‘Where is that?’
Dulcie gestured behind her. ‘Just up the hill there. The big farm at the top of the land is Frank’s. You’ll have passed it on the way in. Wait here a minute.’
She rooted around in a drawer in the parlour and returned with a large bunch of keys.
‘Let’s take the Citroën. You’ll have to fetch it, though, I’m afraid. It’s the one that is the colour of a bruised aubergine. Or at least it was the last time I looked. One of these keys will do the job.’
‘Won’t the farmer mind?’
‘Mind? It’s my bloody car and he gets a nice wedge of rent to spend on pig feed and gumboots, don’t you worry.’
‘But what if he thinks I’m stealing it and shoots me?’
‘You have the keys, don’t you?’
‘What if he thinks I’ve burgled your house and taken them?’
‘You wouldn’t do that. You’re a good lad.’
‘He doesn’t know that.’
‘I admire your active imagination but Frank Storm won’t care. Trust me. His place is up top. You can’t miss it – just follow the smell and then head out back to where the barns are. I believe the Citroën is in the left-hand one. Just have a poke about. On a nice day like this Frank will be out and about anyway: he owns damn near all the way down to Whitby. Take Butler if you’re bothered. He can vouch for you.’
‘There’s just one problem, Dulcie.’
She sighed. ‘Yes?’
‘I can’t drive.’
‘Can’t drive? You barely even have to.’
‘But I can’t drive at all.’
‘Can anyone really drive?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Robert, honestly. It’s only two hundred yards away, and it’s all downhill. Just take the handbrake off and let it roll down of its own momentum. Plain sailing. All you have to do is steer it around a couple of gentle corners and toot the horn on occasion. Oh, and brake when necessary.’
‘But which pedal is the brake?’
‘It’s the right-hand one. Or maybe it’s in the middle. Oh, you’ll work it out. There’s barely a soul about.’ She could see my hesitation. ‘Are you fearful?’
‘No,’ I said, defiantly. ‘I’m not scared, me.’
‘Good. You fetch the Citroën and I’ll fix us a pack-up. Ten minutes will give me just enough time to make a coleslaw to go with the chicken drummers I roasted last night. And a bloody good job I did too. I’d better select a good bottle as well. Or as good as I can muster from my waning batch, anyway. And remember to take the hound – he’s a dab old hand at steering. He’ll see you right.’
The car hopped forward as if it had a tank full of rabbits when I turned the engine over. It coughed once and then twice, and then kicked into life with a rusty splutter. Though it was a beautifully designed and desirable vehicle, Dulcie’s Citroën showed clear signs of suffering from neglect, with spots of rust speckling its sleek flanks and a patina of algae slowly spreading around the rubber seal of the window frames. The wax sheen of its exterior was etched with scuffs and scratches, and a spider had spun an elaborate web in the corner of the windscreen’s interior.
A marvellous array of dials sat before me.
I knew that a car was operated by gears so with some force I pushed the stick into first, where it made a guttural, grinding noise, and then I worked the pedals until I found that by pressing one and releasing the other the car hopped forward again. Then the engine went dead. The car peeked from the barn’s entrance by about three inches.
I started it up and nudged forward again, smoother this time, the cold hard tyres crunching across warm gravel, then slowly turned the large wheel to steer this mass of metal and leather through Frank Storm’s farmyard.
I was driving, very slowly.
But I was nonetheless driving.
As I dipped through divots in the ground and gripped the wheel too tightly, I pushed open the window. A well-fed cat with green eyes appeared from an adjacent barn to walk alongside the car for a few moments, but it soon got bored as it overtook me and then cut across my path.
‘Haven’t had a single lesson,’ I called after it. It momentarily turned to cast me a withering look of disdain that is solely the preserve of the semi-feral farm cat. ‘Not one,’ I added.
The car rolled out of the yard and I turned into the road and let gravity take over. As Dulcie had remarked, it was all down a fairly steep hill and even in first gear I started to pick up a decent pace. This driving lark was easy. As easy as licking monkey’s blood syrup from an ice cream. I let one hand dangle out of the window and wiggled my fingers in the breeze.
