At Hawthorn Time

by Melissa Harrison

  The village itself was startling, a site from which meaning had become fugitive. Apart from the modern road, thick with clods of mud from caterpillar tracks, only the path to the church, open twice a year, bore any signs of use. The pub, smithy and schoolhouse were still identifiable, but nearly everything else was gone, replaced by ugly breeze-block cubes knocked up specifically for training. The land around the buildings was humped and grassy and mute.

  He’d chosen a small, square house with the legend ‘18F3’ on one wall. Like the others it had no windows, but it was safe enough to light a fire inside and he clearly wasn’t the first to do so. With nothing in there, no hearth or fixtures or plaster on the walls, it was a strange simulacrum of a home, one made to practise death in.

  Now and then, flocks of migratory fieldfares blew in to strip the blood-red berries from the hawthorns, but other than that little moved in the settlement. Yet there had been times, during those two months, when Jack had been sure he wasn’t the only one moving through Bricewold’s blank and silent spaces; though whether others like him were living there, or it was locals from nearby villages, or ghosts, he couldn’t have said. Sometimes the past was right up close against his skin, sometimes he could not have said with certainty what was real. Perhaps he was mad, after all, like some of the lot at Twyford Down had said.

  One day in January he’d climbed over a breeze-block wall to explore Bricewold Court. It had been beautiful country house once, that much was clear; but now it had the same MoD-issue tin roof as the rest of the village, and its two dozen tall windows were boarded up. He had tried for an hour to get in, picturing a rich interior hung with dust sheets and cobwebs, a frozen monument to a world that had passed. But he couldn’t get the shutters off, and it was probably empty inside anyway, just dim light and echoes and dust.

  There hadn’t been much left of the grounds except a few ruined outhouses and an avenue of limes, their branches black against the winter sky. But then he had discovered the rectangle of an old tennis court, cracked and weedy but recognisable still. And for a moment then Jack had seen the women in their white skirts and blouses, the wooden racquets in their ash presses and the jug of lemonade with its neat lace cover hung with cowrie shells. Where were those shells now? he wondered. Where were the racquets? The tennis players themselves, he knew, must be long underground.

  The brash, red-clay tennis court at the Manor House in Lodeshill looked like a recent addition. Jack sat by the net post for a moment, feeling the sun on his face and bringing his thoughts back to the present moment. Last year a butterfly had been fooled into laying its eggs on the net’s green mesh, and here and there they remained, a whitish crust like hundreds of tiny barnacles. Jack wondered if the caterpillars, with nothing to eat, had survived for long.

  The morning sun fell on the back of the lovely old house with its mullioned windows, turning it golden, and after a while Jack got up and climbed the steps onto the terrace. A carved stone balustrade ran around it, and against the house wall there was a cracked stone trough from which wisteria grew. A set of teak garden furniture had been neatly folded up, and Jack wondered where the owners were, and how often they were even there.

  Approaching one of the narrow windows he cupped his hands around his face and peered into the room inside.

  Up in the radio room Howard looked up from the Philco and saw the homeless man the village was up in arms about trying to break into the Manor House. Or was he? Certainly he had no business being there, but you’d be a fool to risk setting off the alarms in a property like that. Still, perhaps he was unhinged, like Christine Hawton had said. He had a brief image of himself telling Kitty, urbanely, ‘It’s OK, I spoke to him. He’s harmless.’

  Howard jogged downstairs and out of the back door, but by the time he’d pushed through the conifer belt that separated their garden from the Manor House’s the man on the terrace had disappeared.

  21

  Red campion, windflowers, broom. Commas and one brimstone. Ground elder. Hot and humid.

  It was the first time Jamie really hadn’t wanted to go to work, though there was something familiar about the feeling. To put his helmet on after his shift at the bakery, to walk the half-knackered bike off the drive and gun it into life was to clench his teeth and push through a tangle of something dark. All the way to Mytton Park he maintained a high pitch of thoughts in his head, song lyrics from the radio, repeated phrases that made little sense. He even spoke out loud once or twice. What he was drowning out he couldn’t have said.

