by Adam Thorpe
Then the light swings away like a huge tent. It billows over the lawn and across the house, the house rears up like an hallucination of what it ought to be. Stripped of its dimness and darkness, startled because never has it been stripped like this before – the eyes blind shocks of light, the porch gaping in surprise, then black.
Away the light goes, and I see it thinner, sucked up into the belly of a helicopter. A little blue insect devouring every little gleam and sliver, sucking it all up in a cone of sheer glare, leaving only a black deadness. Bursts of leaves still flying and scattering where the helicopter’s blades took them, sheering low. Violet after-images hovering in front of my nose. I’m crouching in absolute terror, crouching as if a shell’s about to land.
Someone missing? Am I missing?
An upside-down searchlight, that one. I stagger to my feet. I’m cold to the bone, numb with it. What on earth was I doing, sleeping out?
Back in the pub, I wash my scratch, just a little tear in my bag of juices. It’s no more than that. A lot of blood in the forehead, Mother. I have to clean the ceramic with a sponge. Ted’s fussy about that sort of thing.
Bad night. Too much light in my head. I unscrew the bulb but another one swells up. Disagreeable faces I know.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Too warm.
My dear Mother,
I must write more, they suggest. No one does anything here but suggest. I now have an electric kettle.
‘Who’s missing, Ted?’
He grunts, topping up the teapot, clearing away my kippers’ bones.
‘That Pratt boy and a girl, the Walters girl.’
‘But they left the wood.’
‘Eh?’
‘They were in my wood. They definitely left it.’
‘Were they now? Nasty scratch, that. Not Fatso, I hope.’
He’s holding the teapot against his cardie, shaking it gently. I ache in various places.
‘I can tell someone, if it helps.’
‘I wouldn’t bother. Too late.’
A chill seizes me.
‘Oh God. How?’
‘Eh?’
‘Both of them, was it? Oh no.’
‘Wasting our taxes. Imagine what that chopper costs. No one gets a wink of bloody sleep. All out on the square with poles and torches at five this morning, getting our brief. Then where do you think they were found?’
I picture them at the bottom of the pond, for some reason, holding hands with weeds about their stark-white staring faces.
‘Sneaking in to her place. Oh, were we missed, Dad?’
He chortles. The teapot’s spout dribbles tea leaves on his cardie, but he doesn’t notice. ‘His mum didn’t half give him a drubbing, apparently. That Lizzie Pratt.’
He bends closer, whispering.
‘Known as Dizzy Prattle, to everybody but her.’
After breakfast, I undo the oil-paper package and take out the letters. It’s sunny today. I will bicycle out to Windmill Hill. Nuncle thought Windmill Hill was evil. If there are people, there are people. I quite like reading with something else to look up at: families, cheerful and wind-blown. Do my headache good.
Aunt Joy’s rusty machine serves me well, properly oiled: I walk the rougher part of the path from Avebury Trusoe, leading the bike, its tyres whitening on the chalk. The swarms dwindle in the two miles to the hill, apart from a walking group of my own vintage. Some recognise me and stare as they pass, nudging their companions. Twenty or thirty of them. On and on but in the opposite direction, away from the hill, thank goodness, towards the Avebury stones and tea. Last time I was here, the only people I saw were working in the fields, which are now empty. No haystacks to roll off, these days. A few sheep hanging on.
Rustling low beech hedge to my left. Ignore it.
Just a handful of roamers on the hill itself. The noticeboard is blank apart from Malcolm’s sticker. It’s tiny, like a self-adhesive label, not a big bold thing at all – ‘Stop McDestruction’, with something about cattle ranchers destroying forests and wildlife, ‘People and Nature before Profits’, or words to that effect. I feel a sudden pang of affection for Malcolm, looking at it – the fact that it’s so small, stuck on crookedly. Perhaps he lifted up his daughter to do it, on one of her visits.
A bit breezy now and again, but the views clear and sunny, Silbury Hill as always like the grass dome of some interred cathedral. I settle on a hump, children running about around me, squealing. Then I’m left pretty well alone. Vague ripples and bumps, can’t recall which was what, enclosures, barrows, different times overlapping, Neolithic, Bronze Age, different needs and desires. Nuncle gesticulating in wind, his big coat flapping, hat pressed to his head, showing me where the short-horned cattle were brought up, where the first fields of England were dug and sown on the slopes below, where the bulge-skulled dwarf was sacrificed that Keiller unearthed. Me bored stiff, cold in my long shorts. It didn’t strike me as being the navel of evil, the inner circle of our hell. It was too chilly for that. But at least he was taking me out.
