by Jim Powell
This secreted area was a world apart. Straddling the border of Somerset and Devon, it was a sprawling expanse of countryside, with no towns, just villages of differing sizes. Villages with names like Hemyock and Clayhidon, Uffculme and Upottery, which you would think no one could have invented. Roads did not run from A to B, or in straight lines at all. They ran like rivers, serendipitously seeking an ocean that did not exist, through banked ferns and ragwort, ivy choking the trees.
The villages were unpretentious. They sported occasional buildings of blunt ugliness, as if to brag that there was so much beauty to spare that they could afford to wreck this particular corner of it. If there were streets called Orchard Road or Rectory Way, it was because they ran through orchards or led to a rectory, not because some sleazy property developer was trying to pull the wool over your eyes. They had pubs where people would drink beer and cider, not mineral water. I expect they sold pork scratchings that came from pigs.
I don’t know how many square miles can be covered by a single postcode. In this case, it seemed like several thousand. The satnav must have directed me up and down every lane in the neighbourhood. None of them led me to Anna. I saw no one to ask in this pastoral desert, even if I could have mustered the good sense to ask them. After an hour or so, I found my way back to the main road from which Anna’s directions had begun, turned off the satnav and tried to follow them. I fared no better with that approach.
In this landscape, navigation would have been difficult even with signposts. The old cast-iron signs, that had stood since tarmac was first applied to rutted tracks, had evidently now rusted beyond repair. The two county councils seemed to have embarked on a joint programme to replace them with plastic. The first phase of the project, the removal of the old signs, had been successfully completed. In a few years’ time, they would probably get round to the second phase.
It turned into a horrendous morning. Panicking, trying to read the directions and to drive, both at the same time. In tumult at the prospect of seeing Anna, and equally of not seeing her. Undecided what I was going to tell her about my circumstances.
As if that was not enough, at some point a sign told me that I was driving through the Blackdown Hills, that Anna now lived among the Blackdown Hills. Part of my brain told me that this symmetry was a good omen, the confirmation of a world in harmony. Another part told me it was an ill omen. On one Blackdown, in Surrey, I had lost Anna. On another Blackdown, in Somerset, I was looking for her, but had so far failed to find her. Perhaps I would always fail to find her.
It was hopeless. I would have to call Anna’s mobile. She had given me the number, while pointing out that there was seldom a signal at her house. So that would probably be a failure too. First, I would need to find somewhere with a signal for my own. It was nearly midday by now. I drove upwards. At every turning, I took the road that led upwards. I found myself on top of the Blackdown Hills, most of Somerset sprawled around me, washed by autumn rain. There I got a signal, and there I made the call. There was no answer.
I had no idea what message to leave on her voicemail, so I didn’t leave one. Instead, I sat in the car, tears in my eyes.
Tears in my eyes, and stupid thoughts in my head, variations on the themes of destiny and of promises unfulfilled. No, you berk, it wasn’t thanks to destiny that Anna had materialized at Tate Modern. Or rather it was, but not destiny as in ‘the two of you were always destined to be together’. Instead it was ‘the two of you were never destined to be together, which was why it never happened in ’67. Why go searching for complicated explanations? How much of an imbecile are you? Do you need to be dragged all the way to Somerset to have the obvious pointed out to you?’ And the promise, on both occasions, had been just that: only a promise, a promise of the unattainable, not one that would be kept.
I had come to Somerset to see Anna, for no other reason. I had failed to find her house and she had failed to answer her phone. What, a judge might ask a jury, would a reasonable man be expected to do in those circumstances? A reasonable man would make every effort to find Anna’s house, and as quickly as possible, especially if she had prepared lunch for him. A reasonable man would retrace his tracks, get as close as he could to the destination, find a house and knock on the door to ask for directions. I didn’t know much about Anna’s circumstances, but enough to describe her and the bare bones of her life, enough for her to be identified by a near neighbour.
