The Road to Lichfield

by Penelope Lively

  ‘I gather it’s all a bit in the air still – whether it’ll get pulled down or not?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anne, ‘I think it is.’

  ‘It really would be a shame. Have I done everyone? Do please start.’

  Spoons chinked on glass; a blackbird, behind Jim Thwaites’ left ear and on the other side of the window, patrolled the bright May lawn; in Staffordshire now the lanes are fringed with cow parsley and the trees more lavishly green than one would ever have thought possible; the birdsong is amazing, the dawns a blaze of sound; on the river the crowfoot is like snowflakes.

  Sybil, on the opposite side of the table, who wrote, was saying that one felt trapped these days, simply trapped, with the pound in its present state and travel quite prohibitive. ‘Tell me,’ Anne said, ‘isn’t the climate in the Dead Sea pretty unpleasant? I haven’t, of course, ever been there but I somehow thought it was nasty.’

  A fading, now, of the kindly, older-to-younger-woman smile; a glance shot leftwards at Jim Thwaites (‘Attend, please, to this guest of yours’); folding of napkin with pink-painted nails. ‘Oh, goodness, are we back on archaeology? Well, it was a bit sticky of course but one was so engrossed it didn’t really matter.’

  I see.’

  Simultaneously, a clearing of the throat and scrape of chair from Jim Thwaites. ‘Now, I think Joan will want us in the other room for coffee. Shall I lead the way?’

  A quarter to ten.

  A disposal now of the company; Sybil safely on the far side of the room, Don two chairs away with Jim Thwaites, one’s personal allocation a youngish accountant from Henley, diligently seeking common ground.

  Ten o’clock.

  The common ground for which the poor man has had to work so hard (forgive me, I am not really as unresponsive as this nor have I any reason at all for disliking you; it is just that I am not really here) is found at last. His wife’s parents live in Lichfield.

  And how, without my being aware of the process, or, so far as I know, having lifted a finger to help, have we arrived in Lichfield?

  ‘Where, exactly, does your father live?’

  And of course he knows Starbridge, too, has driven out there of a summer evening (escaping from the parents-in-law?), walked down to the river, had a pint in the Barley Mow.

  Yes, I’ve been into the pub once or twice.

  And, if one is looking for somewhere quite nice to have a meal, there’s a new place in a village – oh, three-four miles away on the Tamworth road – run by a Russian chap, ex-wrestler. Oh, really? Thanks, yes, I’ll bear that in mind. And now I see it’s going on for eleven, so I suppose, really if I can catch my husband’s eye, we ought perhaps …

  Actually, says this nice young man, Susan and I are going to be up there for ten days as of this weekend. The parents-in-law are away for a week or so and we’re combining a caretaking job for them with a spot of fishing for me. I had a bit of luck, he says – offer of a few days on the Dove by a friend of mine with a stretch of fishing.

  To the chink of coffee cups, now, is added the hiss of a reel above the river’s noise. One must try to look responsive, not distracted.

  And so, he goes on, if there’s anything we can do – about, you know, you were saying, this business of sorting out your father’s house – as I say, we’ll be at a bit of a loose end in the evenings, delighted to pop out some time …

  And, thank heaven, there is Don’s eye allowing itself to be caught at last so that, amid thanks and one thing and another, one can move away without having given any commitment (forgive me, I am sorry, it’s just that you don’t know into what you have blundered, as how could you, how can any of us?). And then there are only Joan and Jim Thwaites to negotiate and one can stumble, at last, into the passenger seat of the car.

  Eleven fifteen.

  There must be, she thought, some kind of seasonal peak, undetectable, at which growth gives way to decline. It can’t be far off. This line of trees, on this stretch of the A446, was only just showing green two weeks ago; now, the leaves are complete. And as soon as they are complete do they move into the next stage of the cycle? Or is there a standstill period, when they do nothing, when they just are? Could a botanist, studying a leaf, tell you in which month or week it was picked? Can you pin-point that moment at which one condition slides into another?

