The Road to Lichfield Read online

  ‘The thing is,’ Sandra was saying, ‘that the traffic density’s gone up by a hundred and twenty percent over the last year. What? Well, of course it’s not absolutely exact but we’ve done this spot check outside the school now three times and it’s definitely up. Those gravel lorries are simply pounding through – well over forty, time and again – I mean, the young mums with prams just have to leap for the pavement if they’re to preserve life and limb. So we feel the first thing is a Protest Meeting – to get some attention, whip up feeling and everything, you know – and a bit in the local rag and all that, and then …’

  She’s got older, Anne thought. It’s funny, you see people year in and year out, sometimes missing a month or two but seldom more, and you don’t notice. When we first came here Sandra was a young mum. So was I. She was even a bit sexy, then. Graham got her tipsy once after some children’s party, for the hell of it – she kept asking after him for years, he must have patted her bottom or something. He wouldn’t now – Graham’s girls get younger, not older.

  ‘ … And the other thing I wanted to talk about is, what are we going to do about Splatt’s Cottage?’

  ‘Splatt’s Cottage?’

  ‘My dear, it’s going to be pulled down, hadn’t you heard. Some wretched spec builder.’

  Anne said, ‘Oh, but that’s awful.’

  Ten years ago, coming to this place, she had hunted for its origins. She had looked its name up in the Dictionary of English Place Names (‘Cuxing Brk [Cucingam 872 ASC, Cucingas DB, Cucing 1170] Cuc or Cuca’s people. Cuc or Cucu is a short form of names in Cwic –…’), wandered forth from her own Edwardian brick house in search of something that would tether the village more nearly to time and to region, that had more conviction than the housing estates that cart-wheeled out from the church and the High Street. The church (‘Norman in origin, Perp W tower, the rest 1880 by W. Young …’) named and recorded. The War Memorial intruded large events into a small place. Here and there, the names of streets or fields preserved archaic functions – Pound Way, the Brickfield. But of the visible past there was little. A terrace of Georgian brick cottages had been done over by young couples commuting to Reading or London; primrose front doors alternated with rust and eau-de-nil, wrought iron lanterns glowing discreetly above them. In the High Street, some half-timbered façades canted out above the plate-glass windows of Boots and Mac Fisheries. The market cross, pock-marked stone with outline blurred almost beyond recognition, was clamped behind an iron railing beside the public lavatories. And at the far end of Swan Lane, squatting morosely beyond an airy development of Span semis, Splatt’s Cottage clung to a precarious half-life, its windows smashed in and boarded up, the thatch slipping from its roof, its walls daubed with football slogans. It was a cruck-frame farmhouse, reputedly dating from the fifteenth century.

  ‘Surely they can’t do that?’

  ‘They can and will,’ said Sandra. ‘That’s just it. It’s not scheduled, apparently, and now Pym’s – you know, the builders – have bought it off old Mr Taylor and the adjoining land and they’ve got planning permission for five bungalows. It’s taken everyone by surprise. Of course we should have spotted what was going on but one can’t keep tabs on everything.’ She sighed theatrically.

  ‘It’s surprising no one’s bought it to do up, long ago.’

  ‘Well, of course it would cost the earth to make anything of it. But the point is that we can’t stand by and see it pulled down. I mean, the Pickerings had someone staying at the weekend who knows about that sort of thing and he says it’s about eight hundred years old.’

  ‘I don’t think it can be quite that,’ Anne said. ‘I’ve always understood it was fifteenth century.’

  ‘Well, anyway, it’s tremendously old, that’s the thing, and it absolutely must be preserved. So we’ll have to have another Action Group and I was wondering – I’m up to the eyes at the moment with the traffic stuff – I was wondering if you could take that on.’ She stared across the table, almost accusingly. ‘I thought you’d be just the right person, teaching history and everything. I mean, you do actually care about the past, don’t you, and then you’ve got a car so it’s easy for you to buzz round getting people interested.’

  ‘I suppose I could.’

