Disputed Land

by Tim Pears

  2

  My grandparents’ house, built in its own grounds on the slope of Brown Clee Hill, lay on a parish boundary. The large village, with the pub that Uncle Jonny had visited the night before, a garage, a butcher and a baker, and a post office and stores where my grandmother did her shopping – it was virtually a small town – lay to the east. For some reason, however, my grandparents attended the tiny church in the scattered hamlet to the west. Grandma had had an argument with the churchwarden or organist or somebody years before, and she’d refused to set foot in the large village church ever since. Or perhaps it had even been her father? I couldn’t quite recall. Some obstinate vendetta.

  I was the only other member of the family to travel the short journey with them that Christmas morning. My mother approved of my choice. ‘It’s good for children to be bored,’ she reckoned. ‘It stimulates the imagination.’

  My grandfather’s car, though almost new, already smelled of dogs, and was cramped. I sat in the middle of the back seat with my legs folded, leaning forward. Leda and Sel had opted to come along, too, though they’d have to remain in the car; they sat on the floor of the vehicle, one on either side of me.

  ‘Let’s hope it’s not that awful man,’ Grandma said in the passenger seat.

  ‘Could be any one of them,’ Grandpa said, driving slowly. ‘From any of the Corvedale churches.’

  * * *

  The congregation consisted of no more than a dozen members, dispersed around the pews of the small church. I was the youngest by about sixty years. Seven electric bar heaters hung from the roof beams, their orange glowing filaments sending a meagre heat further up into the rafters. There was a pervasive smell of damp stone; of old wood and musty books, warming slowly.

  A Christmas tree stood in the corner up by the altar. The hymn board, with numerals slotted in, had tinsel around it. Fairy lights twinkled along the top of the screen, in front of which was a nativity scene in a wooden stable peopled by squat, home-made figures – of Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus, shepherds, the three wise men – so ugly they were practically blasphemous.

  We sat in pensive silence. On the wall above my head an ancient electric meter made a noise like a dog panting. Below me, attached to hooks beneath the shelf on which we’d placed our hymn books and order of service sheets, hung kneelers embroidered, Grandpa told me, by parishioners: each person had depicted the house they lived in. He pointed out that the endeavour was a kind of subversive parable: regardless of what sort of dwellings they were, from his own virtual manor to the meanest cottage, on the kneelers they’d been rendered all the same size.

  The priest stumbled in, tall, thin and stooping, old as his congregation, flustered. ‘Just come from Clee St Margaret,’ he apologised, breathless, as if he’d run over the hills. ‘The nine-thirty.’ He rushed up to the chancel, and within moments launched into the communion service.

  * * *

  Before long an even older man staggered along the nave to the lectern, holding on to the ends of the pews as he went, to give a reading from the Epistle of Paul to Titus. It was all about how Titus was left in Crete and told to ordain elders in every city there. ‘A bishop must be blameless,’ the man read in a faltering voice. ‘Not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre.’ It was an odd piece of scripture, which grew increasingly mad as he read on. ‘There are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision, whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake.’

  I stole a glance around the scattered members of the congregation. Each appeared to have his or her mind on other things; on other Christmases perhaps, long past. The words being read out washed over them, unheard. I hoped Grandpa had a copy of the Bible in his library: I looked forward to finding this passage and reading it to Holly. ‘One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies. This witness is true. Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith.’

  I went up to the altar rail along with everyone else to take the Eucharist, even though I’d not been confirmed. The priest didn’t realise. The thin wafer sat on my tongue; the wine was a shock of alcohol in the morning. I savoured it, and swallowed the bread walking back to our pew, feeling older than my years. There were prayers: I knelt, squeezed shut my eyes and begged God to make my grandmother well, and keep her well for ever. It seemed unlikely that a God I had no conception of would answer my plea, but perhaps this was itself one of those challenges of faith religion was famous for.

  During the hymns, while the congregation made a pitiful collective attempt at both melody and volume, I stared down at my hymn book: my voice was even more unpredictable when asked to sing as when speaking, and so I kept dumb. The small upright organ was located in the chancel, where we could all see it, the organist a tiny, birdlike woman perched on a stool, who played with great gusto and sang along tunelessly but loudly, giving some life to the hymns, which might otherwise have expired on the wing.

