The Road to Lichfield

by Penelope Lively

  ‘There wouldn’t be anything to tell. And if there were I shouldn’t because I feel awful enough as it is. Except that I feel awful and terribly happy both at once if such a thing is possible, which it seems to be.’

  ‘We both,’ said David, ‘appear to have led rather sheltered lives.’

  ‘I shall have to go home tomorrow afternoon – this afternoon – because I must take Judy to the dentist on Thursday, first thing.’

  ‘I was afraid of that. And then?’

  ‘And then I shall be back the week after.’

  ‘Then that will have to do, I suppose. Though I don’t at the moment see how. Don’t put the sheet back. Stay like that. If you’re cold then I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with it.’

  She lay alone and listened to the lapwings and said to David somewhere else – in his car, perhaps, still driving along empty night-time roads, or going into his alien, inconceivable home – I am amazed, when I have time to be anything. I am like someone with amnesia, untethered both from past and future. At least, the future reaches no further than twelve today when I shall see you in Lichfield, and the past to which I have paid so much attention has become simply Judy and her dentist appointment and the road back to Cuxing, which has to be taken, come what may.

  ‘Judy did what?’

  ‘Oh, Mum, for goodness sake, you don’t have to go through the roof! She merely gashed her hand on this bit of barbed wire and Sandra Butterfield merely happened to call in with some guff for you about something and saw it and said she’d take her along to the surgery for an anti-tetanus jab because it might be shut by the time you got back. You don’t have to carry on like that. She’s not dead for heaven’s sake. Here they are now, coming in through the gate. God, Mum, you’re shaking. What on earth’s the matter? You can see the stupid girl’s perfectly all right.’

  She stood in the hall for a minute, subsiding. Only, of course, from the religious is retribution exacted; the rest of us know that real life is not like that – the wicked go unpunished and the rich shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.

  ‘Oh, Sandra,’ she said, ‘thanks so much – Paul’s just been explaining to me – I should have been back earlier but I got a bit held up, I’m so grateful, Judy what on earth did you do, was it that old fence at the bottom ….’

  ‘Of course I had no idea when she’d last had an anti-tet.’ said Sandra, dumping herself down at the kitchen table. ‘And she didn’t seem to know herself but Dr G. looked it up on her card and she was due – overdue, actually, Anne – so it was just as well. I say, you do look done in – this dashing up and down to Lichfield’s not doing you any good. Do you have to? I mean, does he realize, poor old fellow? I must say, if I were Don I’d be putting my foot down but of course Don’s so frightfully easy-going, isn’t he? If it were James he’d be creating, I can tell you – he doesn’t like me larking off one little bit (not that you’re larking, of course, Anne, I know that) which is a bit daft at our age and after twenty years of marriage, but there you are.’ She chuckled complacently. ‘I should be flattered. Do you know, I even had to trail with him to some business thing in Italy last year, right in the middle of the motorway campaign.’

  ‘Where in Italy?’

  ‘Oh, those lakes up in the north. I was bored stiff, I can tell you, I kept thinking of everything I ought to be getting on with here. Talking of which – that was what I dropped in about earlier, luckily as it turned out. D-day is the week after next.’

  ‘D-day?’

  ‘The Splatt’s Cottage demonstration. Hugh Sidey’s had his ear to the ground and it looks as though that’s when the contractors’ men will be moving in. You’ll be there, I take it?’

  ‘Well, it does depend a bit if …’

  ‘I’m assuming you will,’ said Sandra sternly. ‘We have to turn out in force if it’s to have any impact at all. I’ve brought you one of Mary’s banners. She really has done them rather nicely.’

  The banner, unfurled upon the kitchen table, was made of a coarse, expensive looking linen material, with lettering embroidered upon it in scarlet wool. It said SAVE SPLATT’S COTTAGE.

  ‘Or there’s this one,’ said Sandra, ‘if you’d rather. Pretty, isn’t it? I must say when it’s all over I’d rather like to hang onto them. They’d look rather good on a kitchen wall or somewhere.’

