The House Martin

by William Parker

  So I’m sticking to the pavement as though I’ve obediently fallen back into line. But it’s also common sense. Physically, I’m in good enough shape, but a tumble onto the already complaining knees of a man just on the wrong side of fifty might be a deal more complicated than it would be for a ten-year-old who risks nothing more than a bruise and a scab and the joshing of his crocodile contemporaries. Besides, I’ve done enough falling around. Those days are over forever, I hope.

  My box of memories contains no recollection at all of the warehouse that looms above the street on my left at the beginning of my descent. It must have been there in the sixties—fading rust-red letters on the wall proclaim it as the work premises of one long gone ‘Arthur Readham, purveyor of plumbing equipment since 1887.’ However, the red pillar box I’ve just passed outside the entrance to the churchyard is emblazoned on my memory. I leant my sweat-pricked brow against it early one Sunday morning when the smell of incense and an empty stomach combined to envelop me in a nauseous darkness. ‘Deep breaths, now, Teasdale. There’s a good boy.’ Miss Carson’s voice echoes down the decades as she cups my forehead in the palm of her hand after my flight through the church from the choir stalls. As I’d retched unproductively, my eye had fixed on the embossed ‘VR’ on the side of the box, which forever after alluded to my ‘very’ sick Sunday.

  The view over the river is just as I remember it, though. Towards the bottom of the street, the terrace on the right stops abruptly and gives way to a sloping patch of vegetable allotments eerily unchanged by the passing years. Now in deep sleep for the winter, shriveled brown leaves cling to bamboo poles and wire where three months ago there were bright red tomatoes and fat runner beans. One yellow-brown marrow lies alone, split from one end to the other, slowly returning to earth like an unburied corpse on a battlefield. The stone wall that I’d buffet my hand along in celebration of our return to school after the end of the vicar’s interminable sermon is exactly as I remember it, still protecting the street from the abundance of midsummer vegetables that always threatened to engulf it. Towards the middle of the descent, the wall lowers enough to allow a picture-postcard view of the wide river estuary as it makes its way southward to become the Bristol Channel. There are fewer trees down by the river’s edge now, a sparse collection of oak and elm that has been pruned hard since my time, either by husbandry or punishing winter winds. It’s no longer the thick, secret forest that allowed my ten-year-old’s imagination to people it with Angles and Saxons who, under its cover, stole ashore from their longboats a millennium and a half ago.

  There’s really not much I recognise of the old street now. The sharply descending terrace of houses on the left that might have been the subject of a preservation order had it survived demolition just a while longer, has been replaced by neat, copycat red-brick houses with squat square windows and front doors so small I’m unable to figure out how even a small sofa might be accommodated. There’s a break in the line of the new terrace halfway down that allows for the entrance to a courtyard for parking at the back where once there were kitchen gardens and outside loos.

  It’s a bright, early winter’s morning. The permanent winter fog of the old days, permeated by the tangy smell of burning logs and coal from hundreds of chimneys, has long gone, replaced with the merest passing hint of carbon monoxide expelled from efficient new boiler systems. The smell is quickly dispersed by the sprightly breeze that hurries up the street, and my scarf, carelessly donned in the warmth of the guest house where I stayed last night, is snagged and playfully unwrapped by its pull. I stop to pay attention to its reapplication, suddenly aware of the chill, and it dawns on me that I’m taking my time, slowly fastening the buttons of my duffle coat and fussying the scarf back round my neck as though I might be a reluctant knight buckling on a suit of armour before riding into battle. The steep incline is leveling out—a few more steps will find me at the bottom of the street, and a sharp turn to the left will reveal the old school.

  And now, quite out of the blue, I realise I don’t know whether I want the information or not. What if it’s no longer there, gone the way of the little terrace in a quest for nineteen-seventies’ modernisation?

  I can turn around if I want, remount the hill, climb into the car that I’ve parked next to the War Memorial, and drive away. I don’t have to be here. My little trip into the past now seems ridiculous, foolish almost; I’m beginning to lose sight of the reason why I came.

