When she finally found him, he was sitting on the damp ground under an ancient yew, his back against the buried wall of the old ice house, swishing his stick uselessly in wide arcs through the air in front of him.
‘Good evening.’
He jumped to his feet, brandishing the stick stiffly like a weapon. ‘Ellie – my God, Ellie, it’s pitch dark. What on earth are you doing?’
‘It’s not quite dark.’ She gestured to the dip of the mere: a moon was rising low over the water, making it ripple silver. ‘It just seems darker under here.’
‘Nonetheless.’ He tucked his stick under his arm. ‘I didn’t think you ever came here. I didn’t think you liked the mere.’ Stepping past her, he resumed his slow patrol, marshalling the historic quiet with the arrhythmic swish of his stick. He was angular in the chill gloom.
Ellie hesitated. ‘I wanted to apologize for not coming this evening for library duty.’
‘It was a quiet evening. There were no readers.’
‘That’s as I thought. But the men suggested I come to explain. To apologize.’
‘Think nothing of it, Ellie. You weren’t required.’
‘They thought you might be… I don’t know – offended, I suppose.’
‘I was not offended.’
She could not say anything after that; she could not reply to his brusqueness, so she just walked alongside him, listening to the beat of his stick.
‘They’re quiet tonight, aren’t they?’ she asked, after a while. ‘The frogs.’
He did not answer.
‘They’re probably waiting for the rain. It feels like it’s going to rain, doesn’t it, Mr Quersley?’
He might have nodded, she could not be sure; it might simply have been his movement through the clumps of long grass. Somehow it mattered.
‘Don’t you think so? Don’t you think it might rain, Mr Quersley?’
He stopped, cocking his head. A frog very close to them began with the lightest of groans. In response, a chorus started up all around, strident, undeniable, filling the night with urgent desire.
Oscar held his stick aloft, not quite still. Ellie could see the shiver of the brutal metal tip. For a moment he was poised, then he took one long, quick step sideways, turning, bringing the stick down in a graceful arc, driving the point of it hard into the ground. Ellie saw something flailing.
He straightened himself, pulling the stick out of the earth with a sharp tug and holding an impaled frog towards her. Its legs waved at her frantically, swimming through the damp air; a dark slime squeezed over the bulge of its stomach.
‘Aha! You see?’
It was a slight trophy, but he stood squarely behind it, proud. She put her hand up to keep it away. The frog became still.
With a deft flick of his wrist, Oscar loosened it from the stick and let it drop to the ground. He put his heel on it, twisting his foot several times. Then he looked up at her. ‘That doesn’t happen very often. A clean strike.’
He wiped the sole of his boot on the long grass and Ellie moved away, avoiding the crushed body of the frog. The rain started, slow, heavy drops, intermittent. She pulled the edge of her light scarf over her fringe.
‘You’d better go home, Ellie. It’s going to rain hard. After this hot weather, too, there may even be a storm.’
The drops fell harder.
‘But I just wanted to tell you, Mr Quersley…’ In a sudden burst, the rain descended furiously, rumbling against the ground and the deep water of the mere. She raised her voice. ‘I wanted to explain. In case you thought I’d simply forgotten to come, or that I couldn’t be bothered—’
He, too, was shouting against the noise. ‘Really, I told you, Ellie – it’s of no matter. I… in fact, I hardly noticed your absence.’
His words were squandered by the gusting breeze and he strode away, purposeful.
Ellie stood in the rain, hanging her head, seeing nothing, her scarf clinging now to her hair.
It was several minutes before she began to trudge back through the trees, her pace slowed, perhaps, by the uncomfortable flap of her wellingtons. By the time she reached the manor, she was soaked.
It felt like she had been punished for something.
Six
There was so much: pictures peeling from heavy frames, the skeletal remnants of dark furniture, cupboards stuffed with broken trinkets, lurching statues pale in the gloom, doors everywhere, unlit passages and narrow stairs, collapsed plaster and crumbling stone, the smell of rotting carpets and doomed wood, the irrepressible majesty of the confident spaces.