I’m unwrapping the bundle, Mother.
Now, I mean. Here.
I will proceed in my account as if I didn’t know what I now know.
I unwrap the bundle and trap its oil paper under the bike’s weight. The letters take a minute to sort chronologically, since there are only ten, but each one is several pages. Must be some lost, lost to ants or mould. The drab stuff – orders, accounts, lists – are to do with your job. Optrex eye lotion, rolls of lint, compressed absorbent wool, jaconets, gauze, peptonised milk, dressing scissors, thermometers, a request for a Surgical Pocket Case for Field Work. All those arms against the sweltering air! The residue of all that effort – just these crinkly carbon copies – the only faint proof! Imagine!
Skeletal ants in the folds, who once crawled about in Bamakum. A pin, rusted. A Vogue cover, tightly folded, its thin plumed girl in a leopard-skin shawl (truly!), her blue dress flowing out from her like water. Scrawled in ink at the bottom, below the name of the artist: Plain gauze for poultices 6 yards, 10d. Gamgee tissue? A childish scribble of a tree or a green monster that might have been mine.
I read the first letter again, the others kept in place under my picnic box. Such joy, such energy. This is not really what I remember. Arrival in Africa, stalled at Buea, but still happy, still singing the bright glee of your marriage. The sense of someone more daring than me, at your age, better equipped for outlandish things, far from family and friends. Your voice, Mother, so young and bright and funny, not at all the voice I remember. You were wearier, when I knew you. You had always been part of Africa. You had a pink mask, that was all.
Yet here you were just arriving, dew-fresh, knowing nothing about it.
A toddler in a postbox-red jumpsuit, staring at me, open mouth dribbling, standing astraddle as if about to draw his guns in a Western. I’m on the third letter. Still vivid and amusing. Your letters to me were never like this – you ran out of steam. The toddler won’t go away, it looks mentally subnormal and has what Aunt Joy used to call a green nose that bubbles as it breathes, but someone must love it.
And then I want to weep, seeing how much you wanted to show me what you were like once, tucking these in with my clothes and toys, keeping Father out of it. The toddler toddles up with a sort of bouncer’s waddle and flaps the oil paper about, tearing it. I should be telling this poor monstrous dwarf off but one has to be very careful these days. I look about and see a couple of women chatting on the slope below. There’s no one else around, now. Perhaps it’s nearing lunchtime, pub time. Yes, it is: it’s after twelve-thirty.
‘Go to Mummy,’ I say. ‘Go to Mum. Go on. Scat. Din-dins.’
The toddler gawps, dribbling more profusely than ever from its lolling lip. The bulge of nappy makes it look like a red pear on legs, its incontinence detectable on sweet-sour wafts. Very blonde hair, almost transparent and plastic-looking, sticking up and pulled about by the slightest breeze. The Neolithics
were dark, I think; they came up from the Mediterranean, into our cold and fog. The toddler is now clawing at the letters, bending double only at the waist, right down like African women picking millet outside Ikasa, whose backs were always straight.
‘No!’ I say, firmly.
It takes no notice. There was never anyone else here, before the war, except the odd shepherd in a felt hat and string to keep his trousers up. Oh, the odd lusty hiker or amateur digger in shorts and long socks. But I want to laugh: your first letters have filled me with your joy, your youth, your hope. The toddler actually has one of your letters in its hand now, flapping it about as if it’s stuck there, perplexed by its persistence. No, it’s enjoying the noise. The carbon copy paper makes an interesting noise. It’s the last letter in the bundle and in two pages. If I try to snatch it, it’ll tear. Now the toddler’s grinning, eyeing me as if I should be appreciating this too. I’m on my feet, encouraging the creature to hand over the letter. I have no idea how to speak to toddlers, really. I’m not even sure of its sex. I’m holding my hands out and bending down, back aching, saying, ‘Give it to me, come on,’ and glancing at the women, wondering whether to call them. It flaps the pages about violently now, closing its eyes as if firing a gun. Dust swirls through the air.
