Landed (25 page)

 

They come to a road, and a bridge across the river, which surges below them. A little way further on they come to a T-junction.
Owen remembers that the village referred to on the signpost as being two miles away to the right is large enough to have a bed and breakfast, probably. Or a pub with a room to stay. He has to risk contact now. Somewhere for Holly to get warm, dry her clothes. They are less than a day's walk from their destination.

 

They walk through a housing estate, identical brick houses, slate rooves. Aerials on the top of every house. Satellite dishes. Buddleia grow out of chimney stacks, their drooping stalks, the colour of their flowers – yellow, blue, purple – against the drab bricks and grey slates. A small, rural version of the estate Mel lived on when they met. He remembers the first time he walked her home. She spoke so readily to him, words tumbled out. He listened, calculated, summoned courage. At her door he kissed her on the lips. Her mouth was warm.

Some houses are boarded up with plates of gunmetal grey, perforated steel. Others have no doors or window frames, they look toothless, their black interiors open to the wind and rain. Cows graze on the front gardens, wander across the road, pausing to drop their pats of soft dung.

There is no pub or shop or B & B. Some cottages appear inhabited. Owen senses that their passage is watched by unseen eyes, but he could be wrong.

On a hill outside the village stands a cluster of masts, enormous white dishes, one huge globe. Some kind of listening station; plaintive instruments, receivers pointing, Owen imagines, at the ether, hoping for a signal from beyond. A message from the deities of space, presiding a little out of reach, unknowable but imaginable, hiding as gods will do, awaiting us in the fields of infinity.

It is raining once more. They walk through the valley and
Owen knows that if it were clear he would be able to see in the distance the hills amongst which is the one they're headed for. But the rain is colder than this morning, and seems to be falling less as drops now than as pins, painful, penetrative. He lifts Holly down off his shoulders. She's trembling, barely conscious. Her teeth are chattering and strange noises issue from her mouth in her delirium, syllables without sense, like someone blessed with a holy spirit, babbling in tongues. Owen takes off his jacket and wraps her on his back, puts the hood on his head so that the jacket drapes over her, and resumes walking.

The dog has lost its appetite for dashing here and there, content to traipse along behind them. Bedraggled, her hair plastered to her lean frame, she looks half the size she did. Owen thinks he could carry Holly forever. She's surely lighter than a soldier's backpack. If she were lame he would be her means of ambulation. As she grew heavier so he would grow stronger; would acquire the nobility of a horse.

They must make a detour, he realises, to the small market town two or three miles south-west of here. The rain falls like a cloudburst, a monsoon, with a great roar that must be the accumulation of each one of millions of drops hitting the ground but feels like the sound of the rain itself falling through air. They must stick to the lane now, with visibility reduced to feet, inches, in front of them, a darkness of water. Where the lane is flat it becomes a long puddle; on each incline or declivity of tarmac water courses, made dramatic by gravity. A rider on a horse approaches: a torch attached to saddle or bridle illuminates a beamful of plummeting needles of rain, as if to reveal them rather than clarify the way forward for the rider. Owen backs onto the sodden verge and hides in the hedgerow. What would he look like if the rider could see him? A hunchbacked
tramp and his dog. An idiotic rambler. The horse does not stop but trots on past.

 

Owen knows he needs all his strength and determination to push on, to carry his daughter through this torrential, punishing downpour to safety. Then a song comes to mind, and within a moment he is singing it inside his head. An American folk song.

He thinks there may have been another verse before that one, but it doesn't matter. He is lost in the song, as he imagines that he sings it. Oblivious to the rain.

Owen hears it in a voice in his head that is an imitation of the voice of the singer, one of the last songs the man recorded. This man made each line last longer than one expected, strumming on his guitar then going on little unpredictable runs of
plucked notes, then strumming again. The man's voice in Owen's head is hollowed, his body and all it has lived through resonate in every word, the voice of an old country singer, a dying man.

The rain batters the earth. Tumultuous, the river behind them will burst its banks; there will be chaos and destruction. The animal kingdom huddle in their burrows, fold their wings, curl up and hope the deluge will spare them. Owen trudges into the town. No one is outside on the main street but lamps are on in small shops. He enters one and asks the way to a doctor. Someone gives him directions to the health clinic, some streets away. Someone else says they just saw Dr Green go into his house around the corner.

Owen knocks on the door of a large house. A woman opens it. ‘Dr Green?' Owen asks. The woman looks horrified at this lunatic. She directs him two doors away.

A man opens the door.

‘Dr Green?'

‘Yes.' The man frowns. ‘The clinic's on Market Lane, just along—' he begins, but Owen interrupts.

‘My daughter,' he says, turning around, taking his right arm from beneath her buttocks and unhooking the hood of his jacket off his head. The jacket falls to the floor. ‘Please,' he says.

‘Come in,' says the doctor, stepping backwards and to one side. Owen enters the hall. The dog stays in the porch as the doctor closes the front door and then, as Owen relinquishes his good hand from holding Holly, the doctor takes the unconscious child and carries her into a sitting room.

Owen heels off his shoes, peels off his sodden socks. At least the water has washed off the mud. Barefoot, Owen follows the doctor, who has laid Holly on a sofa. He calls a woman's name, ‘Anna,' over his shoulder, as he removes Holly's sopping clothes. A woman appears in the doorway. ‘Towels,' he says.