  ‘You’re only working part-time, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I do envy you. I’d have adored a career but I never coped with all those exams and things. You’re awfully lucky to have had time for all that. Well, I’ll leave Splatt’s Cottage to you then.’ She took up her fistful of envelopes. ‘You’d better check with the builders what they’re up to.’

  Anne thought: now what have I let myself in for? She went upstairs to have a bath and from her bedroom window saw Sandra’s bulky figure further down the street, talking to someone, the late afternoon foot-traffic of school children and shoppers dividing around her. The greengrocer’s daffodils and tulips stood on the pavement in shocks of colour; Marinas and Cortinas were bringing husbands home from work. Anne undressed, thinking of Splatt’s Cottage and remembering a ritual, when Judy was small, wherein she must always lift the child to peer through the dusky windows in search of heaven-knows-what private fantasy in those empty rooms, abused by vandals and stray cats. Sandra’s right, she thought, I suppose she’s right and I suppose I’ll have to do something – but I wish she hadn’t nailed me like that, just now, this spring, with father ill and everything. I shall be up and down there all summer, I shouldn’t take on much else.

  Lichfield created itself in her head; her father in the white embrace of those hospital pillows, the empty house, the patch of sunlight shifting around his study, that stubborn rose root, its years of growth driving it deep down into the ground. And, accompanying these images, there came what seemed the most unaccountable, the most perverse sense of well-being, of undefined expectation, as in childhood there lay off-stage the promise of Christmas, of birthdays, of a treat.

  ‘How was Harlow?’

  ‘It was there.’

  Once a month Don visited the company at Harlow for whom he acted as legal adviser.

  ‘Just that?’

  ‘Just that, to all intents and purposes.’ Meaning, mostly, I can’t be bothered to talk about it; partly, it wouldn’t interest you. He smiled, placatingly, over the top of the paper.

  Anne said, ‘I went through Oxford on Tuesday.’

  ‘You needn’t have done. I told you. The bypass takes you round.’

  ‘I know. I just felt like it, suddenly. I went down Leckford Road, past your room there.’

  ‘Those were awful digs.’

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you think that’s sentimental, going there.’

  ‘It would have been simpler to stick to the bypass, that’s all. Oxford traffic’s a shambles, nowadays.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the traffic. Don’t you want to know what Leckford Road looks like now?’

  ‘What does Leckford Road look like now?’

  ‘It looks much the same. It was fairly unresponsive.’

  ‘Isn’t that,’ said Don, ‘what places are supposed to be?’

  ‘I daresay.’

  In the next room, the children’s room, the television quacked, erupted into applause, quacked again. The hall clock whirred its overture to striking the hour. Don said, ‘I’ll just have a look at the news.’

  ‘It’s going to mean going up and down to Lichfield a good bit, for the next few months.’

  ‘Yes, I imagine so.’

  ‘There’s a lot of sorting out to do, at the house, apart from seeing father.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Don. He went through to the other room.

  Later, in bed, he laid his hand on her thigh. ‘Annie?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, that would be nice.’

  She visited Splatt’s Cottage. The adjoining Span estate had won an architectural award. Its houses were cleverly stepped to take advantage of the site’s contours and the existing trees (a chestnut, a
clutch of silver birches) had been incorporated into the plan and now looked more groomed and gracious than ordinary trees, presiding over the shaven lawns and paved approaches. Children’s chopper bikes and tricycles leaned against walls and doors, a baby fretted in a sleek black pram; this was an estate of young marrieds, Sandra’s mums who must be protected from the rogue lorries. Outside one of the houses, the old village pump had been preserved, tastefully displayed on a little island of turf, quite detached from any function and more like some piece of sculpture in an open-air exhibition.

  Just beyond the houses, Splatt’s Cottage, lurking behind the hawthorn hedge of its garden, seemed seedy by comparison, not charmingly old but inappropriately so, perhaps even a little obscene, its crouched and sagging form reminiscent of some early Flemish or German woodcut suggesting faintly evil goings-on, undefined medieval perversities. And, as though to confirm this, the ditch outside its garden gate offered scrumpled handfuls of lavatory paper and the pale extended tube of a condom. Anne pushed open the gate (which lurched from its one hinge) and went down the brick path to the front door.

