Ann had a surprisingly snazzy laugh for a person who didn't blink. It was the cause of everything in the first place, the thing that bedazzled Sean, caught him unawares and now it was too late, he had his head through the wire. It grabbed him still. She laughed with her head back and her eyes closed and her mouth fallen open, like someone under a water fountain. Sometimes she had to hold on to something, as if laughing could knock you off your feet. Sometimes the thing she held on to was Sean, and this produced in him a sense of responsibility, of incumbence, as if he were a priest or a tree or some other immovable object. She didn't laugh often. You had to keep your eye on the ball.
Sean had not heard of anyone laughing in space. Smiling yes. But laughing? Space was not a laughing matter, you were not supposed to muck about. You couldn't just bounce up and down and go Wur.
Sean kept a newspaper photograph of the pre-flight Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in his pocket. He examined every detail, each grainy little truth: the two men, their faces free of helmets, grinning proudly out of the turtleneck rims of their spacesuits. For certain Sean Matthews would have grinned proudly too if it were he they were catapulting into the sky, high into the black unknown for the sake of all mankind, his country's flag in his pocket and Planet Earth's own God up there patiently waiting for him. He might well have grinned.
It amazed Sean that dogs, rats, monkeys and chimpanzees had all gone into space before mankind. It was all here in a book called Space, with pre-flight photographs of the animals in their capsules. Laika, once a mongrel, now the Sputnik space dog, showed her best doggy grin for the cameras. There was even a woman called Valentina Tereshkova. Sean had thought women were not allowed in space.
Sean sat at the bottom of the stairs reading this book. Well, not reading exactly, but looking at the pictures and guessing at words. Truth was it wasn't his book at all, but a library book which should have been returned by now. Inside, he found the moon, disappointingly grey and crumbly-looking, and pictures of the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, Laika, the Sputnik space dog, Ed White adrift on his silver cord, Luna 9, Apollo 8, and John Glenn inside the Friendship 7. Sean pointed things out to himself that he would later come to know by heart: Alexei Leonov, William Anders, Apollo command module. There were rockets exploding off launchpads and astronauts ecstatically afloat across the pages. Sean stared at the universe, or a corner of it; a fixed blackness, spangled with stars and planets and a pinkish haze to the right. He spoke the names he had heard of. Milky Way, Pluto, Venus, Saturn, Mars. This was good, this. He could talk about the cosmos all day, like bloody Patrick Moore.
At the book's centre were some photographs of what looked like white bone pushing through black. When you looked harder you saw the bone was perfectly curved like something ceramic and swirled with a dazzling blue. Sean stared. It was the most beautiful picture in the book. He knew it was Earth. You didn't have to read words in order to recognise your home.
Nine
WALTER BROWN WORKED for the Water Company in Wycombe. He rode his bicycle there most days as it was no more than five miles away, though it was hilly on the way back, thickening his calves as each year passed. He had worked his way up from office boy and was satisfied that these days he could call himself office clerk, having put in three blameless years.
The work was relatively undemanding, though Walter discovered he tolerated it quite well. He appreciated the routine, and the anticipation of unwrapping his sandwiches or bursting on to the high street for a quick lunchtime walk, with the opportunity to visit the library or purchase tobacco or check his watch against the Town Hall clock. Lately, though, he felt himself becoming increasingly restless. The repetitive elements, the indexing, filing, stamping, he minded less owing to the existence of the immense horse-chestnut tree that grew, almost to the roof, beside the building. The tree filled the upper windows with its tentacle-spread of mature branches, a sight that mesmerised Walter throughout the seasons, whether they were black-frosted in winter or blossoming, green-laden or aflame around Michaelmas time. He stared, pen poised, until the tree had mapped itself like circuitry into his brain.
Walter had composed three odes to the tree, though he no longer bothered with the first two. Ideally he would have preferred to begin forcefully with 'Great oak!' and felt keenly the frustration of finding himself unable to, faced as he was with a horse chestnut and nothing to be done about it.
