by David Mark
He stopped for a moment and swallowed. His throat seemed dry. I got him a glass of water and placed it down in front of him. He thanked me with a nod.
‘You’re wondering what would be worth saying, I’ll bet,’ he said, smiling.
‘No, actually,’ I said. ‘I know a bit about the history of the area. That was one of the reasons I was keen to come here.’
He seemed surprised. ‘You chose Gilsland?’
I moved my head from side to side like a pendulum, indicating that this was a complex question. In truth, my husband had simply wanted me to be somewhere out of the way. He gave me the option of a dozen houses from rural locations and told me to pick the one I liked. I was in no position to ask for something less remote. If I chose not to go through with the wedding he would simply find somebody else and I would be back on the streets with a swelling belly and nowhere to go but down. I picked a thatched cottage in Somerset but the owner wouldn’t sell to anybody but a local. Gilsland was my third choice. Mrs Winslow’s lawyers had no compunction about selling to a man from well beyond the village boundary. They wanted the best price and in my husband, they found a rich fool willing to pay it. When I first moved in it was with a sense of excitement. I wanted to know all about my new home. Read up on its history and the seemingly endless violence and bloodshed that had scarred the landscape. But the novelty wore off. My extravagant home became my prison. My loneliness became exhausting. Nobody visited. Nobody called. And when Stefan was born there wasn’t a soul from the village who bothered to come and wish us well. I grew to hate the village and its people. After he died, I hated everything.
‘You go in any village you’ll hear stories,’ he said. ‘I’ve no doubt you could stick a pin in a map and find folk who would swear blind their village were the centre of the universe and the most fascinating place on earth. Maybe not just a map. Maybe an atlas. I’ll put money there are men and women even out there in Australia who reckon the history of their little town is worth a book and Australia’s no older than the wagon I’ve got in the barn.’
He must have seen impatience in my expression because he gave himself a shake, as if exasperated with himself.
‘I was the first man at Spadeadam,’ he said, looking down. ‘It wasn’t Spadeadam then, mind. Wasn’t an RAF base splashed all over the papers for being a waste of millions of pounds. Was just miles and miles of bog. Don’t blame me for it but I took the government land surveyors to see the site. Years back. Proper men from the ministry. Men like your husband, I’ve no doubt. Of course we didn’t know it then but they wanted a rocket site. I can see why they liked it. There was nothing of any value there – just a wasteland. When we surveyed it we were probing with rods that go down forty foot. We didn’t get near the bottom. There was a plane came down there during the war. It’s still there. Be a bloody puzzle for them archaeologists, eh?’
‘Fairfax wrote about RAF Spadeadam?’ I asked, confused.
He began to look agitated, though whether it was with me or himself I couldn’t tell. As he spoke, a shaft of sunlight briefly speared through the glass at my back and he raised a hand in defence as it blanched the pink from his face.
‘He spoke to every bugger,’ said Nixon. ‘I swear, late fifties this area was booming. Workmen from Scotland and Ireland. Men from the RAF. Surveyors, solicitors, inspectors. And everybody had been told to keep their mouths shut. Bet you struggle with the thought of that, eh? But we were under orders – you don’t speak when you’ve been told not to. So there was all this guessing. What were they building, what would it become. There were nigh-on three years of guessing before it came out. Some big shot from London came up and wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. Just came oot with it, like. It was going to be a rocket site. They were going to try and reach the moon.’
I nodded, smiling and waiting for more. I knew the story. The Blue Streak programme had been a failure of colossal proportions. Millions upon millions of pounds went into the doomed attempt to get a Brit into space. They’d have had more luck with a ladder.
‘We’d hear the rockets morning and night,’ said Nixon, looking at the pattern in the wood of his chair. ‘Shook the ground sometimes. But it gave the local lads a good living and it brought people in and Fairfax was always the first in line to buy them a pint and pick their brains and get their stories down in his notebook …’
‘Even outsiders?’ I asked, confused.
