SEVEN
Sunday, April 8th, 2001
The Hawk had gone away down the road in the big van, off on what Eric said was his regular evening run to the betting shop, and in his absence, the men standing outside began to behave like schoolboys, chanting, 'Den-nis, Den-nis, Den-nis …'
They all turned to face the house and Amy saw a hand wave from one of the top windows. The chanting rose in volume, 'Den-nis, Den-nis', and a minute later, Dennis appeared at the front door dressed in a clean pair of white overalls. He took a bow as the chant reached a climax.
'To celebrate the arrival of our new friend, Amy,' he announced, 'a special performance of death-defying skill by the world's only professional plank-rider, Dennis the Magnificent.'
'Bloody show-off,' said Tel.
'All right,' Dennis answered airily. 'I don't mind. You do it.'
'I need my legs,' Tel muttered, and the others laughed.
To one side of the yard, there stood a roughly constructed open-fronted shed and inside it lurked a brute of a machine, a great metal saw table, ten or twelve feet long. It looked to Amy as if it would not think twice about slicing entire tree trunks into planks. The flat top of it was fitted with rows of rollers to speed the timber on its way to bisection by the circular saw which stuck up through the table's surface in a savage arc. Dennis led the crowd over to it.
'Just to show that absolutely no trickery is involved, kindly test the sharpness of this blade with a touch of your delicate forefinger, young lady,' he said. 'Careful now. It'll have your hand off soon as look at you.'
Amy touched the blade with her finger. 'It's sharp,' she said.
'Stand back,' said Dennis. 'Let the show begin. Ringmaster, throw the switch.'
Eric pressed a button and the teeth of the saw blade howled and blurred into life. Dennis found a thick off-cut of wood and waved it across the blade. As if any further proof were needed, it sliced it in two with a 'chang' and hurled away the half he wasn't holding.
With Eric's assistance, Dennis took a hefty slab of wood from a stack to one side and set it down on the rollers. It was eight or nine feet long and some three feet wide, a slice the whole width of the trunk of a tree with the bark still on each edge.
It was only when Dennis climbed up on the saw table that Amy began to understand why all the men were standing watching him with such fixed attention. He stepped on to the plank, balancing as if it were a surfboard, as the blade screamed ahead of him and Amy felt her stomach tighten. She looked around at the circle of watching faces and beyond them, up above, she saw another face, just a glimpse of a pale circle behind a window at the top of the tower. It was the window next to her own.
'Oh, come on,' she said, 'you're joking.'
'How close, Dennis?' said Eric.
'What was it last time? Six inches?'
'Bollocks to six inches. It was only five.'
'All right, then. Five last time makes it four-inches this time.'
There was a roar of approval.
Eric reached for a tape measure and marked off a cross on the board, four inches to the left of Dennis's foot.
'Right,' said Dennis, 'let's go. Get further back, all of you. I don't want blood spraying all over your nice clean clothes.'
He kept his left foot where it was and kicked off with his right, propelling the wood along the rollers, riding it down fast on to the saw. It looked horribly close as the smoking blade bit into the end of the plank, but he looked straight ahead of him and rode it all the way without moving his foot, the blade slicing a clean edge right along the plank past his leg.
He jumped off at the far end with a triumphant shout and held the plank up for inspection. The blade had ripped through the centre of the cross.
'Four inches! Yeah. Three inches next time, eh?'
They all slapped his back and Amy looked up at the tower again. The pale face had gone.
'Pub time. You're all buying me a pint for that,' said Dennis. 'Who's driving?'
Unusually, something made Amy think twice – a slight sense that she should take this more slowly. She knew that if she went to the pub she would certainly end up sharing their jokes and their drinks and she could quite possibly end up dancing on a pub table and she might even end up half in love with one of them because of the peculiarly active state of the carnal creature inside her. Above all, she knew it might be the wrong one. That wasn't enough to stop her but it was enough to make her put the decision in the hands of destiny. She watched three crows flying in circles above her head. If one of them landed on the roof before she counted to ten, she thought, she would stay here. The test was loaded heavily in favour of the pub because there was nothing in their behaviour to suggest any of them planned to land. She got to eight and two of them swooped down to perch on the chimney. Bugger, she thought.
In the next moment, she was surprised to find that she felt quite grateful to the crows. She felt an intense degree of curiosity about the contents of Amelia Dahl's journal. Tomorrow she would go to the pub and maybe do all those unwise things. Tonight she would stay behind and read what her ancestor had written.
'Coming, kid?' asked Gengko, holding open the passenger door of a scratched and rusting BMW.
'I've got a bit to do. Might come later.'
'Don't stay here by yourself,' urged Dennis, and his eyes slid for a moment up towards the windows in the tower. 'Come and try the nosh. They do a great horse-burger.'
'In a while. Which pub is it?'
'We have a strict rota,' he replied. 'It's only fair. That way they have time to repair the damage. Only thing is we can never remember whose turn it is, I tell you what though, look for the one with us in it – that'll be the give-away.'
