The Road to Lichfield

by Penelope Lively

  Scotland had much to offer. It seemed, like all places in which holidays are taken, to have been thoughtfully devised to please and divert the spectator. When you tired of scenery, there were beaches on which to sit, and a chilly sea for Judy to sample and ungraciously reject. In Edinburgh, there were art galleries and museums, concerts and plays. History had been most obliging in its range and dramatic content. Even though, as Don complained, the entrance fees were exorbitant nowadays, a few pounds was little enough to pay for painless inspection of other people’s catastrophic lives. And if eighty pence each seemed rather much for castle or abbey, then you could always move on to Glencoe, which was free and made a convenient picnic spot into the bargain. Edwardian hotels, bristling with tartan and antler, were agreeably of another world; only the intrusion of newspapers and television insisted on the march of time. And the events of which they spoke were also not quite real, as though taking place elsewhere. Glasgow, of course, was to be avoided, as indeed it was possible to avoid most suggestions that people live and work in this place, have personal concerns and make biscuits, ships or car components. In ten days, you can move serenely from place to place and feel nothing but appreciation at so well-constructed a playground. One should never take holidays in real places.

  Once, Anne thought, we went to some European country, when I was just about the age Judy is now, and no doubt as uncompanionable, and truth to tell I don’t even know which one it was. There were mountains and lakes, which doesn’t reduce the possibilities much. Switzerland? Austria? Italy? I don’t remember a word anyone said, so language provides no clue. There was a goat, in a field beside a road, with the most appealing pair of white kids; I knitted, intently, with multi-coloured wool that changed from pink to purple to blue; in the huge restaurant of a hotel, crisp with white napery and polished glasses. my parents spoke only of the food, and plans for tomorrow.

  They say travel broadens the mind.

  I was waiting, as presumably is Judy, to grow up. What were mother and father doing? Mother, in her way, enjoyed holidays as occasions for family unity (where was Graham on that occasion? Off somewhere I suppose, half-fledged by then, as Paul is now, released to camp with the school in Snowdonia). And so, I had thought, did father, but now I am not so sure. That placid figure in the mind’s eye, sitting on a rock ledge beside a mountain path, apparently contemplating the view, may have been contemplating quite other things. There’s no knowing, now.

  She walked on the pebbly shores of a loch. It was a long, thin loch –on the map a clean and satisfying shape, like a boomerang, and now, arrived at in late afternoon, seen to lie in perfect symmetry among the hills, its curve apparently planned to lead the eye away to meet the focal point of a promontory with wind-bent tree and mountain peak beyond. The water lapped its beaches in small, regular waves which contributed just the right amount of movement to a still, reflective scene. The pieces of driftwood on the shoreline were bleached pale as bone and stood like sculptures beside clumps of rushes or heaped, glistening stones. From time to time a gull flew slowly down the loch, bright and clean against the pale, even grey of sky and water. There was no litter and no noise except for the cries of sheep and birds; this was an unfrequented place, not recommended for its beauty or interest. Anne sat on a slab of rock (of convenient sitting-height, and placed just right to command the most agreeable view) and thought that this must be the ultimate in romantic landscape. Don, wandering down there at the water’s edge, should pose to left of centre, in nineteenth century costume and with appropriate gesture of appreciation towards the scenery. ‘Don,’ she called, ‘could you be a romantic figure ….’ But Don, too far to hear, grinned and waved and was removing shoes and socks, now, and stepping gingerly into the cold waters of the loch.

  Mother wouldn’t have liked this, she thought. Sad, she would have called it. She liked places to be cheerful – trim flowery suburbs or smiling beaches quick with children or the ordered white gleam of Regency spa towns. She was conditioned by scenery as by weather. A gloomy place; a gloomy day. Let’s go somewhere else; hope tomorrow will be better. She once wanted them to retire to the sun – Spain or somewhere. She thought they’d feel so much better; a friend of hers went to live in Malta and felt an entirely different person.

