At Hawthorn Time (6 page)

He’d found Jack’s camp one night while he slept, had woken him gently with the toe of his boot; but then, as he watched Jack gingerly putting on his boots he’d crouched down quietly to look, pushing Jack’s hands away. Then, brooking no argument, he’d put Jack in the back of his truck with his two curious pointers, driven him to his cottage and cleaned and dressed the blisters himself.

Jack had slept on his sagging, dog-smelling couch for a week, spending the days working with him in the forest; at the end of it he had offered to teach Jack to shoot, perhaps to train him up to work alongside him. It was the one time, since he’d taken to the road, that Jack had considered putting down roots. It was the idea of having a territory and how well the man knew it: every rabbit warren, every woodpecker’s nest, every drey. To belong in that way, to have such a close focus, felt right: a home parish. But ultimately, Jack knew that he needed to be on the move. Something impelled him, though he couldn’t have given it a name.

Now, back on the ground, he moved quietly into the wind into an area of clear fell and then to the dense cover of new pines. After a little while he left the wood behind and took to open country, the stars impossibly bright overhead. For the first time since leaving London he felt at peace.

As he followed the curve of an old hedgeline he spotted a shape trotting towards him and froze: a dog fox, something big and dark in its jaws. It passed close enough to Jack for him to hear fox-breath whistle through feathers.

Approaching some farm buildings in the small hours Jack woke a collie, its barks lofting out from its kennel to echo flatly off the corrugated-iron byres, the commotion reminding Jack for a moment of prison.

He crouched behind a quickthorn hedge until the dog was quiet. Then, unhooking the frayed orange twine that held the metal gate shut, he lifted it carefully over the rough concrete and swung it to behind him.

There had been a dwelling of some kind on this spot since Domesday; in fact, for many centuries before. Now it was just a modern set of farm buildings, but in the stand of nettles that still marked the long-gone midden, in the patch of soil near the farmhouse stained black by walnuts from the lost tree in whose shade horses had once been tied, the land remembered.

In the moonlit yard it didn’t take Jack long to find what he wanted: a plastic bucket, which he rinsed carefully using the tap in the milking shed. He took his pack from his back and set it by the wall, then skirted the barns slowly, passing through another gate into the pasture beyond.

Many of the cows were lying down, but several stood close together in the near corner of the field. They stamped and twitched their tails as he approached, and he spoke to them softly, telling them his name and why he was there:
Jan Toy, Jan Toy, it’s Jack, your green boy . . .

It was important that the first beast didn’t startle, and Jack laid a hand on its warm flank. It blew air from its nostrils and twitched its hide, but it tolerated him. Slowly, he moved into the herd until he was surrounded by their warm, shifting bodies. He closed his eyes and tried to sense which was the calmest animal, but in the dark it was mostly luck.

He ran his hand down the flank of a cow near the edge of the group. It stepped sideways, delicately, but at last it allowed Jack to kneel in the wet grass and press his cheek to its belly. In the dark he heard, rather than saw, the milk jet and froth from the teats as he pulled; he had to listen to its note to tell whether he was directing it into the bucket or onto the ground. As he milked he looked past the breathing herd to the dark horizon where a bright iridium flare announced the slow passage of a satellite overhead.

Afterwards he carried the bucket back to the yard where the collie watched him from the gate with its ears pricked.

‘Hello,’ he whispered, pouring the warm milk carefully into a plastic bottle he took from his pack. ‘It’s me, Jack.’ The collie regarded him. After a moment he returned a little to the bucket and tilted it for the dog. It slunk forward, belly low, and drank. Jack gave it his hand to sniff before he left, and hoped for a welcome if he came that way again.

6

Arum (cuckoo pint, lords and ladies, bobbin joan) – spadix first formation. Ash trees in flower. Sunshine.

Kitty took a seat in the back pew of the church and clasped her hands in her lap. As the echo of the heavy door closing behind her faded away, the air seemed to refold itself in perfect stillness. It wasn’t totally silent – she could hear rooks cawing outside, and the distant sound of a mower – but it had a pellucid, listening quality that she believed could be found nowhere else. Briefly, she shut her eyes. Over the faint reek of damp and the odour of wool kneelers she could smell the flowers brought in for the Easter service several days before, now wilting slightly in their blocks of green Oasis.

Hundreds of years of prayer had filled the space around her, bounded by the building’s cool walls and tall windows: hundreds of years of village breath. Lodeshill’s faithful surrounded her, all loved in their time and their passing mourned; remembered for a few lifetimes, then lost. A name scratched into the back of a pew. A stone slab from which the legend had been worn away by centuries of feet.

She had only meant to pin a notice up in the porch, but had found herself coming in. It was a moment of stillness, that was all. Just a way to step outside your life for a few minutes. Who was it who talked about places where prayer had been valid? This was surely one of them. The vicar had once told her that the whitewashed walls would at one time have been lurid with pictures of heaven and hell, an incentive for people to confess their sins – as she perhaps should one day. It was hard to imagine now, though the leering face, wreathed in oak leaves, on one of the roof bosses spoke of a more vital and mysterious past.

Why did these places persist? she wondered. What hold did they still have over people? The ancient fear of damnation was no more; the approval of the local community hardly mattered to most. And what was that, anyway – community? The faltering congregation, the parish council, the clique of diehard regulars at the Green Man? A year in and she still only really knew a few people in Lodeshill, although the sense remained that there was a core of village life somewhere to which she, an outsider, did not have access. Where this might be if not at church was beyond her; but still.

