by James Wood
I used to follow Terry once he came out of the study. I was disturbed by his large, dirty hands; I had never seen anything like them. Terry swung one of those hands onto my head, and then often I accompanied him into the vicarage garden, and sometimes into other gardens, and watched him mend a broken rose, or build a bonfire, or clean a moss-sown wall. Terry was silent in a way my parents never were, except when they were eating. Yes, that was it, Terry worked as if eating through his jobs, with resigned hunger. Silently he did his occasional work in all seasons: in autumn (which he called the “back-end”), when the laburnum shed its poisonous tadpoles; in winter, when the frost candied the grass; in pricking spring and in powdery summer, when each full tree, busy with sanguine birds, became its own forest. And all the while, I looked at Terry’s hands, broad with earthy seams.
I used to think that Terry spoke “funnily,” and one day asked him why.
“I was born here,” he said. “Me da’s the one what talks funny, he has that many clever words from when he was down the pit.” Terry told me that the coal miners had certain words peculiar to themselves, a whole language, and these were called “pitmatic.” I loved this word as soon as I heard it; later, Max and I would name our philosophical group the Pitmatic Philosophical Society, in homage.
“With this strike on, it’s just down at heels for me da now, he’s angry at them in the pits, the miners, for striking, and he doesn’t say much. ‘I’m resigning my membership’—he said that yesterday, and I said to him, ‘What you talking about, you’re not a member of owt!’ But when he talked pitmatic, like, I couldna get half-nowt from him anyway, so whor’s the difference?” I loved following Terry around, brought him a sandwich and an apple from the vicarage. He hunched over his food as if he were crying.
Sometimes I felt I wasn’t welcome. There was an awkward moment once when Terry asked me if my father helped me with my homework.
“Does he write it for you?” He looked strangely at me, closely.
“No,” I said, lying. I could see a tiny straw of sleep in his left eye.
“I reckon he does. I can tell from your face. Well, that’s not allowed, is it? He’s doing it. That’s clodding! You sitting on your honkers, with your da doing it! What’s the capital of America, then, if your da’s not clodding for you?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I’ve won some of them pub quizzes,” he said, rather than supply the information. When I was older, I discovered that Mr. Deddum occasionally fiddled the answers so that Terry could win the odd pub quiz. Practically the whole village was in on the deception.
I will always remember that afternoon—I was ten or eleven, still small—when, alone as usual, I walked out of the vicarage, down past the churchyard, and turned left towards a little bridge that mounted the river. As I turned the corner, I saw Terry leaning against a wall, breathing heavily, while another man, a stranger, was trying to shake his hand. Both men looked as if their clothes had been shifted slightly to one side of their bodies. One of Terry’s shoes was lying upside down on the pavement. Terry ignored the man, worried his shoe onto his foot—holding out his shaking hands like a diver as he did so—and walked away, followed by me. He was muttering, “I’ll lace him, I’ll lace him.” I followed him to his house; I had never been there. Old Mr. Upsher was watching the television, a daytime sitcom. “I’m in a fight, Da,” Terry shouted, in his high, nervous, unstable voice. “Good,” replied his father, barely stirring. Before I left, Terry showed me what he called “the special room.” It was sparse—a small table, a chest of drawers, and very thin curtains. They fluttered hopefully as the door opened. He turned on the single light, a bare torturer’s bulb. On all the surfaces, and on the floor, were piles of many objects: boxes of chocolates, small decorative plates, a bar of fancy soap, a silver cannon, a framed antique map. I recognized the map. “We gave that to you,” I said.
“This is where I keep everything what’s given us by people for me jobs,” he said. “I don’t touch owt of this … paraphenayli.” He turned out the light and shut the door. “Me da’s not allowed in there,” he said, quite happily. “And diwent tell anyone about this.”
It was a Sunday rule that someone from the village join my parents for lunch. Often these lunches were full of mishaps and misunderstandings. Peter and Sarah were exquisitely courteous, but in such a way that they imprisoned their guests. Father compensated for his shyness by making his questions refined and ornate. He adopted this manner only at the dining room table, almost as if he had been taught it by his parents.
