‘I can’t come with you?’
‘No. Not till you’ve sobered up. All right?’ Then she walked out of the house and left me alone in the silence of the hallway and the morning. And beyond that all the silences of Wiltshire and Hampshire. I sat down at the kitchen table, not knowing what to do. I took out my phone, and there was a text from Sophie waiting for me. What happened to you? It didn’t matter what she did and didn’t know any more. I sent her a message that read, My dad’s dying. I hoped she might call, but nothing happened.
Half an hour later I was sitting in the kitchen with my head in my hands when I heard the doorbell. She was standing on the front step in her school uniform, out of breath. For a moment neither of us said anything.
‘What do you mean your dad’s dying?’ she said.
I thought I might as well tell her everything.
‘All the time we’ve been seeing each other, I’ve been telling you he’s been ill, but I haven’t been telling you everything. He’s got cancer. He had chemo for a while but stopped because it wasn’t working. Last night he had to go into the hospital. Mum’s with him now, but she won’t let me go and see him.’
She came into the house, and in the hallway, as she shut the door behind her, she took me in her arms and held me, my face against her shoulder, my arms around her. We stayed like that for a long time. Then she led me into the kitchen and we sat down on the sofa by the Aga.
‘I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.’
‘I could never find a time to tell you. I didn’t want to scare you off.’
‘You wouldn’t have scared me off.’
‘I thought I was never going to keep you very long. I didn’t want to waste our time feeling sad.’
She flicked her hair from her eyes as if she was angry.
‘It wouldn’t have been wasted.’
‘No.’ I nodded. ‘I know.’ Then I couldn’t say anything for a little while, because I couldn’t bear that I’d got it wrong, all my life I’d got everything wrong.
‘Why don’t you have a shower and then we’ll go to the hospital?’ she said.
‘Don’t you need to go to school?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Go on, have a shower. I’ll wait down here.’
I nodded. I wanted to go. After Mum had left I had felt I wouldn’t be able to, I was too afraid of making her angry, but Sophie saying it made it seem normal. I would go, and I would see him, and things would be OK. I stopped in the door of the kitchen and turned back to face her.
‘Did you sort things out with your ex?’
‘Let’s talk about that another time.’ She smiled, but I could see it was just for show.
‘OK. I’ll be back in a minute.’
I walked upstairs to the bathroom. I turned on the shower and tried to wash myself away in the heat and steam of the water. When I came back downstairs ten minutes later she was already standing, ready to go. We went out of the house and walked along the main roads to the hospital. I wouldn’t show her the secret ways through the fields. I couldn’t think of anything to say to her any more, and she let me walk in silence. I suppose she assumed I was thinking about my dad, but I wasn’t. I wish I had been now. What I was thinking about was her, and how unfair it seemed that things had a way of happening all at once, so you could never give any of them the attention they needed, the attention they deserved, and ended up getting them all wrong.
We got to the hospital. I thought about telling her to go home, telling her I didn’t want her to be there when I saw him, because I knew it was over between us, but I realised I couldn’t. I needed her for just a little longer. I couldn’t face my mum without someone else next to me. I needed her for just another hour. We walked into the hospital, not knowing that Dad had died thirty minutes earlier.
As Close to the Stars as Possible
MARTIN HUGHES: I understand you’ve been examined by a paramedic at the scene, is that correct?
George Street: Yes that’s right.
MH: Very good. I’m going to leave you alone for a moment, I just need to collect my notes, OK?
GS: That’s quite all right.
MH: Would you like a glass of water?
GS: No, I’m quite all right, thank you.
MH: OK. If you do begin to feel unwell at any point during the interview, just let me know and we can get you some medical support, OK?
GS: That’s very kind, thank you.
MH: Concussion can take a little while to kick in, so if you suddenly find yourself becoming tired, just say.
One thing a death will do is make you reflect on how many different kinds of love there are to be experienced in the world. Because in the way you remember a person who has died, you discover a lot about the relationship you had with them in life. Or perhaps it would be better to say that certain things you have always thought to be true are finally proven. Only today, I have had confirmed my suspicion that it is possible to be hurt far more deeply and completely than I was when my mother or my father died, for example. In that, I think, there is a lesson about the variation that exists from love to love in a life, and the kind of love I have lost today.
The police car got us to the station at about quarter past nine. The driver stopped by the front entrance and another policeman helped me out. I was led to an interview room, past the front desk, through the locked door, into a cubicle on the left, and now I have been left alone, and I wish they hadn’t done that, I wish there was someone else here to be with me and stop me thinking.
I don’t mean I feel today like I’ve learned that I didn’t love my parents. But when they died, Dad first and Mum eight years later, although I felt the loss keenly, although on each occasion I felt bereft, I was able to place their deaths among the natural order of things, to understand those disappearances as events that were always going to happen at some point. Because the rational part of me recognised that death is an event in life, and most people are required to live through the deaths of their parents. When my father died I remember the strange feeling that from that day forward I was taking his place in the world. I never had a child to follow after me. So perhaps no one will ever take up my role.
