Landed

by Tim Pears

  Anna leaves the room with a sodden pile of clothes. She is in her late forties, early fifties, elegant, trim. She strides between furniture, round the corner, with a striking purposeful efficiency, as if she might be blind, the exact placing of each footstep practised a thousand times. A moment later she returns with a child’s pyjamas and helps her husband dress Holly. The blue pyjamas, made of thick cotton, are a year or two too large. The doctor takes Holly’s temperature with an old mercury thermometer he shakes and checks before placing in her armpit. Anna brings a duvet, which she drapes over the child. Owen stands, dripping, useless, like a foreigner in a strange country where he doesn’t speak the language, where he understands nothing, but waits, hoping that things will be explained to him, in sign language, with gesture and demonstration; that things will be made clear, that he will be given a role to play. He is almost invisible now.

  ‘How is she?’ he asks quietly.

  Anna, who is sitting at the end of the sofa and gently rubbing Holly’s blonde hair with a red towel, looks up in surprise, as if she’d forgotten Owen was there. Dr Green says, without turning round, ‘Fever. I’ll give her something to bring it down.’ He’s peering into Holly’s ears with his thin torch, and murmurs in agreement with himself, confirming something he’d suspected. ‘Open your mouth,’ he says, and although Owen is certain that his daughter is asleep, her lips obediently part. ‘Wider,’ the doctor says, and he peers down her throat. Then he undoes the buttons of the pyjamas they’d only just put on and listens to the organic mechanisms inside her through his stethoscope. This practice has all his life struck Owen as some kind of superstition. ‘We look for omens,’ a medic had once told him. ‘What things will become.’

  Dr Green carries Holly upstairs. They put her in a single bed in a small spare room. Anna fetches some of her husband’s clothes – pink socks, thick fawn corduroy trousers, boxer shorts, a blue pastel shirt and pink V-necked sweater – and persuades Owen to give her his and to take a hot shower. He does so quickly and returns to Holly’s bedside. He strokes her arm. Dr Green puts his head around the door. ‘Don’t worry. She’ll sleep through. She’s going to be fine. Supper will be ready in a moment.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You can sleep next door, in our son’s room. He’s not here in term time.’

  The doctor’s clothes are only a little too big for Owen, space allowed for the loosening waist, but their shoulders are of equal breadth, their height and length of limb much the same. Owen pads down thickly carpeted stairs. There are paintings, some of them centuries old. The furniture is antique. The old house has odd shelves, niches, in which rest interesting artefacts, heirlooms, mementos of travel. Statuettes. Seashells, pebbles.

  Downstairs in the sitting room a wood fire blazes in the grate. Walls are thick with books. Chairs look deep and welcoming. There is a damp patch on the carpet in the middle of the room. Owen is aware he has never been in a house like this, all these objects of personal value. He studies framed photographs on the mantelpiece: they have one son; two daughters, one has graduated from university, the other is still at school. There is a photograph of the younger girl in school uniform, aged fourteen or fifteen, pretty, brown-eyed, intelligent. She looks like a younger version of her mother, Anna; and like a teenage version of Owen’s daughter Sara.

  ‘Edward, give Owen a glass of wine, won’t you,’ Anna asks her husband. The three of them eat a lasagne and salad at a table in the kitchen. Their daughter, they say, is staying at a friend’s house tonight. This information causes Owen a momentary stab of sadness he can’t explain. Time is all tangled up.

  ‘This is so good,’ Owen says. Every mouthful of pasta, meat, béchamel sauce, crisp topping, every crunch of salad, taste better than he ever knew. They do not ask him any questions. He keeps expecting them to, and wonders why they don’t. In time he understands they aren’t going to. He feels an urge to tell them, to confess. What might he expect? Understanding, forgiveness? Hardly. Absolution?

  ‘This rain,’ he says.

  ‘Used to it now,’ Edward says. ‘Round here.’

  ‘Caught out in it, see,’ Owen begins. But they show no curiosity, do not prompt him to continue. Anna gives her husband the news of some acquaintance she heard from at work today. It seems she is a teacher. Edward says he hopes their daughter and her friend will not be consorting with certain individuals this evening. Something comes back to Owen: he thinks that walking through the town earlier he saw no cars.

