by Adam Thorpe
Lights! Lights!
Lights!
With best wishes and love,
Hugh
April drizzle.
Dear Mother,
I’m doing generally very well. I must say it does me a lot of good writing to you. When are you coming to visit? I’m tied up here for quite a while. I think I’m well on the way to talking again.
Knock knock. No answer. I opened the door. The room had barely changed since you’d last used it – and you used to tell me that it had hardly changed since your childhood. In front of the doll’s house lay a tiny divan and a miniature sewing machine; Rachael must have played with your doll’s house. I put them back immediately, of course.
Rachael lay fast asleep in the narrow bed by the window; her head was turned from me, and her black hair lay like black flames on the pillow. It might have been you, dear Mother, lying there, returned from the shadows of the forest, its bits and pieces of light. But it wasn’t. I touched her shoulder, shook it gently. She mumbled something, turning her face towards me. Your bedside lamp burned gently under its tulip glass. Rachael had said that the gas brackets made her feel sick, but the darkness of the country bothered her, even when the moon had risen. So I found the oil lamp in the cupboard and filled it.
Next to it, on the bedside table, there was a file full of papers and a copy of the ARP Handbook No. 1: Personal Protection Against Gas. She’d told me she was proof reading the new edition for the HMSO. The sight of this made me feel low, for a moment, as did the mournful, baggy stare of her mask, dangling from the bed-end. I saw now that she was frightened of the gas in her room, though she didn’t say that; frightened of the smell it puffed out when it was turned on or off – or even of its bleached light. Much more of it could fall from the sky and burst anywhere at any time, wafting over rush-hour crowds so that they all fell gasping in a wave. Perhaps some shells had burst unseen in wintry woods, sopped up by the cold wetness, only coming up now. And which type would it be? Lewisite? Mustard? Chlorine? Phosgene? Or something non-lethal like bromobenzyl cyanide (whose acronym was BBC, to Nuncle’s delight)? Well, we’d taste it and guess, like apple tastings in the village hall. For now, it was time to go a-Maying.
When she opened her eyes briefly, it looked as if she’d been crying. I kissed the eyelids gently when she closed them, and felt the eyeballs moving under the silken skin, under my lips. She told me it was much too early to wake her. The old pillowcase had left the impress of its lace edging on her cheekbone; I stroked the place and told her it was dawn.
The dewy lawn was cold underfoot through our canvas shoes. The birdsong was deafening. Rachael yawned and shivered.
‘Where’s the sun?’
‘There. There’s the earth coming up,’ I said, pointing.
‘You are strange.’
‘I’m not. I’m just a Copernican.’
‘The sun’s coming up. I can’t see it as anything else.’
‘It takes practice. I trained myself in Derbyshire over a lot of dawns. You have to deceive your eye with the truth. Now I don’t see the sun coming up. I see it staying still while the earth’s tilting.’
‘Well you’re the only one in the world to see it like that.’
She snuggled against me. The new light touched her face. The bright orange disc was the huge eye of a god, and we were descending past it. It approved of her beauty.
We walked through the grey, echoing beechwood, not yet shafted by the sun’s rays. My old stage was dark. There were scurryings everywhere. The hedge of may was still spotted all over with buds. I said we’d have to wait for the sun to warm it. Rachael seemed disappointed; the magic hadn’t worked. She touched a bud, as if its little packed fist might spring open. ‘Come on, you,’ she said. The air was sweet and somehow stippled with warmth, though it was still cold. (You would say in Africa how much you missed May mornings in England, Mother. You know how they are.) ‘Come on, you!’
‘There’s no hurrying Nature,’ I said. I kissed her. Her mouth was still soft from sleep. If a single flower had been out, I would have done It there and then. She was ready. My whole life might have been different. The very bad thing might not have happened, so many years later, because one thing leads to another. But the bud stayed tight and shut.
‘Holloa!’
Waving at me from the other barrow: silhouette identification, her arms stretched out like wings, breaking as she waved. I’d seen one of ours waving its wings like that, then folding its arms into flame, then exploding somewhere over the suburbs.
