Edge of the Orison (20 page)

We notice: a white horse, the strong curve of his back, in a cropped paddock. A hare split open, belly-jam, busy flies, on a hot section of road. Small stones coming loose from glistening tar. At a house, decorated with pink and white balloons, Renchi asks for water and our bottles are filled.

In the early evening, we emerge from woodland into a haze of cereals, blue horizon; no hint of a town, any town. A solitary terracotta roof rises above wavering golden fields. We're not the same people who left High Beach this morning. Dusty light has no interest in our approval. This view disproves James Thomson's notion of ‘View’ (capitalised). Look at it and it dissolves: into thorn bush, sandy track, pillow of cloud. A landscape without structure and form. Call it: off-road Hertfordshire. Unless we achieve Stevenage in the next hour, we'll invade the real Clare story: roofless, hungry, aching in every limb. Grey-haired (no-haired) men on the wrong side of mid-life aiming at mid-lands, Middle England. And finding nobody at home.

As we come on it, the ridge that offers the promise of Stevenage, our terracotta Travelodge confesses to another identity: a crematorium. The inverted oast-house funnel is architectural flimflam disguising two metal chimneys that, on another day, will puff dark smoke over the Constable view. The Stevenage crem is a drive-in corpse-disposal facility: with bonus features. It's right on the road. Edge of town and country. Red tiles. White gables. Nondenominational chapel extension. Multifunctional. Easy on the eye. A missing piece of Milton Keynes: flatpacked, assembled in the time it has taken us to walk from Hertford.

Stevenage is no easy conquest: a laboured entry by way of a non-league football ground and the Roebuck Gate. A New Town laid over the remnant of John Clare's staging-post. Oliver Cromwell heritage country: portraits on pub signs. The killjoy English ayatollah (of myth), stabling horses in parish churches, firing Papist heads out of cannons, finds himself strung up outside a chain of roadhouses and boozers. The Cromwell Hotel, red brick, white woodwork, doubles as a ‘Business Centre’. Unfortunately, we're not booked in. (They'd never take us, our business is inexplicable. Our clothes are preoccupied, virtually free-standing. We have no vehicle and no appointments. Before the Glinton rendezvous with Anna Sinclair.)

The outskirts of Stevenage are voluminous; clients do come
off-road and stay here. A virtual landscape of grassy knolls, business businesses and Glaxo colonies. (Renchi's sister is involved with a lawsuit over dyes injected into her spine with unfortunate consequences.) Spur roads, boulevards, overpasses, mirror-glass towers: but no trace of our guest house. We can't tell if we're in town, or through it, suburb to suburb, without locating an obvious centre.

The Abbington Hotel, we discover, is at the northern limits. Stevenage is a cycle city, lacking cyclists. It's dull to walk, even though every effort has been made to allow for such frivolities. So long as you have a certified destination. So long as you smile for the cameras.

It is seven-thirty in the evening. We've been walking for thirteen hours and have achieved a Clare-like state of hallucinatory exhaustion. We have also achieved, at long last, the ivy-smothered, gravel-accessed Abbington Hotel. A signboard, blocked out with credit cards like the flags of all nations, confirms the fact. Renchi ducks into the privet to drop his shorts and assume respectably crumpled jeans. I pull a clean shirt over a sweaty torso. And we present ourselves at the door.

VACANCIES. VACANCIES. VACANCIES.

‘Sorry,’ says the woman. ‘No trace of your booking. Completely full.’ Bona-fide reps check in by sundown. And don't clutter up vestibules with ugly rucksacks.

I think she reads the dangerous madness in our eyes. I made this reservation, by phone, handing over credit card details. There
must
be a record. Nothing. Well, fine. One day's walk and my London life is a fiction. She sees that we're going to do a Clare and spread out sleeping-bags in her driveway (remembering to set tired heads to the north).

She's sorry. Truly. So much so that she gets on the phone and makes an alternative booking at the hotel ibis. The ibis is back in town, we passed it thirty minutes ago, on the main boulevard: when we still had skin on the soles of our feet. To be rid of us, before the reps notice how their refuge has plunged downmarket, the Abbington woman offers to drive us to the ibis. At once.

Welcome, Bienvenue. ‘Early-Bird Breakfast’ available from four
in the morning. The ibis is the travelling person's oasis of choice. Forty-four hotels in places you'd rather not be (Birmingham New Street Station, Coventry Ringway, London East Barking, Luton Airport). Places where you are comfortably not-at-home, pampered by indifference, courteous apathy. The ibis (same hotel in forty-four different locations) is serviced by unseen automatons.