I felt I was taking my father’s place not only because I was going to take over the farm, and live to a very great extent from that day forward the same life he had known, but also because I realised that everything he had ever thought or stood for or taught me could only remain in the world now if I carried it forward with me through the days remaining. I had, in some way, assimilated his life into mine.
The picture came to me of human lives as waves, lapping in succession at an indifferent shore. His had fallen back and been consumed by the wave coming after, which was my own, and now it was my turn to roil forward up the sand towards the strandline. So the sadness of his death was complicated by the idea that the family of which he and I had been instances in a long stream of being flowing back into the darkness of history was moving forward with his death, was flowing into me. It felt almost as if I had become more alive because he had died. Or that I had a responsibility to be so, now I was the head of the family.
And, as it has transpired, the footnote of the family as well, because I suppose there will be no one at my funeral now who bears our name.
There are sirens that cry out here, as if the whole building were another police car, a great police ship in which all troubles sail. I suppose the building must never sleep, there must never be a moment when someone’s sorrow isn’t starting up these wailing sirens. A light flashes in this room when the calling starts, so bright, it hurts the back of my skull. I don’t want to look at it, but I can’t take my eyes from it. Because I think it is calling for me, this light that is flashing. I think it wants to tell me my old life is over, now I have taken another life, now her life is over as well. In the flash of the orange light above the door I see her face quiet on the pillow, and the curled-up body of the woman thrown from the motorcycle, against the bollard, against the
kerb.
When my mother died the mood was very different. I believed she had been waiting for death for a long time, that we had all known since Dad died that death was really the only thing left to happen for her now. What grieved me most on the morning I found her was that my link with the world of my childhood was washed almost completely away, the only foothold remaining in that time from there on being whatever had lodged in my own memory, now no other witnesses were living.
Now I am old I wish the young man I used to be had worried less about the past and lived more heedlessly in the present. I suppose I did as much living as I could. But I burn to tell men and women who are still young now how quickly it is going to get behind them, how fiercely they ought to love it while they can.
MH: Sorry about that. You sure you don’t want a cup of tea or anything?
GS: No, thank you though.
The police officer has come back into the room at last. He does not look happy to be here. He didn’t look at me as he walked in, so I don’t look at him; I look at my hands instead. I suppose I feel ashamed, ashamed and afraid. I suppose they all feel sorry for me. The old are a regular subject for sympathy. People like me have nothing to look forward to, and everyone young is afraid of that time creeping up on them some time soon. So when they think they see it in someone else, it’s nice to pity the condition. It makes you feel like it is not yet yours, makes you feel safe and distant from the loneliness that comes at the end of life. So much of sympathy seems to me to be about making yourself feel better. There is very little real empathy in the world, I think.
Today is a very different experience to the days when my parents died. There is an even chance in a marriage, I suppose, that you will have to live through the death of your partner. That is a gamble I suppose you sign up for when you walk to the altar. But even if I did sign up for this, I still feel like someone must have betrayed me. As if I have been misled. No one ever warned me it was possible for something like this to happen to me without it killing me, so that I might have to live through it and deal with a feeling like this one. What I am learning now is that the love I shared with Valerie was of a very different nature to anything else I have known in my life. Because she was not a part of my life. She was not something I have lost. She was the reason I did everything. I can barely comprehend what that is going to mean for me now she is gone.
GS: Actually, would it be possible for me to have a glass of water?
MH: Of course. I’ll be a moment. Do you want anything else?
GS: No, thank you.
I remember the first death that really touched my life, the tragic ending of my childhood friend Ned Bassett, who was killed at thirty when he overturned his tractor on to himself. I think of it still, every time I pass the spot, all these years later. He worked with me on the farm, and it was me who found him when he got so late coming back that I started to worry and set out to see whether anything had happened to him. Today I am reminded of Ned because I feel again the injustice I felt on the day of his death. Not that Valerie has died young. But a slow death, a painful death, feels to me like an act of cruelty, and Valerie deserved anything but that. I suppose when you love someone there are no good deaths, no endings you would wish on them; you would only wish them life. But there is something evil about cancer. It seems so very, very wrong for life to burn itself up like that.
And yet all of this is complicated because in amongst the anger and the awful sorrow at what has happened I can’t help feel a relief that she is no longer suffering. And a strange and wonderful gratitude for her life, and the fact I got to share it, which is not lessened by any anger but does a great deal to make all the anger I have seem pitiful and small next to all that came before it. A whole human being’s life.