The field was still in the wood’s shadow below us. Closer, around the barrow, there were spatters of chalk and flint: maybe Nuncle had been digging again. Or maybe it was rabbits. Cowslips in the tough corn. I could pick her a cowslip. Her silhouette was so slender against the burning light, on the round swollen mound. If the earth tipped much further, she might fall into the fire behind her.
I shouted, pointing to the next crest about a mile away, its smooth edge ruffled only by an oak clump. In between lay a heathy coomb, full of sarsen stones that looked like a big flock of sheep, but I had never seen a single real sheep grazing there. It was always in shadow. A heath-dwelling giant had gone for a walk to see his downland mate, I told Rachael, when we were standing on its edge. It was a wet day, and he had a lot of the heath on his boots. A clump of it fell off just here. ‘He must have been a big giant,’ she said, ‘to make such a deep footprint.’
There was something else odd about it, if you remember, Mother. (Did you go there as a child? Or did I show you?) A giant cat had clawed its near side. An enormous beast, the king of all the cats, a big beef the size of a house. Maybe it was Nuncle who told me. It had to have somewhere to sharpen its claws. So the side was scored with belts of grass between the bracken and heather. Some of these grassy stripes kept going all the way down to the bottom. It was hard to tell from the top which was which. It was like a game: sometimes you won.
‘Did you used to play here as a boy? It’s a bit spooky. I’m sure there are some sheep down there. They’re just asleep.’
‘Not very often. Well I did, sometimes. I pretended it was the plateau on Treasure Island. The oaks over there were where they found Allardyce.’
‘Was he the maroon?’
‘No, that was Ben Gunn. Allardyce was the skeleton.’
She didn’t say anything, just breathed so I could hear it. Maybe she wasn’t used to walking and running. Or maybe it was something else. I turned to go back, to head back for the beechwood before the sun came up too much and the rest of the world woke up. People would be doing things in the fields any minute. Horses and motor cars and the smell of bread. Gun oil and men baling out up there.
‘I want to see if those are sheep.’
‘They’re not, I promise.’
She was starting to go down.
‘Wrong one!’ I shouted. I showed her another grassy strip but had remembered wrongly – it was ages since I’d been to this place; we ended up struggling through a heathy thicket of bracken and heather. When we reached the bottom, she started picking leaves and thorny bits out of her stockings and the hem of her coat. The frost lay over everything like a veil. There were one or two gorse flowers out. There were some rabbits at the far end, creeping back.
‘They look so sinister,’ she said, looking at the strange rubble of sarsens. ‘Did someone put them here?’
I told her about them, as you told me once.
‘You mean they were just left here by the ice?’
I nodded. Why did she have problems believing it?
‘But you can see patterns in them, the way they’re set out, squares and rows and things, like a big game of chess.’
‘Well they’re rubble,’ I said. ‘Completely haphazard. More like a game of marbles.’
She climbed on to one of them, a large brown-grey hump that curved up to a point about six feet high.
‘How did they farm here, with these in the way?’
‘I don’t suppose the
y did. Anyway, it’s too heathy, the soil’s poor. Maybe it was pasture.’
She pointed to the stripes of heather and grass on the slope.
‘What are those?’
‘The clawings of a giant cat,’ I said. ‘Prehistoric.’
She shuddered.
‘Horrible.’
She believed me, now. When I fibbed, she believed me.
‘Actually, I think they’re strip lynchets, except strip lynchets are normally horizontal.’
‘Strip what?’
She was giggling on top of the stone, quite high up it seemed to me. The stone was wobbling slightly, despite its enormous size. I told her to be careful. ‘Why? Is it going to fall down after millions of years? Look! I’m Amy Johnson! I’m going to disappear into thin air! Wheee!’
