The best of our town lies behind his cottage. The land sweeps upwards in a velvet swathe, circling high above the buildings like a vivid green ruff. Braxman’s Ridge at the top. It’s all farms up there: sheep, horses, a few head of cattle. Good land. Wealthy people, if they’d ever sell, which they don’t. Occasionally, when I was doing deliveries, I’d spot Mr Gregory from one of the back paddocks, stalking along the cliff path cut deep by a thousand years of walkers. The Atlantic breezes, close to pleasant in summer, would make his hair stand upright before patting it down with a slap.
From the top of the ridge, you can look back at the whole town, curled out of the wind like a sleeping cat. Ahead, there’s a vast expanse of sea.
There’s a seat at the highest point, an old metal bench. Long ago one of the legs worked itself free from its rusty shackle. It arches backwards, as if trying to step away from the hypnotising drop. Mr Gregory would sit there.
If other locals arrived, they’d recognise his dark coat and the beige curve of his hair, but they would not join him on the bench. Beside the man who never looked down, there seemed no space at all.
It was a Tuesday. I was in the new van. Justin usually did the afternoon farm run in the noisy blue bomb, but he’d backed into Grumpy Hedley’s gate while gawping at his daughter, and we had to use the new one. Or I did. Justin still had whiplash, the fool.
The new van normally sat outside the shop, looking spruce in dark green and white. Webster’s Saddlery and Produce. A large horse’s head was painted on one side, an unnatural look in its flattened eye.
I didn’t expect to see Mr Gregory. He didn’t drive and, except for the cliff path, I never saw him out of town. He was heading downhill. I knew it was him, even from the back. It was the walk. Not exactly a goosestep but pronounced, jerky. Boys at school used to copy it, tucked in behind him on his way to class, the others sniggering.
Just as I passed him, I heard a single, loud shout. When I looked back, there was nothing. I turned in Grumpy’s lower field and drove back up the road. Mr Gregory was lying motionless, pressed hard into a leafy hedge like an insect pinned to a board. He didn’t seem conscious. I wasn’t sure if he was alive.
‘I’m fine,’ he called, after a long silence.
I pulled up the van and ran across to him, words already clumping in my throat. I got my name out in something close to a shout. The rest was lost in stony mouthfuls of my usual hesitation.
‘Oh, Peter, it’s you,’ Mr Gregory said, quite jovially, as if he’d just met me in Jury’s Cafe.
He’d opened his eyes but hadn’t moved. His nostrils, flaring pink, seemed to float above the bland ivory of his face.
‘I’m alright, really. Just a slip,’ he said.
I didn’t trust myself with any more speech, so I looked for a dry foothold to help pull him up. Mr Gregory regarded me with a teacher’s appraising look.
‘Fenton, isn’t it? Peter Fenton. I taught your brother. How is he?’
While he tested his limbs in small, balletic movements, I told him about Justin. How we’d both been at the saddlery since leaving St Bart’s. Me first, Justin two years later. How we liked the work, dealing with the animals.
‘Very good,’ Mr Gregory said. He didn’t seem to notice my stop-start sentences. He insisted he was completely unharmed, although his chin was badly scratched. I let him dust himself off. It didn’t seem right to touch him.
‘Can I drop you home, sir?’
Mr Gregory looked doubtfully at the van with its smirking horse’s head, but he climbed in and we shot down Braxman’s Hill and onto our road.
‘You know I’m at the other end,’ he said, into the embarrassed space that lay between us as we passed my house. We both glanced at the sagging roof, despite ourselves.
‘I hope your mother is better now, Peter,’ he said, without turning his head.
I could feel my words gathering in ragged formation. I nodded while I calmed myself; the old ruse. We thumped against the new speed bumps.
‘Excellent,’ Mr Gregory said, as if I’d just given him a full account of my family history. ‘Well, it’s been quite a day, Fenton,’ he said.
A concrete path led to his front door, its edges lined with small, round stones, sunk halfway like rivets on a battleship. Mr Gregory unfolded his long legs and stepped out of the van. After shutting the door, he turned and squinted through the window.