‘No problem,’ says the ibis desk-robot in a computer-generated voice simulation. Welcome, bienvenue. To construction workers in claggy boots, to truckers. To long-distance walkers. Everything is plain and easy. The lights don't work in the bathroom, it doesn't matter. Soap squirts from a wall-dispenser. There is a big firm bed. And you can open the windows.

We sit in the restaurant, the canteen, with other bemused transients. And feel good about microwaved fish, a carafe of sour yellow wine. We are satisfied with the conclusion of the first day's walk. Clare tossed and turned on trusses of clover, pressing against the phantom body of his ‘first wife’. She lay on his left arm, waking him.

I didn't sleep. I put my head on an unyielding foam pillow, shut my eyes, and opened them a nanosecond later to a lion-sun climbing over a palm-fringed desert. Stevenage: Cairo of the Great North Road. The sacred ibis, a water bird, lends its head to Thoth, god of Hermopolis; scribe of the gods, inventor of writing.

I make illegible notes on a complimentary pad; head off to the canteen, where hissing machines spit out cornflake-dust. Ibis croissants are scimitars of delight (small but perfectly formed).

At the end of the month, when my credit card scroll arrives with the demand for a Southend cheque, I discover that the Abbington Hotel has charged me for a night's stay. So perhaps, after all, the ibis was a dream: a shelf of perfect sleep, lulled by traffic, allowing us through the Roebuck Gate and on towards the lesser initiations of the waiting road.

Over our facsimile breakfast, Renchi tells me that when he sorted out his belongings, before climbing into bed, he found that two items had vanished during our ramble through Stevenage: the compass and the crystal.

To St Neots

A blameless morning: 18 July 2000. We are back outside the Abbington, on the edge of town. Renchi, plunging into the privet, recovers his crystal but not his compass. (He has resumed his blue shorts. Today's T-shirt announces: LEARN SWAHILI.) The mural on the underpass, through which we have come, is the product of local schoolchildren. It depicts a funeral possession: hearse with yellow coffin pulled by three-masted schooner. The mourners, sticky silhouettes, wear short cloaks like gendarmes. The procession features several coaches, of the kind that carried John Clare from Stamford to London.

Parked, square across the pavement, near the ibis, is a white police car: Noddy-sized, a notice taped to its perspex window. THIS FACILITY IS TEMPORARILY OUT OF ORDER. When we achieve our first major roundabout, going round a woman in dark glasses (backed a body's length into the privet, reading a thick paperback), we find that the road for London lies straight ahead; we must swing away to the right. A last look at the Abbington, last ever, reveals the book and a pair of white hands sticking out of a hedge.

Traffic into Stevenage stretches back for miles: splintering sunbursts on windscreens, mobiles busy as electric razors. Grooming ceremonies: hair twitching, nose picking, lipstick applying. Mirror auditions. Hungrily abstracted cigarette suckling: smoke breakfasts. Buffers of random music. News without novelty. Child murders, men shot by accident. And on purpose. Exploding vehicles. Stevenage cars are nose-to-rump like cattle. Leaking subtle poisons. An invisible necklace around a fortunate satellite.

Our relief at leaving town, being on the road, is immense. Beneath an avenue of pylons, Stevenage has its own Dome. The
hint picked up from Mandelson's Folly on the Greenwich Peninsula: temporary permanence. A money pit with accidental benefits. This Dome is more active than its metropolitan model. It has two major attractions: ‘The Way Forward in Tennis’ and the ‘r3 Clinic’ (viz. McTimoney Chiropractic, Aromatherapy, Reflexology).

32 MILES FROM LONDON.

A distressed milestone: lettering renewed with black paint. Yellow lichen on north-facing flank. Did Clare touch this stone with his faltering hand?

The road, before fumes become unbearable, before snarling commuters and hissing air brakes, is a tarmac idyll. Walking is effortless, miles tick past; we don't talk. Maps are not consulted. We'll make for Baldock by the most direct route, up the B197, which runs alongside the A1.

Anna gets her revenge.

Our journey to Glinton is her vision, this cloudless morning, and I am experiencing it (if I'm not hunkered down at the ibis, snoring on a foam pillow). It used to work, for years, that she took care of my dreaming; she earthed nightmares that would, in due course, be dressed as fiction. ‘You've started a new book.’ ‘Haven't.’ ‘You're thinking about it.’ ‘Well, yes.’

