The Northern Clemency (37 page)

Tonight it was Malcolm’s turn to talk. The society alternated planning meetings with evenings on which one of them would talk about an interest of his. It wasn’t necessarily the Civil War. People in the society had the widest possible interests—Agincourt, Thermopylae, Bosworth Field, Waterloo, Copenhagen (difficult to do on a moor), El Alamein. If only they could dig up large stretches of the moor, the first day of the Somme might be an enjoyable spectacle. But they’d stuck with the Civil War because the landscape was right, and they’d amassed properties and quite a bit of joint expertise on the subject. But they were all interested in each other’s more individual interests, and each gave a sort of talk from time to time. Malcolm’s particular interest was in the nineteenth-century little imperial wars. The long-bow membership thought it all very vulgar and coarse, he knew, but, a nuts-and-bolts man, he was going to enlighten them with a lot of interesting stuff about early machine-guns in the Sudan campaigns—the Gatling, the Martini-Henry breech loader, the Gardner and then, what Kitchener relied on, the Maxim gun, “which we have got and they have not.” It was a good story. He’d talked before about Fred Burnaby, but in a different context, and they’d enjoyed it.

He’d been in the society for six years now. It’d only been going for a year when he joined. He hadn’t known such things existed. He’d been at the city library one lunch time and had come across a biography of Redvers Buller he’d not read—it was in the “recently returned” rack, and normally it was shelved with what he didn’t bother with, biography. He knew the military history shelves thoroughly, of course. “What’s that you’ve got there?” Margaret, his newish secretary, said to him as he came back through her room. He showed her the cover, a bristling moustached bruiser in a nineteenth-century uniform, stiff with medals, and with one blazingly mad eye, looking very much as you would expect a Redvers Buller to look.

“Oh, are you interested in army things?” Margaret said. “You ought to meet my husband, he’s always on about guns and battles. He’s in a society for it.”

“What sort of society?” Malcolm said.

“A sort of restaging society,” Margaret said. “They restage, recreate, I should say, old battles. They’re all going up on Burbage moor next spring and we’re going to line up in troops and fight the battle of Naseby all over again, not with people being killed, of course. I’m in it, too, though I don’t go to the meetings or anything. I leave that to Richard. I’m going to be a cavalier, because of my hair—” she pulled out her recently permed long hair horizontally, to either side of her face “—and Richard said I can be killed early and then I’ll go up and sit on a hill, watch the rest from there.”

“That sounds interesting,” Malcolm said.

“You could come if you like. They need everyone they can get. I expect you’d be a roundhead, though.”

“Oh, why?” Malcolm said, so plaintively that Margaret burst out laughing. It was funny for Malcolm to say that, he could see, but when they’d done it in school and whenever he’d read any kind of book about it since, that hadn’t been the side he’d seen himself on. He had been flying through the night on a horse, sleeping soundlessly up oak trees, like anyone else.

“Well,” Margaret said, “it’s really just your hair. I expect they’d want you to be on the short-haired side, especially since they’re a bit overloaded on the other. You’ve to be grateful for whatever station they see you in.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind one bit,” Malcolm said fervently, and Margaret looked with some surprise at her nice but mousy boss. “Do you think I could join the society, really?” he said.

“I’ll let Richard know of your interest,” Margaret said formally, and returned to a pile of questionable mortgage applications.

At home, he’d mentioned it casually. Katherine was still busy with the little one, who was only three, and barely registered the information. It was a few months later he worked out that somehow she’d thought it was part of his Wednesday-night gardening club. How could she have got that impression? The misapprehension had only become clear when he’d wondered out loud whether Daniel might like to join in at the society’s big re-creation in the spring, to boost numbers.

“Some sort of flower show?” Katherine said, and he’d explained about the battle of Naseby, and quickly discovered he had to go back to the beginning and explain what he’d been doing every Tuesday night. He thought then that it wouldn’t be difficult to have an affair behind Katherine’s back, if she showed so little curiosity in his doings. He had no candidate in mind: it was an instant, disappointing thought, what he could get away with, when there was nothing he wanted to get away from.