  I don’t feel different, she thought. None of this does anything for me. I look out at it, and observe what it is like, and go on with what I am doing. Go on notching up the days, one by one, examining what has happened and what has not, what he said and what he did not say, cringing every time I look at Don. Every two or three nights I telephone the nursing-home, and they say there is no change. Tomorrow it will be August.

  ‘What time is it?’ said James Stanway to the person who bent over him, doing something irritating to his clothing. He brushed petulantly at her hands, but she put his aside, firmly. ‘Late, dear. Are you going to settle down for the night, now? Would you like a drink?’

  ‘I don’t drink much,’ he said to Betty, ‘as you well know. But yes, after that I think I will, if you don’t mind. A whisky. Why?’ he said. ‘Why after all this time? Why now?’

  She moved from chair to side-board, Betty, in her blue and white dress, seeing to glass, bottle, soda-water, with her quick, neat hands. ‘She had had her hair cut since last he saw her, so that she looked suddenly younger, nearer to the woman he first knew – fifteen years ago. Fifteen years. ‘Why now?’

  And she sat there, smoothing the chintz flowers on the arm of the chair, and talking about change. ‘I haven’t changed,’ he said. ‘Neither have you, I think. And yes, things are a muddle, I am with you there, but they always have been. That has not changed either.’ And, pleating her hair with her fingers as she always did, smiling as she spoke, she was talking now of friendship. ‘Ah, Betty,’ he said, ‘what has got into you? Friendship ….’ But even as he said it, she seemed to go a little further away, to slide from intimacy to familiarity, from a person known to a person one knew. ‘You may be right,’ he said, ‘about things taking their course, but by God I wish they didn’t.’

  The whisky tasted of milk, hot milk. He pushed it aside and voices talked across and above him of someone who was restless tonight, and to whom a sedative would do no harm. He turned his head sideways on the pillow and watched fish swim to and fro across a curtain, or in the shallows of a river.

  Somewhere around the Sheffield turn-off Don said again, ‘Sure you don’t want to go back by Lichfield? Save yourself a trip next week?’

  And again Anne said well no, I think not really, we’ve left it a bit late in the day now and Paul will be back by six, and I’d have to go up anyway, there are things I’ve got to see to, I ought to have a word with the bank manager and there’s a man coming about the leaky pipe at Starbridge …

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘all right, suit yourself. I just thought it might be an idea.’

  Is he insisting? Is he angry? Or is it just a long drive, with much traffic on the motorway and the office looming at nine-thirty tomorrow?

  In the garden at Cuxing the grass was long and the flowers seeding. Anne walked round after breakfast on Monday morning, nipping the dead heads off some pansies and noticing that the old shrub rose against the wall had died right back through the summer and should come out. A lilac might be nice instead. But of course, she thought, we’re not going to live here much longer, are we. I’d almost forgotten. Someone else will have to decide what to do with the rose. I’ll have to start turning out cupboards here, soon, throwing things away, deciding what to keep and what is of no importance. I wonder what I’ll find?

  Her bedroom window opened and Paul shouted from it, ‘Sandra’s on the phone.’

  ‘Coming’ she said, and went inside, thinking of all those cupboards, hugging their menace of old clothes, exercise books, dolls, bricks, small cars, machine guns, postcards, photographs. When I’m ready I’ll take them on, she thought, and not before. When it suits me, and only then.

  ‘Hello,’ said Sandra. ‘You’re back. I
imagine you had a marvellous time. Look, I mustn’t talk long – I’m terribly tied up with this hospital thing now, we’re forming a local Patients’ Association, things are by no means all they should be at the General, I suppose in a way it’s been a blessing having those few days in there with my leg, at least one saw for oneself– but anyway, I had to get in touch to say there’s a winding-up committee for the Splatt’s Cottage campaign on Thursday. At the Pickerings. Do you want a lift?’

  ‘Winding-up?’

