by Olivia Laing
A matter of miles, and the whole landscape had changed, the woods and pastures replaced with cattle and crops, the sandstone ridges with the smoother land that precedes the Downs. It took me a full hour to walk a few yards, so absorbing was this new world. The wheat on either side of the chalk track was at different stages of ripeness: on the west clenched and blue and on the east a fuzzy gold-green that was full of larks. I sat on a concrete block where a footpath sign had fallen and gathered an ear to chew. The grains when I cracked them were milky, though those I plucked later had the taste of risen dough.
The larks were all about me, invisible and uproarious, carolling out the untranslatable song they are said to sing at the gate to heaven. I’d found an owl pellet the size of a greengage on the block, and I turned it now on my knee. It was full of tiny fragments of bone that looked at first like husks of corn, and the carapaces of beetles, which shone blackly and powdered my fingers with a glittering dust.
It was a day of uplift. Everything was rising or poised to rise, the mating dragonflies crashing through the air, the meadow browns clipping sedately by. On the other side of the valley there was a small plane parked in a field and as I got closer I could make out the airstrip that had been built about it. White arrows were rollered onto the mown grass and flaking whitewashed tyres were stacked in threes to hold the bulbs of the landing lights. The plane was cherry-red and white, the legend G-AYYT above its wing. I imagined it looping back from Paris, crossing first the blue English Channel and then the second home sea of the wheat.
The wheat was preoccupying me. It had here reached another stage, the long greenish hairs unfurling and turning it into an ocean of grass, in which the wind moved as it will across water, folding the pile first back, now forth. The wind worked across it and so did the light, and I could not at first piece together how the trick was mastered. The stalks here, on this sloped field, were almost blue, a blue that increased from the boot upward like a flush, though later in the month they would grow gilded and then bleach daily until they were almost drained of colour, becoming the common straw that was once used to roof most of England and is still required by law for repairing the thatch of some listed buildings. The heads of the wheat were golden; the hairs that are known as the beard a watery greenish gold that became bronze towards the tip. When the wind flattened the heads – ah, that was it! – they caught the light, which rippled and rushed down the hill in little ebbs and flurries. ‘The grain,’ explains a Roman treatise on farming, ‘is that solid interior part of the spike, the glume is its hull and the beard those long thin needles that grow out of the glume. Thus as the glume is the pontifical robe of the grain, the beard is its apex.’
The wind had risen and was turning the ash leaves white side out, so that they flashed when the sun flooded by. Between Barkham Manor and Sharpsbridge I walked accompanied by the chink of a wren and a fleet of electric blue dragonflies the size of kitchen matches. I set about stalking one, bigger than the rest, but couldn’t get within six feet of it, though I tried first to tiptoe and then to swoop. Its body was the milky blue of weathered plastic, those windblown scraps you find in hedges or caught around gateposts.
Sharpsbridge itself was stubbornly unfamiliar. I’d stayed here four years ago, in a house that was being rented by the son of a famous artist. It was another sweltering summer and we walked one night for miles, accompanied by the hum of pylons and the sound of a flute spilling from an open window and into the stubbled fields. I slept in an oast house away from the others, in an empty circular room, and above my head the sky through the cowl had been sown with fistfuls of stars. But the house, which was ugly, seemed to have disappeared. Perhaps my bearings had got askew. I kept remembering odd details: a garden full of raspberry canes, a wagon by the pond that had been left to rot beneath a swarm of tiny roses.
I was getting anyway into one of those trances that come from walking far, when the feet and the blood seem to collide and harmonise. Funnily enough, Kenneth Grahame and Virginia Woolf both wrote in praise of these uncanny states, which they thought closely allied to the inspiration writing requires. ‘Nature’s particular gift to the walker,’ Grahame explained in a late essay, ‘through the semi-mechanical act of walking – a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree – is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe – certainly creative and supra-sensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as it were talking to you, while you are talking back to it.’ As for Woolf, she wrote dreamily of chattering her books on the crest of the Downs, the words pouring from her as she strode, half-delirious, in the noonday sun. She compared it to swimming or ‘flying through the air; the current of sensations & ideas; & the slow, but fresh change of down, of road, of colour: all this is churned up into a fine thin sheet of perfect calm happiness. Its true I often painted the brightest pictures on this sheet: & often talked out loud.’