It was a feeling of complete, unfettered freedom.
Something shot across the road, low and dark, from the cover of one earthen bankside to the other. It was low-scuttling but fast-moving – a stoat or a weasel, perhaps. Was there a difference? I slammed on the brakes without knowing which pedal exactly operated the brakes. Instead the car lurched forward with a growl like a sleeping dog poked with a stick, and then a louder, more urgent roar that saw the pointers on several of the dials jump in unison, and in my panic I overcompensated with the wheel, veering first one way and then the other to briefly mount the grassy verge, where, for a long, lingering second, it felt as if I might tip the car over entirely. Somehow I got back on course, though, and the road wound downwards, carving around tight bends that I took with ease. I was gliding now, the towering ancient hedgerows flashing by in a blur with snatched glimpses through the gateway gaps at the fields that lay behind them, then suddenly the left turn into Dulcie’s dead-end lane was upon me. I bore down and took it tight without braking.
The smooth tarmac gave way to the rough dirt track full of ruts and dried-up puddle holes. I leaned to one side as the car fishtailed in the dust, a billowing plume behind me as I bounced and crashed down the track. The spider’s web vibrated and the glove compartment fell open, spilling a mess of empty cigarette packets, a pair of gloves and a half-drunk bottle of spirits onto the floor. I slapped the wheel with my hot palms, exhilarated. The end of the lane and the meadow were fast approaching so I hit one pedal and nothing happened. I tried another and the car accelerated. I tried the third, hard, and it slammed the car to a standstill right outside the cottage at the precise moment that Dulcie casually stepped out of the back door, sporting a racing-green-coloured cape that draped down to just an inch or two above the settling dust. It was fastened across her breast by a large pin decorated with what appeared to be the eye from a peacock’s plumage.
I had stalled again. The engine was dead.
‘Ah,’ said Dulcie. ‘Excellent.’
I was still in first gear.
With Butler and an oversized hamper strapped in the back, Dulcie drove us extremely slowly – though not as slowly as I had – up the steep single road that led inland, away from the bay. All the windows were wound down to clear the car of its decidedly musty odour.
‘We’ll head for the moors while I get my bearings,’ she said, hunched over the wheel as she tried various switches and levers. ‘Now, my eyes would shame a myopic mole so what I want you to do, Robert, is shout up if you see me drifting across the road. Shout loudly. Will you do that?’
We rose up out of the lower lands and, as we crested a steep peak in the road, without warning Dulcie suddenly accelerated and I felt the omelette leap in my stomach.
‘The knack is back,’ she shouted over the roar of the engine and the wind. She accelerated again. ‘I think I should like to see the moors in full summer bloom.’
The road levelled out and took us through miles of moorland billowing in all directions, and we dipped and bounced over undulations and potholes. The dog stuck his head out of the window, his tongue and ears flapping and his lips peeling back to give the impression of a smile.
‘This a Citroën Traction Avant,’ she shouted, ‘which translates as “front-wheel drive”, though in France they call it Reine de la Route. “Queen of the Road”. I rather li
ke that.’
‘How old is it?’
‘It was one of the first models off the production line – 1934.’
‘Did you know Romy then?’
‘Only just. Would you believe it if I told you that we met that very day, and she helped me pick it out? It’s true. We were drunk and she was very persuasive. The salesman couldn’t believe his luck. He was so grateful for his first sale that he gave me free driving gloves and a bottle of fake champagne, which tasted like horse piss but we had finished it by the time we got home nonetheless.’
Here the road forked and at the very last moment Dulcie jerked the car to the right, and all contents that weren’t strapped down slid in the opposite direction.
