The Road to Lichfield

by Penelope Lively

  Other hands, thin, dexterous hands, came down and soaped his, took them from the basin and dried them, laid them on the sheet, one at either side. He said, ‘I need my glasses,’ and a voice, a kindly, young, female voice, said, ‘You’re very spry today, Mr Stanway, that’s nice. Going to sit out in the chair later on?’ The glasses arrived on his nose and the room cleared itself a little, but not much. He lay and thought about a friend he had had at college, whose name he no longer remembered but who lived, he knew, in Dorset and had ginger hair. I am ill, he thought, and tried to say as much to the girl who came and went on the cloudy fringes of his vision. He shouted, I am ill, but she smiled and straightened his pillow and talked of cups of tea. Where am I? he said, but she fed him with a spoon and then went to the door to stand talking with someone else. James Stanway watched something shadowy form and re-form at the foot of the bed. It annoyed him that he could not tell what it was. A tree? Clouds? ‘My glasses,’ he said, ‘I need my glasses.’

  ‘He was very compos mentis earlier,’ said the nurse. ‘But he’s wandering again now, I’m afraid. You can’t get much response. Did you have a good drive up?’

  Beyond her, Anne looked at the old man propped up on the pillows, blinking and muttering. ‘Yes, fine, thanks. There’s no change, then?’

  The girl said, ‘Not really, not to speak of.’ She glanced back to the bed and said, ‘I’ll just draw that curtain, the light worries him, I think. There’s been something bothering him this morning, but he can’t say what, bless him.’ She twitched the curtain and came back to the bed. ‘That better, then, Mr Stanway? O.K. for a bit, Mrs Linton? I’ll pop in later and toilet him.’

  Anne sat watching her father, letting the tension of the journey slip away from her. She had set out early and had gone to the house before coming to the nursing-home. There is a change, she thought, he is different, just, from the week before last. It could not be defined. It was as though he had become more indistinct. All the euphemisms about death as departure came into her head. Her father seemed to be in retreat, not propelled by anything or anyone but of his own volition. She stood over him and took his hand and presently he turned his head and said quite clearly, ‘Anne?’ Pleased, she pulled the chair closer to the bed and talked to him, about the children, about his rose-beds that she would weed again this evening, about her weekend in the Cotswolds. She brought the sheaf of photographs out of the envelope, and the two albums put together by her mother, the second one ending in 1965, the year of her death, with a dozen blank pages after the last entry.

  ‘I thought you might like to look at some photos, father.’ She propped the album in front of him and turned the pages over. ‘Can you see all right?’

  He said something about his glasses that she could not catch and she adjusted them for him. ‘Goodness, these go way back, I hadn’t realized. This must be you and mother on your honeymoon, I think. Cornwall, is that right?’

  And from the sepia views of Mevagissey and St Ives there grew, a page or two later on, Graham sitting owl-faced in a high black pram and presently herself shawled in her mother’s arms; digging a sandcastle on a beach in the year of Munich; parading with gas-mask in 1941. ‘Look,’ she said, turning pages, ‘I remember her; how that house comes back, the one we had that summer; what was that dog called, father, can you think, the one that got run over?’ Her father peered at the pages, mumbling something every now and then. Once or twice he groped with his hand as though to stay hers, to keep her from turning a page.

  They grew and shed their skins, Graham and herself, mutating from one page to another, from infant to child to adolescent to young adult. Don arrived, standing on the lawn of the house in Putney, screwing up his eyes against the autumn sun of 1956; off-stage, unmentioned, lay Suez and Hungary. Marriage. More swaddled bundles. On the last page, two months before her death, her mother stood against a gatepost in the Lake District, taking second place to the landscape, like the figure posted before mountain scenery in a romantic painting. ‘Saddleback, father?’ she said. ‘Is that Saddleback? Or Skiddaw?’ And her father blinked at the photograph and coughed. She wiped a trail of spit from the corner of his mouth.