There was a stile up ahead and as I descended into a field of dock, poppies and wheat, I saw it first as a series of colour flares: rust red, scarlet and golden brown, from which a small, pale gold bird lifted, circled and disappeared. Is the red of poppies the same red as the dye the Venerable Bede describes the Anglo-Saxons making from the shucked bodies of whelks, that ‘most beautiful red which neither fades through the heat of the sun nor exposure to the rain; indeed the older it is the more beautiful it becomes’? It’s so very bloody you’d think it would stain, but it never does, though if the flower is crushed it leaves a smear of bitterness against the skin. The colour is lucent, fully saturated, the red caught within the petal as if within a sheet of stained glass.
The wind was right up. A kestrel hung on the other side of the hedge, wings tilting, its head as still as if it had been pinned to the sky. There were blackfly on the dock here too, and the next field was riven by a ditch. I wandered over to take a look. It was half-full of cool greenish water, from which grew a lovely proliferation of skullcap, watermint, marsh bedstraw and ragged robin, the leaves submerged beneath the surface and the blooms a little above it. A couple of bees were puttering between the flowers, the constant sound they made as lulling as a purr. I lay down on my belly and used the ditch as a sightline, following it across the meadow to the wood beyond. The river must be a field away, I thought musingly, and Isfield two miles after that. And then, in one of those tumbling rearrangements of geography by which the Mole knew he was near his old home, I suddenly realised I’d been here before.
I leapt to my feet. Yes, there was the river, coiling across the top of the meadow, almost full and topped with streamers of weed. It came as a channel ten feet wide and about as deep; the perfect size for swimming. I thought I’d fling off my clothes and tumble in, but now all I wanted was to curl at the margins and gaze down to where the water ran like liquid coal beneath the shadows of the ash. It was pulling hard, and much clearer than I’d seen it, though when I dipped a toe the sediment lifted in clouds from the clay and sent a school of tanned little minnows skeetering for the bank.
It took me the best part of an afternoon to travel the final miles to the farmhouse in Isfield where I’d taken a room. I went station by station along the waterside, beating the bounds of a route I’d walked for years. At the weir the banks were muddy and the pool very still. Up by Henry Slater’s poplar plantation there was a red cinnabar moth resting on an old tin can, wings stamped with circles of solid lampblack. Near Isfield bridge I sat under a blackthorn and watched a chaffinch moving between the hard green sloes, calling as it climbed. Two fishermen passed as I lolled in the sun. Both were shaven-headed and carrying huge rucksacks, and one was talking into his mobile phone. It is, mate. It is signposted. You go down by that garage at Piltdown, that Paki, and it’s down there on the right. It is, mate, it is! All right, see you in a bit. It was the first human voice I’d heard all day, though I’d seen a figure walking through the corn in Fletching and a man strimming nettles by a wall on a farm near Sharpsbridge, bare-headed in
the sun.
The world might have been emptied of people, but it teemed with birds. The blackthorns on the bank spilled over with song. I could hear a wren clinking away, the sound like a 10p dropped against a bottle, and a whole Greek chorus of tits exchanging apprehension and admonition. I could hear them perfectly, but apart from the chaffinch I couldn’t see a bloody thing. After straining through binoculars for twenty minutes I became petulant. The same hot feeling came over me that I remember as a child from playing hide and seek. Come out, come out, wherever you are! I muttered to myself. Come out! – the same words Christ used to raise Lazarus to life. Perhaps the spell had become tarnished over two millennia, for I did not see so much as a blue tit. I needed the ointment that Cherry of Zennor had stolen. If the doors of perception were cleansed, then everything would be seen as it is.