  After the end of the service, while my grandparents conversed with their fellow celebrants, I studied wall tablets. On one was written, This tablet is erected by public subscription to the sacred memory of the soldiers from this parish who fell in action in the Great War. It was dated 1914–1919, which I knew from our study of Wilfred Owen’s poems the previous term to be erroneous: the First World War ended in 1918. Perhaps this remote place existed at a slight angle to, dislocated from, the main current of events.

  Outside the sky was changing, the cloud cover breaking up. There were patches of blue and white. The priest hurried away, and the other members of the congregation limped to their cars. Grandma went over to her family tomb – of course, I remembered, that was the chief reason she came to this church.

  ‘We’ll leave her be,’ Grandpa said, so we kept apart. ‘She’ll be buried here,’ he told me. ‘With her parents; her older brother, who died in Burma; and her sister, who was only a child.’

  I wasn’t sure I understood. ‘What about you, Grandpa?’ I asked. ‘Won’t you two be side by side?’

  He smiled. ‘I expect so, old son. Come over here. I don’t think I’ve ever shown you this.’

  We walked across the churchyard, between graves, and stood by the fence looking out across a large, sloping field.

  ‘What do you see?’ my grandfather asked me.

  The field looked, at first, just like any other parcel of rolling pasture. But as I studied it I began to perceive that the surface was variegated, with subtle hillocks, with dips and mounds. It was as if they became visible, were brought forth, only by our attention.

  ‘There was something else here,’ I tentatively suggested. It was more of a question than a statement.

  Grandpa nodded. ‘This was the site of the original village, until it was struck by the Black Death, the plague, in the fourteenth century. By thirteen fifty it was deserted.’ He spoke of this time as if he remembered it. ‘Gypsies moved in,’ he continued. ‘Camped here. There’s been Gypsy blood in the village ever since.’ Grandpa chuckled. ‘I tell your grandmother it explains the sallow skin and the brown eyes of her family.’

  ‘Is that true?’ I asked, thrilled at the prospect of Gypsy blood reeling through my veins.

  ‘I’ve been teasing her with it all her life,’ he answered. ‘I can just about get away with it, Theo, but I wouldn’t recommend that you start. Whether it’s true or not, who can say? For an island race, we’re wonderfully mongrel.’

  We rejoined Grandma, who took my left arm as we walked slowly out of the churchyard. Squeezing her bony arm with my right hand, I imagined a time a year from now, next year’s Christmas morning; imagined her not walking along this path but there, in her family tomb. All I could think of was how little I knew: of truth, of God, of those people I knew best. People are put in the ground, I thought, like buried books, the stories they’ve acted out buried with them. What remained above? Faint
, fading rumours?

  I would in time inherit my grandfather’s library. It held two thousand, seven hundred and twenty-three volumes, including pamphlets and maps, and a pocket edition of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad that he used to keep in the glove compartment of his car. My parents kindly stored it for me until the time came when I was able to buy my own house, whereupon the first thing I did was to put shelves up around the walls of the small rooms, using cheap L-shaped brackets, and floorboards rescued from skips. I hired a van and transported the books in large cardboard boxes from Oxford.

  I’ve hung on to the library ever since, through half a dozen moves, into marriage and a family of my own. Although actually that’s not strictly true: over the years I’ve probably given away – to charity shops, mostly – about half the books I inherited; but only when I had new ones of my own to replace them with, including many of my own parents’ books, when their time came. The size of the library has, until recently, remained very much the same as it was.

  I’m not entirely sure of the reason for this. It can’t be explained merely by the exigencies of space: the house we’ve ended up in is twice the size of my first and could accommodate a greater number of books. I’ve come to the conclusion that, as an adolescent, I conceived the notion of my grandfather as a civilised man, and, further, that his library expressed this, was appropriate for such a man and his family, available to its members to browse, delve into, borrow from as they will. The prospect of accumulating more and more books felt profligate, intellectually gluttonous. I suspect, too, I would have felt burdened by the weight of obsolete knowledge, superceded by new research. The process of winnowing, on the other hand, deciding which books to remove to make way for an influx of fresh ones, invigorating for the health of the stock, is an essential task of any librarian, as necessary as the regular culling of a herd of deer.

