Son of Heaven

by Wingrove, David

  The music was much louder where they sat, close by the speakers, but Jake didn’t mind that. Music – especially music from the old days – was his passion, one that he shared with Old Josh Palmer, the landlord’s father. Josh was in his eighties now, but he was still fit, still sprightly. He lived in the attic of the hotel, in two large rooms with sloping eaves that, apart from his bed and a small sink in one corner, were crammed floor to ceiling with his ‘collection’. It was offerings from that collection that they were listening to now, a collection that anyone would have been proud of, even back in the old days. In these latter days, after the Collapse, his boxes of ancient plastic-sleeved CDs and even older vinyl seemed an absolute treasure trove, most of it irreplaceable; things you’d never see, or ever dream to see, at market. Things that were old before Old Josh was born. Now they seemed even more precious, for these were the last remaining vestiges of an easier age. An age that had passed for good. That, but for this, Jake would never have guessed existed.

  Right now they were playing one of his absolute favourites, ‘Erin Go Bragh’, its rapid, almost staccato acoustic guitar underpinning the delicious, broad Scots accent of its singer, Dick Gaughan. Jake leaned back, half-filled beer mug in hand, and closed his eyes briefly to listen to the flute that seemed to float out of the speakers, so sweet and high, mouthing the words to himself as he did.

  As the song ended and he opened his eyes again, he saw, looking about him, how they were all watching him, suppressed laughter in every face. Seeing his surprised expression, there was an eruption of delighted laughter.

  ‘What?’

  He looked to Tom for an explanation.

  ‘It’s just you, Jake. That look you have sometimes. Lost you are. Totally bloody lost.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He smiled and shrugged. ‘Well…’

  But he wasn’t going to let it ruin his enjoyment. If the truth were told, he lived for these evenings, when the hot, scented air was filled with music. Annie had loved it too. Sitting there, he could imagine, sometimes, that she was beside him still.

  In spirit, anyway, he thought, pushing the memory away. Yet as he did, so another song began, making him catch his breath.

  ‘Oh, well done, Josh…’

  He looked across at Josh, seated by the controls of the old mixing desk and clapped exaggeratedly, making the old man grin toothlessly.

  ‘River Man’. Oh, how he loved this song. Loved the sweet, gently English voice of its singer, Nick Drake. Loved its understated lyric.

  Above all, what got to him was the bittersweet poignancy of it. The idea of lilac time. Of a time free of all cares.

  ‘Dad?’

  He turned, meeting his son’s eyes. ‘What, boy?’

  ‘These songs…’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘It’s just…’

  Peter shrugged. Jake knew his son didn’t have the same love of this music. Peter liked his music harder, heavier than this. More modern, too. Even so, Jake felt he ought to reward his son somehow. He’d been a real help lately. Fishing in his pocket, he brought out a handful of local coins, stamped with the simple standing stone motif of Wessex. Taking one, he handed it to Peter.

  ‘Go on… Go and ask Old Josh for a request. But nothing too outrageous, eh?’

  Peter’s face lit up. Scrambling up, he ran across to where the old man sat, leaning in to shout into his ear.

  Jake watched the boy a moment, warmed to the pit of his stomach by the sight. Sometimes what he felt for the boy surprised him.

  Turning back, he found himself meeting Mary’s eyes. She had been watching him. He saw that instantly. But why?

  The question must have been in his eyes, for she leaned towards him, laying her hand on his, and smiled.

  ‘I was just thinking… remembering when you first came here. You’ve changed, you know.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Beyond recognition.’

  Jake looked away. Tom was watching him now too. Like he and Mary shared a secret. He sipped at his beer, then, seeing Peter returning, turned and called out to him. ‘What did you ask him for?’

  Peter grinned. ‘You’ll see…’

  ‘Oh god…’

  Peter slipped back into his seat, reaching down to pet Boy before meeting his father’s eyes again.

  ‘No, Dad… you’ll like it. Really.’

  Jake was about to protest when the unmistakable opening bars began.

  Hendrix! It was fucking Hendrix!

  From all around, people were getting to their feet, taking up hunched, head down air guitar poses as ‘Voodoo Chile’ pounded from the speakers.