This reasonable man did none of those things, not yet. This reasonable man fell to pieces. Is that not reasonable? Why shouldn’t a reasonable man fall to bloody pieces? Why does reasonable behaviour always have to relate to reason? Why can’t emotional behaviour also be reasonable? Extreme behaviour, even. I’m fed up with being reasonable. I want to be really, really unreasonable. No wonder judges cock things up all the time. They ask the wrong questions. If they asked what the unreasonable man would do, they might get a more relevant answer. I’ve always hated the law.
I parked the car in a car park in the woods, on the high ridge of the Blackdown Hills. Thinking a walk might clear my head, I set off down the track that issued from it. It led to a massive obelisk that towered over the valleys on either side. On one side, the town of Wellington, the M4 motorway, evidence of bustle and endeavours, of choices and compromises. I don’t know what choices. Mocha and Cappuccino, I should think. Certainly those. Americano, Latte and Macchiato, I shouldn’t wonder. Ristretto, possibly.
Perhaps you’d like to consider your options in our coffee shop, Mr Oxenhay. We have a fine coffee shop. We employ a remarkably talented barista. You can have a coffee entirely of your choosing, Mr Oxenhay. You can say exactly how far up which mountain in Colombia you’d like your beans from. And we have five grades of milk available, from pure Tibetan yak to the cow next door. What would your choice be, Mr Oxenhay? Oh yes, any number of choices, but never a choice.
On the other side of the ridge, Anna’s side, lay rich, primeval farmland, untouched by any century, rolling as far as the eye could see. Even so, in one of those stolid white-walled farmhouses, would live someone who had once owned a Ronco electric carving knife. There is never an uncompromised escape, is there?
I walked to the obelisk. It was in a shocking condition, fenced off, with notices warning of the perils of falling masonry. I wondered how something of this magnitude had come to be erected in the middle of nowhere. Another notice informed me. It was a monument to the Duke of Wellington.
Apparently, the obelisk had been erected by public subscription to honour the victor of Waterloo, who had lands nearby and who took his title from the town. It was meant to mirror Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square: the nemesis of Napoleon’s army and the nemesis of his navy. It, too, was intended to be a column, with a statue of the noble Duke on top of it. Then the money ran out and no one could raise any more, so the dukeless column was sculpted into an obelisk, as if that had been the intention all along. I suppose Wellington had already become a Tory politician by this point and no one, then as now, would have wanted to dip hand in pocket to build a monument to a Tory politician.
I had a vision of Wellington riding on horseback along the wide carriageway that led to his own monument, hoping to pay homage to himself, being told that the money had dried up and would an obelisk be all right, asking himself what you had to do to get a bloody monument these days if defeating Napoleon was not enough. Perhaps even he had doubts about the value of his achievements, or at least other people’s perception of them. Serve him right. Do you think they sell garden gnomes that look like David Cameron? I bet they do. Cameron would look good as a garden gnome.
It was lunchtime and I was hungry. I thought I might as well find a pub in Wellington. Driving down the sheer escarpment, the road buried between the hobgoblin roots of ancient beech and birch, felt like a flight from fantasy into a sadly familiar reality. The sign that ushered me into Wellington declared that it had been voted ‘the best medium-sized town in the South West’. I think I shall suggest to the local a
uthority that Barnet should be designated ‘the best medium-sized London suburb beginning with B’.
It seemed a dismal little town. The sort of town that has yellow cellophane in the windows of gents’ outfitters to stop the stock discolouring. The sort of shop that must therefore turn its stock over about once a year, yet somehow manages to keep trading. The sort of clothes in the window of which it would be hard to say if they were discoloured or not.
The farmers’ market was packing up as I arrived. When Anna had told me that she stood at a market stall on Saturday mornings, selling her produce, a bucolic image had come into my mind. I had envisaged rosy-cheeked farmers’ wives selling butter churned a few days earlier, slicing it with wire and patting it into shape with corrugated slappers like they used to in Sainsbury’s when I was a sixpence. No, not slappers. Clappers. That’s it. Slappers wouldn’t be corrugated, I don’t think. Or perhaps they would. It would depend on the bedsprings.