  The bike wasn’t legal on the motorway, even for the five hundred yards to the site turn-off, so instead he wheeled it over a concrete footbridge that gave him a vertiginous feeling crossing water never did. Halfway across he peered down at the cars and lorries speeding below with a shiver that was almost an impulse to jump, or if not an impulse the shadow of an impulse, the ghost of a feeling about what it would be to be flung – falling – mid-air. And then he brought his eyes back to the narrow strip of macadam under his feet and carried on.

  Far above the little bridge three gulls sculled with leisurely wingbeats; further up again an A320 headed for Spain, its contrail unfurling slowly behind it in the high, thin air.

  Megan wasn’t in the site office when he arrived, and he collected his lanyard from someone else. Unthinkingly he walked to his old hangar, not realising his mistake until he saw Dave the transport clerk swing round on his chair, page 3 spread out on the desk before him, and greet him with surprise.

  ‘All right, Dicko, you back with us?’

  ‘Oh – no. Wrong shed. I’m an idiot. Sorry, mate.’ Jamie turned to go.

  Dave laughed. ‘You’ll forget your head one day, lad. Eh, you OK?’

  ‘Yeah, not so bad. How’s things?’

  ‘Quiet. Where’re you? Catalogues?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s OK.’

  ‘Heard you were out on Friday night.’

  ‘Yeah – why?’

  ‘Good night?’

  ‘It was OK.’

  ‘That Lee – he behave himself?’

  Jamie tried to think. ‘He got a bit lairy once, but it was OK. Why, what’ve you heard?’

  ‘Nothing. Just . . . I don’t like that Lee, I don’t mind you knowing. Or that lot he hangs about with. You’re a good lad, Dicko. You remember that.’

  Over at 14B a shout went up when he entered the shed. ‘Dicko! Dicko! Dicko!’

  Lee strolled over, his hard hat on back to front, palm outstretched flat. It took Jamie a moment to register that he was supposed to slap it in greeting.

  ‘All right, Lee,’ he said, smiling and putting his palm out in return.

  ‘The man himself. You good?’

  ‘Not so bad.’

  ‘Good weekend?’

  ‘Yeah, it was OK. You?’

  ‘Hungover, were you?’

  Already it seemed odd to Jamie that he had felt so uneasy on the way in. Maybe they were proper mates now, him and Lee; maybe it was OK. ‘Yeah, I was a bit,’ he replied, and grinned down at his shoes.

  ‘You legend. Get home OK?’

  ‘I walked. Wasn’t so bad.’

  ‘You fucking walked? No way! Should have got a cab, mate.’

  The hangar echoed with the drone of the forklifts and indistinct shouts from the men directing the movements of pallets and boxes. Jamie shrugged on a hi-vis vest and followed Lee to one of the conveyors.

  ‘Is that how you lot got home?’ he asked.

  Lee’s eyes drifted to the other end of the warehouse. ‘Yeah . . . I mean, we weren’t too far behind you. We didn’t hang around that long after all that, you didn’t miss a lot. Well, not too much.’

  ‘After all what?’

  Lee looked at him in surprise. ‘What, you can’t remember?’

  Jamie’s heart thumped. ‘Course, I – I –’

  ‘Bouncer caught you with Nick’s speed, mate. You got chucked out. Still, could’ve been worse. Police could’ve come.’

  Howard was in two mi
nds about the tramp he’d seen at the Manor House. He considered phoning Kitty at the studio, but he could picture the way the conversation would go. She had a soft spot for people who were a bit different, and more than that, she was contrary.

  ‘So you can’t see the man now,’ she would respond, deadpan. ‘And he’s not actually broken in. So nothing, essentially, has happened.’ He decided to mention it when she got home instead, but when he got back upstairs he found he was too keyed up to concentrate on the Philco.

  ‘Who do you bloody tell?’ he muttered to himself, going downstairs again and pocketing his keys. No point dialling 999. Perhaps he’d just take a turn round the village, see if anyone was about. The vicar or somebody.

