Are you reading more of your nonsense?
Even if I am imagining it, the sound of her voice in this room changes all the air around me, affects me as if it was as real as a stroke, as a heart attack. I am transported back to the first time I heard her speak. It was 1963, a dance in a scout hut on the edge of Salisbury. The ripples of the sixties had barely lapped at the banks of the city then. We have never been a forward-thinking county, but we knew about Elvis and Chuck Berry and the like, and all us young men wore our hair Brylcreemed back from our foreheads.
GS: I’m sorry. I’m just – let me try and tell you then. My home is a farm, I’m a farmer, I live at Martin in Dorset, just over the border into Dorset, do you know it?
MH: Yes, I know the area.
GS: Well, that’s where I live. I’ve always lived there. I was going there when I set off. I was going home. I was tired, you see, and I’d stayed out as long as I could. And I hadn’t been driving for ever so long, five minutes, I don’t know. I hadn’t got anywhere at all, really. I’d been parked up by Sainsbury’s for a little while. I just parked there for a few hours and went for a walk. I was just wandering. I stopped to have a cup of tea in Reeve’s, I just didn’t want to go home yet, you see?
MH: OK.
GS: Are you married, officer?
MH: No.
GS: Do you have someone you love?
MH: What is—
GS: I lost my wife this morning, you see. That was why I didn’t want to go home. And I liked walking round Salisbury because she came from here; it was here that I found her.
So it goes like this. I’m twenty-one – God, what I wouldn’t give to be twenty-one again, to have it all in front of me again. I’ve come with my mates, the other hands on the farm; we head out together into Salisbury at the end of the week to let our hair down, to see and to be seen. We like to go to dances, spend our money on drinks for ourselves and the beautiful girls you can meet at a dance. Not every Friday night, because there isn’t a dance to go to every week, but at least once a month we’ll all get into our best shirts and our smart jackets, slick back our hair, then jump into Ned’s car and ride into town. Ned was the only one of us to have a car back then; apart from these outings there was never much call for any of us to leave Martin, so cars didn’t seem much of a priority. It felt at the time like the most perfect happiness that was possible in the world to be driven into town in Ned’s car with the thought of a beer on your lips, a girl on your knee, your feet flying over the cheap lino of a community hall to the music of the touring bands or the local bands trying to pretend they’d spent the whole week opening for the Beatles on tour. They were pale enough imitations, but us lads were all jealous of them because the girls seemed to think they were immortal. No one in the world ever wielded more power than a boy who knew how to play guitar at a dance on a Friday night.
When I look back it’s harder to feel it as purely, of course. I can’t help but notice that even though I was the youngest of the bunch, I always got to sit in the front of the car. All the time I spent with my friends on and off the farm we always knew I was different, marked out from the rest of them for another kind of life than their round of work days and evenings and weekends. I was going to own the farm once my father died. One day I would be the boss of them all, so it was never me who crammed into the back seat.
My dear departed friends. I have outlived them all now, Ned and David and John. And there’s another inequality, because perhaps it was the work I paid them to do that meant they died so young? The drudge of harvest and winter and morning after morning.
I am trying to keep the image of her away from me, trying not to look at the light, but it keeps rushing up on me no matter what memory I hide in.
Burrow deeper. Get away. Keep it away for as long as you can.
We were good with the girls, the young men of the village of Martin. We liked to imagine we had a reputation, that whenever we walked into a dance, all heads would turn. I think in the end it’s confidence gets you everywhere at parties like the ones we used to go to, so the glorious thing was that it didn’t really matter how good looking we actually were, our prophecies ended up being self-fulfilling. Most weeks there’d be at least one of us missing by the time Ned came to drive us home. The lucky deserter would have to get the bus home the next day, or hitch a lift if we’d gone out on a Saturday night and he woke up in a girl’s bed on a Sunday morning when there were no buses running. On the nights it was Ned who didn’t come back, John was allowed to drive the car. He drank more than Ned, and I was always privately terrified of these journeys, though of course I tried to act relaxed while they were happening.
