Landed (26 page)

Owen is aware of Edward watching him roll a cigarette. He asks, not about the lost hand, but about the tips of the fingers of his left hand.

‘I had a job when I left school, involved working with battery acid, see,' Owen explains. ‘Didn't bother with protective gloves, did I? Being reckless, like you are.' He studies his one hand. ‘When it's cold the tips of the fingers crack open.'

The two men drink the white wine, smoke their hand-rolled cigarettes. The dog slopes into the conservatory and lies beside Owen's chair.

‘You know,' Edward says, ‘you were only able to walk in the way you did because of this deluge.'

‘How do you mean?' Owen asks him.

‘You slipped past our lookouts. Every town is protected now. Wilderness in between.'

‘What is it you have here?' Owen says. ‘If you don't mind me asking, like. Is this how things are?'

‘We support ourselves,' Edward tells him. ‘A certain amount of trade, of course, with market towns like ours, each specialising in a particular industry. Medicine comes from Yorkshire. Most of our clothes from a town in Somerset, though there are two tailors here, and people make their own. It's been much easier since the train lines were opened up.'

Owen sips the English wine. ‘Education?' he asks.

‘Information shared on the Internet. No one stops the brightest leaving. Some do. Many stay.'

‘Food?'

‘Everyone works on the land, at least a little. In the allotments. At harvest.'

Owen tries to imagine the town around them; he saw nothing in the rain earlier. ‘What does this town specialise in, then?'

‘Furniture. Ours is a town of carpenters and cabinetmakers.'

Owen sucks the wet stub of his cigarette. ‘A bed of roses, is it?'

Edward shakes his head. ‘It's not a good place to contract a
serious illness.' The doctor takes a slug of wine, savours it around his mouth, swallows. ‘The surgery we offer, or gain easy access to, is not sophisticated. Prolongation of life is not a priority. Preventative health is.' He begins to roll another cigarette. ‘This will not be a great place to grow old.' He looks at Owen and shrugs. ‘People need to be useful. We can only sustain a certain number. If we accept someone from outside, he or she has to be young.' He licks the cigarette paper and rolls it tight. ‘There's no other way. Some say it's brutal. They're right. It is.' He lights the cigarette, then as he exhales holds it up in the air in one hand, wine glass in the other. ‘The tobacco's pretty awful, the wine's improving. Civilisation,' he says, smiling.

Owen raises his glass. The two men salute each other.

Edward gestures back over his shoulder, begins to say something but stops, deciding words are not needed, or insufficient, and merely nods at his companion.

Owen smokes what he knows will be his third and final cigarette. The bottle of wine is empty. The doctor, he senses, will declare at any moment that it's time for him to hit the hay or travel to the Land of Nod or sleep the sleep of the just.

‘Suppose I don't want to leave her?' Owen says.

He wonders whether Edward, gazing at the floor, is going to look him in the eye. ‘I doubt whether you have much choice,' he says. Then he lifts his gaze to meet Owen's. ‘She's ill.' Edward stubs out his cigarette in the heavy glass ashtray. ‘She needs time to recover.'

 

When he wakes, in the single bed in a child's small room, Owen thinks for a moment that it is Christmas Day. Something has been placed at the end of the bed during the night. He moves his feet and it rustles like the stocking that had once been there,
when he was six or maybe seven, with small objects wrapped in newspaper. One single Christmas morning. A retractable pencil. A satsuma. A tube of fumey chemical goo with which you could blow a huge ball. A plastic knight on horseback. His father gone but his mother had put them there while he slept.

Owen sits up and leans forward. Anna has folded his washed and dried clothes, and put them in a large paper bag. He lies back. Something has come to him from the night, whether from a dream or the processing of the unconscious he's not quite sure. That there is something familiar about Anna. Certain gestures last night – how she held her right hand near her face when she spoke, and the way she stood leaning against the counter in the kitchen – these things remind him of his grandmother. They suggest a different background to her husband's: that he was born into this life, this class, while she has risen into it.

