Son of Heaven

by David Wingrove

  ‘You all ready for tomorrow?’

  ‘Packed up and ready to go.’

  ‘Good.’

  Jake walked away. He ducked through the narrow entrance, stooping beneath the low-silled door and out into the garden. Stepping back into the sunlight, he called out to the little group of wives who were gathered around the big trestle table halfway up the grass.

  ‘Bessie… Mell… who wants the job of skinning these little fellas?’

  There was laughter and for a moment the shadow passed. But walking home afterwards with Peter at his side and Boy trailing them, he saw Tom’s face again, saw something there behind the eyes, and wondered what it was.

  Old Ma Brogan was working in her vegetable garden when Jake came calling.

  Straightening her thin, age-worn frame, she raised a hand to shield her eyes, straining to see who it was. Stray wisps of long grey hair lay across her deeply-lined face. There was mud on her boots and on the hem of her long, green velvet skirt. Elegance gone to seed, Jake thought, studying her a moment before he unlatched the gate and stepped through.

  ‘It’s all right, Mother. It’s only me.’

  ‘Ah, Jake, my love. Come give me a kiss. Been a while.’

  He went across and gave her a hug and a kiss, then stepped back, admiring her handiwork. For a woman in her eighties she was something else. Frail she might have been, but there was no sign of that frailty in her vegetable garden. Nothing but straight, healthy rows of carrots and beans. The last of the season.

  ‘I’ve brought you some conies, Ma. Skinned ’em and prepared ’em, I have. Where d’you want me to put ’em?’

  A smile beamed out from that ancient face. It made him realize how beautiful she must have been as a young woman.

  ‘Ah, you’re a good boy to me, Jake Reed. A better son than that good-for-nothing boy of mine.’

  ‘Now, Ma… he had his reasons.’

  ‘Reasons!’ She spat the word out contemptuously. ‘You’re too kind to him by half. Let his cock rule him, more’s the truth!’

  Jake smiled. He was used to Ma Brogan’s foul mouth. Besides, it was true. Her son, Billy, had been infatuated with a girl, and she only half his age. ‘Cock-struck’ was how Ma Brogan had termed it at the time, and so he was. When she left, he went after her, leaving his aged mother to fend for herself. It was cruel, but it was also life.

  ‘So… where d’you want these?’

  ‘Through here,’ she said, turning and leading the way along the brickwork path towards the back door. ‘You goin’ along tonight, lad?’

  ‘I am.’ And he smiled again as he said it. He liked being called ‘lad’, as if he were Peter’s age again. And he liked being mothered. More than that, he liked Ma Brogan’s irreverent approach to life. Some didn’t, but he did.

  In the kitchen doorway she half turned, looking to him. ‘You want a brew, boy?’

  ‘I’d love one, Ma. If you’re having one.’

  ‘I am. Now put those conies down on the side, then take a seat and rest your legs while you tell me all the latest gossip.’

  Which is precisely what he did for the next hour, sat there in that low-ceilinged, heavily-shadowed kitchen, among the overflowing shelves and the clutter.

  Back in the old days he might have scorned it as a waste of time, but now he knew. This was what life was for. Not for accumulating wealth, nor making an impression. It was for this. The old lady – Margaret, she insisted, flirting with him – made him laugh. Not only that, but she made him think, and if she’d been thirty years younger he might even have slept with her.

  He knew a great deal about her life, about her work as a painter and as a potter, and the children she had raised, never to see again. But aspects of her history were still a mystery to him, even after coming here these past twelve months.

  ‘Margaret?’

  ‘Yes, my love?’

  ‘Can I ask you something deeply personal?’

  She turned to face him. ‘You may.’

  ‘How many lovers did you have?’

  Her smile broadened, stretching the thin parchment of her skin. ‘You cheeky boy. That is personal. But as it’s you…’

  She hesitated, searching her memory, the smile fading then returning as she remembered something, or someone. ‘My god, it’s years since I thought about it…’ She gave a little shrug, then. ‘Twenty? Thirty, maybe.’

