The Road to Lichfield

by Penelope Lively

  ‘I must say you’re being frightfully solemn tonight, Anne,’ said Sandra.

  ‘I daresay I am. Sorry. And I hope you won’t feel too badly of me if in fact I don’t stay on the committee. Truth to tell, we may be moving in any case so I’m not sure I’d be eligible.’ She got up, and smiled placatingly. ‘And if you don’t mind, I think I’ll get back – I told Don I wouldn’t be out long. Don’t worry, Sandra—I’ll walk back, it’s no distance and I’d rather like some fresh air.’

  It was not quite dark, the lanes murky in the half-light of an almost-full moon, eroded at one side (it had been whole, five days ago in Starbridge, seen though her bedroom window there …). She walked fast, dodging puddles and stepping back into the hedge once or twice as cars passed. Approaching Cuxing, the unappealing but undeniably old frontage of a nineteenth century warehouse loomed alongside, the windows smashed and boarded up, surely a vulnerable subject. They’d better start here, she thought, that can be item one on their list; warehouse, circa 1840, of brick, three stories, with slate roof and twentieth century addition in concrete and corrugated iron on the west side. And then there’s the Baptist Chapel, all locked up and unused, there can’t be any Baptists in the village now, that should convert nicely into something more relevant for here and now. Coming round the corner into the main street, she passed the Victorian school, its high windows ablaze with light; there would be no need to save that, it had been snapped up during the property boom for some amazing figure. Now an architect lived there with many children; through an uncurtained window she could see the blue glimmer of a television, and their dark contented shapes in front of it. Perhaps those less contented children of Splatt’s Cottage had attended the school, once upon a time (or had they been too young for that?). Oh, the past is disagreeable all right, she thought, no wonder we’d rather not know. And it has this way of jumping out at you from behind corners when you’re least expecting it, so that you have to spend time and energy readjusting to it, re-digesting it. Or it hangs around your neck like an albatross, so that there is no putting it aside ever, even if you wanted to. Even if you knew if you wanted to, or if David did? Does he? Did he ever? I won’t go to Lichfield for a while, she thought, not unless things change with father. I’ll stay here. Or try to.

  She came into her house, and Don was in the kitchen, stoking the boiler, and turned to say ‘Oh, Annie, I’m afraid they phoned from the nursing-home, things aren’t too good, they wanted you to ring back.’

  The river was high today, in flood. It roared in James Stanway’s ears as he cast, like some tropical torrent, not a quiet English trout-stream, and the rush of water carried his line away till he could no longer see it, further and further, unreeling and vanishing so that surely there could be none left, the reel must be empty …. And now he had dropped reel and rod and was clambering up the bank to get away from that noise, and from the water grabbing at his knees that was going to sweep him away with it if he was not careful, knock him down and take him spinning downstream like that bit of driftwood. But he’d beaten it, got out of it and up on the bank, and there was his wife, sitting there with a book on her lap, which was surprising because he had never made her a fishing widow, never planted her out for long waiting days like some men do. So he sat beside her and took out his pipe and began to talk, trying to explain. Look, he said, I don’t expect you to forgive me or even, probably, to understand. But just to get things straight or as straight as I have any right ever to expect they might be, I want to tell you why. It’s not, he said, that I don’t love you. Or that I love her more. I suppose that I’ve enjoyed going to bed with her more, but that is not the whole of it, not by any means, not even the most important part, perhaps. I have been able to talk more with her than ever I have with you, but I don’t think I have ever told her anything I have not told you, or would not have told you, had you asked. It is not your fault, he said, in no way at all. It is not that you are inadequate, or that I have been unhappy with you. You see, he said, I have led a rather ordinary life: my job has been interesting, stimulating even, but I have sometimes felt unused by it. Oh, it is not that I imagine myself some undeveloped genius. I know my limitations. I have been quite satisfied, on the whole, with the way things were. But let me try to explain.