He loved the society. He’d always been interested in that sort of thing, but he kept his collection of books about the Afghan wars, the Zulu wars, the wars in the Sudan and the Boer wars upstairs in his study. When they’d moved into the house in 1969, at a preferential mortgage rate, the two things he’d liked about it on seeing it were the south-facing garden, well sheltered (the abundance of rocks in the soil he wouldn’t find out about till later) and the decent-sized fifth bedroom. With Tim only a serious toddler, his face usually screwed up in concentration and hardly needing a room of his own yet, Malcolm and Katherine hadn’t quite realized their different plans for the house. For her, it was what she wanted, some sort of guarantee of gentility, a spare bedroom, more than you needed so that you could ask people to stay overnight or for the weekend. (Who, though?) Malcolm saw it as a study, even, he said pretentiously to himself, a
library
. In their previous house, his growing collection of books had been kept, forbiddingly, in the hallway or in a dark wood-effect case, vying for space in their bedroom with Tim’s small bed. A temporary measure, like Tim sleeping in his parents’ room. In the new house, another bookcase joined those two, but upstairs, in the fifth room, and it had become a collection. With the discussions and recommendations from the group, the third bookcase filled up too. Not just with library books and paperbacks. He was doing well at work, and the accidental
third child hardly seemed to make any difference to any of their standing arrangements, despite what they’d feared. They weren’t the sort of people for expensive foreign holidays; he found himself buying new, expensive hard-backed books on a whim, not always ones about his main interests in life.

Daniel agreed to take part in the first re-creation, though not quite as readily as Malcolm might have liked. Malcolm couldn’t have asked Katherine or Jane if they’d like to put a cavalier’s breastplate on. Anyway, someone had to look after Tim, but they would all come and watch. At the meeting the week before, all the extras, the schoolchildren, wives, colleagues, relations, crowded into the school hall. There was a festive atmosphere, and the usual members of the society stood at the front, like a gathering of officers before their troops. He felt bold and self-confident, but also self-aware—Daniel was in the front row, chatting happily to someone’s daughter. The room smelt of old cheese, and of dust burning on an element, and piled-up black-out curtains left to moulder in corners. Malcolm wasn’t expected to say anything, but he felt nervously self-conscious just the same.

Prince Rupert gathers his forty men on the ridge, the other side of Burbage Rocks, beyond the car park; they line up. Their broom-handles, their silver-painted trilbies glitter in the morning sun. The picnickers can see the royal forces, shuffling themselves into line like a pack of cards, shambling about each other on the top of the ridge, a fine defensive position. (Unless the enemy approaches from the back, over the bridge and up the A-road.) Finally, the magnificent army, forty of them, the flower of divine-right chivalry, mostly made up of other men’s wives, is inspected by a chemistry teacher. Prince Rupert’s thin voice, exhausted by years of yelling at third years about Bunsen burners, drifts across the purple-tufted flank of the moor, across the pleasant noise of the brook, to where the civilians, men, women and helpless children dip their boiled eggs into little heaps of salt in silver foil.

But on the other side, just beyond the brook and the picnicking spot, Thomas Fairfax is drilling his fifty troops. The sympathies of the crowd are already enlisted, and Sir Thomas Fairfax, as he got out of his red Cortina in the car park, silver-sprayed cricket pads and squat silver helmet in hand, was surprised to be booed, at very short range, by two well-briefed chemistry pupils. Now, the parliamentarians, mostly faithful attenders of the society, form themselves into tiny battalions. Over the small rise now comes Cromwell and his thirteen thousand
troops, marching in close step; all twenty are grudgingly applauded by the onlookers on their tartan rugs, the faint noise muffled by their holding pork pies, slices of quiche, bags of Quavers and raspberry yoghurts, and soon carried away by the wind. Even from here, you can see their grim-faced determination. They are just by the A-road, the two forces conspicuous on their elevations though separated by the little brook, and the battle is about to begin.