  The second banner, in chocolate brown linen weave with white wool lettering, said WE CARE ABOUT THE PAST. DO YOU?

  Anne said, ‘I think I’ll have the other one, Sandra.’

  Paul, coming into the kitchen, stared at the banners and then at Sandra, and went out again, a hand over his mouth.

  ‘We must rope in the children, of course,’ said Sandra. ‘I’ve already had a word with Judy.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Nothing much. Mine will all be there. I’m keeping them away from school.’

  ‘What exactly do I do with the banner?’

  ‘You put a bamboo through each end,’ said Sandra tersely, ‘where Mary’s left those pocket things, and get someone to carry the other end. Paul, presumably, or Judy. Or Don, even. Well, I must fly now – here is Don, I’ll go before he comes, I daresay you’ve got masses to talk about if you’ve been away since Thursday. ’Bye.’

  Don, coming into the kitchen, looked at the banner and said ‘That’s Sandra, I take it.’

  ‘That’s Sandra. Hello, darling.’

  ‘Hello. Just so long as you’re not expecting me to carry it.’

  ‘No, Don, nobody does. Where are you going?’

  ‘Just to listen to the news. Where’s the paper, do you know?’

  ‘I don’t, I’m afraid. You might give me a kiss.’

  ‘Anne, anyone would think you’d been gone a month …. There!’

  ‘That’s better.’

  ‘How’s your father?’

  ‘Much the same.’

  ‘Well, I’d just like to catch the news.’

  Through the open door, she saw him stop at the hall table and pick something up. ‘This is from you.’

  ‘Oh, yes. So it is.’

  He stared at her, puzzled. ‘You sent it yesterday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you knew you’d be back today.’

  ‘Yes, I just … I don’t know – I just wanted to. I’m sorry,’ she said stiffly. ‘It just seemed an idea at the time.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Don. He looked again at the card. ‘Lichfield cathedral. I supose we must have been round that often enough. Not very exciting, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Could we have dinner a bit early. I’ve brought a lot of work back I’d like to get on with.’

  She peeled potatoes at the sink and thought: Don has never much cared for cathedrals or at least not cathedrals done yard by yard, guide book in hand, which is by no means unusual, lots of people don’t.

  The potato peelings unravelled and fell from her fingers and she stared out into the garden (the lupins a foot high now, the crocus leaves slumped against the grass, a yellow shock of forsythia by the gate) and thought of some occasion early in their marriage when she had toured a church, commenting on its features, she had thought, to Don at her side only to find herself turning to look into the perplexed face of a stranger, with Don nowhere to be seen (but found, later, tranquilly smoking in the cloister). He had not – or apparently had not – noticed her irritation and after a while she had forced herself not to feel irritated because it was a holiday and holidays must not be spoiled by things that are really not important.

  And thus are habits formed, for better or for worse.

  Father, she thought, now father was quite different. He was a great one for the minute and thorough examination and yes, now I come to think of it, there is Bodiam Castle or some such place with mother sitting patiently on a wall waiting for him to be done, and looking at her watch, but surreptitiously in case she be seen. And instinctively I think: poor mother. Why?

  In Starbridge now
, that same moon – chewed away, by a week, since last I noticed it – is seen, at this point in the evening, as you sit at the kitchen table, through the top right hand pane of the window, resting against the line of alders in the field.

  David Fielding said to his son Tom, ‘Look, I’m not absolutely sure I’m going to be able to manage this camping thing next week.’

  ‘But you said you would. In the Easter holidays, you said. You promised.’

  ‘I know,’ he said wretchedly, ‘I know I did. And we shall. But just not next week. Do you mind awfully?’

  ‘I s’ pose not. Why can’t you?’

  ‘Because – oh, because there’s some committees and things I ought to be here for.’

  ‘Can I come fishing with you instead?’

  ‘You certainly can. By all means.’

  ‘Ma said to tell you she’s out tonight and there’s a pie you can have in the fridge.’

  ‘Right.’

