by Tom Bradby
Caroline played on. Julia doubted that anyone else could infuse this song with such feeling.
She put away the album, feeling guilty now that she had not visited her father’s memorial stone – it reflected her inadequacies, not his. She dressed, picked up her suede jacket from the back of the chair and walked down to the kitchen.
Caroline did not hear her approach and, for a moment, Julia watched her. Her head was bent slightly, her concentration intense.
After a few seconds, Caroline took her hands from the keys. They looked at each other.
‘Don’t stop.’
‘Sorry, was it disturbing you?’
‘It’s beautiful, as always. I wish I could play.’
‘Perhaps I could teach you.’
‘Perhaps. One day.’
Julia had been leaning against the doorframe, but she straightened now. ‘I’m going to wander out and say hello to Alan.’
‘All right. He might not be home yet, but …’ Caroline looked at her watch ‘… give it a try.’
Julia stepped over Aristotle, slumped across the entrance to the hall, and walked out into the drive. It was still light, the air warm. Alan’s car was not in his drive, but Julia had intended anyway to go to the churchyard first, so she walked down Woodpecker Lane and turned right again at the Rose and Crown. The pub was an old red-brick building, its lights on, the door open. The de la Rues’ Volvo rounded the corner and Julia stepped aside. It was Henrietta again. This time she waved but did not stop.
Julia hesitated at the lychgate and read a notice about the appeal for the new roof. The church ahead of her had a square Norman tower and was built of clear grey stone; its white clock told her it was almost six thirty. The path from the lychgate to the door ran up a steep incline and the gravestones beside it were at an angle, as if tilting towards the evening sun. The grass around them had been newly mown and was springy beneath her feet.
There were fresh yellow roses by her father’s stone and Julia squatted in front of it, looking at the name then closing her eyes, thinking again of that desolate hillside.
An image came to her of her father in combat fatigues, in the darkness and cold of that last battle. She saw vividly the set determination in his face, the grit and bravery and power, watched him lift himself, turning and raising his head in slow motion. He was a big man, big hands, big shoulders, a face that seemed outsized, overpowering and invincible.
She opened her eyes again. No one was invincible.
Was bravery about strength of character or life circumstances? Those who seemed least hidebound by fear were, in her experience, those with the least to lose.
Julia stood up. She had expected to find here clarity of thought and emotion, but instead had experienced neither.
It was impossible to pass the small stone in the next row without stopping. The inscription here also began with the words ‘In Memory’ and the plot was small, befitting Alice, who had just turned five when she died. There were fresh flowers here too, also yellow roses. Next to Alice, Julia saw that the vase on Sarah’s grave was empty. She paused, her eyes narrowed. There was a gust of wind and the full vase in front of Alice’s memorial stone creaked and tilted.
As she walked down towards the lychgate, Julia tried to throw off the melancholy that this place always induced in her, but as she turned on to the road and looked across to the other side of the green, she saw a man in a dark blue duffel coat carrying his small daughter over the stile and stopped. For a moment, she thought it was Michael Haydoch and that somewhere in the intervening years he had married, had a child, but it couldn’t be him. She watched as the man placed the child on the ground then held her hand as they walked towards the war memorial. The little girl had dark hair that curled over the collar of her long blue coat, and bright red wellington boots.
The man, who had thick, curly dark hair and whom she did not recognize, smiled as they walked past the post office, down towards the cricket pitch and the new homes that had been built beyond it. They moved slowly.
It was a few seconds before Julia realized she was following them.
She turned and walked back up the road.
Alan’s car was in the drive now. His house was called Gardener’s Cottage, and it was of a different architectural style from her mother’s home next door. It was bigger, probably even older, and made of yellowish brick. It had mullioned windows and a steep grey slate roof, with two attic windows and a chimney at either end. Julia knocked and stepped back to wait.
She tried the bell, but it was broken, so she knocked again.
Perhaps he was in the garden.
She opened the door and stepped into the gloomy hallway. ‘Alan?’
Julia could not avoid looking at the poster-sized picture of Alice that dominated the hall: it was the photograph that had been used for the Missing posters and the child’s dark eyes had stared directly into the camera.
The photograph had been taken on the lawn outside during the summer before the murders, when Alice’s hair had been long and scruffy. Julia could remember the exact moment – they had been playing in the tree house when Alan came out with his camera. Alice had not wanted to have her picture taken.
The interior of the house was dark and did not have the decorative neatness of her mother’s home, but Sarah had not been interested in domestic affairs and Alan had done little to make the place homely since her death, although he was an essentially practical man. From the outside, you could tell that it was well maintained, but inside it felt neglected. It had not been redecorated, Julia guessed, for twenty years or more.
She passed through to the living room at the back. The french windows were open to the terrace, the sun streaming in. An armchair had been turned in that direction and a pile of newspapers lay on the floor next to it. On the bookshelf above there was another picture of Alice, this time in a thick winter coat, standing in the snow – alongside a photograph of Alan, Julia and Caroline in ski-wear, with their arms around each other. It had been taken on holiday in Val d’Isère when Julia was about fifteen. She noticed how like her mother she was: they had exactly the same nose and eyes.
