‘Mr Harris?’
‘You can call me Jez, Missie Cochrane, like others do.’ The farrier was a burly fellow whose knees cracked as he straightened himself. He wore a countryman’s outfit of his own devising, all pockets and straps and sudden tucks, which had hints of both Morris dancer and bondage devotee.
‘I think there’s a redstart still sitting,’ said Martha. ‘Just behind that old-man’s-beard. Mind you don’t disturb her.’
‘Will do, Miss Cochrane.’ Jez Harris yanked at a loose strand of hair over his forehead, with possible satiric intent. ‘They say redstarts bring luck to them as don’t disturb their nests.’
‘Do they, Mr Harris?’ Martha’s expression was disbelieving.
‘They do in this village, Miss Cochrane,’ replied Harris firmly, as if her comparatively recent arrival gave her no right to question history.
He moved off to hack at a patch of cow parsley. Martha smiled to herself. Funny how she couldn’t bring herself to call him Jez. Yet Harris was no more authentic. Jez Harris, formerly Jack Oshinsky, junior legal expert with an American electronics firm obliged to leave the country during the emergency. He’d preferred to stay, and backdate both his name and his technology: nowadays he shoed horses, made barrel hoops, sharpened knives and sickles, cut keys, tended the verges, and brewed a noxious form of scrumpy into which he would plunge a red-hot poker just before serving. Marriage to Wendy Temple had softened and localized his Milwaukee accent; and his inextinguishable pleasure was to play the yokel whenever some anthropologist, travel writer, or linguistic theoretician would turn up inadequately disguised as a tourist.
‘Tell me,’ the earnest hiker with the give-away new boots might begin, ‘does that clump of trees over there have a special name?’
‘Name?’ Harris would shout back from his forge, wrinkling his brow and banging a vermilion horseshoe like a manic xylophonist. ‘Name?’ he would repeat, glaring at the investigator through matted hair. ‘That be Halley’s copse, half-drowned dog know that.’ He would toss the shoe contemptuously into a pail of water, the fizzle and fume dramatizing his rebuke.
‘Halley’s copse … You mean … like Halley’s comet?’ Already the disguised sipper and browser of retarded humanity would be regretting that he couldn’t take out notebook or recorder.
‘Comet? What comet’s that? No comet’s round here betimes. Ain’t never heard of Edna Halley then? No, reckon it’s not what folk hereabouts like to tell of. Rum business, if you ask me, rum business.’
Whereupon, with studied reluctance, and after making signs of hunger, Harris the farrier né Oshinsky the legal draughtsman would allow himself to be treated to a steak-and-kidney pudding at the Rising Sun, and with a pint of mild-and-bitter at his elbow would hint, without ever quite confirming, at tales of witchcraft and superstition, of sexual rites beneath a glowing moon and the tranced slaughter of livestock, all not so very long in the past. Other drinkers in the snug would hear phrases expire as Harris caught himself and melodramatically lowered his voice. ‘Of course, the vicar has always denied …’ they would be offered, or ‘Them’s you meet all claim they never knew old Edna, but she’d wash ’em at birth and wash ’em after death, and in between …’
From time to time Mr Mullin the schoolmaster would chide Jez Harris, suggesting that folklore, and especially invented folklore, should not be the subject of monetary exchange or barter. The schoolmaster was tactful and shy, so kept to generality and principle. Others in the village put things more plainly: for them, Harris’s fabulation and cupidity were proof of the farrier’s un-Anglian origins.
But in any case Harris would decline the reprimand, and with various winks and scalp-scratchings draw Mr Mullin into his own narrative. ‘Now, don’t you be a-scared, Mr Mullin, Sir. Never breathed a word about you and Edna, not a word, I’d draw this very scythe across my giblets if ever my gullet started bleating about that business -’
‘Oh, come off it, Jez,’ the schoolmaster would protest, though his use of the Christian name was a virtual admission of defeat. ‘I just mean don’t get carried away with all the guff you give them. If you want some local legends I’ve got lots of books I can lend you. Folk collections, that sort of thing.’ Mr Mullin had been an antiquarian dealer in his previous life.