She was making fun of me on the top of her stone, holding her arms out wide. The more the time passed, the harder it was to summon up the pluck to do It, to make the first proper lunge, to go beyond a long kiss. Now she was on top of a huge wobbling stone, saying she was about to disappear. The stones had children stuck in them. There used to be a village beyond where the rabbits were, and an old witch called Anne Stile had led the children here to dance to the Devil. When she heard someone coming, she covered the children and herself in stone. But being a forgetful old crone, she couldn’t remember the undoing spell. If you listen carefully on certain nights, you can hear their high little voices and the voice of the witch herself-she’s pleading with you to go to her house and bring back her spellbook. It’s on top of the cupboard, between the Condy’s frog fluid and the broomstick oil. Was that what you told me, Mother? Don’t tell me you made it all up! Because I don’t believe you made it all up! Rachael was standing on the very witch’s stone itself: you could tell from the way it curved up into a sort of hood! It would swallow you up by the ankles as the witch tugged you in, that’s what you said! The Wobble Stone. The Witch Stone. Oh, my God. It was actually leering at me. All its wrinkles were a leer on a face. Hit it before it does harm. Hit it, hit it!
Have to dash now.
I’m well.
With love and very best wishes as ever,
Hugh
Showery intervals. Leaves out everywhere.
Dear Mother,
Sorry I’ve been out of touch for a bit. Ups and downs, but generally fine now.
One of her canvas shoes was overlapped by a rough fold and the wrinkles in the stone were leering at me. Ha ha ha. That’s why I went over to her immediately, seized her around the knees and lifted her off as she shrieked. I almost toppled over with her.
‘Youch,’ she said, freeing herself. ‘My foot. It’s got cramp.’
She shook it. The shoe seemed loose. I wrapped her in my arms and hugged her tight. Her heart beat quickly under the light coat – I could feel it. A buzzard wafted beyond us, mewing, as if suddenly there was a strong wind beyond the coomb. For a moment, while Rachael was snuggling into my neck, I imagined us being transported into a past before war was invented. Before the time of the gods. I couldn’t see anything but stones and gorse and grass and sky, you see.
Her body softened against me. My lips tasted salt on her throat. I took her face in my hands and looked. She kept her eyes closed, but her cheeks were shining with wet, and her lips seemed bruised. I asked her why she was crying. She said she didn’t see anything when she looked ahead. I didn’t know what she meant. It was chilly in the coomb. But she didn’t want to shift when I tried to move her away. Maybe she was turning into stone, as in your childish story.
‘They’re overrunning everybody like rats,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘Oh God. So it’s true what they say about the AA Defences!’
‘What do they say?’
I sounded hurt, I suppose. ‘Never mind.’ She gave a long, sad sigh.
‘Do you mean the Germans?’
‘No, I mean the rabbits, dimmo. Why is everyone so calm? They’ve not got family in Danzig, that’s why – they don’t know what beasts can do – human beasts! Well, just wait until they’re prowling about in your lovely village, when your house is their billet and –’
‘It’s not my house.’
‘Oh, you and this thing about your uncle! It’s so obviously because he’s brilliant, isn’t it?’
I flushed so deeply I thought my ears would go up in smoke. Even my hands burned. My knees felt like a schoolboy’s against my baggies. I broke away from her and started walking away, hands thrust in my pockets. She caught up with me halfway up one of the claw marks.
‘All right, Hugh?’
‘No. I thought we were going a-Maying.’
‘We are!’
She was panting from the climb. I was panting from fury. Oh, I was so furious!
‘I didn’t realise you were into the sacrifice of young virgins. You should’ve said. He’d have been so touched. He’d have made a really big pyre and said some really brilliant things you could have slobbered over before having your throat cut!’
I was stopped and staring at her now. Well, she was dragging on my arm, and the climb was quite steep. The sun hit her from behind and burned in her hair. Her face was in deep shadow. I think it was smiling. She hugged me. I hugged her back, incredibly tightly. The slope made us fall on our bottoms. This was It. But she pushed me off.
‘Not here, Hugh.’
I sat up, looking round. There were rabbits watching us, down there. It was rather exposed. I was torn between not caring less and a feeling that the sun was dazzling us to make us a target.
‘Haec statius est tacitis fida cupidinibus,’ I panted.
‘I will lay waste your fort with a huge army?’
‘Almost. Let’s find a wood.’
