‘Only because you’ve never let me meet her.’
‘It’s not that … simple.’ He picked up Jennifer’s toast and bit into it, hard. What was wrong with it? Had she made the jam with salt instead of sugar? No, it wasn’t salt, but tears. He was swallowing Jennifer’s tears. He liked that. To be part of her, made of her. She was special, blessed, serene. That’s why he’d married her. Shouldn’t have married her. Hester wouldn’t be ill now, if he hadn’t. He swamped the tears with jam—Jennifer’s strawberry in a Branston Pickle jar. He’d grown the strawberries himself—large, fat, shouting scarlet ones. Now they were only shrunk and faded pulp. That’s what cooking did—took living, breathing things and turned them into corpses. All good cooks were murderers. Jennifer had won prizes for her cooking. He glanced at her small, strong, sticky, lethal hands. ‘My mother’s always preferred to keep herself to herself.’
‘But she’s dying, darling. It’s different if she’s dying. I can’t bear the thought of never having seen her.’
Lyn split a currant with a fingernail. Hester wasn’t dying—couldn’t be. She had always told him that she lived for him. Thirty years she’d done that, kept him for herself. More than thirty, actually. Other men got married at eighteen. ‘Look, all she needs is a day or two in bed. Some decent food, someone to …’
‘But I could cook the food. Look after her. I’d like to. Please. If anything … happens, then I’ll feel we …’
‘It won’t.’ Can’t.
‘But she’s eighty-two.’
‘Her mother lived till ninety-two. And her mother’s mother till two days off a hundred.’ That’s why he’d had to marry. Couldn’t wait until Hester was gone and he was middle-aged and past it. She had had him far too late. Other mothers didn’t have babies in their late forties. There had been kids at his school with grandmas younger than his mother was. ‘You don’t understand, she’s always been old. It makes no difference what her birthday says.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling—of course it does. Hester can’t defy all natural laws, just because she’s your mother.’
Why was his wife so literal? He meant old like the hills were old, or like himself. He had lived twelve years longer than Jennifer, which hardly counted when it was a matter of birth certificates or candles on his cake. But in terms of drought and rusting, winters, terrors, cold, he was a hundred thousand years older. She was a child still—child bride—pink and eager and easy. He loved her for it, married her because she had all the things his mother never had. Long, soft, messy hair which sprawled on her shoulders instead of being coiled in contours with a barbed-wire fence of hairpins; legs which opened and closed where his mother was only a clothes peg beneath a starched apron. Breasts. He suddenly longed to hold the breasts, anchor himself to her body.
‘You haven’t touched your tea,’ he said, instead.
‘No.’ She was stabbing at stray crumbs spilt on the tablecloth in the same nervous, distracted way she kept picking at his mother. ‘Look, she must be bad, or Mrs Bertram wouldn’t have got in touch with you. Didn’t you say she went out specially?’
‘Mm. Her own phone was out of order.’
‘Well, then … And today’s a public holiday and …’
Lyn shrugged. Good Friday. Christ on a cross and traffic jams on all the roads. The nearest public phone box to the Bertram farm was three whole miles away. Molly Bertram’s mother had been only a few years younger than his own and had known him as a baby, as a boy. He hated that. He had cancelled his whole boyhood by moving south to Jennifer, by marrying. He wiped strawberry from his mouth.
‘All right, she’s ill, but it’s probably nothing much. The Bertrams love to stir things up. The whole village thrives on drama. Why d’you think I left there?’ A thousand reasons, and Jennifer the main one, although it had been Matthew’s money and Matthew’s influence which brought him down to London in the first place. Matthew had even found him Jennifer. He sometimes felt he had never done a thing except through his brother (half-brother). Matthew had introduced him to Jennifer in the same smug, efficient, all-controlling way he’d offered help, cash, art-school, housing, job. Jennifer meant more than all of them. She had blushed when he first asked her out. Girls didn’t blush in the hard-boiled 1980s. She had cooked for him the second time he saw her—not hot cross buns, but chicken breasts in wine. He had hardly touched a mouthful—he was looking at her own breasts. Soft blue angora following him round the room, bending over the oven, wobbling when she laughed.
