At Hawthorn Time

by Melissa Harrison

  Jamie’s throat was suddenly tight. ‘And is Mum – is she OK?’

  ‘Oh, she’s – she’s not too bad.’ He sighed. ‘It’s not easy for her, son. He’s your granddad, and you see a different side to him, but he was always hard on her. He might have put food on the table, but it wasn’t easy for your mum having to deal with all that.’

  ‘Deal with all what?’

  ‘Well, she came along a lot later than your uncles, you know that. She was – an accident. Unplanned. And then what with Edith dying in labour – well, your granddad never got over it.’

  Jamie’s hands felt slick; he wiped them on his jeans and looked down at his trainers. ‘Poor Mum.’

  ‘Course the neighbours helped out, and he got in a local woman to cook and clean. But he wasn’t . . . he wasn’t always kind to her, son. He didn’t like her crying or making a fuss, you know? Even when she was poorly. And he never let any of them make mistakes. Things had to be a certain way – he’s still like that now, but it’s not fair when you’ve got kids. Some of it was the war, but not all of it; some of it was just how his life turned out, the choices he made.’

  ‘Is that why she’s –’

  ‘It affected her, growing up without a mother like that, and him the way he was. And – other things.’

  Jamie wanted to ask what things, but he found that he couldn’t. Even so, it was the most anyone had ever told him about the buried structures of his family, and he stored it away, feeling both the weight and the privilege of it – though when he came to examine it later, lying in bed, he found it already so familiar, so obvious, that it was as though it had been assimilated instantly and was gone.

  In the kitchen his father had put two mugs out on the countertop.

  ‘Oh – not for me, Dad,’ he said.

  ‘Righto. So how’s the car?’

  ‘OK, yeah. Bit still to do.’

  ‘Work?’

  ‘All right. Quiet.’

  ‘Not too quiet, I hope.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I heard they lost another contract, that’s all. Big one.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s not my section, though. Anyway, you seen how big the place is? It’s not about to go under.’

  ‘I hope not. Long as people keep buying stuff, eh?’

  ‘Speaking of work, Dad, I never knew the landfill used to be a coal mine.’

  ‘Didn’t you? Good use for it, I say. Once it’s full you’ll hardly know it was ever there.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘They cover it over, son. After a bit you can farm it again.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, good as new, or nearly. You know that empty field by the road between Crowmere and Ardleton? The bumpy one? Ex-landfill, that.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘They go and test it every so often, check it’s all rotting down OK. One day I expect they’ll start farming it again.’

  ‘So under that field . . .’ Jamie tried to imagine it: all the broken toys and nappies and plastic bags.

  ‘Yep. Two hundred years’ time they’ll be digging it all up again, like on Time Team. Unless there’s been a – I don’t know – a shopping centre built on it by then.’

  14

  Lady’s bedstraw, sorrel, bee orchid. Ash bud-burst. Warm start; heavy showers later.

  On weekday mornings Lodeshill came briefly to life between six and eight. A half-dozen or so cars would back out of their drives, some heading towards the Boundway and from there to work, some to drop off the village’s few children at the comp in Connorville or at the local grammar. Usually the morning was only broken after that by the postman’s van or the meals on wheels, until just after lunch when Jamie would kick the trail bike into life and gun it towards the Boundway for his shift at Mytton Park. Afternoons could be entirely silent until the kids returned from school – unless one of the supermarket delivery vans arrived.

  That morning Kitty had only just pulled out of the drive when she saw the man. He was walking in the very centre of the road, and he looked every bit the old-fashioned tinker; his pack was hung with bits and bobs and decorated with badges, and she thought of the man who used to come to the house when she was a little girl to grind the knives.

  She kept the Audi at a crawl and rolled the nearside window down, ready to thank him as she passed. But he didn’t move to the side.

  The car crept slowly behind him. Did he have headphones on? It seemed unlikely, and Kitty wondered if he might be deaf – or just stubborn. She checked her rear-view mirror; Christine Hawton’s car was coming up behind.

