by Tim Pears
‘You wouldn’t dare,’ Xan said.
‘A drop of three floors straight on to the flagstones on the patio,’ I said.
There was a longer silence, which extended, until it became clear from their drunken snoring that both twins had fallen asleep. Holly, though, was still awake.
‘Theo,’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Is Grandma really going to die?’
‘We’re all going to die,’ I said.
‘You know what I mean,’ Holly said.
I wasn’t sure what Holly wanted, or needed, me to say. ‘Do you know what Grandpa told me today?’ I asked. ‘He said that the Venerable Bede, who wrote the first real history of England, well, Bede wrote, somewhere, that, “Life is the flight of a sparrow through the banquet hall.” I asked Grandpa if that was what he thought: life is just this brief, insignificant flight. You know what he said?’
Holly sighed. ‘What?’ she said, and sniffed, the single syllable nasal and congested with her emotions.
‘He said that for him the banquet hall is the mind of God. That’s what we’re gliding through.’
I didn’t know whether Holly was thinking about what I’d just said. I wasn’t sure I’d explained it properly. That this existence we’re living in is itself the mind of God, which I thought at the time a startling idea. Then I realised that Holly was crying.
‘I don’t want Grandma to die,’ she said.
‘Neither do I,’ I whispered. ‘Neither do I.’ I guess I welled up with emotion myself then. We drifted off to sleep in our alcoves, lamenting the mortality of those we loved, and most likely of ourselves.
IV
1
When I climbed out of my alcove on Boxing Day morning I turned and, before dressing, watched Holly and the twins: in a deep, heavy sleep, still and helpless. I felt old, suddenly, for an odd moment, looking down on these children.
Grandpa was standing well back from the kitchen window, binoculars raised. He stood beside Grandma, who sat in her warm chair by the Aga, with her mug of tea. She wore not her dressing gown as usual but tan jodhpurs and a white shirt. I kissed her good morning, she told me to make myself a drink.
Without lowering the field glasses, as he called them, my grandfather said, ‘It’s here, Theo.’
Beside him, Grandma shook her head.
‘By the coach house,’ Grandpa said. ‘It’ll be on the feeders in a moment.’
‘Don’t talk drizzle, Leonard,’ Grandma said. She paused, her face blank, as if reviewing what had just emerged from her lips for an error she perceived dimly. Giving up on the search, she said, ‘I don’t know why you make such a fuss about your one ruddy woodpecker when other entire species are being forced from their habitat. How long are we going to see curlews here? Golden plover?’
Grandpa ignored her, and she turned to me. ‘Did your grandfather tell you, Theo, that he didn’t hear a cuckoo this spring?’
I had to admit that he hadn’t, and shook my head.
‘For the first time in his life. Is that not right, Leonard?’ She had turned her attention back to her husband. ‘So, just like you, the boy will simply watch the disappearing world. He’ll suffer in a melancholy way. Who knows? Perhaps he’ll write about it, another elegy for your library. But will he do anything?’
My grandmother’s words, my grandfather’s silence, too, had in them the history of other conversations, threaded back through their lives. Ancient conflicts, points where their personalities rubbed up against one another, returned to from new angles, in fresh contexts, year after year through their life together, even while Grandma’s sickness brought a new febrility to her behaviour.
Grandpa stepped closer to the window, and scanned the landscape. He raised his gaze up the hill, and said, ‘Jockie.’ I looked too and saw a white blur up on the lane.
Grandma checked the clock on the wall above her. ‘About time, too,’ she said, and got up. By the time Jockie’s Mini van had travelled down from the lane and around the house to the stable yard, my grandmother had donned her black jacket and was walking across the patio, carrying her riding boots in one hand and helmet in the other. She didn’t walk like a frail old person, their bones turning brittle, but looked wiry and tough still, her back straight, her head held high. She’d given her last horse, Duncan, away that autumn (though she kept forgetting that she’d done so) with the proviso that she could borrow it on occasion. Grandpa explained to me now that he’d presumed no such occasion would arise.