  But all that is neither here nor there. Much more to the point is the light slanting through the poplars beside the dual carriage-way; the shape of that stand of elms on the skyline; the detail of the cow-parsley on the verge as you sit here behind this commercial traveller’s car (coat slung from hook on the door-pillar, samples on the back seat), waiting to turn right for Lichfield.

  ‘I got my picture in the paper’ she said to David ‘I’ll have you know.’

  ‘Did you now’

  ‘And what have you been doing?’

  ‘Waiting’

  ‘Me, too.’

  The seedlings were an inch high; love-in-a-mist, calendula, lavatera. They flourished, defiantly different, round-leafed or long-leafed or feathered like carrots. She hung over them in admiration thinking: why have I not done this for so long? I had quite forgotten the fun of it, the triumph. She tweaked some out, regretting the waste, to give others elbow-room. There, she said to them, flowers I’ll expect from you, come July.

  David said, ‘It hardly seems worth going back, if we’re setting off at half-past nine.’

  ‘Could you …?’

  ‘No,’ he said sadly, ‘I couldn’t really. Not tonight. Nice as it would be.’

  ‘Not nice.’

  ‘No. Quite right. But I can’t think of the right word.’

  ‘I do love you,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll come back for breakfast. And we can get off good and early.’

  Lying alone she thought: what if she isn’t there, this woman? The sensible thing to do would be to telephone her from here in the morning, having got the number through directory enquiries, explain, ask if it is all right to come today. But of course there is no question of doing that because she is only the half of it now, and if she were not there, out or away or declining to be visited, there would no longer be good reason for going to Gloucester together, all day, just us. And I’m not going to be done out of the day – that we will have at all costs, so if she is there, she is there, and if she is not, she is not. And for the same reason, I have not done the tactful, prudent thing and written to her suggesting a visit. In case she said no.

  ‘Down the motorway?’ she said. ‘Do we have to?’

  ‘It’s by far the quickest.’

  ‘But we’ve got all day,’ she said, ‘at least most of it. And we want to see things, don’t we? Motorways just whisk you there like a conveyor belt, you don’t even know you’ve travelled.’

  ‘All right,’ said David, ‘if you want. But I reckon three hours and more in that case. Let’s see …. I suppose there’s this road, by Evesham.’

  ‘No, you’re right – it would take ages. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. It’ll give us longer there – we’ll have a good look round Gloucester, after I’ve seen Mrs Barron, or before.’

  But the motorway, as motorways go, was not so bad. It swept through and above Birmingham, aerial on its flyovers and interchanges, at a level with tower-blocks and electricity pylons, detached from the muddle of housing and factories below. Riding high, the cars streamed steadily at roof-top level; peeled off to north, south, east and west at appropriate points. The tower-blocks glittered in the sunshine, remarkable, like futuristic illustrations in an architectural magazine; beneath them, here and there, streets of red-brick terrace housing and blackened nineteenth century factories crouched in shame. ‘What’s the canal?’ said Anne. ‘The Grand Union, of course,’ said David. ‘Dear me, haven’t you ever taught the industrial revolution?’ ‘I’ve tried not to.’ ‘Escapist,’ he said. ‘Not at all, it’s just that I don’t know enough about it.’

  And the motorway, she thought, escaped Birmingham most compet
ently. You hardly had to slow down at all, to go through it and beyond. A city of a million people made an interesting backdrop, a piece of scenery to be studied over the parapet of the road, sliding past at fifty miles an hour, so many acres of brick and concrete and steel, layer upon layer, topped now by the long curves of the road system, riding impervious above everything. She stared at barges, full of grass, slumped in the mud of the canal.

  ‘There,’ said David, ‘that was Birmingham, that was. A clear run south now.’

  Not a bad motorway at all. The Cotswolds lay now to the left, a long blue flank; to the right, the Malverns peaking sharply out of wide flat lands. Anne said, ‘Elgar, on our right. Battle of Evesham coming up. Have we time for a coffee?’

  ‘I once went to Norway,’ David said, in the motorway coffee-bar. ‘I don’t know a thing about Scandinavia. I can’t tell you how restful it was to be in a place stripped of associations.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I’d like that at all, I’d feel displaced. And I should have thought you would too. You’d start wanting to find out.’

  ‘No, I just admired it.’

