by Adam Thorpe
The repairs to the house prevented them from going on holiday to the sea one year and he spent the two weeks fending off the twins’ demands in the orchard while he worked on the trees, apple and cherry and plum, a book on orchard-keeping kept open by a stone, its pages rippling in the heat. He knew it was the wrong time to prune and cut but did it anyway, convinced that the trees were tough and sinewy enough to take it. He was impatient to see the orchard fruit properly, finding its rows of gnarled and twisted boughs the most beautiful place on the property. But after he had cut it in the ruthless way the book recommended at another season, the place was no longer beautiful but maimed. He had maimed it. He rarely went into the orchard after that, leaving its long grass to the boys. He went in once in the early autumn to spray it against a disease which contorted the leaves and made them swell like peaches, the spray catching in his throat and making him feel peculiar for a few days. The spray dripped off the swollen, twisted leaves like milk. He did this again just as the buds were breaking, at the recommended time. Half the trees did not leaf at all, or leafed only on one or two branches. He had killed them, it appeared. They were too old to take all this drastic treatment, Lucy suggested. He shouted at her then, perhaps for the first time in their marriage. She never stopped talking, he shouted. She never stopped telling him what was what. He crashed away into the undergrowth at the far end of the garden – a part they had decided to leave wild after reading an article in the newspaper’s gardening supplement – and left her crying by the old sink outside with its green stain like a grass snake, its broken pots on the side, the hung fork above it webbed with cobwebs that no one had touched since the day they had moved in.
Her mother died and she inherited a large sum with which they renovated the house from top to bottom and cleared the garden once and for all, drastically. He felt he had made a desert of it from which he might start again. The new house – it was like a new house, though its spirit was very old, as was its clean repointed brick – stood up now in the cleared garden as it must have done five hundred years before, proud and defiant. This was what they told themselves. The twins were away at boarding school and the orchard was torn up to make a tennis court. Lucy had hated her mother and felt now that she had been rewarded for all her years of endurance. She looked out upon her property and felt even happier than she had done when she had first arrived; she felt she could breathe. The air was lighter. The sunlight came through undisturbed. She wondered about Douglas. He would not play tennis – they had rowed about this – or entertain the idea of her friends playing, so that she was stuck with the ball-cannon when the boys were away at school. He had been happy to lose the orchard, or at least he had accepted the idea in good grace. He spent more and more time walking in the woods without her since their bad row about the tennis, which she had lost. He could be very stubborn and had threatened her with divorce. He had let her build the tennis court – an expensive all-weather variety painted green – only to cripple the use of it, for she had imagined tennis parties during the week, the sun winking upon jugs of lime cordial, husbands far away in their offices or cars, the wives talking and talking. Laughter. She knew that Douglas’s attitude was a kind of grief, he was in mourning for the orchard and by the next summer he would be fully recovered, the hedge would have grown around the wire fence a little, the court would have settled into itself and would look less raw and absurdly new and she could enjoy her tennis parties. Meanwhile she played the ball-cannon alone, adjusting its pitch and angle as recommended in the manual, notching up the speed. They had purchased it second-hand from the boys’ prep school, but it worked impeccably. Sometimes it frightened her. She would have preferred Douglas or one of her friends. Gradually after hours and hours on the court she came to know the ball-cannon’s characteristics, adjusted herself to its manic repetitions, its speed and clockwork character. She improved her game considerably and beat her sons hollow when they returned from their new school for the summer holidays – despite their sudden spurt of growth, their broad shoulders, the hint of facial hair that the sun caught. They were very surprised. Douglas was surprised, though he failed to show it. She seemed so much younger, he thought. He sat on the court’s edge and sipped white wine, watching her from under a peaked cap. He remembered his sons squealing tinily between the orchard’s trees as if it was both yesterday (or even that morning) and also very long ago, decades or even centuries. This made no sense, he thought. Behind him the house stood as if on its own, tender shrubs and the odd sapling manfully sprouting from a circle of mulch in the new grass, everything labelled in case they forgot what they were. The new grass was so tender that the boys had been instructed not to play on it, but they no longer played, he noticed. They played tennis and they played their music or their computers in their rooms, but they no longer rolled about the garden, scuffing it. His daughter did not exist but he imagined her anyway, he imagined her playing between the trees of the orchard and riding her horse along the lane or even through the woods, ducking the lower branches and trampling the wild garlic. She had blond hair and a winning smile and called him Daddy. He smiled and stirred the ice in his wine. One of the boys had told him languidly that it was barbaric to put ice in wine, and he had flinched not with embarrassment but with grief at the loss of the modest child he had once known. Now Lucy was playing both boys at the same time and they were getting angry because she was too good for them, running about the court in her white tennis skirt that he found sexy, its hint of virginal innocence and health strained at by the flesh within, the sweat and the sharp smells of effort, panting and grunting. One of the boys came over to him and thrust the racquet in his free hand while the mother was shouting out not to be a bad sport. Douglas got up and walked over to the vacated spot and waited. He was reasonably drunk with wine and sunshine and his own secret thoughts. He thought of the spray dripping off the leaves like milk and the red and pink eyes in the undergrowth. He thought of the hung fork webbed with cobwebs and how he had wanted to ask the builders to conserve it, to work around it, but in the heat of the moment he had not dared, it had sounded ridiculous. They had ripped out the sink in a matter of minutes and taken the fork off its hook without a moment’s thought. The pink and red eyes had vanished. The fork’s wooden handle had crumbled into powder. He gripped the racquet and told his wife to serve. She looked very pleased and he felt this pleasure run through him like ice. He had not played for years and he missed the ball. His son groaned and told his brother to come back, but his brother had already left the court and was walking towards the house over the tender new grass. The wire-frame door swung shut.
