Ashes In the Wind (31 page)

The mirror had been put together by a regimental saddler with no horses left to saddle. Artillery, machine guns and Flanders mud turned the Royal Irish Dragoons from the flamboyant horsemen who charged alongside the Scots Greys at Waterloo into poor bloody infantry. It had been sent back to Derriquin, together with a few letters, photographs, four medal ribbons and a worn signet ring, all that survived of Henry Burke after the first day of the Somme.

The mirror is a talisman. It holds James, through years of daily use, within its frame; if it breaks, more than glass would break. It has watched him change from a pink-cheeked optimist, just beginning to shave, to his present lean, cautious reflection. He sometimes turns and looks as he leaves the bathroom to see whether his reflection is still caught, is watching him go.

As he shaves on the morning of his trip to Scotland, for the briefest of moments James seems to step sideways, away from and out of his body, while the world stops turning. And as he rejoins himself, and the world begins to move again, he is entering the body of a stranger. He knows the stranger’s history; he decides in that moment to leave it behind.

On the slow train to Edinburgh, James struggles with the
Guardian
, then sleeps, woken at irregular intervals at Peterborough, York, Darlington, Durham. His carriage is almost empty apart from a businessman tapping at his laptop two seats away. The slowness of the journey heightens his feeling of escape. He looks at his reflection in the carriage window. You’re the one I’m escaping, he says to himself.

Outside Durham the train stops altogether – in a field that stretches out to a housing estate James sees a young couple lying on the grass watching their small child kicking a red football with clumsy determination. It is a reminder of his own childhood, his early married years, his daughter, years of optimism and hope.

Disjointed images along the journey lodge in his half-awake
memory – an angler under a green umbrella, a field with half a dozen piebald ponies, a giant yellow digger idle in a gravel pit, the great towers of Durham Cathedral, a wall of graffiti-ed initials in red, yellow and blue, all using the same bulging capitals.

He has brought his great-grandmother Burke’s diaries and letters with him, an archive of County Kerry in the middle of the nineteenth century, handed down by his great-aunt. A long train journey had seemed an ideal opportunity to sort through them, but he soon realizes that he needs a bigger table and a more settled mind for the task, and he puts them away.

Beyond Newcastle the train edges gradually towards the coast, the balance between land and sea shifting until the track is separated from the North Sea by less than a mile of well-cultivated fields. The train is behaving oddly, stopping at intervals for no apparent reason, waiting a few minutes, and then starting up again. James dozes off until a violent stop jerks him awake to a landscape that he has dreamed before. He is looking across ploughed fields to a narrow river estuary. On the far side a little town crouches under a castle- and tree-topped hill. Curving towards him is the enfolding arm of a harbour wall guarding the estuary mouth and twenty or thirty boats against the winds of the North Sea. The sun has come out; the water of the estuary gleams.

His waking dream is interrupted by the gloomy voice of the ticket collector.

‘Complete electrical failure. Next carriage doors opened, won’t close – can’t go on – relief train in half an hour from Newcastle.’

The businessman sighs.

James looks again at the town, the river, the estuary, the sunlit sea. He stands up with a sudden purpose, picks up his bag and walks into the next carriage. It has been cleared; the doors, as the ticket collector has warned, are open. After a moment’s hesitation James jumps down to the low embankment, climbs through the hedge and sets off across the fields towards the town. He has a feeling of escape, of shaking off pursuers.

There is no path. He skirts the ripening wheat and makes slow progress across the fields, damp clods of earth clinging to his black shoes. Gripped by a sudden feeling of childish folly, he looks back, turns and goes on.

Between the second field and the edge of the estuary the land merges into the water through a long reed-covered margin. A brace of teal rise up and circle inland, and as James watches their flight he sees what had been his train move cautiously across the viaduct spanning the river a mile upstream. There is no obvious alternative crossing. A rough path leads in two directions, inland between high hedges to the viaduct, outwards to the estuary mouth and the coastline. He turns inland, unhappy at the thought of clambering up to the viaduct.

‘Why couldn’t the train have given up the ghost on the other side of the river,’ he mutters, realizing as he speaks that it is the enfolding arm of the harbour wall that has pulled him out of the train and towards the town. Without that view he’d still be on his way to Edinburgh.