“And your fair niece, whom I once met … Ah, is she still sans husband? She should hurry. You know that line from the poem, ‘Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.’ I always thought her eminently marryable, however.” Muriel Spedding, to whom this question was once addressed, lost all her customary jauntiness and muttered into her soup. Mother’s task was to translate her husband for others, so speedily and instinctively that many never noticed it. Peter might ask of a guest: “Are you talking about that oddly uncherished little path that bifurcates the top field?” and my mother, sensing that the visitor was lost, would insert: “You mean Pilgrim’s Path, by Harrison’s farm?”
In my memory, these Sunday guests were always single, middle-aged women, hungry for company but made clumsy by Peter and Sarah’s obvious fulfilment in marriage. Demurely they stood in the hall, fiddling with coats whose buttons seemed too large for their fingers, their screenlike spectacles magnifying their anxious eyes into bullets of panic, their long, obscuring skirts a kind of lay equivalent of Peter’s chaste cassock. Only their thick grey strong metallic hair, simply cut by the one salon in the valley, seemed to be in its prime, greedily nourishing itself at the expense of the soul.
On the Sunday of my visit a year ago, Susan Perez-Temple, who was not at all shy, was the guest. Everyone knows about Susan because of the exoticism of her background. Her father was a valet in the royal court in Madrid, and she grew up practically in the palace. She arrived in her usual lemon coat and a string of huge, flamboyant amber beads which had been given to her mother by a Spanish nobleman.
“How’s my favourite philosopher?” she said, offering her dry cheek to me. And then to Peter, “How’s my favourite vicar? Don’t overdo it, Peter. There was absolutely no need for you to take the service today.”
Susan is highly conservative. She carries with her a constant suggestion that she might at any moment complain about something or other, because her favourite conversational gesture is “Don’t get me started on …” “Don’t get me started on South Africa and Mr. Desmond Tutu”—she would snap his name as if she were teaching numerals to stupid children. “Don’t get me started on the United States of America,” spelling out the words as if the union were a recent chimera. But in fact she never does “get started” on any of these controversial subjects, and I’ve decided that this is perhaps the unconscious strategy of a shy woman with strong private opinions, in the way that a small country might boast about the power and professionalism of its army without often deploying it.
As we sat down to lunch, she said:
“Imagine, Sarah, I was sitting in the village hall last Thursday. Actually, I was thinking about you, Peter, stuck in that awful hospital in Durham. Don’t get me started on the hospital! You remember that a string quartet were playing? Before the concert, the schoolchildren had had a tea party, and it was a dreadful rush to get them out in time. During the concert, I became aware of a very strange smell, an odour really, and I began to look around, and couldn’t see anything. Well, then I saw the radiators: on every one of them there was a large, wet, dirty tea towel drying out! Can you think of anything more primitive? Really, this village! The hall isn’t some kind of nomad’s tent, it is not a yurt—do you know the yurt? I sat in one last year on my Mongolian trip.”
Susan had just come back from Uganda, where she had seen twelve corpses, all from the same family, laid out on the grass. No one would tell her what had killed them. The auth
orities had arranged them as a series, according to height, from the tallest to the shortest.
“They were a bit like those cheap nests of Russian dolls I once saw on my trip to Moscow. I imagine it was some kind of virus, because they were immediately buried, and then all of their belongings were set on fire.”
The image powerfully struck me.
“Christ,” I said, perhaps too enthusiastically—and saw out of the corner of my eye Father’s disapproval of that blasphemous invocation—“what an amazing and awful notion. The absolute destruction of everything, and the completely irrelevant fate of losing everything after one’s death, when one is already totally extinguished.”
“But in fact not totally extinguished,” said Susan. “The Ugandans, so I was told, have a word for the grave which translates roughly as ‘hiding place.’ So they may consider themselves to be hanging around after death. Anyway, they are usually buried with some of their favourite objects.”
Peter started at this, and as he moved, so a long arm of ash broke off his cigar, suddenly, and fell on to the large blue tablecloth. It made me think of a sailor who has walked the plank and suddenly fallen into a blue sea. I laughed to myself.
