At Hawthorn Time (22 page)

He drank his tea black, rinsed the cup carefully and put it away; then he looked around the kitchen and whispered a last goodbye to Edith.

It was time. Before he left he took his Pacific Star with its once-bright ribbon from the trouser pocket where it had lived for over half a century, passed his right thumb from habit over its familiar contours and placed it gently on the hall table. Then he pushed his feet into the boots he kept half laced to save bending, shrugged on his worsted jacket and walked out into the heavenly morning.

After he had gone a breeze crept in at the open door and fluttered the pages of the
Racing Post
, obscuring and then revealing the medal, its royal cypher worn smooth by the old man’s anxious hands.

The outline of Babb Hill was part of the architecture of Jamie’s self, like knowing which lintels he needed to duck his head under, or the way he wrote his name. He didn’t have to look for it on the horizon; he always knew which direction it was in, and its differing silhouettes from all sides: how the summit looked wreathed in cloud, the way the sun fell on its slopes and the cloud-shadows chased over it. He knew where the badgers dug into it, and the texture of the earth they brought out from its interior; he knew the weak-tea colour of the water in the clay pits. These things were so obvious that had he thought about it it would have seemed impossible that people in the very same county could live with only a vague image of Babb Hill in their minds. And although he dreamed so often of escape, the idea that all this knowledge would leave him – that one day these places might be to him a memory and nothing more – was not something he could easily conceive of.

He’d woken early, like his grandfather, and had decided to climb the hill before breakfast. He took a short, steep route up to the summit, avoiding any dog walkers and early joggers who might be on the main track. Beneath the trees the damp ground was thickly clothed with the limp leaves of bluebells and wild garlic, dying back; the dew quickly soaked into his trainers, making his feet feel cold, but he knew that on the east-facing side the morning sun would be warm. As he climbed a woodpecker drummed once and was silent, and from somewhere deep in the trees a woodpigeon murmured complacently to itself.

On warm nights there were often couples in the long grass on Babb Hill. Jamie had seen it a few times: pairs of pale knees and buttocks moving; cries that made his skin prickle and flush. Up at the trig point there were sometimes telescopes pointing skywards; it was a good place to look for meteors or read the map of stars above – the same stars, he often reminded himself, that had watched over the men who made their fort there thousands of years before. The fort was gone, but the hill itself was the same, and the shapes of the land around it. He wondered why it seemed so hard to believe.

Now, though, the summit was deserted, and he was glad of it. He sat down with his back to the toposcope and looked out at the landscape below. The copse where the goshawks had nested was hidden in a fold of trees, but further away he could see the spire of St James’s marking Lodeshill’s position between the four farms, and the Boundway scoring a straight line past the village. Somewhere along it was the deer he’d killed – unless someone had taken it away for the pot by now, as his granddad had told him to. Further out was the dull stain of Connorville and the glittering motorway, and then the bluish rumour of hills. Buzzards mewed from the invisible staircases of the thermals overhead.

Around him grasshoppers, having stilled themselves at his approach, restarted their tiny saws, and a magpie paced speculatively towards him where he sat with his arms loosely linked around his knees. The sun was warm on his face, and he could almost believe himself to be a child again, up here on a May morning with nothing to do for the rest of the day but inhabit this place in which he had been born as an animal does, unthinkingly and with something that was not love, but had something of love’s depth and simplicity.

He looked at the valley below, the line of the water table made visible on its distant slopes by the old farms and hamlets built along the spring line. Somewhere down there was Mytton Park, its blank sheds humming inside with activity, the reed beds in the artificial lake filtering out the shit from the staff toilets. It still troubled him, why Lee and Megan and the others had abandoned him at the Vault. Had he embarrassed himself – or them? He couldn’t remember. In a few hours, when he got to work, he’d find out.

Breakfast first, though, and then some time on the Corsa. The sound system was wired in now, though he hadn’t had a chance to test it out properly yet; not on the driveway, his mum would have gone spare. He’d take it out for that, turn it up, really feel the bass vibrate.

This morning’s job was to fit a set of underglow LEDs that would make it look as though the car was floating on a pillow of blue light. He’d seen them in an auto magazine, and they were pretty cheap. When they’d come in the post his mum had said he was like one of those birds off the TV decorating a nest and hoping that a female would come; the way she’d said it was like a joke, but with a trace of mockery in it he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He’d told her that was just stupid; it wasn’t anything to do with girls.

Jamie began to descend again, clouds gathering behind him to the south-west. A breeze picked up, shivering the young oak leaves as though the flanks of Babb Hill were sighing.

‘Bricewold,’ Jack said out loud. It had finally come back to him, what this place reminded him of.

It had been a bad night. Dreams had troubled him so that the boundary between waking and sleeping was uncertain, and he’d felt himself surrounded, part of some vast and shadowy throng. Finally he had cried out, waking himself with a great effort. There had been nobody there.

When it began to grow light he had sat up and found that he was bone-tired, his lower back stiff, and so he had decided not to go to Woodwater today. Instead, he was in the grounds of the big Manor House in Lodeshill, picking his way through the low box maze towards the tennis court. There was no car in the drive, and no movement from inside; he’d checked. He wondered who the owners were: Russians? accountants? rock stars? A world away, no doubt, from the family who had passed it down through the generations and to whom the villagers of Lodeshill had for centuries tipped their hats. He pictured the long-gone carriage house, pictured the hounds massing at the gate.