The toddler holds my life, my happiness, in its chubby hand. Pale violet marks on a page, flapping about.
Bent low over it, starting to tickle it, I’m stunned by its finger jabbed on my eye-patch. The letter is now hovering in the light breeze, on its own, like an enormous butterfly, turning over and coiling and separating into its separate pages before they descend and quiver on the grass a few yards off. I chase them as they’re wafted another few yards through the air. The toddler’s now at my picnic box, the other letters ruffling – such light paper, almost like rice paper. This is ridiculous. The last letter crinkling in my fist, loping back, my Achilles tendon tweaking for some reason. All I do is pull the toddler away and tap it ever so very lightly on the wrist. Such a tiny wrist, such a very tiny tap. More a touch than a tap. It instantly wails, of course. Wails and wails.
Bringing the mother. Head swivelling in instinct, blood calling. I stand helplessly, as if I’ve dropped a vase and the owner’s running at the smash. She’s not cross with me, exactly, more embarrassed, suspicious too, apologising and burying the toddler’s face in a handkerchief but also wondering what might have happened – which I am explaining but also rubbing away, not wanting to blame a toddler for something, not wanting to sound peevish so sort of chuckling about it, crumpling the letter in my fist, making a paperweight of my foot.
‘Oo, you’re niffy,’ she says, lifting the wailing thing to her face so that its midriff bulge is at nose-level, then snuggling her face into it. ‘That’s the trouble. She wanted to be changed.’
I’m glad it’s a she, for some reason. The mother takes her away and she’s changed there and then on the slope below me, the second woman glancing back as if I’ve done something wrong, not softening the glance with a smile. I feel too exposed on this hill, and the breeze is getting up. Silly decision. A Sunday, different in the week. Everybody disgorged on Sunday. I leave the letters for a moment, tucked back in the pannier, and eat my sandwich. Take time. Relish Mother’s new voice.
Tabun. Nerve, nervous, what a nerve. Picturing Malcolm’s musical up here, I, Nubat – awful songs probably, drizzling on the equipment, audience huddled on the slope in anoraks, usual thing. Fire-eaters, jugglers, shouting you can’t hear, crackly guitars, a dog running amok amongst the costumes, the cables. Should I tell him about Tabun? Only increase his enthusiasm. Edward Arnold saved the day. Have everyone dropping dead and twitching, twitching and dropping dead I mean, like that Ionesco play or the end of Hamlet. Awful lyrics about nerve gas, slides probably, Hiroshima sneaking in, the Gulf War. Multi-media. The arts bods loving it because it’s a pot-pourri of sensations and terribly accessible, a floor-show for flounderers.
The letters I’ve read and not read rustle in the pannier. Mother in the bush, on the steamer. Those old names. Herbert E. Standing as the real person, not in cricketing togs at all. Gallantry as he left for the bush, to die. Tarbuck’s stammer. Chief Ibofo, still young. Hargreaves, though haven’t met him yet, haven’t got to Bamakum even. Maybe we’ll get to the bottom of the Lyle’s Golden Syrup mystery. Maybe not. Not easy to read, have to read slowly: pale violet carbon, smudged, stained. Faded, of course – but the voice as fresh as if it was talking to me. No Quiri yet.
The toddler goes off between the two women, like a prisoner. No, that’s unfair. Maybe the mother’s sister or sister-in-law. Aunt Joy. The family in rings rippling out around it, to the furthest cousin. Not it, it’s a her. Never learned her name. Could have been my granddaughter. Loneliness of no kin. But then think of Ray Duckett: not much help, his sons. Family after family after family, here, with their shorthorn cattle at first, then maybe goats, then countless generations later it was sheep, sheep and more sheep, and now each one arriving for an instant with woofy dogs and their little worries, incomes, recreational hours, growing memories like sponges on a reef. That time that man with the eye-patch. Can never be too careful.
A crow passes, sounding a couple of alarming croaks, as if a great ratchet in its throat is turning. The little toddler is a red blob now, way down where the big field’s ploughed to the road half a mile off.
