At Hawthorn Time

by Melissa Harrison

  ‘That’s what art’s all about,’ the teacher had told them. ‘The philosophers say there’s no way of really knowing that other people even exist. But art proves them wrong.’

  Kitty hadn’t really understood, and it had been another student, weeks later, who had explained it to her. They had been in a hotel at the time, his hand warm on her breast, the damp sheet tangled around them.

  ‘I wish I could capture this,’ he’d said, gazing at her.

  She’d laughed. ‘You could take a photo.’

  ‘No, more than that. I mean how you are, how I feel. The light. All of it. That’s what art’s for, isn’t it? And poetry, all that. A way of capturing a moment of reality and transmitting it to someone else, maybe years in the future.’

  ‘You want people to know our secret?’

  ‘No, I mean – this is real, you know? Us. Now. But soon it’ll be over – gone. As if it had never happened.’

  Kitty had reached for him and they had made love again, and later she had gone home to Finchley, and to Howard. But since then she’d felt it, sometimes, looking at paintings, and even, once or twice, reading a poem: the shiver, the magic, of another consciousness revealing itself to hers. I existed, I felt this, I thought this: you can feel it too.

  Not that she thought she could emulate proper artists: of course not. But everyone could try, everyone had a chance to leave their mark. Tucking the camera securely under her arm, she pushed her way awkwardly through the hedge to her left. There was a broad ditch on the other side choked with oily orange water, and glad of her walking boots, grimacing slightly at the stretch, she took a long step over it into the ploughed field beyond.

  In its centre was a single oak, stag-headed but dressed on its lower branches with young, bronze leaves. In a couple of weeks it would perfect, she thought: iconic, but somehow melancholy, too, its dead top section, white as bone, contrasting perfectly with the rich earth below. She picked her way towards it along a set of tramlines, stopping every few minutes to take a photo, trying to remember the rule of thirds as she framed each shot. Already she could feel the painting she might make forming in her mind.

  It happened just as she was about to recross the field drain by the road. She felt briefly dizzy, like floating; then it was as though her legs failed and she found herself half sitting in the ditch, her boots deep in the mud and her hands and trouser legs coated in oily slime.

  Again, she thought, with a sudden wash of fear that made her gorge rise; the last time she’d been in the bedroom, drying her hair, when her vision had blurred and a sudden weakness in her arm had made her put the hairdryer down.

  She sat very still on the ditch bank with her eyes closed for a few moments, taking deep breaths; then she groped around for the camera with a shaking hand – but it was nowhere to be seen.

  7

  Ground ivy, purslane. Beeches in full leaf. Hornbeams first flower.

  At sunrise Jack was walking a lost green lane behind the gardens of a nursing home. Seamed into the land like a crease in a palm, it was impossibly ancient, its silence the accumulated silence of history. Thick with nettles and Queen Anne’s lace, its centuries-old wheel ruts were lost in dead leaves from the trees that formed a nave overhead; midges danced in columns in its still air. Part of its length marked the border between badger territories and at intervals along the bank were their latrines, the bare soil clawed over and pungent with scat. Jack grinned approvingly to himself as he passed, and batted a leggy black fly from his cheek.

  The last two times he’d slept he’d felt the peturbation of a large town not too far ahead running like static through his dreams. He didn’t want to walk through its precincts or shopping streets, didn’t want to negotiate its roundabouts or estates or business parks. It was a new town, still more like a wound than a scar, and Jack knew it held nothing for him – nothing that wouldn’t cost. He had decided to take the long way round it; it was probably safer that way, too.

  It had felt like they were waiting for him, that time in Berkshire. Why? What good did it do anyone to lock him up; what harm to let him be? Walking the old cart track then he’d pictured it as it once might have been, the trees hung with wisps of hay for weeks after the last of the wagons had come in from the fields each year. Its ghost bisected a fragment of hazel coppice between farms, a little wood it would have taken him a few minutes to pass through had he been let alone.