After dinner, they sat on two stiff chairs and talked about safe permitted things like television (which he hardly ever watched) and Art which she awarded a capital A, then kept respectfully away from. He knew he would have to choose between her and Hester, her and Hernhope. He no longer needed that cold creaking house footprinted with his fear, blabbing tales of his lonely barbed-wire boyhood. He wanted to shake free of it, move south of it. Jennifer was south. She came from a small, good-tempered Sussex townlet where the hills were only swellings and the wind ruffled rather than uprooted. She had south in her face and figure. A gentle, temperate girl who wasn’t exactly beautiful, but had something of summer in her—something warm, ripe, plumpish, mellow, ready, when he and Hester were rough, bitter, bowed. Her hair was the faded, sun-streaked colour of shredded wheat, too long to be tidy and too wavy to be chic; her eyes a frail, fragile blue which in some lights paled to wood-smoke and were barely defined by her fine fair brows. All her lines were soft—breasts, profile, features—nothing sharp or angular. A girl you could sink into.
They had married in a dark church on a pale grey morning with a few frail spokes of sunshine nudging the narcissi on the altar. Three years ago. Three hundred years ago. His mother hadn’t attended. Hester had treated the wedding as if it were somebody else’s letter delivered to the wrong address. He sent her photos, money, endless reparation. He couldn’t phone. Hester didn’t believe in easy, instant communication. She preferred struggle and crossed lines.
Since the wedding, he had never returned to see her. Every week he planned to; every month he pencilled it in his diary, underneath the guilt. Jennifer coaxed him, urged him, suggested dates, made plans. He always agreed until the date came round. He hardly understood his own reluctance. Perhaps he feared to return in case he became Hester’s child again. There should never have been a Mrs Winterton Junior in the first place. He cleared his throat, tried to sound decisive.
‘You’ll only make her worse if you try to interfere, Jennifer. She’ll say you’re … spying on her. My mother never cared for company and now she’s almost a … recluse.’ He shut his eyes. Their tiny rickety table was lengthening into twelve foot of Spanish oak—the overweening table which had stood stern and massive in his childhood home, solid as a ship. It had been a ship, hammered from the decking of an eighteenth-century frigate wrecked off the north-east coast. He and Hester had sat marooned at one small corner of it, dwarfed by its proportions, the row of empty chairs mocking their aloneness. Often, as a boy, he had filled those chairs with instant family—sisters with bare arms, all beautiful, all saving him the best bits, cushioned grandmas, cuddly aunts. Later he invited guests, figures from his school-books, Mohammed and Copernicus, artists—especially artists—people he could confide in, show his drawings to. Leonardo da Vinci, El Greco, Pieter Brueghel. Nice to have a name like Leonardo, instead of sissy Lyn. (‘Lyn’s a girl!’ they had chanted at his school.)
He opened his eyes, stared down at the tablecloth. He and Hester had eaten off bare wood. Jennifer had made an ‘H’ out of the crumbs, his mother’s initial facing them both ways, legs firmly planted, arms folded tight across her middle.
‘Are you all right, darling?’ Jennifer had got up from her chair and was hovering there beside him.
‘Y … yes. Yes, of course I am.’ He tugged at the cloth. The ‘H’ shivered and collapsed. Jennifer’s hand was stroking down his neck. He seized it, trapped it between his own, pulled her down to him. He had all her hair spread out acro
ss his lap when the phone shrilled. He pushed her off, as if his mother had come in. He knew it was Northumberland before he even answered—let her answer.
‘Hallo? Oh, Mrs Bertram. Yes, Lyn did explain. You won’t know me. I’m his wife, Jennifer. I …’
Of course Molly Bertram knew her. Everyone knew everyone up there, gossiped about him and the wife he had never presented for their inspection. (Probably thought she was odd or cracked or crippled because he had hidden her.) How he had run away and left his mother to rot; how he was arty, selfish, never really fitted, couldn’t farm, fence, marry, couple, sow …
‘How is my mother-in-law?’
He winced. Jennifer mustn’t call her that. Mother-in-law meant marriage and Hester hadn’t sanctioned any marriage.