‘Forgot about Boxing Day,’ he admitted. ‘Not to mention your grandmother’s bloody-mindedness. Nothing I could say to change her mind.’ He lowered the binoculars for the first time, and shook his head. ‘Seems to have disappeared,’ he said regretfully.
I laid the table for breakfast. Uncle Jonny came in, saying, ‘Stick the kettle on, Theo. Pa, I’ll need to use your Internet after breakfast if I may. Bloody sight easier if you had wireless.’
‘They only just got broadband,’ I told my uncle, making a face to show him I understood how backward things were out here in the sticks.
Jockie had collected my grandfather’s copy of The Times from the garage in the village, and my parents picked it up off the table in the hall on their way into breakfast. While Mum poured apple juice from a bottle in the fridge, Dad scanned the headlines.
‘Oh, no,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ Mum asked.
‘Pinter’s died.’
Uncle Jonny opened a mouth full of half-munched toast and said, ‘Which one?’
‘What do you mean, “Which one?”’ my father said, coming over to the dining table. He was carrying the newspaper, as evidence, but maybe Jonny didn’t realise that. ‘Harold, of course.’
Uncle Jonny frowned. ‘I don’t remember any Harold. George was the one who played rugby, wasn’t he?’
My father gazed at his brother, scrutinising his face for clues; to what, I wasn’t sure. ‘Harold Pinter,’ he said. ‘The playwright. Nobel prize. No Man’s Land. The Birthday Party.’
Uncle Jonny gazed back at him, then nodded slowly. ‘I thought you meant the Pinters of Cleobury North,’ he said.
My mother broke open a hot roll. Butter melted. She added bilberry jam.
‘That looks good,’ Dad said. ‘Give me a bite, Amy.’
‘Make your own,’ she said. Turning to Grandpa, she added, ‘He always does this.’
‘Because,’ my father said, in his own defence, ‘what you make always looks better. In fact, what anyone makes looks better, and it’s all my father’s fault. Whenever we went on a picnic Pa had the knack of knocking together delectable snacks. He’d spread a piece of bread with butter, break a chocolate bar up and put the bits on it, fold the bread over, you remember, Jonny, and there was this delicious chocolate sandwich.’
‘So why didn’t you just copy him?’ Mum demanded.
‘Too late,’ Dad admitted. ‘Pa would take ages getting everything ready, by which time I’d already eaten mine.’
Uncle Jonny looked at Mum and shook his head, glancing towards his brother, and said, ‘Greedy bastard, he was.’
‘Nineteen seventy-five,’ Mum said, abruptly changing the subject. ‘Or maybe seventy-six. My godmother had me to stay with her in Oxford on my own, for the first time, and took me to see Otherwise Engaged at The Playhouse.’
‘What, a Pinter play?’ Dad asked. ‘I don’t recall that one.’
‘Simon Gray,’ Mum said, ‘but Harold Pinter directed, I remember. I must have been your age, Theo,’ she said to me. ‘Alan Bates played the main role, of this man trying to listen to a piece of music, who’s endlessly interrupted, by a succession of maddening people. I remember it clearly,’ she said. ‘It was so exciting. Funny and foolish, but with other things going on I was aware of without understanding: the man’s calm, and how long it could last. The whole evening, really. Taxi back to my godmother’s house in Old Marston. You won’t remember her, Theo. It became a regular treat, staying with her, t
aken to the Playhouse.’
After breakfast Grandpa asked me to give the dogs a quick run. ‘Take the field glasses,’ he said. ‘See if you can see him.’
The day was colder than it had been. The sky was filled with banks of cloud in differing tones of grey. With the earth in its winter hibernation, nature’s smells were dormant, though not for the dogs: they tore hither and thither, the ground crisscrossed with the tracks of nocturnal animals. I walked beyond the coach house and the rusted machinery, past the swing ropes, up into the paddock above the riding school. Using the binoculars I found a buzzard on the hill, hovering high above the dead bracken, its gimlet eyes scrutinising the ground for movement. I scanned down, and there, in the magnified circle of the lens, appeared Aunt Lorna, jogging along the track that skirted the hill. She disappeared from sight, my view of her blocked by a grassy mound, but then reappeared down the path around it, running more freely now, letting herself go downhill. It wasn’t easy to keep the binoculars on her, but I was determined to, right up until she filled the lens. Except a voice shattered the solitude of my voyeurism, making my heart thump; my arms dropped to my sides, the weighty binoculars cracked against my breastbone.
‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’
It was Holly, who was looking not at me, as I’d feared, but up the hill. I gratefully handed her the binoculars. She raised them to her eyes. ‘I wish I could be beautiful like her,’ Holly said, as she adjusted focus. ‘It’s all double vision,’ she said. ‘I can’t get it to go into one.’
‘Just takes practice,’ I mumbled.
She handed back the binoculars. ‘Botox,’ Holly said. ‘Or Restylane. She has it done in New York.’ There was an unmistakable tone of approval, or envy, in her voice. ‘I’ve checked them on the Web. There’s all sorts of injectables you can have. Oh, and Grandpa said to tell you we need to leave in a couple of minutes.’
I whistled for the dogs, and we turned towards the house. ‘She talks to you about it?’ I asked.
Holly shook her head. ‘There’s genetically engineered collagen,’ she said. ‘And they’ve just about eliminated allergic reactions.’
‘Why are you so interested?’ I asked.
Holly shrugged. ‘I suppose I might have breast enlargement if they don’t get bigger,’ she said. She must have seen my reaction – I sensed her glance in my direction – because she added, ‘Not now, I mean later. But the face. That’s what everyone sees, right?’
I suppose I was shocked in part because I’d taken to heart my mother’s opinion: that people who have cosmetic surgery are mentally ill, and the doctors who operate are criminals. ‘But you,’ I said. ‘You’re so …’
‘So what?’ Holly asked.
I heard noises up ahead, and glanced across the yard. My father was putting red buckets into the boot of Grandpa’s car. Grandpa called to me, ‘Put the dogs inside, would you, Theo?’
I watched my grey wellies clump along. I could feel my cheeks, despite the cold, glow red with unwanted heat.
‘Pretty,’ I said.
Holly laughed. ‘You’re just saying that,’ she said, and ran towards the car.
2
Men – and women – of action cause the problems in this world, don’t they? People with what are commonly called powerful personalities. Those who live a quiet life, on the other hand, tolerant of their fellows, adaptable to circumstance, capable of making an accommodation with the fugitive nature of love and the ephemeral fact of this fleeting existence; such individuals do little harm.
Yes, it is true that our children berate us for not having changed our ways sufficiently, forced others to change theirs. But the doers cause the problems, how are the thinkers to solve them? Even if they could turn themselves into doers, would they not then change their natures, and themselves create havoc? Of course they would.
This dualism, not between mind and matter but between changing the world and leaving it alone; this, it turns out, is the dichotomy embedded within the human species, which has gradually revealed itself over the course of history, unfurling like the tongue of some hideous serpent.
For hundreds of thousands of years survival kept the men of action busy enough, in hunting and war, while the rest were left to forage and gossip, to teach their children, to study healing herbs and intoxicants, to paint on the walls of caves, to make music. Technology has allowed the men of action to lay waste the world.
* * *
My father sat in the passenger seat, Holly and I in the back, as our grandfather drove us down to the large village to the east. Dad was telling Holly about a painting in the collection at Christ Church Picture Gallery, called The Butcher’s Shop. ‘It’s an awfully strange painting,’ he was saying, ‘no one really knows what it means, but the human figures and the animal flesh are quite beautifully rendered. I think you’d like it.’
He spoke in such a way that made me think he knew more about art than I’d suspected. A private interest of his, kept separate from Mum and myself.
‘Soutine’s my total favourite,’ Holly was telling him. ‘My art teacher showed me this book.’
As we passed the first houses on the outskirts of the village, I noticed the car slow down a little. On our right-hand side was a For Sale notice outside a small, brick house, and Grandpa turned his head and peered at it as he drove by.
In the centre of the village lay the ruins of a castle built a thousand years earlier by one of the Marcher Lords. Little of the building remained, but the walls of the keep had been made good and the only entrance was through a great arched stone gateway, beside which my father and grandfather took up a position, each shaking a red bucket, saying, ‘For the hunt staff,’ to those who passed them.
