We arrived in the dark. Waiting at a turn in the road was Aunty Ena. She was holding a lantern on a stick, like Florence Nightingale come to greet the wounded. With the light at her shoulder, her face glowed like a ghoul. Me and Mr Stadnik were the only ones left on the wagon. The driver asked Aunty Ena if maybe he could stay the night before setting back.
There is a Public House in Stradsett that will Meet your Needs, she said, very sharp and sounding a lot like my grandfather. I expected from her tone there would be more rules to follow. I was wrong.
I got a proper look at her when we got inside. Tall, thin, with hands like paddles. There was just her in the house, the scent of recent polish and, underneath, lingering and stale, the smell of dead cabbage on the air.
She showed us our rooms. Mr Stadnik’s was a dark square with a skylight over a narrow iron bed. There was a wardrobe with a sprig of rosemary on the middle shelf, and a washstand with a jug and bowl, empty apart from a dead spider. Mr Stadnik peered up into the skylight and smiled.
How charming! he said, I shall see the stars shooting!
I immediately wanted this room. Mine was only a few steps along the corridor, but it had an ordinary window and an ordinary bed. No stars shooting.
Ah, but here now, said Mr Stadnik, calling me over to the window, Here, you can view the whole world.
That was true enough. The whole world as far as it went, right to the edge of the horizon; the whole world of mud-track yard and long brown field and the sky hanging like dirty washing.
Aunty Ena’s tour was brief, a hand flung out to this room or that, and so quick that all I could get was a glimpse of half-light, the bare reflection of a window on a wall.
There’s nothing in them, not a thing. Everything is sold. She put a hand to her throat, as if she’d said something rude. Mr Stadnik made a little cooing noise.
Times are difficult, he whispered.
Yes they are – her voice went high – Especially out here. People like Albert don’t realize. It’s harder out here. There’s nothing, you see, nothing and no one. And he sends the child! Mr Stadnik just rested his hand on my head and kept it there.
He has sent me too, he said at last, To help you. I would be glad to do it.
The tour ended in the kitchen. Everything was set out in a heap on the table, cups with broken handles and saucers piled up on each other, a silver toast rack with no toast in it and a pitcher half-full with dusty water and a small can of jam with a tarnished spoon stood up in its crusted centre.
You’ll see I don’t have visitors, she said, her hands splashing at the space in front of her, So you won’t mind helping yourselves. But he – she said, pointing at Billy the dog – Must fend for himself in the barn. No food for animals here.
She left us alone. Whatever Aunty Ena had received in the parcel from my grandfather, which we decided must be food, she wasn’t sharing with us. Mr Stadnik set about opening the cupboards. Each one smelled worse than the last, as if the cabbages had invaded every gap with their own ruinous scent.
No food for people here also, he said, lifting the lid off the empty bread barrel. He found some crackers in a wrap of paper on the dresser, took the rime off the jam with a knife, sniffed it then held it out for me to do the same. We ate the crackers dry, straight from the paper, Mr Stadnik chewing slowly and making a face every time he swallowed.
Very good, he said, when we’d finished, Tomorrow, we buy food, and after tomorrow, we make it. He spread out the crinkled wrap, blowing off the crumbs and pressing it flat with the palm of his hand, and began to make a list.
In the morning, we walked the mile to the village, down the track we rode up the night before. The sky was pearl, heavy as a shroud. The birds weren’t singing, there was no wind. Only the sound, growing fainter as we walked, of a piano being played.
~ ~ ~
Ena leans forward, rising off the piano stool in order to watch them go. They are both too short, increasingly so, she thinks, craning her long neck to follow their path into the village. He is older than she imagined, fifty at least; he wears ridiculous clothes. But his eyes are full of light. He’s from somewhere else; he speaks like a hero in a romance. She imagines where somewhere else might be, and how a hero in a romance might speak, even if he’s far too short to be a proper hero. The child is peculiar. Ena sings the word. That hair, that white hair, like a starlet. Like a child star. The child star and the romantic hero are holding hands as they negotiate the wide ditch at the bottom of the track that separates Ena’s land from everywhere else in the world.