  Jake looked to his son again and grinned. ‘Boy, I raised you extremely bloody well.’ And ignoring Peter’s disgusted look, he too got to his feet and started playing along. As the music faded, Jake opened his eyes again, to find Tom and Mary watching him again, their eyes delighted.

  ‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’ Tom said, getting up and gesturing to Jake to hand over his now empty glass.

  ‘I bloody well did.’

  ‘It’s good to see.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Jake looked down. He knew what Tom was saying, beneath the words. He must have been hard to be with after Annie had died. His mood had been so dark, so… unremittingly morose. He had forgotten how to have fun. If it hadn’t been for Peter. Well… who knew what he’d have done? As it was, the pain lingered, but he could deal with it now.

  As Tom went off to get the beers, he looked to Mary again. ‘Am I that fascinating?’

  She smiled.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, when she didn’t answer. ‘Just that you seem to be watching me tonight.’

  ‘Do I?’ The smile broadened. ‘Just that it’s good to see you smiling again. I never thought…’

  She stopped, her expression changing. A new song had begun. Another old folk song, its mood wistful this time. Jake didn’t recognize it, but it had a distinctly gaelic feel.

  ‘D’you want to dance?’

  Her question surprised him. ‘I… don’t.’

  ‘You used to. With Annie.’

  That too was different. Before now they had come to a kind of unspoken agreement not to talk about Annie and how things used to be. But that had changed, apparently.

  ‘Have you and Tom been talking?’

  ‘Talking? That’s what married couples do, surely?’

  ‘I mean about me.’

  She shrugged, but there was a smile on her lips now. ‘You’re our best friend. Of course we talk about you.’

  ‘Yeah? So what have you been saying?’

  He was conscious, suddenly, of the children listening in. From seeming bored, they were now attentive. Mary, too, seemed to suddenly become aware of it. Looking about her she shooed them all away.

  ‘Go on, go… This is adult talk.’

  When they were gone, Boy trailing in their wake, Mary turned to him again.

  ‘So?’ he asked. ‘Why am I suddenly so interesting?’

  ‘You’ve always been interesting.’

  He shook his head. ‘The truth.’

  Mary looked down. It seemed to him that beyond her playful teasing she was steeling herself to say something. Only right then Tom returned, and Jake sensed that the moment had passed. He wasn’t sure why, or what it was about, maybe nothing, only it wasn’t how she usually was with him. She nor Tom.

  ‘Got it all ready for the morning, have you?’ Tom asked, handing Jake his beer.

  Jake nodded, but he was staring thoughtfully at Mary.

  ‘Your wife…’ he began.

  ‘Is a very, very, very fine wife.’

  Tom put his arm about her, hugging her to him.

  ‘Maybe… Only I sense she means to meddle in my life.’

  ‘Oh?’ Tom sounded surprised. ‘And how would she be a doin’ that?’

  It had come to him, just a moment before. What she was doing.

  ‘I think she means to find Peter a new moth
er.’

  Tom looked to Mary then back to Jake. He was smiling now. ‘Would that be so very bad, Jake? I mean… you need a woman in your bed.’

  There. As blunt as that. ‘Do I?’

  ‘You know you do,’ Mary said; but she looked down as she said it and seemed to blush.

  ‘If I needed a good fuck…’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ she said, meeting his eyes defiantly.

  No, he thought, thinking of Annie. It never was. But there was something odd going on here. He only had to look at Tom to see it. Tom had a secret, and he wasn’t a man to feel comfortable with secrets. Only Jake guessed Mary would have made him swear not to tell. Whatever it was.

  Jake looked up, recognizing the song that was playing. It was Sandy Denny, ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’.

  He smiled, feeling a sweet sadness. Annie had always loved this song.

  ‘You’re a sweet woman, Mary Hubbard,’ he said, looking back at her. ‘But you must leave me be. I am as I am. If I loved your sister too much, then there’s no blame in that. I’m not ready yet, okay?’

  ‘Okay. I’ll leave you be.’

  But she said it softly, and to his ears it sounded much like Annie would have said it, had Annie been there.