  Were you alone? she wanted to ask, and could not. She sat looking at him, moved him in her mind to a picture-postcard Norway of forests and fiords, a faceless Mary at his side (tall? short? dark? fair?). ‘More coffee?’ he said. Or should we be getting on?’

  As they drove into Gloucester Anne said, ‘Have you ever been here before?’, and when he replied, never so far as he could remember, felt a particular satisfaction. How nice, she thought, to spend a day together in a place that means nothing to either of us. ‘Where shall we go?’ she said, and he groped in the parcel shelf of the car and passed a book across. ‘I thought we’d give its architectural glories a proper going over, armed with Pevsner. All we need now is a car park.’

  But something seemed to have happened to the architectural glories of Gloucester. Northgate, Southgate, Eastgate and Westgate promised well but did not provide. Moving from Woolworth’s to Marks and Spencer to the British Home Stores David said, ‘Presumably it was blitzed, this place. Post-war rebuilding.’ ‘Oh, no, I don’t think so,’ she said, ‘why should it have been? I mean, it wasn’t industrial, was it?’ ‘Well, it must have been. Shall we go this way?’ ‘There’s nothing much down there,’ she said, ‘not according to the book, anyway.’ ‘It’s just apparently there’s this very good fishing-tackle shop here and I promised Tom some flies. I rather suspect it may be in this street.’

  Bother Tom, she thought, walking the length of an undistinguished street of butchers and greengrocers. Beyond, the tower of the cathedral rose behind office buildings. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it’s nearly one, you know.’ ‘Sorry, I did promise him, that’s all. Do you mind if we just have a look along here?’. ‘No,’ she said, ‘of course not.’

  ‘What did you say?’ he shouted, over a thunderous lorry.

  ‘I said it doesn’t seem to have been blitzed. According to Pevsner it was pulled down – “ … no less than about twenty-five buildings in Westgate Street which were listed as of architectural or historic interest under the Town and Country Planning Act after the Second World War have now been demolished.” Isn’t that dreadful?’

  ‘Ah. There it is, on the corner. Sorry, Anne, I won’t be a minute.’

  ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘you’d like to know, that’s all.’ But he was gone now, into the shop. She stood on the pavement, resentfully reading of a two-storeyed eighteenth century house of red brick with stone dressings, and the National Provincial Bank which preserves a section of Roman pavement in the hall. Surely, she thought, flies could be bought anywhere, I’ve seen flies in Woolworth’s come to that.

  Over lunch she said, ‘I must ring Mrs Barron.’ ‘Already? We shall have to cut short the cathedral. I hadn’t realized it was so late.’ ‘We spent,’ she said, ‘rather a long time looking for that shop.’ Their eyes met for a moment and she thought: we are irritated with each other, and I don’t know what to do about it. She went to find a telephone.

  ‘Any luck?’

  ‘Yes. She said it would be best if I came along about three.’

  ‘What did she seem like?’

  ‘Hard to tell. She was a bit taken aback, I think. I should have written before.’

  ‘I thought you had.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t.’ They sat in silence for a moment. ‘David …’

  ‘Mmn?’

  ‘Have you ever thought – do you ever think – about what happens after my father dies?’

  He looked at her, and quickly away again. ‘Oh, but you’ll be coming up, won’t you, for one thing and another?’

  ‘Will I?’

  ‘Anne,’ he said, ‘look, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about living it’s not to imagine that much if anything can be planned ahead.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning. Just wondering.’

  ‘Don’t let’s,’ he said. ‘Not today, anyway.’ He put out his hand and laid it on her arm for a moment. ‘Well now, what about a bit more of Gloucester before your date with Mrs B.?’

  Plan? she thought, wandering around the cathedral, no, I’ve never planned anything much either except children which in fact is one of the most bizarre things one does. Plan another life, when one has so little control over one’s own. She looked at David, standing in the rainbow light of a stained-glass window, and thought: You are unplanned, if ever anything was. A year ago you did not exist, and now I step gingerly from one day to the next. A year ago or thereabouts I took father for a jaunt one day to Ludlow and Mrs Barron did not exist either; we drove along Wenlock Edge and he enjoyed the castle and tea in a hotel. There will never, she thought in bitterness, be that again. The east walk of the cloisters, she read, has the earliest fan vaulting known. I have forgotten to give Paul the money for the deposit on the school camping holiday. All my life now I shall see David stand like that, looking at something I cannot see, sunshine on one side of his face.