  Jake feigned shocked surprise, which made her laugh.

  ‘You wanted an honest answer, you got one.’

  ‘For which I thank you. But now I want to know something else. Who was the love of your life?’

  She stared back at him and for an instant, her eyes were still young in that otherwise ancient face. It made him think of the old saying – that the eyes were the windows of the soul.

  ‘What’s got into you today, my boy?’

  ‘I don’t know… It’s just that I’ve been missing her these past few days.’

  ‘Ah…’

  A faint, wistful smile had come to her lips. She met his eyes again.

  ‘His name was Matthew. Mattie, I called him. My beautiful Mattie. Ah, he could stoke the fires, that one.’

  ‘Was he your husband?’

  ‘Good Lord, no! My husband, hah! I had three husbands and a fat lot of good any of them were, especially the last! First he ran off, and then his son!’ She gave a snort of exasperation, then, after a long breath and more calmly she said, ‘No, my love… Mattie was my secret. We’d meet as often as we could, in his room, sometimes, but more often in hotels. Sixteen years younger than me, he was, and I knew it couldn’t last, only…’

  Jake frowned, seeing how deep the pain still was, and felt a moment’s regret at having raised the subject. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I…’

  ‘No… don’t be. It wasn’t like that, you see. He didn’t leave me. Or rather, he did, but not through choice. He said he’d love me forever. But then he died. In a car crash. It was awful. I didn’t know what to do with myself. His family didn’t know, you see, and if they had they wouldn’t have approved. But the funeral… Oh, it was terrible, Jake. I couldn’t stop crying. And no one there knew me. No one even bothered to ask who it was sitting there at the back of the church sobbing her heart out. No one.’

  For a moment he felt like holding her, comforting her for what was clearly still an unhealed wound, even after all these years.

  ‘How old was he?’

  She wiped at her eyes. ‘Twenty-six.’

  Jake caught his breath. It was the same age he had been when it had all come crashing down.

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.’

  She reached out and touched his arm.‘No. No, you should. I like talking about the past, even if it hurts. Even if…’

  She shook her head.

  ‘What?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing, Jake. Just that some days it feels like some dreadful illusion. That none of it really happened and I imagined it all. Dreamed it.’

  He nodded, understanding. It was exactly how he felt some days. How most of them probably felt, those who had survived the world coming apart at the seams. Simply to be here now seemed something of a miracle.

  Jake got to his feet.

  ‘You got to go?’

  He nodded. ‘I’ve got a lot to do before tonight. You goin’ along?’

  She laughed. ‘Not me, boy. My old bones aren’t up to it any more. The walk there would do for me.’

  ‘You sure I couldn’t come get you? You could sit on the cart…’

  ‘It’s very kind, my love, but no. You need to enjoy yourself, and how could you do that if you had to keep an eye on me, eh?’

  ‘But Ma…’

  ‘Margaret.’ Her voice had an insistent tone to it. ‘And no. I’ll be fine.’

  Jake kissed her, held her to him a moment, then quickly hurried away, before he saw the tears welling in her eyes. But halfway up the long slope that led to Church Knowle, he turned and looked back, noting how the cotta
ge seemed embedded in the landscape, the thatched roof the same brown as the surrounding fields.

  He turned away. What he’d said to her was true. He had been thinking about Anne a lot these past few days, and he felt he needed to do something about it. As it was he felt haunted, and as a rational man he felt uncomfortable with that.

  I should go see her. Talk to her. Yes. But first he’d pack, ready for tomorrow.

  The farmhouse was a long, low building, set back off the main street, the grey of its slate roof peppered with small patches of green and orange. It was a sturdy house, an unfussy house, functional in a way so many of the local houses weren’t. They were more picturesque, more pretty, but Jake had chosen well. It was warm in the winter and the roof never leaked. And besides, it had cost him nothing.

  The front door was unlocked. It was never locked. Not these days. If you couldn’t trust your neighbours, then who could you trust? Jake stepped inside, into deep shadow. The kitchen was at the back, overlooking the yard, the living room to the left. Both bedrooms were upstairs.