I envisaged their horny-handed husbands butchering haunches of beef and shanks of mutton, slaughtered in their own barns and well hung. The meat, I mean, although perhaps the farmers too. I expect they would be round here. And amongst them Anna, wearing a flat cap and brown ironmonger’s apron in gamine style, flirting with the farmers, cold-shouldered by their wives, surrounded by diminishing piles of free-range eggs and potatoes covered with earth, or whatever it is they grow in.
I don’t know if we all do this: take one small grain of substance and spin gossamer strands of candy around it to create a soufflé confection of sugar and air, far removed from reality. Building things up in our minds into grand edifices of delusion. I don’t think I used to behave like this, at least not often. Lately I seem to have been doing it more and more. I used to eat candy-floss at Battersea Funfair, along with toffee apples. There was a kiosk at the bottom of the helter-skelter.
The Wellington farmers’ market was nothing like I had imagined. It was indoors, for a start. A vast mural of spectacular ineptitude covered one long wall of a Nonconformist church hall. The produce may have been local; little of it seemed to have come from a farm. It looked like a WI stall at a small village fete. ‘A collection of weird people selling stuff’ doesn’t have quite the same allure as ‘farmers’ market’, probably, so accuracy had been trumped by marketing once again, the authentic by a replica. I watched the ferreting of the women with their autumn coats and sludge-green headscarves and woven baskets.
And I looked up at the painted beams, held in place by thin metal stays, below a fibreboard ceiling, and thought of another dowdy church hall, in another county, in another age.
I first saw Anna across a crowded dance floor in a Methodist church hall in Haslemere in December 1966. I was staying for the weekend with Simon, an old friend, and was dancing with his sister Linda. I use the word ‘dancing’ loosely. When I came up for air after a long snog, a girl was standing in the distance, in perfect focus, the foreground congregation no more than a blur. She was not dancing, but standing with two men at the bar. She was tall and slim, fine blonde hair falling to her shoulders. The main point was not the looks, fabulous though they were. The main point was the attitude. She was fully engaged with the two men, laughing animatedly, hand reaching out to touch arms, tactile. At the same time, she seemed to be detached, sufficient in her own space, needing nothing and nobody.
The next morning I asked Simon about her, described her to him. ‘Sounds like Anna,’ he said. ‘Anna Purdue. Do you fancy her?’
‘Just a bit.’
‘If you can get close to Anna,’ said Simon, ‘you’ll have done better than anyone else round here. Everyone thinks she’s a prick-teaser.’
We were so assured then, so categorical in our judgements. We could condense our peers into a word or two. There were no nuances; no on the one hand, on the other hand, or yet agains. Appraisals were staccato. Life was simple. Verdicts were certain. Over the decades, we have applied layers of make-up to ourselves and to others. Silt deposits from different eons accrete upon our river beds. If all of this were stripped away, all of us reduced once more to a word or two, I would still be a chancer, and perhaps Anna would still be a prick-teaser.
I looked around the market hall for her. I was a little puzzled. In her email, she had said that she was usually on a stall at the farmers’ market on Saturday mornings, but that there wasn’t one that day. Surely Wellington would be her local market. Perhaps she had confused the dates. Anyway, she wasn’t there. I found a pub nearby. It was late for lunch, the lunch I should have been having with her. Too late, as it turned out. The pub had stopped serving food. I bought a pint of beer, sat down on a hard settle and decided to feel sorry for myself.
I don’t often feel sorry for myself, and not only because I’ve had so little cause to do so in my life. Self-pity is pathetic. Whenever I feel it coming on, it quickly transmutes into anger and self-loathing. After a few minutes of considering myself the least fortunate man in the world, I began to rip myself to pieces. You stupid, useless bastard, I told myself. Bone-idle all your life. Presenting your laziness as flair and intuition, because you can’t be arsed to do the research. Chucked out of your job because you can’t hack it any more. No guts to tell your wife you’re out of work. More or less an alcoholic, give or take a Babycham. Shit husband and father. Chasing some bit of skirt down in Somerset for God knows what reason. She didn’t want you then. She doesn’t want you now. And in any case you can’t even find her because you’re such a useless prat.
For some reason, I said all this out loud. It made it more official.