  The trouble with all this, she said to him, is that it leaves so much out. Almost everything. Such, for instance, as this lady of yours whose name, yet, I do not know and who must have loomed large behind all these snaps, but of whom there is no sign at all. Like Suez and Hungary she can only be filled in once you know about her. I begin to see how slippery the past is. It is not, as Farrer would have it, that chronology is a difficult idea to grasp. The problem is the shadows it throws. This happened, and then this, and then this. But if you keep your eyes only on that, you miss another dimension and end up with something that is not the truth at all, or only part of it.

  For instance, she said, you didn’t know, in that photograph where we’re all grinning away outside the church at Starbridge, that I almost called the whole thing off, the week before. And then panicked, and couldn’t. I walked down a street with Don, a street in London with lime trees just in flower – I can smell them now – and thought: I’m not sure I want to marry him, not absolutely, totally sure. I like him and probably I love him but sometimes ever so faintly he irritates me. And I pushed the feeling away and we did get married and we’ve been perfectly happy, I think, on the whole, by and large, ever since. We don’t nowadays, talk to each other a great deal.

  Did you talk to mother?

  The nurse, coming in, said ‘Family photos, now that’s a nice idea.’ She hung for a moment over an open page, ‘Don’t they look funny, those clothes? And it’s not so long ago, is it, 1961? Could you give me a hand, dear, lifting him?’

  The old man, in their sturdy grasp, dabbed feebly for the album as it slithered from his lap.

  ‘The open window,’ said the note on the mat, ‘suggested that you were up here again. I spent a few minutes with your father last week; he did not know me, I’m afraid. I’ll look in later this evening to see if you’d care for a drink.’

  It was a sheet from an exercise book, folded into four and then in half, like, she thought, the notes passed from hand to hand along a line of desks at school. She read it and re-read it, made a cup of coffee and read it again. Outside the window a robin sang with piercing sweetness; the spring grass blazed from end to end of the garden; the sun on her back was as warm as the touch of a hand.

  She went upstairs to have a bath, and lay smiling at the yellow plaster of her father’s bathroom ceiling.

  David said, ‘I thought we might go a bit further afield. There’s the Plough at Yoxley which isn’t at all bad. Do you fancy that?’

  A filmy golden moon, plumped out by two weeks, rose above the house opposite. ‘I haven’t,’ he went on, ‘had any fishing since I last saw you, what with one thing and another, but now it’s the holidays, there’s a bit more chance …’ Getting into the car, he talked without looking at her, fiddling with keys, starting the engine, swinging out onto the road too fast and braking as the headlights of another car swept round the corner. ‘Sorry.’

  You cannot say calm down to a man you hardly know. Neither, much as you would like to, can you reach out and put a soothing (or otherwise) hand on his thigh. Anne said, ‘Have you had a good week?’

  ‘Two weeks. Two weeks and two days, in fact …’

  I know that, too.

  ‘ … So so. Fairly run of the mill. No, not entirely. I met some parents of one of our boys who startled me rather – I’ll tell you about that. And Mary had an accident with our car. This belongs to a friend of mine.’

  Mary. Mary, she is. ‘I hope she wasn’t hurt?’

  ‘No. And what about you – you’ll have finished your term, too.’

  ‘Very much so. I’ve got the sack. Did you know that chronology was a very difficult concept? Too difficult for people of fifteen?’

  ‘I did not. Tell me.’

  Sitting in the Plough at Yoxley, while David, his back to her, waited his turn at the bar
, she studied the row of prints on the wall opposite: they presented a series of scenes that seemed as though they should be connected, like episodes in a strip-cartoon – a stage-coach drawing up at a Dickensian hostelry, early Victorian squires in the hunting-field, similar people carousing round a laden table. She turned from them to find him watching her across the room.

  He brought drinks and said, ‘I’ve come across that type myself. Usually at conferences. He’ll go far, I fear.’

  ‘Oh dear, do you think so?’

  ‘Probably. People who generate theories tend to, in the educational world. Even if they’re thoroughly bad theories. I’ll give you a job. Come and live in Staffordshire.’

