by David Smith
The man was still breathing but I could tell that he was near the end of his life. I quickly looked over his body and we both saw a new flood of blood escaping from an artery that had been severed below his groin. There was little that we could do for him apart from apply pressure and hope the ambulance would arrive before it was too late. The man opened his eyes for a second and stared at me. He smiled and whispered something very faint before closing his eyes for the last time.
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. It sounded like ningma,’ Dottie said.
I continued to fight for the man’s life to the end. I was almost in tears with the concentrated effort.
‘You’re wonderful,’ Hugh said under his breath.
It was only then that we heard Eddie’s plaintiff calls for help.
Chapter Three
The Lonely Pine – (Allegretto) ‘R.B.T.’
On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.
Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
The long-case clock in the hall struck eight (yes, I know it probably should have been thirteen). Something caught my eye outside as it flashed past and I got up quickly to peer out onto the corner of the street through the yellowing net curtains that lay limply in the sash windows.
I saw the black cab hit the two men on the scooter, sending one of them cartwheeling ridiculously across the bonnet. He landed prone, already neatly curled in the recovery position, on the kerb between the two bollards that had been placed there a few weeks ago to protect pedestrians crossing the busy street. The other motorcyclist lay alongside the spinning wheels of his scooter in the middle of the road.
It was hard to see well what was happening because of the angle from the window but I recollect the cab waited a minute or so whilst a man got out of the far door, checked the bodies and then ran down the road, after which the cab sped off. I moved to the side window to see better and noticed a lady staring down at the same scene from the upstairs window of the nursing home opposite; our eyes met for a second before she turned away.
In the peaceful ambiance of my study, this carnage seemed unreal, like an unfolding dreamscape. In the corner of my eye I saw a couple of people run past the front window towards the scene of the accident. The gunshot, when it came, was largely silent and did not disturb my private reflections further, but I did notice the black cab now driving the other way and pausing for a second down the street. I crossed out the sentence on the pad before me, paced round the room for a few moments and then sat back down heavily at my desk, taking up my pen with new enthusiasm and writing out a second line.
Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours that they meant to murder him.
Graham Green, Brighton Rock
I was in the middle of preparing my weekly seminar for my regular creative writing classes that were scheduled that afternoon. My chosen theme was ‘the best first line of a novel’. I had the radio tuned to a local music station, having tired of the inspiration of my usual jazz that morning. Some soporific singer whose name was new to me was explaining her personal connection to her muse. The dead poet she mentioned was someone whose writings I knew well and whose poetry I had actually taught on a course at Harvard years earlier. Her version of his lines sent a cringe down my spine.
‘Really, you have to be joking,’ I muttered aloud, singing the body electric.
*
I poured myself a cup of tea from the tray that my partner Dottie had brought me earlier and then stood and peered through the window again. Outside on the pavement, I could see a small crowd gathering. I heard the front door open and saw Dottie run out onto the pavement towards the accident scene. There was a man I didn’t know already kneeling over one of the two bodies. I assumed the guy on the ground was the driver of the scooter as he was still wearing a helmet. Dottie and this man were joined by another woman, whose face I did know. This woman went immediately to the side of the second motorcyclist who moments earlier had been catapulted from the back of the scooter by the massive car and who wasn’t wearing a helmet. She was one of our neighbours. Her face was one of those pretty faces, which ought to have a name in my memory bank but that I struggled at that time to connect to a name. Her head was close to the young man’s face and her hair fell over him like a veil.
‘Betwixt the stirrup and the ground, mercy I ask’d; mercy I found’ I whispered under my breath.
I wondered whether I should phone for an ambulance or join Dottie but I could see that there were already several more bystanders at the scene, any of whom could have already made that call. Maybe I should have gone out to help as well but I generally do not like to get involved in those kinds of situations and possess no medical skills; Dottie would have known much better exactly what to do. The woman on the radio was still insisting that ‘Whitman was my daddy’. Just too much, I thought, some people have no class. Indecisive, I considered again if I should go out and help but thought better of it; no, there were already too many people there, I’d just be in the way. In any case I did not have much time left to finish my tutorial. On reflection, I wonder if I was being pragmatic or just plain callous.
*
On the desk, I noticed the folded newspaper I’d brought back with me the night before from my trip up to town. I’d picked it up off an empty train seat, where it had lain, discarded by one of the many faceless passengers on the rail journey back from Marylebone. The front page had tickled my interest. I studied again the photograph of a thirty-something woman staring out from the page, above her the headline Thirteen Years of Solitude. Was this the Evening Standard’s attempt at magical realism but 87 years short-changed? I chuckled at the conceit, at the coincidence of authorship with my original choice of text for the afternoon tutorials. Term was over of course, but I liked to keep my brain ticking over during the summer months with a series of private seminars that I ran for local writers and those who did not write. It was a book club of sorts for the deeply committed, for those who loved literature. The events unfolding before me on the street and the words rolling from my pen on to the paper appeared to be linked, through coincidence or intent, in a fatalistic dance.