  Once, when I was a boy, I rescued a dog from a river. I have never mentioned this to anyone, because it seemed to me at the time, and still does, a stupid thing to do. The river was deep and fast and I was not a strong swimmer; the risk of drowning was considerable and my life was more valuable than the dog’s. I was not particularly fond of animals. I just thought it would be interesting to take the risk, that I might be missing something if I did not. Some people would call that courage: I don’t think I would. I tell you this, he said, because it seems to illustrate an aspect of me that you have probably never recognized. I don’t expect I have ever seemed anything other than a moderate and cautious man to you. And on the whole I am. Just once or twice in my life that part of me has taken over, has insisted on going as far as there is to be gone, on having what there is to be had. The dog is not perhaps a very good analogy for Betty; there was neither risking nor saving being done there. But the incident will do to illustrate what I mean about myself, Betty and the dog being both in a sense irrelevant.

  He turned and looked at his wife, sitting there reading on the river bank, saying nothing. I am so sorry, he said, that I seem to have kept something of myself back from you; that is perhaps the shabbiest betrayal of all.

  Thirteen

  Anne thought, once, that he said something. She leaned forward and spoke to him, but the mutter, if it had been that, died away. His mouth fell open and he breathed noisily. It was nearly eleven o’clock; she had got up at six, had driven along empty early-morning roads. Now, she sat by her father’s bedside, holding his hand, watching the rooks glide above the gardens beyond the window. The trees were patched with autumn colour.

  She fell asleep, sitting upright in the wicker chair, and dreamed that she and her father walked together, hand in hand, on a huge, sea-rimmed beach. She was ten. They came to a breakwater and she wanted to jump off it, but was afraid. She stood skipping from one foot to another on its shingly top, and her father down below on the sand said, ‘Come on, Anne, now, make up your mind – either do it or don’t.’ ‘Will you catch me?’ she cried. ‘Promise you’ll catch me!’, and he said in his sensible matter-of-fact voice that he couldn’t promise that, now could he? If she wanted to jump, she must jump, it must be her choice and she must either do it or not, it was up to her. She dithered there on the breakwater, while gulls leered at her from the clear salty sky and far away the waves curled white at the edge of the shining sand.

  Waking, she did not know if she had dreamed or remembered. The door opened and the matron came in, with a doctor. Anne went and stood by the window while the doctor examined her father, and then said that the pulse was stronger, but his breathing very poor now. The matron said, ‘Why don’t you go off and get a bit of rest, Mrs Linton, and come back later? We have your phone number at Starbridge, haven’t we?’ Yes, she said, yes I think I will.

  There was a note from David at the house, undated. Could you ring me, it said, at the school – leave a message if I’m not there.

  He was there. ‘Oh, Anne,’ he said, ‘you’ve come …. I wondered – you didn’t say. I thought maybe you mightn’t get up till next week.’ She began to explain. In the background a door opened and closed; there were voices; David in an aside told someone he wouldn’t be a moment. He returned to her and said, ‘I’ll come out to the house tonight – around eight. Is that all right, Anne?’ ‘I expect so,’ she said. ‘If I can’t be there I’ll leave a note.’

  She sat in the garden at Starbridge, outside the study window, within earshot of the telephone. She had intended to spend an hour or so on some of her father’s files, but the boxes lay beside her, untouched. There’ll be time enough for that, she thought, later. Or perhaps in the end I’ll do what Graham s
aid we should do in the first place – throw the lot away.

  The grass of the lawn had grown tall, and seeded, and was now the fawn of uncut hay. The roses had flowered, and flowered again, and thrown up huge juicy suckers. The outlines of the beds were blurred by weed and grass; it would be hard to recover them now. Bindweed, pouring down the bank at one side, had half-filled the small concrete chasm beside the coal bunker, submerging a dustbin and creeping into the back yard. How much grows, Anne thought, in a summer. So many pounds of grass and leaf and flower and seed, all gushing out, come what may. She saw for a moment her mother, moving among the dahlias in that bed at the end there, staking and tying: the dahlias flowered still, flopping across an undergrowth of weed. A garden is an unresponsive thing, its anarchic temperament re-asserting itself as soon as the back is turned. We invent gardens, she thought, picturing the gardens of medieval Books of Hours, stiff formal Elizabethan gardens, herb gardens, oriental gardens. A garden is a fantasy – an arrangement of plants as we think they should be, not as they really are. And time of course puts everything back into place. She wondered if she would ever make another garden. I don’t think I’ve got the heart for it, she thought, not again.