  ‘How I wish,’ she said, ‘I could.’ And then, quickly, to break a threatened silence, ‘You were going to tell me about some parents.. ’

  Going into the Ladies, towards the end of the evening, she caught her own face unawares in the mirror, sideways, the reflection thrown back by another mirror in the opposite wall, and saw a woman who did not (she thought) look forty, smiling to herself, reaching in her bag for a comb, momentarily a stranger, or a friend long unseen and half forgotten. She looks nice, Anne thought – I look nice. Quite pretty too. The reaction surprised her; she had never been vain. Her own looks had never much interested her; it was with relief that she had shed the intense physical self-consciousness of a young girl. It seemed an odd bonus, at the end of all those years of neglect, to have emerged really quite nice-looking, no worse, certainly, than many women whose time and energies must have been devoted to self-preservation. She combed her hair and washed her hands, looking again at her own face in the mirror and thinking of how her mother used to insist on the connection between good looks and a state of mind. ‘You can’t be thinking nice things and look an ugly person – it’s written on a face, how a person feels.’ It’s not true, of course, not true at all. Except just in this one thing. Which is why I must not go on looking like this. I could, she said to her face in the mirror, I could be entirely wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. I could have made the most awful and embarrassing mistake, which is why, among many, many reasons, I must not look like this. She went back into the pub, trying to restore anonymity to her expression.

  David thought: money I’ve never regretted, I’m not equipped to be a rich man, possessions don’t mean much to me. I have had a good deal of satisfaction from my work and great pleasure from my sons. I have adapted to other circumstances. Until now, I believe, I did not think I had been too badly done by. I would not have thought of myself as a dissatisfied man.

  He got up abruptly, as Anne returned, and said, ‘Shall we go?’ Walking to the car, he kept apart from her. As they got in, she said, ‘Was your car badly damaged?’

  ‘It’s mendable.’ He started the engine, and said, as they drove out of the car park, ‘My wife will probably lose her licence. She had had too much to drink.’

  There was a long pause. Anne said, ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘I wasn’t with her. She hadn’t been to a party or anything gay like that. She doesn’t often go to parties. She simply, from time to time, has too much to drink. She has done that for a long while now.’

  They drove, in silence, through a half mile or so of Staffordshire. David went on, ‘She isn’t an alcoholic. The problem, if that is the right word for it, is contained. And now let’s talk about something more cheerful. How is your campaign to cherish the past? This derelict farmhouse of yours?’

  ‘Oh, that,’ she said, ‘I’m in a dreadful muddle about that.’

  He listened to the story, chuckling once or twice in the darkness. ‘What an extraordinary place Berkshire sounds. I daresay there are people like that up here, though. I just don’t move in those circles. So you’re going to abandon Splatt’s Cottage to its fate?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I really don’t know.’ They were back at the house. Her hand on the door, she said, ‘Thank you so much, David, I did enjoy …’

  ‘Could we meet for lunch in Lichfield tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’d like that.’

  ‘After you’ve seen your father.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That would be lovely.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well, then. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Oh – yes, where? Somewhere central. The cathedral? No, make it the square.’

  ‘Johnson’s house?’

  ‘Yes. Johnson’s house would do fine.’

  ‘About half past twelve?’

  ‘About half past twelve’ he said.

  He drove home, put his friend’s car into the garage, picked up his son’s bike which had been left flung down in the drive and leaned it against the wall. He went into the house and listened to the sound of bathwater running. ‘I’m in,’ he called up the stairs, and above the noise of the water a voice called back, ‘Yes, I heard.’ He opened the door of his younger son’s bedroom and looked for a moment at the hunched shape under the bedclothes. His elder son, coming out of the lavatory. said ‘Hi, Dad.’ He said ‘Hi there,’ and went into his own room. He undressed, got into bed and lay staring at the window. The bathroom door opened and closed, and another door. He turned out the light.

  After Paul’s birth, Anne had wept. She had howled at the ceiling of the hospital labour ward and Paul, in the crib beside her, had howled also. Don, arriving late from the office after some confusion about messages, had been disconcerted by them both. He said, ‘What’s the matter?’ to Anne, and stared with doubt at Paul. ‘Nothing. It’s just such an anti-climax, that’s all. And I’m so relieved.’ He patted the baby, gingerly, and said, ‘Relieved about what?’ ‘Relieved it hasn’t got two heads or anything.’ Don said, ‘It was never really on the cards that it would.’ He sat uncomfortably on the chair beside the bed and took her hand. ‘This really isn’t any time to be in tears,’ he said, ‘do stop it, Annie.’

