At Hawthorn Time (14 page)

‘He won’t go. He hates it, having things decided for him.’

‘Well, we’re going to have to try and make him. Being independent is one thing, and he’s done well for his age, but it’s not fair on your mother having to worry about him by herself. Your uncles all had the good sense not to live nearby, but if your granddad gets poorly, or – well. It can’t all be on her shoulders.’

Jamie’s throat was suddenly tight. ‘And is Mum – is she OK?’

‘Oh, she’s – she’s not too bad.’ He sighed. ‘It’s not easy for her, son. He’s your granddad, and you see a different side to him, but he was always hard on her. He might have put food on the table, but it wasn’t easy for your mum having to deal with all that.’

‘Deal with all what?’

‘Well, she came along a lot later than your uncles, you know that. She was – an accident. Unplanned. And then what with Edith dying in labour – well, your granddad never got over it.’

Jamie’s hands felt slick; he wiped them on his jeans and looked down at his trainers. ‘Poor Mum.’

‘Course the neighbours helped out, and he got in a local woman to cook and clean. But he wasn’t . . . he wasn’t always kind to her, son. He didn’t like her crying or making a fuss, you know? Even when she was poorly. And he never let any of them make mistakes. Things had to be a certain way – he’s still like that now, but it’s not fair when you’ve got kids. Some of it was the war, but not all of it; some of it was just how his life turned out, the choices he made.’

‘Is that why she’s –’

‘It affected her, growing up without a mother like that, and him the way he was. And – other things.’

Jamie wanted to ask what things, but he found that he couldn’t. Even so, it was the most anyone had ever told him about the buried structures of his family, and he stored it away, feeling both the weight and the privilege of it – though when he came to examine it later, lying in bed, he found it already so familiar, so obvious, that it was as though it had been assimilated instantly and was gone.

In the kitchen his father had put two mugs out on the countertop.

‘Oh – not for me, Dad,’ he said.

‘Righto. So how’s the car?’

‘OK, yeah. Bit still to do.’

‘Work?’

‘All right. Quiet.’

‘Not too quiet, I hope.’

‘Why?’

‘I heard they lost another contract, that’s all. Big one.’

‘Yeah, it’s not my section, though. Anyway, you seen how big the place is? It’s not about to go under.’

‘I hope not. Long as people keep buying stuff, eh?’

‘Speaking of work, Dad, I never knew the landfill used to be a coal mine.’

‘Didn’t you? Good use for it, I say. Once it’s full you’ll hardly know it was ever there.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘They cover it over, son. After a bit you can farm it again.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, good as new, or nearly. You know that empty field by the road between Crowmere and Ardleton? The bumpy one? Ex-landfill, that.’

‘No way.’

‘They go and test it every so often, check it’s all rotting down OK. One day I expect they’ll start farming it again.’

‘So under that field . . .’ Jamie tried to imagine it: all the broken toys and nappies and plastic bags.

‘Yep.  Two hundred years’ time they’ll be digging it all up again, like on
Time Team
. Unless there’s been a – I don’t know – a shopping centre built on it by then.’

14

Lady’s bedstraw, sorrel, bee orchid. Ash bud-burst. Warm start; heavy showers later.

On weekday mornings Lodeshill came briefly to life between six and eight. A half-dozen or so cars would back out of their drives, some heading towards the Boundway and from there to work, some to drop off the village’s few children at the comp in Connorville or at the local grammar. Usually the morning was only broken after that by the postman’s van or the meals on wheels, until just after lunch when Jamie would kick the trail bike into life and gun it towards the Boundway for his shift at Mytton Park. Afternoons could be entirely silent until the kids returned from school – unless one of the supermarket delivery vans arrived.

That morning Kitty had only just pulled out of the drive when she saw the man. He was walking in the very centre of the road, and he looked every bit the old-fashioned tinker; his pack was hung with bits and bobs and decorated with badges, and she thought of the man who used to come to the house when she was a little girl to grind the knives.

She kept the Audi at a crawl and rolled the nearside window down, ready to thank him as she passed. But he didn’t move to the side.

The car crept slowly behind him. Did he have headphones on? It seemed unlikely, and Kitty wondered if he might be deaf – or just stubborn. She checked her rear-view mirror; Christine Hawton’s car was coming up behind.

He kept walking, his loping gait unhurried, the sun glinting off a little copper pot that banged at the side of his pack. There was a big CND badge on it, Kitty saw now, and, incongruously, one with the Virgin logo; she recognised another, too, with a guitar and the words ‘Burning Rubber’ arranged in ornate cursive around it. Howard would like that, she thought, and made a mental note to tell him later.

She leaned her head out of the window, considered a friendly greeting; but he must have known she was behind him, and so it would surely come across as an attempt to make him move out of the way. Though she did actually want him to get out of the way, when all was said and done: she had a doctor’s appointment to get to. But what if he was a bit . . . unbalanced? She rolled the window up again and sighed.

Eventually there was a passing place, and, without him having quite ceded his position, Kitty found there was enough room to manoeuvre the car past, on her face a carefully friendly smile. But when she looked back at him in the rear-view mirror he was gazing past her, somewhere invisible, far ahead.

My grassroots constituency dances as they pass
 . . . Jack thought, watching a cabbage white flutter helplessly against the backdraught from the car.
There are deep truths too deep for them to grasp.

