At Hawthorn Time (9 page)

Nearly dusk. Jack sat up slowly, working the knots out of his neck and shoulders. Was he actually being looked for? Maybe, maybe not. He was supposed to be on a doorstep curfew, required to sleep every night at the hostel in London for the next two months. But he could no more survive in a city than a swallow could live underwater.

He’d spent much of the day trying to find a lane marked by a line of oaks with double trunks that he’d heard about from a gypsy family he’d travelled with years back. They’d told him their forefathers buried children with an acorn in each hand, and that this lane marked a succession of stillbirths born to one woman many years before. Now he was in the area he’d wanted to see the twinned trees and pay his respects, but although he knew it was somewhere nearby he couldn’t find it. When he’d heard a distant siren he’d decided to slip away and find somewhere to rest for a few hours.

Now he took a notebook out of his pack, unwound the rubber band that clasped a biro to it and tried to write down some of the things he’d seen that day in case they might make a ballad or a poem, but the rhythms wouldn’t come. Instead, he flicked back through its pages: scribbled observations, metaphors, flights of near-visionary fancy. ‘Half mad,’ he muttered to himself. ‘More’n half.’

Before putting his boots on he checked his socks and trouser turn-ups for ticks, rolled up his sleeping bag and stashed it away. Then he shouldered his pack and made his way out of the wood towards the cooling towers. There was a river on the other side of the golf course where mayflies would probably be emerging; if there weren’t too many fishermen around he had a good chance of a couple of brown trout.

Behind him, bats began to hunt the clearing where he had slept as the red sun slipped slowly behind the trees.

Not far away, in Ardleton, the television’s cold light was flickering across the seamed landscape of James Albert Hirons’ face. He sat looking past it, unseeing; thinking instead of the lurcher puppy that Edith had taken in rather than see drowned in a bucket. Tess, Edith had called her; she had such soft ears, that dog, and he smiled now to remember them. She’d had a kennel in the garden, but when she got old and her back legs began to go he’d relented and folded up a blanket for her by the range. One clear, ice-bound winter night not long after Gillian had started school Tess had kept asking and asking to go outside, but every time he opened the back door she just dragged herself to the flower bed, out of the way, and lay down. Three times he’d carried her back in, knowing but refusing to know what was happening; she’d died in the kitchen the next day.

And he thought about when he and Gillian’s boy used to go dipping in the ponds and canals for old iron. How the lad had loved it; it was funny the things that fascinated you as a child. He probably didn’t even remember it now, great lanky beanpole that he was. Still, it had done the child good to get him out of that house from time to time. Not that his father wasn’t a good man, but Gillian had them all wrapped around her little finger with those nerves of hers.

She’d always been needy, though, all the way through her childhood: always crying or poorly, something wrong with her every day, it had seemed. It wasn’t him she’d got it from – after all, you couldn’t have behaved like that in Changi, you wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.

He’d had a friend in the camp, Stan, a Lincolnshire lad a few years younger than he was. One day they were all moved, without warning, from their attap huts to the prison itself. The stone cells were tiny and crawling with rats and lice, and when the guard locked the door behind them Stan had broken down and sobbed. He’d never forgotten how the other two men in the cell had turned away, pretending not to see, as though Stan’s distress was contemptible – or even worse, contagious.

After a while the old man slept and dreamed he was a little boy again, stumbling behind his father who was sowing, his right hand, brown from the sun, broadcasting seeds from a hopper at his chest evenly onto Culverkeys’ warm soil. He craned to see past his legs to the big tree ahead – and when he did he saw that the sun would soon go down behind its branches. ‘We must go home,’ he said, suddenly afraid; ‘Dadda, night’s coming.’ But his father, deaf and half blinded by the Great War, strode on; and James saw that he was sowing mung beans, not barley, and that above him shone not the Plough but the Southern Cross. And then he heard the clanking sound of the harrow coming up fast behind, and he woke up in his chair, his father long gone, Edith and Tess too, the television stark and loud in the corner and his old heart frightened in his chest.

10

Herb Robert. Bracken unfurling. Snakeshead fritillaries.

Chris arrived just before lunch on Saturday, announced by the crunch of his Mini’s wheels on the gravel drive. It was a blustery, rainy May morning, the sunshine, when it came, blindingly bright on the wet roads before the sky darkened and another shower blew in.

‘No thanks,’ said Howard, as he always did, pretending to shut the door on his son where he stood on the mat, only to open it again and usher him in with a grin and a mock bow.

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘Oh, she’ll be down in a minute, I’m sure. She’s got a bit of a headache. Said she was going to have a nap.’

While Chris took his coat off and hung it on the newel post, Howard took his son’s bag to the study, where he would sleep. As always when the kids visited he would be back in the master bedroom, with Kitty, something he had mixed feelings about.

‘This for us?’ he said, returning from the study with a bottle of Malbec in one hand. ‘Shall we?’

‘Oh, just a beer for me, Dad,’ said Chris.

‘Right you are. How’s everything?’

While Howard poured the drinks, Chris began to tell him about the last month: a driver had left, problems with the IT system, and his continuing efforts to woo a new client, an electrical retailer with stores all over the south-west. It wasn’t a move Howard would have made, but then, he wasn’t running the firm any more.

‘There’s no money in the south-west, son,’ he’d said when Chris first told him of the plan. ‘It’s all poverty down there, they’re on EU grants, they’re not buying bloody flatscreens. By all means go ahead, but don’t bank on them surviving long.’