Owen stands, watching, grey water dripping and seeping from him, his clothes, onto the doctor's carpet. He thinks that he ought to be the one to take off his daughter's clothes; he's not even assisting the doctor. Anna returns with an armful of towels. Holly is semi-awake, half helping her damp shirt peel off her. Her pale body shivers, her face is red, she is trying to talk. Sounds come out of her mouth but they are barely words, certainly not sentences. She moans or gasps disconnected syllables, delirious.

Anna leaves the room with a sodden pile of clothes. She is in her late forties, early fifties, elegant, trim. She strides between furniture, round the corner, with a striking purposeful efficiency, as if she might be blind, the exact placing of each footstep practised a thousand times. A moment later she returns with a child's pyjamas and helps her husband dress Holly. The blue pyjamas, made of thick cotton, are a year or two too large. The doctor takes Holly's temperature with an old mercury thermometer he shakes and checks before placing in her armpit. Anna brings a duvet, which she drapes over the child. Owen stands, dripping, useless, like a foreigner in a strange country where he doesn't speak the language, where he understands nothing, but waits, hoping that things will be explained to him,
in sign language, with gesture and demonstration; that things will be made clear, that he will be given a role to play. He is almost invisible now.

‘How is she?' he asks quietly.

Anna, who is sitting at the end of the sofa and gently rubbing Holly's blonde hair with a red towel, looks up in surprise, as if she'd forgotten Owen was there. Dr Green says, without turning round, ‘Fever. I'll give her something to bring it down.' He's peering into Holly's ears with his thin torch, and murmurs in agreement with himself, confirming something he'd suspected. ‘Open your mouth,' he says, and although Owen is certain that his daughter is asleep, her lips obediently part. ‘Wider,' the doctor says, and he peers down her throat. Then he undoes the buttons of the pyjamas they'd only just put on and listens to the organic mechanisms inside her through his stethoscope. This practice has all his life struck Owen as some kind of superstition. ‘We look for omens,' a medic had once told him. ‘What things will become.'

 

Dr Green carries Holly upstairs. They put her in a single bed in a small spare room. Anna fetches some of her husband's clothes – pink socks, thick fawn corduroy trousers, boxer shorts, a blue pastel shirt and pink V-necked sweater – and persuades Owen to give her his and to take a hot shower. He does so quickly and returns to Holly's bedside. He strokes her arm. Dr Green puts his head around the door. ‘Don't worry. She'll sleep through. She's going to be fine. Supper will be ready in a moment.'

‘Thank you.'

‘You can sleep next door, in our son's room. He's not here in term time.'

The doctor's clothes are only a little too big for Owen, space allowed for the loosening waist, but their shoulders are of equal breadth, their height and length of limb much the same. Owen pads down thickly carpeted stairs. There are paintings, some of them centuries old. The furniture is antique. The old house has odd shelves, niches, in which rest interesting artefacts, heirlooms, mementos of travel. Statuettes. Seashells, pebbles.

Downstairs in the sitting room a wood fire blazes in the grate. Walls are thick with books. Chairs look deep and welcoming. There is a damp patch on the carpet in the middle of the room. Owen is aware he has never been in a house like this, all these objects of personal value. He studies framed photographs on the mantelpiece: they have one son; two daughters, one has graduated from university, the other is still at school. There is a photograph of the younger girl in school uniform, aged fourteen or fifteen, pretty, brown-eyed, intelligent. She looks like a younger version of her mother, Anna; and like a teenage version of Owen's daughter Sara.

 

‘Edward, give Owen a glass of wine, won't you,' Anna asks her husband. The three of them eat a lasagne and salad at a table in the kitchen. Their daughter, they say, is staying at a friend's house tonight. This information causes Owen a momentary stab of sadness he can't explain. Time is all tangled up.

‘This is so good,' Owen says. Every mouthful of pasta, meat, béchamel sauce, crisp topping, every crunch of salad, taste better than he ever knew. They do not ask him any questions. He keeps expecting them to, and wonders why they don't. In time he understands they aren't going to. He feels an urge to tell them, to confess. What might he expect? Understanding, forgiveness? Hardly. Absolution?

‘This rain,' he says.

‘Used to it now,' Edward says. ‘Round here.'

‘Caught out in it, see,' Owen begins. But they show no curiosity, do not prompt him to continue. Anna gives her husband the news of some acquaintance she heard from at work today. It seems she is a teacher. Edward says he hopes their daughter and her friend will not be consorting with certain individuals this evening. Something comes back to Owen: he thinks that walking through the town earlier he saw no cars.

They have red Leicester cheese, biscuits and fruit for dessert. Neither Edward nor Anna ask about Holly. Owen remembers, with a jolt, the dog: she'll be trembling in the porch for sure, already loyal as a lifetime companion. ‘It's all right,' Edward assures him. He gestures over his shoulder, back towards the depths of the house. ‘She's in the drying room. I found an old tin of dog food. Ours died six months ago.' He smiles. ‘It's good to have a dog in the house again, isn't it, Anna?' His wife harrumphs, and he chuckles, evoking some unserious marital discord.

 

‘The gentlemen will retire to the drawing room.' Edward smiles. ‘Bring your glass.' He carries the second wine bottle, Owen follows into an unheated conservatory. Edward lights candles on a small table. The rain stopped some time ago. Ice is forming on the glass roof and windows. They sit in wooden garden chairs, Edward produces a tin of tobacco from his pocket. ‘Anna banishes me here,' he says. ‘Better than outside, I suppose.' Having taken a plug and a paper he slides the tin towards Owen. ‘Help yourself. It's not exactly Virginia, I'm afraid.'