Holly and I went on into the grassy keep. Almost as large as a cricket field, though bumpy and undulating, it was used for concerts and plays in the summer as well as the village fête, and various galas. Now people who’d driven from other villages around, cottages, outlying farms, as well as the inhabitants of the village itself, walked in, and milled around, greeting those they knew. Knots of people formed, their breath condensing in the cold Boxing Day morning, then unravelled and reformed in new clusters of conversation. Above, the cloud cover gave way to patches of clear blue sky, and quite suddenly the sun broke through, so that we had to shield our eyes, as we strolled around.
Horses and riders trotted in in dribs and drabs, in ones and twos. One woman held her reins in one hand, a mobile phone to her ear. The three hunt staff wore red jackets. They brought in the hounds and let them wander. All the other huntsmen and women wore black jackets, white jodhpurs, boots, except for one joker in a Santa Claus costume. There were some riders younger than Holly and I, on small ponies. They wore skullcaps. Most of the adults wore riding hats, the odd one a beagling hat. One or two had stuck Santa hats on top of their riding helmets; red and silver tinsel was wrapped around the bridles of their horses.
A short distance from us a horse became skittish, unsettled: it started wheeling around. People backed swiftly away, clearing a space around it. For a moment I thought that the rider, a middle-aged woman, speaking to her mount and pulling on its reins, was making the horse do this, as some sort of stunt or trick. But then I realised that she was attempting the opposite, trying to calm it down, which in time it did.
Everything was much bigger close-up. Holly and I went right up to a white horse whose rider towered above, and let us pat the animal’s flanks. You couldn’t feel its power from a distance, but up against its muscled flanks, its quivering strength, you could imagine what it must be like to be hurtled along on top of one, over hedges, ditches, out of control. The hounds, too, were long-legged, rangy creatures, loose-limbed. They roamed among the crowd, autonomous beings. I saw one pad up to a child in a buggy who held a rice cake in his hand: the hound snaffled it and carried on, loping along. The toddler stared into space for a long, horrified moment before bursting into tears.
‘Look over there,’ Holly said. A woman rider had co
me into the keep. Her face hidden behind a veil attached to her top hat, she wore a black jacket and a black skirt, and rode side saddle; she looked like the mysterious heroine of some provincial novel.
The keep had filled up, with riders and those on foot, when our grandmother rode slowly in. Duncan was a tall black horse, I don’t know how many hands high. He’d been well groomed for the occasion: his mane was plaited tight to his spine, his sleek skin shone. He pranced through the crowd, his head high, and Grandma sat straight-backed aboard him. Other riders nodded to her, and she slowed Duncan to a stroll. Holly and I watched as people on foot came up to say hello. Some approached, only to stand some yards away and gaze at her, nodding if she caught their eye, before wandering off, somehow satisfied, whispering to each other.
Grandma wove a slow figure of eight through the crowd. The sense of anticipation that had been building was put on hold, all eyes upon her. She never looked so imperious to me, looking down upon the crowd from the great height of her mount, and although she did not deign to give so much as a smile to anyone, you could tell that she was happy.
‘You know what’s happening, don’t you?’ Holly whispered to me. I shook my head. Holly gestured towards our grandmother. ‘They all know,’ she said. ‘People are saying goodbye.’
Riders began forming a line. People on foot moved towards the exit, and coalesced on either side. Then the Master of Hounds raised a trumpet to his lips and blew. The hounds jogged over from around the keep and followed him as he led the way out through the stone gateway. Behind them went the riders in a loose procession three or four abreast, out of the castle keep and on to the road, the horses’ hooves clattering on the tarmac.
People made their way to their cars, parked higgledy-piggledy on grass verges, in the square, in front of the church. On the way home, driving out of the village, Holly asked Grandpa if he’d ever gone hunting.
‘Me?’ he said. ‘Good God, no. Chase some poor vixen across the fields to watch her ripped to pieces by a pack of dogs? Not my idea of sport, Holly. I prefer to use a gun, which your grandmother calls a coward’s weapon.’ He laughed. ‘You’d be more likely to find me with the hunt saboteurs. Like your uncle here.’
