by Jeremy Page
My father handed over the wheel and came into the cabin. He sat down on one of the bunks and looked at his hands for a long time.
‘OK, so what happened?’ he asked me.
He looked old, the stuffing knocked out of him.
Then he turned to Elsie. ‘OK, what happened, Elsie?’
10
And the Trees Too
Euximoor Drove, Cotton’s Corner, Popham’s Eau, Three Holes. Rain and mist driving across the landscape in blowing fogs, tearing through stands of poplar and gusting round farm-houses, pumping stations, labourers’ cottages. Plau Field, Low Fen. Buildings without inhabitants in a land without people, somewhere lower than the sea itself, and us, somewhere on that negligible line between earth and sky.
Elsie had stuck to a description of pulling the boat out at the old sluice, how the stars had come out, how the storm had drenched us and of the heavy feel of the man’s oilskin jacket she’d worn. My father listened with a patience born out of weariness, biting a hangnail, fiddling with his ear, waiting for her energy to wane. Wondering what he’d do then. Soon, Elsie did stop talking, and my father stared out the front window while he picked with his fingernails at a cork ball tied to a keyring. He never quite knew what to say to her.
Uncomfortable with the unfolding of a serious family drama, the other men had chosen to sit it out by the wheel. I recognized them from the fondue party. The one who’d told my mother about taking the armchairs to London had lost his energy for talk, as if that had been his yearly quota and he’d used it up. Both men zipped their parkas so tight only a small aperture of fake fur remained of their faces, as they passed a hip flask back and forth.
By the time my father had built a small pile of cork shavings on the counter we reached Three Holes. The rope pulling the Mary Magdalene went slack and the little rowing boat nudged into our stern with a gentle bump. No one reacted to it and it didn’t wake Elsie, who had crashed into sleep in the space of minutes. She didn’t wake when my father carried her out of the cabin, passing my mother, who didn’t look up once from beneath her umbrella, Elsie’s red hair hanging over the green shoulder of his oilskin, her mouth like a collapsed O as he picked his way up the bank. The two men stayed in the wheelhouse, deep in their coats. Surely Elsie couldn’t just sleep her way out of all this? But she was limp in his arms. And a strange moment there on top of the bank: my father kissed Elsie, once, tenderly, on the cheek, and almost as soon as he did it he wiped it away with his finger. The glass cabin door swung gently to and fro. I decided to follow my father and Elsie but one of the men moved instinctively to the hatchway. Looking up at his big coat and a shadowed eye peering out from his fur-lined hood, I pulled the door closed and went back to my seat. I looked at the cork shavings and swept them off the table.
Half an hour earlier we’d passed the abandoned tractor engine where I had chased eels. I thought of the waterlogged flip-flop with its huddled crew of pebbles clinging on for dear life, and the sight of the one representing my father falling off the back of the boat. Falling off and never being caught. And I imagined him sitting in the front room of the Holbeachs’ cottage. Ethel Holbeach, plump and waxy in her morning dressing gown, fussing with Elsie’s wet clothes. Elsie, sullen and miserable, being made to stand on cold tiles. Mr Holbeach, as grey as the fens, considering some verse from Proverbs in his head because he had no words of his own.
A similar scene two hours later. From behind tightly shut doors I heard the vented fury of my father, his voice tight with the effort of restraining himself. His sense of betrayal. His whole damned situation stuck in this dreary farmhouse on the edge of the Fens with a madwoman for a wife. Occasionally, my mother sneezed, but otherwise she said nothing, and at lunchtime she went to bed and stayed there all day, knowing the weight of silence would be handed over to my father, and in it he’d hopefully find some guilt for the things he’d said and the things he’d done.
That night I dreamed of the oilskin creatures picking their way across Bedlam Fen. Oily creatures with no faces, the rain dripping off them. Their feet sinking into the marsh. And as they advanced - with each footfall - I heard the house creak. Eerily the dreamland fen sank into my room’s shadows, and I realized I was more awake than asleep. The creaking continued. Slow, uncertain footsteps pacing the corridor. Opening the door, I saw my mother standing right outside, her head angled to one side as if she’d been brushing her hair. I touched the hem of her nightie and she pushed me away and then held her hand in front of her. Silencing some imaginary noise. The storm had left a terrible silence in its wake. Her eyes were open but she didn’t see me. I just stood there, looking up at the marbled pattern of the moonlight shining through the wet window on to her face.