I scrambled up, taking her hand, and we ran straight for the beechwood. Oh glorious world! Trampling over the young corn, food for the nation at war! Throwing cowslips over her!
At the may hedge. It was not yet in the sun. Its corymbs were about to burst. White, white, white. Foaming up the edge of the beechwood. Almost there. I picked a bud anyway and swallowed it. God knows why. I almost choked. I had to hawk it out. She was laughing so much. The cool warm world one great pool and every gesture stirring its naiads. Sweet May. Sweet sweet May of youth.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Quite warm. Lawn being mown.
Dear Mother,
It’s not easy to write to you about certain things, but I must.
The beechwood wouldn’t do. As soon as we plunged in, I realised this. It was full of faces. They had watched me perform my plays and one couldn’t blame them for being intrigued. Their Elizabethan ruffs and hoods and hats poked out from every root and bole and branch. Fairies flitted here and there, not all of them good. Lost princes and melancholy clowns, too. I had peopled this wood so many times, to keep myself company. A goodly company! Henry IRVING was strolling about, keeping an eye. And William SHAKESPEARE himself was leaning against a tree, chewing on a goose-quill. You see my problem, Mother. No theatre is ever really empty. No isle is ever quite silent.
So I aimed for the wildwood, Rachael dragging on my hand. ‘It’s all right! It’s all right!’ I hissed. Perhaps we would have seemed very intent to anyone looking on – to Nuncle, for instance, as we flitted over the wedge of the lawn separating one wood from the other. I don’t know, I can’t remember how we arrived, only arriving, plunging into the deeps. Clambering over the chicken-wire and plunging into the deeps.
It was so quiet, so shadowy, so safely tangled. Such a safe spot for shy lovers. And then the poem goes on:
Pervixi; neque enim fortuna malignior unquam
Eripiet nobis quod prior hora dedit!
Did you know this poem? Petronius wrote it. He killed himself because he knew Nero was about to order him to.
I have had my day, but bad luck in the future
Shall never be able to take away from us
What past hours have given!
Yes it can. Oh yes it ca
n. Unless you kill yourself first, before Nero calls you in.
With all my love and affection, dear Ma,
Hugh
Inclement weather. Radio prattling next door.
Dear Mother,
The next day, we said goodbye on the platform at King’s Cross Station. Even through the smoke and steam, her neck still smelt of wild garlic.
‘See you jolly soon,’ I said.
My sick leave was over. I was going up to Hull. I squeezed on to the train and managed to lean out of the carriage. Our fingers were hooked until the last moment. I ignored the filthy remarks from my fellow passengers. The train shoved me against them and I caught a kitbag in my stomach. Fuck fuck fucking fucker – usual Forces thing from around me, but no violence. I scrambled back to the window. Her face was a tiny garden in a waste of khaki, a garden of white lilies like Campion’s in the song. Her hand waving in its cream glove like a seagull. Then nothing but steam and smoke and the shrieking of a tunnel.
Your affectionate son,
Hugh
Someone says there’s been a frost.
Dear Mother,
Too short, they suggest. They’re helpful, generally. Spots of bother.
War experience. Everyone wants to know. It’s the eye-patch. I lost it off Malabar, I tell them. Boy sailor. SS Abinsi. Pirate vessel rammed us. Sold off as a slave. That’s interesting, they say. They find everything so fucking interesting. They’re just trying to get me to open my mouth instead of using a pen. I’ll tell them I’m a poached egg, if they’re not careful. But they’ll only come in with a chair and say it’s a piece of toast.
Otherwise, to be honest, things are quite pleasant.
I haven’t touched Rachael for fifty-four years – not since our fingers were unhooked that time. Or is it fifty-five? I’ve lost count, this end. I’ve touched Aunt Rachael once. A handshake after your brother’s funeral, 1965. Love, Love Me Do. A small squeeze, then separation. She was drunk and chain-smoked unfiltered King Size. She had bags under her eyes, her whole face had collapsed, her hair was a mess of grey, she was dressed in black slacks with white crumbs on them. What was I supposed to do? Quote Petronius again?