“You know, don’t you,” Peter asked, and looking bemusedly at me as if I were a little strange to be laughing at this moment, “that the locals have a word not dissimilar for the grave? They call it a lair. A northern and Scottish word. It is not applied to the grave per se”—he pursed his lips—“but to one’s slot in the graveyard, the place you book with me before you die.”
“Why are you sounding quite so jolly?” asked Sarah, with a smile in her voice.
“Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Obviously a lair suggests that the dead are waiting down there to rise up again and attack the living, like bandits. Awfully pagan really, I ought to discourage it, but they all use it. It’s important that they book now, because we are running out of space.”
“I’m already booked,” said Susan.
“So you are, in the northwest corner, I believe, with me!” said Peter. “Just as New York can only expand upwards, our churchyard can only expand downwards. We don’t have the room to put man and wife next to each other. No, now we have to rebury old corpses further down, and then put a new corpse on top of the old one.”
“So, ‘lair’ is actually more precise than ‘six feet under,’” said Sarah.
“It’s more like twelve feet under. For instance, Dr. Braun. Now, his wife, remember, died, what, ten years ago? Anyway, Braun has booked a lair—of course he doesn’t use the word—in the same grave as his wife. But there is no space alongside. So when old Braun pops off, we will have to rebury Mrs. Braun farther down, and then put her husband on top of her. It’ll be tighter still for Terry when he dies, because both his father and mother are down there already. Braun is much better off in that respect.”
“No democracy, even in death,” said Susan with satisfaction.
I shuddered at all this blithe talk of burial and reburial, because at that point in my life I had attended only one funeral, my grandmother’s, at which I behaved very poorly. I was six when my granny, Peter’s mother, died. Father took the service, said “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and threw soil down into the pit. I could make no sense of anything. Why was he doing that? My friend Richard threw gravel at my bedroom window in the same way, to get me to wake up early so that we could go and play behind the big tree on Pilgrim’s Path before breakfast. Was Daddy throwing soil to get Granny to wake up? Down the path from the churchyard I saw a man in a grey cap polishing with an invisible cloth the doors of the hearse. It looked like he was writing playful letters on the car. I envied him; he had escaped our miserable responsibilities. Daddy sternly intoned the words of the funeral service, and everyone looked very intelligent, staring and frowning at the coffin, as if it were Granny’s fault she was dead. Suddenly I broke away from the mourners and ran fast towards the hearse—why, exactly, I don’t know. I fell on a tree root or stump of stone, twisted my ankle painfully, and cried out. Behind me, my father, dressed from head to toe in a black cassock, a column of night, strode towards me with a furious look on his face. Furious. Simultaneously, the driver approached, and the two men, converging, picked me up, each holding one of my arms. The driver started to ask me if I was all right, but Father spoke over him. “Come back to the grave,” he said, still frowning like everyone else gathered there. I stood next to him at the graveside throughout the rest of the service, and his black cassock thinly brushed me.
I could never forget my father’s stern face as he strode towards me. After that disgrace, I had a recurrent nightmare, in which my father, dressed again in his black robes, walked angrily towards me, and my grandmother then woke up from the dead, pushed open the coffin, pursed her lips as my parents did, and began to whistle a horrible tune—it was the hymn “Crimond,” which we sang in church. I wanted to tell my parents about it, but they seemed so happy, and I didn’t want to spoil their happiness. I was silly, because if I had told them I am sure my parents would not have been cross, as Peter once was when he caught me telling a lie. “Now, my little man,” he said very solemnly, gripping my arm firmly with the pincers of muscular Christianity, “we won’t have lies in this house. We absolutely will not have lies in this house.”
I was so shocked that I cried, and Mother came to comfort me.
“Oh really,” said Peter, “if you indulge his tears, he will become as bad as Saint Ignatius—weep, weep, weep.”
“Was Ignatius especially tearful?” asked Mother, interestedly, turning away from me.
“My hat, yes. Saturated in tears. Endless tearful self-punishments. Ignatius couldn’t get up in the morning without challenging the day to a weeping match.”
And, as usual, my parents drifted off into their charmed world, their happy involvement with each other.