She moved away, her nightie bone-white in the corridor. Her door shut with a click, and I glimpsed something move at the end of the corridor, and realized my father was standing there, dark and brooding in the shadows. He gestured briskly at me, pointing me back to bed, and then with impatient steps I heard him coming down the corridor to make sure my door was closed as I climbed back beneath the blankets.
From then on I spent most days at the Stow Bardolph Estate, where I’d watch how my father priced a cow by the feel of its spine, or how the angle of a sheep’s neck became a mark in a ledger. The marks built up into impressive accounts. How disease, vermin, seasons and gate prices bowed the beauty of his tables. How livestock, fowl and game - the whole array of animal nature - tabulated in columns on the one hand, fox, mole, badger and rodent on the other. Figures in red and black over several books, corralled into one irreducible number. Profit.
Only in the bull-pen did I see the dreamer he’d once been. The man who’d known animals before he’d known himself. I was allowed to sit on a high ledge where I could look down at him as he stroked and examined the bull. It was the Red Poll, about a ton in weight, and a deep tan in colour. My father had no veterinary training, but it was clear he was trusted more than anyone to treat the animal. He and the bull had an understanding, and I sat on my ledge in awe. Often he’d unchain it from the hook and lead it round, the bull taking a stumbling solid walk, only a few steps till its flank pressed against the bricks. It was an old brick shed rising up to blackened roof timbers, with two high windows - and in the mornings shafts of sunlight would fall into the otherwise dark pit. It was a very calm place. The bull breathed heavily while being led, its breath mixing with my father’s pipe into a heady evocative cloud. The bull had a wild pink eye hidden in the curls of its head, and it would glance once at me on my ledge and then look at me no more as it passed between the sunbeams. My father spoke to it all the time, close by its ear. A lulling sound full of that’s it . . . fine . . . come on now . . . easy, until the animal seemed to be at one with his leader’s somnambulant whispers. Sometimes the Red Poll would swing its square head to one side and my father would be flung back on his heels, but he never raised his voice. The animal trusted him, a tamed giant, bending its spirit to walk in staggered circles through the straw as if wisdom were being passed from man to beast. This was the man who as a boy had killed a calf and cut out its tongue - an act that earned him the right to speak with bulls.
Then my father would disappear somewhere, and I’d wait in the kitchen making models out of dough. I made all the farm animals, and watched them grow deformed in the heat of the oven, and at the end of the day I filled my father’s silent car with the sweet smell of bread.
My mother would take these loaves humorously, but when I closed her hands round them, I often noticed a tremble in her fingers which had not been there before. Her eyes, always sad, seemed to have grown duller. The food was still on the table for evening meals, but she didn’t speak to my father any more, and when she spoke to me it was with a cracked, quiet voice. It was a silence that eventually drove my father to eat in his study, taking the food quickly from the table and washing his plate alone at the sink later. No mention that we ate the same thing on several nights running, or that it had lost its taste.
No one really knew what she did during the days. The garden became overgrown and eggs stayed in the coop. Only a kitten, Pepper - found as a stray on the estate - lifted her at times from the depression, as it ceaselessly chased bits of wool, ambushed my mother from behind chair legs and pounced on her hand to bite or scratch a finger, her hands becoming covered with tiny scars.
The sleepwalking continued even after my father fitted a lock on her door. She would bang on it, waking us and herself, and as she was in such obvious distress he removed the lock and let her wander free. Sometimes I’d hear a noise from outside and see her standing on the back lawn, looking silently out over the fens until my father came to guide her back inside, being careful not to wake her.
