Marlford

by Jacqueline Yallop

  Oscar noticed the stiffness of his stance, his anxious lean forwards as though, perhaps, he wanted to go after Ellie, or haul her back. He busied himself by helping the boys to pack away their homework.

  ‘But, you know, even though she’s such a dinosaur – there’s something about her, man, isn’t there?’ Dan added.

  Oscar accompanied the young readers to the front steps, wiped down the table and piled their books away neatly. Only then did he speak again.

  ‘Perhaps I should have made sure she was better informed.’

  ‘But it’s not your job, man. It’s what I said – it’s the decadent elite. You can’t be held responsible for all that.’

  Oscar finished tidying laboriously, as though Dan was not there, then he took up his position behind the desk, standing very straight, with his hands on the open day-book of loans.

  ‘She probably should have known about it,’ he admitted, quietly. ‘I could have told her.’ He slid his palms over the ledger, pressing into its solidity, and then, with a sudden, brisk gesture, he said, ‘But, young man, allow me to tell you about the Braithwaite Barton Memorial Library…’

  Nine

  Gadiel sat in the sun on the stone rim of the fountain. A breeze skimmed across the flat land and the flashes of waste brine by the chemical works, squeezing up the terraced streets and blowing spray now and again onto his skin. The hours that crept so slowly at the squat, demanding and accusative, lay more gently here. Cars came occasionally, circling the nymph; women walked up from the cottages and headed towards the centre of the village; a tractor started up on the playing fields behind, making growling passes up and down the cricket pitch. This slight activity added to the sense that nothing was happening.

  He did not want to think of Ellie again, or the unsettling intimacy of the odd arrangements at the manor, so, while he smoked, Gadiel tinkered with perspective, trying to hook smoke rings over the top of the works’ chimney. The task was more difficult than it looked: when he blew out a ring, he found that the chimney was not quite where he had expected it to be after all. Getting to his feet, he hauled himself up onto a higher ledge and perched alongside the water nymph, wrapping his arms across her bare shoulders, steadying himself by gripping the loose folds of her stone gown in his fist. She pushed her tipping urn against his chest, as though he might help her with the weight. He dangled one leg over the trickle of water and puckered hard, leaning, so that he could puff his smoke ring high and true. Still it squirted away.

  He shuffled around the fountain, the reflections from the tiles slapping blue squares onto his skin. Facing Braithwaite Barton, looking towards the pull and plunge of the roofs at the centre of the village – the confident strata of brickwork thrown into confusion by the sag of the land – he saw Ellie, coming quickly towards him.

  Gadiel started. He pulled away from the nymph, breaking the steady trickle of water as he jumped down, brushing his hands over his clothes and flicking away his cigarette; it fell into the shallow basin with a hiss. He started across the cobbles that flared from the fountain, his legs oddly unstable.

  She was wearing an odd kind of shawl: a poncho knitted in two shades of faded pink, fringed with knotted wool in a selection of pastel colours. It hung limply over her shoulders, longer at the back than at the front. She had not seen him yet.

  He took a long breath and stepped forwards. ‘Hello, Ellie.’

  She looked at him, her eyes wide. ‘I had no idea – that there’d been a man on the moon.’

  He was going to laugh, but then he recognized the same expression that he had seen on her face when they were in the billiard room – anguish only barely concealed, closer to the surface now, about to break through. He was worried that she might crumple there in front of him.

  ‘Look – why don’t we have a walk?’ he offered. ‘I’ve been hanging around here for ages. I could do with stretching my legs.’

  ‘No, no. I have to go.’ She went to pull away. He knew that she hardly saw him.

  ‘Look, Ellie. I don’t know what the matter is, but I’ll help. Whatever it is – honestly, I’ll help you.’

  He brushed his hand playfully against the fringe of the poncho, and Ellie watched the tassels dance between them.

  All he saw was the way she looked down.

  ‘Ellie, really – I didn’t mean to say anything wrong. Don’t be angry.’