‘Most of it’s web-based, though, Dad,’ Chris had said. ‘Doesn’t matter where the actual stores are any more. People know the laptop they want, they read the reviews online; if this lot can do it at the best price people order it. Doesn’t matter where they are, or how well established, as long as it’s mainland UK.’

Maybe he was right. It seemed a saturated market to Howard, electrical; but then what did he know? And it had been part of Chris’s business plan when he took over: twenty new UK clients to fund the container warehouse in Felixstowe he’d leased. The risk of it still made Howard’s heart lurch sometimes, especially the way the country was going; but it wasn’t his business any more.

‘We need to offer proper freight handling if we don’t want to be crowded out,’ Chris had said; and he was probably right. ‘If we can hold goods off the ship and get them out direct we can pull in bigger clients. We need to be scaling up, Dad. People aren’t just going to stop wanting stuff all of a sudden. Someone has to get it to them; it might as well be us.’

‘What about fuel – have you found another supplier?’ Howard asked now.  There was a diesel tank in the yard that was topped up by a tanker every week, but the cost had been climbing steadily.

‘One or two are coming in a bit under, but there’s no guarantee they won’t go up too,’ Chris said. ‘I’m not sure it’s worth changing. Plus we get good credit right now; it could take ages to build up a relationship with someone new.’

Howard nodded, held his peace. He would have changed supplier, more than once if necessary, kept the cost down month on month. But then, he hadn’t been looking so far ahead; he’d been content for the firm to earn him a good income and pay the wages of his office staff and drivers. Old-fashioned, he knew. But still.

After lunch the three of them put on outdoor shoes and went out for a stroll. He and Kitty had gone for quite a few walks when they’d first moved to the village, but after a couple of months the habit had fallen away.  Yet when the children visited it was a way to offer them something, a last remnant of family as well as a look at the countryside neither of them had on their own doorsteps.

Chris walked in the middle; Howard put his hands in his pockets and thought about how they used to take him to the park when he was a toddler and swing him between them. It was as though his muscles still retained the memory of the little boy’s weight, as though his hands could still feel the terrifying delicacy of his son’s hand and wrist as between them they lofted him over puddles to his squeals of delight.

They passed the church with its massive yew, jumbled gravestones and simple war memorial marked with eleven names, and took the lane that led off past the vicarage onto the fields. Stiles from one field to the next were marked by yellow arrows; Howard thought of what Kitty had said the week before and wondered if perhaps this was one of her ancient paths, centuries old. If it was it didn’t look like much.

In the distance the grey hulk of Babb Hill dominated the skyline; moving dots beneath the summit were either kites or hang-gliders, it was hard to tell. ‘Blue remembered hills,’ said Howard. It was one of the only lines of poetry he knew.

The fields were mostly just grass, still wet and heavy with the morning’s dew. Every so often a tiny, pale moth would flutter uselessly before their approaching feet, and from one paddock a pair of horses regarded the three of them briefly before dipping their heads again as they crossed the top of the pasture and took the stile into the next field.

‘I’ve been reading about one of the local legends,’ said Kitty. She walked with her head down, almost shyly offering the topic to the two men. She had been quiet over lunch, Howard thought, but she seemed fine now.

‘Oh yes?’ said Chris. ‘What’s that?’

‘Puck – a sort of hobgoblin, you know, or a fairy. Very ancient. Anyway, I thought I might use it for a painting one day.’

Howard looked quizzically at her profile as they walked, a glance he intended, at some level, for her to see. So far her paintings had all been of landscapes or flowers, and not particularly interesting ones to boot – so how a hobgoblin was supposed to come into it was a mystery.

‘What’s it all about, then?’ asked Chris.

‘Well, this goes back hundreds of years, of course. He lived on a farm near here – although I think there are lots of Puck stories from all over the country, actually. Anyway, this one goes that in return for a tenth of everything the farmer harvested Puck made sure that everything grew: the crops never failed, the well didn’t dry up, the animals didn’t get sick. He wouldn’t cross the threshold into the farmhouse, or do any of his magic on people, but he brought fertility to the land and the animals so the farm prospered, even in bad years.’

‘Sounds like a witch, more like,’ said Howard. ‘Or he made a pact with the Devil.’

‘No, he wasn’t evil, not at all – though he wasn’t exactly good, either. Anyway, after a while the farmer got greedy; he started to wonder why he should have to give a tenth of his harvest away. So he began keeping back some of the sheaves. Puck found out, of course, and when he did he turned into a hare and ran away. But before he went he cursed the farmer and the land, and since then all sorts of misfortunes have been blamed on him.’

‘Like what?’ asked Chris.

‘Oh, you know. Cows’ milk drying up, haystacks burning down. And there’s an old track where he’s said to appear from time to time, demanding that the farmer honour their bargain. Anyway, I thought I might go and have a look at it later this week. I don’t know, I like these old stories. They’re part of what makes one place different to another.’

‘Even if all the stories are the same?’ Howard chipped in. ‘I mean, if you collected together all the mischievous fairies, black dogs and, I don’t know, haunted houses from all over the country, you’d soon see they’re all of a type – just ways of explaining what was unexplainable back then. Fortunately,’ he continued, turning to Chris with a grin, ‘we have science now.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, Dad. It must have been amazing growing up in those times: there’d be a story attached to every cave, every rock, every tree. It wouldn’t be, you know,
there are some trees
–’ Chris waved an arm at the general view – ‘and we know everything there is to know about them, though hardly anyone actually bothers to learn their names. It would be a case of, this tree, this
oak
tree, has a wicked witch in it, this willow tree is magic –’