The Extremes

by Christopher Priest

  Nick Surtees was not in his office, but the computer was on, the screen shimmering with the glittering random shapes of a screen-saver program. It looked familiar, and it briefly amused her that the same software she saw being used all over the US was also popular here.

  Amy was in the bar, vacuuming the carpet. Teresa found her there, having been drawn by the loud irregular humming of the machine. Amy switched off as soon as she saw her.

  ‘May I help?’

  ‘Yeah…Mr Surtees. Is he around?’

  ‘He should be. Maybe down in the cellar?’ To Teresa’s surprise the young woman stamped three times with the heel of her shoe. ‘He’ll come up if he’s there,’ she said.

  A few moments later Nick appeared at the door. He was carrying a large plastic crate filled with dark bottles of lager, their caps wreathed in shiny golden foil. He dumped the crate on the counter, and because Amy had turned the vacuum cleaner on again he led Teresa back to his office.

  She said, ‘I can’t help noticing you’re into computers.’

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Not as much as I used to be, anyway. I use that one for writing letters, and keeping the bar records. Amy does the hotel bookings on it as well.’

  ‘I’ve been hoping you could help me with mine,’ Teresa said. ‘I’ve brought my laptop, but I’m not sure if I can use it while I’m in England. It’s got rechargeable batteries, but I have to run them up from the mains and things are probably different here.’

  ‘Did you notice the terminal connector in your room? That’s compatible with most laptops.’

  ‘No, I didn’t see it.’ Teresa realized that the strangeness of the hotel and the English accents were making her feel as if she was unable to look after herself. She had started acting what must seem to these people like the rôle of the helpless woman.

  It was actually she who had bought the laptop in the first place, not Andy. He said he saw so many computers at work he didn’t want to have to deal with them at home too. Teresa saw a lot of them at work too, but what that did for her was underline how useful a portable could be. These days she couldn’t imagine how she could ever function without hers.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Teresa said. ‘There must be a pharmacy here somewhere?’

  ‘There’s a branch of Boots. And a couple of smaller places. Do you want me to tell you how to find them?’

  ‘No, thanks. I thought I’d take a walk through the town.’

  It was a cold, brisk day, but without rain. She left the hotel, wearing her quilted coat with the hood, and walked up the road at the side of the hotel. She left behind her the nondescript area of twentieth-century town houses and shops, and came almost at once into the Old Town area.

  At one time Bulverton had sat astride an inlet of the sea, where there was a natural harbour. It had silted up and fallen into disuse many centuries ago, but all the houses in this part of town were built as if the harbour was still there, facing in from the declivities of the shallow hills around. Where Phoenician and Levantine trading ships had reputedly once docked was now a park, well covered for the most part with trees, and containing a small pond for boating and ducks, a bowling green and tennis courts. The houses had been built, replaced and rebuilt many times over the centuries, but apart from a few places of modern in-filling, presumably after German bombing during World War II, the houses were all pleasantly matured. Even the modern ones did not look too out of place.

  Close to the park the buildings were mostly small cottages or houses, many of which had been turned into shops, restaurants or businesses, but above and behind them rose several terraces of larger white and pastel-coloured houses. Standing there, looking at the rows of attractive houses, Teresa felt a wave of recognition sweep over her. She knew she had been here before, in this park, in this gracious, resigned town. A sudden sickness rose in her: denying the unwelcome sensation, she snatched her head to one side, as if in an angry rejection of someone or something.

  It worked, and she felt her head clearing. Her migraines were something she had always kept to herself, protecting her job. Anything that seemed to indicate chronic frailty was not a wise career move with the Bureau. Taking medication created another risk: all federal agents had to submit to random urine and blood tests, and you never knew what conclusions the testing teams would draw from the presence of certain chemicals in the body. A friend of Andy’s had put her on to a psychotherapist in Washington, and he had taught her techniques to help ward off the onset of attacks. They worked once or twice. Later she had tried other methods.