In the end, they chose a room that was empty apart from a four-poster bed with mouldering curtains, a greening mustard-gold, their edges frayed and their seams splitting.
Dan stepped warily towards the window, testing each of the floorboards in turn. ‘Turn on the light. Let’s see properly.’
Gadiel searched both sides of the doorframe for a switch. ‘I don’t think there is one.’ He went back out to the corridor; when he returned he was puzzled. ‘There aren’t lights anywhere. I don’t think there’s any electricity.’
‘Nothing at all? Don’t be stupid. There must be, man. Even stately homes have electricity. Even the rich need toasters.’ Dan scrubbed angrily at the glass of the window with his wrist, working a circle into the grime and peering through it, as if to find the cause of such a complicated deception. All he saw was his own reflection, flat against the dark.
He pushed at his hair, turning away and flinging himself full length, backwards, onto the bed. They heard the squelch of the springs and, moments later, smelt a stale must. ‘We can’t let it put us off, man. Not now, when we’ve got a good thing going. And I bet there’ll be electricity downstairs. We should go downstairs again. We can set up the wireless.’
‘I don’t know.’ Gadiel went over to the bed and fingered the curtains gently. The fabric flaked, disintegrating under his touch. ‘I quite like it up here. There’s something about it… it’s as if they’ve lent us their bedroom, as if we’ve been invited to stay.’
‘Oh, come on, we’re not house guests, man. This is a squat. It’s a radical act of subversion.’
‘Still, I think it’s a cool room. I think we should stay here.’
Dan sat up, brightening at a sudden thought. ‘OK – yeah, I see. It’ll be ironic. A statement. The modern politics of equality and opportunity in the boudoir of the ancien regime.’
Gadiel rubbed away the greasy dust between his thumb and forefinger. He laughed. ‘You talk rubbish,’ he said.
When they had first forced their way into the rear of the house, they had left their bags by the door. Now, they could not find their way back. The bedroom corridor was longer than they remembered; there were several flights of stairs. Only the faintest glow squeezed through the scarred and dirty windows and the darkness disorientated them. They had not thought to mark their route and neither of them had noted any features by which to navigate. They had to feel their way, keeping close together.
‘We should have left a trail of string, like that Greek guy,’ Gadiel said.
‘Theseus.’
‘Yeah, that’s it – Theseus.’
‘And the Minotaur,’ Dan reminded him. ‘It’s just the kind of place for Minotaurs.’ He pounced on Gadiel, gripping him by the shoulders. ‘Rargh!’
Even such a stupid joke disconcerted them.
They found themselves on the ground floor in the most ancient part of the manor, the rooms smaller and lowceilinged, panelled in thick wood and flagged in stone, the air cool, trapped from winters long past. They came to a dead end where the passage was blocked by a wall and had to retrace their steps. They chose another door. The internal configuration of the house was baffling: different periods were overlaid one on top of the other, each wrestling with the next, grappling to overcome structures that had gone before: there were doors at odd angles; windows packed with stone or sulkily offering abbreviated views; cupboards and closets knocked through into airy chamb
ers; elegant reception rooms eroded into cupboards and closets. The fabric of the manor seemed uneasily held, the aggression of its reconfigurations barely contained.
‘We could be here for ever at this rate, man, going round and round,’ Dan complained. ‘I can’t believe they could live like this. Why would they want to live like this?’
It seemed too insubstantial, their hunt for an untidy pile of carrier bags, tiny evidence of the present in the vastness of the past.
‘I suppose they knew their way around,’ Gadiel answered, reasonably.
Dan opened another door to a dead end. ‘Look, man, in my house you open a door and it goes somewhere. There’s a reason to open it. There’re no tricks. It’s honest. Here – well, it’s… it’s pointless.’
‘It’s cool, though, too, don’t you think?’ Gadiel answered. ‘Isn’t there a part of you that thinks it’s really cool?’
‘I’m not taken in like that, man.’
‘I bet you are, really. I bet you love it.’
Dan gave a short, bitter laugh and walked on.
At last, and all of a sudden, they found themselves in another set of rooms, defiantly simple. Somewhere a tap dripped.