  3

  Upon returning to the house I searched for my parents and found them, to my surprise, in my grandparents’ bedroom. They were speaking to each other in hushed voices. ‘I’ve always rather coveted Pa’s chest of drawers,’ my father said. In his left hand he held a sheet of blue stickers.

  They each gave a little start when they realised they’d been interrupted. Relieved to discover that it was me, they resumed their investigations. ‘It’s very dark wood,’ said my mother, frowning. ‘Nineteenth century, like most everything else. Mahogany, I should think. And look: it hasn’t got legs. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the upper part of something else, like a … you know, what are those things called?’

  ‘A tallboy?’ Dad wondered. ‘Maybe. I seem to remember being told it was Scottish.’

  ‘I prefer that wardrobe over there,’ said Mum. ‘Don’t you?’

  My cousins were in the drawing room. The twins wanted to sort the presents into piles according to the recipient, in preparation for opening them that afternoon, but Holly was making them wait until she’d taken a photo or two, using her camera as a kind of sketchbook.

  ‘I hate digital,’ Xan told her.

  ‘The trouble is it’s fake,’ Baz agreed.

  ‘I like the grain of thirty-five mill,’ said Xan. He was staring hard at a cuboid shape wrapped in thin Christmas paper that had his name on it, trying to make out the object within.

  ‘We’ve got a processing lab at school,’ Baz explained.

  ‘I love photography,’ Xan said.

  ‘Who do you like?’ Sidney, on the sofa, asked from behind her book.

  ‘Kodak,’ Xan replied.

  ‘Agfa’s better,’ Baz said.

  ‘Fuji used to be good,’ Xan said. ‘But their green’s not the same as it was.’

  ‘Cibachrome’s the best,’ Baz decided.

  ‘That’s very true,’ Xan solemnly agreed.

  Uncle Jonny was outside the French windows, talking on his mobile. It seemed extraordinary to be conducting business on Christmas Day, but it was clear that he was, from the way he was standing, feet planted on the ground two feet apart. I went out, as he concluded his call.

  ‘The fuckers were desperate to buy a month ago,’ he said. ‘Now I want to sell they’re not interested? You tell them no one kicks me in the bollocks and walks away.’ He snapped shut what I thought of as his profanity phone, put it back in the left-hand back pocket of his jeans. The day was colder than yesterday, though it didn’t seem so, since wide swathes of the sky were now blue. Uncle Jonny wore a pink, open-necked shirt, with gold cufflinks. He turned and found me standing there, like some shivering acolyte. ‘Let me give you a word of advice, Theo,’ he said. ‘When your business is doing well, borrow as much money as you can. You know why?’

  I considered the question carefully, though I hardly knew whether it was the kind of puzzle to be answered with common sense and logic. ‘You can make the business bigger?’ I ventured.

  Jonny shook his head. ‘Number one,’ he said, ‘you pay yourself a dividend out of that money. Number two, it’s good to have debt whose interest you’re obliged to service. You know why?’

  Sensing I was unlikely to know the correct answer to this one either I shook my head.

  ‘Because,’ Jonny said, ‘it motivates you and the people who work for you to perform better.’ He grinned. ‘I’ll tell you a secret, Theo. It’s all about confidence. Of course. Everyone knows that. People look at me and say, “We’ll trust him with our money, he’s such a confident bastard.” I know that. But that’s not what drives me; not confidence. Fear. That’s what drives us. Fear of failure. Shame. Ruin.’

  Having delivered himself of this counsel, Uncle Jonny looked around him, as if for a better audience, then up at the walls and eaves of the house. ‘Funny old place, this, eh?’ he said.

  I mumbled agreement. ‘Have you finished putting your stickers on the furniture yet?’ I asked, anxious that I was being presumptuous in doing so.