  ‘Well, that’s all we can do, isn’t it? There’s a bit of money left in the kitty, that’s the thing – you know, from the whip-round we had for the banners and the ads in the paper and all that – so we’ll have to sort things out. Actually Hugh Sidey’s awfully busy with me on the hospital business. I must say he is going to be a great asset locally.’

  ‘Thursday’s all right, I think,’ said Anne. ‘Yes, please, I would like a lift. Have they finished knocking it down?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Though naturally I suppose they won’t build actually on the site now. I mean I can’t imagine anyone wanting to live there, can you?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Sandra said, ‘Oh, of course you won’t have heard. The thing is that it all turned out to be rather horrid. They started digging trenches in the garden – for drains and whatnot – suppose – and they found these skeletons. Right outside the kitchen door. Skeletons of children – two. Anyway, the police took them off and they had them looked at and they thought they were early nineteenth century, probably, but the nasty thing was one of them had been ill-treated, there were broken bones or something. And they were terribly undernourished, sort of half-starved apparently. There was a thing in the paper about it, about how they could tell about diet from bones and all that, and one of the historians from the university did a piece and said it might have been infanticide when the price of corn was awfully high or something and lots of country people were starving and couldn’t cope with feeding their kids and that sort of thing. It was a rather complicated article with a lot of stuff about fluctuating bread prices and business about the Poor Laws, I didn’t read it properly I must admit – most of it was rather boring, actually. But it does seem so creepy, doesn’t it? The cottage was frightfully attractive, or at least it would have been if it had been looked after properly and then when you think …. Well, anyway, after that of course nobody’s going to fancy living actually on the spot, are they, or at least not anyone local because of course everyone heard about it. In fact people are saying old Pym’s going to have to knock a bit off the price of his wretched bungalows as a result, so I suppose some good’s come out of it. Serves him right. I’ll see you on Thursday, then, I must rush.’

  Well, thought Anne, fancy that now. How clever of Splatt’s Cottage. I suppose it could be said to have won, in the end. I must get hold of this article. ‘Have you heard?’ she said to Judy, who appeared suddenly in the kitchen doorway, ‘about Splatt’s Cottage?’

  ‘The skeletons? Yeah – Susie told me. I was right, wasn’t I?’

  ‘I thought it was eels you said it had.’

  ‘Something nasty – same thing. Where are you going?’

  ‘Into the village. I shan’t be long.’

  Anne walked down Cuxing High Street, past the market cross imprisoned behind its iron railing and the impeccably restored timber-frame façade of Barclays Bank and the less-cherished eighteenth century brick front of the green-grocers, where she stopped to buy vegetables. At the War Memorial, where Cuxing’s better-remembered dead were listed in order of social rank, she met Mary Pickering, who paused for a moment to give a gay account of a camping holiday in France. ‘See you on Thursday,’ she said. ‘Do bring your husband if he’d like to come – we thought we’d make a bit of a party of it since there’s not all that much business to discuss.’

  Anne continued down the street. The old-fashioned draper’s on the corner, whose closing-down sale had lingered on month after month, was now an Antique Emporium, she saw. She stopped in the entrance, and saw droves of stripped pine chests of drawers, corner cupboards, Victorian kitchen tables. At the sides of the room were shelves of the copper hunting horns and ewers and warming pans and horse-brasses that would be slung from the beams of pubs and restaurants. New brass handles, in eighteenth century designs, had been clapped onto old deal chests or tough functional little dressers; the painted carcase of a nineteenth century pram had been made into a plant-stand; an oak butter churn, polished up, stood as an ornament upon a marble washstand which had itself been stripped and given new china handles to its drawers. Each object was wrenched from its own past. It was as though by displaying what had gone before and making an ornament of it, you destroyed its potency. Less sophisticated societies propitiate their ancestors; this one makes a display of them and renders them harmless, like parents whose warnings may safely be ignored for we see now that wet feet do not in fact give you a cold in the head.

  She felt a presence beside her and turned to see Mr Jewkes, of the County Planning Office. He said, ‘Pricey, I imagine.’

