by James Long
The scene fluttered, shifted. Ignored, the ghost of his companion shredded and blew away in the breeze. Unthinking until it was too late, he had kept the image of the garland on a dark head. The dark head was still there, a dark, loved head but not the same one. The features were blurred, awaiting his attention as clay waits for the potter to set it into shape, but the landscape behind had writhed to a new, sharper form.
Did he look at it? That was the way it felt but the eye he used was in his mind, and it was the evidence there that he now inspected. It was the first time he’d given the garland hoop, the very first time, after he’d dug it from the pits. Just for confirmation he looked hard at the edge of the woodland, the straight, neatly trimmed edge – then swung his gaze around a landscape assaulted by geometry. From below the round of the hill, old shouts crawled back across four long lifetimes. In his memory he walked, weightless, down to them and saw a red, sweating zealot in a stained smock, Parson Mowbray, egging on his axemen with crazed shouts as he peered down the line of his sighting sticks, glorying in the crash of timber.
‘Not that one, damn you! Foil me with imperfections, would you? Hurry up down there. This is a race that we are running, Jonah, and unless you swing your axe the trees will beat us. They’re growing faster than you can cut. That branch there, man, that and the one above it. They’re spoiling my line. This is God’s work, Jonah. The turmoil of nature is an insult to him. We neglect the great gift he has given us if we let nature sprawl rampant across our inheritance.’
All around, the landscape had taken on the geometric shapes that marked the silly fad of that temporary landscape. Queen Anne was dead and the foul-tempered German George had come from Hanover with his two mistresses. Every country conversation about him started with ‘He doesn’t even speak English’ and ended with ‘Well at least he’s no Catholic.’ Some great daftness seized the country and raw nature became a threat to man’s God-given right to dominate. The flailing Church, confusing nature with debauchery, saw threatening sexuality in every burgeoning hedge and went to work with sharpened steel to hack it back. Straight lines cut the countryside wherever you looked – fields, hedges, orchards, woods, all penned back to fantastic regularity in pursuit of some ideal of human domination, buttoned up into safe chastity.
Ferney smiled at the memory as he let mad Mowbray fade away, smiling for the time it had all wasted as subversive nature ran its hopeless watchmen ragged. He let the vision drift away, the trees planted in intersecting rows, the squares, triangles and diamonds of woodland, a giant, hopeless, frightened child’s picture of the way the world should be. In the end he was left as he wanted to be in the deep loving circle of this girl, whose face he could not quite bring back, a love which, even when diluted by memory, still had the power to shake him. He held on to the illusion as long as he could as her image sat there fooling him with fragments of comfort, wearing the garland ring with a pleasure shining from her that was not to last.
CHAPTER THREE
Unaccustomed exhilaration poured through Gally the second she awoke. For once there was no sour-headed legacy of disturbed sleep. No footprints of dreams disturbed the washed beach of the new day. The scents and sounds of a fresh spring morning infused the caravan – beaming in, barely diminished by its thin walls and loose windows, to where she lay on old foam and hardboard, curled against Mike’s back in their zipped-together sleeping bags. She raised her head, but even that small movement sent a shiver through the caravan’s flimsy joints. Hearing the change in Mike’s breathing, she froze, unsure for a moment whether she was ready to share the pure experience of the first morning. He grunted, questioningly. She kissed the back of his neck.
‘Morning, Micky. Stay there. I’ll make the coffee.’
A tee-shirt and shorts were enough and her bare feet met fresh dew as she stepped down from the cold ridged edge of the caravan doorway. The house faced her, low and blurred by its green wrap of vegetation. Hers. Theirs. The edge of the sun was just crawling up over its roof and a magpie burst out of a dark top window with a clatter. One for sorrow, she thought, not believing it, but its mate followed. Two for joy. There was certainly joy to be found here. Now she did believe.
She stood there, gazing at it while the sun climbed fully into view. Keeping the greenness, that was what mattered. She wouldn’t let it be raped, cleared away by builders who would only think of coercing the old walls into a dispirited forgery of a brand-new house. It had to be done, but it had to be done with care and love. She wanted it to stay just as it was now with only the grosser abuses of age set right. Almost just as it was, anyway. As she looked, straining to picture the perfect outcome, one detail kept imposing itself, something that was skewing it off-centre, not quite right.