The storm at Bedlam Fen had been the start of it, but now the silence descending on the house and my mother’s gradually worsening illness seemed to spread across the entire landscape. It was called Dutch elm disease, but to me the sight of these trees dying in an agony of curling leaves and peeling bark - it all seemed part of the same marsh fever that had claimed her.
The great elm trees at the estate were monitored weekly, then daily as the disease spread. When it was spotted, the branches would be lopped, cut up and burned. Leaning against the wet wood of a five-bar gate, with me sitting on top, my father told me these were some of the tallest in the land, the trees that had made England strong because the wood never split, and that this was a disease sent from the Continent in revenge. That was when he could still joke about it. Goose’s take was that the elm suffered from a great arrogance. Like the oak, they had little sense of humour. It was a simple matter of them changing their ways. Whatever the reason, the country was gripped with hysteria as the landscape changed so brutally, and my mother’s marsh fever went unnoticed. In the silence over the dinner table at one of our increasingly rare family meals, my father eulogized the dying elm as the saddest, most tragic thing he’d ever witnessed. He couldn’t imagine a land without elms. And at a moment of real frustration he spat out God! Why not the ground elder! Even my mother smiled at this, then served the food in silence, the muted stab of the wooden spoon against the sides of the casserole dish the only sound. It was clear - from my side of the table - that the real tragic loss in my father’s life was happening right there in that room. Under his nose. But unlike his efforts to conquer the elm bark beetle, he did nothing to save his wife from fading away. Unable to contemplate a land without elms, a land without her was swiftly approaching. Entire country, my father continued, only tree I care about’s that elm in the forty-acre. Two hundred year, maybe older. Ain’t going to get that one.
But it did.
It happened, even though he thought he could outwit the beetle. Even though he tried to become a scientist.
Parcels and books had been arriving wrapped in brown paper and smelling of glue and ink. Sometimes he made a phone call to London, and I’d sit in the corridor pretending to practise my writing while I listened to him pronouncing Latin names in his Norfolk accent. Ceratostomella ulmi had too many long vowels for him to say convincingly. He often had to repeat what he said, altering the pronunciation and sounding nervous.
Other times the phone would ring, I’d hear my father laughing, but when I went in the living room he’d say hang on a minute into the phone then cup the mouth-piece and snap at me to go out and shut the door behind me.
I took letters to my father from Antwerp and The Hague, and he let me stand in his study while he read them. A new feeling of importance for him. It felt quiet in there; the books silenced the air. I smelled their spines and their dusty paper and saw the corners of the pages where he’d nibbled the paper as he thought. Every one of those books, partly eaten. Tacked to the window frame was a solitary cockchafer, held by a pin. I touched its wings and they felt like paper and my father said careful you don’t break him, he’s fragile. He flew a long way to get on that pin. It seemed strange an insect might fly anywhere only to be skewered on to a piece of wood. On his desk was his pipe and several twigs of elm with the bark stripped clean. He had a glass demijohn full of elm leaves. There was a strange metal toy he called a gyroscope, which he used as a paperweight, and he let me spin it while he read the letters, and after he finished he tore off the stamps and gave them to me.
Leaving the study one evening, putting the stamps in my pocket, my mother looked at me from the scullery. Her eyes were glassy. And I knew that while I’d been in there her own disease had spread.
A car has drawn up in the yard. My father rushes out to meet one of the farmhands and hears the news he’s been dreading. The lad says something about the forty-acre and my father hitches up his trousers and picks a burr off his shirt. Preparing for the worst. He drives off in the car and doesn’t come back till after dark, and when he does it’s only to tell us he wasn’t hungry and get in the car - we’ve got to go right away.
By the time we reached the estate a crowd had collected round the great elm tree in the forty-acre pasture. Car headlamps had been trained on the tree while wooden pallets were piled round the trunk. When that was done, my father went forward with a jerrycan of paraffin and poured it round the base. The lights from the cars overlapped each other on the trunk and the wood and on my father’s back. Above him, the silent tree rose motionless.