‘Will you come for a light tea, Peter? So I can thank you properly. Bring your brother. It would be nice to see Justin again. Thursday? Six? Excellent.’
He was gone. There’d been no time to answer. Justin had until Thursday to be out of that damn neck brace.
A light tea. I told Peter I wasn’t going. No way. But my brother has a certain look that he gives me, without saying a word – and suddenly there I am, doing what he wants. We went along on the Thursday evening, me walking in behind him, glowering, my neck still throbbing. We both felt a bit awkward because Mr Gregory was still a teacher to us. History. Special subject: the War in the Pacific. We called him Greggers at school. He wasn’t too strict, not mean like some of the psychos. He was a bit of a clean freak. He kept a bright blue cloth in his briefcase to wipe down his desk. He’d swoop it across the wood like an exotic bird before folding it carefully and pushing it into one of his bag’s leather pockets. He kept to himself but everyone respected him. There was something untouchable about Mr Gregory.
He never taught Peter, who left St Bart’s just after Dad was killed. It was supposed to be his last year of school. Things hadn’t been going well for him, and his speech problems were getting worse. When Dad ploughed his new Harley into the railway bridge, Peter just fell apart. We all did, but Peter was the worst.
Old Charlie Webster took us under his wing. He’d known Mum for years – some connection with horses, way back. He offered Peter a job at the saddlery. Grandma kept saying it was a shame to see him leaving school early to go and work in a shop. Mum eventually snapped, shrieking that if Grandma hadn’t pandered to her son’s every whim, he wouldn’t have been off making a fool of himself on a motorbike, leaving his family flat broke. Grandma took to quilting after that. Kept to her room.
Peter loved the saddlery. Dealing with horses calmed him. His stammering almost disappeared, except when that insufferable polo bunch came in, or when Grumpy’s daughter, Lucy, came to see him. I used to fancy her myself. That’s how I nearly broke my neck up at their farm, gawping at her while I was reversing. Two weeks in a neck brace was a high price to pay. She wasn’t interested in me.
Hard to believe it, but we enjoyed that first trip to Mr Gregory’s house. Mum had worried that he might be a bit strange, but it was fine. He was kind, and interesting to talk to. We told him about Dad, and all that came after that.
And it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Sometimes, he could be quite funny. Well, witty. Clever. You wouldn’t see it coming.
We always sat in the long sitting room. Mr Gregory usually had a fire burning, often well into summer. He liked the heat. There were three walls of ancient books in dark covers with a small, framed photo here and there. One picture looked like Mr Gregory as a young child, grasshopper legs in white lawn shorts, squinting into a bright sea.
There was always tea, properly brewed. Thin china cups with deep saucers. He taught us chess but we were both hopeless, sullying his beautiful wooden set with our clumsy moves. Mostly, we just talked, leaning into the hard-backed chairs, the brown leather creaking.
The room was painted an odd colour: a kind of dark orange. Above the fireplace, three model cars were parked in a neat line on the mantelpiece. Boyhood toys, I thought, given pride of place in a lonely man’s front room.
He told us about his time in the Pacific. At school, he’d stuck to the facts pretty dryly, but when he finally talked about the horrific years he spent in a prisoner-of-war camp, we thought it was a shame that he couldn’t spea
k of it as a teacher. There was a lot that he could not say.
We’d been calling on and off for over a year before he told us – eyes fixed on the model cars – what happened to his father. But the thing he kept from us the longest was what was happening to him.
‘Liver, Fenton. Worst one of the lot. Typical. A legacy of the camp, they tell me. Going to get painful. Nothing to be done, of course. Too late for any treatment.’
That’s how he told me. Just me. He wanted to protect Peter as long as possible from his own soft heart, from his tangle of words.
‘Check the back gate for me, Peter, would you?’ Mr Gregory had said. He had a morbid fear of vandals. We watched from the kitchen window as my brother made his way across the damp grass.
‘I’m dying, Justin,’ Mr Gregory said, without turning his head. ‘I need your help.’