A lark, at last. Plain when they come down, brown and plain, they’re noble and tiny and so very ecstatic when they’re Shelleyising, as Rachael called it. Instead of shrilling. Rachael. Rachael. That scene in Twelfth Night, a Clown with a tabor, talking to Viola. What does he say? Something about sentences like gloves, turned inside-out by a good punning wit but then they’re wrong, they’re wanton. Not wanting his sister to have a name because a name is a word and to dally with that word might make her wanton. ‘Rachael’, with its secret entrances and nobbly bits, its openings into paradise. We might have had children, then grandchildren. Family lines. Viola and the Clown with a tabor have family lines. I am the last. After me, I suppose, it’s a blank, not even a squiggle.
I can still see the red blob, now really a dot, as I munch my apple. When she’s seventy, I’ll be a hundred and thirty-eight. Doesn’t sound so much older, put like that. Her red dot like the complementary dab Cézanne or Renoir or maybe all of them put in to off-set the blue-green, like now. Puffs of turning trees, straw light in the air, autumnal. A poppy or a streak on a roof or just a red something, a splotch of red shadow, or the whole painting would go soft.
Then I freeze, the apple at my mouth. Oh my God. Oh my goodness.
Mrs Pratt’s son, last night.
Oh my God.
With the apple at my mouth.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Sopping dullness. Wind cuffing the glass. Been like this for a fortnight. Cheers me up.
My dearest Mother,
I bite the apple. Sounds just like a burst of ack-ack.
I now know who Adrian S is. Why that bedside scribble out of Macbeth, a few nights back.
Adrian Samoiloff. The legendary lighting wizard from the 1930s. Converted a Henley Regatta scene into a Turkish harem at a touch of the switchboard. Richard III, Nottingham Rep, 1949 (Hugh Arkwright as Rivers); the whole cast turning from royal purple to funereal black on the death of Henry the Sixth, without moving a muscle. The complementary of red is blue-green: moonlight has blue in it, its albino steeliness has blue in it. Dominick’s blouson turned the colour of old blood. Without red light waves, redness cannot exist: nothing to bounce back into our eyes, Mother. Enter ten ladies in bright red gowns. Blue-green flood, up full. Ten red gowns snap into ten black gowns. They’re ready for the funeral.
Now I understand that scribbled note in the night! Making the green one red.
So concentrate, Hugh. Finish your ack-ack apple and concentrate.
What had Gracie Hobbs said? She’d been singing carols, had an Aladdin lamp on a chain but she didn’t need it. Then walk
ing back, afterwards, after the drinks, saw the Red Lady in the lane. We had Aladdins in Africa – the moths swaddled their gentle light each dusk. God, I didn’t think twice, when she said it: she didn’t need the lamp not because she knew the words but – because it was a bright night! As bright as last night. A clear, full moon, as described in the Netherford Weekly News I looked at only a few days ago.
The snow shone, twinkling. A night brighter than a leaden day. Perhaps the cocks crew, confused. Perhaps even I noticed, sick in my darkened room.
Gracie Hobbs could not have seen a cherry-red coat that night – no, not with the snow and the full moon! It would have been the umbrous brown of old blood, wouldn’t it?
I eat the core, pips and all.
Oh dear, Gracie. Oh dear. Anyway, that night has gone and for good. Like trying to hold a piece of light in your childhood hand, pretending it’s a diamond. But the letters have brought you so close, I’m not all that upset, more embarrassed. I wipe my hands on the grass and read on, about other days and nights before my time.
Have you ever been to Pisa, Mother? Just after the war I met an American bomber-pilot who had bombed the railway junction there in 1944. He’d dropped incendiaries but messily, too high up, as the Americans did. The leaning tower, the cathedral, the old sun-warmed mossy roofs, all shrunk to a pale patch in olive green beneath him. Now he was shrunk and pale, too: it was his incendiary shell that had bounced on to the roof of the Campo Santo, he reckoned. Set it alight. Six centuries of rich bequests dabbed and stroked on to the cloister’s walls – gilded horses and blue-winged angels and soft lumps of hills speared by cypress trees, the hundreds of faces spread either side of the sun-striped walk, all so busy. A kind of miracle, an alchemy of faith and grace and sheer zest!
Blistered to nothing in an hour. The only painting to survive was the Day of Judgement, full of leering devils shovelling sinners into flames and boiling oil, tweaking their noses with giant pincers, all that. He told me that on balance he’d rather not have been born, if by not being born the paintings could have remained.