It was the tennis court that had made him think of Bricewold, a deserted village owned by the MoD where he’d spent a bitter winter many years ago. He had filed in, with a couple of dozen others, to its little church for a special Christmas service, and in the darkness afterwards he had simply slipped away. Someone at Twyford Down had put him on to it; soldiers still trained there, but not very often, and you could camp in the empty houses. He’d walked there, on the off chance; he was sick of protesters, their bickering and politics, and he had a sore on his leg that wouldn’t heal.

That the army owned the valley in which Bricewold stood was immediately clear: notices informed him of the danger to his life, and in one field an old tank was rusting away, a buzzard heraldic on the gun turret, a freezing wind off Salisbury Plain ruffling the dappled feathers of its breast.

The village itself was startling, a site from which meaning had become fugitive. Apart from the modern road, thick with clods of mud from caterpillar tracks, only the path to the church, open twice a year, bore any signs of use. The pub, smithy and schoolhouse were still identifiable, but nearly everything else was gone, replaced by ugly breeze-block cubes knocked up specifically for training. The land around the buildings was humped and grassy and mute.

He’d chosen a small, square house with the legend ‘18F3’ on one wall. Like the others it had no windows, but it was safe enough to light a fire inside and he clearly wasn’t the first to do so. With nothing in there, no hearth or fixtures or plaster on the walls, it was a strange simulacrum of a home, one made to practise death in.

Now and then, flocks of migratory fieldfares blew in to strip the blood-red berries from the hawthorns, but other than that little moved in the settlement. Yet there had been times, during those two months, when Jack had been sure he wasn’t the only one moving through Bricewold’s blank and silent spaces; though whether others like him were living there, or it was locals from nearby villages, or ghosts, he couldn’t have said. Sometimes the past was right up close against his skin, sometimes he could not have said with certainty what was real. Perhaps he was mad, after all, like some of the lot at Twyford Down had said.

One day in January he’d climbed over a breeze-block wall to explore Bricewold Court. It had been beautiful country house once, that much was clear; but now it had the same MoD-issue tin roof as the rest of the village, and its two dozen tall windows were boarded up. He had tried for an hour to get in, picturing a rich interior hung with dust sheets and cobwebs, a frozen monument to a world that had passed. But he couldn’t get the shutters off, and it was probably empty inside anyway, just dim light and echoes and dust.

There hadn’t been much left of the grounds except a few ruined outhouses and an avenue of limes, their branches black against the winter sky. But then he had discovered the rectangle of an old tennis court, cracked and weedy but recognisable still. And for a moment then Jack had seen the women in their white skirts and blouses, the wooden racquets in their ash presses and the jug of lemonade with its neat lace cover hung with cowrie shells. Where were those shells now? he wondered. Where were the racquets? The tennis players themselves, he knew, must be long underground.

The brash, red-clay tennis court at the Manor House in Lodeshill looked like a recent addition. Jack sat by the net post for a moment, feeling the sun on his face and bringing his thoughts back to the present moment. Last year a butterfly had been fooled into laying its eggs on the net’s green mesh, and here and there they remained, a whitish crust like hundreds of tiny barnacles. Jack wondered if the caterpillars, with nothing to eat, had survived for long.

The morning sun fell on the back of the lovely old house with its mullioned windows, turning it golden, and after a while Jack got up and climbed the steps onto the terrace. A carved stone balustrade ran around it, and against the house wall there was a cracked stone trough from which wisteria grew. A set of teak garden furniture had been neatly folded up, and Jack wondered where the owners were, and how often they were even there.

Approaching one of the narrow windows he cupped his hands around his face and peered into the room inside.

Up in the radio room Howard looked up from the Philco and saw the homeless man the village was up in arms about trying to break into the Manor House. Or was he? Certainly he had no business being there, but you’d be a fool to risk setting off the alarms in a property like that. Still, perhaps he was unhinged, like Christine Hawton had said. He had a brief image of himself telling Kitty, urbanely, ‘It’s OK, I spoke to him. He’s harmless.’

Howard jogged downstairs and out of the back door, but by the time he’d pushed through the conifer belt that separated their garden from the Manor House’s the man on the terrace had disappeared.

21

Red campion, windflowers, broom. Commas and one brimstone. Ground elder. Hot and humid.

It was the first time Jamie really hadn’t wanted to go to work, though there was something familiar about the feeling. To put his helmet on after his shift at the bakery, to walk the half-knackered bike off the drive and gun it into life was to clench his teeth and push through a tangle of something dark. All the way to Mytton Park he maintained a high pitch of thoughts in his head, song lyrics from the radio, repeated phrases that made little sense. He even spoke out loud once or twice. What he was drowning out he couldn’t have said.

The bike wasn’t legal on the motorway, even for the five hundred yards to the site turn-off, so instead he wheeled it over a concrete footbridge that gave him a vertiginous feeling crossing water never did. Halfway across he peered down at the cars and lorries speeding below with a shiver that was almost an impulse to jump, or if not an impulse the shadow of an impulse, the ghost of a feeling about what it would be to be flung – falling – mid-air. And then he brought his eyes back to the narrow strip of macadam under his feet and carried on.

Far above the little bridge three gulls sculled with leisurely wingbeats; further up again an A320 headed for Spain, its contrail unfurling slowly behind it in the high, thin air.