At Hawthorn Time (2 page)

It was still possible to find work on the land almost all year round: picking daffs began in February, and farms often wanted help with lambing; in summer there was hay to mow and soft fruit to pick – although he hated the polytunnels with their close, stale air. You could usually get work picking apples in September and, later, felling Christmas trees; he had once spent much of December making holly wreaths. But fieldwork was what he loved best, and it was spring: nearly asparagus season. He thought back over the farms he knew, and that knew him: he wanted to keep his head down, didn’t want to sign any papers this time, and that narrowed the options a little.

He’d set out from Devon in January to walk vaguely north-east. He’d never meant to come to London, but the arrest and the sentence – for breaching an order not to trespass, although all he’d wanted to do was walk an old cart track between villages – had blown him off course.

Now he decided to keep to the old Roman road north out of the city. Eventually it would take him to a little village called Lodeshill which had four farms with asparagus beds clustered around it. There was one he’d promised himself never to set foot on again, but he felt sure that one of the others would take him on for a few weeks with no questions asked. There was some lovely countryside up that way, quiet and slow and unvisited, and not too busy with day trippers – not like Cumbria or Cornwall. It was an in-between, unpretentious place.

Apart from the road, the quiet concatenation of the drink inside its can, when he opened it, was the loudest thing Jack could hear. When he had finished he lay back, thankful for having eaten, thankful for the weather, wondering when sleep would come. And then he slept.

As the sun rose slowly over Jack’s head a hawthorn in the hedge behind him felt the light on its new green leaves and thought with its green mind about blossom.

2

Horse chestnuts, swallows, blackthorn (sloe).

As soon as his wife had left the house Howard went about shutting all the windows. It was a warm day, but not so warm they all needed to be open, and anyway, he couldn’t bear the sound of the road. Flies were getting in, too; he’d swatted one in the kitchen earlier. Kitty would only complain at bedtime, when there were insects in her room.

It wasn’t the road through Lodeshill he minded; there wasn’t much traffic on that. Why would there be – there was no shop any more, and the Green Man was hardly the type of pub people sought out. Even the church only got a few of the faithful, and those on foot. Kitty one of them now, of course.

It was the Boundway that bothered him. Straight as a ruler it ran, passing the village less than half a mile away, and the local louts all gunned their muscle cars along it – especially at weekends. You could hear them changing up from miles off, the whine of it; you’d think they’d find a better way to spend their time, but no. Still, he reflected, putting an old Kinks CD on the hi-fi in the living room, it could have been worse: he’d heard that there’d once been quad-bike racing somewhere nearby, though the track had closed down long before they arrived in the village.
Et in arcadia arseholes
, he thought, and went to the pantry for a drink.

He knew there was a six-pack of lager left over from the last time their son Chris had visited, but it was a brown ale he was after. He’d need to get plenty of booze in for next month, when their daughter Jenny was flying back from Hong Kong and both kids would be with them for the first time in ages. Vodka for Jenny, he thought. Probably.

There was no brown ale. Sighing, he turned and climbed the stairs to the radio room; there was a Marconi 264 that wanted a new valve. Downstairs, a bumblebee knocked twice against the kitchen window before lurching away into the warm spring air.

Most of the time Kitty had the master bedroom to herself; Howard usually slept downstairs, in what had previously been the study. Before they moved to Lodeshill from north London, a year ago, it had only been an occasional thing; now, apart from when the kids visited, he was down on the sofa bed every night. It was something they did not discuss.

There were three bedrooms upstairs; one was Kitty’s, one had briefly been Jenny’s until she left university, and still was when she visited. The light was good in the third, so when they moved in Howard had taken the old pink carpet up and built a counter around two sides, set his tool chests underneath. Then he bought a craft light and a stool, carried the radios up from the garage – he had just four, then, and one in bits – and got to work. He had thirteen vintage wireless sets now, all pre-war; good working examples, not boot sale stuff. Five more he’d sold or traded. Where do you stop? There were people who had two hundred.

You could find them easily enough on the Internet, of course, but he felt – obscurely, though with some certainty – that it wasn’t the right way. He went to swap meets and the odd show, but preferred local auctions and private sales to buying from other enthusiasts, despite the extra legwork it entailed. Admittedly, most of what came up that way was rubbish – either cheap to begin with, bodged about or beyond repair, good only for parts – but not always.

Word of mouth had got him more than one tidy example: ‘I know a bloke who’ll take that off your hands.’ He had a Ferguson 366 Superhet that was found by a local family in the attic of a house they had just bought; it came to him covered in dust for five quid. The Marconi he was working on now turned up in a barn near Deal, and had barely been touched the cabinet full of mouse shit, the dial clogged with cobwebs and chaff.

As well as finding them, doing the work himself was what he loved: replacing the knobs, restoring cracked Bakelite, a new valve here and there. He wasn’t an expert, not yet, but he did OK, and his experience with guitars and amps helped. There was something almost magical about taking an old wireless and bringing it back to life: the way they could be woken, no matter what state they were in, to pull living sounds from the air. The lovely old cabinets hiding such comprehensible innards; the simple heft of them in his hands.

It was gone four when the letter box banged; he was trying to get at the capacitors, deep under a block of resistors, and was working carefully and with minute concentration. He considered ignoring it but it rattled again, followed by the slap of something landing on the mat. After a moment he carefully set down his tools and went downstairs. For God’s sake, a telephone directory. As if anyone used those any more.