Sylvia Pusey worked as a secretary at the Water Company. Walter had not really noticed her until one day she touched his arm on the stairs and said, 'You can take me to Hughenden Park for the botany if you like.' Walter hesitated then, to be sure he had heard correctly, and he had hesitated ever since where Sylvia was concerned. She was a perfectly nice girl, pretty enough, pleasant, obliging, with nice brown hair, who held no extremist views about anything. But Walter felt only a kind of blankness when he looked at her. She produced in him something inert, disinclined. Walter's mother, on the other hand, took a shine to Sylvia.
Walter lived with his mother, Hilda Brown, in one of the red-brick semis built in 1908 on Valley Road. Hilda Brown pointed out to Walter that Sylvia was a good, ordinary, polite girl; pretty, but not too pretty, educated but not too educated. He would be a fool to look a gift horse in the mouth, she said.
Hilda Brown was always having to point things out to people. She thought if she didn't point things out, the whole world would go entirely around the bend. The man next door, for example, kept cages of yellow and blue birds, referred to by him as buggery guards, and occupied himself strangely, at night, in the back garden. He shouted out habitually in his sleep and his wife had grown nervous as a hare. Hilda knew he had fought in the Boer War, but she did not consider this an excuse. He preferred birds to people, that much was obvious. She kept Walter away from him.
Walter's father, Frank Brown, had worked at the Town Hall. It was generally supposed that he had helped arrange Walter's appointment at the Water Company. Unless you were very idle indeed, he used to say, you would have a job for life, unlike those who were laid off during difficult times and could not know what on earth was coming next, or how they would feed their families.
Walter understood it was important to know what on earth was coming next, but he couldn't bring himself to fear for his future the way everybody else did. The day he had discovered his father kneeling before the gooseberries with his face in the dirt, he had known he was going to go about things differently. To expire suddenly on your knees, while not ideal, was preferable to dying lingeringly in a bed, anyone could see that. But Walter remained troubled by the memory of his father's body – the weight, the dampness, the yawning oval of his sour-smelling mouth.
Walter's father had managed to escape the first war by dint of his age. He was forty-three when Walter was born and forty-five by the time conscription came. Invalided soldiers and hearsay brought the facts home to him, and Frank Brown became fretful about the good fortune that had spared him. Bad luck seemed more likely, and this particular fortuity haunted him for the rest of his life.
Walter's grandfather too had worked at Wycombe Town Hall, worked his way up, was how Hilda put it; a dynasty of hard-working clerks, the Browns. Walter was born in their little house on Penn Road in Hazlemere where they all lived, three generations of clerks together, until Walter's father got a mortgage and they moved to one of the smart, newly built houses that was to remain his home until the day of his great departing.
As a boy Walter had known the woods as well as his own two hands. Still, Mary Hatt had a talent for hiding. He found her at last in Millfield Wood, up an elm, straddling a low branch. He had to shout, then she screamed and spat at him for frightening her. Now she would not come down. All right then, she would come down if he chased her, that was fair.
Walter had chased Mary many times. He had stopped enjoying it, truth be told, now he was nineteen, but Mary was a creature of persistent habit and one of anything was never enough. Mary liked any sort of game or lark. Hide-and-seek was all right, but best
of all she liked games involving stealth and surprise. 'Boo' was her first word. One time she chased the man come to do the steam cultivator all the way up to Provost Spinney, laughing like a bear all the way. She had a great burst of a laugh – she could let it off like a missile and it would catch up with you no matter how fast you ran.
He had agreed to her request and chased her again. Now she had disappeared. Walter stopped and caught his breath and waited for her to jump out or scream or pelt him from behind, but she didn't come. He sat down on a bulging tree root and wondered what would happen to him if it turned out he had lost her. He rested his long chin in his hand. He considered the thrashing he would get from her father, the hiding from his mother, p'raps others, p'raps all the mothers and fathers, p'raps they would line up with belts, canes and horsewhips. There would be nothing left of him by the time they were finished. They would have him arrested. Mr Looker, the policeman, would ask him where he lived, though he knew it perfectly well; he would ask it in his gloomiest tone. He would be guilty of something, of everything. He would go to prison. Walter hung his head. His father had once said, 'Look after nature, Walt, and nature will look after you.' This seemed a tragically sad thing to Walter now; he couldn't think why.