Although I was the baby of the group, my luck was usually as good as anyone’s, and I saw as much of the Saturday-morning bus as the others. A good shame, that one. Sometimes the men who drove past you would shake their heads and smile when they clocked your last night’s clothes and the rings round your eyes, as though they had played that game too, long ago.
Golden, burning days indeed.
I knew she was different the moment we met. I’m sure that would seem strange and old hat to other people if I said it aloud. It was a Saturday dance in an old prefab in Harnham, and the band was good, and I liked the mood in the air the minute I walked through the door. I saw her straight away. She was standing with three or four other girls by the makeshift bar, smoking a cigarette, and I suppose we must have made a bit of an entrance because all those girls stopped talking and looked at us boys looking back at them.
I only saw her, not the other girls standing around her. She had the most extraordinary eyes the colour of amber, and that sweep of auburn hair I loved so much for the rest of her life, and I remember she wore a blue scarf with some kind of pattern to it. I imagine it must have been floral, but the picture won’t come clear and that scarf of course is long vanished; I haven’t seen it in years and years. Whatever its pattern may have been, I remember it sort of showed off her eyes and the shape of her face very well.
Of course, you didn’t go straight up to a girl at a dance. So I held her look for a moment, then left her alone for half an hour. Then, with a couple of drinks inside me, when the room was packed and everyone dancing, I went up to the girl who would become my wife and asked her what her name was, and she told me her name was Valerie. I asked her if she wanted to dance, and she came out on to the floor with me, the two of us walking hand in hand. She was a better dancer than I was, but I suppose I must have been good enough, because I didn’t take my eyes off her and she didn’t take hers from me. When we were hot and out of breath I asked if she wanted to go for a walk, and she said she did. I kissed her then, once we were outside and alone in the dark, a rush of nerves and feeling, a rush of euphoria when she opened her mouth and kissed me back. She asked me where I lived, and I told her I was from Martin. She told me she lived close by and asked if I wanted to walk her home, and of course I agreed because we both knew the steps to the dance we were dancing. At her front door I kissed her again, then she asked me inside and I followed her into the hallway, holding her hand, walking on tiptoe so as not to wake her parents. It was as easy as that. I had found the meaning of my life in the course of an evening. A pair of amber eyes, a sweep of auburn hair, a blue scarf glimpsed across a room. I never wanted to go out looking for another girl again.
None of this, of course, is what the policeman sitting opposite me wants to hear. So I don’t tell him any of it. I give him the colder facts instead.
MH: I see. I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr Street. Was her death sudden?
GS: No, no. She died quite peacefully really, after a long illness. It was all calm; it was all very much expected.
MH: You must have been very distressed.
GS: What do you mean?
MH: Only that it must have been a very distressing day for you.
GS: Of course it was. By God. Of course it was. How else do you think I might feel?
MH: I’m sorry, but I’m only trying to as
certain your state of mind this evening when you got into your vehicle.
GS: My state of mind? What do you mean, state of mind? What the hell does that mean?
‘Long illness’ indeed, who am I pretending to be, the obits writer of The Times? I should have the courage to give the thing a name and call it cancer, to tell him what happened, to say it out loud. Anything else is just shirking the fight, and God, how I want to fight now, when I think of what happened to Valerie.
The sickening impact of metal on metal, the crunch and the rending. I barely had time to apply the brakes before I hit her, then swerved violently away and into the building, the whole sky closing over me as the dark of the brickwork blocked out the light and I thought that everything was ending. And I fancy now, though I can’t be sure, that even as I shattered the window, as it flew over me, I heard the body of the woman on the moped hit the ground. What was it that killed her precisely? A broken back? A broken neck?
GS: I was upset, of course I was upset. I felt very angry. I felt much more than upset. I don’t know the word for how I was feeling. There isn’t a word for something like that.
MH: Mr Street, what time of day did your wife pass away?
Painful to reduce it to such a cold fact as the time of death. Where would you place that, would you say? The minute she stopped breathing? The day of the diagnosis, one year earlier? The first bout five years before that, the first course of chemotherapy and the subsequent remission? Surely this had been a relapse of all that, a return to the dark old days, the thing coming to claim her a second time round? Or if you were feeling bleak enough, and I am of course feeling bleak enough today, perhaps you would point to the moment of our marriage, when her fate was sealed and the life she was going to live was all mapped out for her, or even the moment of birth as where Valerie started to die?