  How could a wood be private, anyway? What did that even mean? But by that time he was breaking an order. ‘You’ve run out of chances, mate,’ the arresting officer had said, pushing him roughly into the waiting van; ‘it’s not like you wasn’t warned.’ But he wasn’t Jack’s mate; in fact, it felt as though he really hated him, and that, after thirty years on the road, was new. ‘Fucking homeless,’ he’d called to the other copper over the roof of the van. ‘I can’t stand ’em, you know?’

  They’d taken his notebooks from him in prison, which was almost the worst part. It wasn’t until he’d got out that he’d had a chance to write it all down. That was one of the first things he’d wanted to do when he got to the hostel, but by then his memory of events had become hazy; either that, or his mind just didn’t want to go there any more.

  Where are the primroses that used to carpet that wood? he’d written, in the end. Why don’t you coppice it if you say it is yours? You think it doesn’t matter, that it is just a wood. You think things will always be the same. You think you have dominion – that you’re not part of things. Like in that book. But if there is no light the primroses can’t come. Is it spring you are afraid of or something else? Life finds a way but not like you think. I am still here.

  He’d known it didn’t make sense even as he wrote it. He hadn’t been well then; London had disordered him somehow.

  He was much better now.

  After half a mile a blaze of yellow rape opened up on Jack’s left and sunbeams lanced down here and there into the green lane’s gloom. For a while it was bordered by a fragment of laid hedge so ancient it was merely a line of trees with strange angles in their trunks. As he put a hand on one he saw the men who had laid it two hundred years before: the billhooks glinting in the pale winter sun, the earth thick on their boots, their hands white with cold. He saw the brutal wounds to the young stems, cut nearly through, thrust sideways and secured with stakes hammered into the reluctant ground. The skill of it, and the pride in the neatness of the pleaching. Later, the green buds bursting into life on the shattered stems as spring came; the hedge filling out, a living stockade of thorns. Years of useful life, and then left uncut for one winter; two. Eventually, the base thinning, holes appearing. Finally the branches disentangling from one another, the trees growing taller and assuming separate lives.

  The lane was heavy going underfoot, and Jack scrambled up the bank and burst through into the sunlit field beyond. A stile at the far end took him onto a roughly surfaced farm track edged with giant hogweed, the thick, purple-spotted stems obscenely virile at the base. Caught amid them was a scrap of red and white: a chocolate wrapper dropped by a careless walker or blown there from one of the litter bins by the school fields not far away. Jack bent to pick it up; it smelled almost overpoweringly of sugar. He tucked it into his pack with a few other bits of rubbish he’d collected.

  The closer he got to Lodeshill and its farms the more he found himself thinking about Culverkeys. He’d had work there twice, both times for only a few weeks – though it had been hard to believe, when he’d arrived the second time, that it was the same place. The farm kitchen – which was as much as he ever saw of the house – was dirty, Philip Harland sallow and unshaven; he’d not dared ask what had happened to the wife and kids. Philip was clearly drinking, though he seemed for the most part to have it under control; until the last day, when Jack had had to quit, he hardly spoke beyond what was necessary – but Jack hadn’t minded that.

  The first time he’d worked there had been very different. The Harlands had three children, if he remembered right
ly: two teenage boys, one tall and quiet, one more high-spirited, and a little girl. Though he’d never had much to do with the family, something about the eldest boy had troubled him; the sense, perhaps, of a self held at a remove, shut away beyond reach – as he himself must have been at that age, before he found his true path. He’d wondered then why one child should be so affected and not the others, and when he’d arrived at the farm a second time and had seen the way things were he’d been glad, in a way, to think of that boy – and the other two kids – elsewhere.

  Jack walked on, thinking about the other farms near Lodeshill where he might find work. After a little while a tune came to him unbidden, attaching itself to him with instant and unarguable authority and driving the past from his mind. Where was it from? It had the simple, lilting melody of a nursery rhyme, but it wasn’t one he could think of. ‘Uncle Tom Cobley’, he realised after a few bars, and smiled to himself, feeling the tune furl out behind him as his whistle got louder; and then, ‘It’s like a ribbon,’ he said out loud in a sudden West Country burr, ‘a girt green one!’