  ‘I expect so. I used to like Hapgood’s – the old shop. It was the last place I know to have cotton reels and things in tiers of little drawers with glass fronts.’

  ‘And lady assistants in black frocks,’ said Mr Jewkes unexpectedly. They smiled at each other. ‘We last met, of course,’ he went on, ‘over Splatt’s Cottage. Now that’s a coincidence – I had that case in mind only yesterday. There was this interesting article in the paper, apropos of the burials found there.’

  Anne said, ‘I missed that. We were on holiday.’

  ‘I must see if I still have it. You would have been interested.’ They moved away together down the street, Mr Jewkes explaining that he was in Cuxing to inspect a site for which planning permission had been applied for an estate of forty houses.

  ‘Will you grant it?’ Anne said.

  ‘Confidentially, Mrs Linton, I doubt it. The proposed development is not in sympathy with the rest of the village and I don’t like the idea of much more infilling on the Reading road. I must say,’ he went on, ‘I like Cuxing. It always seems to me one of the more fortunate Berkshire villages – fortunate in that it escaped too much twenties and thirties building. I know you may feel that from time to time the planning laws are misapplied – but I’m sure you wouldn’t want to go back to the anarchy of the pre-war years.’ He looked at her over his gold-rimmed spectacles, with a teasing smile.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I certainly wouldn’t.’ She smiled back; there was no getting away from it, he was rather nice, Mr Jewkes. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she went on, ‘we’re probably leaving it. My husband wants to buy a bigger house somewhere.’

  ‘Well now,’ said Mr Jewkes, ‘I wonder what kind of thing he has in mind …. I’ve just come from a place that might possibly be of interest. Pym’s of Wallingford – brother, you know, of your Pym here – have applied to convert an old coach-house just down the river. I had a look at it on the way here and could see no reason why not. Unused for donkey’s years – lovely site, views across the Downs. Quite a nice tasteful outline plan they’ve produced – keeping the exterior much as it is. Your husband might like to get in touch with the builders before they advertise – that’s the kind of thing that tends to get snapped up rather quickly these days.’

  ‘Yes. I expect it does. I’ll tell him. Thank you, Mr Jewkes.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. By the way – I put two and two together after we last met and realised you taught my eldest at some point, in the comprehensive. He enjoyed your classes, he said – he’s rather keen on history.’

  Anne said, ‘Good. In fact I don’t teach there any more.’ She explained the circumstances of her dismissal. Mr Jewkes made sounds of disapproval and regret. ‘And does that mean you’ll be on the look-out for a job, Mrs Linton?’

  ‘I suppose so. I hadn’t thought, really. I’ve been a bit taken up with other things lately. My father is very ill – until that’s over it�
�s a bit difficult to concentrate on anything else.’ What a euphemism, she thought. What a stupid, self-deceiving euphemism, in every way.

  ‘Quite,’ said Mr Jewkes crisply. ‘May I offer my sympathies. I take it your father is of a considerable age?’

  ‘Yes. He’s quite old.’

  They paused now by the turning to the car park. ‘Very nice to have met you again,’ said Mr Jewkes, and hesitated for a moment, as though not knowing how to break away, jingling the car keys in his pocket. ‘I imagine you studied history at some point, Mrs Linton? Excuse me – I don’t mean to sound impertinent.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said, surprised. ‘I took a degree in it.’ Something made her add, ‘Ages ago, of course,’ which sounded foolish. Mr Jewkes nodded. They shook hands, with awkward formality, and he walked away to his car.

  Anne went home. At the corner of the street she saw the postman, bringing the second delivery, pause at her gate, flick through the pile in his hand, and go up to the front door. She walked very slowly the rest of the way, stopping to examine a notice on a lamp-post, to talk to the small boy next door. Inside the house, on the mat, was the glitter of a scenic postcard. She picked it up without looking at it and carried it into the kitchen. There, she read that Don’s mother was in Devon, having a few days by the sea, and looked forward to seeing them in a few weeks’ time, in September.