~ ~ ~
The shop has no name above it, nothing in the window but a sheen of white steam. The only reason we know it’s a shop is because the man that’s been trudging in front of us along the lane turns abruptly into the doorway and we hear the bell. Mr Stadnik holds his finger in the air and smiles at me. He often does this when he makes a discovery.
Inside, there’s a counter with a grey cat spread along it, and a woman behind the cat with her hands folded under her pinny. She’s talking to the man. She looks at us, but doesn’t say hello. At the back of the shop, behind a second counter, another woman in small round glasses is weighing a pile of parcels. She writes on the corner of each one before putting it aside.
Look like ’er gonna spit, Doris, the man says, nodding at the darkening sky outside.
’Bout time ’n’all, she says.
We wait our turn in the darking gloom. It gets so dim in the shop, the cat on the counter goes invisible, nearly, except for its burning eyes. The woman with the parcels has to squint to write on them. The rain falls in a rush against the glass.
Stay steady till it pass, Doris says. The man sits down on a stool next to the counter, running his hand over his face and grinning now at Mr Stadnik.
You take a turn, ’bor, he says, Ise on a promise!
Doris makes no move. It’s the other woman who serves us. She stops her parcel writing, and comes to inspect Mr Stadnik, so close she’s practically standing on his toes. She looks him up and down. Her eyes behind her glasses are as big as the cat’s.
Can we help you? she says, in a voice that says she can’t. Mr Stadnik would take off his hat if he hadn’t forgotten it. He bows his head a little instead, smiles at the woman, and produces our list from the pocket of his overcoat.
~
It doesn’t blow over. It rains. It rains for the whole day, and then on into the night. It rains the next day and the next day and the next. The dust on the land is picked up by the wind, coating the windows with a film of grit, finding its way into my hair, crunching like salt between my teeth.
Outside, the sky is over everything. Inside, Aunty Ena plays the piano. She hums under her breath. At first, thinking I need to be entertained, she finds things to occupy me.
You ought to do something, she says, with a kind of bright terror in her voice, You must do something!
She brings me items to polish – blackened pots, a dented brass plate with a milk maid stamped into it, two tarnished spoons, a fistful of knives with ivory handles.
Be careful with those, she says, dropping them with a clash onto the table, We don’t want an accident, do we?
Holding the knives with the edge of a duster, I spread the vinegar paste along the blades. I do it with my fingers. It’s not the sharp edge making me shudder, it’s the feel of bone. I won’t touch the handles.
When everything is gleaming, there’s nothing left to do but sit. Aunty Ena says she isn’t much of a talker, but I don’t mind that, because neither was my mother. But my mother never sang the way Aunty Ena does; that would’ve sent the Moons flying to the doctor.
~ ~ ~
Late autumn sun in Chapelfield comes like spring. My grandfather feels it on his head when he’s tending the garden, on his neck as he bends to pull up the weeds encroaching on the path. He senses the last warmth of it; rain is aching through his bones. For a while now, the trains on the tracks below have been more frequent, carry a heavier vibration,
as if they have changed their nature. The rumbling alongside the garden wall is like a premonition. My grandfather avoids the wall entirely after a while. He tends to his garden. He doesn’t look up at the sky.
~ ~ ~
Even though it never stops raining, Mr Stadnik sets to work in the field. He doesn’t mind the wet; he doesn’t mind that the earth is sodden and that every morning, whatever had been dug the day before is turned into a pool of quag. He’s digging a channel, he says, for drainage. Aunty Ena says it looks more like a moat. Often Mr Stadnik unearths things buried in the sod: a gnarled beet wearing a smile, a blackened coin, a small knit of bones. He has a way of dealing with his finds: the beet is lobbed into a sack, the coin he spits on, rubbing it with the bulb of his thumb before slipping it into his pocket. But he is careful with the bones: he makes a tidy pile on his handkerchief, spread out flat at the edge of the ditch. I can’t think what Mr Stadnik will do with them; perhaps he’s saving the bones for Billy the dog. I know he hates the feel of them too; I’ve seen him, pulling the edges of the bundle together, careful not to touch, his breath short and heavy and his face like stone.
