Disputed Land

by Tim Pears

  The Saxons, in turn, were overcome by Normans, and were themselves pushed west. William the Conqueror settled his most savage Norman knights in the border country, where they became known as the Marcher Lords, holding sway over the territory they were given and any more they could wrest from the Welsh. On Grandpa’s shelf were, so he claimed with perhaps, in hindsight, a certain amount of poetic licence, a scrap of chain mail worn by Robert de Say of Clun, and Roger de Lacy of Ludlow’s own helmet.

  For the next two hundred years Welsh princes swept down from the mountains to do battle with the Marcher Lords, part of a greater Welsh resistance, until in twelve eighty-two Edward I gathered a huge English army and conquered once and for all the wild country. The last prince was David, captured and sentenced to death in Shrewsbury, where he was drawn and quartered. You could feel with a shudder the brutality of that time in the weapon on Grandpa’s shelf, a mace, used to mash people’s flesh and bones.

  Until the Civil War the borders remained comparatively quiet, then, for the next four hundred years. Welsh long-bowmen stood alongside the English launching showers of arrows with which they slaughtered French forces at Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt. ‘With arrowheads like this one, Theo,’ my grandfather had told me. ‘Feel it in your hand.’ The small blob of sharpened metal felt ominously compact and heavy. ‘They fell like hail, piercing the armour of the fiercest knights in Europe.’

  Some five years into the project, Grandpa understood the enormity of his ambition. ‘If I’d only begun it as a young man, devoted my life to that instead of the fruit business,’ he told me, his voice trailing off into consideration of what might have been; a life like his son’s, after all. From that moment he began gradually restraining his research, working his way back towards something more manageable. ‘I intend to publish a monograph on the history of our village next year,’ he’d said that summer. ‘Perhaps, after that, an essay on this house, and your grandmother’s family.’

  My grandfather removed his glasses and closed the book he was reading. He got wearily to his feet and carried the notebook to his desk. ‘What time is it, old son?’ he asked. Before I could answer, the clock on the mantlepiece chimed once, on the half-hour. It was a typical Grandpa trick.

  ‘Sun almost over the yardarm: those dipsomaniacs upstairs will demand their sauce,’ he said, taking a pipe from the ashtray on his desk and relighting it with a red-tipped Swan Vesta match. The tobacco in the bowl caught with an audible hiss. Grandpa shook the match and dropped it in the ashtray, and gazed out of the wide window, into the garden. I didn’t know anyone else who smoked a pipe; it was a both traditional and exotic practice. The smoke had a pungent acridity I found immensely appealing, and it was to breathe it in that I stood beside my grandfather, looking out. In the moonlight we could just see, above the beech hedge circumvallating the lawn, the tops of trees in the wood beyond the grazing pasture.

  ‘The twins told me,’ I said, ‘that your wood’s like the New Forest, or the Forest of Dean: original English woodland.’

  Grandpa laughed, in his own, particular way. A throaty chuckle, made with a warm smile on his face, so that even though he was laughing at you it wasn’t done unkindly. The twins had rinsed me, successfully, and he was amused by this success – and hoped that I would be, too.

  ‘It’s not true, is it?’ I said. ‘I didn’t think it was.’

  ‘I planted those trees the year my father-in-law died, Theo,’ Grandpa said. ‘Fifty-two years ago. A year after your grandmother and I were married.’ He turned to me and, nodding, said, ‘Every single one of them myself. My back aches with the memory.’

  ‘Why didn’t you get Jockie to help you?’ I asked.

  Grandpa smiled. ‘I wanted to do it,’ he said. He sucked on his pipe. ‘The only trouble with Jockie is he can’t stop tidying things up.’

  I wondered what was wrong with that.

  My grandfather gazed into the distance. ‘I like a little mess,’ he said.

  I asked him how long the trees would be here. He sucked on the stem of his pipe and blew smoke from his mouth, its aroma reaching my eager nostrils.

  ‘They survived the great storm of eighty-seven,’ he said. ‘We’re not expecting another one for a couple of hundred years, are we?’