Just then a sparrowhawk lifted across the roof of the wood, sifting the sky before dropping, light and lethal, between the trees. Oh, to see as a sparrowhawk does! My vision is 20:20; as humans go I am sharp-eyed. A hawk’s vision is 20:5 and its world is correspondingly magnified. There’s not a needle in a haystack that could escape its gaze. What’s more, the available spectrum for a raptor’s eye far exceeds that of a human. They have five types of colour-receptor to our three, meaning they can, for example, perceive ultraviolet light, thus tracking mice by the ultraviolet gleam of their urine. A hawk can also see true yellow, whereas the human eye has no way of telling whether the colour of a dandelion is the yellow of the spectrum or an equal mixture of red and green. It made me want to stamp my feet in rage, the thought of all I miss.
Perhaps I was being greedy. The vision I have is enough to overwhelm me; another two receptors and I’d be on the floor. I let go of trying to find the hidden birds and let my eyes rest on the horizon. The wood where the sparrowhawk had disappeared was in perpetual motion, the branches smashing the light to smithereens. The morning’s high cloud had given way to mare’s tails that streaked like fog across the glassy blue. None of it was as solid as it seemed. I remembered something Matthew had told me, a few weeks before he left. He was explaining the space occupied by matter. Most, he said – meaning 99.97 per cent – of the matter in your body occupies the volume of a mote of dust so minute as to be invisible. The reason why we’re not in fact so small is due to the tiny remaining proportion of matter that is composed of electron orbitals. These almost weightless rings of charge guard their own space fiercely; more than bones it is they that can be said to form the architecture of our bodies.
This fact, astonishing in itself, can be expanded out. 99.9 per cent of the matter of all the human bodies on the planet, all 6 billion of them, takes up no more space than a single sugar cube. The rest is made up of empty space and drifts of electrons, nothing more. As for the planet: a whirling cloud of charge with a fistful of protons scattered through it. I lay back on the ground, which felt solid enough, and tilted my head to the river. It had snagged a scrap of sky and a few wavering trees that kept fanning out to reveal gaps. Is it any wonder we persist with the idea of an afterlife, from Hades where the heroes rest to the heaven and hell of the Bible. Can this really be all there is amid the darkness, this coloured and insubstantial realm?
That night, after dumping my bag in Isfield and eating a bowl of cassoulet in a pub so recently refurbished it still smelled of paint, I carried on up the river to where a wooden bridge crossed onto an island. The waterlilies were blooming, yellow and without scent, and the black water poured between the posts, rippling coldly in the setting sun. There were geese in the paddock opposite, grazing alongside horses, and beyond them a field of maize or peas. A fisherman was casting under the oak, the fourth I’d seen that evening. His dog ran to and fro beside me, watching the line as it dropped out of sight. Everything steadies at sunset, the day drifting down or closing in. Two moorhens were on the far bank, dozing on a wooden step. The dog trotted off with her master, who had caught and thrown back a single silver fish.
When I turned for bed, the sky was on fire. I couldn’t keep up. It was impossible. I could barely even see. There was a lapwing in the fields by the Anchor, beating through the sky on wings like oars. In the ashes of the east a narrow moon had appeared, the same dull silver as the fish I’d glimpsed. A sunset is caused by particles of pollen, dust or soot in the atmosphere scattering the light. Though the particles themselves were invisible from where I stood, they had flooded the sky with streaks of Bede’s red, in Latin coccineus, the word he used also to describe flames. The red gave into other colours, each of them wrung from a whelk dyer’s vat: bluish grey, reddish purple, violet and indigo blue. Beneath them the river ran. It caught what it could. The last colours hung there, undissolved, in that looking-glass world that’s so nearly the twin of our own. In places the water was red, like the river of blood that True Thomas crossed. If I waded out now, where would I end up? I wasn’t sure. No matter how closely I looked, I wasn’t sure.