‘Old Mother Fairweather and all that, you mean? Fact is, Mr Mullin, Sir’ – and here Harris gave a look of modest smugness – ‘I’ve tried ’em on that stuff and it don’t go down so well. They prefer Jez’s stories, that’s the truth. You and Miss Cochrane can read your books by candlelight together -’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Jez.’
‘Must have been a comely one in her time, that Miss Cochrane, don’t you think? They do say someone stole one of her petticoats off the line last Monday seven-night when old Brock the badger were playing by the light of the moon on Gibbet Hill …’
Not long after this encounter Mr Mullin, earnest and embarrassed, all pink face and leather elbow patches, knocked at Martha Cochrane’s back door and declared his ignorance in the matter of the stolen underclothes, about whose loss he had been truly unaware until, until —
‘Jez Harris?’ asked Martha with a smile.
‘You don’t mean – ?’
‘I think I’m probably a little old for anyone to be interested in my washing.’
‘Oh, the … the rogue.’
Mr Mullin was a timid, fussy man whose pupils called him Chiff-Chaff. He accepted a cup of peppermint tea and, not for the first time, allowed his complaints against the blacksmith to take slightly higher ground. ‘The thing is, Miss Cochrane, in one way I can’t help being on his side, telling whoppers to all those snoopers and nosey-parkers who won’t even let on what they’re up to. Let the deceiver be himself deceived – I’m sure that’s the tag, even if I can’t quite put my finger on it for certain at the moment. Could it be Martial …?’
‘But on the other hand …’
‘Yes, thank you, but on the other hand, I wish he wouldn’t invent these things. I’ve got books of myths and legends he’s welcome to. There’s all sorts of tales to choose from. He could lead a little tour if he wished. Take them up to Gibbet Hill and talk about the Hooded Hangman. Or there’s Old Mother Fair-weather and her Luminous Geese.’
‘They wouldn’t be his stories, would they?’
‘No, they’d be our stories. They’d be … true.’ He sounded unconvinced himself. ‘Well, maybe not true, but at least recorded.’ Martha merely looked at him. ‘Anyway, you see my point.’
‘I see your point.’
‘But I feel you’re on his side, Miss Cochrane. You are, aren’t you?’
‘Mr Mullin,’ said Martha, sipping her peppermint tea, ‘when you get to my age you often find that you aren’t on anyone’s side, not particularly. Or on everyone’s side. Whichever you prefer, really.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Mullin. ‘You see, I thought you were one of us.’
‘Perhaps I’ve known too many us-es in my lifetime.’
The schoolmaster looked at her as if she were somehow disloyal, quite possibly unpatriotic. In the schoolroom he was keen to ground his pupils. He taught them local geology, popular ballads, the origin of place-names, the migratory patterns of birds, and the Kingdoms of the Heptarchy (so much easier, thought Martha, than the Counties of England). He would take them to the northern edge of the Kimmeridgean formation, and demonstrate old-fashioned wrestling holds illustrated in encyclopaedias.
It had been Mr Mullin’s idea to revive – or perhaps, since records were inexact, to institute – the village Fěte. One afternoon an official delegation of schoolmaster and vicar had called on Martha Cochrane. It was known that she, unlike most of the village’s current occupants, had actually grown up in the countryside. Over mugs of chicory and shortbread biscuits they petitioned her for memories.
‘Three carrots long,’ she had answered. ‘Three carrots short. Three carrots any variety.’
‘Yes?’
‘Tray of vegetabl
es. Tray may be dressed, but only parsley may be used. Cauliflowers, if included, must be on stalks.’
‘Yes?’
‘Six broad beans. Six scarlet runners. Nine dwarf beans.’
‘Yes?’
‘Jar of marmalade. All goats entered shall be female. Jar of lemon cheese. Friesian Heifer Maiden not showing more than two broad teeth.’
She fetched a booklet with a faded red cover. Her visitors looked through it. ‘Three Dahlias, Cactus, 6″–8″ – in one vase,’ they read. Then: ‘Five Dahlias, Pompom, under 2″ diameter.’ Then: ‘Five Dahlias, miniature ball.’ Then: ‘Three Dahlias, decorative, over 8″ – in three vases.’ The frail book of lists seemed like a potsherd from an immensely complicated and self-evidently decadent civilization.