  I found my parents in their blue bedroom. Chatting to each other, they didn’t notice me slip in. Mum was kneeling on the carpet, wrapping presents. Dad leaned back against a large chest of drawers, breaking off and passing to her short strips of Sellotape. I lay on my front on one of the beds, feet by the pillows, looking down on them.

  ‘She’s got a nice figure, wouldn’t you say?’ Mum conjectured.

  ‘I really didn’t notice,’ Dad said.

  ‘I only wonder if it’s real. Her breasts seem rather perfect, don’t you think?’ Mum measured paper, cut out the sizes she needed. ‘I can’t imagine she ever breastfed those twins.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Paid some Mapuche wetnurse to do it for her, I wouldn’t be surprised.’

  Dad stuck bits of tape to his knuckles. It brought to mind for a moment a boxer – a wonderfully inappropriate image for my gentle father. ‘I thought you told me she goes to a gym,’ he said.

  ‘All the time,’ Mum confirmed.

  ‘Well, there you go.’

  As he spoke, my father bent his head until it rested on his left shoulder. Then, in slow motion, he gradually leaned his entire torso in that direction. Mum stopped what she was doing. She and I glanced at each other, and both stared at this extraordinary behaviour. It looked like the beginning of some yoga stretching exercise Dad hadn’t done for twenty years, and had just remembered. He put out a Sellotape-covered hand to the carpet to support himself as he leaned further.

  ‘Quite amazing,’ he said. Mum and I waited for further explanation. He got up to a kneeling position, shuffled on his knees past Mum, took hold of the chair by the dressing table, and turned it over. There, on the base of its seat, was a red sticker, with the number 2 written on it.

  ‘Pa bought me this when I won first prize in a national essay-writing competition,’ my father said. ‘I was fourteen. “The first in our family with a chair in history,” Pa said. And look: my brother’s put one of his bloody stickers on it.’

  My father hardly ever cursed. The way that he stretched the first consonant, creating an extra syllable, and then put the stress on the second – ‘his ber-ludd-y stickers’ – made me see them as truly blood red.

  Mum shook her head. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘at least it’s not a first priority.’

  ‘I’d figured the only object I really wanted was my parents’ portrait. And one or two of Pa’s archaeological finds. But you know what?’ Dad said, frowning. ‘This needs to be taken seriously. We have to be a bit clever about it.’

  Mum and I waited for him to explain.

  ‘We need to work out what we want, and then consider how likely Jonny – or indeed Gwen – are to want the same pieces. We need to gamble. I mean, there are probably one or two things I want that the others can have no possible interest in. In which case we can put them in the third category.’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Mum said. ‘Don’t waste first or even second choices on what no one else wants. But I mean it should be easy: Jonny appears to have put stickers on what he wants already. Wait for Gwen to do the same.’

  My father tapped his skull. ‘Good thinking, Amy,’ he said. ‘But hang on.’ Dad paused, took a breath, and sighed. ‘You know I wouldn’t put it past him to lay a false trail. I really wouldn’t.’

  The gong rang downstairs. We gathered in the drawing room. The doors of the wood-burning stove were open and the fire crackled and roared. The pile of presents in their different coloured wrapping paper, to which my parents and I now added a further contribution, had grown momentous. It looked like a film studio prop, a representation of family gifts rather than the real thing. It was easy to imagine that inside each package was nothing but an empty brown cardboard box
.

  Grandpa opened a bottle of champagne, allowing the cork to pop and bounce off the ceiling: he poured it into flutes which the twins passed round. ‘Pity Jonny’s not here,’ he said. ‘He’d appreciate this vintage.’

  I was just close enough to overhear Aunt Lorna whisper to Melony, ‘By ten’o’clock he would drink meths.’

  ‘Where is our dear brother?’ Dad asked Gwen.

  She leaned towards him. ‘Gone to the pub, like he said,’ she confided, as if they were all my age still, and covering for the mischievous brother; keeping his escapade out of earshot of their mother. ‘Said he’d be back for supper.’

  Our grandmother sat in her chair beside the fire. Xan handed her a glass of champagne, saying, ‘Try not to drink it too fast, Grandma.’

