An article about his hobby appeared in a reputable Sunday newspaper, accompanied by absurdly glossy photographs of himself with the red car positioned in front of the house. The result (as he understood it) was that the house was burgled of most of its valuables, and the shed in which the Lotus was sheltered was set alight, destroying everything within it; despite the licences for meetings of historical interest, petrol-driven vehicles were legitimate targets these days. The police were only interested in the burglary, although trusty Cliff berated them from behind his rake. They laughingly threatened to search his gardening hut for illegal chemicals and went away, pursued by imprecations.
The loss of the car struck Gus as in some way symptomatic, and he saw his life as irredeemably blighted and the rest of humanity as bent on violence and envious revenge. He was not at all surprised when, one morning in the greenhouse – to which he had retired with a book from an abruptly chilly day in January – the white-clad Aidan Eldraw appeared like a wraith on the threshold beyond the orchids and ferns. He looked healthier than on the first visit two years previously, and Gus had the unpleasant sensation of being sucked of his blood as the man talked. He had no bicycle this time: he had walked ten miles, hitched a lift from a slow solar waggon for the last five.
‘None of my recent letters have been answered,’ he said. He was sitting on an iron chair once painted cream and now freckled and blistered by rust, yet appeared not to be aware of the danger to the starchy freshness of his clothes. ‘So I’m forced to come to you again in person to hear the truth.’
‘Did you burn my car and rob my house?’ asked Gus. The stranger – Gus still thought of him as a stranger, though his face was frighteningly familiar from bad dreams – smiled and shook his head.
‘You must have so many enemies,’ he said. ‘Since the Revolt.’
‘Most of them are misinformed, as you know.’
‘The clampdown was on your watch.’
‘Yes. The lightning conductor, they called me. I took the blame during the trials. But there is nothing I can do about my enemies. It was a long time ago. The future is what counts and everything is now apparently in hand. We’ve passed the peak, did you know that?’
‘Everyone knows that,’ the man scoffed. His brow was not shiny, nor his upper lip. On the contrary, he had the pinched look of someone still chilled. Yet the greenhouse was unpleasantly hot and humid, beading its moisture on every surface, on petal and leaf and stem, on paper and on human skin.
‘They say the effects won’t be immediately felt, even on the glaciers. Which seems contradictory’ Gus went on, folding his wrinkled hands on his book. ‘One never knows who or what to believe.’ He paused, slapped at a mosquito whining in his ear as if punishing himself. ‘I’ve thought hard about your allegations. I’ve searched my memory for the slightest justification for their outrageous content and found none.’ The words came easily and calmly from his mouth.
Aidan Eldraw shifted in his iron chair. His smile was bloodless, his stare without highlights – as if the very eyeballs were dry.
‘I don’t happen to believe you,’ he said. ‘I happen to believe Persephone.’
Gus registered the craquelure on the iron tracery of the greenhouse, built so long ago that even his grandfather remembered it as a boy. The oldest panes of glass were blown by hand and ruffled the scene outside as he moved his head. Small bubbles of air rested in them, like air in ice. The world might melt, he thought, or catch fire and be blown away in ashes, great drifts of ash. Whatever they say.
He closed his eyes and thought of his car, of its leather seats and the oily interior of the engine, of the speed it would go and the cheery innocence it provoked in all those who laid eyes on it, of the track rushing under his wheels and the scenery blurring into an abstraction of dim colour, of his old heart pounding under the racing overalls.
He opened his lids again and said to the man, ‘If you don’t go away I will call the police.’
‘Prime Minister, you know perfectly well that the dead can’t be arrested.’
‘I am no longer the prime minister, I am seventy-nine and retired for decades. And you are not a ghost. I, if anything, am the ghost.’
The man stood up: the rusty chair had left stains like old spots of blood on the cream suit. ‘Poor Persephone,’ he said. ‘You’ll never know what you did to her, will you? One day long ago, on a road leaving Nairobi, as I was heading for Mombasa, I saw a sign. It said, TAKE NOTICE: WHEN THIS SIGN IS UNDER WATER, THIS ROAD IS IMPASSABLE. Please think about this sign, Prime Minister. Think about it very hard.’