And beyond that there is another thought lying in wait for me, a melancholy I do not feel able to engage with now – the thought that this was not just the death of my wife but the end of a line, the end of my family. How enormous that idea seems to me today, though I have been ignoring it for years. When I die it will be as if none of us ever existed, as if none of the days of our lives ever took place.
MH: Here we are. Right then, shall we begin?
GS: Yes.
MH: Could you state your full name and address for me, please.
GS: George William Street, Manor Farm, Martin.
MH: Thank you. Now taking your time, and in your own words, could you tell me what happened to you this evening?
It is on the downland surrounding the village of Martin at the mouth of Cranborne Chase that our story has really played out, and I can’t tell how I feel about its coming to an end here in the city of Salisbury, ten miles to the north of our home. At first sight it seems like a tragedy for our endings to be uprooted like this and take place out of the context of everything that has come before, all the little triumphs we have shared. It seems to steal something away. But no river ends in the place where it started. And perhaps it is a kindness that the memory of this day will never cast its shadow too closely over our home. Perhaps it is right that a death takes place away from where the life was lived. And perhaps we haven’t been too brutally torn from our moorings by coming here. Being a farmer in Martin, there’s not much call to visit Salisbury more than every once or twice in a month for the market day, but it is still the brightest star in the constellation of settlements here where the green south of Wiltshire flows into Dorset and Hampshire.
The place where we made our life is a fairly brief interlude of cultivated land between the wildness of the New Forest to the south and the wildness of Salisbury Plain to the north. There can’t be forty miles between the ending of one and the beginning of the other, and in the sweep of land between them there is Salisbury and then a tapestry of farmland as rich and giving as any land in England.
The farmed stretch of Wiltshire is a highly organised, modern model of agricultural work, the twentieth century having imposed an efficiency on us all that led to startling changes in the way crops were grown compared to the way things were done round here a hundred years ago. My farm, which is about two hundred acres, I suppose now constitutes something of a historical document in itself, being so much smaller and more piecemeal than the big industrial outfits that surround me. But even I am not a mixed farm any more, growing one crop in one field and something else in the next. That tradition is very long gone. All my acres are given over to cattle. Even I have adopted the most efficient model I possibly can, in order to keep hold of some version of the way of life I grew up with and not have to sell up and move into the city.
GS: Well, I don’t know where to start. Where do I start?
MH: Perhaps you could tell me where you were driving to?
GS: What do you mean?
MH: What was your intended destination when the accident occurred? Where were you going?
GS: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know, do I? I suppose I was going home. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. I didn’t want to go home.
MH: To Manor Farm, that’s your place of residence, yes?
Place of residence is, perhaps, a more appropriate phrase to use than saying home, because I can’t be sure whether we’re ever at home anywhere, whether we ever belong anywhere. The more deeply you inhabit a landscape, the clearer it becomes that that landscape does not in turn feel deeply inhabited by you. I walk round my farm, and I can see layers and layers of memories on every corner, whole lives that have been lived there. But after I die, no archaeologist will ever be able to reveal those pictures that are visible to me. The world holds no trace of what happens in it unless we carve it in with violence or concrete. The whole of life as I have experienced it lives only in me, in my head, and the world itself is indifferent. What I think of as everything there is in the world, is no more than a reflection on the surface of the river. And the river will still be flowing when there are other faces reflected in it, and it will tell them nothing of what passed there before.
MH: Mr Street?
GS: Yes?
MH: Are you feeling OK?
I take hold with both hands of the rim of the plastic bucket chair I am sitting in and try to turn my thoughts to the room I am in, not my history. I have let the silence drift on too long. I suppose I have been trying not to think about what has happened. Perhaps I am in shock. I clasp my hands together so they don’t shake, and stare down at them. Perhaps if I keep things small, keep the world focused on as tiny a thing as the light from the striplight falling on my hands, I will be able to wrestle back some control.
GS: Well, I’m having trouble knowing what to tell you, you see.
MH: Why don’t you just tell me what you remember?
I can hardly keep from smiling then. I know that’s awful, but I can’t help hearing how stupid he sounds. What does that mean, what I remember? Does he want my whole life spooled out in front of him? He’s going to have to ask smaller questions than that if he’s going to get what he wants. Who am I, after all, to say where one thing stops flowing into another?
MH: Mr Street, I need you to tell me what happened.
The room we are sitting in is like a cubicle on a building site somehow. Not that I know very much about building sites, but I’ve been on them. A window in the door but no external windows, nothing on the walls, a striplight overhead, nothing here really but the table and two chairs, me and him, and of course the mirror window beside us, the famous mirror window you read about in every detective story. In all my years I’ve never been into this room before, or a room like it, but I’ve pictured it often enough, The Interrogation Room, reading my detective stories. Nonsense, she used to call them, though she always meant it kindly. Quite distinctly I hear her voice, and it frightens me, ringing out without an echo in this harshly lit room.
Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain Page 11