Soon we were driving down into the village of Grosmont, but Dulcie did not slow, not for a moment, and in a shot we had left it behind and just a few minutes later were speeding through Goathland with a honk of the horn that disturbed the stillness of the village green, and a man stepped out of the post office to stare, agog, as if we were at the helm of an invading Panzer rather than a mud-splattered, sleek-looking Citroën driven by a waving, whooping tall lady and a dog happily trailing long strings of drool the length of the village.
In time we entered trees and twice Dulcie pointed and shouted, but her words were lost in the noise of movement, and though I was slightly afraid that she might crash the car I did my best not to show it. The stench of petrol was strong as we drove deep into the thick forest where pines towered and loomed on either side, and I caught glimpses between the columns of timber of cool, dry clearings carpeted with the thick weft of dead needles upon which shafts of sunlight fell, and occasionally there were fleeting gaps in which road signs pointed to tiny villages where woodsmen lived and worked.
The trees ended and a back road took us into a town that was busy with people on market day, and Dulcie was forced to slow. She leaned in close and shouted in an unnecessarily loud voice, ‘Pickering: full of crusty old duffers, best press on’, and she floored the car again, accelerating at such speed that several cars pulled over to let us past or slowed in order to remonstrate, their drivers angrily waving their fists.
Signs for other places flashed by.
Kirby Misperton. Amotherby.
Scagglethorpe. Brawby.
We skirted the town of Malton and then a few minutes later Dulcie finally slowed and took a right turn onto a long road that appeared impossibly straight, and which ran like a ribbon into the heart of a great private country estate. We passed beneath the arches of an ornate gatehouse, followed the road to an obelisk on a roundabout, and then turned right again onto a drive that led to the biggest house I had ever seen, perhaps the biggest in Britain, a beautiful sprawling palace of stone with a huge domed roof and wings running off to either side, and walled gardens, and acre upon acre of green lawns leading down to a lake.
‘Well, now,’ said Dulcie. ‘Not a bad little pile.’
Everywhere I looked there was opulence and architectural grandeur designed to evoke feelings of such awe and wonder that it forced me to reconsider my sense of perspective.
‘Where are we?’
‘Castle Howard, domicile of the Howard family since the first foundations were dug in 1699, though of course it is rather ostentatious to call it a castle when it is, in fact, merely a very large stately house – though, granted, an ambitious effort that incorporates several different styles: a bit of baroque here, a touch of Palladian over there.’
‘Do people live here?’
‘Certainly.’
‘In all that space?’
‘In all that space.’
Dulcie pulled off the road and steered us down onto the vast lawn. She turned off the engine and when the car rolled to a stop she got out. Butler jumped out beside her.
‘A fine spot for a snack, I’d say.’
I climbed out and looked at the tyre tracks we had left across the pristine grass.
‘Do you know the owners?’ I asked.
‘No. Should I?’
‘I just thought it might be a bit odd for them to find some strangers pitching up in their garden.’
‘Like you pitching up in my garden, you mean?’
I realised she had me there, and could offer no reply.
‘Come on and help me with this,’ she said as she cast her cape aside and unfolded a tartan picnic rug.
Dulcie drove with less urgency on the return journey. Nips from a hip flask containing a liquid that gave her teeth a deep red tint, along with the food and the excitement of the drive down, had combined to make her somewhat lethargic as we headed east this time, leaving the Howardian Hills.
We bypassed Malton once more and took the Scarborough road across the Vale of Pickering through mile upon mile of open countryside whose vast open spaces were punctuated by numerous small villages, many of them split between East and West or Lower and Upper, in which there were family lines that had barely strayed beyond these small communities where farming was the main occupation and where there was little work to be had that didn’t concern agriculture. Others bore the names of past cultures – of further Viking settlements established by raiding parties: Staxton, Flixton – the language of the land joining to create a narrative through shifting epochs and changing rulers. Yet for those who tilled and turned the soil, and harvested the land’s bounty at summer’s end, here life had stayed relatively constant for centuries, with existence spare and closely tied to the changing seasons.