The man who claimed to have known Persephone never came back; at times Gus would wonder if the creature had ever existed. The blisters of rust on the old seat had broken, that was for sure, and Gus had not sat there for years. Delusion was a distinct possibility, although the visitant’s Kenyan connection seemed plausible enough.
If you could go on seeing the sign, then all was not lost. He smiled at this, often. Was that what the man had meant? Or something quite other?
When he was dying, on a tropic day in early spring, and stumbling in his visions along a green downland track, he was surprised to find the sign underwater, and quite invisible, and the way forward gone for good save the odd tell-tale ripple over the drowned hedgerows. A moment of clarity ensued. He wished to say sorry. But he could not speak.
Mrs Cutler scowled and the nurse wiped his brow. He asked to be raised up against the pillows and gesticulated for a pen, for paper, for ink – not the pallid soya ink on his desk but the old deep-smelling violet ink that he had sealed in a bottle decades before, in a cupboard drawer. But the liquid had dried up to no more than a stain around the inside, like a trick bottle he had once bought in a toy shop when he was a boy and had long since lost.
He held the little vessel loosely in his hands, studying it intently as if it held some divine secret, thinking – through a haze of weariness and pain – of all the words he might have written, of all that he might have regained.
Go Light
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
Gary Snyder
Leaving Frideswide
David Constantine
Word came by a thin Somali boy on a mountain bike. Suddenly he appeared at the open door, braking hard and behind him the brazen sky. Letter for you, Miss, he said. He stood there offering it over the handlebars. Beth noticed that his trainers didn’t match. Well I hope they fit at least, she said. She had taken to uttering her hopes aloud – softly, below the hearing of anyone more than a yard away, but aloud, and her fears likewise. Said, they were real, she owned up to them, the things she hoped and the things she feared. The messenger wore a blue football strip, kingfisher blue. He could not be more than seven or eight. He wore his importance proudly and fearfully. How white his eyes.
Beth came out from behind her desk and took the letter. What are you called? she asked. – Barnie, Miss. – Would you like some apple juice, Barnie? – Yes, please, Miss. She took a jug from the fridge and poured him a glass. The generator died half an hour ago, she said. But it should still be all right. Barnie gulped it down. Beth poured him another glass. Not much this year, she said. Not much and the last.
The letter, on county council notepaper, was handwritten in beautiful copperplate at which Beth marvelled, before she read:
Friday 30 September
Dear Ms Atkins,
The buses will come for your party tomorrow, 1 October, at 10 a.m. Please be ready to leave at once. According to your submission of 15 September, you have forty-three people in your charge. We shall send an ambulance for Mrs Eaves, to bring her to hospital here. On the buses there will be space for five wheelchairs. Luggage is limited to one suitcase and one handbag or shoulder bag per person. There will be space also for your box
files. Before leaving, please make the office, the school, the Big House and all sheds, outbuildings, stores, and workshops as secure as possible.
I wish you a safe journey.
Yours sincerely,
Thomas Cartwright
Health and Social Security
Below this was scrawled: PTO. Beth turned and read: Dearest, admire the script! Harry’s dad – he used to sort our post – offered his services. There’s another talent we never knew we had! Be brave tomorrow. I’ll follow when I’m let. My love as always. Tom.
Beth looked at Barnie. He was staring at her, almost imploring, which choked her throat with pity. Oh dear, she whispered. What will become of him? Barnie, she said, will you take a note back to Mr Cartwright, please? I will write it quickly. Yes, Miss, said Barnie, his stare never quitting her face. Beth wrote: My darling, please send Barnie to me with the buses tomorrow. I will have written you a letter by then. Tell Barnie he must carry my letter to you. I couldn’t bear to leave without being sure that you will have my letter. But it is too sad for words. Beth. She sealed and addressed her note. Barnie tucked it down his right sock, and vanished into the heat.