It was several minutes before she threw down her shoe. It bounced, heel down, off the top his head and rolled into the moss. Now he would thrash her himself and see how she liked that. But when he looked up it was not Mary he saw, it was something else – a nymph perhaps, a thing that dwelt in a forest, and there it stood, on a branch, casual, as if this were not at all strange. 'Mary?' he said and she smiled back, though Walter would never be able to recollect this smile his whole life long, because it was her breasts he was concentrating on, her naked breasts to be precise, the only breasts he had ever seen, the only breasts he had ever thought about wanting to see. And all his boyhood dreams he hadn't yet dreamed and all his boyhood wishes he hadn't yet wished came true instantaneously, and somewhere in a darkened corner of Walter's head a star exploded.
'What y'starin' at then?'
Walter didn't answer. It was a complicated question.
'Do you like me then?'
There was no point in Walter trying to speak, so he didn't. Instead he sank to his knees, like a hind when the shot takes him cleanly, like his own poor father at the soft arrival of his death.
Sid Perfect and his friend, the Methodist Charles Sankey, had once made their living poaching. Sankey was from Lyme Regis. Something tragic had happened to him, though nobody could remember what exactly. The pair were dab hands with long nets, purse nets, gate nets. Like fishermen on dry land they could haul in rabbit, hare or game bird. On a weekend they would visit the White Horse and lose their sea legs altogether. You could see them pitching about like a couple of rubber pirates, tipping and falling, storm-tossed, until finally they would each vomit up a song and hit the deck.
Sankey used to join Sidney Perfect on well-lit nights with nets and spade. Everyone admired Perfect's ferrets. He had jills mainly, rather than dogs. They used to flush out scores of rabbits for Sankey to pop when they worked as a team. Sometimes they were in trouble over it and at other times a farmer would be only too grateful to get the rabbit numbers down before his crops were ravaged. Always an excellent shot, Sankey, but since he found God he had laid down his weapon and taken up The Word. Now he wouldn't hurt a fly, or a wasp, even as those very wasps devastated the orchards. Time was when a farmer would be only too glad of a team like Sankey and Perfect: rats, rabbits, pigeons, moles – a shilling per skin they got for mole pelts – even sparrows, a flock of a thousand or more might settle on a field of wheat and do for it. On a moonlit night the contrasting wide and narrow silhouettes of Sankey and Perfect with ferrets, purse nets and spade were as familiar in the nocturnal landscape as bats or barn owls.
Charles Sankey, meanwhile, had pretensions to preaching. He had never received any type of formal instruction, or even informal welcome, from any church in the parish of Hughenden or elsewhere. He had become a Methodist in Lyme Regis in 1922. He chose the Methodists because they seemed a cheery bunch compared to the other denominations. He knew nothing about it, but he liked the songs. He worshipped locally at the Widmer End Mission Hall. He made an occasional nuisance of himself, particularly where preacher Harry Blagdon was concerned. He was never without his hymnal, Sacred Songs and Solos, which he carried about him, though there wasn't a hymn in there he didn't know by heart. 'I know one thousand, one hundred and thirty-nine hymns by heart' – this is what he claimed and no one suggested putting it to the test. One day, out of love for God and clerical ambition for himself, Sankey gave up ale. Though it made him sorrowful to do so, he emerged a better, cleaner, godlier man. He took his large, kindly face, with its lumpy nose and dome of a forehead, to house, woodland, farm, anywhere they did not serve ale. He walked spryly, up on his toes, in any direction salvation was required and blessings prayed for. A few were charmed by his melancholy tone, friendly advice, and quick intelligent eyes that threw glances and squeezed together when he smiled. He was not too holy for jokes or sponge cake, and his long pale hands rested warmly on the palms of those in need or trouble.