Back upstairs he peered again through the magnifier at the circuit, but found he couldn’t narrow his focus properly, failed to feel again the thread of the stubbornly absent current and its likely pathway and hindrances. He replaced a capacitor, but even as he did so he was remembering knocking on doors after school when he was a child and running away; and he thought, too, of the time he picked May blossom from the churchyard, with its ripe and heady scent, and brought it home to his mother, who had chased him, cursing, from the door. Half a century ago, but still like yesterday. That such moments could remain latent somewhere in the intricate cortices of the brain; that he, not far off sixty years of age now, should still detect their resonance. It was a mystery.

He swung the craft light away and stretched his back. A beer before Kitty came home; why not? Not the Green Man, though, with its unfriendly farmers and local doleys; the Bricklayer’s Arms, in Crowmere. It was only ten minutes away, and it was a nice day for a walk. He fetched the paper from the sitting room, switched off the Kinks and set out.

Lodeshill was barely a village; more a hamlet, really. As well as Manor Lodge there was a grand Elizabethan house with mullioned windows and a box maze at the end of a long private drive; a pretty church, largely overlooked by the ecclesiastical gazetteers; a Georgian vicarage (the vicar himself served several churches, and lived elsewhere); the Green Man; a dozen modern houses of varying quality, and a cul-de-sac of ugly bungalows inhabited mostly by the elderly. What had once been the shop and post office was now a private house, though it still had a red letter box set into one of its stone walls.

Past the church the houses gave way to fields and the road began to climb gently as it passed the outbuildings of one of the four farms that surrounded Lodeshill. In places the centre of the road was faintly mossy, and here and there was dung, for the most part dry and pressed into the road’s surface by tyres. Bluebells and celandines starred the verges, and the leaves on the blackthorn hedges were very green.

After a couple of hundred yards Howard turned left onto a footpath that ran through Ocket Wood. The path followed the line of a ditch and bank which had once marked the wood’s boundary, but which the wood itself had at some point in its long history overspilled. It was mostly oak, with some ash, alder and holly, and had been coppiced and felled on a regular cycle since the Dark Ages – though not for a long time now. In medieval times it had supplied the manor house with timber and the villagers with kindling for their fires; their pigs had been turned out in it each year to eat the acorns and mast. Later still it became a gamekeepers’ preserve, the public kept firmly out. Now it was mainly visited by dog walkers, and the understorey had not been cut for years.

Jenny was always telling them to get a dog; she said the exercise would be good for them. But what his daughter hadn’t yet learned was that there was an age beyond which you stopped really caring about what was good for you – especially if, as in Howard’s case, you’d fucked yourself up pretty comprehensively when you were younger and were just waiting for the damage to become apparent. Now, every year that passed without cancer – or something worse – was a bonus, he told himself. Anyway, here he was, out for a walk. And he did it a couple of times a week. You couldn’t argue with that.

The Bricklayer’s Arms had been extensively refitted and the inside was all blond wood and chalk boards. Howard leaned on the bar and nodded at the barman, who brought over a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale and a half-pint glass.

‘Wife not with you?’ he asked in his cheerful Australian accent. Kitty hated the Bricklayer’s, had only set foot in it once or twice, but it pleased both the barman and Howard to pretend that he was there more often with his wife than without her.

‘She’s at the shops,’ Howard replied, the merest hint of an eyebrow standing in for the hackneyed observations about women and shopping which had long since been exhausted between them. In fact, Kitty was not a woman who shopped for pleasure, and Howard had no idea where she had gone. She may well have taken her easel with her; he hadn’t checked.

With a brief feeling of bleakness, quickly pushed away, he surveyed the available tables before making his way to a seat near the window and opening the newspaper.

He left just before eight, as the sky outside started to grow dim. If Kitty had been painting she’d not outstay the light, and there was no harm in getting back before her.

Ocket Wood was a shadowy mass on either side of the footpath, and although he’d only had three bottles of Brown the fact that he couldn’t see much around him made Howard feel drunker than he was. It was association, too, he thought, groping towards the insight; you were
supposed
to weave home from a pub in the dark, it was ingrained. Not that it was quite dark yet, but still.

He found, to his surprise, that he still had his empty bottle with him, and with a growing awareness of a need to pee he struck off the path and made for a huge ash stool nearly six feet across, a ring-shaped remnant of a single tree that had been coppiced repeatedly many years before. The new trunks it had sprouted, now ancient themselves, leaned outwards as the crowns competed for light.

When he got back to the path the image of his piss puddling hotly on the dead leaves between the trunks remained in his mind all the way home, as if spotlit somehow in the otherwise black and secret spinney.

Kitty’s car was reversed in next to the Audi when he got back, and inside he found her in the sitting room, ironing. ‘Good day?’ he asked, edging past the board and switching the TV on. ‘Gin and tonic?’

‘No thanks,’ she replied. ‘Have you been to the pub?’

‘I popped in,’ Howard said. ‘Did you paint?’

‘No, I went to see Claire. I did tell you.’

Claire was an artist Kitty had met not long after they’d moved to the area. She exhibited at local galleries and craft shows across the county, pictures of dogs, mostly, and the odd group of cows. She wore copper bracelets on both arms and thick-soled flip-flops that she claimed were the same as going to the gym. Howard disliked her.