He walks slowly along and takes a right fork towards the river, which narrows in a final constriction before splaying out into the estuary. The river is spanned by a rickety footbridge, half a dozen railway sleepers resting end to end on wires suspended either side from two overhead cables. It has been built for fishermen and, judging by the rusting cables and weather-beaten sleepers, not very recently. The bridge sways with each step as he makes his way across.

At the halfway point he stops, looks upstream and sees a fisher in the final stages of playing a fish. The distant figure – it is hard to tell whether it is a man or a woman – beaches the salmon, bends to unhook it, and then nurses it gently in the shallows before letting it go.

On the other side he follows the path downstream; it curves away from the river to open up a full view of the town and its little harbour. His pace quickens, bringing him to a road flanked by houses on the landward side and on the right by the sprawl of the estuary.

A green bench gives him a chance to sit down and think about his surroundings and his erratic behaviour. His disengagement began in the morning in his shaving mirror; even so, leaving a train in mid-journey was out of keeping with his measured, rational approach to life. You’re a retired Permanent Secretary, he tells himself, due in Edinburgh for a Trust dinner tonight and a Trustees’ meeting tomorrow. Sitting there, he unrolls a mental list of memorial services, silver wedding anniversaries, regimental reunions, seminars on funding the arts, college Gaudies, godchildren’s twenty-firsts, farewell parties for barely remembered colleagues, all of which he has converted into duties. The clubs need a separate list – the Garrick, the Other Club, the Saintsbury. He feels suddenly liberated from these self-imposed obligations. And without guilt.

He leaves a message on her mobile for his deputy (a brisk forty-year-old who calls James ‘Chair’ even over dinner, and is longing to display her chairperson talents). He blames family complications for his sudden absence, presses ‘Send’, and drops his phone into the litter bin. As he walks away, he imagines its ring-tone calling, calling in vain.

The path joins a small road leading into the town.
‘Welcome to Allenmouth’, the sign says, approving James’s decision to abandon the train. In smaller letters below it announces, ‘Twinned with Lippspringe (Germany) and Castéra (France)’. Passing an old-fashioned red telephone kiosk and postbox, James sees with pleasure that the latter is marked ‘G VI R’. Perhaps he is changing his decade as well as his destination.

His road is now flanked by shops and houses, an engaging mixture of the architecture of the last three hundred years, stone, brick, render, the tallest a half-timbered Edwardian/Elizabethan building with an unglazed gallery on the top floor. The street looks like the miniature rows of houses that accompanied his Hornby train set when he was eight. The saltings are tamed by a low wall that gradually increases in size to form the harbour. The tide is coming in; the wall’s granite blocks change from dark to light, marking high tide fifteen feet above low water. Twenty or thirty boats, mostly day-fishing boats with one bigger trawler and an incongruous fifty-foot ketch, bob at their fendered moorings or on buoys further out.

On the corner of the road there is a four-storeyed, red-brick, Victorian building, taller than its neighbours, with a first-floor bow window and a swinging heraldic sign, the Allen Arms. A small card in the window says ‘Bed and Breakfast’. James goes into a large, cheerful bar with two or three men nursing their drinks in the guarded way of low-spending regulars. The barman, busily polishing glasses, becomes animated and friendly when James asks for two Scotch eggs, a pint of bitter and a room for two nights.

‘Sally,’ he shouts, in a broad Geordie accent. ‘Gent here wants a room,’ and to James, ‘She needs to get the room ready – the holiday season’s beginning.’

James takes his pint and his eggs – he is thirsty and hungry from his walk and his change of plan. Or, to be precise, the abandonment of planning in favour of an uncharted future.

Twenty minutes later he is shown up to a room overlooking small narrow gardens to the backs of houses. Half a dozen pigeons wheel around a loft tacked on to the middle storey of the house opposite. The room is clean and simple.

‘Facilities on your right at the end of the passage. Twenty-nine pounds a night, in advance, including breakfast.’

Unpacking his briefcase takes a minute. He has a sponge bag, clothes for his Edinburgh day, and his great-grandmother’s diaries and letters. The papers for the meeting he shoves into the wastepaper basket.