  It was locked, though she could see through the broken window beside it that people had been into the cottage. There was a beer can on the floor and some old newspapers. She walked round the outside, examining the structure as revealed externally in the curve of the crucks, the horizontal timbers, the infilling of herring-bone brick work plastered over but showing here and there where the plaster had cracked off in chunks. I’ll have to do some homework, she thought, get a book on timber-frame buildings, try to find out about this place, how old it really is and all that. You can’t defend something efficiently unless you know what it is you are defending.

  The back door was wide open. There was evidence in the kitchen of recent, and transitory, occupation. A nest of newspapers and broken-down cardboard cartons in one corner; an empty cigarette packet, more beer cans; a scrawl across one wall – Leeds Rule OK?; lengths of light flex spewing from the walls where fittings had been torn away.

  How long since anyone had lived here? She moved through the small rooms, trying to extract information from objects. There was a square stone sink and grooved wooden draining board in the kitchen, and an iron range. No bathroom and only an outside wash-house and lavatory. Small decorative Victorian grates in the bedrooms. In one upstairs room a twenties fluted glass lampshade had escaped the vandals. If the past had been cherished here, it was because of poverty, not good taste.

  And further back? I don’t know about this sort of thing, Anne thought, these beams might be any age. She tapped the wall above the brick fireplace in the sitting-room and thought she detected a hollow noise. An open fireplace? Inglenooks? The bulge beside the back door must surely be a bread oven, entombed now in the wall. And had the ground floor been always this warren of tiny rooms? Surely, once, one big open place – wasn’t that how these houses were laid out originally? Extraordinary, really – you take a tree and chop it in half and build a house out of it, and people come along, hundreds of years later, and stick iron ranges into it made in Birmingham and glass lampshades from Woolworth’s. And somewhere along the line there is some curious adjustment to the way people feel about the past and it becomes immoral to knock the place down.

  The interior walls were blistered with damp. There was a smell of cat. Closing the back door behind her, engaging its feeble latch (as though that would keep anyone out) she tried to re-animate the affection she had once felt for this place, and failed. Ten years ago, when they came to Cuxing, she used to bring the children down here on afternoon walks, when they were three and five. To walk this lane now was to feel again their small hands cling to hers as they darted back from private sorties to the ditch, the five-barred gate to the field, the arthritic branches of the willow at the corner. Passing the Span houses, she had caught herself in an automatic glance to see if the ditch was flooded, a possible child-hazard. But the Span houses had not been built then: there had been a field of cows where they stood and the ditch was drained and tamed now, nothing but a sulky lair for nettles and docks. Splatt’s Cottage had seemed, then, entirely different, a faintly mysterious place, the beckoning climax of a walk (summer walks, in recollection, but surely there must have been winter days, too, cold and wet, and why, remembering, were the children never demanding or recalcitrant?), a Hansel and Gretel house in the woods. Yes, that of course must have been its allure for small Judy, held up to project her infant imagination into those murky rooms; a gingerbread house, a fantasy place.

  But I liked it too, Anne thought, it had some special meaning for me, then, though it was just as run down, just as seedy. I can’t quite see why, now, though I can see that Sandra’s perfectly right, one can’t stand by and let it be pulled down, it must be the oldest building in the village.

  And, walking back past the Span houses (the young mums, trousered and smocked, herding their children back now from the primary school) she decided that it was they, the new arrivals of brick and pre-cast concrete, that made the cottage seem a profane intrusion where once it had stood so appropriately in its landscape of field and cow, water and willow. And of course, she thought, that is what does happen – the present does alter the past, quite true. But that’s not an argument for knocking down Splatt’s Cottage. She found an envelope in her pocket and scribbled on the back of it the names of those whose finer feelings might be appealed to on its behalf: old Miss Standish, the Pickerings, that retired Professor.

