The Levels

by Peter Benson

  I lay in bed, with the radio on. I had a headache. My father asked my mother why I didn’t come downstairs. She didn’t know. I heard him talking to the fire. She asked if he needed some logs. He didn’t. I stared at the ceiling. It reflected the sky. Shadows raced over me. The sound of the rain, the door slamming, my footsteps across the yard. The mash bin lid banging back, the chickens starting up, familiar sounds, the ones I was doomed to hear forever.

  I didn’t bother to start work till late anymore, I didn’t care if I hadn’t the money. What was I going to spend it on? So long as there was enough for the groceries and the bills, I didn’t see the point anymore. My father couldn’t climb the stairs, my mother was busy with the chickens, I stayed in bed till ten o’clock. It didn’t matter. Dick might call later. We could go to Jackson’s. I’d met some other people there. You didn’t get airs from them, you could bet on it. What they came out with was what they meant.

  I had had a phone call from a butcher in Bridgwater. His baskets were late. I had always been told to be polite to the customers — it was bred into me, they were the reason we ate — but I just told him to get stuffed and find someone else to make them. If he wasn’t satisfied with what I’d done, he could get lost. I’d let the business go downhill. It was nothing to do with me. I had tried my best. I had been gentle with her. She hadn’t been hurt. She breathed London air, I breathed this.

  My mother didn’t care anymore either. When I got up and showed my face in the kitchen, she just pointed at the cereal and said, ‘Finish them up. They’re soggy.’ Soggy. Typical. She was the only other woman I’d known. She looked at me.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘And stay in the same house as you? That too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bloody impossible.’

  ‘But I …’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘That girl. She mucked you about, turned your head …’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘What girl? Billy. Fool yourself, but don’t fool me.’

  ‘Mother?’ I couldn’t face breakfast. I stared at the floor. It told me nothing. I stared out of the window. Rain flooded the fields beyond the orchard. She lived in that direction. Imagine what I felt like. I had a good memory. All the things we did were still fresh in my mind, clear as a bell, ringing over the moor. I fought to keep them out, it was hard, I struggled, gave up. ‘Mother. Do you love the old man?’

  ‘Love him?’

  ‘Yes?’

  She gave a grunt and turned away, wiping her hands in her apron. ‘Love him?’ she said.

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘Sorry.’ She knew all about it, she had the look in her eyes. ‘Love,’ she said, ‘is what you make it. We’ve just gone along, he never knew much different, and if I ever did, I soon forgot about it. But it was different then. We didn’t have telly …’

  ‘Telly?’

  ‘Distractions. I wouldn’t be young today,’ she said, told me to at least eat some bread, and went to the front room to straighten the furniture.

  I sat in the workshop. I had begun to do strange things. I’d got interested in odd stories about composers. A woman on the radio collected them. Beethoven had poured cold water over his head to keep himself awake, jugful after jugful. So much water got inside his piano, the strings rusted and the hammers stuck, in the end it couldn’t make a sound, but it didn’t make any difference because he couldn’t hear anything anyway. Beethoven stories were the commonest. Chopin ran a close second, with Mozart third. In one week, Mozart wrote so much music, that if you tried to copy it out, let alone do the composing, you couldn’t finish in a week. I thought about that. The woman who told the story spoke with a German accent. Mozart had been a tragic figure in history. Touched by God, destroyed by the devil. The woman was a professor from Vienna. She had compiled a book of stories. I remembered them, they became important to me, the lives of great men reduced to my size. I even went to the library and borrowed an encyclopaedia, but in the end, didn’t care.

  I couldn’t avoid Drove House, so long as it stood I had to go past. Damn the place. Another house for someone to rent with more money that’s right. Its damp and angry walls would wait for them. Its sheeted furniture could loom in the darkness for as long as it took. The ivy on the walls and the elder trees, scratching, scratch, scratch, at the windows, and the ghosts. The ghosts would wait in their place, preening their smiles and their dead, white, maggoty eyes, scalding, unblinking. What had I done to deserve it? I tried to remember my sins. My sins. I was no longer pure.

  I couldn’t work. One day, I would again, but for the moment, I didn’t care. I went for a walk. Simple Billy. Sweet boy. Gentle thing. Clever enough to have been at college, he just never had the chance. Fated to be a basketmaker, laughed at for his skills by people who thought it was something he’d been taught in hospital. The last of a proud line. Poor man. Hardly anyone knew he existed, what would he leave to the world? Sixty-five years of basketmaking? Working a five day week, that’s sixteen thousand nine hundred days. Six baskets a day; 101,400 baskets. What a useful thing to do, all those baskets and a cracked back. Twisted, broken fingers, hands so calloused they could smooth a plank of wood.

  The romantic picture of the country; a wise old craftsman putting the finishing, loving touches to his work, content in his world, happy with his lot. Screw that. Simple Billy. Sweet boy. Gentle thing. He grew to love self-pity.

  I had grown to love self-pity. I walked as far as Muchelney, and back along the river bank. The rain eased but not the wind, sheep sheltered in what protection the bare hedges provided; a heron stood in a pool, swayed by the breeze, hungry.

  Muriel. In the end, I didn’t blame her. She had done what she wanted to do, and I was being Billy, born a century after his time, when women didn’t have the same chances. What could she want from me? She had a beautiful face and the brain to match; her man would never be like me. Dick would call later, that was more likely. I thought about that. It could happen forever. What a tomb.

  This tomb followed me into winter, through the new year to the spring. Spring. A new beginning. I tried to make it so. Another day. I riddled the stove, stoked it, and carried the ash to the heap. A breeze came off the sea, miles away, a flooding wind.

  I stood on the porch with a cup of tea. My mother and father took up all the room in the house, we hadn’t had breakfast, they were washing. The moor stretched out, here and there, rows of pollard willow, the odd cow, Chedzoy’s whistle and his dog. Dogs remind me of Dick. Dick and I used to throw stones at cows. The river saved us.

  Only time I thanked the damn river, but it’s never been anything but a river to me.

  I carried my tea to the workshop, and soaked enough sorted willow for the morning. Some people soak the night before ... I was by the door, staring at a tree I’d planted against the wall. It looked dead months ago, but I can’t dig it up, I get a feeling, once in a while; something might happen.