Not only his grandmother. They were gestures Sara already showed signs of having inherited.

 

Owen gets dressed. He goes through to Holly. Children look exhausted when they're asleep. The smell of yeast and rising dough. He goes downstairs. Coffee. Warm rolls. Home-made blackberry and apple jam. There are jars of different sizes on shelves along one wall of the kitchen. Jams, jellies, chutneys. Fruit in syrup.

‘Help yourself,' Anna tells him. ‘I'll give you a tray to take up to your girl. She'll be hungry when she wakes.'

‘She's sleeping now.'

‘She'll wake ravenous, believe me.'

‘The coffee's good,' Owen says.

‘We're getting there.' Anna pours cornflakes into a bowl. Puts honey in one dish, raspberry jam in another, on a wooden tray. ‘Edward said to say goodbye. He had to go.'

Owen nods. He eats toast. He feels looked after by this maternal woman, though she can hardly be more than ten years older than him. Anna sits down. She cups her mug of coffee as if to warm her hands. ‘Her mother,' she says. ‘Is she not with you?'

Owen swallows the rest of his own mug. He shakes his head. Gazes at the surface of the wooden table. ‘No,' he says. ‘She's not with us.'

Anna says nothing but waits, offers a silence that Owen may fill with further words if he so wishes. A generous, expectant silence. He looks up, and into Anna's brown eyes. It is as if Sara is looking at him, as if his daughter had not stopped at all, her destiny curtailed, but quite the opposite: she has grown and overtaken him.

‘She'll find us, for sure,' he stammers. ‘Don't worry.'

 

Owen takes the tray upstairs. He finds Holly in the slow process of waking. Josh always woke with his eyes wide open, alert, inquisitive, and jumped out of bed. Holly prefers to luxuriate in her unstretched limbs, under the warm covers.

‘Breakfast is served,' Owen says. He opens the curtains. Holly goes to the bathroom. Within moments of her return excitement – staring wide-eyed at what's on offer on the tray across her lap – has given way to a regal demeanour.

‘Yes, I think I do like strawberry jam better.' Holly rapidly accustoms herself to having breakfast in bed, makes it look like an everyday occurrence.

Owen sits on the bed. Watching one's child eat is almost metaphysical in the pleasure it gives, appreciating the nourishment he or she gains. The beauty of the brutish process.

‘Did you look under your pillow?' Owen asks.

Holly scrunches up her face at her father, then feels behind
her. Her expression changes when she discovers something there, and brings it out, grinning. A pound coin Owen remembered to put there last night. The tooth fairy.

Anna was right: Holly eats everything. Her father removes the tray, she leans back against the pillows, replete, in need of further rest. Owen feels his daughter's forehead: her fever is gone. He strokes her arm. Holly pushes her pyjama sleeve up to her shoulder so that he can reach further. Soon her eyelids become droopy. Owen realises he has no idea what will happen next, there is no plan. This is a moment that could not be improved upon. Perhaps this is how things will stay, somehow, forever.

Holly opens her eyes and looks at him and says, ‘You have to go, Daddy.' It's as if she's just remembered something she was supposed to tell him. ‘You don't have much time.'

He leans down and they hug. He feels her hand pat his back. Owen raises himself back up, Holly closes her eyes, and he resumes stroking her arm until she falls asleep.

O
wen walks out of the town. Over these past days he has made his way west; now he heads north. It's no more than five miles away – as he climbs the rise into the Camlad valley he can see it – the middle one of three hills there on the far side of the valley.

His breath condenses before him. This weather is still insane. The sky is a dark, deep grey, almost black, a single enormous cloud heavy with water or ice. He pauses for a moment to listen, realising as he does so it is silence that has prompted him. There is no sound of either birdsong or running water, the accompaniment to his and the children's odyssey. A stillness that is more like autumn than spring, as if the earth is holding its breath, this great organism anaesthetising itself against the approach of winter.

Each and every one of us, Owen thinks, must undergo our own apocalypse. Is that why we are ready for the world's?