  Feeling a little better, Teresa walked through the centre of the park itself, enjoying the peaceful ambience in the cold air, with the surrounding houses constantly glimpsed through the shrouding branches of well-grown trees and shrubs. She could easily imagine how peaceful this park would be in summer. The noise of traffic was muted, even now, when most of the branches were bare.

  She sauntered through slowly, half expecting to come across a hamburger franchise or sports store ruining the place, but there was none of that and the whole park gave off a sense of pleasant neglect. In fact, the only sign of sponsorship she could see anywhere was a number of wooden benches placed at various points, each with a small plaque, commemorating the lives of some of the residents of the town. Teresa was particularly touched by one: To the Cherished Memory of Caroline Prodhoun (d. 1993)—She Loved this Park.

  Teresa walked as far as she could in the park, coming eventually through a gate into a residential street that ran across the top. She turned right along this, then followed the perimeter of the park and walked back down in the direction of the sea, pausing to glance in the windows of the small shops along the way. Here she discovered that appearances can be deceptive: many of the quietly prosperous-looking shops turned out, when you were actually standing in front of them, to be closed or—in some cases—closed and empty. Many of them were antiques shops or secondhand book stores, but almost without exception they were unstaffed and unlit. The antiques shops, in particular, looked as if they were used more for storage than for selling to the public. One or two had printed cards thumbtacked to the door, directing the delivery of packages to nearby alternative addresses.

  Teresa peered through several of their windows, dreaming about being able to buy some of the chests, light-stands, tables, cases of books, dressers. They looked so solid, so well made, so old. Staring at the ancient pieces of furniture, Teresa felt the subliminal resonance of a different kind of culture from the one she was used to: the civilization of Europe, its history, long traditions, old families, deep-rooted customs. She was still enough of a Briton to recognize with a kind of longing the culture she had left behind when her father removed her to the US all those years ago, but also enough of an American to feel the urge to acquire some of it by purchase. None of the shops gave any indication of prices, though, and then there would always be the problem of shipping such heavy and bulky stuff back home.

  Which made her remember again, in sudden acute anguish, the house standing empty in Woodbridge by the Potomac, and then think of Andy, and then of why she was here in England.

  Halfway along the parade of closed shops Teresa turned to the left and walked up the hill to pass the larger houses. This was a residential zone, and from the look of it the people who lived here were fairly affluent. Although cars were parked at the sides of the road, the lanes that ran in front of each row of houses were obviously intended for pedestrians only. From this relative eminence she gained a wider view of the town, which continued to enchant her with its simple prettiness. She knew nowhere at home that had this kind of effect on her. Directly in front of her, on the other side of the park, was a large church with a square tower. A cluster of houses surrounded it, but behind those she could see taller buildings, longer roofs. Further towards the sea, on the same side of the park as the church, Teresa could see the coloured canopies of an outdoor market; again, there were large recently built buildings behind them. In the distance, inland, there
was a ridge of higher land, crusted with modern houses.

  She tried to imagine what this sleepy little town must have been like, that day Gerry Grove went walkabout with his semi-automatic rifle. The news reports from England had described how the quiet town had been shattered by the violence of the event, a rude awakening from its peaceful slumbers, and the rest of the clichés journalists loved so much. It wasn’t a painting on the lid of a box of candy, or a still from a romantic movie. People lived and worked here, brought up their kids, grew their flowers. Some fell in love, some beat each other up, some tried to make a living, some tried to do something useful in the community…and one of them, a self-absorbed and lonely youth with a string of minor offences behind him, had a thing about guns.

  Teresa, of course, came from a country where a lot of people had a thing about guns. She too had a thing about guns. There was nothing in the idea that was itself shocking, but for it to happen here, probably the last place you would expect it, was one step beyond the expectable.