  ‘Me?’ my uncle replied. His grimace suggested I’d accused him of indecent exposure. ‘Not my area, antiques,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Women’s business. I’ve left all that sticker stuff to Lorna.’

  ‘But what about furniture in your own room?’ I asked. ‘From your childhood?’

  Uncle Jonny shook his head. ‘They mean nothing to me. Bits of junk.’ He gave a sudden tremble of his wide, solid shoulders. ‘Love and power, Theo,’ he said. ‘That’s all that counts. It’s bloody cold out here. You coming in?’

  * * *

  Grandma had agreed to let others cook the main meal later, but she’d insisted on preparing a light lunch of pumpkin soup with home-made rolls, along with the ham, Stilton, cheddar. Finding her on her own in the kitchen, I told her all about the stickers: that Auntie Gwen was choosing furniture based on sentiment for her childhood, Lorna was selecting the finest antiques, and my Mum and Dad were doing both of these, while also trying to second-guess what the others were doing. I was aware of my filial disloyalty, but the fact was it distressed me to find them assessing Grandma’s furniture the very day they’d learned that she was mortally ill. I hardly appreciated that they might be holding their sorrow at arm’s length, in whatever way they could; that it would come back for us all after dark.

  My account filled Grandma with glee. It may have been that I exaggerated a little as I went along.

  ‘Look at them,’ she said. ‘Like hyenas, snarling over the bones of an old carcass.’ She cackled with delight. ‘I’ve let the dogs loose, you see.’

  The only trouble was that, possessed of a febrile energy, Grandma moved quickly between the kitchen, the pantry and the larder – with its deep freeze and an extra fridge – so that I couldn’t just whisper, but had to follow her around in order to keep up the conversation, and although I spoke as quietly as I could she kept saying, ‘Speak up, boy!’ and ‘Don’t swallow your words!’ I was certain people could hear.

  ‘My advice, Theo,’ Grandma said, ‘is don’t have them yourself.’

  ‘Have what?’ I asked.

  ‘Children, of course. Awful things. Dreadful
.’ She screwed up her wrinkled face as she reached for a jar of chutney. ‘Horrid.’

  ‘Why did you?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh, one did in those days. One didn’t imagine one had a choice, you see.’ She carried a tureen back to the kitchen. ‘One was an ignorant little bitch, really. Where’s Holly? Would you two go and get me some apples. You know where they’re stored, don’t you?’

  The apple loft was above Grandpa’s workshop. We climbed the wooden staircase, dimly lit by a small window greyed by dust and cobwebs, and came out in a room whose smell was overpowering: sweet, musty, decaying and delicious all at once, in one complexity of scent that I inhaled deeply, my nostrils greedy for it.

  I wasn’t sure Holly even noticed the smell. It was the sight that captivated her: apples laid out on wooden trays, in specially constructed racks. She slid trays out, revealing all sorts of size, shape, shade of colour. Each variety was identified by marker pen on a white plastic tab tacked to its tray: Ribston Pippin, Catshead, Ashmead’s Kernel.

  ‘I’m coming back here this afternoon to start a still-life,’ Holly said, and it was true that it was as if we’d stepped inside an old painting. ‘I’m not even going to take any photos.’

  ‘The apples are breathing, you know,’ I told her. ‘They inhale oxygen just like us, exhale carbon dioxide. To store them through the winter the air has to be monitored, and changed when necessary. It’s called gas storage.’

  We picked some of the odder-looking specimens from assorted trays, and put them in the basket we’d brought with us. Holly was looking around the store, nodding at the trays, her lips moving: she was clearly making calculations.

  ‘I don’t quite get it,’ she said. ‘There must be a thousand apples in here – I mean, I’ve never seen so many in one place – but I can’t see how Grandpa could have made all his money just from these. Are they really rare and expensive, or what?’

  I didn’t mean to laugh. I tried to swallow my derision as soon as it leapt from my mouth, but too late. In the murky room I saw Holly’s brown eyes narrow. How was it, I wondered, that our grandfather’s laughter lacked cruelty or scorn, and was not hurtful? Why couldn’t mine be the same?