GS: It was early this afternoon. So a long time before the accident. And I wasn’t crying and I wasn’t shaking and I felt very empty but I felt under control when I got behind the wheel, which I think is what you’re asking.
I had known the previous evening what was going to happen, but they hadn’t let me stay at the hospital. She was too tired, they said; it was best if she were given time to herself, if I went home. All the same, I think she and I both knew what was coming when I kissed her good night and headed for the car park.
When she first went into the hospital it seemed ridiculous to me that I might ever leave her side at all, but atrocities such as that quickly become habitual. Because of course you can’t stay there and let everything else fall away, not if you’ve a farm to run. Not if your wife is telling you she wants her peace in the evenings sometimes as well. You must reconcile yourself to the fact she needs her sleep, that work must be done, and learn how to walk away from her day after day and get into the car and drive home. And sleep alone in the big bed, thinking of her. And try to be hopeful in the mornings. And try to survive the nights.
When the milking was done I headed for the hospital like always, shirking half my work and leaving it to the young men who have taken the place of the young men I grew up with, the boys who have done the lion’s share of my work since Valerie fell ill. And I suppose will be doing all of it very soon, if the place doesn’t have to be sold. I won’t be much use for much longer. As always, I stopped at the Nisa on the road to the hospital to buy her some bananas and a bottle of water and a copy of the Telegraph. While I queued to pay I was overcome by the most awful certainty that today what I was doing was hopeless – that the bananas I had just put into my basket were never going to be eaten. She had been unwell yesterday, worse even than the day before, which had been a deterioration in itself. The state of things hung unspoken in the air. Neither of us could ever have talked about something like that. It was never our way to come at such things head-on. Nonetheless, it was there in the looks that passed between us, and that was why I had asked the nurse for the first time in weeks about staying the night last night.
When I got to the front of the queue I didn’t know whether I could bear to buy the things I had in my basket. I felt sure she would never need any of them, that everything I was about to pay for would end up unused. I didn’t mind paying for it, of course I didn’t. What I couldn’t bear was the thought of having to throw them all away, later that day or that evening, as if I was throwing her out with the last of the light. I had never even liked bananas, and I doubted I could have made any use of something meant for her on the day she had died anyway, it would all have to go in the bin, and I thought there must be a very real chance that having to do that could actually break my heart. I might end up dying of grief on the same day that she died of cancer.
Then I imagined the scene where I arrived to see her without my usual offerings, my pathetic day’s provisions in their Nisa bag, and she realised I hadn’t brought them because I didn’t think there was any point any more, and that was far more horrible to contemplate. The idea of her face in the moment she knew I had written her off. I paid in a hurry when I thought of that, because I wanted, just for one last time, to take her hand in mine and hold it as tight as I dared, and try to persuade her just once more that it was all right, that things were going to be all right.
Then I saw what she looked like on her last morning as the light from the window fell over her face. Her breathing was laboured, and by that time the nurses knew as well as we had done the previous evening that her story was ending. It was clear in the way they were gathering around her, like the egrets who fly over Martin Down. Someone took me aside when I had sat with her for about an hour, to tell me how very ill she had become in the night, because she was slipping in and out of consciousness and they wanted me to understand that it was almost over now, it couldn’t be long. I hardly listened at all, just nodded my way through everything that needed to be said so I could get back to her as quickly as possible. I wanted her to see my face for all the time she had left awake now, so she knew she was safe. Just in case it stopped her feeling frightened. That was all the influence over things that was left to me by lunchtime. Mankind can build cities, split atoms, create life. We are all but helpless in the face of death. I felt like a baby, and it was all so unfair, because of course what I really needed just then was her. Her strength and wisdom and understanding. She, perhaps, would have known what to do, if only she hadn’t been dying.
When the nurse had said all he wanted to say I went back to Valerie and sat down next to her again and took her hand, and she woke and smiled and stayed awake for a little while. I told her, I’m here, my love. It’s all right. She told me she loved me, and I told her I loved her as well, and then we sat there holding hands like lovers till she fell asleep again.