  Later, she returned to Lichfield. There was a nurse sitting by her father’s bedside. ‘He’s had a little stroke, Mrs Linton,’ she said. ‘The doctor feels it must be a matter of hours now.’ The old man’s face was dark; he seemed barely to breathe. Anne said, ‘I suppose there’s no chance he might – know anything now?’ The nurse said, ‘Oh no, dear, not now. I’m afraid he won’t know you’re here at all.’

  She sat for a while in the wicker chair, in a strange peace, beyond time or suffering. She believed, now, the nurse’s claim that her father knew nothing. When the nursing-home began to clatter into its evening routine of food-trolleys and bed-pans she returned to Starbridge.

  They walked down to the river. David said, ‘I’ve put the rod in your father’s cloakroom, by the way.’

  ‘Fishing’s over?’

  ‘For this year.’

  Standing beside him on the bank, as once before, Anne saw his reflection in the water, alongside those of trees suspended head-down like recollections of nineteenth century trees in a darkened oil-painting. David was tethered by a rim of grass and reeds to another, dimmer David falling away into the river, his face and expression indistinct, fractured by tiny shiftings of the river’s surface. He had turned to her and was smiling, but when her eyes travelled downwards to the reflection again his smile had been shattered by some distortion. He scowled from far down in the water, rejecting her, a stranger she could never have known.

  She said, ‘Sorry – what did you say?’

  ‘I said have you done anything about a new job?’

  ‘Not so far. I haven’t felt much like it.’

  ‘Did the nursing-home ring again?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  They followed the river bank, past the place where, once, they had sat drinking tea from David’s flask, had seen a dipper. ‘I don’t think I’m going to go on teaching,’ she said. ‘Not history, anyway’

  ‘Oh, come,’ he said, ‘you can’t rat on it now. What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with it. If anything’s wrong it’s with me.’ She stopped and stripped leaves off a willow (yellow-mottled, September leaves), dropping them into the water one by one. ‘I really don’t know any more,’ she went on, ‘if I have anything straight about the past at all. How I feel about it. I certainly don’t feel competent to lecture children. I don’t know if it’s something people carry around like a mill-stone, or if it’s what they prop themselves up with. Sometimes I think that perhaps it’s only buildings that successfully digest the past. Cathedrals. People like you and me seem to drag it around with them, in many ways.’

  ‘I thought we were talking about history, not us in particular.’

  ‘I’d rather talk about people. Us, maybe.’

  ‘Look, Anne,’ he said, ‘I’m sure this isn’t the right time ….’

  ‘With my father dying? My father’s been dying since we first met.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s true.’

  ‘And after he dies,’ she said, ‘to put it brutally, because one might as well be brutal, just about everything else is – after he dies, we aren’t going to see each other any more, are we, David?’

  He said, after a moment, ‘Do you think anything else was ever possible?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘I told you I was craven.’

  ‘You’re not craven,’ she said. ‘Not more than most.’

  They walked back to the house across the field. David said ‘There was a boy here last week with an air-gun, blasting off at the lapwings, which I imagine is illegal.’

  ‘I imagine so.’

  ‘I told him not to.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Look’ he said, at the garden fence, ‘I’ll see you … When?’

  ‘That rather depends.’

  ‘Will you let me know about your father?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Anne,’ he said, ‘I don’t really want to go into it – it does no good to anyone – Mary knows about it, somehow.’

  ‘I imagined there was something like that. Don’t go into it, David – I don’t really want to hear.’ She put her hand on his arm, and took it off again at once. ‘I’ll let you know how he is.’

  Presently, while she was heating herself a tin of soup for supper, the matron rang to say that her father had died, quite peacefully, without regaining consciousness, a few minutes before.

  She sat beside the cooling soup for a while, and then went back to the telephone to dial Graham’s number.

