometimes exchange, or if it is too bold an advance into more personal territory against which she is about to raise a barrier. But he smiles when she says, ‘You flatterer, you!’ As he is fingering the collar of a blue polo shirt, he can hear her dressing – the clack of heels on the wooden floor and a sound like paper crinkling. She takes a pink skirt and white cardigan out of the wardrobe, worried about the momentary lack of movement in his room, where he is standing still, his ears straining to catch her every intimate action. She hooks t
he clothes on the wardrobe door and lies back naked on the bed, knowing that he won’t enter without knocking.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she calls, through the thin wall.

  ‘Almost ready.’

  She quickly dresses. ‘Me too,’ she says. ‘Let’s walk there – it’s a nice evening.’

  Though as physically restored as he’ll ever be, he has to take stairs one step at a time. At the bottom, he waits for her. He hears her bedroom door click shut. Then there is an instant when there is no sound, no sign of her presence, as if she has been silently snatched away from him, and he feels beads of sweat forming on his temples. Then he looks up and she begins her descent. The old stairs are steep and for a second he can see her directly from below, her skirt billowing like a parachute, her long limbs glistening in the downstairs light, the rest of her in shadow. She is heavier than he is as well as taller and her weight, the weight of good health, makes the stairs creak, move even, as she grips the banister. He grows giddy, but then she is smiling, coming closer, holding out her hand for him. He grips it, as an anchorage for him and to help her dismount the rickety staircase, but he is too confused to separate need and chivalry and in his turmoil she keeps coming forwards, like a spectre in slow motion, and gently touches his lips with her own. As he places his hand on the side of her neck he can feel her heart, her good, good heart, pumping, and he catches again the graveside’s feline perfume.

  Doctor Fritz

  It is late October. A Sahara sun has been baking the leaves in the spinney to a turn. He has detected a chill of late, inevitable but long-detained. It has not yet affected Tracey, the jolly little girl from the council who visits every few weeks, advancing towards him through the trees. The wireless speaks of creeping deserts and rising oceans, of coastlines crumbling into the sea. He has noticed that nothing will now remove the stain in the toilet (Kinsella, Belfast, 1936) and wonders if asking Tracey’s advice will be interpreted back at her office as a further lowering of his guard. He guesses she has already told them of his asceticism, though that is probably neither an expression in her vocabulary nor, even if it is, something denoting conscious denial rather then negligence. She smiles whenever he stands at the portal of his incomprehensible world. He is sunlit, browned by a strange, meridional sun, while she is in shadow. He now thinks it was a mistake to tell her his name is really Fred, not Fritz. Dr Fred Stebbing, musicologist. It wasn’t necessary. She has befriended him but her motives are ulterior. She is peeling away, manoeuvring him into a position of acknowledged helplessness. He looks to the tshuapa on the sideboard for anchorage. Although it has been explained to her, Tracey shows no interest in what lies behind it. Tracey accepts everything, takes notes. She is a simpering dossier-builder parting the branches, the branches that are refusing to surrender their leaves.