‘That was what surprised me,’ he said. ‘Seemed like he’d lost sight of what he was writing. Seemed like he had just got into the habit of nosing about. He was forever asking questions.’ Nixon stopped. Sucked his lower lip. ‘It wasn’t a good time to be nosey. Not when there’s war still in people’s memories and the Russians were after every secret they could steal. Somebody from the base must have reported his interest. He was white as a sheet after they had a word with him. Some men in suits, that’s what he told me. Told him to stop nosing.’
I waited. Raised my empty cup to my lips and then put it down again. Looked at his feet, clad in mismatched socks, and wished I had known his friend.
‘What are you saying?’ I asked.
‘There’s no profit in asking questions, that’s what I learned from Fairfax. You understand?’
I stared at him, suddenly realising where this was going.
‘Are you trying to frighten me?’ I asked, angry. ‘Because if that’s what you’re trying to do then you need to be a lot scarier …’
He hit the table. I expected the mug to jump but he pulled the blow at the last and it ended up being a feeble slap at the wooden surface.
‘I heard you was asking questions,’ said Nixon, infuriated with the way the conversation had played out. ‘Ray said you walked in the bar last night bold as brass. And John’s wife Felicity, she told him you spoke about a body on the grass at the church. Says that’s what Fairfax was doing when he crashed that blasted silly car.’
‘And?’
Nixon screwed up his face; wrinkles forming into mountain ranges at the corners of his eyes. ‘He bought that car because it looked like a drawing his son had done. Did you know that? He would do owt to feel close to that lad. It were years ago the men in the suits told him to stay quiet but when I heard he’d died, that was the first thing I thought. I knew it were silly – my wife said as much. But when Ray said you’d seen him and that you were acting suspicious …’
‘Is that what I was doing?’
‘There’s stuff you don’t know,’ he said, and his breathing was heavy. He was scratching at his hair as if ants were biting his scalp. ‘Do you know about the camp? About the lads during the war? The stories Fairfax heard – they were too much for him to publish, I reckon. Too raw. He’d got to the stage where he wasn’t asking questions for a book – he was asking questions for the sake of it. He wanted to know everything about people. Had got it in his head there were all these secrets to be unearthed.’
In truth, I knew very little about the camp he spoke about. I knew a POW camp had been built a couple of miles from Gilsland during World War Two but that was as much as I had read.
‘It weren’t just a few soldiers, love. These were the senior Nazis – the U-boat diehards who had been Hitler Youth. It was a De-Nazification Camp. They came here as prisoners to learn how to be anything but a Nazi. They worked the land round here. Went out in work gangs. Some of them stayed. When the war ended they were allowed to go home or they could do what many did. Married a local girl and made a life. There’s a gadgie works the dust carts in Brampton. Bit of an accent but other than that you wouldn’t know he weren’t a local. The war ended and times changed but Fairfax, well …’
‘He’d lost his son,’ I said, understanding what Nixon was trying to say.
‘No, I don’t mean he held a grudge,’ said Nixon, shaking his head. ‘The opposite. Sought them out. Asked questions. Always scribbling.’
I suddenly felt cold, standing in the window with my wrists touching the cold metal. I moved into the centre of the ki
tchen and didn’t feel any better for it. I was as agitated as Nixon. I wanted him to tell me what he thought.
‘If you’re concerned there was something more to his death, you should tell Chivers,’ I said, bluntly. ‘He might listen to you.’
He scoffed at that. ‘Chivers? Man’s a jobsworth. Does as he’s told and can barely lever his fat arse out of his car. He wants it easy. Always has.’ He screwed up his face again. ‘I’m talking to you because you’re not from here. Because you’ve got no reason to think there was any explanation for his death other than an accident. And yet you seem to. You think there’s something to dig into. And maybe that’s got me thinking. I don’t know. Maybe I just wish my friend hadn’t died.’