  A faint breeze ruffled the huge, makeshift screen, making the image ripple, as if the dreamlike aura of the ancient movie were suddenly revealed for what it was. A chimera. A fiction about a life that now seemed equally a fiction.

  Even so, nothing, at that moment, seemed more real, more true, than what was unfolding on that screen.

  Sat there among those who loved him best, his face all but hidden in the half dark, Jake wiped away the tears that had been rolling down his cheeks unchecked. It was absurd, he knew, but this scene – where Sergeant Troy stooped over the coffin of his dead love, Fanny Robin, and kissed her cold, dead lips – always got to him. Nothing had the power to move him more. Watching it, he knew Troy’s despair; knew just how he could utter those awful, soul-destroying words to the living woman he had so cruelly and mistakenly married.

  To prefer the dead ideal to the living reality. It was absurd… but true.

  Beside him, Peter was quietly shaking with emotion. It was, as so often, all too close to be comfortable. Jake wanted to reach out and take his hand, but there was that awful restraint between them – that inability to talk of the matter. And so each suffered it alone.

  As the final frame finished and the credits ran, Jake quickly made his way across to the back of the inn, squeezing through the packed back bar – where the men were crowded round the tables, talking and smoking their pipes – and into the gents.

  He was standing there, relieving himself, when Tom Hubbard came and stood beside him.

  ‘And married the woman that had the gold…’

  Jake smiled. It was a line from an old song, and, as so often, it said perfectly what he had been thinking. He himself was no Troy – no adventurer. Oh, he had been in the past, but not these days. No. Nowadays he was more of a Gabriel Oak figure, sturdy and reliable. But when it came to love…

  He glanced at his old friend. ‘It all comes full circle, don’t you think?’

  Tom shrugged. ‘I dunno. Watching that… well, the whole damn twentieth century might as well not have happened. I sat there thinking… this is about us, now. Only, if none of that had happened – all that stuff that came between times – then we’d not have had the film. Ironic, eh?’

  ‘We live in ironic times.’

  ‘Maybe. Yet we’re comfortable enough, don’t you think?’

  Jake buttoned himself up. ‘Another beer?’

  Tom shook his head. ‘Not me, boy. I’m headin’ back. Need some rest before our trip tomorrow. But the girls are stayin’ on.’ He glanced at Jake and smiled. ‘We’re not abandoning you.’

  Again, there was something behind the words, only Jake was too muddled to work out what. He’d have another beer himself then go. Tom was right, after all. You needed your wits about you on the road.

  They made their way back out into the long back bar. There, at the crowded central table, Geoff Horsfield, a tall man in his sixties – a historian by profession, who had run the school in Corfe for the past twenty years and more – was holding sway.

  ‘I was just saying,’ he said, looking up at Jake and reaching out to hold his arm. ‘Some’at’s got to change. How we are… how we live… it can’t go on. We’re driven as a species to evolve, socially as well as biologically. This here… this little pocket of warmth in which we exist… it’s not viable. Not long term, anyway… It’s no more than a sideshow. I’d say the main event’s to come, wouldn’t you, Jake?’

  Only Jake didn’t want to say. He’d had this feeling in his gut the past week or so – a feeling that the presence of the strangers on the Wareham Road that morning had fed, like tinder to the flame. A giddying sense of uncertainty. It was like they were all on the edge of a cliff. One single push was all that was needed and they’d be over the edge again and falling.

  ‘I dunno…’ he began, but Tom took that moment to interrupt.

  ‘How we live, here in Purbeck… I’d say it was all pretty civilized, wouldn’t you? Tonight, for instance. Who here would have it different? Or do you forget how it was before the Collapse?’

  ‘No one forgets that,’ Will Cooper said, speaking from where he sat just across the table, ruddy-faced and dark-eyed, his sparse grey hair stretched thin across his sun-burnished pate. ‘None of us wants that back. But Geoff’s right. We can’t stand still. We ’ave to move on. This is all well and good, but it feels to me like we’re all just sitting on our arses waiting to die.’