Mike was shifting around as she boiled the kettle, but he didn’t fully awake until she sat down carefully on the end of the bed and tried to find a place for his coffee mug among the ill-fitting foam cushions that filled the end of the caravan.
For a moment he thought of complaining at the early hour and the inadequacy of the mattress, but the joy radiating out of her snuffed out the negatives before they had a chance to form. There was a languorous ease in his limbs despite the bed, which brought home the fact that the night had been unbroken by the customary cycle of startled fright and calming words.
‘You slept through,’ he said.
She nodded, smiling. ‘Oh Mike,’ she said, ‘it’s so wonderful. Come on. I want to show you. Let’s walk round the village before anyone else is up. We’ll have breakfast when we come back. Everything’s perfect. It’s just what I’ve always wanted. We mustn’t let the builders cut the creepers down. Oh, and the front door’s all wrong.’
He put his hands over his ears and dived completely inside the sleeping bag. She smiled happily, threw his clothes at the lump where his head was and went back outside.
There were two ways to the village from the junction at the top of their lane. They took the long way round, up to the right, the narrow road climbing between trees which opened out to small fields. Mike, infected by Gally’s delight, felt the stirrings of his professional interest as they walked on and on past scattered knots of houses and came eventually to the church again.
‘It’s really extraordinary,’ he said. ‘There’s no centre to the village at all. We must have come at least a mile and there’s still more of it. All these footpaths and little lanes and look at the field boundaries too. It’s still completely medieval.’
‘I love it,’ she said, leaning on the churchyard wall. ‘Can’t you just feel it all? There’s so little modern clutter to get in the way.’
Mike looked at her, scraping the toe of his shoe in the road uncertainly. ‘The old man,’ he said suddenly. ‘Yesterday. What on earth was all that about?’
At that moment she didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to speculate on something that had left her wondering herself.
‘It was just a present. I thought it was sweet of him.’
‘You don’t usually like wearing . . .’ the word escaped him. Hats? Headbands? ‘. . . that sort of thing.’
‘Oh nonsense, I’m always buying them.’
Buying them, not wearing them, he wanted to say, but was reluctant to spoil the mood.
‘When you put the flowers in it, he was crying.’
She was silent, frowning a little, looking past him into the middle of nowhere.
‘I don’t know exactly why. I think he was just happy.’
‘Well I think he’s a bit round the twist. I’m not sure we should encourage him.’
For an illogical second, a passionate denial flared up inside Gally. The garland ring had touched her. She almost felt it had brought her the good luck of a good night’s sleep and a perfect awakening.
‘Mike,’ she said, keeping her tone to mild reproach. ‘There’s no harm in him. Maybe I reminded him of someone. Don’t be horrid about him.’ She looked around, feeling a need to deflect the conversation. On the corner by the churc
h was a wooden post topped by the village name in wooden letters, framed like an inn sign.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘The sign spells it as two words, Pen Selwood.’
‘I noticed that when we drove in. The signs when we came into the village are the same,’ said Mike, ‘but it’s joined up into one word on all our maps, Penselwood.’
The church clock struck seven. From round the corner came an old woman, as wide as she was high. Although the morning promised nothing but sunshine, she wore a pink plastic hood knotted under her chin. White curls spilled out around it, framing a face so startlingly flat that it looked like a plate. Her cheeks seemed to stick out further than her tiny nose and the mouth below, though outlined by generous lips, made little use of the acres of space available to it. Even from fifty feet she was twinkling at them and the twinkling grew with each step nearer. They stopped talking, frozen by the appearance of this force of nature.
‘Morning, my muffeties,’ she said in a squeak laden with good humour. ‘I like to see early risers. Caravan all right, is it?’
This seemed to short-circuit all the conventional possibilities for introducing themselves to someone they were both quite sure they’d never met. Mike shot Gally a startled look. ‘Yes, thanks,’ he said. ‘How did you know, I mean, have we, er . . .?’