A haunting sound, the hoot of a wood pigeon, reaches Owen. He's not sure for a moment whether it is from the wood up to his left or from his memory. Another sound, mechanical this time: a quad bike, from higher up there, somewhere along the Kerry Ridgeway. The whine of its engine might have been designed expressly to irritate such men as his grandfather. Owen walks on, but a little later is stilled by the shrill cry,
almost like a seagull, of a buzzard. He looks up: the brown bird soars in wide, ascending circles on its broad rounded wings until, at a certain magical moment, as if conjured out of the grey sky, it disappears from sight.

 

Owen recalls his grandfather staring up into a blue sky. Owen gazed up too. ‘Can't be,' the old man muttered. A buzzard soared, seeming not to need ever to flap its wings. It looked as if it must be able to see a route ahead for itself on the currents and thermals and gusts, the shifting complexity of wind made visible in its sight.

‘What can't?'

‘Do believe it is,' Owen's grandfather decided. ‘Look at the long tail. Honey buzzard. Never heard of one this far north.'

The boy asked the reason for the bird's name. ‘Feeds on bees and wasps' nests,' his grandfather said.

‘Does it feed on honey?' Owen asked.

As if a piece of food had gone down the wrong way the old man retched into laughter, chuckling to himself at the boy's stupidity. He coughed up phlegm that he spat out before saying, ‘Insects, of course.'

They were leaning against the gate to the field above the cottage, Owen standing on the second rung. His grandfather composed himself from his rare outburst of pleasure, sighing and shaking his head. Owen wondered if he would always be stupid. He wondered whether he should stop asking questions, saying things, exposing his ignorance, or rather accept that his role in life might be to give other people amusement by the depth of his imbecility. He thought he could detect a degree of contemptuous affection in his grandfather's voice. Except that, braving a glance up at his grandfather beside him, Owen saw that his mood had shifted: he was considering something
that made him not only solemn but angry. Owen assumed that what annoyed his grandfather was his own issue's idiocy. Of how it reflected back at him.

But then it struck Owen – this thought in his mind as if it had materialised there out of some powerful elsewhere, a subversive invasion – that his grandfather was wondering whether actually such birds
did
eat honey. And realising that he didn't know. That he had laughed at his grandson, yet perhaps he was the ignorant one, and the boy's enquiry was curious, intelligent.

 

It is only after he's climbed a stile and is crossing an empty field down towards the river that Owen realises with a surge of panic that he's left his hook behind in Edward and Anna's house. He'd forgotten to strap it on, though it is something he's done every morning for the last six years. The occupational therapist, he remembers, Andrea, told him that after the first week he'd never forget it again. Well, seems she was wrong. The omission as absurd as forgetting to put on your trousers. The sleeve of his jacket flaps loose from the stump, just below his elbow. Had he left it behind for Holly? A hideous memento. Perhaps it is something else, another part of him, of which he must be divested.

Owen decides that probably he is glad to be without the hook, but he wonders whether he'll be able to accomplish one-handed what he still has to do. There is only himself left. The blade, in his jacket pocket, is sharp.

What makes Owen stop and turn to look behind him, he doesn't know. There, twenty metres away, is the dog. Realising that he has stopped, she pauses. She glances at him with her grey eyes. There is fleeting eye contact before she gazes off to the side.

‘What are you doing here?' Owen demands. ‘You stupid dog. Why aren't you with Holly? Or with Edward and Anna? They'd be glad of you.'

She won't look at him. His grandfather told him how you could tell from a collie's eyes whether or not they'd make a sheepdog. Dogs with light eyes were often the sort who would get mesmerised by a sheep: would lie down and refuse to get up and on with the job, whatever the shepherd said. Stuck, he called it. Dark-eyed dogs on the other hand could be too meek, the kind to turn away from confrontation with a ram or cussed ewe.

‘Go back!' Owen commands. ‘Shoo!' Adopting the guttural tone he remembers. ‘Get on, get on, scat!' Advancing towards her. Shyly she rises and retreats. But when he turns and resumes walking away, the dog, after some seconds, once more follows.