  He let the whistle die away and closed his eyes for a few paces, feeling the nettles swishing against his boots and being crushed juicily underfoot. Briefly, he felt sorry for their bruised leaves, but he knew that it evened out: his passage across country left seeds and spores swirling in his wake, and everywhere was better for his having come through.

  Eventually the green lane gave out onto a B-road, but long before it did he stopped and thought his way ahead, feeling the pull of the town’s quiet margins, the untrodden ways past its centre that would keep him safe. When he did cross the road it was in tree-shadows, a mere flicker at the edge of the windscreen to a passing car changing down for the bend. In the rear-view mirror: nothing. He had melted into the sun-dappled trees on the other side.

  8

  Celandine, cuckoo flower, meadow buttercup.

  Jamie slept badly and woke on Friday morning from a dream in which he was in the back garden of his grandfather’s house, except that it was also Ocket Wood and the old man wanted him to cut down all the trees. He didn’t have an axe or a saw, and he’d tried to explain, but his grandfather just got angrier, urging him again and again to fell the trees. Eventually the old man turned and, his familiar face disfigured by fury, snarled at him: ‘You always were a waste of space.’

  ‘You look awful,’ his mum said when he came downstairs in his tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt. ‘I hope you’re not coming down with something.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Jamie yawned. ‘Is there any bread?’

  ‘In the bread bin. What’s the matter, you’re not poorly?’

  Once, when he was very small, a bout of strep throat had turned into a raging fever that nearly saw Jamie taken into A&E; all he remembered about it now was his mum’s impatience, and how his dad had stayed at home to comfort him until the banana medicine began to work. Now Jamie was an adult he could see she couldn’t help it, so there was no point being upset about it. Being upset didn’t do anyone any good.

  ‘I’m fine, Mum,’ he reassured her now. ‘Just didn’t sleep well.’

  ‘Why, they not working you hard enough?’

  ‘Plenty,’ he said, turning away. Her hair was lank and she wasn’t dressed yet, her loose breasts and belly distorting her pink pyjama top with its cheerful cartoon.

  ‘I get paid today,’ he offered her, in a deliberately upbeat voice.

  ‘That’s good, you can give me some housekeeping.’

  ‘OK. I thought I might go and see Granddad before I go in.’

  ‘I’ve got a couple of meals you can take him. Pick him up a copy of the paper on the way, too, will you?’ She drew her dressing gown around her and turned away, her slippers whispering on the lino.

  ‘I’ll go on the way to work, Mum. Got some stuff to do on the car first.’

  There was no sense in showering until after he’d finished, so when he’d had his toast Jamie put his trainers on, went out to the front drive and took the tarp off the Corsa. A robin sang in the forsythia by the driveway as he lifted up the car’s bonnet and began to work.

  Jamie’s grandfather had been born in Lodeshill just after World War I, the eldest son of an infantryman who’d lost one eye and his hearing to a stick grenade near Pas-de-Calais in 1917. Now he lived in the pebble-dashed post-war semi in Ardleton of which his wife had been so proud, and in which Jamie’s mother, and his three uncles, had grown up.

  Ardleton had once been a thriving market town, but in the 1960s the new town of Connorville had increased in mass and pulled in everything around it. Its road signs were taken down or altered; even the football team was renamed. Nowadays its streets were merely part of Connorville’s general sprawl – although Connorville wasn’t even a proper city, as the old man often said. It was just a collection of retail parks and roundabouts, when all was said and done.

  It had been that way for two decades now, but Jamie’s grandfather still lived as though the old landmarks remained valid, and continued to navigate by them: the cattle market; the handsome Edwardian library, now a job centre; the derelict site of the once-busy foundry; the old abbey fishponds, long silted up. He’d caught bream there as a child, probable descendants of the monks’ own fish – or so he had told his grandson, on more than one occasion. There was no one left any more to contradict him.

