The Road to Lichfield Page 4
‘Bugger! Sorry!’
Blood welled up through the crust of earth on the ball of his thumb. He groped in his pocket with the other hand and said, with sudden helplessness, like a boy, ‘I haven’t got a handkerchief.’
Anne said, ‘That looks rather deep. You’d better come in and put it under the tap.’
He followed her into the kitchen and sat at the table. She ran water into a basin, hunting in the cupboards for Dettol and cottonwool, and when she turned to him again saying, ‘Here, let me …’ saw that he was white and sweating, his head turned from the thumb which dripped earth and blood onto the floor.
‘Are you all right? Here – put your head between your knees.’
He leaned forward obediently and she held her hand on his shoulder for a minute or so until he sat up again.
‘How ridiculous!’ he smiled at her, weakly. ‘We seem fated to do nothing but ask each other if we’re all right.’
Anne said, ‘You remind me of Paul. My son. He cut his foot once on the beach – I was remembering it just now – on some broken glass or something and wouldn’t look at it for hours because he was sure his toes had come off. He was six or seven. Have you always been like that about blood? Hold it over the sink now. Don’t look.’
‘Just about always. Not a good failing for a schoolmaster. Have you any idea how much bloodshed a medium-sized boys’ school averages per week?’
‘Pints, I should imagine. Sorry, I’m getting your sleeve a bit wet.’ His hand, under hers, felt cold. Fishing, of course, gives you cold hands. Her father, coming in on summer evenings, would lay his on her cheeks, either side, teasing, to warm them.
‘As for National Service … I spent my time quaking at the sight of those sabres on the wall in the officers’ mess.’
‘How awful. But what do you do about fish? Bashing them on the head?’
‘Oddly enough, that I can do. Fish blood seems different.’
‘I find that inconsistent. There, it’s nearly stopped bleeding now. Can you press it together for a few minutes?’
‘No, I’m much too infirm.’
‘Oh, dear,’ she said, ‘Then I shall have to.’
The single chromium spout of a pair of mixer taps, stared at with intensity, becomes the arched neck of some misconceived prehistoric creature, presenting a bright, elongated reflection of anyone who faces it. Two people, side by side, flow one into another, formlessly pink, brown and green. Fortunately, perhaps, the reflection is too distorted to return anything so precise as an expression, as eyes, or mouth, or nose.
Anne said, ‘I really think that’s all right now.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I’ll just put a bit of plaster on and then we might have a cup of tea.’
‘That would be nice.’
They sat facing each other across the kitchen table, silent now, and then both speaking at once.
‘Have you been teaching in Lichfield long?’
‘Berkshire, you said you lived in, wasn’t it?’
Anne said, ‘Yes, a village near Reading.’
‘Ah. Commuter country. That’s a kind of landscape I’m not too familiar with, being a provincial lad by birth and upbringing. I’m used to places people live in rather than work from, though I don’t know you could say that of these parts, nowadays. Brum spreads its tentacles a long way. I grew up in Nottingham.’
‘I’ve never been there, I’m afraid.’
‘I don’t recognize it, nowadays. New shopping centres as far as the eye can see. Ring-roads and flyovers and what have you. Now there’s a town that’s been progressively raped over the last fifty years. It used to have a seventeenth century town hall, did you know? That was pulled down in the nineteen twenties.’
‘I thought it was notorious for its slums, once.’
‘Oh, yes, them too. We lived in lower middle-class Nottingham, respectable little streets, most of them are getting bulldozed now. My father was a grocer. After Cambridge I came back and taught in the local schools for ten years or so, then a stint in Manchester, then here.’
Anne said diffidently, ‘I teach too.’
‘Your father never mentioned that. But then I must admit he didn’t often talk about you.’
‘Only in a very small way – some O-level history at our comprehensive. I’d like to do more, though, eventually.’
‘Another historian,’ said David Fielding, ‘We’re an unfashionable lot.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The tide’s against us, hadn’t you noticed? People haven’t got that much time for the past nowadays. They want vocational instruction.’