  He went through. There were long shelves both sides of the hallway, crowded floor to ceiling with books. Like the house, he had ‘inherited’ them, and again, like the house, he had come to appreciate with every passing year just how carefully they had been chosen.

  The kitchen was neat and clean. The skinned and washed rabbits that the women had prepared had been hung up in the larder. Fresh wood had been cut and stacked. The oak table had been wiped, the breakfast things washed up and put away.

  Jake smiled. Peter was a good boy. A dependable boy. He worked hard and never complained.

  He crossed the room, standing there a moment at the sink, looking out through the long window, wondering where Peter was. Only he knew where he was. He turned and saw at once that the bucket was missing from the hook.

  Jake washed his hands and dried them, then stepped out, into the yard. From there he had a view down the lane towards the well. He could hear the pigs snuffling in the shed at his back, the chickens restlessly clucking. Bessie, their Jersey, was in the barn nearby, sleeping no doubt.

  Jake shielded his eyes to look.

  Peter was sat on the broad ledge of the well, Meg beside him. They were holding hands, staring at each other in that lovesick fashion Jake had noticed of late. Boy lay nearby, one eye open, looking out for his master.

  Again Jake smiled. In that too they were lucky. To have met such people as the Hubbards, here at the end of things.

  Normally he would have left them on their own for a bit, but there was much to do. And besides, there would be plenty of time later on for them to gaze adoringly at each other.

  He walked down the sloping lane towards them, his booted feet crunching on the gravel. Hearing it, their hands fell apart. Snatching up her bucket, Meg hurried away, giving Jake a smile as she went.

  Embarrassed, Peter jumped down. He lifted his own bucket and began to walk towards his father, Boy jumping up to follow.

  Jake smiled. ‘It’s okay, you know… holding hands. You can hold hands. It is allowed.’

  Peter didn’t look at him. He was blushing now. But Jake, studying his son, saw how tall he’d grown, how close he was to being a man.

  How his mother would have loved to have seen that.

  They were at the gate now. Jake watched as Peter expertly nudged the old latch and pushed through, the heavy bucket swaying in his hand.

  ‘You know what, lad?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought we’d go see your mum, later. Once everything’s done.’

  The young boy turned, meeting his eyes. ‘You all right, Dad?’

  Jake looked away. It was his turn to be embarrassed. ‘I’m fine…’

  ‘Yeah…?’

  ‘Yeah…’ Only he didn’t have to say. Peter was watching him now, a perfect understanding in his eyes.

  ‘I’ll cut some flowers for her.’

  ‘That’d be nice.’

  Only what he felt at that moment couldn’t be contained in words. To have been so lucky and unlucky. To have found her at all and then to have lost her. No. Sometimes words – even whole hallways full of words – were not enough.

  St. Peter’s Church stood on a mound at the turn of the road, as it had since the early fourteenth century, a neat, solid-looking building of grey stone. Old as it was, it was merely a replacement for the old Saxon church after which the village – Church Knowle – had first been named. Priests had read the ancient services in Latin long before the great castle had been built a mile or so to the west, and there had been a rector resident since 1327. It was here that the locals gathered every week, not to sing hymns or say prayers like their ancestors, but simply to talk – to air grievances, seek help, to raise any problems they might have, and generally to keep things ‘ticking over’, as they liked to call it. Few among them were religious in any special way, yet they shared a feeling of connection to the land that was almost pagan in its intensity – a sense of belonging.

  It was over there, on the far side of that lushly grassed space, near the back wall, that they had buried those who had died six years back. And it was there, now, that Jake and his son came, to put flowers down on the neatly-kept mound that was Anne’s grave.

