At Hawthorn Time (8 page)

‘Did you bring the
Post
?’ he asked now, opening the door.

‘I forgot. Sorry. I’ve got a couple of dinners for you, though: beef casserole and a tuna pasta bake.’ Jamie went through to the kitchen and put the Tupperware containers in the fridge. In the front room the old man sank back into his armchair.

‘Bloody dinners,’ he muttered. ‘She thinks I can’t look after myself.’

Jamie wandered through. His grandfather was trying to tune a little battery-operated radio, his liver-spotted hands turning it testily in his lap.

‘You got something on, Granddad?’

‘Not yet. Three o’clock at Kempton Park.’

‘I could look it up on my phone if you like.’

‘Phone, lad? That’s no good to me.’

Jamie sighed. ‘I’ll pop out and get the
Post
for you now. It’ll only take a second. Is there anything else you want?’

‘Take an apple with you, on the hall table. And don’t be long.’

The land his grandfather’s street stood on had been an orchard before the second war, and the washing line in his garden stretched from the back of the house to a rogue Worcester Pearmain that had grown slowly from a windfall after the trees themselves had been grubbed up. Every autumn the old man stored the apples carefully in newspaper in the shed, where they would sweeten through winter and fill the air with their fragrance; he’d always put a couple of boxes at the gate, too, but hardly anyone ever took them – or, at least, not that Jamie could remember. He looked for one on the hall table, but there were none there. April, nearly May: it was far too late in the year.

‘Your granddad send you out?’ said the man at the shop.

Jamie nodded.

‘How is he?

‘OK,’ said Jamie, fishing in his pocket for some money. ‘Bit on the grumpy side.’

‘No change there, then.’

But it was a change. Jamie had always loved spending time with his grandfather, had taken to riding his bicycle all the way to Ardleton when he was only seven or eight. He saw more of the old man now than even his mum did, something he’d never really noticed until Alex had pointed it out one day. ‘Does she not ever visit him at his house?’ he’d asked, and Jamie had realised, belatedly, that although his grandfather often came over for Sunday dinner, it was usually only he and his dad who dropped in on him at home.

He’d never been too sure why he spent so much time there. It wasn’t as though they never argued, because they did – like when Villa were playing City, for instance. But it never made any difference, and when he next visited things would be just the same. It helped that his granddad spoke his mind, too: he just said what he thought, and you didn’t have to try and work out what he really meant, didn’t have to worry that things were any different than they seemed.

But over the course of the last year or so the old man had turned inward. Often he was irritable; sometimes he didn’t answer when Jamie spoke but sat with his hands on his knees, his face towards the window. It was as though he was listening to something else, something Jamie couldn’t hear.

‘Is he going senile?’ he’d asked his mum a few weeks back.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she’d replied.

‘He seems different.’

‘He’s ninety-three,’ his mother said, and it was true – he was far older than any of his friends’ grandparents, after all. Yet he still went to the corner shop every day, still kept the house tidy. But something was changing, and Jamie could feel it.

Once, years before, his mother had told him about the nightmares he’d had when she was a little girl. ‘Screaming and shouting, every night, sometimes,’ she’d said. It was upsetting for Jamie to even think about. ‘He’d never admit to it the next day, of course. It was like it never happened.’

‘Why, though?’

‘Too proud. He didn’t like anyone knowing.’

‘No – why did he have nightmares?’ he’d asked.

‘The war, Jamie,’ she’d said, folding her arms and looking at him. He’d nodded, but hadn’t been sure what she meant; he felt as though he should already know somehow – yet the one time he’d asked to see his granddad’s medals he’d told him he didn’t know where they were. It had been Harry Maddock, the gamekeeper, who had eventually filled Jamie in about the prisoner-of-war camps, and how lucky James Hirons, who had served his country as a coder in the navy, was to have come back from Singapore alive.

Jamie used to help Mr Maddock out now and again; Harry would let him drive the shooting brake sometimes, which was probably where his love of cars had begun. He remembered the keeper’s imprecations about not flattening the crops; remembered, too, the smell of blood on the night air from the warm, stiffening rabbits slung into the cage on the back. That smell was tied up, now, with what had happened to his granddad: the mysterious thing that had branded him invisibly and that Jamie – lucky, soft, with his indoor job and his computer games – would never understand. He had wondered then how it was that Harry knew, and not him; and whether his grandfather would ever speak to him about it.

Back at the house he dropped the paper in his grandfather’s lap and sat down in the other armchair. The old man leafed through it, listlessly, then turned to the classifieds at the back.

‘I see Culverkeys is being broken up.’

‘You’ve seen the ad?’

‘Someone’s set to make a mint. It’s wrong, I say.’

His grandfather had spent his married life working for a firm that made household appliances, first on the line and then in the office, but before the war he’d been a farmhand. He’d once shown Jamie an old black-and-white photograph in which two huge Suffolk Punches strained towards the camera, the single-furrow plough behind them guided by a boy no more than fourteen. ‘Recognise it?’ he’d asked, tapping the photograph. A huge oak was just visible in the field behind the plough. ‘That’s the Batch, on Culverkeys. I first learned to plough there, with my old man. Always thought I’d go back, you know? After the war. But it was a different world by then: women doing men’s work, tractors all over. And I had the TB to get over, of course.’

‘So d’you think they’ll build on Culverkeys?’ Jamie asked his grandfather now.

‘Build on it, dig it up. There’s no money in farming any more.’