  They have red Leicester cheese, biscuits and fruit for dessert. Neither Edward nor Anna ask about Holly. Owen remembers, with a jolt, the dog: she’ll be trembling in the porch for sure, already loyal as a lifetime companion. ‘It’s all right,’ Edward assures him. He gestures over his shoulder, back towards the depths of the house. ‘She’s in the drying room. I found an old tin of dog food. Ours died six months ago.’ He smiles. ‘It’s good to have a dog in the house again, isn’t it, Anna?’ His wife harrumphs, and he chuckles, evoking some unserious marital discord.

  ‘The gentlemen will retire to the drawing room.’ Edward smiles. ‘Bring your glass.’ He carries the second wine bottle, Owen follows into an unheated conservatory. Edward lights candles on a small table. The rain stopped some time ago. Ice is forming on the glass roof and windows. They sit in wooden garden chairs, Edward produces a tin of tobacco from his pocket. ‘Anna banishes me here,’ he says. ‘Better than outside, I suppose.’ Having taken a plug and a paper he slides the tin towards Owen. ‘Help yourself. It’s not exactly Virginia, I’m afraid.’

  Owen is aware of Edward watching him roll a cigarette. He asks, not about the lost hand, but about the tips of the fingers of his left hand.

  ‘I had a job when I left school, involved working with battery acid, see,’ Owen explains. ‘Didn’t bother with protective gloves, did I? Being reckless, like you are.’ He studies his one hand. ‘When it’s cold the tips of the fingers crack open.’

  The two men drink the white wine, smoke their hand-rolled cigarettes. The dog slopes into the conservatory and lies beside Owen’s chair.

  ‘You know,’ Edward says, ‘you were only able to walk in the way you did because of this deluge.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Owen asks him.

  ‘You slipped past our lookouts. Every town is protected now. Wilderness in between.’

  ‘What is it you have here?’ Owen says. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, like. Is this how things are?’

  ‘We support ourselves,’ Edward tells him. ‘A certain amount of trade, of course, with market towns like ours, each specialising in a particular industry. Medicine comes from Yorkshire. Most of our clothes from a town in Somerset, though there are two tailors here, and people make their own. It’s been much easier since the train lines were opened up.’

  Owen sips the English wine. ‘Education?’ he asks.

  ‘Information shared on the Internet. No one stops the brightest leaving. Some do. Many stay.’

  ‘Food?’

  ‘Everyone works on the land, at least a little. In the allotments. At harvest.’

  Owen tries to imagine the town around them; he saw nothing in the rain earlier. ‘What does this town specialise in, then?’

  ‘Furniture. Ours is a town of carpenters and cabinetmakers.’

  Owen sucks the wet stub of his cigarette. ‘A bed of roses, is it?’

  Edward shakes his head. ‘It’s not a good place to contract a serious illness.’ The doctor takes a slug of wine, savours it around his mouth, swallows. ‘The surgery we offer, or gain easy access to, is not sophisticated. Prolongation of life is not a priority. Preventative health is.’ He begins to roll another cigarette. ‘This will not be a great place to grow old.’ He looks at Owen and shrugs. ‘People need to be useful. We can only sustain a certain number. If we accept someone from outside, he or she has to be young.’ He licks the cigarette paper and rolls it tight. ‘There’s no other way. Some say it’s brutal. They’re right. It is.’ He lights the cigare
tte, then as he exhales holds it up in the air in one hand, wine glass in the other. ‘The tobacco’s pretty awful, the wine’s improving. Civilisation,’ he says, smiling.

  Owen raises his glass. The two men salute each other.

  Edward gestures back over his shoulder, begins to say something but stops, deciding words are not needed, or insufficient, and merely nods at his companion.

  Owen smokes what he knows will be his third and final cigarette. The bottle of wine is empty. The doctor, he senses, will declare at any moment that it’s time for him to hit the hay or travel to the Land of Nod or sleep the sleep of the just.

  ‘Suppose I don’t want to leave her?’ Owen says.