All around us war had left a stain, and the shape of rural life was changing. Rationing had created an appetite that was proving to be insatiable and farm plots were being bought up and reconfigured for mass production. Hunger rather than conflict was the great fear now. The days of the simple ox and the plough that my father had spoken of were long over.
We drove through the suburban fringes of Scarborough, gliding down side streets of tall town houses advertising vacancies, and after catching fleeting views of the early evening sea, drove inland and back up onto the moors, for no one had seen fit to lay a road on this wild stretch of prehistoric coastline that led back to a bay whose appeal was in its isolation, accessible as it was only by those strong in thigh, sturdy of boat or keen in wonder.
As she drove, Dulcie’s chin slumped ever closer to the steering wheel and twice I loudly instigated conversation to ensure that she was awake, and each time she turned her head and looked at me as if I were a stranger, confused and bleary-eyed as if pulled back from the precipice of a deep sleep.
She spoke little, and her demeanour was one of deflation.
The dog detected as much and by the time we pulled down the narrow uneven lane that led to her cottage he was licking at Dulcie Piper’s earlobe from the back seat. She parked the car haphazardly and left Butler and me to our own devices as she sullenly headed into the house without a word.
IX
I didn’t swim that evening. Instead I spent the night with the verses of John Clare. Of all the poems that Dulcie had impressed upon me, his were the ones with which I felt the greatest affinity. Some of his work – those pieces that documented his wanderings down the lanes and across the fields of England, observing the seasons, working, pursuing freedom – was like a mirror held up to my own life. Until then I hadn’t realised that there existed such poets who laboured on the land and wrote down what they saw and felt, what they smelled and tasted and heard.
Up until that summer, poetry had been a secret code spoken only by toffs, as mystifying as the Latin they seemed so fond of quoting. It had been just one more way of keeping the working men and women in their place, a locked-out world of lives never to be lived by the likes of me. Poetry had been a way of complicating the simple.
Yet I now found that secret universe opening up to me a little more each night through poems read in the studio, and nowhere more so than in the words of John Clare, agricultural worker and prophet of the soil, written more than century earlier. The strength of feeling he conveyed was almost overwhelming and I
especially returned to one work, an epic in miniature called ‘The Flitting’, which resonated deeply and which I attempted to memorise in substantial chunks of rhyming verse. This breathless display of microcosmic poetic cartography – of rabbit tracks and molehills, hawthorn hedges and orchard floors, of nightingales and crooked stiles – was one that I too was experiencing. Clare was a new friend and confidant, a spirit guide and voice of comfort in the lamplit shadows of this creaking shelter.
And still each night I thought of the girls on the beach. No matter how much physical labour or swimming I had done during the day, they distracted me to the point of insomnia.
My head whirled and my fizzy blood swirled and popped in my ears as I lay back and thought of their thighs and their flat stomachs. I thought of the backs of their knees, their nostrils and the wrinkles of their elbows. I wondered how their hair must smell when it was wet and how often they cut their toenails. I thought of whether they put sugar in their tea and what their armpits looked like and the different ways in which they walked on the wet sand and whether they had tasted lobster and collected fossils or coloured their hair or read John Clare.
And I wondered what thoughts kept them awake at night.
This preoccupation with the girls of the bay made me want to learn to write so that I could compose poems to all of them and then leave those poems folded into cracks in the rocks for the tide to take, the ink washing free of the paper, the paper slowly mashing to a pulp, the pulp joining all the other decaying matter in the great slate-grey soup, and then – and only then – would I have the courage to tell them that they were the subjects of great poems, but to read those poems they must learn to read the sea. Then, hearing these words, and understanding my honest intentions, and recognising the poetry of such a romantic gesture, perhaps then they would fall for me entirely.
But until that day came I continued to lie in the dark on the creaking floorboards with the night wrapped around me and my legs restlessly twitching with desire; I felt a sort of illiterate emotional helplessness over the impossibility of any of this ever happening. These outcomes existed only in the white-burning pit of my sunstroked imagination, and in the morning I awoke, itching, sweaty and encrusted to the coarse wool of my blankets.
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