Billy stays in the barn. He catches rats, I suppose, although all I ever see him do is bounce backwards and forwards on a long chain tied to the door. He makes it look like elastic, running the pure length of it, jerking so hard at the end that, for a moment, he’s flying. His bark is constant, hollow yaps that sound like someone way off in the distance banging a piece of iron. But there is no one way off in the distance; there is only distance. Mr Stadnik says you can see your neighbour coming to visit you before he decides to set out. Pleased with this joke, he repeats it to Aunty Ena. She doesn’t laugh: she goes very clipped.
Our neighbour is Mrs Myhill, she says, And her daughter, Agnes. You will have met them at the shop. They do not visit.
Aunty Ena spread her arms wide, as if the gesture would explain.
You see, Mr Stadnik, I am an incomer. And you – lifting her hands together now to a point – Will be even less likely to receive visitors. You are a foreigner. You’ll find that life is very quiet in the country.
I lie in bed at night, and between the hooting bird and the keening wind, I think about the countryside being quiet. It’s not true. Noise fills my sleep: Billy’s chain becomes the knocking bones of skeletons as they rise from the fen; the rain is a shower of silver coins; the barking is the scarecrow standing in the far field, knocking his pipe out against the fence. His head is bent to one side and his hair is luminous against the sky. He wears my grandfather’s face.
In the rare silence, the moments midway through the chain unravelling and the barking, my mother visits me, smiling, her hair piled up on her head and her bare feet soundless on the dusty track. She’s happy to see me, she says, she tells me she is resting, now. She doesn’t ask about my father. He never comes back. He stays hanging in Fisher’s window, waving like a puppet. There is nothing I can remember to bring him close: no voice, no words. Despite all the stories, he is a shape without a noise. Then the din of the countryside starts up, and they are all lost again inside it.
~
Mr Stadnik is convinced he can make things grow. When the ditch is finished and the digging done, he plants himself at the end of a row and, bending and unbending, prods seed after seed into the soil.
Be good and strong, he tells each one. From far off, it sounds like he’s singing. He works without a shirt, and despite the cloud hanging on his shoulder, his skin goes dark as the cuff on his wrist. Aunty Ena leaves off from her piano and takes to looking out of the window. She looks out of the window every day for a week, craning her neck like a giraffe nuzzling a branch. There’s nothing to see, except Mr Stadnik getting smaller and smaller as he disappears into the sky, then bigger and bigger as he comes back. Occasionally, she calls me to her side and remarks on his progress.
I’ve told him, she says, But does he listen? Nothing can grow there. Black land, they call it. Dead land.
The watching softens Aunty Ena. Even though it’s dull most days, her eyes are full of light.
Look how far he’s got, Lillian, she’ll say, He’s whizzing through that land!
I don’t think he is. To me, having been called to look only a few minutes before, he’s inching up the furrow like a worm. But Aunty Ena is content. Sitting in front of the fire, I keep an eye on the hands of the clock, edging the hours into dark. I listen to the slow tick, to the wind, to the squeak of Aunty Ena’s sleeve on the window as she wipes her breath from the glass.
~ ~ ~
Chapelfield, and my grandfather moves from kitchen window to hearth and back again. Sometimes he looks at his clock on the mantelpiece. One day, he realizes that what the time is doesn’t matter. He lets the clock wind itself down. There is rain on his garden, and snow, and in later days, a sharp, clean sun. Things grow. He lets them grow. Sometimes, when the noises start again above his head, he sits on the upturned bucket behind the cellar door, and remembers me.
~ ~ ~
One Sunday before church, Aunty Ena swaps her black fitted long-sleeved dress for the same in maroon. She wears a white blouse underneath it, with a small round brooch pinned to the collar.
Opal, she says to me, with a crooked smile, Supposed to be unlucky! But superstition is for heathens, Lillian. What is it for?
Heathens, I say, not knowing what one might be.
She turns to Mr Stadnik,
Are you a heathen, Mr Stadnik?
A man prays when he cannot act, he says, sounding like someone else.