‘What, the doctor? Oh, I see.’ She didn’t see. She had never lived there. Hernhope for her was merely a quaint and pretty name on an Ordnance Survey map, not a house which had lost its farm, its fields, its sons, abandoned in one of the remotest parts of England. England stopped at Newcastle for most people. It was easy to forget the country north of it, which butted against the Border and lost itself in the lonely Cheviots where your nearest neighbour (bar the sheep and crows) could be several miles away. He remembered looking at the map when he was just a boy at school and seeing his home in the scrawniest bit of England, as if someone had grabbed it by the neck and squeezed and squeezed until all the life and flesh and flowers had bulged above it or below it, leaving it bare and bruised, the hills still marked with purple-swollen thumb-prints. Northumberland had always been a strange uneasy county. Even at the time of the Domesday Book, it hadn’t been included—too lawless and remote.
Jennifer was frowning as she replaced the receiver. ‘I’m afraid your mother’s … worse, Lyn. Mrs Bertram says she shouldn’t be left alone. She’s been sitting with her herself, but they’re so busy with the lambing, she can’t tear herself in two. And her eldest daughter’s gone to Glasgow for the week so she can’t help. Hester ‘s refused the doctor and the hospital. Mrs Bertram says she’d never forgive herself if anything happened when she wasn’t there. We’ll have to go up now. In fact, we ought to leave immediately.’
‘We … c … can’t. I’ve got things to finish, w … work to …’
‘But you said you wouldn’t work. You said we’d go to Matthew’s all day tomorrow. Can’t we cancel that and go up North instead?’
Christ! His family both sides of him. One threatening from Northumberland, one holding court in Putney, both insisting on his presence. Yet he would have liked to please them all—be son, brother, husband, not just self. Self was always bullying, though—bullying and scared.
‘We can’t let Matthew down, Jennifer. You know what he’s like. He’ll have killed the fatted calf by now.’
‘Matthew ought to go himself. I mean, considering Hester brought him up, surely he …’
‘Oh, don’t start that again.’ Lyn hated ‘oughts’. There were enough sticking in his own flesh. ‘Matthew’s done a lot for me. That’s his way of squaring things.’
‘Sunday, then. Let’s go first thing Sunday morning.’
‘That’s Easter. We can’t travel Easter Sunday.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well … traffic, holidays, everyone on the roads.’
‘They’ll all be gone by then. It’s a very good day to travel, actually. The crush will be today and Monday. OK? If that’s all right, I’ll go and sort the cases out.’
‘Look, you’d better let me drive now, Jennifer.’ Lyn laid his hand on the steering wheel, next to his wife’s. Their hands looked strange together, as if they were two unrelated species—his lean, sallow, bony; hers plump and pink and warm.
‘Oh no, Lyn, I’m enjoying it.’
‘But we’re getting nearer.’ He couldn’t arrive at Hester’s being driven by a wife. ‘You won’t be able to manage. The roads get really rough soon.’
‘You said that half an hour ago.’
He could see she didn’t believe him any longer. The sun had dogged and dazzled the hedgerows all the way from London when he had promised cold. The countryside was gentle, when he had shaped it cruel. A hundred times she had slowed and gazed, exclaiming. ‘But, Lyn, it’s beautiful’—almost accusing him of fraud. ‘It’s not remotely bleak at all.’
She had no real right to judge, yet. These were still the lowlands—lush, green, self-indulgent meadows loping towards the smudged and hazy brush-stroke of the horizon. But the Cheviots were waiting just beyond, drawn up in battle-lines, ready to jump out on him, each phalanx higher than the lowering one below it.
He tried to see the country through her eyes. Rooks flapped idly over new-combed fields; gaunt and gappy hawthorn hedges were breaking into leaf so fiercely green it hurt. Lambs, skippy white against their stained and stolid mothers, piston-shot away from the rumble of the wheels. The sky—blue, serene, unbounded— admired itself in the bright mirror of a burn. Things had let him down. Daffodils in full deceitful flower, blowing garish yellow trumpets in front of squat grey houses.
‘They won’t even have had a spring yet,’ he had told her late last night, tugging a dead daffodil from the arrangement on the dressing-table. ‘Look, ours are almost over, while theirs won’t be in bud. Everything’s much later than down south.’
‘Nice,’ she’d said, tissuing a blouse. ‘We’ll get two springs that way. Ours we’ve had, and theirs to come. Anyway, it can’t be that cold. A woman on the radio said she’d heard a cuckoo in Morpeth.’