  ‘Did you bring the Post?’ he asked now, opening the door.

  ‘I forgot. Sorry. I’ve got a couple of dinners for you, though: beef casserole and a tuna pasta bake.’ Jamie went through to the kitchen and put the Tupperware containers in the fridge. In the front room the old man sank back into his armchair.

  ‘Bloody dinners,’ he muttered. ‘She thinks I can’t look after myself.’

  Jamie wandered through. His grandfather was trying to tune a little battery-operated radio, his liver-spotted hands turning it testily in his lap.

  ‘You got something on, Granddad?’

  ‘Not yet. Three o’clock at Kempton Park.’

  ‘I could look it up on my phone if you like.’

  ‘Phone, lad? That’s no good to me.’

  Jamie sighed. ‘I’ll pop out and get the Post for you now. It’ll only take a second. Is there anything else you want?’

  ‘Take an apple with you, on the hall table. And don’t be long.’

  The land his grandfather’s street stood on had been an orchard before the second war, and the washing line in his garden stretched from the back of the house to a rogue Worcester Pearmain that had grown slowly from a windfall after the trees themselves had been grubbed up. Every autumn the old man stored the apples carefully in newspaper in the shed, where they would sweeten through winter and fill the air with their fragrance; he’d always put a couple of boxes at the gate, too, but hardly anyone ever took them – or, at least, not that Jamie could remember. He looked for one on the hall table, but there were none there. April, nearly May: it was far too late in the year.

  ‘Your granddad send you out?’ said the man at the shop.

  Jamie nodded.

  ‘How is he?

  ‘OK,’ said Jamie, fishing in his pocket for some money. ‘Bit on the grumpy side.’

  ‘No change there, then.’

  But it was a change. Jamie had always loved spending time with his grandfather, had taken to riding his bicycle all the way to Ardleton when he was only seven or eight. He saw more of the old man now than even his mum did, something he’d never really noticed until Alex had pointed it out one day. ‘Does she not ever visit him at his house?’ he’d asked, and Jamie had realised, belatedly, that although his grandfather often came over for Sunday dinner, it was usually only he and his dad who dropped in on him at home.

  He’d never been too sure why he spent so much time there. It wasn’t as though they never argued, because they did – like when Villa were playing City, for instance. But it never made any difference, and when he next visited things would be just the same. It helped that his granddad spoke his mind, too
: he just said what he thought, and you didn’t have to try and work out what he really meant, didn’t have to worry that things were any different than they seemed.

  But over the course of the last year or so the old man had turned inward. Often he was irritable; sometimes he didn’t answer when Jamie spoke but sat with his hands on his knees, his face towards the window. It was as though he was listening to something else, something Jamie couldn’t hear.

  ‘Is he going senile?’ he’d asked his mum a few weeks back.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she’d replied.

  ‘He seems different.’

  ‘He’s ninety-three,’ his mother said, and it was true – he was far older than any of his friends’ grandparents, after all. Yet he still went to the corner shop every day, still kept the house tidy. But something was changing, and Jamie could feel it.

  Once, years before, his mother had told him about the nightmares he’d had when she was a little girl. ‘Screaming and shouting, every night, sometimes,’ she’d said. It was upsetting for Jamie to even think about. ‘He’d never admit to it the next day, of course. It was like it never happened.’

  ‘Why, though?’

  ‘Too proud. He didn’t like anyone knowing.’

  ‘No – why did he have nightmares?’ he’d asked.

  ‘The war, Jamie,’ she’d said, folding her arms and looking at him. He’d nodded, but hadn’t been sure what she meant; he felt as though he should already know somehow – yet the one time he’d asked to see his granddad’s medals he’d told him he didn’t know where they were. It had been Harry Maddock, the gamekeeper, who had eventually filled Jamie in about the prisoner-of-war camps, and how lucky James Hirons, who had served his country as a coder in the navy, was to have come back from Singapore alive.