Mr Stadnik has never been invited to church with us, even though he walks us to the lane, bowing low as we jump the ditch. If he had a cloak, he says, he would throw it down. It’s plain he’s keen to go. I would tell him that he’s not missing anything. The church is big and rocky on the outside, and inside it’s hollow and cold. The vicar speaks the words, Aunty Ena fishes about for the book with the tiny writing in it, everyone starts up singing, and I pretend I am Jonah in the whale.
Today will be different. Aunty Ena tells Mr Stadnik to put on his suit and accompany us. Mr Stadnik doesn’t have a suit. He has a jacket with shiny elbows and a stiff shirt with frayed wings, which I think won’t do for Aunty Ena. But when he presents himself, standing at the turn of the stairs with his hair slicked flat across his head, smelling of goose fat and rosewater, she blushes and puts her chin on her chest.
How Exotic, she says into her brooch, May I introduce you as Henry?
Mr Stadnik does one of his little bows. He smiles up at her, a show of yellow teeth.
And you may call me Enid, she says.
They walk either side of me, up the lane to the ditch, Mr Stadnik holding my left hand, and Aunty Ena – Enid! – holding my right. Their hands tight and sweaty, squeezing me between them. There’s a break in the air, a smell of matches, a noise like a storm overhead. A point of light runs through me, out of Aunty Ena, up one arm and across my chest and down the other arm and into Mr Stadnik. It grates through my veins like the sound of Billy flying on his chain. My hair rises of its own accord off my scalp. I can feel it lifting.
Oh look! says Aunty Ena, pointing into the distance, A shooting star. Quickly, we must make a wish!
We watch the star fall, which is not a star at all; it’s a shard of grey metal with a streak of light attached.
No, Mr Stadnik says, Not a shooting star. What should we do?
A suck of air, a pocket opening in the sky, and then a roar. Aunty Ena starts to run, dragging me with her, and I drag Mr Stadnik. Both of them running now, jerking me off the ground, nothing beneath my feet, my stomach in my throat, all of us running away. It’s like riding the gallopers at the fair. They don’t stop: I’m strung out between them like a kite and as they run, they laugh, lifting me and swinging me, laughing so hard it’s frightening now. Before the corner of the churchyard they stop still and listen. I can hear a wheeze like a bellows in Mr Stadnik’s throat. He leans on a headstone while Aunty Ena composes herself. Mr Stad
nik repeats his question.
What should we do?
We should pray for them, Aunty Ena says.
Mr Stadnik wipes his forehead with the tips of his fingers.
But we’ll tell someone? he says, Someone can help them?
No. It will draw attention to— she corrects herself – Where none is wanted. We didn’t really see it, did we? If we were looking the other way, we might not have seen it. And they may be safe, after all. We might cause a fuss over nothing. I want Mr Stadnik to challenge her, but he turns away from the thin line of smoke in the distance, turns and nods, as if this is the right thing to do. Mr Stadnik said people pray when they cannot act; and I’d like to believe that Mr Stadnik is always right.
~
We didn’t see a shooting star. According to Aunty Ena, we didn’t see anything. But whatever it was or wasn’t, I would like to see it again. I would like to make a wish.
By the time we get to the church, Aunty Ena and Mr Stadnik are silent, ashamed in their looks. They stand apart and pretend they are strangers. Instead of praying, instead of pretending to be Jonah, I close my eyes and wish anyway.
eleven
Perched like a crow in a treetop, Joseph Dodd watches. From the tower of Trinity Church, he has a clear view of the surrounding flatland, the great sweep of Middle Drain cutting through it like a slake. On fine days he can see the old windmill on the lip of the horizon, and another church, floating on a distant field. More often the air is mist, drifting like liquid in front of his eyes, so he can only see what lies immediately below. Much of the land here is busy with work: women in overalls with high-pitched voices. There is nothing remarkable in this for him, nothing he would need to keep secret. Nothing that might betray his secret. His interest lies in the two fields either side of Stow Farm. This is it, a forbidden interest from a forbidden vantage point.
Remember Me Page 9