Earl Margaret has the whistle, and is the designated instigator of the hostilities. She scrambles down the heather to a sort of mid-point, raises her whistle, does a little curtsy-cum-courtly bow to both sides, and then to the spectators, who are greatly enjoying all this. But before she can blow it, from the road behind comes a furious hooting and a shriek of brakes. A driver in his car has seen the first stages of 14 June 1645 as he descended the rise, and, open-mouthed and inattentive, has wandered on to the wrong side of the road, clipping the wing of a white Mini going in the opposite direction. Everyone, even the soldiers, abandons their position and runs over to see what has happened; Sir Thomas Fairfax remarks to Prince Rupert, as they stand and enjoy the furious altercation between the drivers, that it might not have been a very good idea to mount this event within such close sight of an A-road. “It’s all about convenience,” Prince Rupert says. “We had this out, we decided it was as well to have it close enough to the car park that we’d not be clambering over miles of moorland before we could start. There was the question of the toilet arrangements, too. It’s quite handy here.”

Now Earl Margaret does blow the whistle, and the battle begins. Fairfax’s men begin to file along the top of the ridge, perhaps overdoing the head-hung exhaustion. After five minutes, Prince Rupert’s men—Earl Margaret having rejoined them—mount an attack. Some of the lady royalists break ranks, running down the hill waving their broom-handles and dustbin-lids about their flowing locks like cavemen, uttering very uncourtly yelps and howls, and have to be called back by means of Prince Rupert’s rude and blunt-vowelled commands. He wishes he, too, had brought a whistle.

They cross the brook, some treading across delicately on the stepping stones, even queuing politely, others flinging themselves heartily into the stream with warlike shrieks, and when they are all over, mount a charge on Fairfax’s cavalry. There are no horses, and, after long discussion, there are no indications of horses, either. “I’m not standing there with a sodding hobby-horse between my legs,” was the general
view in the society’s meetings, and you just have to know that the ten at the back are Fairfax’s cavalry. They wheel and retreat, to the spattering applause, like rain on this sunny day, of the onlookers. “Who’s that meant to be, then?” the newly arrived driver asks his hosts—it turns out he didn’t know there ever was a civil war in England, even, and everything has to be explained from scratch. They all explain from scratch, even the seven-year-old. The royalist cavalry has been routed, and the infantry (six of them) soon follow, stumbling away across the moor. One of Fairfax’s men is killed, pinned violently to the moor with a pike, stabbed again and again. This is the first death—they thought they’d just have the one at this stage—and everyone applauds as the first casualty milks his scene, rising up three times before succumbing. He stands up, once thoroughly killed, and bows to everyone, left, right, centre, to general amusement and gratification.

But already the Fairfax forces have summoned aid, and over the hill, just like a Western, the car-driver remarks, come Cromwell and his men. They’ve been drilled better, and advance in a grim silence, their pikes held out straight. The royalists re-form into battalions, and finally the two armies engage.

The whole thing comes briefly to a halt, with the arrival of the photographer/journalist from the
Star
, who had promised good coverage in the paper but had got the starting time wrong, and then it resumes; they all chase about for ten minutes, and finally return to a position in front of the spectators, where the royalists are ceremoniously killed with bayonets, broom-handles, pikes, most of them for the fourth or fifth time now. The spectators applaud; the dead stand up; they all bow.

Afterwards, the state of his marriage was clear to Malcolm. Other families came along and cheered and joined in; were interested. It had never occurred to him that Katherine might show an interest, and he put her next to the other sorts of wives, the ones who turned up rarely, if at all, the ones who made carping comments, complained about the cold, or ignored their husbands’ interest. Ed’s wife was like that, by his account, thought the whole thing such a waste of time and money (you could see her, pink candlewick bedspread drawn up to her cold-creamed face, sour eyes watching and nagging), and Ed had been driven to ask Malcolm seriously if he could open a building-society account for his small club and warfare expenditure, all correspondence going to some other designated address. Malcolm couldn’t help him,
and things weren’t as bad as that in his own household. Amused tolerance was about as strong as it got.

On the other hand, there were women like his secretary Margaret, Richard Thwaite’s wife, who’d thrown herself into it heart and soul, and obviously had the whale of a time, marching up and down the roped-in irregulars, shouting “Give me a B … (B!), give me a U … (U!),” until the picnicking onlookers laid down their hard-boiled eggs and clapped along with her bugger-chant.