She stabbed him in the ribs with a playfully violent finger. ‘Get on with you. You’re Mr and Mrs Martin. ’Course you are,’ as though they needed convincing of it. ‘I’m Mary Sparrow. Anything you want to know, don’t ask me, cos I always get it wrong.’
‘You didn’t get that wrong,’ said Gally. ‘We’re just having a look round to get our bearings.’
‘That’s right, my muffety,’ said Mary, beaming. ‘Looking’s free. You do all the looking you like and if anyone says otherwise, you say I said it was all right.’ She pointed past the church. ‘Up there. That’s where the battle was.’
‘Battle?’ said Mike. ‘Peonnum, you mean?’
She cocked her head on one side and looked at him. ‘You do what you like on ’em,’ she said, and shrieked with laughter. ‘More like drop rocks on ’em, I expect. Proper battle, my muffety,’ she went on when the quaking subsided. ‘Seven hundred dead there were. Vikings. That’s what I were always told, but then I expect I’ve got that wrong too.’ She looked past him. ‘Here’s someone coming as might tell you better, though as often as not he don’t have the time of day for strangers.’
They looked round and Ferney, walking towards them with a touch of leftover stiffness, split the morning into Gally’s delight and Mike’s reserved mistrust.
‘Knows everything there is to know, roundabouts,’ said Mary Sparrow in a stage whisper. ‘And so he should at his age. Eighty something, he is.’
‘Surely not,’ said Gally and looked again at him, at ease moving through his landscape, outlined in bright morning light. His eyes were fixed on her and held her gaze.
‘Mr Miller,’ called Mary. ‘Come and meet these two. They’s new.’
‘I’ve met them already, Mrs Sparrow, thank you.’
He stopped in front of them, gave Mike an almost unnoticeable nod and addressed himself to Gally. ‘How are you this morning?’ he said and smiled.
‘Very well indeed,’ said Gally emphatically, unaccountably glad to see him.
‘Tell them about the battle,’ shrilled Mary Sparrow. ‘Don’t be wasting their time with chat. They’re busy.’
‘No we’re not,’ said Gally. ‘Really.’
‘Go on. Tell ’em about Kenny Wilkins and the seven hundred dead.’
Ferney turned on the old woman in mock rage. ‘Be off with you, Mary. You’ve got it all wrong. I’ll tell them what I like. Go and bother someone else.’
She broke into gales of high-pitched laughter and stumped off. Ferney looked at each of them in turn. The eager kindness with which he gazed at Gally faded to a guarded, closed expression when he turned to Mike.
‘We were just looking round the village,’ said Gally. ‘Trying to get to know it a bit.’ A flicker of expression seemed to pass over Ferney’s face and she stopped. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, ’course I am,’ he said, rather abruptly. ‘What did that silly old woman tell you?’
‘Just that there was a battle with the Vikings behind the church. Seven hundred dead, she said.’ Gally paused and looked round at Mike, inviting him into the conversation, but he kept his mouth shut so she went on. ‘Mike wanted to know if that was the famous battle. Peonnum or something.’
‘Well, it was a famous battle all right,’ said Ferney, ‘but not that one. Edmund Ironside and Canute’s Danes, I suppose that was the one she meant. You want to know about Peonnum – that’s a different business. You have to go up there aways,’ he indicated the lane leading north.
Not on your life, she thought – then immediately, how silly.
A mile or more off, rising above the tops of the trees in the direction he indicated was the summit of a tall tower.
‘Is that it? Where that building is?’ asked Gally, knowing only after she’d said it that it wasn’t.
‘That’s Alfred’s Tower.’ Ferney’s tone was derisive. ‘It’s just a modern bit of nonsense. Got nothing to do with Alfred at all. You don’t go that far. Where you want is Kenny Wilkins’ Camp.’ He was watching her closely and she felt uncomfortable again.
Mike wasn’t interested in the tower or the old man’s directions. ‘Peonnum probably didn’t happen here,’ he said loftily. ‘It was much further west. No one believes it was here any more.’
Gally’s heart sank at the didactic superiority of his tone. It wasn’t at all what he’d said before. Ferney’s claim had clearly had a perverse effect, moving him to an opposing view on the matter.