  The road reached back to Cuxing in orderly lengths; from Staffordshire through Warwickshire into Oxfordshire. No surprises there, no unsuspected town popping up to right or left, no shifting hills or wandering rivers. The landscape at least is constant. Places don’t change. There, she saw, were the cooling towers, and there the traffic light in Banbury where once one hummed The Marriage of Figaro between lorries, and there the spot where poppies had blazed, suddenly, in the middle of June. You must know that road like the back of your hand, Don had remarked once, and oh yes, she thought, I do indeed. One is never going to get rid of it now, along with a great deal else. It has its associations now, come what may, as Lichfield is associated forever with Samuel Johnson. Places aren’t quite as detached as they’re made out to be.

  Blanched of feeling, observing without seeing, she drove from the A446 to the A41 to the A423.

  Come up to London, Graham had said. Don’t sit around feeling low, Annie, I should think you’re a bit whacked, one way and another. He wouldn’t have wanted that, you know. Let’s not have any fuss now – remember? That’s what he would have said. Tell you what – come up and meet me at the studio and we’ll go out and have a nice lunch and cheer ourselves up. He’d have approved of that. How about it?

  And so she walked now through glass doors into this large reception hall where people dressed as Graham dressed sat around on leather-upholstered chairs or vanished through swinging doors with lights above them into unseen hinterlands where, presumably, work was done. Graham Stanway? said the girl behind the desk, is he expecting you? They’ve got a studio day, you know – oh, I see, I’ll ask the porter to take you up then. Studio One it is, The Tower of London. The what? said Anne, confused. Tower of London, said the girl – series title. Jim, could you take this lady to Graham Stanway in One?

  What an unreal place, Anne thought, following the man down corridors, up staircases, past flashing lights, over cables. How odd to come and work in a place like this, to come and spend the day making things up, inventing a world that isn’t. Behind a closed door a typewriter clacked, tethering the place for a moment to the real world of letters and figures. This way, miss, said the man, and now they were in some cavernous place where lights blazed onto a set with cardboard-painted stone walls, trompe l’oeil
barred window, historical-seeming furnishings, man in jeans and T-shirt doing something to a candle-stick; beyond, the room vanished into dusk, wires coiling down from an invisible ceiling, people milling about among cameras and cables. He’s not on the floor, someone said, better take her up to the control room, and now suddenly here was Graham at the bottom of a spiral staircase, saying hello, Annie, sorry, I’ve been on the look-out for you but I couldn’t get along to Reception. And suddenly she felt like crying.

  Come up and watch, he said, we break in half an hour or so and then we can go and have some lunch. How are you, Annie, are you O.K.? I’m all right, she said, what about you, how are your insides? A bloody nuisance, he said, we don’t talk about them – oh, they’re under control. not to worry.

  And now they were in this cool dark goldfish bowl of a room with banked rows of monitors and a line of people on swivel chairs in front of dials and switches, more people glassed-off to right and left, jeans and shirt-sleeves everywhere, voices crackling out of the darkness. Here, said Graham, you sit down here, mind the step, that’s the operative monitor, for your information, the one in the middle, that’s the picture that goes on the screen, the rest are the different camera shots. You’ll hear us behind you talking to the studio floor, at least Maggie does most of the talking – she’s the director, I’ll introduce you later but I’ll have to go now. O.K., love? It won’t be for long – anyway I’m told it’s quite amusing when you don’t see it day in day out.

  What is it? she said, what’s the film? Historical soap-opera, said Graham, life and times of the Tower of London in eight episodes. We’ve got to the sixteenth century in this one, there’s Sir Walter Raleigh coming up on Camera Two now – actually it’s turning out quite nice, we’ve got some good film in the can, super stuff we did in Epping Forest last week. It’s not all in the Tower, then? she said. Oh, Lord, no – we move around, the Tower’s just handy as a central theme – you know, take something solid like a place and watch history seething around it and all that, it’s a good device, gives us scope to bring in just about everything. Good old bread-and-butter costume drama, everybody loves it. See you in half an hour or so, Annie, O.K.?