He sets off to explore Allenmouth. In the harbour, somebody on board the ketch is coiling ropes; a man sitting in a dinghy is wrestling with a reluctant British Seagull outboard motor, a defunct brand that had tested James’s patience and tortured his hands on Irish seaside holidays. A couple are embracing at the end of the harbour wall, which is rounded off with a small battlemented tower. James walks out to the tower and back towards the town, turning inland up a steeply sloping street past the row of houses he had seen from his room.

A sign points up a grassy lane to ‘The Golf Club – Visitors Welcome’. The clubhouse is a small building surrounded on three sides by a generous verandah. Twisted iron columns support a red shingled roof. The building is locked; a notice in the window says ‘Ring Jack Pearson, Professional, for a lesson or access to the clubhouse’. James makes a note of the telephone number, finds a teak garden seat and sits down. The course is spread out before him, a perfect nine-hole links, four holes out, one on the turn, four more back.

Below the course the coastline stretches out in the sun. Sand dunes fall away to a long stretch of white beach marked at regular intervals by wooden breakwaters, untested by the waves of the incoming tide. A lighthouse blinks on a distant headland. Oystercatchers wheel along the shore; a few waders pick away at the darkened rim of the sand. The red flags marking the greens flutter in the sea breeze. James feels a sudden surge of pleasure. This could give him something to do.

By the next morning he has decided to stay. A trip to the gentlemen’s outfitters he’d seen the day before produces corduroy trousers, half a dozen Viyella shirts, some woollen socks that remind him of his prep school, a brown herringbone jacket, stout brogues. Looking at himself in the shop mirror, James realizes, with a curious feeling of filial duty, that he has become his father.

He walks back towards his hotel and notices in the window of the junk shop a clutter of sporting equipment. He goes in, surprised by the loud clang of the doorbell that announces his entry, and asks about the golf clubs.

‘All yours for a tenner,’ the young man in charge suggests. James picks through the assortment and winds up with a modern steel-shafted driver, a miscellaneous collection of irons including ‘the Harry Vardon Mashie Niblick’, a number four wood, a beautiful hickory putter and a canvas bag.

Saturday morning is bright and clear, sharpened by a wind off the North Sea that pushes James at an angle along the quayside towards the newspapers. The smaller fishing boats knock against the harbour wall; two nets are laid out to dry in long coils, adding the tang of fish and tar to the salt of the sea air. A few seagulls hang in the wind and a lonely seal shows his disappointed face above the harbour’s water. An orange fisherman’s glove, fingers and thumb inflated with air, bobs on the surface and points to the sky.

As he walks on, he hears loud, throbbing music from a side street leading off the harbour. The sound, out of place on an Allenmouth Saturday, draws him towards a low green Scout hut whose corrugated-iron roof amplifies the steady beat inside.

The double doors are open. He walks up to the entrance and looks in. Now he can hear the words, ‘The Lord, Lord reigns,The Lord, Lord reigns,The Lord, Lord reigns,’ sung over and over again by a group of around twenty men and women. A priestess in a purple robe holds a microphone. Framed by a screen showing the text ‘The Lord reigns’ over an image of a tumbling mountain stream, she dances from side to side, leading the song and the singers. The congregation are dancing or swaying on the spot, from time to time lifting their hands aloft. They are all smiling as they sing.

At the back, a tall young man is dancing in counterpoint to the priestess at the front of the hall. He is strikingly handsome. Both his arms are raised; his eyes are closed as he dances and sings, ‘The Lord, Lord reigns’. James takes a step forward. The young man opens his eyes, gives a warm smile, moves towards James and folds a friendly arm around his shoulder. ‘Join us, brother, join us.’

‘It’s not... I’m late,’ mumbles James, and as he turns to go is caught by the hurt look on the young man’s face.

How can they be so bloody happy? James wonders as he walks away, feeling a mixture of guilt and cowardice as sharp as the sea air.

On Monday morning he wakes, disoriented, and tries to get out of bed on the side next to the wall. He turns left instead of right to find the lavatory at the end of the corridor and, the final, painful indignity, stubs his toe bloodily on the projecting foot of the bed. This bad start is redeemed by a sunny, blowy morning and a walk along the seashore; by lunchtime he decides to move out of the pub.