‘Oh, come,’ she said. ‘I can’t entirely agree with that. I should have thought it had never been more popular, literally popular. Cheap Book Club editions of history books all over the back of the Radio Times; millions of people tramping round stately homes every weekend; the last hundred years in some aspect or other being re-hashed on the telly every time you turn it on.’
‘The past as entertainment.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you put it like that, I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. But all the same I …’
‘But when it comes to the past as instruction, that’s another matter.’
‘Is it instruction?’ she said. ‘Should it be? I’ve never been sure about that. The lessons of the past and that sort of thing … Why should you learn from history? Why not just learn about it?’
‘When you start arguing you look like your father.’
‘Do I?’
‘And you have his way of picking a subject up and chewing it like a bone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, offended. ‘I didn’t mean to be boring. I thought it was quite interesting.’
‘You aren’t a bit boring. I don’t know when I’ve been less bored.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Good.’
‘Go on.’
‘I’ve finished that now. I can’t remember what I was going to say. Would you like some more tea?’
‘Yes, please. And what else do you do, down in Berkshire, apart from making sure history isn’t too instructive? You’ve got children?’
‘Two. Boy and girl. Fifteen and thirteen. What about you?’
‘Two boys. Same sort of age. But, dear me, don’t let’s start talking about our children, I have enough of that professionally. Trading parental experiences is seldom a rewarding pastime. Best left to educationalists or psychologists. Your father had the measure of that. He seldom spoke of you or your brother – which I don’t for one moment imagine meant lack of affection.’
‘No, I don’t think so. Though he was always a bit detached from family life. It’s odd, but I keep getting this feeling now, going through his papers as I have to do, of only partly knowing him.’
‘Presumably one only does know – see – a parent in one dimension?’
Yes. Yes, I suppose so.’ She went on to speak of her thoughts that morning, of the deceptive picture of a life as presented by bits of paper.
David said, ‘More selective than a museum archive, presumably. He must have chosen what to keep.’
‘But the same emphasis on economic life.’
‘To the exclusion of the passions?’
‘Well, yes,’ she said.
‘Are your children going to find a drawer of love-letters?’
‘I don’t suppose they are.’
‘You see …’ he said. ‘But there’ll be expired passports and old insurance documents by the dozen.’ He was silent for a moment, contemplating his own plastered thumb, resting on the yellow formica table. He went on, abruptly, ‘Why are you doing all this now? You could leave it for a bit.’
‘Until he dies?’
David nodded.
‘I’m not sure, really. To start with because I had to – to sort out money things, you see. Partly because in some peculiar way I want to. It’s not like me,’ she added. ‘I hate tidying. I’ m very disorderly. My husband complains.’
H
e ignored this. ‘The death of parents – of a parent – is a climacteric business, in all sorts of ways. You feel older, and younger, both at once.’ He lifted the tea-pot and topped up both cups, spooning sugar into his own. ‘May I? My father died about fifteen years ago. He was the kind of grocer that doesn’t exist any more – the old-fashioned corner shop – I’m glad he didn’t live to be capsized by the age of the supermarket. When he died I had to clear out all the shop accounts. Pathetically small sums of money – going back into the twenties, you see, people owing three and six till Friday, that kind of thing. And all those scraps of paper to do with what a person is, that you’ve been talking about. Every certificate of mine. He didn’t have your father’s reticence, I’m afraid, about his offspring. He was the Ancient Mariner where his son was concerned – the neighbours must have shrivelled at the sound of my name.’ He laughed.
‘Presumably he was proud of you. That’s not a crime.’
‘Yes and no. He thought it was a fine thing to have a boy at university – that was unheard of in our street. But he was a midland business man, in however small a way – he thought a schoolteacher’s income a very poor return on all that educational investment.’
‘It is.’
‘If you look at it like that.’ He sounded suddenly sharp.
Anne said in embarrassment, ‘I don’t. But I see what he meant. If you’ve spent …’
‘I’m sure you don’t. I didn’t mean to slap you down – sorry. What does your husband do?’