The door groaned and clanged again behind her, and the dust motes danced in the draught. ‘Oh, Katherine, hello,’ the vicar called out, in less than reverential tones. Still, this was his workplace, she supposed; he couldn’t always be treating it like some kind of monument. ‘A moment with God?’

‘Something like that,’ she replied, getting up. ‘I just popped in to put a notice in the porch,’ she said. ‘My friend Claire – she’s an artist. She’s got an exhibition in Connorville. Is it all right?’

‘Of course, of course. And how is your painting? The weather’s been lovely – perfect for you, I’d have thought.’

‘Oh – yes.’

‘You’ll be exhibiting them soon, no doubt. You must let us have a preview!’

‘Oh, I’m not sure about that,’ Kitty said. The truth was, she seemed to have hit something of a wall. All those years spent dreaming of moving to the countryside, all those years of still lifes and art classes and day trips to beauty spots – yet now she had it all at her fingertips the landscapes she was producing looked nothing like the shining visions she had carried around in her head for so long. Technically they were passable, she felt, but there was something missing, something she couldn’t quite identify or describe. When she thought about it, which was often, the word ‘immanence’ kept springing unhelpfully to mind; but it wasn’t anything religious that her paintings were lacking, it wasn’t that at all.

That afternoon she took the camera and went out looking for possible locations. Nowhere too obvious, but she did want it to be beautiful. She wanted it to sum up her feelings about the area, somehow; to communicate what it was really like.

How she had yearned for green places when she lived in Finchley; for somewhere ancient and unchanging, somewhere where the past lived on in the woods and fields, where you could imagine its previous generations and feel connected with the things that were there now. When Chris and Jenny were young she had insisted on holidays in the Lake District or Cornwall; there, out in the landscape, she had felt herself expand, felt something in her quieten – if only momentarily. When the kids got older it had not been so easy; they had wanted to go somewhere hot, like their friends, and Howard had been only too happy to agree. So it was Italy, Morocco, the odd skiing trip in between; meanwhile, she had the walls of the house hung with images of the countryside: watercolours, etchings, prints, it didn’t matter. And eventually, as the kids grew up, the long campaign to escape London had begun.

Now she drove to Babb Hill and parked in a little car park formed from an old quarry. The route to the summit was busy at weekends, and with joggers and dog walkers in the mornings, but it was a Thursday afternoon and there were only a couple of other cars there. She slung the camera over her shoulder, locked the car and set out.

The path was wide and for the most part shaded by the trees that clothed the hill’s flanks. The beeches were almost fully out but the ash leaves were still locked in their black buds and plenty of light filtered down. Here and there were pools of bluebells, luminously ultraviolet where the sun hit them, but Kitty had already painted bluebells, and moved on.

Apart from the TV mast, trig point and toposcope, the hill’s broad spine was undulating and bare, its ancient hill fort now no more than two massy humps bisected by the path. The views were breathtaking: on clear days like today it was easy to believe you could see nine counties. Kitty set the camera’s zoom to infinity and fired off some pictures, but she already knew that what she had captured was both too distant and somehow too general.

The climb had taken it out of her somewhat, but she didn’t want the day to be wasted. Back at the car she got an Ordnance Survey map out from the glove compartment and spread it out on the bonnet. Just north of Babb Hill was a little village she’d seen signposts for, but hadn’t yet explored. She decided to go and have a look.

It turned out to be bigger than Lodeshill, with a listed church and some fine old almshouses. She parked near the war memorial and took the lane north out of the village past fields where fat lambs butted their mothers, the camera banging against her hip. Although it was still warm the afternoon was beginning to draw in a little: her shadow was long on the road beside her, and the hedges on either side were filling up with birds.

Years ago, before Jenny had been born, she had taken a photography course. The group had gone out on field trips designed to teach them how to look, how to notice the things that spoke to them, so they could learn to capture them in a way that other people might enjoy.

‘That’s what art’s all about,’ the teacher had told them. ‘The philosophers say there’s no way of really knowing that other people even exist. But art proves them wrong.’

Kitty hadn’t really understood, and it had been another student, weeks later, who had explained it to her. They had been in a hotel at the time, his hand warm on her breast, the damp sheet tangled around them.

‘I wish I could capture this,’ he’d said, gazing at her.

She’d laughed. ‘You could take a photo.’

‘No, more than that. I mean how you are, how I feel. The light. All of it. That’s what art’s for, isn’t it? And poetry, all that. A way of capturing a moment of reality and transmitting it to someone else, maybe years in the future.’

‘You want people to know our secret?’

‘No, I mean – this is real, you know?
Us
.
Now
. But soon it’ll be over – gone. As if it had never happened.’

Kitty had reached for him and they had made love again, and later she had gone home to Finchley, and to Howard. But since then she’d felt it, sometimes, looking at paintings, and even, once or twice, reading a poem: the shiver, the magic, of another consciousness revealing itself to hers.
I existed, I felt this, I thought this: you can feel it too.

Not that she thought she could emulate proper artists: of course not. But everyone could try, everyone had a chance to leave their mark. Tucking the camera securely under her arm, she pushed her way awkwardly through the hedge to her left. There was a broad ditch on the other side choked with oily orange water, and glad of her walking boots, grimacing slightly at the stretch, she took a long step over it into the ploughed field beyond.