He turned his back on me at that, manoeuvring himself so I was looking at his shoulder. ‘Maybe I just want you to ask a few questions, like Fairfax would.’ He spun back to me, narrowing his eyes. ‘You said you saw a body. After the tree fell.’
I pressed my lips together. Nodded.
‘And it weren’t there when you got back?’
I shook my head.
‘And Fairfax had been there in the time you took your eyes off the site, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘So Fairfax might have moved it,’ he said, cautiously.
I stayed silent. Listened to the ticking of the clock. Shivered, as if I was staring at my own grave.
‘Why would he do that?’ I asked, at last.
‘I don’t know, love. And I’ve been here long enough to know that people are happy to say nowt. Sometimes you’ll see a pike take a perch in the tarn. You’ll see teeth and fury and blood and scales. And a moment later there’s not a ripple on the water. That’s here, love. People are happy to wait for the ripples to drift away. But I need to know if there were scales in the water. I need to know if a pike took a perch.’
I heard myself breathing. Heard the tick of the clock change its rhythm and realized I could hear my own heart. Nixon looked at me for a moment longer than I was comfortable with. Then he gave a nod and rose from the chair.
‘I’ll see myself out,’ he said, quietly. He looked as though he was about to reach out and shake my hand. Then he stopped himself, as if the action would be wrong.
‘His notebooks,’ I said, unable to help myself. ‘They might make for interesting reading.’
He stopped in the doorway, smiling a strange little smile. ‘If you knew where he kept them, love, you’d know every dirty little secret in the village.’
‘He never showed you what he wrote?’
‘Not a word,’ said Nixon. ‘But I swear to God, there are those would kill to get their hands on a few pages. And then there are those who would put a match to every page.’
I was still standing there when I heard the door close. Still standing there when the next streak of sunlight pierced the cloud. Still standing when it winked out, and pitched me into darkness.
FELICITY
Transcript 0004, recorded October 29, 2010
Don’t hunch your shoulders. That’s what me mam always said. We’re prone to a hump, the lasses in our family. Mam’s started when she were not much past fifty. Looked like a question mark by the time she died. I always try to hold myself straight, though you don’t want people thinking you’re looking down your nose. Takes an effort, remembering. Some people never manage it. They grow old staring at their shoes. Spend their dotage walking along looking like they’ve dropped a tenner.
Were hard to keep my head up that day. Rain was falling straight down and every drop seemed to be looking for the back of my neck. I were probably wearing the headscarf that John had brought back from Carlisle. Nice silky material, all gold and red, like a fire. No bloody good in the rain but it was better than nothing and if I’m honest, I think I liked being the only splash of colour in that sea of grey. The sky looked like a coalman’s bathwater and the streets had rivers in every gutter. The leaves had been falling for a couple of months so there was no end of muck and mulch being carried in the gullies and it didn’t take long for the drains to fill up. Even at the bus stop by the post office I could hear the River Irthing, gurgling and mumbling like a sleeping drunk.
‘You think it’ll come?’
Pat had to ask it twice before I realized she was talking to me. My head was full of Fairfax. Full of footprints in dust and crumpled pages that smelled of smoke. Full of dead Frenchmen and hot coins.
‘Got your head in the clouds, Felicity? Be careful, you’ll drown.’
I told myself to smile. I’d always got on with Pat. Weren’t her fault she were born a little hard of thinking.
‘Sorry Pat, load of things on my mind. What was you asking?’
‘Brampton bus,’ she said. ‘Think it’ll come?’
‘Came last winter when we had five feet of snow,’ I said. ‘It’ll manage rain.’
She seemed relieved at that, as if I were the wireless and given her some official bulletin. In truth, I wasn’t sure. Didn’t even know if I wanted it to turn up. I should have spoken to John first off. Told him what I’d found and what I’d read. Should have walked up the hill and knocked on Cordelia’s door. Mrs Green in the post office said she’d been at Samson’s the previous night, bold as brass. Asking questions. Giving Chivers a pasting behind his back. She wasn’t letting it drop. She should know what I knew. She should at least be allowed to give me her opinions on the scraps of paper I’d found hidden in the church floor. She’d been to university, after all. Had a good big brain. I think I was just frightened of seeing the look on her face. I hadn’t supported her. Had been too busy snivelling and trying to make it all into a lie.