‘He’s a solicitor.’ Down in Berkshire, she thought, in somebody’s sitting-room, on somebody’s lawn, they say at this point, ‘Oh, really?’ in a bright, approving voice that means: ah, now I know where I am, who you are, how rich, where your children go to school, what you are likely to feel about things.
David Fielding said, ‘Sensible fellow, I daresay.’
Outside, it was dusk. In the field, a shroud of mist now hid the line of willows. The garden fork stood stark as a gibbet where Anne had left it upright in the rose-bed. A motor-bike crashed down the lane through the silence and David said, ‘I’d better go.’
At the door he said, ‘I’ll go in to see your father, of course. When will you be up again?’
‘In about a fortnight, I expect. Unless they think I should come before.’
‘Perhaps I’ll see you.’
She said, ‘I hope so.’ After he had gone she sat in the kitchen, doing nothing, staring at the dirty tea-cups. The telephone ringing made her jump.
It was Graham. ‘Anne? Look, I’ve fixed things to come up on Friday.’
‘Good.’
‘Everything O.K.?’
‘More or less. Graham – one thing … Did father ever have anyone he gave some kind of allowance to? A pension or something? That nurse person we had in the war, when mother was working – what was her name?’
‘Search me.’
‘Not Barron?’
A fractional pause. Graham said, ‘Don’t think so. What’s the problem?’
‘Nothing, really, it’s just there’s this Mrs Barron he has a standing order for at the bank. Fifteen pounds a month.’
A longer pause. On another line, voices faintly chattered. ‘Look,’ said Graham, ‘I shouldn’t bother about it. Just leave it.’
‘But we’ve got to know who she is, this person, for goodness’ sake!’
‘Not necessarily.’ Was that what he had said? There was a windy sound in her ear now, as though he was yawning, or sighing, down there in London. ‘Not to worry anyway.’
‘I’m not worrying,’ she said crossly.
‘Jolly good, then. Well, I’ll keep in touch.’
‘Right you are. ‘Bye.’
‘’Bye.’
She slept badly, falling from long wakeful stretches into a fitful sleep, tumultuous with dreams and images. She got up early with a headache, projecting forwards into the day so that in her mind she was already back at home and about the things that would await her there. It was as though the lengths of road in between did not exist, as though you cut from one place to the other as in a film. She bustled round the house, closing windows, pushing her things into a bag, thinking of a meal for tonight, of what she had to do tomorrow. But sitting at the kitchen table over a cup of coffee she saw again David Fielding’s hand with plastered thumb laid against the speckled grey and yellow formica. With the sharpened observation of hindsight she saw too his hair fringed with grey above the ears, the unravelled stitches at the cuff of his sweater, the cracked bowl of his pipe. She wrote ‘mince, onions, carrots, pickle’ on the back of an envelope – the evening meal could be bought on the way home – and thought: he must keep father’s rod, – should like that, it’s much the most sensible thing, I’ll talk to him about it again, sometime.
Three
‘Fill her up’ said Graham, and the garage attendant, laying a lascivious hand on the car’s expensive rump, thought: what a waste, an old bloke like him having a job like this, it’s not bloody fair. He slammed the cap back on the tank, not properly screwed up so like as not it would drop off within five miles, and came round to the window. ‘Four fifty, sir.’
And Graham said, ‘Well, that’s how it goes,’ so the boy thought for a minute he was taking the mickey and was going to come back at him, hard, till he realized it was the money he was talking about. ‘Daylight robbery,’ he said with a grin. ‘Goodnight, sir.’ From the office he watched the tail-lights of the car link up with the rush-hour traffic.