I can’t imagine any life feels like a real life that isn’t lived entwined like ivy with someone else’s. That’s how your days can matter and take on a weight, if you can make another person laugh, feel something, if your life can become part of a richer pattern. That seems to me to be the one truly beautiful thing there is in the world.
GS: She fell asleep for the last time around one, and it was quite quick after that. She just stopped breathing in the end, you see. And have you known that feeling, those five minutes?
The policeman took a breath and nodded, and I made a mental note that I must find a way to thank him, from whatever cell I ended up in after tonight, for engaging with me like that in that moment. I’m sure that’s not how you’re supposed to treat murderers, if that is indeed what I am. It’s certainly what I think I must be, because didn’t she die when I ploughed the car into her? Like a rabbit going into the blades of a combine, wasn’t she scattered out of existence? I would have to write him a letter to express my gratitude for his consideration from my prison cell. I doubted that I would be able to express any feeling properly now.
MH: Yes, I have.
GS: Well then, you know what it was like. And the time straight after that.
It had been as if I had gone deaf. I didn’t let go of her hand for a long time, not
until I was asked to, probably not the first time I was asked to either, because for a long time I really couldn’t hear anything. I think my body was going into shock, because that is one symptom of fainting, isn’t it? You grow pale, your senses fail, you can’t hear or see anything, then you collapse. So perhaps I sat there with her when she died and went white as the sheet she lay on. I didn’t want to let go of her hand until I absolutely had to, because as long as we were still together like that, while we still shared that much, I felt I had not yet left the clearing in the woods where we had walked together. I knew letting go of her hand would be going on into the dark.
Another siren has sounded.
GS: What’s that noise?
MH: I’m very sorry, Mr Street. That siren means I need to leave for a couple of minutes. Will you be all right here?’
GS: On my own?
MH: Just for a minute. The siren means another officer needs some help.
GS: Then of course you must go. I’ll be all right here.
MH: I’ll be right back.
And I am alone again, and the memories well up now there is no one to distract me from the prison of myself. I can hear the sound of the car hitting the motorbike. I can hear the sound of the cardiac monitor, going on forever on the same single note. I think when she flew from the bike I heard the crunch as she hit the ground and her body wrapped impossibly, contortedly round the bollard. I can’t have done, over the sound of the car, but it is here in the room with me now, that sound; it is taunting me with what I have done, it is trying to drown me in the horror of this evening.
I had walked up that same road earlier in the afternoon, as if I had been planning the crime, it appears to me now, though of course that wasn’t what I was doing. I was simply trying to get away from myself, and what had happened, and to control my breathing, and get a grip on my grief and stop myself crying. I knew Winchester Street was quiet, and no one would see me if I started to cry down there. I thought perhaps if I walked that way I would be able to distract myself for a moment. There were memories here that could lead me away from her. The cobbler I always used was on Winchester Street, a dowdy little shop I liked because it had no pretension, it made no attempt to look beautiful for its customers. It sold new shoes and mended old ones, and the proprietor seemed to trust that was enough to keep him ticking over. So the little shelf racks on which his shoes and polishes were displayed had been hammered together out of old ply and not replaced in the twenty years I had been going there. The shop had a pleasant smell of machine oil, which made me feel I was in my workshop at home. I liked the owner. I had never known his name, but he seemed to know me when I came in to have things mended, from the way he greeted me, and that made me feel like the shop was a place I belonged. That, I suppose, is a trick a shopkeeper learns, to make his customers feel like the owners of the place, as if they could be at their ease and take their time, so they spend their money and feel good about it and keep him in business. He was a quiet man, the cobbler, and I used to fancy sometimes he had lived through some great trauma that made him seem so distant from the day around him, as though there was another skin between him and the rest of the world, as though he was under water. I walked past the shop that afternoon and was surprised to find it was closed. There were boards across the windows. I wondered idly where I would get my shoes mended now and what had happened. Perhaps he had gone bust. Perhaps he had simply had enough.
Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain Page 12