*
Coincidence, if you’ll permit the indulgence, is God appearing at each step that humankind takes, I jotted down on the paper.
In anticipation of such coincidences, my parents conceived of my existence more than fifty years ago on a dirty weekend in Tenby. There is an earthiness to that South Wales origination that I cherish, even if most of my subsequent life has been lived in the elite world of literature and music. Both my parents were academics. My father died a peaceful death some time ago and my mother sold off our inherited London house and retired to a splendid home in the Worcestershire countryside. She won a prize for a novel when she was young and still writes poetry for pleasure. I remember the excitement of that earlier time. I’ve never been as successful a writer as my mother, but I’m still hopeful and supplement my professorial income with various articles and editorial pieces. In fact I’ve published two novels and had been planning a third for some time before this new opportunity presented itself to me on a plate.
I have both an elder brother and a younger sister, but none of us have yet produced grandchildren for our mother. That is clearly a matter of regret to her. My brother was an analyst at a London stockbroker and made a lot of money but has now retired to the Caribbean. My younger sister, Claudia, with whom I now share the house, is both extremely beautiful and extremely difficult to know; a psychologist and now a sculptress, with a gleaming but rather cold intelligence. Despite her talents, she eschews fame and fortune and has totally dismissed the attention of numerous suitors, seeming to prefer the company of other women to that of men. She always reminds me of the heroine in that Keats poem, La Belle Dame sans Merci.
See a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and feve
r-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci
*
In the 1970s, my father invented a theory, a ‘coincidence theory’ we jokingly called it within the family. In reality it had had a more abstruse mathematical name; something called ‘cusp bifurcation’. I was never too clear on the detail. My father lectured in mathematics at the same local university where I now teach and achieved a modicum of fame for a time in the 70s and early 80s; his lectures were apparently generally ‘standing room only’. For me, this interface with university academia sparked an unfortunate adolescent interest in unachievable women, a string of twenty-something student babysitters – girls with IQs of 160 and impossibly beautiful figures. They too often left me aching with lust and even more bored with my spotty teenage peers.
*
Richard Baxter was sent to the local public school. At first as a newcomer, he was disliked by the other boys, who found his interest in art and classical music discomfiting. They wondered whether he was ‘queer’, a word that was still in common usage at the time, sniggered when he approached and avoided standing too near to him in the changing rooms, as young boys do. He was smart and tough though, a decent cricketer and an amateur actor. These attributes soon broke down the barriers, especially when his less-able classmates needed help with their homework. He was generous with his time, so attitudes amongst his peers moved on quite rapidly. It quickly became apparent from his reputation for daring behaviour at parties and the minor fame of his parents that he was a magnet to attract the more desirable girls from the neighbouring school.
In turn, it was these girls’ parents who now became wary of his liberal upbringing and warned their daughters to be careful of this perceived predator. There was no boasting but it was clear that he was already intimately familiar with the fairer sex in a way that the other boys only dreamed of. His openness about his experiences intrigued his peers and his experimentation with smoking weed, permitted at home by his parents, created a tension and a reputation that meant he was able to maintain some covetous respect from the prevailing schoolboy cliques. Still, he never tried too hard; if some girl wanted to go to bed with him, he would indulge her, but sex was never a compulsion of his and he did not have a long-term girlfriend till much later in life.
He went up to Cambridge with a scholarship and received the affectionate name of ‘Cherub’ because of his curly hair, blue eyes and pink cheeks. He both studied and partied, achieving a first in the first year of tripos, but in his second year he began to drift steadily into less desirable fringe behaviour. His looks received attention from both men and women at the Sidgwick arts site and although he continued to be popular, he never engaged totally with either his peers or his studies again. Despite this social and academic ambivalence, he somehow repeated his excellent results in finals, gaining a double-first and a further scholarship to study at an Ivy League college in the US.
After three brilliant years at Cambridge, Baxter moved across the Atlantic to Harvard and taught history and literature for a while, pandering to precocious freshmen and sophomores, many of whom also tried to bed him, entranced by his golden locks and seductive English accent. He was hesitant about their advances for ethical reasons but found their connections and fathers’ money useful and their willing, athletic bodies a worthwhile distraction from the deep study required of him for his doctorate. Hawthorne, Melville, Hemingway and Henry James became his staple fodder but Kerouac and Ginsberg were increasingly his spiritual inspiration.
*
I glanced out of the window again and noticed how the woman in the street was becoming more agitated. Maybe I really should have phoned 999. What was her name? Annie, Alice maybe? Yes, that was it, Alice. Yes, I had placed her, I knew her a little: she was a friend of one of my relatives, a nice enough lady whom I had said good morning to once or twice in the street and who, from all appearances, seemed to be on good terms with just about everyone. Now that I had remembered who she was, I also recalled reading something about her in the local newspaper. It was something about forensics, I think.
They seemed to be coping well with the situation outside. It was only then that I became aware of the other incident further down the road, in the direction of the town. I could see that another crowd had gathered there. But even standing on my chair, I was unable to get a clear view from the window. The first ambulance had arrived. I noticed how the pigeons in the trees were making a mess of the roof of the electrical sub-station opposite. I would soon have to ring someone at the council about that.