  I hate this, he thought, I hate this as much as anything I have ever done. Tom. Tom and Alan than whom, hitherto, nothing has been more important. He said to Tom, ‘Come for a walk. I’m fed up with these scripts.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad – I said I’d go round to John’s.’

  ‘O.K. I’ll have to make do with my own company.’

  Tom, he thought, who will in two years’ time be eighteen and on the brink of all those choices that determine how things work out, and whom I can help only up to a point. Oh, we can pore over university prospectuses together, and weigh up the pros and cons of this place or that, this course or those options, and he will pay attention to me because he is a sensible lad and recognizes that I know a bit about such things. But of the rest I can say little, and he would probably listen less, for immemorial reasons. We all have to make our own mistakes, as my mother used to say; you make your bed and you lie on it. You drive a nail into your own coffin. But when you are eighteen – or twenty-three – it is inconceivable that the choices you make must be worn like albatrosses around your neck for the rest of your life. And when you are forty-two it seems the ultimate malevolence that one should have been faced with those choices at the point in life when most of us are least equipped to make them.

  To make them not wisely but well.

  To make them other than for craven reasons. Out of fear of hurting a person, or disappointing them, or just because it was expected. A man tripping up in the street is more worried about humiliation than death. I married Mary because it would have been too much bother not to, and one can always hope for the best.

  And so, for good reason, because they are bright boys and not unperceptive, my sons will not come to me for advice about that kind of thing, nor shall I offer it.

  I could pray, if I were a religious man.

  I could tell them that perhaps they are lucky to be here, given that a few months – weeks? – after our marriage their mother said from under me, ‘Look, I’d better tell you rather than go on pretending, I don’t all that much care for sex.’

  I could tell them that one adjusts to more than I would ever, once, have thought possible. And no doubt they – being bright – would say, but why, Dad, why go on? And I would have to say again, probably just for craven reasons, some more comprehensible than others.

  We will never, of course, have such a conversation.

  David walked into the Red Lion and said, ‘Pint, George, please.’ He sat by the fire and the landlord, putting on another log, said, ‘Warmer today. Last time I’ll light this, I reckon. We can make do with a potted plant next week. In the middle of your holidays, I suppose, Mr Fielding?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Got any plans?’

  ‘A bit of fishing, maybe.’

  He sat in the pub, as he often did, until nine or so, and went home to eat the pie from the fridge and watch a television play with his sons, in companionable silence.

  Graham telephoned Anne and said if it wasn’t a nuisance he thought he’d turn up next weekend. ‘I say,’ she said, ‘we are favoured these days. What’s happened to all your ladies?’ And Graham, indistinct in a call-box, besieged – as it sounded – by pneumatic drills, said or seemed to say that he didn’t much care, just at the moment. ‘Fine, then,’ she said. ‘We’ll see you here. I’ll have been up to Lichfield again by then, I daresay.’

  James Stanway woke from what seemed to him to have been many days’ sleep and said to the girl in a white apron beside his bed, ‘How long have I been laid up like this?’ He could not at first hear what she said in reply but then she leaned closer and he understood that she was pleased to see him feeling more himself today, and would he like a nice bit of fish for his dinner? ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know I think now I’m fit again I ought to be getting home, my wife doesn’t care for being on her own for too long.’ He waited for someone to do something about this, but when he looked around the room again the girl had gone and when next he was aware of a presence by the bed it was a very different one: Betty wearing the silk scarf he bought her once for Christmas, talking of opera, a taste of hers he had come to share. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I bow to your superior judgment, but I remain unconvinced that Carmen is a major work. What about Verdi, now? How do we feel about Verdi?’

  Eight

  ‘There’s a quiche in the fridge,’ she said to Paul, ‘for tomorrow’s lunch. And a hot pot for supper, that wants a good half hour in the oven, and there’s some cheese-cake and a chocolate mousse and a bolognaise sauce for Friday night – you only have to do the spaghetti yourselves – and lots of cheese. Oh, and I’ve made some of that pizza you like – all you do with that is pop it in a hot oven for a few minutes. Do you think you’ll be all right?’