  She told Don of her visit and, stung by the mild derision of his response, found herself repeating Sandra’s phrase – caring about the past. It sounded absurdly pretentious and made her more irritated still. But look, she said, one can’t just sit back and do nothing, can one? And imagined that behind Don’s shrug and his indifference (his laziness, she said to herself) lay the thought that she was becoming one of those women herself. And, thrashing about in this mire, she made it worse.

  ‘You never commit yourself to anything. I mean, not to anything that’s going to cost.’

  ‘Cost?’

  ‘Cost emotionally. Oh, I don’t mean that everyone should rush round having causes, like Sandra. But just sometimes you have to identify with something.’

  ‘And you feel identified with Splatt’s Cottage?’

  ‘No, of course not. Well, yes, in a stupid kind of way. All right, caring about the past is a silly expression, but that is what it’s about, I suppose. I mean, the place isn’t especially beautiful – in fact yesterday there was something a bit repulsive about it – but in the last resort it is a very early building and there aren’t many of them in Cuxing. It stands for something.’

  Don said, ‘You certainly expect a lot of the inanimate world.’ And smiled, that cat-like, placating smile. End of argument. Except, of course, that the argument had never been. We have never, she thought, never ever had a stand-up row, because Don cannot be bothered with that kind of thing. Once, in her extreme youth, in the days before Don, she had had a lover with whom she fought devotedly. Aged eighteen and nineteen, they had blazed their way in and out of bed, through partings and reconciliations. Married to Don, she had thought how childish all that seemed. This, she had said to herself complacently, is how grown-up people behave, with restraint and consideration.

  ‘That,’ she said now, ‘sounds just too clever by half, frankly. All I’m doing is give up a bit of my time to something that might be worth doing.’

  Graham telephoned to say that he had been up to Lichfield and that if it was all right with them he’d pop down to Cuxing for the weekend. ‘Time I gave your kids the once over. Don’t put out any red carpets.’

  ‘I wasn’t proposing to,’ Anne said, ‘And furthermore you’ll have to come with us to an extremely dull local party on Saturday night.’ With a sudden spurt of warmth she added, ‘I don’t mean that – it’ll be good to see you.’

  Paul said ‘I mean what exactly is Uncle Graham? Like Dad solicits or people are engineers?’

  ‘You may well as
k,’ said Don.

  ‘He always seems to have pots of money.’

  ‘Your uncle,’ said Don, ‘is a media man.’

  ‘I know he does things for the telly. But what, exactly? I mean, you see his name on something but it’s come and gone before you’ve had time to find out what he did.’

  Anne said, ‘He’s a producer. He arranges and organizes programmes. Works them out in the first place and then hires actors and people and oversees everything.’

  ‘Do you think he knows the Goodies?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Anyway, he doesn’t do that kind of thing. He does drama series, or serious plays.’

  ‘Your cultural stuff?’

  ‘Vaguely cultural,’ said Anne, ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Pity. Now if one had an uncle who knew the Goodies, that would really be something.’

  He was late, of course, for lunch on Saturday, arriving in a sports car that she thought ludicrous; she felt again the sting of exasperation with which, years ago, she had watched him arrive at home, always inconvenient, always in possession of something new (clothing, car, girl) that patently could not be afforded.

  ‘My god, you’re getting a paunch!’

  ‘If your husband weren’t around I’d pass a comment on your grey hairs. How are you, Don?’

  But he was at his best, out to please, chatting up the children, telling jokes that thawed even Don’s immemorial distaste for his brother-in-law. He was a person who could induce emotional schizophrenia, always had been; in childhood, she had swung between bitter hatred and passionate support. Now, in a muted form of this, she watched him wash the dishes after lunch, clowning unfamiliarity with a perplexing ritual, encouraging Paul in schoolboy horse-play, and glared beyond him at the car, toad-like in her drive.

  ‘What a ghastly car!’