‘Is that why he killed himself – Mr Harland? He couldn’t make it pay?’

‘Who knows, boy. Who knows. But I saw a farm sale once, when I was a lad. There was terrible shame in it for the farmer to lose his land, terrible shame. And Philip was never the same after the wife left – or so I heard. I was surprised he carried on for as long as he did – it can’t have been easy, just with hired hands. And they say it was always her as did the books.’

‘Maybe he thought she’d come back.’

‘Maybe. But I’ll tell you something, lad: that place goes back a long way – they’re one of the oldest families around here, the Harlands. You’ll find them in the churchyard, dozens of the buggers, and the war memorial, too, of course. That’s why I was surprised about the crematorium. They should’ve buried him in his parish church, where he was baptised. God forgives all, or so they say.’

‘The farm’ll go to Alex’s mum now, won’t it – to his wife?’

‘I doubt it – she’s not a Harland any more, not if they got a divorce. But we’ll see. We’ll see what the bloody lawyers do now, eh?’

‘I have to go now, anyway, Granddad,’ said Jamie. ‘See you next week.’

‘Take an apple with you,’ called the old man as the door swung shut.

That evening, after he got back from his shift, Jamie slipped his jacket on and went out. ‘I’m just going for a quick pint,’ he called from the hallway. His father, watching TV with his mum, held up a hand in acknowledgement. But instead of turning up Hill View towards the Green Man Jamie forced his way through the grown-over gap in the hedge at the end of the cul-de-sac. It was the first time he’d set foot on Culverkeys since Alex had left.

Jamie could remember when the field in which he stood had been two fields, Hope’s Piece and Lower Hope, both designated set-aside and so left unmown. The grass in June had grown chest-high – although of course he had been smaller then – and was purple with wild marjoram and pyramid orchids and alive with butterflies. There was no set-aside any more, though, and looking at the huge field now you couldn’t tell where the old hedgeline had even been.

At the top of the field was a copse, planted generations ago as cover for foxes and to improve the country for the hunt. Not long before Alex had left, the two of them had discovered a pair of goshawks nesting there. Jamie had made Alex swear to protect the chicks, when they hatched out, and they had taken turns to check on the nest using a heavy old pair of binoculars Alex had found in the farmhouse. It had been their secret, the last they would ever have together, and Jamie had tried not to think about it since.

He wondered when the last time was that anyone had come this way. The farm had felt like forbidden territory after Alex had gone; he’d been cast out by Mr Harland, and by fear. But being there again was bringing it all back, as he’d known it would: the landscape of his childhood, its grassy uplands and shadowy thickets. He had believed it lost to him somehow, but of course it had been there all this while.

The air was cooling, the stars bright above, and Jamie hunched his shoulders and jammed his fists into his pockets as he walked. Far away to his right he could just about make out the farmhouse, crouched within the dark huddle of its outbuildings, and beyond that, Great Reave and Five Acres, where the heifers had been until a few weeks ago.

Slowly, he crossed the field’s gentle flank to where a silvery disc spoke of the wet winter they’d had. It was the last place on the farm to hold the snow, a slab of white that remained long after the other fields had warmed up. He wondered if the new owners would know this; whether they’d care. Whether the fields would even be fields any more.

9

Avens, dog’s mercury, harebells, vetch. Otter spoor by the river.

It wasn’t the first time Jack had woken up covered in birds. He gave a start and was surrounded by the whirr of pinions, the breeze from their wings fanning his face as a dozen or so birds exploded from his body up into the branches of the little wood in which he lay.

For a moment he froze, willing them to return; but as his eyes adjusted to the low evening sun he saw that there was someone standing over him, their shadow reaching across his sleeping bag. He leaned up on one elbow, shading his eyes, his heart lurching in his chest. But only the trees’ long shadows lay black on the ground.

The birds seemed to have melted away, too, like a dream that disappears before you can snatch at it. Corn buntings, he thought for some reason; not that you saw them in numbers any more – or ever would again, probably. He lay back down for a moment, unseeing eyes fixed somewhere beyond the branches. In the police cells they woke you every hour to check you weren’t dead.

The wood he had camped in was young, having sprung up in the 1960s in the no-man’s-land between a power station and a golf course on Connorville’s scrappy outskirts. Myxomatosis had devastated the local rabbit population in ’53, ’54, and without their nibbling teeth far more saplings had survived their first few years than usual; on the golf course the greenkeeper kept them down, and the land around the cooling towers was managed, but in the area between the two a few hundred trees had quietly set down roots. Now the wood was almost established, though it had yet to be marked on maps or given a name. Jack liked it for its opportunism, and for the stray golf balls that dotted the ground. They worked on him like conkers, and he couldn’t help but pick them up and walk with them for a while.

And there was something else, too: in places like this he felt invisible in a way that he rarely did in the proper countryside with its signposted walks and intelligible views. Places like this, in the shadow of a power station, were far from picturesque, and they were somehow wilder for it. Hardly anyone went there except for lovers and local children, who sensed that these ungovernable scraps of land were somehow outside the law. Jack had lost count of the tepee-like dens, stained mattresses and secret camps he had stumbled on in such places over the years. He always left them untouched.

His own childhood was almost entirely lost to him now. It had lingered on in his memory for a little while like a contrail in a clear sky, growing fainter and fainter, until now, when he thought about the past, he thought less of his own and more of the line of men who had gone before him, a dim procession out of some dark history, their future uncertain.