Was that right? Or did he just think it was because it rhymed? There had been something there, he was sure of it, but as he snatched at the thought it evaporated. He wasn’t as sharp these days; he used to know things, he used to know about
deep truths
. Didn’t he?

The first farm he asked at had nothing for him; nobody there seemed to remember him, either, and he wondered if maybe he should have shaved his beard off after all, wondered if perhaps it had just been too long since he’d last been up this way. They had a team of Eastern European kids out on the beds; good workers, the farm manager told him: keen. He’d been hearing that a lot in the last few years, and it was true. Sometimes he felt as though he was the last itinerant Englishman still willing to work the land. He wondered if it was true.

He had ruled out going to Culverkeys, and the other three farms had begun to blend into one in his mind, but as he approached the one called Woodwater it began to come back to him. It looked, from the road, like a child’s drawing, with a pretty brick farmhouse, a tidy barn and even geese in the yard. The milking shed, dairy and asparagus pack house were tucked away beyond a line of sycamores.

Jack skirted the farmhouse to the ugly bungalow behind it where the Gasters lived, and rang the bell.

‘Well, if it isn’t Jack,’ said Joanne Gaster, opening the door. ‘I always look out for you this time of year! Where’ve you been?’

Such kindness; Jack wasn’t used to it, and for a moment he found himself struggling to know how to reply.

‘Oh – you know. I travel about.’

‘And how are you, anyway? I see you’ve brought the good weather with you.’ She leaned against the door jamb, shading her eyes against the sun, but didn’t invite him in.

‘Oh, I manage. Place looks tidy.’

‘It has to these days, for the B&B. And you know we do cheese now, and ice cream?’

Jack nodded. ‘I saw the sign.’

‘Had no choice, really. Milk’s cheaper than water these days.’

‘Asparagus going well for you?’

‘It’s been a lifesaver, I’ll be honest – especially since Culverkeys ploughed theirs under. We put in more beds soon as we heard, and they’re going great guns now. We’ve more or less picked up their order.’

‘Culverkeys – that the Harlands?’

‘Philip, yes, God rest his soul. Anyway, you couldn’t have timed it better – we’ve just started on ours. We’ve got six in the bunkhouse already though, I’m afraid.’

‘That’s OK, I – I have somewhere to stay.’

‘Shall we see you tomorrow, then? About six?’

Walking back up the lane Jack wondered what Philip Harland had died of, and when. Perhaps it had been drink. He tried to think how old the children would be now, whether one of them would come back to take over the running of the farm. The eldest boy, the quiet one, perhaps, with his clear love for the land: yes, he could picture that. It fitted.

Tonight he would sleep in the sliver of old copse he’d found; not the wood by the village, with its dog walkers and Neighbourhood Watch signs, but another one, further out towards Crowmere, trackless and unvisited. Rain was on its way, but there was a yew there, shadowy and dense; the ground beneath its low branches was bone dry. It had four ancient pennies driven into its trunk, though they were so blackened now and almost grown over that, apart from the squirrels and treecreepers, nobody but Jack even knew that they were there.

Tomorrow he would be back in the fields, and everything would be behind him. He knew that Mrs Gaster wouldn’t make him sign anything; she never did.

After her doctor’s appointment Kitty decided to go and buy a new camera. Sitting by the drainage ditch after her fall she’d known hers must be submerged in the muck somewhere, but shaken as she was, the thought of groping blindly for it in the cold water with its rusty, polluted sheen made her feel dizzy – and in any case, it would probably have been beyond repair. She had thought briefly of the photos she had taken, locked away inside it, but when she finally stood up, gingerly testing her balance, she looked round to find that the oak she had wanted to paint looked nothing like as iconic as she had thought; that it was, in fact, just a tree in a field. And so she had let the water claim the camera and had gone back to the car; and, when she felt ready, she had driven home and had a long bath.

It had been easy to conceal the loss of the camera from Howard; he took little notice of any of her art things, most of which she kept in the studio she shared with Claire. More than that, though, it felt natural: photography had always had a frisson of secrecy about it.

She’d met Richard at the evening class she’d begun taking when Chris started at nursery school, and she’d known almost straight away that she was going to have an affair with him. He had an easy grace to his movements, slow and unselfconscious, but more than that there was something self-contained about him, as though he didn’t really need others’ good opinion, as though he was sufficient unto himself. It was unusual, and it gave him a sense of quiet assurance that she found fascinating.

Kitty had gone into the affair calmly and, it seemed to her then, with her eyes open. She had told herself it would be over soon enough; it was just a bit of excitement, a secret; something nobody would have expected of sensible, strait-laced Kitty, and that no one could take away.

She still remembered the first time he touched her, the moment they crossed that invisible, devastating line. He’d given her a lift back after the class, the air in the car fizzing and cracking with what was happening between them. He had pulled up a street away and cut the engine; they had sat quite still for a long moment, and then she had turned to look at him, the blood surging in her veins. And after that kiss she was for ever after a different woman – a different wife.

Yet where was the harm in it, really? None of her and Howard’s friends knew Richard, and she’d known she would never blurt it out to him, whatever happened. It certainly wasn’t about leaving him; in fact she didn’t believe, then, that it was about Howard at all – though in the years that followed she would come to understand more about what had driven the choice she’d made. With Richard she could be irresponsible and inconsistent; she could have a sense of humour in a way she couldn’t at home, because Howard co-opted all that territory and someone had to be the grown-up and that someone was always her.