‘I remember that! I remember the tap!’ Gadiel was triumphant. He rushed ahead. ‘Look, Dan, that’s the window we broke to get in.’
They were back at the bags. Everything was as they had left it: shards of glass kicked into a corner, a window wedged open. They stared at the evidence, baffled by it, in the end, as much as relieved; it drew them back from the illusions of the manor’s interior, unexpectedly confirming the ordinariness of their arrival.
‘And look – there’re lights here and everything. Look!’ Gadiel pointed above his head to a single bulb, brown with filth, stuck with flies, the most marvellous of discoveries.
He found the switch and flicked it on; the bulb buzzed and gave out a dim glow, enough to grasp the extent of the kitchens, stores and pantries, small workrooms at the back of the manor, which led one from the other, looking out on to an internal courtyard through a row of wide windows. Pale blue paint peeled from the plaster; cupboards hunkered against practical brown tiles.
Gadiel extracted a cobwebbed bundle of wax candles from the shelves and examined it solemnly. ‘We should borrow some of this stuff,’ he said, but there was little left to scavenge and they were steadfastly practical, looting nothing more than some string, a dish of clothes pegs and a bar of green soap, nibbled at the corners by mice.
As they collected their things, Dan pulled a portable radio from one of the carrier bags, holding it up solemnly, a trophy. ‘We have to listen. They’ll be nearly there won’t they, already?’
Gadiel flattened his hand over his mouth, making his voice crackly, distant. ‘Apollo 11, this is Houston…’
They laughed together.
They argued about the route back to the bedroom corridor, and, in the end, it may have been only by chance that they came upon the narrow, turning staircase that took them up. They paused at the barricade that marked the end of their part of the manor: the corridor was properly truncated here, bricked up with roughly cemented breeze blocks that prevented access to the wing in which the Bartons were still living.
‘It’s not much, this.’ Gadiel tapped lightly on the barrier. ‘They’ll hear us. It might frighten her.’
Dan held his candle high. ‘Who?’
‘Ellie. I don’t want her to… you know, she might not like it.’ Gadiel leaned forwards, putting an ear against the breeze blocks.
‘But that doesn’t matter.’ Dan spoke more loudly than he needed to. ‘What she thinks doesn’t matter – this is a political act, man.’
‘Sssh.’ Gadiel flapped a hand to try to quieten him, and the candle flame leapt. He drew back from the barricade. ‘Of course it matters. She’s been nice to us. They gave us supper; we just turned up at the house and they gave us supper.’
‘You make it sound biblical.’ Dan smirked. ‘Come on, Gadiel – we’re squatting. It’s a recognized form of protest. It’s a movement.’ He pressed his spectacles hard against his nose. ‘“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”’ He shrugged. ‘You see?’
‘But it’s not as simple as that,’ Gadiel insisted. ‘Not here.’
‘Come on, that’s Marx. Karl Marx. Don’t you believe in a new social order?’
‘Yeah, I suppose.’
‘Of course you do. That’s why we went travelling, isn’t it? To see something of the world, to make a difference.’
‘I thought you just wanted to try out the van.’
‘Oh, come on. I had bigger ideas than that.’
‘Not till the van broke down and we turned up here, you didn’t.’ Gadiel grinned.
‘Yeah, I did. But I knew you wouldn’t come if… Man, you see? I knew you’d be like this if I’d proposed a radical agenda.’
Gadiel was unmoved. ‘How had you planned to change the world, then?’
‘See the world, I said. See the world.’ Dan poked at his spectacles. ‘Which is what we’re doing.’
‘Well, we’ve not seen much of it. It’s not been a week since we left.’
‘Yeah, and already we’ve started a squat. Come on, Gadiel – you’re being negative, man.’
‘But there’s only two of us,’ Gadiel pointed out. ‘And no one even knows we’re here. How’s that going to make a difference? It doesn’t make sense if there’s only two of us.’
Dan slapped his hand against the breeze blocks. ‘Others will come, won’t they, in time? They’ll come and join us. Other people will hear about it and come.’
‘What other people?’
‘I don’t know. But that’s how squats work, man – they grow.’