The last of their fleet of motley cars drove out of sight and the house was suddenly quiet. She found the journal where Peter Parrish said it would be and went searching for a place to be alone with the book, unconsciously looking for a vantage point where the composition of the landscape would work on her mental canvas, A bird was singing a spring song in the evening air. She found her place a hundred yards in front of the house, across the meadow-grass towards the river, where an oak tree stood alone. The field, which must have once been a lawn, ended in a sharp dip, dropping by about half her height to the next field beyond. The edge was a straight line, a deliberate boundary and she knew what it was. This was a ha-ha, the landscape designer's device to provide an uninterrupted vista while keeping the sheep off your lawn. Was it just an old children's fantasy or was it called a ha-ha because that was what you said when you fell down it without looking? She imagined elegant women in crinolines, strolling on hand-cut lawns. It would have been a huge expanse of grass. How did they cut it before there were mowers?
The oak tree grew at the left-hand end of the ha-ha, as she looked out towards the river. She had a sudden pang of regret at what she had just turned down, feeling too alive to be by herself in this quiet place, but then she looked at the tree again and saw that it, too, was pulsing with pent-up life. Above her head its branches were tipped with wild, green jewels glittering in the evening sunlight, waiting to pump unfolding leaves out into the springtime. She put her arms halfway round the trunk, leant her cheek against it and the upward surge of sap beneath the bark hummed in harmony with the blood flowing in her own veins. At the foot of the tree, two exposed roots ran down the bank like the arms of a chair, disappearing into the earth below. They were polished to stained ivory by wind and rain, and between them was a soft hollow of mossy grass – a seat made for anyone watching for their ship coming in.
She nestled in, leant back against the trunk and stared at the wide river beyond. The hill on which the house stood was little more than a slight rise but the land all around was flat and it was just high enough to give her a perspective on the view. The river's edge was only a few hundred yards away down the slope, but the tide was now out and a bank of sandy mud spread away from the shore towards the channel. Way out in the middle of the water, slogging towards t
he Lincolnshire side, a yacht heeled over in a wind that had not yet reached her. On the distant bank a cluster of toy chimneys, catching the sun and staining the sky with steam, betrayed the presence of another refinery and marked the grand scale of the distance between them. Amy was glad she wasn't on the boat because the Humber seemed all at once to be a river you could die in without anyone noticing at all. A rusty-hulled tanker was butting its way steadily towards the sea, thousands of tons of steel puny against the sullen chocolate water. Amy had a sketch pad with her and she tried to catch it but it wasn't a view for pencil and paper. In black and white it came out as nothing more than a wide river. It needed colour to bring out the strength and the smell of it. It displeased her to find there was nothing in sight that she wanted to draw. She needed a reason to be here in this spot, here in this house. Could Gengko be a reason? Or Micky? Not Micky. Better celibacy than Micky. Looking at the skin on her arms, she imagined them old, spotted brown and wrinkled, and a sense of urgency gripped her. This is my time for love, she thought. I must not waste even a week of my prime. She gazed at the river while the currents in her own blood gradually slowed down. She heard a clatter of birds' wings up in the tree above her head and a lone car passing on the road behind the house, Amy suddenly longed for interesting ancestors. Twenty-five years to a generation. Three hundred and ninety-three years would be fifteen and a bit generations. Three generations is grandmother, four is great-grandmother. Fifteen would add twelve greats tacked on before the grandmother. Was that who Amelia was? She might be just a far-off aunt. 'Directly descended,' her mother had always said, 'directly descended' from the Dales of Paull Holme. Lineage, to Amy's mother, explained everything. Genes, even genes by marriage, counted for a lot. The hazy ghost of Paull Holme was her equivalent of that bumper sticker which says 'My other car's a Porsche'. In her suburban, Surrey-villa life she would let it be known that she herself was a Beaman (from Ascot, as she would always say – the Ascot Beamans, with the underlining clearly audible). On the complicated snakes-and-ladders board of the English class system, she was obsessed by the question of whether she had moved sideways or upwards to marry. A Dale from Paull Holme might have started higher on the ladder than an Ascot Beaman but Amy's father's family had slid down a longer snake.
She opened the book with a flutter of anticipation, but what was inside was distressingly modern. Sheets of word-processed paper were glued to the pages of the exercise book. The typeface was ugly, the spacing was amateur and at first sight there was no humanity in the words. Amy began to read the first page, searching for its writer's voice, and it could equally well have been fact or fiction.
JANUARY 14th, 1662, Tuesday
This day we did not stir far, it being a fast-day declared by the parliament with prayers required to bring us more seasonal weather. This last winter, as the winter before it, has been as if it were summer and as last year brought so much sickness in its wake, there are fears that the plague will return unless cold weather comes. Little done. It happened that a scaffold on the back wall was let fall in the morning but by good fortune, the men standing upon it had come down a short while before and no harm done but for the breaking of two bowpotts below and the ruination of the flowers in them which were the damask roses I brought here from the old house in the town. The limner did not appear from his bed all this day to my husband's great anger. l am displeased with the form of the archway to the kitchen wall and will have it done again. The men will listen to the captain but amongst them are those who will but stare and smile at what I tell them. I intend to bow them to my will. This house is mine to shape.