  Q

  It was at the end of my Greek holiday, while I was sitting in the taxi on the way to the airport in Mytelene, that the idea came to me to come back to Saxham.

  The young taxi driver was showing off, driving like the devil possessed along narrow mountain roads with sheer, willy-tingling drops on either side threatening us like the wide open jaws of an alligator patiently awaiting a momentary miscalculation. Now and again, I’d catch his twinkling eyes observing me in the rearview mirror, thrilled at the discomfort of his nervous passenger experiencing the joyride from hell. Eventually, I’d plucked up the courage to ask him, in my own roundabout way, to slow down. ‘Too much time at airport,’ I said, ‘We arrive too early. I like to see your island out of the window, slowly—slowly. More slowly…’ By the time I’d realised that I might just be delivered to the airport in one piece—a good hour before check in—I was practically moving myself to tears with the imagined eulogies of my broken-hearted loved ones at a standing room only funeral.

  As the taxi emerged out of the mountains, hurtling towards the airport on the last lap of the journey, the image of a skinny naked child, high up on a roof with his arms outstretched like wings, came back to me out of nowhere.

  It struck me with the force of a slap across the face with an open palm, as though I might be a fainting heroine in a forties’ film needing a shock to bring her out of some panic-induced reverie. It did just that, and I knew at that moment that as soon as I possibly could, the first available weekend, I’d come back to Saxham, walk down this very road towards the old school, and once again stare up at the window where the boy that I’d once been had found the spirit and mad courage to make a break for freedom and had climbed out of a dormitory window onto the roof.

  I’ve left it a little while, though. My resolution faltered once I got home and back into the routine of work and the promise of lazy weekends doing fuck all. In the end, there’s been some sort of resistance to the visit that I’ve not examined too closely, and for a while, it had allowed me not to bother to book a room at the only guest house I’d been able to find on-line in Saxham. I had a good enough excuse to postpone, too; Pa had another stroke, the week after my return—only a small one, but there’s a pattern being set now, and it certainly won’t be the last. In fact they suspect he’s had at least another tiny one since then. He’s alright—‘coming out on top,’ as he puts it, but I can see the inevitable direction we’re heading in.

  But last night, two months later than I intended, I went for it. I decided I’d pop down to visit Pa in Weybridge and then carry on West along the M4 rather than returning home. I’d spend Sunday afternoon and most of Monday in Saxham.

  Q

  It was already growing dark when I arrived last night. I took my time after leaving the nursing home, determined to put a step on it, to get to Saxham and have a good nosey around before the light failed. But I found myself dawdling along the first stretch of the motorway, slowing the car from my customary eighty-five miles an hour to a sedate sixty-five, suddenly wondering what on earth I might do with an evening in a strange place.

  A bank of grey clouds, heavy with rain, had been gathering over to the west as I set off from Weybridge and reached me an hour later as I stopped for a late lunch. I stared out of the window of the service station at the driving rain, taking my time over a lunch that resolutely conspired against me; the ham salad sandwich, extracted with exasperation from a cellophane package that wasn’t prepared to give it up without a fight, was just
old enough to be hinting at day old scraps in a kitchen bin on a warm day, and the cup of tea I’d bought to accompany it contained a tea bag that resolutely refused to part with any of the English Breakfast flavour that the label promised.

  Just an hour or so later, sipping yet another cup of tea at the next service station, I try to bury my head in the Sunday Times. But now and again I find myself raising my eyes to look out onto the vast frame of the suspension bridge that lifts the road from England into the sky and deposits it on the far side of the river in Wales; the very same bridge that, years before, I’d wake early to stare at in the far distance from the window of the dorm.