■
They had known they must leave. At least, those in charge and those in their care whose wits still worked that way had known it for weeks. All the same, Barnie’s word was very sudden. Beth stood in a vagueness, staring out into the flickering heat. The air itself was hot, she could scarcely have said where the sun shone from, its heat had entered the air that people must look at, feel, smell, and take into their lungs for breath. Perhaps it will rain, she said. But that was an out-of-date hope, not big enough. Very likely it would rain. It might rain next week, tomorrow, before nightfall. So what?
■
Kingston stood in the door. That kid ride like the wind, he said. Oh, Kingston, said Beth, they sent him to say the buses are coming tomorrow. I knew him for a messenger, Kingston said. That boy’s a born messenger. Kingston advanced, as out of a fiery furnace. Nobody at Frideswide could say how old he was: maybe sixty, maybe ninety. He had been there for ever. Kingston was where he had come from and what he was called. That was the one sure thing. Beth and everyone else at Frideswide who thought about Kingston supposed that something bad had happened to him early on. Or not just bad – the worst; so that nothing so bad could happen to him again. That seemed the most likely reason for his calm, stature and gentleness. His hair was a dirty white, he wore soft and faded clothes, walked slowly, looked around him a good deal, stooped his height benignly over all who spoke to him. Then we better get moving, Elizabeth, he said.
The office was more or less packed up already – in box files 1-30, year by year, a record of who had come and who had gone, the aspirations, deeds and disappointments of the place. Tom Cartwright, who had come visiting more often than he strictly needed to, said one day, if he was let, he would write a proper history of Frideswide, from the leper hospital to the new woodshed with its solar panels, from Sir Philip Swithamley to Ms Beth Atkins. Beth put on her wide straw hat and went out with Kingston to tell whoever had to be told.
Alfred was standing at the school gates with his photograph. He been standing there too long, said Kingston. He won’t come in, said Beth. I’ve tried. He’s having one of his bad days.
■
Beth’s office was in the old school, facing the front yard. The juniors had moved some years before, to a bright new place, but the infants still attended, or had until July, when the schools, this and the rest, finished for the summer holidays and no new year would begin. For a while, daytime and evenings, the hall and the classrooms continued to accommodate courses, events, and meetings of one sort or another. There was art, Keep Fit, IT, local history, yoga, English as a foreign language, first aid, a crèche, a playgroup, twice a week the CAB were there, once a week the MP, there were discos and talks on global warming, the WI held their AGM, the Allotments Committee met, so did Crisis at Christmas, all the usual things that people arrange for mutual aid, instruction, and entertainment continued for a while in the hospitable old school, till one by one in the gathering heat they ceased, they gave up, they were terminated. The foyer still said, Welcome! in thirty-five languages, the classrooms harboured their equipment and materials, the charts, the paintings, the photos, all the bright paraphernalia, but the humans, infant and adult, were gone, and already from the roof space to the cellars the emboldened rats had the run of the place, up and down the stairs, and Beth, working late, heard them at her back, the risen and rapidly multiplying population.
The old heart of Frideswide, the leper hospital and its chapel, once some distance outside the city walls, had over the last hundred years or so been taken in; but from above, from a police helicopter, say, the whole domain looked to be feeling for the lost country still. In a ragged fashion it reached beyond its own boundaries for connection with like-minded terrain: an unkempt graveyard, a park, the backs of gardens, an allotment, the dark corridor of a stream or a disused railway line. Even before the heat, the very thought of this thriving greenery was a refreshment. It lingered in parched minds now as an after-image: terrible loss, commensurate longing.
Wherever you went in the territory of Frideswide you heard the rumour of the city, faintly the traffic on the motorway, trains passing west, and now and then a big military plane came over low, heading for its base in the open country, concrete enclosed by wire. But these sounds of the outside world, if heeded at all, had only ever deepened the feeling of sanctuary. Now silence pressed upon the quiet of Frideswide, you hearkened at it far more than you ever had to the din of the streets, you listened to it.