  It was afternoon and there were no cars moving at all in the village. Howard stood at the lychgate and stared at the church, but there was no reason for anyone to be in there and he felt shy about trying the door.

  He walked up Hill View and back without seeing anyone, then took the road out to the nearest farm – though of course it was standing empty right now, and as soon as he remembered it he turned back. God, it was like a ghost town. He tried to picture himself just knocking at a random door, and failed.

  The Green Man was probably the best option; it wouldn’t be open, but somebody would surely be in there. Yet when he knocked on the side door by the kitchen nobody answered. ‘Sod it,’ he muttered to himself, and went back to the house. At least he’d tried.

  Later on he backed the Audi out of the drive and headed to Connorville. Jenny would be arriving at the weekend and there was something he wanted to buy – although perhaps it was a stupid idea. They probably wouldn’t have it anyway, he thought, and that would be the end of it.

  It would be so lovely to have her back – and Chris too. He pictured himself, a father again, smiling expansively at them all over dinner; pictured Kitty putting her hand over his and smiling back. God, like a bloody advert. He must be getting daft.

  In Connorville he parked in the multi-storey and strolled around the main shopping centre. It was quiet in there: women with pushchairs queuing for the glass lift, old men with plastic bags. The air felt dry and full of static.

  After two circuits he had to concede that there was nowhere that sold CDs; it was all online now, he supposed. Checking the time on his parking slip he headed out to try the pedestrianised central area.

  Eventually he found a charity shop specialising in books and music at the dingy end of a precinct.

  ‘Do you have any Simon and Garfunkel?’ he asked at the counter. He felt, for some odd reason, exposed.

  ‘It’s alphabetical,’ the woman at the till replied. ‘Try under S.’

  Howard felt himself flush as he turned away. For God’s sake, it wasn’t actually obvious; not in a charity shop. It might have been by genre. There was no need to be rude.

  But he forgot his irritation when he found, on the shelf, the CD version of the exact same tape Jenny used to make him play in the car when she was small: 20 Greatest Hits. Even its cover was familiar, and he smiled to see it again now, turning it over in his hands to read the song titles on the back.

  Where the tape had originally come from he could no longer recall; certainly not from him, as his music collection was almost exclusively rock. But there had been a long period – years, it felt like now – when Jenny had demanded this one tape in the car, over and over and over. He had hated it at first, but the songs had somehow got under his skin until they were both belting them out and grinning at each other across the gearstick.

  Chris, being older, had deemed it embarrassing, and when Kitty was in the car they usually listened to Radio 4. It wasn’t a secret, but they’d both tacitly understood – even Jenny, at only what, ten? – that Simon & Garfunkel were theirs, and nobody else’s.

  At the till Howard was effusively friendly to the woman and felt that by this he had regained both the moral high ground and, obscurely, the upper hand. When he got back in the car, he put the CD on and sat with his eyes closed for the first three songs, tapping the wheel, whispering the lyrics to himself and smiling. He drove back fast with his window down, the restless spring air thundering past and bringing with it into the car the ambiguous scent of May blossom.

  Kitty had started another painting; there was a press of them in her head, all the little things that had not seemed fit subjects for a picture before but now spoke to her powerfully and mysteriously of what the place she lived in was actually like. She felt for the first time as though she had something to say, something particular to her, rather than the reaching-out for second-hand transcendence that had characterised her previous work. She almost couldn’t bear to look at her other paintings now, they seemed so timid and imitative: bluebells in a wood, distant hills, a ruined abbey. For goodness’ sake, she thought when she looked at them now; what on earth had been wrong with her? The picture she was working on was of the brutal footing of a pylon, the way it was anchored in cow shit and dandelions. It couldn’t have been more different.