An old man sitting at the next table smiled at me. I thought he must be trying to pick me up. Do they have gay people in Somerset? They must do, you’d think. It turned out that he wasn’t gay. He was being friendly. Or both, of course. How should I know?
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You don’t seem a very happy chappy’
I tried to ignore him, but he was one of those pestering do-goody types that force you to talk to them even when you don’t want to. It wouldn’t surprise me if he went to church just to annoy people by giving them the sign of peace. He had white hair and glasses and wore a tweed jacket and tie. Like a retired university professor, I thought. It turned out that was exactly what he was. He insisted on telling me his name was Ernest. I didn’t tell him my name. I wondered how I could decently give him a sign of peace off.
‘Please don’t take this amiss,’ he said, ‘but it seemed a bit odd you talking to yourself like that. Is everything all right?’
‘I think I will take it amiss,’ I said. ‘Yes, in fact I’ve made a definite decision to take it amiss. I’m up to here with bloody psychiatrists. I don’t need another one.’
‘That’s strange,’ said Ernest. ‘I am a psychiatrist. A psychologist, in fact.’
‘Do you have any pills?’
‘No. Why should I?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’d have thought you would. Psychologist. Psychiatrist. Psychoanalyst. Psychotherapist. Psychobabble. Psychobollocks. And no bloody pills. Trickling around the country with your bicycle clips, poking your nose into other people’s business. Are you trying to tell me I’m ill?’
‘No, no. Not at all.’
‘Implying I’m one stick short of a rhubarb patch?’
‘Certainly not,’ he said.
‘It sounds like it to me.’
‘No. I wasn’t suggesting any such thing. Well, it’s been very nice meeting you, Mr . . . Mr?’
‘Marrow,’ I said.
‘Very nice meeting you, Mr Marrow. I ought to be going now.’ He drained his glass and walked swiftly out of the pub. I went up to the bar.
‘Another pint, please.’
‘Sorry. We’re closed.’
‘What do you mean you’re closed? I’m standing here talking to you and I want a drink.’
We stopped serving at two-thirty.’
Something snapped. The brake cable, possibly.
Well, I didn’t stop drinking at two-thirty. G
ive me a pint.’
‘Out.’
I thought about clambering over the bar to get a drink, or to head-butt the landlord. I decided it would be wiser to go round it. The landlord was practised at dealing with awkward customers. He grabbed my arms.
‘You. Out. Now. Or I’ll call the police.’
This was a fight too far. ‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘I’ve no intention of staying in this rhubarb patch a minute longer.’
I wandered back to the car park in a roundabout way. No, there wasn’t a roundabout, I don’t think. There were traffic lights. It was raining heavily by then. I had no umbrella and my car was at the far end of the car park. My head felt a little fuzzy, goodness knows why after one pint. I decided I needed some shelter until the rain eased off. I was by the barrier at the time. It seemed to be extraordinarily wide. Several feet wide, I should say. Quite wide enough to shelter me. Definitely fit for purpose. I lay under it for a while.
A few minutes later, maybe half an hour, I don’t know, a man drove up and asked me to move so he could get out. I ignored him.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ll use the other exit.’
The way things were, I felt I might use the other exit too.
I tried to imagine Judy lying where I was lying and found it impossible. She would never, in any circumstance short of dementia, consider doing such a preposterous thing. It would not cross her mind as an option, any more than it would cross her mind to headbutt a pub landlord. That was the problem with her. No imagination. I would like to say that these things would not normally cross my mind either. It wouldn’t be true. Extreme behaviour crosses my mind frequently. I’ve machine gunned endless world leaders with my car headlights.
I realized that I was cold, wet and uncomfortable. The barrier seemed to have got narrower, telescoping itself into a thin bar. It obviously had some mechanism to deter people from lying underneath it, which was quite understandable, but irritating. It was no longer protecting me from the rain. I got up and returned to the car, focused on looking normal. I sat and shivered in the driver’s seat, wondering how to rescue my weekend, my life. I think I fell asleep. When I awoke, and for want of a more appealing alternative, I decided I’d better do what I should have done that morning.