Horrors of London, she endured them on my behalf. Folding houses with soft floors. Rivers flooding subterranean passages. Skull-faced stalkers. One-legged dogs. Bubbles of skin that closed around her, cutting off breath. And, worst of all, a man hammering on the door, wanting to be let in. A man with my face. While this impostor, her other husband, lies beside her in the bed. I wake, untroubled, after eight hours: she twists and turns, sits bolt upright; tense, waiting for first light. A few hours of shallow sleep before the day's tasks begin. Before I stroll, whistling, to my desk.

The young Anna, when I met her in Dublin, was a poet, schooled and approved by her father (supposed descendant of John Clare). A man who successfully escaped Glinton and the farm. And who ran a model chemical plant: no strikes, excellent safety record, wasteground given over to the cultivation of vegetables for the
canteen. (She is a poet still, without the fuss. The writing. She operates by momentary abdications of attention that never have to be explained. We trade in such exchanges. I front the business, stick my name on the spine. And wait to be found out.)

Geoffrey Hadman set his eldest daughter to writing a poem a day, verse forms to be mastered. Sonnets, villanelles. These poems were never made public nor commented on; they were a task, a duty accepted without complaint. So that, when she arrived in Dublin, Anna was primed for the tone set by the university's long-established magazine,
Icarus
. Her work, at first, was acceptable. Mine was awkwardly modernist and full of itself.

I was in touch with the barbarians, Beat and Black Mountain enthusiasts. I published, to local scandal, a three-column piece, airmailed from Tangier by William S. Burroughs. Two of the founding Beats, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, were at that moment visiting Oxford. Henrietta Moraes trailed along.

Afterwards we went to the nearest pub to warm up. Allen and Gregory had a drink or two and started to undress, screaming passionately, ‘You bloody English mother-fuckers. You kill your poets. All the greatest, you murder them. Keats, Shelley, Byron, John Clare.’

In Dublin, poetry blotted up booze. In McDaid's, Toner's, the Pearl Lounge, green-livered poets incubated spite. They manfully ignored one another, until the opening arrived for that rehearsed quip, delivered over the shoulder as they departed: hunched and mildewed phantoms of the anthologies (talking loud enough to be noticed in America). You could watch them pissing it away, under the cool stare of cellophane-collared curates with Spanish Civil War pedigrees, fresh-faced country boys setting down platters of thickcut ham-and-cheese sandwiches.

At Anna's request, I carried a bundle of my poems, faintly typed, to a party in Rathmines. The bundle stayed in my coat. The coat was forgotten. We left in a Dublin taxi, making it up as we went along. Times fresh enough, the softness of the seats, the driver's
helmet of Sweet Afton, to be reinvented, reforgotten. Indulged for their radiant obscurity.

I come abruptly out of my reverie as we notice another peripheral ‘Golf Centre’. We lean into cushions of displaced air: Stevenage reps on the burn, sleek convoys of armour-plated school-delivery vehicles. Relief columns for Baldock. Anna must be waking, now, in Hackney; carrying her breakfast tray back to bed. When I get home, I'll find the evidence: screws of kitchen roll blotted with cherry stones, sheets sandpapered in toast crumbs. I haven't much to report: a faded sign for the A1(M) and a few blood-tipped feathers, claws and mince in a buzzing heap. An empty forecourt with chalet-style petrol station attached. A blue car with the door of a red car rammed through its windscreen. A shattered driving mirror fragmenting sky, road, walker, into Cubist slivers. A very worried man in a crisp royal-blue shirt (frosted Blairite half-moons beneath moist armpits) jabbering into his mobile.

WELCOME TO BALDOCK: Historic Market Town. Twinned with Eisenberg & Sanvignes-Les-Mines.

Baldock, I'm ashamed to say, has never meant more to me than this, a marker on the road north. The town takes its name from
Baddac
, the Old French term for Baghdad. ‘This name was given to Baldock (Herts),’ concludes
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names
, ‘by the Knights Templar, who held the manor.’

Middle England infected by news from elsewhere: Baldock/ Baghdad. Grubby invaders, we advance through shady suburbs and broad pavements (innocent of pedestrians). Renchi is charmed to find himself in conversation with a rusting oldie who has been around since Templar times. No mere canine accompanist, the Baldock dame is a willing collaborator. Clear blue eyes. She advises us on tea-rooms and potential cafés.