  He kept walking, his loping gait unhurried, the sun glinting off a little copper pot that banged at the side of his pack. There was a big CND badge on it, Kitty saw now, and, incongruously, one with the Virgin logo; she recognised another, too, with a guitar and the words ‘Burning Rubber’ arranged in ornate cursive around it. Howard would like that, she thought, and made a mental note to tell him later.

  She leaned her head out of the window, considered a friendly greeting; but he must have known she was behind him, and so it would surely come across as an attempt to make him move out of the way. Though she did actually want him to get out of the way, when all was said and done: she had a doctor’s appointment to get to. But what if he was a bit . . . unbalanced? She rolled the window up again and sighed.

  Eventually there was a passing place, and, without him having quite ceded his position, Kitty found there was enough room to manoeuvre the car past, on her face a carefully friendly smile. But when she looked back at him in the rear-view mirror he was gazing past her, somewhere invisible, far ahead.

  My grassroots constituency dances as they pass . . . Jack thought, watching a cabbage white flutter helplessly against the backdraught from the car. There are deep truths too deep for them to grasp.

  Was that right? Or did he just think it was because it rhymed? There had been something there, he was sure of it, but as he snatched at the thought it evaporated. He wasn’t as sharp these days; he used to know things, he used to know about deep truths. Didn’t he?

  The first farm he asked at had nothing for him; nobody there seemed to remember him, either, and he wondered if maybe he should have shaved his beard off after all, wondered if perhaps it had just been too long since he’d last been up this way. They had a team of Eastern European kids out on the beds; good workers, the farm manager told him: keen. He’d been hearing that a lot in the last few years, and it was true. Sometimes he felt as though he was the last itinerant Englishman still willing to work the land. He wondered if it was true.

  He had ruled out going to Culverkeys, and the other three farms had begun to blend into one in his mind, but as he approached the one called Woodwater it began to come back to him. It looked, from the road, like a child’s drawing, with a pretty brick farmhouse, a tidy barn and even geese in the yard. The milking shed, dairy and asparagus pack house were tucked away beyond a line of sycamores.

  Jack skirted the farmhouse to the ugly bungalow behind it where the Gasters lived, and rang the bell.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t Jack,’ said Joanne Gaster, opening the door. ‘I always look out for you this time of year! Where’ve you been?’

  Such kindness; Jack wasn’t used to it, and for a moment he found himself struggling to know how to reply.

  ‘Oh – you know. I travel about.’

  ‘And how are you, anyway? I see you’ve brought the good weather with you.’ She leaned against the door jamb, shading her eyes against the sun, but didn’t invite him in.

  ‘Oh, I manage. Place looks tidy.’

  ‘It has to these days, for the B&B. And you know we do cheese now, and ice cream?’

  Jack nodded. ‘I saw the sign.’

  ‘Had no choice, really. Milk’s cheaper than water these days.’

  ‘Asparagus going well for you?’

  ‘It’s been a lifesaver, I’ll be honest – especially since Culverkeys ploughed theirs under. We put in more beds soon as we heard
, and they’re going great guns now. We’ve more or less picked up their order.’

  ‘Culverkeys – that the Harlands?’

  ‘Philip, yes, God rest his soul. Anyway, you couldn’t have timed it better – we’ve just started on ours. We’ve got six in the bunkhouse already though, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s OK, I – I have somewhere to stay.’

  ‘Shall we see you tomorrow, then? About six?’

  Walking back up the lane Jack wondered what Philip Harland had died of, and when. Perhaps it had been drink. He tried to think how old the children would be now, whether one of them would come back to take over the running of the farm. The eldest boy, the quiet one, perhaps, with his clear love for the land: yes, he could picture that. It fitted.