  There was a strong murmur at that. Some were in favour of what Will had said, but most were against. Such talk was old ground, of course. Time and again they had sat here late into the night, in the light of the old log fire, drinking the landlord’s best ale and chewing this one over. But tonight there seemed a sudden urgency to their talk.

  ‘Things’re changing,’ Dick Grove grumbled, shaking his head in a foreboding manner. ‘Word comin’ up the road is that’s something’s ’appening out east.’

  ‘Rumours,’ Tom said. ‘Nothing solid.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Geoff answered him, ‘but some’at’s ’appenin’, make no mistake. And perhaps it’s time it did. We’ve got too cosy. Too complacent.’

  ‘You think so?’ Tom asked. ‘You think we’ve got soft?’

  ‘Not soft so much as accepting.’

  ‘Accepting?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not advocating a return to how things were. God help us, no! It was like bleedin’ Sodom and Gomorrah, remember? The Age of Waste. A whole society living beyond its means. Yes, and we’re better off without it. But Mankind has to move on. It’s in our natures. It’s how we’re wired genetically. To sit on our arses, as our good friend Will so eloquently put it, that just isn’t an option!’

  ‘You would say that,’ John Lovegrove chipped in, pointing a long, bony finger at his friend, ‘but that’s cos you’re a ’istorian. I’m just a farmer and I rather like things as they are. Things weren’t good afore the Fall. Sod’em and Gomorrah, like you said, and all on live TV!’

  There was laughter at that, yet as it faded Jake found his attention caught by the music drifting in from outside. It was Coldplay. ‘Everything’s Not Lost’. He smiled at the irony, then looked back, his eyes moving from face to face, tracing the circle of his friends. As Geoff talked, they looked on, their ruddy faces intent, their eyes aglow in the fire’s warm, flickering light. They were good men, every last man jack of them, but right now they were afraid. He could sense it. Something had changed. None of them knew what, but there was the feel of it in the air.

  Change. It was coming. Only none of them knew from which direction.

  Tom leaned close, speaking to his ear. ‘I’ve got to go. See you in the morning, eh?’

  Jake nodded, looking on as Tom said his farewells, then went outside, back into the crisp late evening
air.

  The bonfire had burned down. In the cleared space near where Old Josh sat behind his speakers, couples were slow dancing now, lost in the music, while overhead the moon sat full and large in the cloudless sky, a pearled circle against the dark.

  Jake smiled. The world could fall apart and still people would be dancing.

  ‘Jake…?’

  He went across. Their table was in deep shadow. Only one figure sat there now, hunched in to herself, as if against the cold.

  ‘Mary? Where are the others?’

  ‘Gone off.’ She smiled at him, then patted the bench beside her. ‘Come and sit with me.’

  He sat, feeling her shuffle up to him, her warmth against his side.

  ‘Been putting the world to rights, have you?’

  He smiled. ‘Tom’s gone home.’

  ‘I know.’ She took his arm, put it round her shoulders.

  ‘Mary?’

  ‘I’m cold, is all.’

  He closed his eyes, feeling her snuggle in against him. It felt nice. Warm and friendly.

  ‘Jake?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What we said earlier. About you needing a woman…’

  He looked at her again; saw how intently she was watching him.

  ‘What’s goin’ on? You and Tom. You’ve been odd tonight, the pair of you.’

  ‘Odd?’ She feigned offence, then smiled. ‘It’s nothing… You want to dance?’

  ‘I don’t do dancing.’

  ‘No?’ She sighed. ‘Oh, go on… Please, Jake. For me. Just one dance? I’d dance with Tom, only Tom’s not here…’

  Jake shrugged. ‘All right. But just the one. Cos Tom’s not here.’

  She held his hand as they walked across. The song ended. As the next began he took her in his arms. It was The Verve. ‘Lucky Man’.

  ‘Oh, Jake… I love this song…’

  He held her close, closing his eyes, letting himself succumb to the warmth of her. Enjoying the way she pressed against him, swaying gently, the way she softly sang along to the words of the old song.

  ‘You know what?’

  ‘What?’ She spoke into his neck, a lazy drawl, her breath warm against his flesh.

  ‘I feel like I’ve been set up.’