‘Mounted Fancy Dress Competition?’ the Reverend Coleman mused. ‘Two covered coat hangers? An article made from Salt Dough? Best Child Handler under 15 years of age? Dog the Judge would like to take home?’
Despite his respect for book-learning, the schoolmaster was unconvinced. ‘Perhaps on the whole we’d better start from scratch.’ The vicar nodded agreement. They left behind the District Agricultural and Horticultural Society’s Schedule of Rules.
Later, Martha had flicked through it, remembering yet again the smell of a beer-tent, sheep being sheared, and her parents swinging her up up into the sky. Then there was Mr A. Jones and the way his beans had gleamed on black velvet. A lifetime on, she wondered if Mr A. Jones had ever cheated to arrive at such perfection. No means of knowing: he had become manure himself by now.
Pages fell from the booklet’s rusted staples; then a dried leaf. She laid it, stiff and grey, against her palm; only its scalloped edge told her it was from an oak. She must have picked it up, all those years ago, and kept it for a specific purpose: to remind herself, on just such a day as this, of just such a day as that. Except, what was the day? The prompt did not work: no memory of joy, success, or simple contentment returned, no flash of sunlight through trees, no house-martin flicking under eaves, no smell of lilac. She had failed her younger self by losing the priorities of youth. Unless it was that her younger self had failed by not predicting the priorities of age.
Jez Harris crept past the cascade of old-man’s-beard, leaving the redstart undisturbed, and bringing himself luck, according to his own new lore. His scything and lopping left the churchyard looking attended to, rather than actually neat; birds and butterflies continued their lives. Martha’s eye, and then her mind, followed a skimming brimstone southwards, across downland, over water, and past chalky cliffs to another burial ground, a place of bright drystone walls and laundered turf. There wildlife would be discouraged; if it were possible, earthworms would be banned, and so would time itself. Nothing must be allowed to disturb the resting-place of the first Baron Pitman of Fortuibus.
Even Martha did not begrudge Sir Jack his grand isolation. The Island had been his idea and his success. The Peasants’ Revolt of Paul and Martha had proved a forgettable interlude, long written out of history. Sir Jack had also dealt swiftly with the subversive tendency of certain employees to over-identify with the characters they were engaged to represent. The new Robin Hood and his new Merrie Men had brought respectability back to outlawry. The King had been given a firm reminder about family values. Dr Johnson had been transferred to Dieppe Hospital, where both therapy and advanced psychotropic drugs had failed to alleviate his personality disorder. Deep sedation was prescribed to control his self-mutilating tendencies.
Paul had lasted a couple of years as CEO, which was longer than Martha had predicted; then, with professions of reluctance and great age, Sir Jack had taken up the reins once more. Shortly after this, a special vote by both Houses of Parliament created him first Baron Pitman of Fortuibus. The motion had been passed nem con, and Sir Jack conceded that it would have taken an arrogant man to refuse the honour. Dr Max elaborated a plausible family tree for the new baron, whose mansion began to rival Buckingham Palace in both splendour and Visitor throughput. Sir Jack would gaze down the Mall from the opposite end, reflecting that his last great idea, his Ninth Symphony, had brought him merited wealth, world fame, market applause, and a fiefdom. Truly was he acclaimed as both innovator and ideas man.
Yet even in death he had remained rivalrous. The idea of sharing common ground with lesser players seemed a little unworthy when the Island’s founder came to designate his final resting-place. St Mildred’s, Whippingham, the estate church for Osborne House, was taken down and reassembled high on Tennyson Down, whose popular expanses might in future years perhaps be renamed, though of course only in response to a firm expression of Island will. The two acres of churchyard were enclosed by a drystone wall set with marble tablets bearing some of Sir Jack’s more eternal dicta. In the centre, on a slight rise, was the Pitman mausoleum, necessarily ornate yet essentially simple. Great men should be modest in death. All the same, it would be negligent to ignore Visitor requirements at a future hotspot of England, England.