  ‘I should think we’ll just about survive.’

  ‘And remind Dad there’s an onion tart for him because he doesn’t care for spaghetti.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And there are some crumpets.’

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Whose birthday is it?’

  ‘I just want to be sure I’ve left enough,’ she said. ‘And I’ll ring tomorrow night, tell Dad.’

  The road to Lichfield unfurls now in stages, each length known and experienced; it would be impossible any more to mistake the route though there is a temptation to turn off here or there and experiment with a side-road or diversion. One wants, now, to prolong the journey. One wants to savour it to the full, this anticipatory joy, slow down over favourite sections, stop even, once or twice, and postpone arrival for a little because the contemplation of it, the expectation, is almost as good as the thing itself. From the A423 to the A41 to the A452 … From that smooth sweep of fields to those lines of poplars funnelling the road away to a distant point to this factory chimney sending its spirals of smoke out into the clear blue spring sky.

  In the nursing-home, she found her father lying with his eyes closed, breathing in lengthy rasps, as though his body existed for that purpose only. It seemed an absence of consciousness far beyond sleep, and the Matron, coming in as she stood over him in anxiety, said that yes, this was a coma, but he would probably come out of it and was in no immediate danger. ‘We have to expect this kind of thing,’ she said, ‘especially as he’d been particularly spry and lucid lately. I wish I’d known you were coming up, Mrs Linton, and I’d have suggested you put it off for a few days. What a shame.’ She laid her hand for a moment on Anne’s arm. ‘Rather a wasted journey for you – but let’s hope you’re more fortunate next time.’ Anne walked out through the gardens to the car park and thought: I would, I think, if it had been possible, have told father about this, about what has happened to me.

  In Starbridge, she set about going through his papers in the desk once more, since, the nursing-home visit having been cut short, there was an hour or so to spare. Less squeamish now, she emptied files onto the floor and sorted quickly through their contents, filling a grocery carton with discarded brochures, minutes of committees, reports on this and that. How little I kno
w, she thought, about how he spent his life – that he was in Cologne in 1958 at some gathering of European educationalists, that he was a member of a committee studying the proposed changes in the O-level syllabus, that he once wrote a long letter to The Times about second language teaching in primary schools. So far as I am concerned – have been concerned – he existed to be my father, and now one finds that was not the case at all, or only a small part of it.

  In one box she found a bundle of letters from her mother, hesitated, and then snapped the elastic band back around them and returned them to the box. There were letters from herself, also, which she read with interest (‘I’m going to marry Don Linton – I’ve known him for ages now, two years on and off, and I know we’ll …’, ‘Judy has a tooth now and howls day and night,’ ‘Paul is Gabriel in the school nativity play’) and from Graham, which she read also. There were no others, except a few recent ones from friends or former colleagues. Anne thought: whatever he kept of her he kept inside his head, nowhere else, he had nothing, except that one photograph, which seems to be accidental. So many years, of what must have come in the end to a kind of domesticity, and not a scrap of paper to record it.

  She heard David’s car draw up outside and sat waiting where she was, on the worn Persian rug, calling out through the open front door, ‘I’m in here.’

  ‘I’ve never been to this place,’ said David, ‘but I’m told it’s quite good, and we can’t go on for ever eating omelettes off your father’s kitchen table. It’s run by some Russian called Joe.’

  The restaurant was murkily lit and had a perfunctory décor of chianti bottles hung in clutches and swags of fishing net. Its walls were lined with photographs of wrestlers, scowling into the room in attitudes of menace. It seemed that they related to the past of Joe himself, shambling from table to table in striped butcher’s apron, his huge paws engulfing the pencil with which he scribbled down orders. He spoke easy Staffordshire: only the slant of his eyes in his broad face was central European. The meal was surprisingly good. They sat over it as the restaurant emptied and were finally alone with Joe, who drank morosely in the cupboard-sized bar. When he came over with the bill Anne said, ‘You do the cooking yourself?’