  ‘Don’t be fresh with me, young man,’ she told him, and then, raising her head, addressing us all, ‘Marvellous news! I’ve received a new text from Matt on my own mobile. He’s arriving tomorrow, as early as he can make it, and he can’t wait to get here.’ My grandmother looked so happy she glowed; because, I supposed, he’d managed to text her directly, without intermediaries.

  A second bottle was opened, the cork this time flying at an angle and dropping on Melony’s head, for which Grandpa apologised without ceasing to chuckle.

  ‘I thought Mattie was coming today,’ Baz said, in a peevish tone.

  ‘He’ll come when he’s quite ready, thank you very much,’ Grandma said. ‘As soon as he possibly can.’

  I was focussing on people’s conversations, partly to keep my gaze from drifting to my aunt, but my head kept turning of its own volition in her direction, and I’d find myself staring at her, and have to wrench my attention away. She wore a tight shirt which had red flowers on it and also gauzy, see-through bits, and black flared trousers, and the same perfume she had on the previous evening. Her hair was piled up on her head; loose strands fell either side of her face. She was so beautiful my eyes were drawn of their own accord. I’d heard the expression that such-and-such a woman’s beauty took a man’s breath away. That’s not what happened, exactly; it was more that my lungs forgot to do their job, I don’t know how long for. Eventually, by a stroke of fortune, Sid and Holly came in through the door from the kitchen area, carrying plates, and they were greeted with a commotion that jolted me into taking a great breath of air, just before I would, almost certainly, have fainted.

  There were smoked salmon sandwiches made with thin slices of brown bread, with quartered lemons and black pepper. Now there was something ‘to soak it up’, Grandpa decided we could all have a second glass of champagne.

  People rearranged themselves, and conversation resumed. Aunt Lorna was now on the big sofa opposite the fire. ‘I used to play with a boys’ team in Buenos Aires,’ she was telling Melony. ‘Every year, as I grew older, people complained. My mother said her friends in the polo club were saying things behind her back, but my father insisted that his daughters had the right to do the same as their brothers.’

  It wasn’t just my aunt’s physical beauty. Her body possessed some kind of magnetic force; a vertiginous attraction: I was pulled towards it as if towards a cliff edge. Not that I knew what I wanted to do when I got there, other than to fall.

  ‘If I wished to play football, he wouldn’t let my mother stop me,’ she said. ‘I played until I was fourteen, fifteen.’

  I discovered myself about to sit down on the arm of the sofa next to my aunt when Holly elbowed me in the ribs and hissed in my ear, ‘Have you heard about these stupid stickers?’

  ‘Of course I have,’ I said, as if I hadn’t already made it quite clear that I knew a lot more than she did about what went on in the house, owing to my summer visits, and the particular closeness of my relationship with our grandparents.

  ‘I was there when Grandma explained it,’ I said.

  ‘It’s so dumb,’ Holly said. ‘I mean, my Mum says she doesn’t want anything to do with it, but then she told Sid she’s just going to choose the bits she really loves.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s chosen a cracked old mirror, for one thing,’ Holly said. ‘And a chamber pot! A potty, she called it.’ Holly’s pale cheeks flushed with anger, I couldn’t really see why, but then, as if to answer me, she continued. ‘Has she asked us? I mean, who’s this stuff for in the end?’ Holly shook her head. ‘She doesn’t care about us at all. Me and Matt and Sid are the ones who are going to end up with the rubbish she chooses.’

  She saw me frowning at her and added, ‘Eventually.’

  ‘Eventually,’ I said, ‘you’ll pass it on as well.’

  Holly grimaced, and said, ‘I’m never having children.’

  The twins were at opposite ends of the room, sat on the floor behind people’s chairs, sending texts to each other: they’d peep around the side of the chair to look at each other and glance and nod towards someone else, then return to their parallel conversation, across the radio waves of the room. Otherwise the company was convivial, restrained. People spoke quietly to their neighbours. With Uncle Jonny absent there was a lack of animation to proceedings. I looked at my father, who was standing near the Christmas tree, chatting with Sid. He was holding a book – the one, I assumed, she was presently devouring – to which, in polite turn, they clearly referred. It seemed to me that the energy between the two brothers had been unequally divided; as if some of my father’s due allotment had been held back, for his brother, born eighteen months later. Not that I felt, realising this, any less love for my father. It just made me feel somewhat sorry for him.