  ‘Oh, no – no, it’s just – I don’t know what’s happening. At the library, they told me about a man called Neil Armstrong. Some little boys told me – young boys, hardly more than ten years old.’ But it was Oscar Quersley’s crumpled expression she remembered, and Dan’s astonishment. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

  Gadiel only partly understood. ‘Is that all it is? But, look, there’s stuff about it everywhere. If we go to the newsagents we can probably pick up one of those special editions. They’ll have all the facts in there – if there’re things you want to know.’

  ‘I want to know all of it.’

  He laughed. ‘Come on, then.’

  But her eyes were hard and dark. ‘That’s what you meant, when we were talking in the woods – when you were talking about listening on the radio. I didn’t understand.’

  ‘I thought you were a bit vague.’ He tried to preserve his smile in the face of her anger. ‘That’s why I went out to look at the moon, you see – I mean, I didn’t expect to see space rockets or anything, but you know…’ His voice trailed away.

  ‘I didn’t understand,’ she said again. ‘I had no idea what you were talking about.’ She looked at him, pleadingly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me about Neil Armstrong?’

  ‘I thought you knew. I thought everyone knew.’ But he saw that he had let her down. ‘Look, Ellie, let’s go and buy some papers or something. You can read about it – everything about it.’

  He offered her a hand, but she swept by him, her poncho tassles swaying as she went on ahead.

  ‘It’ll be too late, though, won’t it?’

  Gadiel waited under the striped awning outside the newsagents, leaning back against the wall, one foot propped against the brickwork. He watched the customers across the street at the sunken fishmonger’s: only the top section of the shop door was visible, the rest of it was buried beneath the pavement. Alongside, the wide window, too, was mostly hidden below street level; what remained was jammed open with a cut-off broom handle, creating a narrow aperture through which the fishmonger passed out a paper packet. His head barely reached the knees of his customer, who stooped low to take his fish and pay.

  Gadiel only slowly took in what he was seeing – the unlikely angles of the skewed window and door, a child’s drawing of a shop front – and, before long, he was distracted by the far-off chime of an ice-cream van.

  By the time Ellie emerged from the shop, he was bouncing impatiently from foot to foot, blushing violently with the prospect of pleasing her. ‘Do you want an ice cream?’ He beamed at the magnificence of the proposal.

  Ellie gripped her magazines hard to her chest, as though he might threaten to steal them from her. ‘An ice cream?’

  ‘Yeah, from the van. It’s not here yet, not quite, but I can hear it. Can’t you hear it?’ The tune was coming louder, the notes more shrill. ‘We’ll go up to the top of town. Meet it up there.’

  ‘Wait – Gadiel – I can’t…’

  ‘It’ll only take a minute. Come on, have a treat. Have a treat on me. I can hear it getting closer.’

  They pushed back up towards Braithwaite Barton just as the van trundled into view from the edge of the salt pits, orange and crimson trumpets on its roof spewing an elongated nursery rhyme.

  As Gadiel set off towards it, waving, Ellie gave in to the sense that the day was beyond her, distorted and strange. The chimes played one more loop then stopped, making everything oddly hushed.

  She sat on the bench at her grandfather’s feet, placing her magazines neatly beside her. Gadiel brought two ice creams, the thick, bri
ght red sauce dripping onto the pavement leaving a trail that might have been blood – his hands were already scarlet.

  He held one of the cornets out to her and settled against the wide base of the statue, licking the gloop from his fingers.

  Ellie held the treat at arm’s length and studied it. But she was too slow: her scoop of soft ice cream, inadequately sculpted, slunk from its cornet and landed with a soft splat on the pavement.

  She could not bring herself to look at the mess, grubby pink, already watery. It felt like a desecration.

  ‘Never mind – share mine.’ Gadiel held his cone towards her.

  She shook her head. ‘Thank you. There’s no need.’ Her voice was grainy, threatening tears, but haughty, nonetheless. She rose from the bench and stepped away from her grandfather’s protection, turning her back so that all she could see were neat flowerbeds, inscribing perfect parallels either side of a raked gravel path.