  He wonders whether Edward, gazing at the floor, is going to look him in the eye. ‘I doubt whether you have much choice,’ he says. Then he lifts his gaze to meet Owen’s. ‘She’s ill.’ Edward stubs out his cigarette in the heavy glass ashtray. ‘She needs time to recover.’

  When he wakes, in the single bed in a child’s small room, Owen thinks for a moment that it is Christmas Day. Something has been placed at the end of the bed during the night. He moves his feet and it rustles like the stocking that had once been there, when he was six or maybe seven, with small objects wrapped in newspaper. One single Christmas morning. A retractable pencil. A satsuma. A tube of fumey chemical goo with which you could blow a huge ball. A plastic knight on horseback. His father gone but his mother had put them there while he slept.

  Owen sits up and leans forward. Anna has folded his washed and dried clothes, and put them in a large paper bag. He lies back. Something has come to him from the night, whether from a dream or the processing of the unconscious he’s not quite sure. That there is something familiar about Anna. Certain gestures last night – how she held her right hand near her face when she spoke, and the way she stood leaning against the counter in the kitchen – these things remind him of his grandmother. They suggest a different background to her husband’s: that he was born into this life, this class, while she has risen into it.

  Not only his grandmother. They were gestures Sara already showed signs of having inherited.

  Owen gets dressed. He goes through to Holly. Children look exhausted when they’re asleep. The smell of yeast and rising dough. He goes downstairs. Coffee. Warm rolls. Home-made blackberry and apple jam. There are jars of different sizes on shelves along one wall of the kitchen. Jams, jellies, chutneys. Fruit in syrup.

  ‘Help yourself,’ Anna tells him. ‘I’ll give you a tray to take up to your girl. She’ll be hungry when she wakes.’

  ‘She’s sleeping now.’

  ‘She’ll wake ravenous, believe me.’

  ‘The coffee’s good,’ Owen says.

  ‘We’re getting there.’ Anna pours cornflakes into a bowl. Puts honey in one dish, raspberry jam in another, on a wooden tray. ‘Edward said to say goodbye. He had to go.’

  Owen nods. He eats toast. He feels looked after by this maternal woman, though she can hardly be more than ten years older than him. Anna sits down. She cups her mug of coffee as if to warm her hands. ‘Her mother,’ she says. ‘Is she not with you?’

  Owen swallows the rest of his own mug. He shakes his head. Gazes at the surface of the wooden table. ‘No,’ he says. ‘She’s not with us.’

  Anna says nothing but waits, offers a silence that Owen may fill with further words if he so wishes. A generous, expectant silence. He looks up, and into Anna’s brown eyes. It is as if Sara is looking at him, as if his daughter had not stopped at all, her destiny curtailed, but quite the opposite: she has grown and overtaken him.

  ‘She’ll find us, for sure,’ he stammers. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Owen takes the tray upstairs. He finds Holly in the slow process of waking. Josh always woke with his eyes wide open, alert, inquisitive, and jumped out of bed. Holly prefers to luxuriate in her unstretched limbs, under the warm covers.

  ‘Breakfast is served,’ Owen says. He opens the curtains. Holly goes to the bathroom. Within moments of her return excitement – staring wide-eyed at what’s on offer on the tray across her lap – has given way to a regal demeanour.

  ‘Yes, I think I do like strawberry jam better.’ Holly rapidly accustoms herself to having breakfast in bed, makes it look like an everyday occurrence.

  Owen sits on the bed. Watching one’s child eat is almost metaphysical in the pleasure it gives, appreciating the nourishment he or she gains. The beauty of the brutish process.

  ‘Did you look under your pillow?’ Owen asks.

  Holly scrunches up her face at her father, then feels behind her. Her expression changes when she discovers something there, and brings it out, grinning. A pound coin Owen remembered to put there last night. The tooth fairy.

  Anna was right: Holly eats everything. Her father removes the tray, she leans back against the pillows, replete, in need of further rest. Owen feels his daughter’s forehead: her fever is gone. He strokes her arm. Holly pushes her pyjama sleeve up to her shoulder so that he can reach further. Soon her eyelids become droopy. Owen realises he has no idea what will happen next, there is no plan. This is a moment that could not be improved upon. Perhaps this is how things will stay, somehow, forever.