  Outside Mrs Barron’s house he said, ‘When should I pick you up, do you think?’ ‘I don’t know. An hour? Less, maybe. Suppose it’s awkward. I’ve got cold feet, suddenly.’

  ‘It’ll be all right.’ He smiled in sudden intimacy. ‘Don’t worry. Look, best perhaps if we meet. Outside the cathedral – between half-past four and five?’

  ‘Yes’ she said, grateful. ‘Yes, that would be better.’

  The house was in a street of modest detached houses; quiet, tree-lined, secure. Anne rang the bell and thought with sudden surprise that her father, probably, had done just this, at some point, stood on this well-swept step looking at the panel of opaque glass half-concealing the someone who, on the other side, fiddled with latch and handle.

  She was older than Anne had expected – nearer fifty than forty. Carefully dressed, if dully, and with a reserve, a stiffness, about her that seemed not the product of this particular occasion. Anne followed her into a tidy, somehow dispirited sitting-room as she explained that any other day she would have been at work, in the Public Library, but had had the day off to go with her daughter to the hospital that morning. Anne said, ‘I hope it’s nothing serious?’

  ‘It’s for her hay-fever. They give them these injections now. She’s got her As coming up, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed – it makes her wretched most years. So, as I say, any other day you wouldn’t have caught me in.’ Covertly, she returned Anne’s examining look. ‘I’m sorry to hear about your father. I’d been wondering how he was these days. Is it bad?’

  Anne told her. Finishing, she said, ‘I wondered – I have no idea when you last saw him?’

  ‘Not for some time now. Two or three years. He used to drop in on us once in a while, when he was more active. I’d have liked to go over there – but I didn’t like to intrude too much.’

  Anne said, ‘Look, I think I ought to say – I knew nothing about you, or – or your mother – until just recently. It’s come as a bit of a shock.’

  Mrs Barron was
silent for a moment. When she replied there was a response in her voice that had not been there before. ‘Oh, I see. I’d not imagined that. Yes, I can see you’d be taken aback – anyone would.’ She looked across at Anne with, now, an awkward friendliness. ‘I don’t know what to say, really. Except I’m sorry he’s so ill. He was always good to me – he helped me out, you know, after my husband left me. He’s been very good.’

  Anne said, ‘What did you call him?’

  ‘Uncle James.’

  There was a pause. Mrs Barron said, ‘I’d have liked to see him. But if as you say he’s not really …. Well, there doesn’t seem a lot of point.’

  ‘I don’t really think there is.’

  ‘Here’s Janice. Jan, just come in here a minute.’

  The girl stared sullenly at Anne through her mother’s explanations. She said ‘Hello,’ and then at once to her mother, ‘I don’t see why I should have to help with this school concert. It’s always the Lower Sixth gets stuck with it and it’s not bloody fair.’ She blew her nose into a shredded hank of Kleenex, glaring aggressively at her mother.

  ‘Well, what do you expect me to do?’

  ‘Nothing. But I can’t do that and come shopping, can I?’

  ‘Nobody’s asking you. And I’ve told you – don’t wear that old skirt. I was ashamed of you in the hospital, looking like that.’

  Anne turned to look at the photographs on the mantelpiece. Mrs Barron with a younger Janice; an elderly woman; Janice as a baby. Behind her, mother and daughter wrangled until suddenly Janice said ‘Well, you know what I feel, anyway.’ She banged out of the room, without another look at Anne.

  Mrs Barron said, ‘I’d have liked her to go to a private school, but that’s been out of the question. She’s bright, there’s no doubt about that.’ She seemed undisturbed by, or unaware of, her daughter’s gracelessness. Without apparent interest, she sat while Anne spoke for a few moments of her own children, looking at Jan who stood in the gateway talking to another girl. As Anne paused she said, ‘I don’t like that Linda, she’s not the right type for her.’