‘Aren’t I good enough?’ Douglas asked.
His son smirked.
‘Of course you are, Dad.’
A pang of love shot through him now when he saw how vulnerable the boy was, how ready to be afraid of life. It was his turn to serve and Douglas did so, lobbing the ball so gently over the net that it was certain to go in but it somehow missed the line. The sun was hot on his neck. There was no shade on the court. Of course, he thought, Lucy must have her tennis parties. She must fill the place with her affection, her friends in their white sports outfits must fill the place and talk. He served the second ball and it struck the top of the net and bounced the right side. An aeroplane groaned in the sky, throbbing westwards. He served again and it was alright, Lucy returned it gently to him and he struck it back hard in a pale imitation of his long-ago prowess when he could slice the ball so that it skimmed the net to drop abruptly the other side as if on a wicked thread. Now the ball bounced off the cannon standing at the back and leapt up high as if alive. He watched it curl against the blue sky, the sky of a desert in Dubai, of his possible other life, while the others squealed with laughter. When the holidays were over the house would again be empty of the boys and he and Lucy would find it much too quiet. A few months before, under the same conditions, waiting for their weekly phone call from school that was not coming (as if they had been forgotten), he had emptied a bottle
of full-blooded red on the white carpet between the white leather sofas while Lucy was playing the ball-cannon under the new floodlights: he had watched the wine splash upon the whiteness – tipping it out for a reason he could not explain even to himself – and the stain had remained for good like the faintest of echoes where so much else had fallen into silence.
PRESERVED
I was working on a dance. This was the Philip Glass era and the music was ambient, repetitive. It was by a composer I won’t name because I have grown to hate his music. I forced myself to like it back then because there was no choice; it was the future, and the future often turns out to be fraudulent when it arrives.
My cousin Saul lent me his house in Tuscany for three weeks to work on the piece. I wanted the choreography to be plain, simple, with sudden odd eruptions from a much more primitive era. But the music did not give me a storyline. There was no rootedness. The commission came from a major international dance company, operating out of Stuttgart. (Later it was amalgamated with what my friend Hector called the Rhine Gang.) After fifteen years in California, I thought this job would reintroduce me to Europe.
The big old Tuscan farmhouse was divided in two. The other half was owned by Saul’s best friend from the Jersey POW camp days, Ivor. Right now it was empty, but I knew from Saul that the two halves mingled on the paved terrace, which was covered by wisteria and looked out over the lawn and the woods to the hazy coast, where Shelley was washed up. This was April, and the weather was very mixed. The wisteria had not yet flowered but there was blossom on the apricot trees. I lit a fire in the upstairs room and it was very cosy. The cool and the wet were welcome after San Francisco. I was thinking seriously of settling back in Europe. I had this presentiment of catastrophe – maybe the quake, maybe nuclear attack (this was the 1980s, remember). I had lost a lot of friends to AIDS. And I’d split up with Angelo after he sold the flower shop. Either way, I fancied keeping my head down somewhere in Europe.
On the third or fourth day the other half was suddenly filled with noise – a group of friends, from England. I appreciate young people. Youth is important to me. I regard myself as a young man in an old man’s body, and even that body amazes people with its supple elasticity. It is not just the exercises: it is also the meditation. To transcend, daily, one’s cares for fifteen minutes is to smooth out one’s skin. I pin my soul on the washing line and let it billow and freshen. Except that no one has a washing line in the States.
I introduced myself on the terrace. They were three unmarried couples. Mark was with Jill, Lucy was with Oliver, Jamie was with Tamsin. Tamsin was fine-boned with a dancer’s long legs, but she had never danced (I asked her).