‘Yeah, and what will happen then? To Ellie? We’ll have to go back to university at the end of the summer and – well, then what?’
Dan shrugged, setting off for the bedroom, his candle light bobbing. ‘It’ll be out of our hands, man,’ he answered, talking as much to the fickle shadows as to Gadiel. ‘The squat’ll have a life of its own by then.’
Seven
Ellie turned away from the lime avenue and the mere, on to the rutted tarmac lane that led to the hutments, walking unhurriedly to the two lines of oblong shacks, patchworked in corrugated metal and wooden panels, greening in the damp shade of a row of fir trees. The buildings were featureless. The hutment closest to the manor, still in use by the men, was in reasonable repair – it had been mended in places; the ground around the doorway trodden smooth – but the rest were overgrown with brambles and spiked through with twisted saplings; they created an ugly scar of ruined shacks, their roofs collapsing and rusting, their walls splayed. The barbed wire that had once coiled around them was denuded, like the coarse hair of a very aged man. It sprang in odd directions, forced into crude and unexpected sculptures, finally slinking away towards the end of the lane and disappearing into a shallow sinkhole. The field beyond, bounded by a black-and-white metal fence, was neatly planted with barley, pale and dense, almost ripe.
Ellie collected water from the standpipe so that she could wash dishes in the wide, flat sink which was secured to a wobbling trestle of sorts at the side of the hutment. From the lane and the strip of cleared land alongside, she picked up empty beer cans and a number of dog-ends, then went behind to the toilet, which she sluiced with water from the hose, jamming the wooden door open with its wedge to air the cramped and foetid space within.
Inside, the dormitory was laid out with two parallel rows of metal bedsteads, twenty in all, most of them empty; a single, large table was the only other piece of furniture. She made the three beds nearest the door and collected the washing piled on the floor.
As she cleaned, she recited Shakespeare, the complaints of injured Caliban accompanying the brisk scratch of the broom. But the verse flustered her; she found t
he conversations of the previous evening cramming back into her head, the words stripped and prickly, meaning nothing now. She grabbed one of the metal bedsteads, letting the broom drop, breathing hard, sickened with the dizzying sense that she was falling. It took her a while to compose herself. When she set to work again, she took care to sweep more slowly, beginning a leisurely dramatization of The Lady of Shalott, transporting herself to a springtime of lilies; a blossoming island where she drifted on the dark river of Tennyson’s long poem, beautiful and bewitched, half-sick of shadows. Standing on her toes, she looked out of the high window, expecting to see the approach of an armoured knight through the narrow slot of brilliant light, his figure massive on the jewelled saddle of his heavy horse. She heard the thunder of hooves from the fields beyond, the rattle of armour, her sigh.
She could not quite believe it when he did not appear.
She pushed the trailing washing into a sack, smelling the men’s familiar scent of stale cigarette smoke and damp cloth.
‘We’ve been considering the matter of the van,’ Hindy said.
Ellie started. They were standing by the table at the end of the hutment, watching. Alongside them, the door was still closed. She wondered if she had somehow summoned them by flapping out their smell from the grubby linen.
‘And the young men who came to supper last night,’ Hindy continued.
She hoisted the sack over her shoulder. ‘I thought I explained. The van is broken. It’s awaiting repair.’
‘We’ve been to Home Farm to suggest Oscar makes a visit to the stable yard. And we’ve decided to have a word with you.’
Hindy and Luden looked at Ata steadily; he stepped forward.
‘Miss Barton, when we first came here, it was a real country estate,’ he began. They must have allowed for the kindness of his tone, his natural sympathy. Something about his slenderness, too, and his dark skin, gave his words a delicacy. ‘It was in many ways, for us, the apotheosis of England. Of civilisation, if you like. It’s what we’d been told about, as boys – it’s what we’d imagined when we came to this country. But we found ourselves trapped in the cities, jaded and disillusioned, unable to find a place for ourselves, overlooked on account of our way of speaking, our manners and our clothes. It was coming here, to Marlford, that changed everything. It was what we’d been searching for.’
Marlford Page 6