  Holly opens her eyes and looks at him and says, ‘You have to go, Daddy.’ It’s as if she’s just remembered something she was supposed to tell him. ‘You don’t have much time.’

  He leans down and they hug. He feels her hand pat his back. Owen raises himself back up, Holly closes her eyes, and he resumes stroking her arm until she falls asleep.

  o spare me a little, that i may recover my strength; before i go hence, and be no more seen

  Owen walks out of the town. Over these past days he has made his way west; now he heads north. It’s no more than five miles away – as he climbs the rise into the Camlad valley he can see it – the middle one of three hills there on the far side of the valley.

  His breath condenses before him. This weather is still insane. The sky is a dark, deep grey, almost black, a single enormous cloud heavy with water or ice. He pauses for a moment to listen, realising as he does so it is silence that has prompted him. There is no sound of either birdsong or running water, the accompaniment to his and the children’s odyssey. A stillness that is more like autumn than spring, as if the earth is holding its breath, this great organism anaesthetising itself against the approach of winter.

  Each and every one of us, Owen thinks, must undergo our own apocalypse. Is that why we are ready for the world’s?

  A haunting sound, the hoot of a wood pigeon, reaches Owen. He’s not sure for a moment whether it is from the wood up to his left or from his memory. Another sound, mechanical this time: a quad bike, from higher up there, somewhere along the Kerry Ridgeway. The whine of its engine might have been designed expressly to irritate such men as his grandfather. Owen walks on, but a little later is stilled by the shrill cry, almost like a seagull, of a buzzard. He looks up: the brown bird soars in wide, ascending circles on its broad rounded wings until, at a certain magical moment, as if conjured out of the grey sky, it disappears from sight.

  Owen recalls his grandfather staring up into a blue sky. Owen gazed up too. ‘Can’t be,’ the old man muttered. A buzzard soared, seeming not to need ever to flap its wings. It looked as if it must be able to see a route ahead for itself on the currents and thermals and gusts, the shifting complexity of wind made visible in its sight.

  ‘What can’t?’

  ‘Do believe it is,’ Owen’s grandfather decided. ‘Look at the long tail. Honey buzzard. Never heard of one this far north.’

  The boy asked the reason for the bird’s name. ‘Feeds on bees and wasps’ nests,’ his grandfather said.

  ‘Does it feed on honey?’ Owen asked.

  As if a piece of food had gone down the wrong way the old man retched into laughter, chuckling to himself at the boy’s stupidity. He coughed up phlegm that he spat out before saying, ‘Insects, of course.’

  They were leaning against th
e gate to the field above the cottage, Owen standing on the second rung. His grandfather composed himself from his rare outburst of pleasure, sighing and shaking his head. Owen wondered if he would always be stupid. He wondered whether he should stop asking questions, saying things, exposing his ignorance, or rather accept that his role in life might be to give other people amusement by the depth of his imbecility. He thought he could detect a degree of contemptuous affection in his grandfather’s voice. Except that, braving a glance up at his grandfather beside him, Owen saw that his mood had shifted: he was considering something that made him not only solemn but angry. Owen assumed that what annoyed his grandfather was his own issue’s idiocy. Of how it reflected back at him.

  But then it struck Owen – this thought in his mind as if it had materialised there out of some powerful elsewhere, a subversive invasion – that his grandfather was wondering whether actually such birds did eat honey. And realising that he didn’t know. That he had laughed at his grandson, yet perhaps he was the ignorant one, and the boy’s enquiry was curious, intelligent.

  It is only after he’s climbed a stile and is crossing an empty field down towards the river that Owen realises with a surge of panic that he’s left his hook behind in Edward and Anna’s house. He’d forgotten to strap it on, though it is something he’s done every morning for the last six years. The occupational therapist, he remembers, Andrea, told him that after the first week he’d never forget it again. Well, seems she was wrong. The omission as absurd as forgetting to put on your trousers. The sleeve of his jacket flaps loose from the stump, just below his elbow. Had he left it behind for Holly? A hideous memento. Perhaps it is something else, another part of him, of which he must be divested.