Graham, two and a half hours of the M1 ahead of him, flicked the switches of the radio and settled for the news. He sailed through darkening counties, informed of this and that, sliding from one lane to another, reasonably comfortable, reasonably content, moderately tired. At the ends of weeks, nowadays, he tended to feel a bit done in, which of course meant nothing at all, nothing a bit of a holiday, come the summer, wouldn’t put right. Around Luton he thought, for a while, of the divorced lady with whom, other things being equal, he usually spent Friday nights. He thought that somehow there might not be a lot more of those nights, but it wouldn’t be much skin off his nose, one way or the other, all things considered. I could do with a rest, a bit of time off all that. I’ll go down and see Annie and the kids next weekend, ought to keep up more than I do, months since I saw her. Northampton coming up, not bad time, there before eight, anyway.
Not even houses are inert: everything moves on. Anne, stepping into her home, felt herself reclaimed by the place, her attention at once arrested by all those minute and instantly discernible changes produced by time. Tuesday had given way to Thursday; on the hall table, two letters, a circular and a bill; in the kitchen, crockery in the sink, clothes flung down in one corner, something decaying in a saucer on the fridge. Her children, banging into the house in the tailend of the afternoon, seemed to swamp her with demands.
‘What thing on Saturday? Oh, I suppose so, if I’ve got time.’ To Judy, hunched at the kitchen table, wolfing bread and jam, she said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask how grandfather was?’
‘Sorry. How was grandfather?’
‘He isn’t very well, I’m afraid.’ Pity eclipsed her irritation as she saw the girl with momentary detachment, suspended in that eternity between childhood and womanhood. ‘Don’t eat so much bread, darling, it’s so fattening.’
‘I’m fat already. So what’s the point?’
‘You could get thinner. I’ve put on weight, too. We’ll go on a diet together.’
‘I’d still have spots.’
‘We’ll try a different kind of stuff from the chemist.’
The girl said nothing, tranced in gloom. Anne thought: poor things, they don’t know what they are, what’s expected of them, it’s a rotten time – what nonsense is talked of childhood, of that bit of childhood.
She said, ‘I was looking at all sorts of old photos at grandfather’s, of you and Paul when you were little – I meant to bring them back, they might have amused you.’
‘Mmn …’
‘Not really. Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘Can I have 25p to get Susie a birthday present?’
‘All right,’ Anne said. Not even, yet, sustained by memory – they haven’t that crutch, so far. She went to the kitchen window and stood looking into the garden, at the raw green leaves of the lupins that had climbed a perceptible inch or so since she had left, at the blazing polyanthus and the crocuses now spurting untidy greenery above the tattered flowers. The roses were in full leaf, the chestnuts offered embryonic candles, the grass of the lawn was long enough to cut: next week the school holidays would begin.
Paul put his head round the door and said, ‘Sandra Butterfield’s here. You have been warned.’ Anne, drawn up defensively against the sink, abandoning the garden, thought: no, I will not offer her tea, or she’ll be here an hour or so and I’ve a hundred things to do. She watched Sandra bustle past the window, head down over a fistful of papers that she shuffled through as she walked. What is it this time? Liberals; Oxfam; Christian Aid Week? She went to open the door.
‘My dear, I mustn’t stop – I’ve got all the C.P.R.E. stuff to push round – but I did just want a word with you or Don about the Traffic Action Group. You see the thing is …’
Anne said, ‘Come into the kitchen.’
Sandra Butterfield sought causes with the fervour of a medieval churchman in pursuit of a heresy. Her small, tubby person exuded energy and indignation. Propelled by her and her followers, over the years, this spruce Berkshire village had embraced liberalism, cherished the environment, fought the threat of a motorway, restored the church spire. Denied the need to work by her husband’s income, she pursued occupation. Hers was the stocky, tireless physique of a peasant woman bowed over a cornfield in some nineteenth century painting; transposed into her large modern house in this tranquil commuterland, she seemed to dart hither and thither with the undirected pent-up energy of a clockwork toy. A prettier woman would have taken up adultery. Sandra, bundled into woollies and tweeds, sat now at Anne’s kitchen table, spread out her papers and envelopes and put a large red biro tick against an item on a list which, Anne could see, said ‘Recruit Lintons for Traffic Group.’