  A baby, a small, flesh-and-blood baby, seemed such an anti-climax to all that time thinking about getting married, and then getting married, and being married. Out of that, came forth this. Paul lay raw and angry in his cot, a chrysalis whose future yawned unpredictably ahead. He might grow up or he might not; he might die in infancy or the world might come to an end while he was a child. She was alarmed not by him, but for him. Don said, ‘For goodness’ sake, Anne, it’ll all work out all right, you see.’ And, fifteen years later, she had to admit that it had. Paul was alive, well, and showed no sign of being the cataclysmic force for good or bad that she had imagined. He was simply there, and a world without him was unimaginable.

  She thought of this as she dressed, looking out of the window at the garden where the thinner sprinkling of weeds on one of the rose-beds marked her efforts of a few weeks before. Elsewhere, groundsel and couch grass were taking over. She thought of David Fielding’s son, born at around the same time, and of the woman who had given birth to him. Who, from time to time, drank too much. She went down into the kitchen and made coffee: beyond the window the spring day shone. She was seized with amazement at the progression of seasons, at the ceaseless passage of one condition to another, at the state of change in which we live, at the beauty of it. The willows in the field were explosions of colour; the whole landscape promised. Is it always like this? she wondered, is there always this feeling of what is to come? She sat looking into the garden and remembered wanting passionately, as a child, to hold onto a moment of happiness, to freeze it, to remain within it for ever. She thought: I will do something that on the face of it is ridiculous. I will plant things in the garden, for summer. She took a purse and walked down into the village, to see what she could find.

  She had done the same in that first house of theirs, in the London suburb in which Paul was born. It was she who had been proud of the house, not Don. For him, it had been a stop-gap, a makeshift, the best they could do for now. But I don’t want, she said, a posh Georgian thing in Kensington. I like this, it’s lovely, it’s just right. And she had
polished its ugly thirties bow windows and planted tiny plants in its long thin garden. Paul and the plants grew together. Don had been working in a big London firm of solicitors, in a junior capacity. That, too, was a stop-gap. Out of sight, she knew, round the corner, lay that partnership in some well-established provincial firm, and in due course (after that summer at Poppet Sands, when Paul was six or seven) it had come. And, a little sadly, she had abandoned the plants – waist-high now, or overflowing walls and paths, according to their patterns of growth – and the cherished house and moved, or been moved, to Cuxing. What’s the matter? said Don, this is a much better house, for goodness’ sake, Annie, it’s cost half as much again, and you’ve always said you wanted to live in the country. She had planted things once more, though not, she realized, for some time now. Nowadays she watched things grow – saw with surprise that the rambling rose put in when they first came had reached the gutters, that the buddleias were old and woody and should be cut right back, that the rock garden was matted with growth and the rocks submerged.

  The Post Office sold seeds. She tried to remember, from the London suburb days, what you grew in the open ground, and chose love-in-a-mist, marigolds and something that looked gaudy on the packet called lavatera. She walked past the churchyard; an old man was pushing a hand-mower between the gravestones and rooks called among their nests in the trees behind. She stood listening and the old man, stopping, straightened up and saw her. He said, ‘’Morning. Nice one.’ And she said, ‘Yes, it’s lovely, isn’t it.’ He looked at the packets in her hand. ‘Nice to look ahead. Ground’s a bit cold yet, though.’ ‘Is it?’ she said, anxiously, ‘is it too early, do you think?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘no – bit more sun, that’s all we need. You get them planted, they’ll be fine.’

  Back at the house, she found a fork and rake and went out to clear a bed. Down at the bottom, beyond the lawn, near the top of the field, there was a place where her father had grown vegetables – a few lettuces and carrots, some rows of spinach. She forked out last year’s spent plants, dug and weeded the bed. Beyond her in the field the lapwings kept up a continual plaintive wailing; sometimes, looking up from her work, she saw them tumble from the sky in mating rituals, spiralling downwards to the grass like stalling aircraft. Out of sight, the river poured over stones in a shallow place.