*
After teaching diligently through the first few semesters at Harvard, Baxter spent the first long summer vacation in the more lucrative and urgent pursuit of cash. He had heard of a scam where men were able to double or triple their investments by bringing contraband in crates from the maquiladoras south of the border and selling it up north. No narcotics just spare parts and machinery. Baxter, as the younger son of a writer and an academic, was not one of the wealthier speculators, but he did have some money saved from teaching to invest. It was the start of a new adventure when he stepped off an Amtrak train with $300 in his pocket and headed straight towards the Mexican border, into the exciting drama of the south west in 1985.
Being an educated public school boy, drilled in the grammatical precision of Cambridge Latin, he quickly assimilated the Spanish language and enjoyed the challenge of becoming a native speaker. This period also heightened his interest in the new wave of Latin-American writers that were now exploding on the world literary scene and caused him to adapt his own narrative style to reproduce the idiomatic Spanish that he heard all around him.
In the fall, he returned to Harvard a much wealthier man. After further tedious periods of teaching, Baxter was determined the next summer to fulfil a growing ambition. He would journey south again, this time by foot, hitchhiking along the eastern slope of the Rockies, down towards Arkansas and Kansas before tracing the Okie trail. He would follow the legendary Route 66 through Amarillo to Arizona on the way to the golden promise of California. He was planning to teach his own course on the relationship between Steinbeck and Kerouac and as a ‘tenderfoot’ he knew that the best way to get into the soul of those ‘dust-bowl’ writers was to experience the landscape first hand.
‘Jack Kerouac is overrated, Steinbeck was my god.’
Along the route, he planned to take a detour up into Colorado to pursue a research project he had taken on to fund his trip. A century ago, prospectors had discovered gold on the Ute Indian lands in south-western Colorado. The miners had ignored the reservation boundaries and swarmed over the native hunting grounds. The Utes threatened war. Baxter had agreed to research the history of the federal commission that went to the reservation to preserve peace – an interesting historical event that had never before been documented in detail by any other writer.
While travelling in this mountain land, he also developed an increasing interest in the role of guns in the American frontier story and throughout this time met many men who still considered a gun part of their everyday apparel. Jake Chisholm taught him how to shoot after rescuing him from two men preparing to skin him at poker. Wild Bill taught him the meaning of ‘the drop’ and warned him against wearing a gun in town unless he wanted trouble. Shooting was the source of his later deafness. He brought quite a collection of hunting rifles and handguns back with him to England, most of them still working. He had never bothered much with gun licenses but they made a nice display now on his study walls.
After finishing this project and in the weeks left before returning to Harvard, Baxter stopped at Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, a village west of Santa Fe. He took a room in the pueblo where his blue eyes and rosy English cheeks earned him the name of ‘Poshizmo’, or ‘Dawn God’. He was inspired and writing prose again. After one morning session, with nothing to do except wait for the shadows of ladders to the flat roofs creep along the smooth walls,
he wrote the following:
A moon just past its first quarter was shining on the Indian pueblo of Santiago, so that one side of the main street (it only boasted four) was in deep shadow, while on the other the mud-built houses were made almost beautiful by the silver light. The walls on the bright side were curiously barred with the slanting shadows cast by low, broad ladders, which led from storey to storey of the terrace-like buildings, and by the projecting ends of the beams that supported their flat roofs. Outside each house, clear away from the wall, stood a great clay oven, in shape exactly like a gigantic beehive as tall as a man. In the deepest shadow on the dark side of the street, between one of these ovens and the wall, something was crouching. There was no one to disturb him, however, and the bright moon of New Mexican skies sank lower and lower in the west, and yet he remained there motionless, except when now and again the night air, growing colder, caused the blanket to be gathered more closely to the body it was protecting.
Richard Baxter Townshend, Lone Pine
It was at that time that he learnt belatedly of his father’s death. The distressed letters from England soon convinced him that after a three-year absence he should go home directly to his widowed mother. So instead of returning to Massachusetts, he boarded a cheap flight bound for London from Denver.
As soon as he set foot back in England, Baxter found the mellowness of an English autumn oppressively muggy compared to the Rockies’ bracing air. Moreover, he felt like a stranger in his native land having become accustomed to the expansiveness of the desert landscape for so long. His heart was soon longing for escape and adventure again.
Returning to England, he had also immediately realised that most of his friends were already well established in their various situations, most in stable relationships, many married, nearly all with professional jobs. He found it difficult to break into a social circle again, feeling excluded by these mature relationships, frustrated that few listened to his stories of the Wild West with any degree of interest or conviction. Fortunately, he was introduced by his mother to a sweet girl, Lettice Dorothy, or Dottie as she preferred to be known, a cousin of the famous Lygon family. She wrote poetry and read English history – she was later to become the biographer of Endymion Porter and an expert on the Long Parliament. Baxter wasted no time in falling for her and decided almost at once that he wanted to marry her but without a steady job this was deemed impossible by her father.