On the second evening they invited me to supper. At least, Lucy did. Lucy was gushy and kind, although I wasn’t sure even then how deep her kindness went. She was the best friend of Ivor’s niece and had well-bred looks and a comfortable, plumpish body. Oliver was tall and stiff, as if he had never gotten over being head of his public school. He had made two mistakes: he had brought shorts and he was wearing them. Jamie was smooth and narrow-eyed, a trainee lawyer with extremely expensive shoes. He had been kicked out of his public school for a reason no one would divulge. They were all training to be something.
I sat at the end of the kitchen table with Mark and Jill. They seemed the odd ones out – Jill plain and scholarly, Mark what my mother would call ‘rough at the edges’ and with dark colouring. He spoke with a pronounced northern accent. He was a botanist, he told me – a palaeoethnobotanist. He sat through dinner in a bright orange cagoule: their half of the house still had a chill in it. His eyes were almond-shaped, with long black lashes. He had a delicate nose on a big face.
‘Macro- and microstructures of fossilised horse dung, stratifications of peat bog samples, pollen, charcoal, rhizopod analyses,’ he said. ‘That’s me. ’Ow do.’
‘Hello.’
He was from Wolverhampton, which he called Wolvo. He told me about his childhood. He and his parents would drive out to the Clee Hills for picnics in the family’s old Austin, his dad smoking Senior Service and singing ‘Oh What Will Mother Say?’, the boy in the back under a trouser-press with big rusty wing-nuts.
‘Big enough to take on ten thistles and a butterbur,’ he said. ‘Champion flower presser, I was, as a sprog.’
I smiled. I liked the way he spoke, even though it was loud.
‘Mum would try to get me to count the telegraph poles so Dad’d pipe down. All I could think of were flowers, though. Smell of the earth they popped up out of. I loved to take my trowel and dig, even back then.’
‘A nut, even back then,’ said Jill.
Jill was his first girlfriend. She had been a fellow graduate student in the Department of Geography at Birmingham. She had short hair and contact lenses that troubled her, but a makeover might have made her pretty. Her thesis was about the influence of water levels on the siting of acid-tolerant species in the oligotrophic habitat of the raised bog. His thesis was on the characteristics of peat humification in relation to dead plant material.
‘You can see how we’re made for each other!’ laughed Jill.
Mark said: ‘We worked together as assistants on Lindow Man, just after he was excavated.’
I did not look impressed enough, although he waited.
‘You don’t know Lindow Man?’
‘Spider Man, but not Lindow Man.’
Lindow Man, they told me, was found in a bog and dated from the pre-Roman era: the only British bog body of any significance. Although squashed and distorted, the only face from proto-historic Britain. Sensitive as lichen. A sacrificial victim. Mark had worked on the contents of the preserved stomach.
‘Same as if you were to drop off the twig now,’ he said, ‘straight into a peat bog. If I were to cut you open in thousands of years’ time, it’d be all spag and tomato bits.’
‘Thank you, Mark, that’s a nice thought. But I guess I’m pretty well preserved already.’
I couldn’t finish my meal. As they were talking, I felt a familiar excitement. I knew that my dance had found its rootedness. My dance would be entitled ‘Bog Body’, or just ‘Lindow’ – it would be a homage to Lindow Man.
A couple of days on, Mark told me how his mother had disappeared.
We were at the end of a good supper and he had drunk a lot of the local Chianti. We all had; we were outside and the candles were flickering in the warm spring air. The others were sharing jokes about their crowd back in London – old school pals, mostly. Mark and I sat apart from the others on wicker chairs. He looked very fine in the candlelight, despite (or perhaps because of) his lumpy sweater, which had dried seeds and grass caught in its knit. I dread using the term Lawrentian, at least in public, but he did make me think of the young Alan Bates – if you changed the nose.
‘They had a big argy-bargy one day, out on the Clee Hills near Trablow Moss. My hands were black. I was digging up this burst football out of a boggy patch, taking no notice of their nonsense. The burst football was soft and light. As black as my hands. Some folk reckoned that Mum had an accident, fell down a gorge or into a bog. Others say she had another man, in Goole. At any rate, she stomped off over the grass and never came back from that day to this.’
‘Goole?’
‘So they said. I’ve never been there. Maybe I should go.’
‘That’s terrible, Mark. I mean, that she never came back.’
‘Hardly remember her,’ he shrugged. ‘Auntie May brought me up, after Dad went off to the nut-’ouse. I kept the burst football until Auntie May chucked it one day, saying it was mucky. Which it was, because I’d never washed off the peat. I felt a bit upset, to be honest, though I didn’t say a thing. I didn’t say a thing about how I hadn’t dared clean the peat off it, just in case it was something else and not a burst football.’