  I hadn’t intended to stop. The outline of the bridge can be seen from many miles away as you approach it along the M4. I thought I’d take my reintroduction to it in my stride. I was coming at it from an unfamiliar direction, from the east, and besides, I imagined that any memory I might have had of it was well buried. But when it presented itself to me again in all its magnificence, its pillars like giant rugby posts disappearing into the low clouds above, it seemed to me to be entirely, shockingly familiar, concertinaing time and unexpectedly filling me with foreboding. Instead of just asking myself what I might do to pass the time on a rainy night in Saxham, I began to battle with the idea that I might not want to go any farther.

  I read every last bit of the paper, including the sports section that usually finds itself sorted straight into the recycling bin at home; then I drank more tea and ate an unnecessary Danish pastry in a quest to delay my journey. I even toyed with the idea of tossing a coin to break my indecision—‘Heads I go on, tails I turn back.’ I left it so long that the bridge had turned white and red with the lights of the non-ending stream of traffic leaving England and arriving from Wales. But as evening began to obscure the structure, slowly turning it into an unfamiliar stranger, I rose from the table by the vast plate-glass window on the cliff overlooking the estuary, went back to the car, queued at the tollbooth and crossed the river.

  Q

  ‘It’s a lovely place you have here,’ I said last night to Mrs. Sheringham, stepping out of the rain into the warmly lit entrance hall of her guest house.

  ‘Yes, it is a beautiful old house, isn’t it? One of the oldest in the village, actually. Georgian front but Elizabethan behind,’ she said to me as I signed the visitor’s book placed next to a terracotta bust of Nelson and an arrangement of dried flowers on a mahogany side table. Huge black and white prints covered the walls and climbed the staircase of the wood-paneled hall.

  ‘Wonderful mezzotints,’ I said, glancing up from the page where a departing Mr. and Mrs. Shultz from Escondido, California, had signed their names above mine. (‘We loved our stay and sure plan to come back some day. Great breakfast!’)

  ‘Aren’t they grand?’ replied the petite figure in the neat check trouser-suit—more legal secretary than landlady, I thought to myself. ‘We inherited them when we took over the house last year from the previous owners. They bought them for next to nothing when the contents of the old prep school down by the river were auctioned off.’

  ‘Courtlands?’

  ‘That’s it,’ she said, looking surprised. ‘You know of it?’

  ‘Yes, I’m an old boy, actually. And I think I remember the prints; they were in the entrance hall.’

  She showed me up to a room at the back of the house where chintz curtains, heavy with colourful birds of paradise and already drawn against the night, pooled extravagantly onto the floor. On the walls were more prints in faded gold frames—a series of eighteenth-century aristocratic beauties in ancient Greek costume looking sultry while leaning against urns and playing lyres. The duvet was folded back invitingly to reveal off-white cotton sheets, and on the bedside table, under a lamp with a pleated shade, there was a little basket of potpourri and tissues in a silver dispenser. On a low oak chest of drawers opposite the bed, a large glass jar of what looked like homemade cookies had been placed next to a kettle, a white porcelain teapot and two matching cups.

  ‘You’ve done a wonderful job with the house. It’s really beautiful—quite different,’ I said. ‘You’ve not been here long?’

  ‘Just under a year. We’re refugees from the Square Mile; we’d had enough of the rat race and decided we wanted to be able to spend more time together as a family.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to settle. Will you be staying with us for dinner?’ she said as her hand played with the single strand of pearls at her neck.

  ‘No, thank you very much, Mrs. Sheringham. I’m off to meet friends,’ I lied.

  I wasn’t sure about sitting in a small dining room with one or two other guests whilst feeling obliged to indulge in a little polite, strained conversation over soup. I imagined that I might find a window seat at a table laid for one in a busy little bistro in the village, where I’d be able to bury myself in my book and take in the surroundings.