There was no sign of him on the terrace. ‘Alan?’ she called.
She retraced her steps to the hallway, wondering whether to stay and wait for him or go home.
It was possible he was up in the attic room and hadn’t heard her, so she walked slowly up the stairs, the floorboards creaking beneath her feet.
‘Alan?’
The corridor upstairs was dark.
Julia looked down towards Alice’s bedroom at the end, took a pace towards it, then hesitated.
She walked forward slowly, telling herself she’d be able to see down to the far corners of the garden from there.
The room had been stripped. Not just of pictures, or belongings, but everything. Even the Winnie the Pooh wallpaper had been removed, though traces of it stuck to the corners. The curtains had gone, too, which made the room seem doubly bleak. Julia moved to the right, touching the wall and picking at the bits of wallpaper that remained.
She turned slowly around.
She felt uncomfortable, shivering involuntarily before walking away, stopping briefly in the corridor and looking into Alan’s bedroom, which was neat, the large bed covered in a white bedspread.
The floorboards creaked again as she came down the stairs.
‘Julia!’ Alan’s broad smile dispelled her sense of awkwardness as he strode forward, gripping her hard for some seconds then pushing her back, holding her shoulders, still grinning. ‘It’s been too long.’
He wore faded cords and a baggy green sweater big enough to share. His greying hair was too long and curly for an officer. He had a bulbous, squashed-up broken nose, and a generous, round, lived-in face that had not aged since she had known him. She thought he was like a hobbit, in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Bloody army.’
He led the way through to the back. ‘We
’re due at the Rose and Crown in half an hour, but come and have a drink.’
Alan came in with a bottle of white wine and poured two glasses. He gave her one and they stepped out on to the terrace. She looked down at his feet. His trousers were too short, his suede brogues battered and scruffy, and she realized that he, almost more than anything else now, was England to her. England and decency, survival and regeneration. Home. She found herself smiling.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’
She sipped her wine, then took the bottle from him to look at the label. It was a semillon sauvignon from the Margaret River in Western Australia.
‘Moved on from Coca-Cola,’ he said.
‘Oh, shut up.’
‘Your mother bought it for me.’
‘Yes. She seems to have got into her wine. It’s your influence.’
He smiled, shrugging. ‘Have you left China for good?’ She didn’t answer immediately and his expression became apologetic. ‘Was your mother wrong to tell me that was—’
‘No, of course not.’
‘I thought you were in Ireland, the next thing I know you’re in China.’
‘A life of excitement and glamour.’
‘An emergency?’
‘In a way.’
‘Did you see much of the country?’
She recognized that, for both her mother and Alan, this was a sufficiently neutral question. ‘No, I think I can safely say that I didn’t.’
He frowned. It was a gesture of care, like a school chaplain. Or like a father. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Fine.’ Julia took a sip of her wine and then turned to face the common.
They both looked down across the fields to the barbed-wire fence and the wooded bank that rose beyond it. Julia wondered suddenly why Alan had never chosen to move away.
‘It must have been quite an experience,’ he went on.
Julia tried consciously to relax. ‘Depends on what you call an experience.’
His expression altered. ‘I’m sorry, I should know better than to start prying.’
‘Oh, come on.’ She smiled at him. ‘Don’t be stupid. Our defence of the realm, or its interests, was a battle lost, that’s all.’ She tried to sound, and feel, casual.
‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Ireland went so well,’ he said. ‘Or that’s the impression I got from your letters.’
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t very good at replying in Beijing.’
‘Don’t worry about me.’
‘But Mum …’
‘She worries about you, gets herself wound up, but she doesn’t want to make you feel under pressure.’
Julia looked at him. ‘She thinks I don’t confide in her enough.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I don’t confide in anyone.’
He did not answer.
‘So, are you preparing to go measure for measure with the local RUC commander in Northern Ireland?’ she asked.
‘Do you know, I hate whiskey and especially Bushmill’s?’
‘I used to insist on Jack Daniel’s,’ Julia said, ‘which was almost as bad, in their eyes, as demanding water.’
He smiled. ‘I suppose we should all hope for a new IRA ceasefire, but I can’t help wondering if boredom for six months in a barracks in Londonderry is going to be harder to manage than the usual crap out on the streets.’
‘I thought the IRA had done with their ceasefiring.’
‘Apparently not.’
Alan sat on the table next to her, pulled up a chair and propped his feet over the back. He massaged his neck. ‘Can you imagine six months confined to barracks? The men will be killing each other. I spoke to a friend in the Grenadiers who was in Belfast during the last ceasefire and he said it was absolute hell.
‘Anyhow,’ he said, standing up again and pulling his trousers around his waist, ‘I’d better get changed. I’ve persuaded your mother that she needs another skiing holiday, probably next February, in Val d’Isère again – or maybe even in the States, for a change. Vail or Beaver Creek. The de la Rues are coming, possibly with one or two of their offspring, plus or minus families …’
‘I heard about Jessica.’