Child again. Romanticising. She had never been further north than Birmingham. Sussex was fat flowery toytown land (thatch and honey-suckle), its feet dangling in the warm piddling waters of the Channel. He had grown up in battle country where the scarred hills bled towards the borders. Hills frowning with castles, raided by the Scots. Some years, they didn’t hear the cuckoo till early June.
He jumped as the car lurched over a rabbit already flattened on the tarmac. A cortege of little corpses left behind them on the road—a decapitated pigeon, a hedgehog with its front paws clasped together as if praying for revival. There was blood even on the windscreen, tiny orangey splodges splattered on the glass where hordes of little insects had suicided into it. In the country, death stared you in the face. A row of shrivelled moles strung by their lips on the spikes of a barbed-wire fence. The knell of gunfire echoing from corpses. It was death he had run away from in the first place. The men up here all shot and trapped and murdered, won status with their guns. Mick Bertram’s rough-cut father had called him chicken-livered because he preferred a pencil to a rifle, or chose to sketch the muscles of a fox rather than paralyse them.
‘Look, I said I wanted to drive, darling.’ His voice sounded rougher than he had meant it to. He rarely called her darling. That was Jennifer’s word, one which had embarrassed him at first. He wasn’t used to darlings—Hester never used them—almost feared his wife was mocking him. But soon he had accepted them, grown fat on them.
‘Aren’t you too tired to drive?’
‘No,’ he lied. He had hardly slept last night. They’d had lamb for lunch at Matthew’s, followed by sherry syllabub and acid indigestion which lasted through the highest of high teas and on through Jennifer’s over-rich and quite superfluous supper. He had gulped down Alka Seltzer and gone to bed—spent three hours steering their low-slung double bed through a tangled motorway of blankets. At 3 am there’d been a pile-up in the overtaking lane. He had burrowed through the wreckage for his wife.
‘It’s all right, Lyn. I’m here. It was only a nightmare.’
Only. The headlamps faded into their beaming bedside lights. His heart was still thumping like a ten-ton lorry hurtling over shale. He lay restless till the dawn, listening to Jennifer’s relaxed and heavy breathing. Almost resented her sometimes because she could return to sleep so easily. He glanced at her now, humming to herself, some cheerful schmaltzy tune he didn’t know. A pilgrimage to Hernhope was just a drive to her, a spree.
She drew into a lay-by, got out and stretched her legs. ‘It’s hot, Lyn. Beautiful. Just look at that sun! It’s almost like July.’
He narrowed his eyes against it—‘Freakish’—slipped into her seat. It was warm beneath his bottom. His wife was always warm. She was clambering in beside him, the curve of her breast blocking out the sky. He kept his hands firmly on the wheel. Mustn’t think about the breasts. His mother could probably see him now. Hester could scan the whole of England, just lying on her bed. He pressed his foot down, swerved to avoid a pheasant dazzling across the road.
‘Oh, Lyn, it’s gorgeous. See those colours on its neck?’
‘They’re two a penny up here. They fatten them up deliberately, so there’s more of them to shoot.’
‘You mean they’re only bred to be killed?’
‘Yes. Like the lambs. That nice little joint we had at Matthew’s yesterday probably hailed from here.’ He wanted her to see it how it was. Lambs were only cuddly toys in London, or plastic packages in Sainsbury’s Fresh Meat section. You could avoid death in the town.
He tried to picture Hester pale and silent. Almost worse than her reproaches. He turned a groan into a yawn. He was tired. Not just from the drive, the miles, the constant fear and fretting about his mother, but from all the painful memories that lengthened with the road. Jennifer couldn’t feel them. Even now, she was fairy-taling the map, squeezing romance and fantasy into the place-names which had hemmed him in from childhood, turning them into poetry, when for him they were obituaries or bad school reports, etched deep into his soul.
‘‘‘Lord’s Seat’’. Isn’t that nice? And ‘‘Nagshead Knowe’’. And ‘‘Angryhaugh’’ and ‘‘Bleakhope’’. There’s a tremendous lot of ‘‘hopes’’ around—‘‘Milkhope’’, ‘‘Wholehope’’, ‘‘Nettlehope’’, ‘‘Hernhope’’. What does ‘‘hope’’ mean exactly?’
‘Not what you think it does.’ Hope had been in short supply up here.
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