Sir Jack had divided his last months between architects’ drawings and the weather forecast. Increasingly he believed in signs and portents. The mighty William had somewhere remarked that noisy laments from the sky frequently betokened the passing of great men. Beethoven himself had died while a thunderstorm crashed overhead. The last words he spoke had been in praise of the English. ‘God bless them,’ he had said. Would it be vain – or might it not be truly humble? – to say the same when the heavens protested at his own going hence? The first Baron Pitman was still ruminating his farewell epigram when he died, gazing complacently out at a blue and settled sky.
The funeral was an affair of orotundity and black-plumed horses; some of the grief was real. But Time, or, more exactly, the dynamics of Sir Jack’s own Project, had its revenge. In the first months, Premier Visitors came to pay their homage at the mausoleum, to read Sir Jack’s wall-wisdom, and depart thoughtfully. Yet they also continued to tour the Pitman mansion at the end of the Mall, if anything in larger numbers. Such loyal enthusiasm pointed up the emptiness and melancholy of the building after its proprietor’s death, and it seemed to both Jeff and Mark that there was a difference between making your Visitors reflective and making them depressed. Then the logic of marketing flamed like a message on Belshazzar’s wall: Sir Jack must live again.
The auditions had their disconcerting moments, but they found a Pitman who, with a little coaching and research, was as good as new. Sir Jack – the old one – would have approved the fact that his successor had played many leading Shakespearean roles. The replacement Sir Jack swiftly became a popular figure: descending from his landau to plunge into the crowds, lecturing on the history of the Island, and showing key leisure-industry executives round his mansion. The Pitman Dining Experience at The Cheshire Cheese proved a jolly Visitor option. The only marketing downside to all this was that throughput at the mausoleum dropped as fast as Betsy’s egg-basket; on certain days Visitors were outnumbered by gardeners. It seemed to most people in dubious taste to smile at a man in the morning and attend his grave in the afternoon.
The Island had been on its third Sir Jack by the time Martha returned to Anglia after her decades of wandering. She stood on the foredeck of the quarterly Le Havre ferry, hooting its uncertain way into Poole harbour; as a fine spray refreshed her face, she wondered what sort of a berth she herself would find. Ropes were thrown and tightened; a gangway was hauled into place; upturned faces looked for people other than her. Martha was the last to disembark. She was wearing her oldest clothes; but even so, the mutton-chopped customs officer saluted her as she stood before his polished oak bag-table. She had retained her Old English passport, and also secretly paid taxes. These two precautions put her in the rare category of Permitted Immigrant. The customs officer, his thick blue serge suit disappearing into stout Wellington boots, pulled out the gold half-hunter strung across his belly and timed her repatriation in a sheepskin ledger. He was certainly younger than Martha, but looked at her as if she were a l
ong-lost daughter. ‘Better one that hath strayed, if I might make so bold, Ma’am.’ Then he handed back her passport, saluted again, and whistled up an urchin to carry her bags to the horse-taxi.
What had surprised her, watching from afar, was how quickly the whole thing had unravelled. No, that was unfair, that was how The Times of London – still published from Ryde – would have put it. The official Island line, loyally purveyed by Gary Desmond and his successors, was gloatingly simple. Old England had progressively shed power, territory, wealth, influence, and population. Old England was to be compared disadvantageously to some backward province of Portugal or Turkey. Old England had cut its own throat and was lying in the gutter beneath a spectral gas-light, its only function as a dissuasive example to others. FROM DOWAGER TO DOWN-AND-OUT, as a Times headline had sneeringly put it. Old England had lost its history, and therefore – since memory is identity – had lost all sense of itself.
But there was another way of looking at things, and future historians, whatever their prejudice, would no doubt agree on identifying two distinct periods. The first began with the establishment of the Island Project, and had lasted for as long as Old England – to adopt the term for convenience – had attempted to compete with England, England. This was a time of vertiginous decline for the mainland. The tourist-based economy collapsed; speculators destroyed the currency; the departure of the Royal Family made expatriation fashionable among the gentry; while the country’s best housing stock was bought as second homes by continental Europeans. A resurgent Scotland purchased large tracts of land down to the old northern industrial cities; even Wales paid to expand into Shropshire and Herefordshire.
England, England Page 25