  Tonight he would sleep in the sliver of old copse he’d found; not the wood by the village, with its dog walkers and Neighbourhood Watch signs, but another one, further out towards Crowmere, trackless and unvisited. Rain was on its way, but there was a yew there, shadowy and dense; the ground beneath its low branches was bone dry. It had four ancient pennies driven into its trunk, though they were so blackened now and almost grown over that, apart from the squirrels and treecreepers, nobody but Jack even knew that they were there.

  Tomorrow he would be back in the fields, and everything would be behind him. He knew that Mrs Gaster wouldn’t make him sign anything; she never did.

  After her doctor’s appointment Kitty decided to go and buy a new camera. Sitting by the drainage ditch after her fall she’d known hers must be submerged in the muck somewhere, but shaken as she was, the thought of groping blindly for it in the cold water with its rusty, polluted sheen made her feel dizzy – and in any case, it would probably have been beyond repair. She had thought briefly of the photos she had taken, locked away inside it, but when she finally stood up, gingerly testing her balance, she looked round to find that the oak she had wanted to paint looked nothing like as iconic as she had thought; that it was, in fact, just a tree in a field. And so she had let the water claim the camera and had gone back to the car; and, when she felt ready, she had driven home and had a long bath.

  It had been easy to conceal the loss of the camera from Howard; he took little notice of any of her art things, most of which she kept in the studio she shared with Claire. More than that, though, it felt natural: photography had always had a frisson of secrecy about it.

  She’d met Richard at the evening class she’d begun taking when Chris started at nursery school, and she’d known almost straight away that she was going to have an affair with him. He had an easy grace to his movements, slow and unselfconscious, but more than that there was something self-contained about him, as though he didn’t really need others’ good opinion, as though he was sufficient unto himself. It was unusual, and it gave him a sense of quiet assurance that she found fascinating.

  Kitty had gone into the affair calmly and, it seemed to her then, with her eyes open. She had told herself it would be over soon enough; it was just a bit of excitement, a secret; something nobody would have expected of sensible, strait-laced Kitty, and that no one could take away.

  She still remembered the first time he touched her, the moment they crossed that invisible, devastating line. He’d given her a lift back after the class, the air in the car fizzing and cracking with what was happening between them. He had pulled up a street away and cut the engine; they had sat quite still for a long moment, and then she had turned to look at him, the blood surging in her veins. And after that kiss she was for ever after a different woman – a different wife.

  Yet where was the harm in it, really? None of her and Howard’s friends knew Richard, and she’d known she would never blurt it out to him, whatever happened. It certainly wasn’t about leaving him; in fact she didn’t believe, then, that it was about Howard at all – though in the years that followed she would come to understand more about what had driven the choice she’d made. With Richard she could be irresponsible and inconsistent; she could have a sense of humour in a way she couldn’t at home, because Howard co-opted all that territory and someone had to be the grown-up and that someone was always her.

  As weeks and then months passed she’d found that her attraction to Richard only grew. She tried to dismiss it – she had fallen in love with Howard, after all, so she knew better than to trust her feelings. Not that they had been wrong, exactly; she had wanted Howard’s irresponsibility and his sociable nature back then. But it took a long time to find out what people were really like, so what was going on with Richard was infatuation pure and simple. She barely knew him, not really; she only got to see his best side, so the magic didn’t diminish; and more than that, she was free to invest him with all sorts of qualities, safe in the knowledge that she would never know him well enough to discover whether he had feet of clay.

  But despite all her level-headedness it slowly came to feel as though their drinks in out-of-the-way pubs and snatched afternoons in hotels were becoming her ‘real’ life, while her marriage became a kind of anteroom, a place she slowly, imperceptibly, stopped inhabiting. And yet for months she continued to believe that she could do it; that she could somehow have both lives.

  ‘Do you feel guilty?’ he’d asked her once. They were in a dingy pub in Ruislip, sitting next to each other in a booth, rather than facing, so that he could put his hand on her thigh under the table.