  The sun was in Gadiel’s eyes. He squinted at her while he licked ridges in the dome of his ice cream. He thought there was something new in her bearing but perhaps it was just a trick of the light, the smudge of rough shadows.

  He watched a while longer. She was still, half-turned from him, her chin lifted to the sky. He saw how much she looked like the statue above them.

  ‘All done then?’ He felt he ought to speak, otherwise his quiet scrutiny was too much of an intrusion. ‘Shall we head back?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. Thank you for waiting.’ She glanced at the magazines on the bench and said then, with desperate intensity, childlike: ‘I want to go home.’

  She led him from the gardens. They skirted the repair works in the street and walked briskly down the slope. Ellie did not glance at the library. She continued purposefully beyond the nymph and up an alleyway by the almshouses, quickening her pace as she drew near the kissing gate.

  Gadiel offered his arm. She took it without looking at him but also without hesitation; he drew her close. She gripped the magazines in her free hand with new determination.

  She tried to picture them walking together. She auditioned a variety of scenarios, flicking through them like picture postcards stacked in a tray, but none of the images would hold steady; they would not quite come clear: her imagination failed her. She was thrown back to their unremarkable tread, the broken surface of the old driveway, the unkempt limes, the soft green light webbing around her, the strength of his arm beneath her hand, and something she could not determine, a thrill of some kind, an ache.

  They were in sight of the manor. It had never looked so beautiful, the façade shadowed, the windows dark, the domes imposing in the slanting sunlight. The brick tower had somehow sloughed off its utilitarian ugliness; it seemed solid and reassuring, its plainness confident. The scattered weeds of the gravel drive, the sinking roof of the portico, the shabby flowerbeds: all this seemed as it should.

  Ellie saw the men sitting together on one of the stone benches on the terrace. They had a long, wide view from there, the whole of Marlford laid out before them. They would have seen her approach with Gadiel, she knew that.

  Then she heard the stable clock strike, a long succession of unsteady notes. She broke from Gadiel’s arm and hurried on more quickly, alone. ‘I need to read this,’ she called over her shoulder, gesturing towards him with the magazines.

  He caught up with her. They had not finished; there was so much more to say. ‘But, Ellie, we were having a good time.’

  ‘Yes – exactly – you made me forget.’

  ‘Forget what?’

  She glanced towards the men, but from this distance she could only guess at their expressions.

  ‘About Neil Armstrong. About the boys. About everything.’

  Gadiel was halted by the ferocity of her accusation. He stood still.

  She pushed on more quickly, the green and yellow sense of summer, the swirl of heat and colour adding to her muddle, everything unexplained, nameless and formless.

  After a moment, Gadiel began to follow her, wary. ‘Ellie, don’t run off. Just stay and talk for a moment.’ Before she could reply, he had slipped his arm under the drape of her poncho, the pink wool flowing over him like molten marshmallow. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, I promise you,’ he said, simply. ‘We’ll sort out everything. Even the man on the moon.’

  She gasped at the feel of his hand around her waist; she had no idea what to make of it. She was so intent on its weight, its warmth against her, that she could not keep hold of her bucking thoughts.

  ‘No – please. You should go back to the village now. Please – go. Go away.’

  She glanced again at the men, and pushed at him. They were both surprised by the force of it.

  Ten

  Their pace was dictated by Luden’s shuffle: a slow, stately progress, filing along the side of the Victorian extension, briefly passing a blocked door and two windows in the Georgian style, turning the corner under a round, pinnacled tower, working their way inexorably towards the low roofs of the medieval buildings. They might simply have been taking a walk back in time.

  Luden stopped on several occasions to catch his breath; as the expedition continued, he reached for Hindy’s arm, leaning heavily. Once they paused to examine a crack in one of the flagstones, shaking their heads at it sadly and poking round about to determine the cause, but they negotiated the turbulent contours of the pitted courtyard with steady determination and went directly to a wooden door, its grey paint peeling. They stood in front of it, in a line, crenellated, their differing heights a makeshift comedy.

  Ata took a small, square tin of 3-in-1 from his pocket and put the nozzle into the keyhole, squirting until oil spilled down the door like hair tumbling from a clasp, then he fitted the key and turned it smoothly. The door gave inwards with a creak.