‘You’ll be needing some bits and bobs, I’d imagine,’ said Pat, huddling back into the protection of Debbie’s cottage opposite. Some days Debbie would let you wait in her house until the bus came. Today she hadn’t poked her head out the front door. Pat and me were soaked to the bone.
‘This and that,’ I said, and wondered to myself why I was being vague.
‘Aye, I’m short of that meself.’
Pat was in her early sixties with a face like yesterday’s rice pudding. She was small and round and had worn the same burgundy overcoat for as long as I’d known her. She was a hard worker though. Her husband, Keith, had taken ill a few years back and their son had no interest in taking on the family joinery business so it had fallen to Pat to make ends meet. She cleaned at the school and for a few of the big houses out towards Lanercost. Polished the silverware and glassware for the big fancy club on the Longtown road. She usually cycled but the weather had made that impossible. She needed the bus to come. Needed to deposit her savings in the Brampton bank before Keith could find where she kept them and limped his way down Samson’s.
‘Oh, there she is,’ said Pat, suddenly, under her breath. She raised a hand and waved at Mrs Parker, who was emerging from the post office with an empty basket over her arm. ‘I wonder if her halo keeps the rain off.’
‘She’s a kindly soul,’ I said, not really paying attention. ‘All those letters to write. Food parcels to send. She’s one of the good ones.’
Pat gave me a look like I was daft.
‘Short memory, Felicity,’ she said, a bit harsh for my liking. ‘Might be a saint these days but she were a terror when she were a girl. That poor brother of her’s had to bugger off to university just to avoid her. That were a daft thing to do cos he barely came back and he ended up shot to bits in the war. She can send letters and butter and bacon to half the starving families in Germany and she’ll still always be that nasty cow from the big house as far as I’m concerned. Anyways, Germans are doing better than we are these days. All the POWs are making a fortune over there. What’s she still bother with them for, eh? They may have worked her farm but I reckon twenty-two years later it’s time to pack it in.’
‘Maybe she’s being kind,’ I said, and it sounded feeble. I blushed a little and turned to the street, where Mrs Parker was climbing into her expensive car. As usual, she had a face
worse than the weather.
‘Kind? She’s maybe doing penance. She’d have been in the poorhouse if not for her husband and his bright ideas. More to the Swiss than yodelling and cuckoo clocks, believe me. He aint pretty but he’s interesting. Gave a good lecture at the Women’s Institute, which you’d have known if you bothered coming along.’
I turned my sigh into a cough and then shivered, exaggeratedly, as a silence began to stretch between us.
‘I were sorry to hear of Fairfax,’ she said. ‘They say it was sudden.’
‘Aye,’ I said, and it sounded too much like a shrug to be decent. ‘Janet and me were opening the curtains at his place this morning. Was all I could do not to run out the door.’
‘Was a good man,’ said Pat, nodding approval. ‘Knew him since I can remember. Always had a twinkle in his eye. You find the envelope?’
I shook my head. ‘Don’t think the bugger ever planned on dying. The place is a pigsty.’
‘No wife these past years,’ said Pat, shaking her head at this sorry state of affairs. ‘Kept himself smart though. Always shaved and scrubbed.’
‘That silly car,’ I said, falling into the easy back and forth.
‘Bought it for Christopher, if you ask me.’
‘Aye, that’s what everybody said. Maybe he just wanted it for himself. Either way. Least he died driving something he was proud of.’
Pat considered this. ‘You think he would still be alive if he had a more sensible car?’
‘I don’t know much about cars,’ I said, wiping rain from my face. ‘But you can still die if you drive a tank. Sometimes accidents happen.’
Pat nodded her head in agreement. ‘Was a shock for poor Ern,’ she said, widening her eyes.