  ‘It’s funny, I don’t. I must be a terrible person. Anyway, I’m sure Howard has secrets of his own.’

  ‘You think he’s had affairs?’

  ‘Of course he has. He’s out drinking practically every night, for one thing, he comes in at all hours. Why wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Does it bother you?’

  She frowned. ‘I’ve given up that right, haven’t I?’ She looked away then, and Richard had turned her face back to his and kissed her, slowly, carefully, in a way that Howard never had.

  It couldn’t last, of course. One day she’d found out she was pregnant again. The baby was Howard’s; she wasn’t stupid enough to get caught out like that. She’d finished it with Richard then; she’d had to, although it had felt to her like the end of her real life; her true self, so newly discovered, put away again in a box out of sight.

  For two weeks she had cried gaspingly, messily in the shower, and silently in bed while Howard slept. She’d planned to blame it on hormones, but Howard never even asked her if anything was wrong. And when Jenny was born the whole thing began to feel as though it belonged to a different life, so that with the passing of years it was almost as though she’d got away with it scot-free.

  Almost, but not quite. Even at the affair’s dizziest heights she’d known there would be a price to pay, and she was right: the bill had simply been deferred. The damage to her marriage turned out to be to its founding story: that of she and Howard and why they were together. It was the creation myth every couple produces, and she had written a new one with someone else, an act of heresy that made a lie of the first one and could never be undone. And ever since the affair, when she had needed to call on that story, to remind herself of the reasons why she was married to Howard – in the difficult months after Jenny was born, and later, when his drinking was at it worst – she had found that it was no longer there.

  But she had stuck it out. They had given the kids a decent start in life; for the most part, Howard had turned out to be a good father to the two of them, loving and kind. Admittedly he irritated her, but that was just marriage, wasn’t it? It wasn’t all passion and gazing into each other’s eyes, not for the long haul; she knew that. So why, twenty years on, was she thinking about Richard again?

  Perhaps the doctor had unsettled her. After years of Howard’s endless minor complaints she’d become a bit cavalier about her own health, and hadn’t thought much about the appointment other than as a way of putting her fall in the field out of her mind. So when he’d said he was referring her to a neurologist it had come as a shock; back in the car she’d sat for several minutes st
aring ahead, her mind a blank. It had made her think of something Howard had said, when he retired: ‘This is it, then. The last act of my life starts here.’ She’d dismissed it; he had a melodramatic streak, he always had. But sitting motionless at the wheel, the keys swinging gently in the ignition, she’d experienced something similar: a sudden glimpse, perhaps, of the finishing line. And it had made her think about her life and about the choices she’d made.

  The camera shop was in one of Connorville’s retail parks; it was always hard to remember which block of units to pull into, and she kept an eye out for its logo on the big banks of roadside signs. There seemed to be more and more of them every day, and new estates springing up, named after the places the developers had destroyed: The Pasture, Tupp’s Wood, The Millrace. Along with the empty new bypass and the huge, clapboard Church of Latter-Day Saints that squatted at one of the roundabouts you could have been in America – or anywhere else, in fact.

  In the overheated shop with its air as dry as static Kitty did more than just replace the old camera, upgrading instead to a far better model than the one she had lost in the ditch. After all, what else were they supposed to do with their money but spend it? Howard had done well out of the business, and they had sold the Finchley house at the right time; they’d given Chris a deposit for his first flat, and would do the same for Jenny when she finally moved back to the UK for good, but other than that they could do what they liked, something about which she felt intermittently guilty, but for the most part enjoyed.

  Kitty often thought about travelling, but deep down she knew that the entente between her and Howard would not survive such enforced intimacy. She would have liked to have gone somewhere by herself – the Norwegian fjords, perhaps, or Finland, somewhere wild and remote – but to ask for such a thing would have changed the landscape of their marriage irretrievably, and after a lifetime together that idea came with a sense of vertigo that might not have been proof of her feelings for Howard, but was real enough.