  They were immaculately prepared: Hindy had two torches, one in each of his jacket pockets, their batteries new, their beams bright; Ata had a further selection of keys, each on its own length of string, tied together at the top in a heavy, impenetrable knot. He hung them over his wrist and arm; they jingled as the men went on into the house. Luden sniffed noisily. It did not seem impossible that he could smell out their route.

  They could see Dan with his back to them, boiling a kettle on the hob in the cavernous kitchen. The scuff of their steps was inaudible over the breathy almost-whistle of the rising steam and they watched for a while, Luden stabbing an angry finger at the pile of broken glass kicked into the corner behind the door.

  They took in the signs of haphazard habitation: empty tins, dirty plates at one end of the long deal table, a carrier bag spilling groceries onto the floor by one of the dressers, stubbed-out cigarette ends in a blue saucer.

  ‘Young man?’

  Hindy spoke up, but Dan only cocked his head, not sure what he had heard.

  ‘Young man – you, at the range.’

  Dan gasped and spun round. ‘Blimey, man… what? I thought I heard something. You crept up on me, man.’

  ‘Might we ask what you are doing here?’

  Dan found that his hands were trembling. He stuffed them into his pockets. ‘Who are you, anyway?’

  Hindy repeated his question, not varying his intonation. ‘Might we ask what you are doing here?’

  ‘What are we doing?’ Dan began to gather himself. He moved from the range, placing himself squarely in front of them so that they could fully appreciate his defiance. ‘We’re squatting.’ He pushed at his spectacles slowly, taking time to settle them on his nose, folding his arms across his chest.

  ‘Squatting?’ Ata squeezed the question, rattling keys.

  Dan caught the lilt of his accent and noticed the bronze lustre in Ata’s thin face, the almond curve of his eyes.

  ‘Yes – do you understand?’ He spoke slowly for the benefit of the gangly foreigner. ‘Squatting. It’s a word meaning… meaning… well, you see we—’

  Hindy interrupted, in his perfectly honed English. ‘Young man, of course we understand the notion
of squatting. We just don’t understand why you’re squatting here, amongst us. In this house. At Marlford. Perhaps you would care to explain?’

  Dan raised his eyebrows at a patch on Hindy’s tweeds, then turned back to the range.

  ‘Miserable vermin.’ Luden was still breathless.

  Dan lifted the kettle and set it aside. He watched the steam rise for a moment before turning back.

  ‘It’s an official squat.’ He took in Luden’s expression of withered disgust, the thrust of his sharp chin. ‘By installing it here amongst the waning influence of the privileged few, we’re proposing a reversal of ingrained social and financial hierarchies. We’re proposing a new social order. A revolution, man.’

  The men kept their eyes steadily on his face.

  ‘You’ll have to leave,’ Hindy said.

  ‘Oh, no, you can’t force us to leave. That’s the thing about a squat, an official squat. And there’re more of us on the way. It’ll grow, man. It’ll draw together a community of like-minded people. It’ll become a genuine movement for change.’

  Luden stepped forward with a slight, compact movement. ‘What you are doing is illegal. If you do not leave the property immediately, we will call the police.’

  ‘That won’t do any good.’ Dan smiled. ‘Squatting’s a civil offence, not a criminal one.’ He was certain of this, smug.

  ‘A matter of splitting hairs,’ spat Luden. ‘You are trespassing.’

  ‘No, we’re not. We’re in the unoccupied part of the house. You see, that’s why we’re squatting. We’d only be trespassing if we were in Mr Barton’s part of the house.’

  ‘It all belongs to him, though. It’s all his house, isn’t it?’ Ata asked. ‘Couldn’t he be said to be occupying it, but simply not using it all at any given time?’

  The question seemed reasonable.

  Dan glared at him. ‘No, man, only a section of the house is inhabited. The remainder is abandoned – derelict – a common resource.’ He took a deep breath, clearing his head after the confusion of Ata’s sophistry. ‘The question of ownership is irrelevant.’