  Just as the tourists in Port Arthur, Tasmania, the schoolchildren in Dunblane, the students in Austin, Texas, wouldn’t have expected it. All were nice places, quiet and livable places, the sort of small towns that people moved to rather than from. There were dangerous cities, and all cities had areas where no one in their right mind would walk alone or after dark, but still there remained in most people a profound, instinctive belief that bad things only happened in bad places. Bulverton was the sort of place you searched for, so to speak, a kind of comforting ideal.

  What was it? Staring down at the large area of the town she could see from this place, Teresa tried to isolate and identify what it was she was responding to. It was not just Englishness, nor prettiness, because England didn’t have a monopoly on pretty places, and anyway Bulverton was too much of a muddle to be simply pretty. The area around her hotel was grim enough, and although grim in a particularly British way it was a quality of grimness that was commonplace to her. It could have been in almost any town anywhere. Maybe it was a sense of proportion: one building set against the rest, each one in its turn built to blend with the others. Scale came into it too: this was a town that had grown up in and around a small valley. American architects would have vied with each other to build the biggest, brashest place and grab the best view, but here the buildings seemed to work organically within a kind of consensus of what Bulverton meant to everyone who lived there.

  It all made for a simple naturalness, and although she had been in the place for only a few hours—and had been trying to sleep for most of those—she already felt more deeply about the town than she ever had about Washington or Baltimore or even her agreeable dormitory town of Woodbridge.

  She crossed the park again and headed for the church she had seen. It was called St Gabriel’s, and was built on a low rise and fronted with a small churchyard. She tried to read some of the headstones but without exception they had been made illegible by erosion. The door of the church was locked and no one was around to open it for her.

  Next to the church was a small garden, fenced and gated, but unlocked. A sign on the fence described its circumstance:

  CROSS KEYS GARDEN. This is the Site of the Cross Keys Inn, Destroyed by a German Bomb at around 1.00 pm on 17th May, 1942. It being a Sunday Lunchtime the Inn was full and there were many Casualties. Eleven Residents of Bulverton died, and Twenty-Six more were injured, the worst Loss of Life in the Town in a Single Incident during the World War. The Names of the Dead are Inscribed on a Plaque at the rear of the Memorial Garden.

  Teresa pushed open the gate and walked in. The garden had not been allowed to become overgrown, but it was obviously not given regular attention. The grass of the tiny lawn was in need of cutting, and long shoots drooped from the trees and shrubs. She found the commemorative plaque on the wall, and pushed aside a long thorny shoot from a rose bush that was growing across it. She regarded the names, trying to remember them for later, in case she came across anyone still living in the town who was related. Her memory was fallible, so she found her notebook and jotted down all the surnames.

  Eleven dead; that was fewer than Gerry Grove’s victims last year, but it had been a major disaster. It would have felt just as devastating in its day, even during a war, something so terrible it would never be surpassed.

  Bulverton today was still in the aftershock of Gerry Grove’s shooting spree, but in half a century would there be any more lasting memorial than this?

  A sidestreet led away from the church and the memorial garden, and Teresa walked along it, emerging after a short distance into a broad shopping street. This was the High Street, a fact she elicited from a sign attached to a wall on one of the intersections. Many people were moving around, going about their shopping. She walked from one end of the street to the other, looking at everyone, feeling that although it was still only her first morning she had nevertheless been able to see many different facets of life in the town. She kept her notebook open, and while she walked along she wrote down the locations of the police station, the library, the Post Office, the banks, and so on, all places she would probably be needing in the days ahead.

  At a newsagent’s she bought a town map, and a copy of the local paper. She glanced quickly through the pages as she walked along, but if the massacre was still on people’s minds that fact wasn’t reflected in the local news.

  Outside the council offices—a modern block, but built to blend unobtrusively with the rest of the town—she saw at last an explicit reminder of the massacre.

  A large sign had been erected in the shape of a clock-face. The legend above it said: Bulverton Disaster—Lord Mayor’s Appeal. Where twelve o’clock would normally be was the figure £5,000,000, and instead of two hands only one large one swept around, signifying what had been collected so far. It presently stood at about twenty-to, or at just over £3,000,000, and a red band had been painted in behind it.