9
DURING MY STAY AT THE VICARAGE LAST SEPTEMBER, when my father was recovering from his heart attack, Jane came up for the second weekend. Because she had seemed so glad to get rid of me in London, I was wary of her. But she was surprisingly cheerful. We walked a lot in the countryside around the village. It was cold and damp, and the air slowly labelled her white cheeks with two pink dots. She gripped my hand and I gripped hers, and with nervous happiness I glanced at her often to see that she was indeed happy, taking my signs from the firmness of her chin and the always sensitive needle of her ponytail. I used to look sideways in this way at Jane, so as to know how to act, what to say.
We walked in the relentless northern rain, along the road between Durham and Sundershall, and I looked through Jane’s eyes and saw again the high hills, where cloud-shaped sheep moved, and the lower fields, which were full of cows. As the cows sighted us, they pricked a swaying wander over the sucking mud, came to the fence and snorted faint figures of steam. Their mooing noises buzzed deep down in their unemotional throats. We dripped at the cows and they dripped back at us, and then we walked a little more, noticing the birds that jumped onto the fence, the starlings and jetty rooks so abundant in the north, each high-strung, jerking movement resembling the separated frames of a film. At dusk, on the telephone lines, the starlings armied. The rain ceaselessly fell, a million little surrenders of water, and the hills and fields surged green. Sometimes a car went past us, lashing water to the side.
We had been instructed by my mother to pay a visit to Max’s parents, Colin and Belinda Thurlow. The order was characteristic; I think that my parents considered that the Thurlows, whom I very much disliked, were somehow good for me. Peter thought that Colin’s abrasiveness fortified me somehow. And they also liked to show Jane off to the Thurlows, I think. On my own I was no match for Max’s great success as a journalist. Max the great columnist at The Times, Max the opinion-maker. Perhaps my parents were ashamed of my wasted years. But with Jane by my side, I was at least a significant married man, with an advantage over the still-bachelor Max. Jane was evidence that I had clearly made some use of all the
hours and days of my wilderness twenties.
Colin and Belinda teach at Durham University, though Colin is now emeritus. Belinda is an historian, of leftish and once Marxist slant, and her older husband a classicist who writes under the forbidding initials C.R.M. Thurlow. When they first arrived in Sundershall, in the summer of 1973, Mother promised me that I would gain a friend: the Thurlows had a thirteen-year-old son, exactly my age. But Max was allowed out to play only rarely, as if ordinary life were a dubious party from which children had to be swiftly collected. Dear Max, bespectacled and tall, with a slight stoop even as a teenager, was studying for a scholarship to the day school I was already attending in Durham, and seemed to be almost imprisoned in his bedroom. When, rarely, he was released, he generally brought with him a schoolbook, which he read if the excitements flagged. But Max certainly enjoyed smoking, which we did at the top of Pilgrim’s Path, underneath the large, spreading, Atlas-like oak tree. He became a junior scholar of cigarettes, erudite on the different strengths of Gitanes and Dunhills.
The Thurlows live in a pretty Georgian house lit with bright honeysuckle, which covers the dark red bricks in seasonal distractions. Other than the vicarage, it is the only large house in Sundershall, and is known as “The Oratory.” The household at The Oratory seemed strange to me when I was young. Colin and Belinda were remote, cold, pedantically involved in their “work.” There was none of the Bunting geniality at the Thurlowses’. I remember how Max used to open the door (whispering in my ear that he had “some new fags”), and as he did so, two study doors on either side of the hall opened. From one side appeared Belinda’s head, and from the other Colin’s nose. Belinda, seeing that it was only me, and Colin, apparently merely smelling my presence, then withdrew. The Oratory is very plain inside. I once peered into Colin’s study during the winter and was shocked to see plastic sheeting nailed to the windows, presumably to keep out draughts. Through these sheets the garden looked submarine. The corridors are freezing, in all weathers, and in the downstairs bathroom a bar of green medicinal soap, with a magnet embedded in it as if it were a grenade, clings stingily to a metal holder which extends from the wall. Thanks to its magnet, it seems, the bar of soap lasts years.