  I took a plate of sandwiches around the room, offering them fleetingly to people, and managed to get back to the corner with a few left. Holly didn’t want any more, neither did Xan or Baz. Smoked salmon was a developed taste, I presumed; a sign of maturity. I squeezed lemon on one, and ate it in two sumptuous mouthfuls. It was my fourth so far. In the din of chatter all around me, I wondered how many I could consume before supper.

  Then, suddenly, there was a lull, of the sort that sometimes occurs in a room full of people. Each of the half-dozen conversations ceased at the same moment, except for one, to which everyone else’s attention now switched: my mother was nodding, as Auntie Gwen – the two of them sat on the small sofa, over by the piano – told her, ‘It’s not quite twelve weeks, we’re not really telling anyone yet, not even the children.’ The two of them were so intent upon each other that neither noticed ten eavesdroppers surrounding them. ‘Melony’s been here before. Years ago. But yes.’ Gwen smiled. ‘We’re hopeful. Really hopeful.’

  My mother took hold of Gwen’s hand, and it was now that, slowly, as if waking from sleep, both Mum and Auntie Gwen blinked, looked around, saw people staring at them with various expressions of puzzlement or shock.

  Grandma was the first to speak. ‘Are you serious?’ she demanded. ‘You surely cannot be serious.’ She looked from Gwen across to Melony, and back to her daughter. ‘Tell me it’s not true.’

  I was impressed, to be honest, that Grandma had cottoned on so quickly to what was going on. I only did so myself because Holly had told the twins and I the night before what her mother and mother’s girlfriend were attempting, and even so I couldn’t quite believe that the woman sitting next to Aunt Lorna on the big sofa had a baby growing inside her; a baby made from one of Gwen’s eggs and the sperm of a chinnor male friend of theirs, mixed in a laboratory, implanted in Melony’s womb; a baby who would be my cousin. Melony did, however, look different from how she had a moment before: visibly pale, stricken.

  ‘This is outrageous,’ Grandma said, standing up.

  I noticed my mother catch my father’s attention, and make a face as if to say both, ‘Look, this is just the sort of behaviour I feared,’ and ‘Do something!’ I glanced at Grandpa, sitting in the armchair beside the tree, Holly kneeling beside it. He was looking at Grandma unperturbed, making no attempt to intervene. Auntie Gwen began to sob. All the colour had drained from Melony’s face: I�
��m sure if she had tried to stand up, she would have been unable to.

  ‘Quite frankly,’ Grandma said, ‘I can’t tell you how disappointed I am.’

  It was Sid, of all people, who stepped forward. ‘Look what time it is,’ she said. ‘The lasagne must be ready by now.’ Holly scuttled out, whether hurt at discovering the news in this way or to check on the supper I wasn’t sure.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ said Grandma. She marched to the door. ‘I’m going to bed.’ She stopped in the doorway, turned back, and addressed the room. ‘There are sixty million people on this island, do you genuinely not realise? An island capable of sustaining, what, twenty million, at most? Will you really not admit it? We’ve not fed ourselves for two hundred years. And look what they did to your father’s orchards!’ She looked around, her piercing eyes boring into each one of us in turn. ‘Can we really expect other countries to keep supplying us with food that they will need? No.’ She shook her head. ‘No, we can’t. The planet is dying, and trying desperately to save itself. Vast tracts of populated land are going to be uninhabitable. This island will be a lifeboat, an ark, that people from all over the world are going to try to cling to.’

  It was the first great political speech I’d ever heard, and I heard it delivered live, in a shrill voice of barely restrained hysteria, in the drawing room of my grandparents’ house in Shropshire.

  ‘Millions of people live like the royalty of earlier epochs,’ Grandma continued. ‘Never have so many people lived so well. The height of civilisation, and it’s built on sand. We’re passing on a society in a state of decadence and you, my own children, are unable to curb your self-indulgent breeding.’ My grandmother shook her vulture-like head. The head of an ailing prophet. Having given this blast, she looked suddenly frail, as if it had used up all her force. She reached out to the doorframe for support. My father leapt up from his chair and rushed over, and helped her walk towards the stairs.