Frideswide’s workshops were clustered behind the school, by the entrance to the market gardens; across these gardens, next to the main orchard, stood the ruins of the chapel and the leper hospital, and close to them the Big House, once the workhouse, and there most of Frideswide’s people lived.
■
The first workshop was still busy. They were assembling wooden toys – engines with trucks and carriages, farm buildings, dolls’ houses – and painting them and the humans and animals to go with them, in bright colours. Beth sat down at one of the benches. She had no wish to impart her news. Kingston sat against the wall, very upright, and closed his eyes. He withdrew. It was like sleep, but deeper, further away, blacker, in the substratum of himself, beyond consolation and asking for none. Even in the heyday of Frideswide when there was much to do and the bright things they made for children passed quickly to the shop and into the outside children’s world, even then, suddenly, in any company and on any occasion, Kingston might retract himself and sit against the wall, showing the face of a sadness as old as thinking man. Nobody intruded upon him.
Beth said her news matter-of-factly and watched it home, from face to face. The same at the other two working benches. Leaving, she said, Supper’s at six-thirty. And to herself, in the undertone: Candles and oil-lamps.
Bench by bench in the other two workshops, Beth told the people they were leaving home next day. After that, entering the gardens, she sat in the doorway of the nearest shed and pulled her straw hat down over her eyes. The faces appeared, all of them together, pressing to be seen again as they had looked when she spoke the news. Hardest among them to bear were those like Sammy who had not known what to make of it, was it good or bad? and who looked, for example, to Albert who knew it was bad and expected no better, or, for example, to Ethel, who smiled on the world, never learned but forgot and reverted always to her incurable bent in favour of trust. So Sammy looked at one or the other and back again at Beth: again and again he looked hard at Beth. He rested his big hands on the red roof of a dolls’ house and his eyes like creatures at bay implored her to promise nothing bad would happen.
It was late afternoon. Between the shed and the Big House lay the acres of cultivated land, all manner of plots, all shapes and sizes, with osier hedges, and the paths passing under rustic arches. There were coops and trellises, cane wigwams for beans and sweet
peas, small families of apple, pear, damson, and plum, a scrap of old woodland with beehives in. There were troughs, water butts, sheds; here and there a wicker statue, a scarecrow. So much work year after year, so much wit, care, inventiveness and delight, all the loving craft, ending. No one was working. A dozen or more of Frideswide’s own people and a dozen at least from outside come in for respite and to learn. They should have been here, among the statues and the scarecrows; you’d have seen people picking, tending, pruning, clearing, getting ready for next year, there’d have been a slow bonfire or two, and from the far corner you’d have heard the Dixie Band practising for Apple Day. Really, there was nothing much left, no chickens, no ducks, nothing much had come through, scarcely enough for their own needs, very little for the shop, nothing in store, the glacial days in May, then the heat, the searing, the hail, the dust, the hail, deluge, tempest, heat, heat, heat, had left wreckage, blackening, blight, and putrescence, and over all, till the next sweep of rain, lay the fine red dust.
Beth watched the red kites. They came in up the quiet motorway and, unless the weather was furious, congregated over Frideswide, twenty or thirty of them, spying down, tilting, gliding lower for a closer look. You might come across one on the earth itself, tearing at a find, not at all perturbed by your arrival. They would clean the place up. The deer came in too, fallow and muntjac, along the parched corridors, for any remnants of succulence. And stray dogs, once or twice already a pack of them, and lone cats ranging out of town. After three days of hot south winds, many thousands of butterflies blew in with the red dust. They clouded the brassy sky, the local birds fell upon them gratefully, they drifted the earth, the wood-chip paths, the asphalt playground, the roofs, the gutters, the sills, in a soft litter and it was only then, fallen and finishing, that you saw how beautiful they were, how delicate their structure and fabric, how various their symmetries, countless thousands of creatures, flocking, whirling and settling as softly as snow.
Beacons Page 16