IV
WAKE
I WALKED BACK THROUGH FIELDS of sleeping cows as the dusk fell down about me. I was staying that night in an old farmhouse near Isfield church, in a room at the end of a long corridor separated from the rest of the house by a velvet curtain. It smelled smoky and sweet, as if apple wood or cherry had been burning for generations. I’d been lent a torch when I went out, and now, tiptoeing back in, I was given a flask of hot milk and a homemade truffle to take up to bed. It was nice to be coddled. I wrapped the duvet round me and ate my feast while flicking through a book I’d found hidden beneath a stack of Country Life.
It was a local history, designed like a diary and made up of scraps culled painstakingly from Victorian newspapers. The stories weren’t framed or explained. They ran one to the next, disconnected and fragmentary, suicides jostling with hare hunts, floods with village picnics. All the river episodes seemed to involve violence and death. ‘In June 1886,’ I read, ‘62-year-old John Hobbs, a carter at Colin Goodman’s farm in Sheffield Forest, drowned in the Ouse between Sheffield Park and Rotherfield Wood. The farmer, Daniel Watson, found the lifeless body gruesomely floating upright, with the legs embedded in sand and mud and the swollen and disfigured head just below the water line.’
The carter had drowned right where I’d stopped and watched pollen drift the preceding day. The river there moved at the base of a channel a good eight or ten feet deep. The banks were lined with nettles, and there were only a few places where the water could be glimpsed, starred with lilies and gartered by weed. Twigs and straw were caught in the crotch of a hazel opposite: a high water mark that meant the river in spate would be quite a sight. It must have been a wet June in 1886, I thought, for a grown man to be submerged upright. I turned to the index, but there were no more mentions of John Hobbs.
What a strange way to be preserved in history, bedded knee-deep in a sandbank. There aren’t many records of drownings in the Ouse, Virginia Woolf aside, and the most famous of them took place six centuries before Hobbs slipped or jumped into the summer river. The Battle of Lewes was waged in the hills above the town in 1264, and many of the soldiers fighting with Simon de Montfort against Henry III are said to have fled into the marshes between Hamsey and Lewes and become trapped there, some drowning on foot and some still astride their horses. I’d walk in their tracks in the morning, and as I gave way to sleep I saw among the fluid images that precede dreams the soldiers’ bodies, mail shirts glinting, as they rolled beneath the water.
I was woken by sparrows talking in the eaves. It was sunny again, and I demolished the largest breakfast I think I’ve ever seen, with rounds of cereal and stewed fruit followed by a fry-up and mug after mug of perfect coffee. In the course of the morning’s conversation, I found out that the house was once three cottages and that the middle one had previously belonged to a man who collected Sussex folksongs, though for the life of me afterwards I couldn’t remember his name. The vicar was – but how had we got on to this? – a jazz drummer, and had recently walked to Lindisfarne; the woman next door wa
s thinking of keeping bees. It was the kind of parochial conversation that is soothing to a stranger, full of church gossip and anxieties about what the neighbours might do or leave undone. My own plans were minutely inspected. Would it take me long to reach Lewes? Had I enough water? Did I have a flask to take a little more coffee? I was regretful about the latter, since I could think of nothing nicer than a riverbank coffee after a solitary swim.
It was another baking day. I cut across the cricket pitch and took the long stony path down to the river. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as happy as I did that morning, with the fields rising like foam about me. I might even have been singing as I cut across to Barcombe Mills by way of the grazing lands of Boathouse Farm. There are often sheep in these fields, but today they’d been replaced by a herd of pretty cows the colour of milky tea. I eyed them warily from the top of the stile. I am – and I confess this in shame – afraid of cows. As I gazed down at the herd, I noticed one had raised its head and was staring back at me. It had a massive neck and a curly blond poll and – I began to feel slightly sick – enormous balls like Edward Gibbon. The bull watched steadily as I teetered on the stile, trying to decide what to do. I didn’t want to cross the field, but I was damned if I was going to retrace my steps. Anyway, there were more cows on the other bank, all pied except a couple of roan and white spots like Staffordshire figurines.