He said something to the tree in the timber man’s custom of asking forgiveness for what he was about to do, then he lit a ball of newspaper and threw it at the wood and I watched the sudden whoosh of blue flame erupt like a ghost of the tree. The blue flame rose and vanished into the feathery mass of the leaves and with it I hoped this one act might cleanse the tree. But soon the pallets were alight and crackling with the sound of the wood splitting. The fire rose and the people moved back from its heat. The leaves singed, curled and withered as the whole tree seemed to shiver like a fountain.
My mother watched from the passenger seat with the door open, her face warmed by the death of the tree. I imagined the fire reflecting in her dark eyes, and I wanted it to burn there, purifying her while above us the tree filled with the strange haunting sounds of fire. Of sap boiling and fizzing, of the breath of gases through the canopy, of twigs spitting as though a sudden rage had gripped the tree after two hundred years of peace. One of the cars began to reverse across the pasture and I watched it weaving into the darkness. Beyond it, about a mile away, another elm was on fire; its blaze a golden candle of yellow against the black woods.
My father made his way over to me, his face stern but his emotions under wraps because he was there to tend the fire and not make a scene. He bent down to me and I smelled the fire in his hair and he told me never to forget what we were watching, and then he walked off wearily towards a group of people standing by a Land Rover. I wondered if he felt he’d failed everybody; with his demijohn of leaves and his half-eaten books and his letters from Europe.
I followed him, trying to step in his footprints in the long damp grass while I watched my own shadow flicker round my feet. The people by the Land Rover were staring at the tree and chatting to themselves, smoking cigarettes. My father went to the rear of the car. It moved down as he sat on the back step, then a woman came to him and the car bounced down again, slightly less this time. She was on his lap. And then her voice.
‘You smell of smoke.’
He didn’t answer.
‘George.’
‘Yeah, s’pose we all do.’
Whoever was sitting on his lap shifted closer to him.
‘It’s got to be this way,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘Saw you say something. What was it?’
‘Wish.’
‘George, what we going to do?’
I ran off into the dark middle of the pasture and looked back at the scene. At my mother, in her car, by herself. At the raging fire of the still-burning tree. At the Land Rover. My father, with the girl from the fondue evening sitting on his lap. Her head nestled in his shoulder, and I imagined her - like me - smelling the fi
re and the paraffin there. My father seemed limp with exhaustion, his arm round her waist, leaning into her, the wounded man. His hand on her leg. Never forget, I heard him say.
Fire, which punctuates my life so often. My father kept that blaze alight, burning all the other diseased wood in his life, starting the next morning, when the Mary Magdalene was dragged into the yard and set on fire. Straight after breakfast, with little fuss, as if he were bagging up rubbish. My mother showed little interest, knowing intuitively he was testing her. Challenging her to do something.
He waited for that moment when a fire can’t be extinguished to save the wood, and then left for the estate. Gull, excited by the fire, followed his car as it slewed through the mud. I was the only one to stand in the yard while the boat and the dreams of my parents went up in flames. Those clouds, painted on the hull, blistering and peeling like bark, exposing the dark green of the undercoat before that too burned through. I began to think of a small rowing boat amidst the muddy swirls of a large, powerful river. Of a man standing up in it. Of an engine dragging idly through the water. I thought of a young woman slipping off the seat and lying supine on the planks. Of thin summer dresses and the lapping of water.
And slowly the scene replayed through the jaws of the flames. As the wood split. As the keel crashed softly in two.
Either he lost interest in taking me to the estate, or he had his own reasons for not wanting me there. It suited us both - he went off in his car, chased by the dog, and I rode around on a bike. Three Holes was eight miles away. When I first cycled there I leaned the bike against the brick bridge and walked along the top of Popham’s Eau till I was behind the house. I sat, tying grasses together and wondering what to do. There was no movement from the house. I pulled out my father’s gyroscope and spun it, watching the centre wheel revolving so fast it looked like an insect’s wing. It pulsed drunkenly in my hand. It was early spring and the Holbeachs’ acre was immaculate. The soil was as dark as treacle, prepared, turned, broken, turned again and raked flat. And in its centre, the house looked like it had landed there overnight, without proper root there, waiting for the moment when hundreds of prize tulips would break the soil.