At the end of the garden, Peter gave us a thumbs-up sign. Mr Gregory raised his teacup to him. As I watched Peter walk towards us, I knew I was trapped. I wanted to run from that cottage, from the town, from everything that kept me here, protecting other people.
But I had to deal with it, the younger brother. Shield Peter, as I’ve always done. He’d got overly fond of Mr Gregory, and he wasn’t going to take another loss well. I’d borne the full weight of Dad’s death. Not Mum, not Peter. I identified Dad’s body. I was just eighteen. Old enough, it turns out, to see your father lying dead with half his face staved in, the roots of his teeth showing on one side.
I was just a boy. It was too much to ask.
I think there’s a time, in all bad things, when you wonder how it came to this. How a person who wanted a plain life, a plain-spoken life, could be here, at this terrible moment.
It was raining.
There was wind, of course, but the rain was a surprise; it had been dry for weeks. That was part of the plan: dry earth, no slips, no footprints. There was more light than we imagined.
We walked up in single file, keeping close to the seam of trees. Justin went first, then me. Mr Gregory followed behind, head bowed, legs working hard. We didn’t speak.
Speed. That’s what we needed. ‘No silly nonsense,’ he’d insisted at our final meeting. ‘It’s in everyone’s interest for it to be quick.’
We stopped just before the metal bench and let Mr Gregory pass, as planned. He sat for a long time, staring ahead. We watched his back. A hank of his hair, caught by the wind, flapped to the wrong side of his head. I wanted to step forward and tidy the ungainly strands. Make it right for him.
But we did not move. There was a thin shrieking in my ears that I first thought was the wind, but this is how horror sounds. The worst part of it is the waiting.
Mr Gregory stood up. That was the sign.
The rain had slowed to the lightest mist. He made his way to the edge with unbearable slowness. It was not fear, I felt quite sure, but pain.
Close to the chosen point, his feet skidded, halting abruptly on a craggy tuft of wind-hardened grass.
I did not look at Justin. I could hear him breathing hard, above the wind, above the shrieking in my head.
Mr Gregory had thought of everything. We were to check no one was watching, then walk down just to the right of where he stood, where the last remnants of an ancient stone wall still clutched at the rocky edge. He would not look at us, even though we were approaching almost from the side. His right hand was up, palm facing out to sea.
I thought of the painting in the refectory at school: The Light of the World. William Holman Hunt. The fish pie on Fridays. The smell of boiled potatoes in the corridors. We ate under that picture. Had to write an essay about it. Did you know that the model for Jesus was a girl?
The rain stopped. The sea was crashing onto the rocks below. Mr Gregory lowered his hand. We did not move.
Justin pushed past me, rough and grunting. The earth came up. Tiny stones pressed into my face, cutting it with cruel, pointed teeth.
We painted out Charlie Webster’s name and the smirking horse on the new van. A pair of backpackers bought the old blue bomb. We watched it groan up Braxman’s Hill and out of our lives.
Funny how we still call it the new van; like us, it’s getting on now. We’ll need to repaint it again soon, retrace the fine lettering: Fenton’s Produce and Saddlery. Peter will do it. He has a steady hand, these days.
Old Charlie sold the place to us when he retired. He still comes in to chat to the customers and berate us for what he calls our spendthrift ways. He and Mum still see each other, but she sticks to her old house and keeps him at a friendly distance. We did up the place for her, fixed the kitchen and the roof. She’s happy there.
I’m just up the road if she needs me. The little cottage with the stones studded along its front path. It looks the same today, except we built on a room at the back when the babies were born. Mr Gregory’s chair is still in the orange sitting room. Dark apricot, I’m told it’s called. We had the chair re-upholstered. I never sit in it.
It was always going to be me. I see that now.
Who would have thought practicality could be such a deadly characteristic? Mr Gregory was a practical man. He found out he was dying when he was still at St Bart’s, in my last year of school. The holidays he claimed he spent with his sister in Glasgow turned out to be multiple surgeries. Treatment, after all. But the cancer was unstoppable. Years as a POW taught him to gauge just how much his body could take. He timed it to perfection. But he could not act alone.