  Jake had carved the headstone himself from a solid slab of oak, fashioning it in the shape of a tree. It had taken him all of three months, but it was a fine piece of work, one of which he was immensely proud. Back in the old days he would have struggled to have finished such a task – things were so easy, so ‘throwaway’ back then – but this was something different. This was something meant, his own small monument against Time, and he had poured all of his feelings for her into the simple design. As for the words…

  Jake gave the smallest shake of his head, thinking about it. He had never found anything quite so hard as choosing what to carve into that smoothly varnished surface. After all, what did you say? ‘Passed in her sleep’? No, because she hadn’t. She had been in torment until the last. It had been agony – sheer hell – to see her suffer all of that. So what then? How to express the utter totality of his loss, his grief? And there were Peter’s feelings to consider, too, for it was his mother who had been snatched from him so brutally. Jake had felt honour bound to make sure his son had his say. Because this mattered. How you honoured the dead, how you remembered them after they were gone, that mattered. He understood that now.

  And so, between them, they had honed it down to the simplest of words. Words which might somehow prove a vessel into which all of their grief, all of their painful memories, might pour themselves:

  ‘Our darling girl. Missed beyond words.’

  Jake knelt there a moment, his fingers tracing the hand-carved words. Then, taking the special scissors from his jacket pocket, he began to trim the grass.

  He was just finishing, wiping the surface of the slab with a damp cloth, when he grew conscious of another presence close by. He turned, looking up into the sunlight. ‘Mary…?’

  She stood there, staring past him at the headstone, a faint wistfulness in her expression. She was Anne’s sister, three years her elder, and as Jake looked at her he could see reminders of what he had lost in Mary’s face: her eyes; her long, dark, curling hair; in the very way she stood there, her weight on her left foot, her head slightly tilted. It was precisely how Anne had always stood.

  She was holding a small spray of flowers. Lilacs. Anne’s favourites.

  ‘It never seems to get easier, does it?’

  ‘No... No, I…’

  He left it unfinished. Then, realizing that he’d done all he’d come to do, he clambered up, brushing the grass clippings from his knees.

  Mary spoke again, quieter this time. ‘You know… I always thought it would be me. I always expected her to tend my grave.’

  ‘Really?’ Yet even as he said it he saw the truth in it. Anne had always been the healthy one, the more vigorous of the two. Even if Mary had not already been Tom’s wife, he would have chosen An
ne, had it come to it, purely for her vitality. She had possessed so much life. Yet it was Anne who had succumbed to the fever, not Mary.

  ‘Have they decided?’ he asked, changing the subject.

  A smile lit her face. She knew without asking what he was referring to.

  ‘Far From The Madding Crowd. You know, the old version, with Alan Bates, Terence Stamp and Julie Christie.’

  Once a month, as tonight, they would haul out the old generator, fill it with oil, and show a film. Something from the Past. ‘Who chose that?’

  ‘The women. We wanted something romantic for a change.’

  He nodded to her and made to leave, calling Peter and Boy to him. But at the gate he looked back and saw her, kneeling by the grave now, talking to her sister as he so often did, holding the lilacs out to ‘show’ Anne, a strangely fragile love there in the muscles of her face.

  So fragile, and yet so strong. Jake turned back, looking to his son, noting, as he so often did, how he too carried the familial genes.

  ‘I am the family face…’

  ‘Dad?’

  Jake smiled. ‘Old words, boy. Just old words.’

  Darkness had fallen. In the long, high-walled garden of the Bankes Arms Hotel, a massive bonfire cast its warm, flickering light over the crowded scene, bathing everything in an ever-changing cloak of gold and black.

  Above the chug-chug-chug of the ancient, oil-powered generator, music played, struggling to make itself heard against the babble of a hundred voices.

  Every one of the big bench tables was filled to overflowing. People had come from miles around, bringing their families. Relaxed now, their faces shining, they ate and drank and talked, while all about them their children ran and played, carefree and happy.

  Jake and Peter were seated at the table closest to the generator, sharing it with Tom, Mary and their daughters, Cathy, Beth and Meg. Boy, as ever, lay hidden in the shadows beneath, his jet black eyes reflecting back the firelight. From time to time he would lick his chops, a faint whine escaping him as he sniffed the air, taking in the mouth-watering scent of roasting meat that, mixed with the strong burned-chemical odour of the generator, filled every breath.