  Wreaths were laid on the ground beside the door to the building. Teresa stood a short distance from them, unsure of whether to go over and peer at the messages, feeling this would be intrusive, but at the same time she didn’t want just to pass by, as if she had not noticed. It was beginning to seep into her at last: a constant background sense of the disaster. Not just the wreaths, the memorials, but the fact she was always thinking about it, looking for some sign of it.

  She realized she had been seeking it in the expressions on the faces of passers-by, and bearing a hitherto unremarked surprise that there were no more physical scars on the town, or more specifically the fact that the people at the hotel hadn’t said anything about it. But people hid pain behind calm expressions.

  Teresa knew she too was acting like that. What she ought to do was get straight down to what she had planned. Find people, talk to them. Were you here in town on the day it happened? Did you see Grove? Were you hurt? Was anyone you know killed? She wanted to hear herself say it, wanted to hear the answers, wanted to release all the pain that was pent up in these people and in herself.

  But it was of course none of her business. The disarmingly pleasant aspect of the town, the restrained conduct of the people in the streets, as well as the fact that she knew nobody well enough even to talk with them casually, underlined the fact that she didn’t belong. She had wondered about this before she left home, knowing it would probably happen. How would she, an outsider, be treated? Would they welcome her, or would they shun her? Now she knew it would be neither. They left her alone presumably because they would anyway, but also perhaps because that is what they wanted her to do to them.

  This was a town that had been bereaved, and she knew something about that. She was an expert, in fact. She thought about Andy again. Why could she never stop? However much time passed it never got better, never got easier. She forced her thoughts away from him, and almost at once a coincidence followed.

  As she walked back in the general direction of the hotel, Teresa was thinking about Amy. She had been easy enough to strike up a conversation with
, and Teresa wondered if she should start her enquiries with her. She must have been living in Bulverton last summer when the shooting happened, and would probably know a lot of local people. Working behind the bar in a small hotel had that effect.

  As she was musing about this, Teresa reached a paved square where a dozen or so market stalls had been erected. People were shopping, wandering along between the stalls, and a pleasant hubbub of voices mingled with music coming from one or two radios placed at the back of the stalls. Many of the stalls were selling fruit, vegetables or meat, but there were other kinds too: secondhand books, videos and CDs, gardening tools, children’s clothes, pine furniture, and so on. It was at one of these, which sold inexpensive household goods—plastic buckets, mops, laundry baskets, brooms—that Teresa saw Amy. She appeared to be arguing with the stallholder. He was a man no longer in the first flush of youth, his body apparently once developed but now going to fat; he had straggly hair and a full beard. He looked angry and was talking quickly to Amy, jabbing his forefinger at her. She was standing her ground, looking almost as irate as he was, her face jutting towards him. She looked pale and determined. At one point she pushed his prodding finger aside, but he brought it back threateningly.

  Teresa was immobilized by the sight of the man, and stared at him in amazement. She knew him! But how, and where from?

  Other shoppers, who had been walking behind her, were bumping into her and trying to get by, and she realized she was blocking the narrow passage between the stalls. She walked on as slowly as she dared.

  As she approached she could see the man’s face more clearly, and the certainty of recognition began to recede. His looks were undoubtedly familiar, but now she saw him close up she wondered if it was because he was a type she recognized, rather than an individual. His hair, moustache, high forehead, incipient pot belly, the dirty white T-shirt under the leather jacket, his thick shoulders and arms, were in themselves unremarkable enough, but there was something about his bearing, the aggressive way he confronted Amy, that reminded her unnervingly of many men she had had to deal with in the US. He looked like he belonged to one of the many armed militias that had formed in the last two decades in the rural USA, buried away on remote farmland, and hidden in woods. Teresa involuntarily cased his body with her eyes, looking for the bulge of a firearm, the linear indentation of a holster strap, or some other hint of a concealed weapon.