There was a note below, written in pencil. 'Bowpotts = flowerpots. Kitchen wall arch — signs of alteration, Ihs,' Had Parrish written it? Probably, she thought.
JANUARY 16th, 1662, Thursday
This day I have sent by the Carter to York to discover the reason that the hangings have not come to us before. There was a great noise and to-do this morning soon after the workmen commenced, occasioned by a dispute between the joyners and the masons as to why the balcony in the kitchen yard is not supported by its props and in consequence leans like a drunkard. My husband is away in the town attempting a settlement with the Customs House for the Trinity Elders. AM did come again this day. He said he was come to shew drawings of the Spurn lighthouse to my husband but I think he had other fish to fry. He spent much time in discussion with the limner and, knowing I have no knowledge of that language, chose to make little of his business when I asked him what it was they said. The limner now complains of the light and would move to a different room. The men say we must find twenty yards more of good elmwood boards for the north tower but in truth I am not sure it is worth the candle being a dismal space and always will be. The drain new dug from the house of office is blocked up and spreads a stench through the whole house. The men say it is dug too shallow at the further end and must be redug to let all flow faster down it. This I have told them to do without waiting for my husband's return, for I do not think he will wish to live with the stink even though it costs dear to have the work redone.
She couldn't read the long note scribbled below this except for the word 'drains' and also something that looked like 'missing corbels'.
JANUARY 24th, 1662, Friday
We heard this day by the Carter that the execution has been commanded of all of those murderers of the late King Charles who still remain alive, but for two who were forced to take part in the plot against their wills. The planks which the Carter brought to us are of fine elmwood and I judge it is full-seasoned. There is sufficient to make the new floors in the north tower which have been open to the sky in their ruin these forty years. I would that I could share fully in my husband's pleasure in these two great towers. They do seem to me to be ancient sad places but I shall put that from my heart and take pleasure in the finishing of them and the fine new house that now stands between them which is just as he did make promise to me when first he told me his intention.
The limner is in an ill temper and seems to complain a great deal. He has been drinking strong water. The brushes are wrong, the pigments are wrong, he is obliged to mix up his own tints. He is a sorry fellow and disobliging. Our friend AM has been at Sunk Island in dealings with his old adversary and will come on the morrow to deal with him in his own tongue.
Amy put down the book and lay back against the trunk, her arms resting along the roots. From behind her came a slam from the front door of the house, that same house Amelia described, now being made new again. Feet scuffed through gravel where there should have been no feet, then fell silent when they reached the grass, coming in her direction. She sank lower into the protective embrace of her tree, not wanting to be found, not wanting to share this with someone who should not even be there, but the slightest of sounds in the grass beyond the tree told her the feet were indeed approaching. Carefully she craned her head just far enough around the trunk to see a man heading for the field's edge to her right. It was the only person it could have been, the man from the attic room, the man in the black overalls, and he was not at all as he had earlier seemed. In the room, she had seen a creature at bay, contorted around his injury, someone pitiful. The man who was now strolling across the grass, thinking himself alone, could never be pitied. He was in command of his world, striding through it with the grace and the disdainful certainty of a cat. He was tall and slim and from the side she was watching, the injury she had seen earlier might never have been. Her eyes widened and the growing excitement she had felt since she had first driven in through the wood suddenly had a focus.
He reached the ha-ha and stood at the top of it and if he had turned he would have seen her immediately, however far she sank down into the roots. She watched him, trapped and unable to move. He faced across the muddy river while he rolled a cigarette from a decorated tin. Something irresistible inside her so badly wanted to know how he managed with his damaged hand that she leant forward to see more clearly.
He was all black, his cloth
es, his thick hair, scraped back into a long pony tail exposing a widow's peak. He lit the cigarette as she opened her sketch pad again and quickly outlined him, realizing only as she brought her artist's eye into play that he was taller than she had thought, his chest widening out to powerful shoulders. A bird burst out of the tree, buzzed past his head and he flashed a look at it as if he might seize it from the sky. She was reminded of childhood birthday trips, zoo animals behind their bars, unaware of her, staring at the inner jungle which was their birthright.
Then, so suddenly that there seemed no transition from one state to another, he was looking right into her eyes, the fresh, healing scar standing out in startling pink.
'Are you drawing me?' He had a compelling voice. It left no room for lies.
'I was trying to.'
'I don't remember you asking,' he said, crushing the barely smoked cigarette under his foot and turning abruptly away. Amy watched him walk back to the house, his head high.
Not cat, she thought, panther. Feral and dangerous.
The wind that had been heeling the yacht out in the channel finally reached her, bringing with it the faintest smell of sulphur.
When she heard the door of the house slam shut again, Amy tried to read more of the journal but he had taken all of her peace with him. It was starting to grow dark and the idea of going back to the house, back to the room next to his, was unthinkable. Whatever it might bring, the pub seemed the only alternative. She got in the car.
The Painter Page 7