‘Yes.’ He shook his head. ‘Not good. Anyway, if you’re interested, and if you want to bring anyone …’
Julia was embarrassed and flushed. Alan responded in kind. Neither of them acknowledged it.
‘Great to have you back,’ he said.
‘It’s good to be home.’
Julia put the glass on the table and, rather than going through the house, walked down the steps to the garden. As she did so she looked out again towards the common, and relished the novelty of looking out over green fields and well-ordered countryside. This was not just a response to Beijing, but to the last three years of stress and confinement. It was a rejection of neon lights and polystyrene coffee cups, of difficult, emotionally charged decisions and the aggression that sometimes accompanied the debates surrounding them.
She ducked through the gap in the hedge and walked across the newly mown lawn to the back of her own house.
With its red carpet, open fire in the corner, the line of spirit bottles above the bar, the horseshoes, the hunting pictures, the riding boots and the stuffed foxes, the Rose and Crown was just the same, its air of faded comfort not yet having tumbled into the seediness for which it had long seemed destined. There were three men leaning against the bar, one still dressed in boots and an outdoor jacket. Julia did not recognize any of them, but she wanted to say hello to Doberman, the pub’s owner. He was a big man with unkempt hair, a scruffy moustache and a face to match the curve of his belly. Today, as always, he had a tea-towel over his shoulder. He boomed her name and leant over the bar to give her a sloppy kiss on the cheek.
Doberman had moved to the village just as Julia had turned seventeen and she had spent a couple of university vacations working for him, either behind the bar here or at outside functions, mostly weddings. He had always been known by his surname.
She extricated herself and followed her mother to the corner, where Alan Ford was the first to his feet. Julia kissed Adrian Rouse, then his wife Leslie. Before they’d had time to sit, the de la Rues arrived. Alan bought the drinks and Adrian brought up the chairs, Leslie leaning across to ask Julia how long she was going to be home. Alan drew up a stool next to her.
‘You probably wanted to be alone with your mum tonight,’ he said, picking up on their earlier conversation.
She looked at him. ‘No. Rather like this,’ she said. Seeing the concern in his eyes once again made her aware of her disgrace, which had not seemed real until now, when she was finally in context. He sighed, noted down everyone’s food order, and disappeared to the bar again.
Henrietta de la Rue leant across. ‘Lovely to see you,’ she said. Jasper sat next to her, his oversized face fixed in a paternal smile. More than ever, he looked a caricature of the man he was, like a seal that had ballooned into a walrus but remained unaware of the transition. Leslie and Adrian Rouse were at either side of Caroline and the three were in deep conversation about hunting – or, rather, Adrian was listening to the two women. A nearby meet had been attacked by saboteurs the week before – it was becoming a regular occurrence.
Julia studied Adrian’s face. He was, she thought, one of life’s natural listeners. An observer, the kind of man who, however sporadically, would have kept a war diary. He seemed to have aged more than anyone in the village and was squarer, his hair thinning and receding fast. He had a thin nose with black hairs poking out of the edge of it. When she had been a child he was a sleek, good-looking man, but he was neither now.
‘It’s absurd,’ Adrian said.
Julia looked at him. So did Leslie and Caroline.
‘What is?’ Leslie asked.
‘This new lot. The Government – being opposed to hunting and encouraging the antis. I bet they eat meat, every last one of them.’
‘What’s the relevance of eating
meat?’ Julia asked.
‘Well, have you ever been into an abattoir? It’s ghastly. Hundreds of thousands of animals are slaughtered every week and the antis come out after a few bloody foxes, which are horrible creatures anyway.’
Julia was reminded of the moment of naked terror that must be the precursor to any execution.
Alan had returned from the bar. He picked up his glass and raised it. The moment was upon them and Julia felt a twist of dread. Everyone stopped talking. ‘Before the food arrives,’ he said, ‘a brief toast. I know we always propose one on this occasion, but since Julia is here tonight for the first time in a few years, home from doing her duty …’ Julia felt her face reddening at the attention and the inappropriate nature of the tribute. ‘… I wanted to say a few more words than usual about Mitchell Havilland. We know, each of us, how much he would have enlivened this gathering. That was his skill. And I think, as the years go by, we perhaps miss him more, not less.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Looking back now, he seems to me to have had enough life for several people, a big man in every sense. Funny, full of life. But also honest, decent. Fair. Which mattered if you happened to be serving under him as both Adrian and I had the privilege of doing.’ Adrian’s face remained impassive. ‘A man of unusual integrity. A rock. We all experienced the benefits of his belief that you had to work to help people in your community.’
He looked around meaningfully.
‘I don’t want to eulogize – we all knew his faults. Energetic to an intolerable degree. Driven. Too much so for some tastes, though not mine. Now, fifteen years after his death, I occupy the position he once did as commander of the battalion, but if I am half the man he was then I’m doing damned well. And I don’t believe I am.’
He paused once more.