  At the studio hours passed without her noticing them, a stiff back, or Claire’s departure, often the only way she’d realise how long she’d spent at the easel. On the days she didn’t go in she took the camera out and walked the fields, alert for things that declared themselves to be real, to be particular, rather than the kind of idealised pastoral vision that, she now saw, had been obscuring the actual countryside around her. And stronger than ever was the sense that with these paintings she could communicate something true and have it heard; that she could, somehow, connect.

  Less than a week, now, until the appointment with the neurologist: it came back to her as soon as she stood up and took her brushes to the studio’s little kitchen to wash them ready for the next day. And tomorrow it would be a day closer, she thought, watching the colours unspool in the sink. With the tap on, she pressed her thumbnail against the base of each brush to release the pigment trapped at the root of the bristles; Claire had once told her not to, but then Claire was funny about her brushes. You could always buy more.

  Kitty locked the studio and got into her car. Sometimes she wished she really could believe in God; if something bad happened you could tell yourself it was all part of a plan. But most of all, it would be comforting, now, to say a prayer and think that someone was listening.

  Though it wasn’t as if she didn’t believe in anything at all. She believed in the church: not as an organisation, but in St James’s itself, and parish churches like it: somewhere a village had brought its fears and hopes for centuries, that had marked its births and marriages, and buried its dead, for time out of mind. The idea that that could be lost – was being lost – seemed unthinkable.

  Yet rationality could be very lonely, she thought, starting the engine. The little folded prayers on the board at the back of the church; the ancient entreaties written on lead and cast into Roman wells. What else could you do, when all was said and done? How else, really, could you ask for help?

  ‘There you are,’ said Howard when she got in. ‘Fancy a drink? I’m having one.’

  ‘I do, actually,’ she replied, taking off her coat. ‘I’ll have a glass of wine, please. How was your day?’

  ‘Good,’ Howard called out from the pantry. ‘You? Painting going well?’

  ‘It is. I’ve started a new series.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Howard. He handed her a glass of wine, picked up the sports section and subsided back into his chair. ‘That Puck fellow?’

  ‘No – it’s sort of – well, it’s a bit more complex than that.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Howard again, turning a page.

  She looked at him for a moment. ‘It doesn’t matter. You know, I think I’ll have a bath.’

  ‘Righto.’

  When she came back downstairs Howard was still reading the paper. ‘I’m going to start dinner,’ she said.

  After a while he drifted in to the kitchen.

  ‘I meant to say. I saw that homeless guy.’

  ‘Wh
ich homeless guy?’

  ‘The one that’s been hanging around the village.’

  Once, a few months after she had had ended her affair with Richard, someone had casually mentioned his name in conversation. The mismatch between her inner reaction and her offhand response was similarly acute now, and she wondered why on earth she felt so protective of him.

  ‘Oh yes? Where?’

  ‘He was at the back of the Manor House, peering in at the windows. I kept an eye on him – he wasn’t actually trying to break in, otherwise I’d have called the police.’

  ‘Surely there’s no need for that. He’s not doing any harm. Did anyone else see him?’

  ‘I don’t know – I don’t think so, there was nobody about. Why?’

  ‘I just . . . people can be funny about anyone who’s a bit different, you know? I don’t like to think of someone like him being locked up. It’s not right.’

  ‘He should go into Connorville. They’ll have a homeless shelter there.’

  ‘What if he doesn’t want to go into a shelter? What if he just wants to live outdoors?’

  ‘Well, that’s all very well, but I can’t see the locals tolerating it. Think of the gypsies – they’ve not exactly been made welcome round here. The vicar was telling me about it on that Rogation thing.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s completely different. And anyway, he’s not a gypsy.’

  ‘Well, what the hell is he, then?’

  ‘I don’t know, Howard. Look, why don’t you go and pour me another glass of wine?’

  Howard raised an eyebrow but said nothing, retrieving the bottle from beside his chair and bringing it into the kitchen.

  ‘After dinner shall we sit down and go through what we need for the weekend?’ he asked as he topped up her glass.

  ‘You mean for the kids? I’ve been to the butcher and ordered a shoulder of lamb, and we can go to the supermarket on Friday. Why, what else were you thinking of?’