The Gregory family did not have a good war. Mr Gregory’s father narrowly escaped the beheadings that came to most of his platoon. After the surrender of the Japanese, the family was reunited. They began again, apparently intact. But they were each disintegrating in their own reserved way, his father most of all.
‘We thought they’d attack by sea,’ Mr Gregory told me. ‘That was the disaster.’ No one dreamed that the Japanese would slash their way to Singapore through supposedly impenetrable jungle.
Years later, safe in their English house, his father hanged himself above his workbench. Mr Gregory, then a teenager, found him dangling above the toy cars he’d worked on to calm his mind. His mother buckled at the horror that came to her, at last, in an unremarkable red-brick street. She became obsessed with suicide, convinced that her son was planning it, the neighbours, the teachers, the Welsh woman at the library.
One hard winter she was found in her nightdress, beating on the door of the post office, convinced someone inside needed saving. On her deathbed, in a delirium of cancer and morphine, she begged her son never to do it.
And he could not. Fearless as he was, he would not go to the edge and jump. Nor could he bear the last horrors of an illness that had taken his mother before him. He needed someone practical. Someone like him, only young and strong. Someone already damaged enough to push a man off a cliff in cold blood. Someone who wouldn’t flinch when his brother, finally knowing the plan, scattered the chess pieces across the table and sobbed like a lost child. Someone like me.
Mr Gregory did not fall on Braxman’s Hill that first day. He had been waiting for me. Waiting for the sound of the old van, and the broken boy within it. He almost missed it, not listening for a new van, not bargaining on the fact that his saviour and killer was at home watching television in a neck brace.
Like us all, he did not bargain on complication. He did not expect to find a tongue-tied boy, an innocent, who could never, no matter what, push a man in the back and topple him over a cliff.
But a practical man thinks on his feet, and Mr Gregory saw, quickly enough, that the route to me was through Peter. It was a long game. I did not see it coming.
The return was good, you might say. Mr Gregory left a surprisingly large amount of money, for a teacher. He made sure the cottage went to me. He knew it would be me, in the end, up there on the cliff. The house is a comfortable place, and my wife, who thinks a practical man is a wond
rous thing, loves its cosy rooms, its solid, dependable walls.
There were no suspicious circumstances. He’d left everything in order: a letter on the mantelpiece, tucked behind the cars, a copy posted to his solicitor. To Peter and Justin Fenton, for their kindness in my final, difficult years.
His older sister, whose existence we’d privately questioned, arrived on the overnight train that very day, as invited. We came for lunch, as instructed, to find an old woman with the same flared nose, holiday baggage slumped on the cottage path. Together we stirred our tea in his good cups as the search helicopter was buffeted along the sea’s edge high above us.
She read at the funeral, her voice confident in her dead brother’s draughty school chapel. She spoke of the family’s suffering, how the English boarding school she’d dreaded had saved her from a similar fate. It was a dignified ceremony. Father Morrison talked a lot about mercy.
And life goes on.
Peter is a good businessman. Together we’ve built the saddlery into a thriving concern. The local newspaper covered his wedding last year.
I walk a bit now, to keep fit, to clear my head. The same deep path takes me up to the ridge; the same wind tugs at my sleeves. The bench has never been repaired: one gangling leg still threatens escape.
Sometimes, not often, I sit there.
On certain days, the days when I feel anger rising, that broken seat feels crowded, as if all the drowned ghosts have joined me to mourn what can’t be undone. What can’t be saved. They flit in the clean space before me, riding the thermals like glinting sea birds. They’re beautiful. Mesmerising.
I wish they would carry away the touch of dark gaberdine. How smooth it was. Of a thin, hard spine beneath, yielding.
The water thunders far below. I never look down.
Thirty Years
They marry on a day of bountiful omens. A poltergeist wind harries the car, crashes the door shut on his hand. She wears a dress bequeathed by his mother. In an overheated room, they dance. The bridesmaids, slick in lilac upholstery, pull in their stomachs and hope for better. Her aunt, narrow-eyed, weighs him like a ham, does not smile as they pass.
This Taste for Silence Page 6