Harry Blagdon, however, was the official lay preacher. He walked many miles on his circuit to Bourne End, Lacey Green, Flackwell Heath and Bledlow Ridge, and was envied by Charles Sankey, who begrudged him every step of his mission, every handshake, every cup of tea with parkin slice. At first Sankey had attempted a friendship, walking alongside him, sometimes all the way to Little Missenden, always joining him in worshipful singing as they travelled through sleet and rain and wind. But at every destination it was Father Harry they hurried out to greet, Father Harry who must come in after such a long journey and wash and get warm and take tea with cake, Father Harry who must suffer the fussing attentions of the womenfolk and the mindful solicitude of the men. It wasn't just the tea breads – Sankey could hear the jab of piano keys and bursts of song from inside the houses as he waited outside, he could hear the women's voices and the respectful silence that fell as the preacher spoke.
Sankey reckoned God was as much in his heart as in Harry's and He guided his tongue as mindfully too, but nobody else seemed to see it that way, and particularly not Father Harry as he handed Sankey his hat to hold while he comforted a grieving woman with unusually beautiful hair.
One day Sankey had his shotgun by him as he hoped to take a bird or two at dawn at the Hughenden estate before anyone else was about. A bright disc of sun had hung itself over St Mary's Church, the place it auspiciously began each day with the melting of the churchyard dew. Then there it was: Harry's black hat skimming the hedge, a phlegmy version of The Lord Taketh Care of Me', and before he was able to give it careful consideration, Sankey found that he had fired.
The shot was not accurate. And though Sankey knew he had not actually killed the preacher this time, he felt sufficiently afraid of himself, of what he might do next, to run away and hide in a lightning tree until noon. He hid the gun in a dry ditch where nettles grew, until it was safe to retrieve it.
Father Harry Blagdon suffered no physical injury other than mortal fright, which repaired well enough after the ministrations of local ladies, and was aided ably by generous amounts of tea, perhaps gin, and cake. Afterwards, however, Harry's story grew tall with telling until only those closest to God were able to believe it. These enrichments (garnishings you might say), sprinkled upon the truth to better explain to his flock the everyday miracles performed by God, were not in Harry's mind in any way related to actual sinful untruths. In any case he told the story, richly embroidered, for many years to come. He had been walking by Millfield Wood, he pronounced, when a blackened creature more than ten feet high with terrible sharpened horns appeared before him. Father Harry knew right away it was the Devil. He preached the word to the beast until, terrified, it turned on its hairy hocks and ran. And though it took a swipe or two at the preacher, brave Father Harry pursued it, chasing it back into the woods with its
tail on fire.
Father Harry Blagdon was a celebrated hit after that. Sankey had inadvertently boosted Blagdon's reputation and spoiled his only opportunity for apprenticeship. Blagdon's circuit increased as his reputation grew. His triumphs over the beast meant he became increasingly in demand across South Bucks. Who was to say there was not another beast lurking? It was not possible to search every copse, every spinney, each stretch of woodland. Who would protect the good people of Hughenden? Who would flush the beast from the woods, so the people of the parish could sleep soundly in their beds?
Ten
IF HE IS to enter deep space, Sean must practise being weightless. They walk, Sean and Ann, to the pond by Cockshoot Wood and he throws himself in. Ann waits for him to surface. She hurls in a stone to get his attention but there is no sign of him. She waits, bored. She wonders if he has drowned.
Up he comes then, spluttering like an amateur, half strangled in his blue tubing. Ann loses interest and watches the pond for movement. The surface is grey-green and busy with insects and there is a lapping at the far end.
Legend says the Hughenden Dragon lives here, though no one has ever seen it. Though it is impossible to know what to expect, chances are it won't respond kindly to the arrival of a small trainee astronaut in its depths. The dragon had to be at least four hundred years old. One day, in its youth probably, it was said to have frightened a farm girl as she collected water and the girl's neighbours hatched a plan to kill it. The story was well known locally. It was decided the girl would sit at the water's edge, tempting it to the surface, and when it appeared they would leap out from behind briars and set about the serpent with axes. It was said the unfortunate creature let out piteous cries. A woman and a baby were swallowed by a dragon from this very same pond some years after; that is the rumour. It remains unclear whether the original creature had survived or if another was in residence. Nobody took any chances, all the same, until eventually a lack of fresh occurrences faded the collective memory and turned the tales into local legend.
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