Ferney looked at him mildly. ‘So I’m no one, am I?’ he said. ‘And all the other people round here, they’re no one?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Mike cautiously.
‘Everyone born here knows about the battles. Handed down from father to son. Old Kenny Wilkins and all that.’
Until then Mike had been thinking that Kenny Wilkins’ Camp was perhaps some caravan site. He was suddenly struck by a preposterous thought. ‘Kenny Wilkins? You don’t mean Cenwalch?’
‘Last few hundred years, they’ve called him Kenny Wilkins round here. Easier to remember.’
‘Look.’ Mike was almost lost for words. ‘Cenwalch fought the battle of Peonnum in 658. That’s more than thirteen hundred years ago. Are you saying we should believe people here remember that?’
‘You believe what you like,’ said the old man. ‘All I’m telling you is that’s what people round here have told their children going back generations. They’ve called him Kenny Wilkins for donkey’s years and they call that place his camp or sometimes his castle, depending on how the mood takes them.’
‘For, let’s see now, sixty generations?’ said Mike incredulously. ‘Cenwalch becomes Kenny Wilkins and that’s supposed to be evidence?’
‘So what’s your evidence then?’ asked Ferney, and he smiled at Gally. Gally immediately felt guilty, caught in a cross-fire, her loyalty challenged. She turned away and began to study the parish noticeboard with seeming interest.
Mike adopted a lofty tone. ‘There’s evidence of West Saxon settlement around Exeter far too soon after 658 for the battle to have been here.’
‘What sort of evidence?’ Ferney insisted.
Mike faltered. ‘Conclusive archaeological evidence,’ he said, and it sounded lame even to him.
Ferney just smiled. ‘You go down Exeter way then and you ask around there. See if they remember Kenny Wilkins.’ He waved dismissively at Mike, turned to go off in a direction which took him past Gally a few paces away, muttered something to her and walked off without a backward glance.
They headed back towards the house in silence for quite a while then Mike turned to Gally and said, ‘All right then. What have I done?’
‘Well,’ she said judiciously. ‘You were
a bit snotty.’
‘Snotty?’ he said indignantly. ‘He comes up with all that nonsense and you call me snotty?’
‘Who says it’s nonsense? You should listen to people like that.’
‘Folk memories? If historians took folk memories seriously there wouldn’t be any history books and we’d all be making offerings to tree spirits.’
‘Double whammy,’ she said. ‘Both ways there’d be more trees left.’
It was too good a morning to argue and she suddenly felt protective towards Mike, knowing intuitively but without being able to explain it that what he felt towards Ferney was partly jealousy.
‘Come on, professor,’ she said, ‘I’ll make you some bacon and eggs and you can look through the history books and tell me how long ago they were laid.’
They walked down the road with their arms round one another, peeping on tiptoe over the hedge as they approached the house to enjoy previously unseen views of their overgrown ruin, tucked under the hillside.
Over breakfast, his mouth full, Mike looked up. ‘We never did ask him about the Danes and the seven hundred dead. I wonder what that’s all about.’
‘We’ll ask him next time,’ said Gally cheerfully and refilled his mug.
‘He keeps turning up, doesn’t he?’ said Mike morosely. ‘I suppose there’s bound to be a next time.’
‘It is his village.’
‘Ours too. Anyway,’ he said, putting down his knife and fork, ‘what was he mumbling to you at the end there?’
She smiled at him. ‘He said, and I quote, “Kenny Wilkins had red hair and a bloody bad temper but don’t tell your husband because he’ll never believe it.”’
Just as a job of work can be good, cheap or fast but not more than two out of those three, so luxury and lightweight caravans don’t go together except at a forbidding price. At the end of a long day spent measuring, planning, considering options and simply probing the masking undergrowth around the limits of their new home, Gally and Mike had been driven by a sudden, chill gust of rain into their flimsy box. They would both have liked a bath, but the plastic cupboard that doubled as washroom and chemical loo contained only brittle, discoloured remains of a shower system that looked unlikely to have worked even in the far-off days when it was new. Instead Gally heated soup on a gas ring, spreading a cloying warmth around the caravan, and dumped the dirty mugs into a sink that seemed to bow a little even under their minute weight.