  It wasn’t to be, though. A walk up the damp and windy high street quickly confirmed that Saxham had failed to be colonized even by the ubiquitous Indian takeaway. There was a chemist’s, a hardware store, a Spar convenience shop, a post office—all in darkness except for an outfit that flattered itself with the name ‘Jo’s Antiques and Bric a Brac’. When I cupped my hands above my forehead and pressed my face up against the window to see what might be inside, the cavernous space, lit by a single bulb, was nearly empty but for three or four pine fire surrounds to the side of the window, leaning up against each other and anchored against the wall by a vast brass bedstead in several pieces. In the centre of the shop was a rusting neo-Victorian iron garden table with four chairs. On a trestle table in front of them a large string puppet with a dejected look on his face—perhaps because he was missing a leg—was propped up against a bread bin next to a collection of tin tea caddies and two dusty fifties’ decanters with tarnished ‘whiskey’ and ‘gin’ dog tags round their necks.

  So I got back into the car and drove too fast through the silent, dark, rain-soaked villages that border the river on the way to Gloucester, where I was sure that I’d find some lively little joint in which I’d be an inconspicuous stranger. But when I got there, it didn’t exist—at least not on a rainy Sunday evening in early December. I drove round the wet, deserted streets lit by half-hearted Christmas lights, and got caught up in a one way system that refused to release me from its clutches till I’d completed three or four turns of the inner city. Finally, I abandoned the car in a side street and walked into the windswept, pedestrianised and empty centre, losing my temper with my disobedient brolly that was trying to turn itself inside out with all the determination of a toddler embarking on a tantrum.

  In desperation, I became the last customer in a McDonald’s on the point of closing for the night, sitting on a plastic-backed chair in the hard, unforgiving light that sucked the little colour from the face that was reflected back at me from the mirrored wall opposite. The only other customers—two teenage boys eating with their mouths open and flicking each other’s wrists with elastic bands—argued loudly over the results of some local football match, while a spotty, morose girl mopped ineffectively round my feet, the sweet, sickly smell of the disinfectant catching in my throat while I thought of the dinner I’d passed up back in Saxham.

  Q

  ‘You’ve come to visit the grave?’ Mrs. Sheringham was wiping her hands on a tea towel as she stood at the doorway that led from the dining room into the kitchen. She’d collected my empty plate, asked if I’d like a fresh pot of tea which I readily accepted, and had then allowed herself to relax into a conversation with me, her last remaining customer.

  I’d dawdled in my room this morning, watching the nine o’clock news on the television until I supposed that most of the other guests had finished their breakfasts, and then made my way down to the dining room along corridors that smelt of fresh paint, the newly laid carpets muffling the creaking floorboards un
der my feet. Gloss-white fire doors opened and swung shut behind me, radiators hummed, and filling cisterns whistled somewhere above my head. A hint of soap, aftershave, and toothpaste emanated from behind closed doors where commercial travelers readied themselves for the day. I seated myself at a table on the opposite side of the room to an elderly couple muttering to each other under their breaths about whether it might be alright to ask for another round of toast and just a little more water in their pot before coming to a joint decision that there really wasn’t time since ‘We’re supposed to be at Doreen’s in three quarters of an hour from right now.’

  ‘I’ll expect you back for dinner, then,’ Mrs. Sheringham had said to them as they rose from the table. While the old gentleman fussed about under his shirtsleeve to consult his watch, his wife steadied herself on the back of her chair before retrieving a walking stick from the nearby corner. ‘Yes, yes, we’ll be looking forward to that by then—won’t be much of a spread at Doreen’s, I shouldn’t think,’ she added, muttering to herself.

  ‘The grave? I’m sorry?’ I said.

  ‘Freddie Burston’s—Courtlands old Headmaster?’ she replied, looking perplexed.

  ‘No, no, in fact I’d no idea he’d died,’ I said, recalling the tall ungainly man with the loud voice that we’d all been so wary of. ‘I’ve not had any sort of contact with the school for many years to tell you the truth. But I am so sorry to hear that. When did he die?’

  ‘Oh I do apologize. I was just assuming it was the reason for your visit. We’ve had one or two old boys turn up since the funeral, actually. It was about three or four weeks ago, now, I think.’ She turned her head back towards the kitchen where a shadowy figure was bent over an open dishwasher, noisily stacking plates.