The Wild Silence

by Raynor Winn

  Where the hell was he?

  I switched the lights on. Mid-morning; the sun had already moved beyond the point where it shone into the flat and it was getting darker. I finished the tea and sat at the table gazing out of the tall chapel window that looked out on to the wall of the neighbour’s garden. At six feet high it half-filled the view, but above that was the upper terrace of garden shrubs and a magnolia tree. A large brown rat dropped out of the ivy and walked across the top of the wall; then he stopped, looking in at me, his round eyes staring until he turned around and went back the way he came. I opened the door to see where he’d gone. I could hear him, but I couldn’t see him, just the wall of ivy that clad the cliff face a metre and a half away from the door. From the dark damp corridor of greenness between the chapel wall and the cliff, my eyes followed his trail of rustling leaves upwards through the ivy. Up there, between the buddleia bushes and the roof of the chapel, was a thin blue strip of sky, a world where the sun shone and the wind blew and I knew I had to be there; a dark sense of enclosure had borne down on me and I had to get out.

  Grabbing my coat and phone, I hurried out into the street, intending to follow it up to the open cliffs, as I had every day since we’d moved to the chapel. The narrow street, hardly wide enough for a car to pass through, seemed full of people. People walking, talking, loud gesticulating people. I walked a short way along the road, but was suddenly gripped by an overwhelming sense of panic and pressed myself against the garden wall of a terrace of houses until the people had passed. What was happening? I couldn’t understand the pulsing sensation in my head, and the reddening face. Not a hot flush, they were in the past, but what was happening? Was I ill? More people walked by, noisy, busy people.

  ‘Hi, lovely day.’

  It was all I could do to mutter a muted ‘hi’ in response. I didn’t know what to do or which way to turn, but found myself running back to the chapel, slamming the iron gate behind me and disappearing down the concrete alleyway. I lay on the floor of the flat trying to calm my breathing, my thoughts racing. Gradually my head stopped pounding and I realized that in the year since we’d arrived at the chapel I’d barely said a word to anyone other than Moth or our two children when they phoned or occasionally visited. When out alone I didn’t speak if I could avoid it; if I was with Moth I let him do the talking.

  Had I tried to talk to anyone since we’d moved there? There’d been opportunities in the shop when I could have had a conversation while the lady behind the counter filled my bag and asked me, ‘Are you living here now? I’ve seen you a few times. Where have you moved from – out of Cornwall, obviously?’ She had done so numerous times, but I’d avoided a conversation on each occasion, just muttering ‘thank you’, grabbing the bag and leaving. There had been moments when people in the street had stopped to look at the façade of the tall, imposing chapel and asked about its history, and I’d said I wasn’t sure but I’d get Moth because he knew all about it. Then I’d scuttled to the back of the chapel and stayed there. I was in a state of hyper-alert over-awareness whenever I left the flat. When we walked the path, our rucksacks stuffed with our possessions, I’d had no problems, so why now in the village did I feel this need to be invisible? Any hard-won grain of self-belief I’d found while we were walking had vanished, lost in the sea mist as it crept up the river. I sat up, angry with myself. So much time spent avoiding any interaction with people was ridiculous. I’d let this thing get out of control.

  I found the laptop and put on the meditation channel I’d recently discovered. The cross-legged guru spoke to me in smooth tones.

  ‘Breathe in and follow the breath out, and focus on the breath. Let go of all thoughts and follow the breath.’

  I followed the breath. I was good at this. I could empty my head and follow my breath as if I was born to it. But even as I breathed, the sound crept in and wouldn’t leave. A voice from some hidden, subdued, suppressed part of me that wouldn’t be quiet. That deep resonating sound which felt like a question.

  The phone rang. Yes, at last.

  ‘Where are you? Don’t tell me you’re in St Ives?’ Last time he’d forgotten where he was going, he’d called me from a café on the north coast, an hour away from uni. Maybe this time he’d headed west.

  ‘Not today. I met one of the other students in the car park and she finally found the courage to ask me what I was doing in Cornwall and why I was on the course.’ Moth was finding sharing the course with a roomful of twenty-somethings quite difficult; they seemed to live in an entirely different world to him.

  ‘Can’t believe no one’s asked you before. What did you say?’

  ‘I stuck to the line we used on the path – that we’ve sold the house and I’m studying as part of a career move into teaching.’

  ‘Not really a lie, just a half-truth, but you’ve said it now so she’ll tell everyone else. Can you keep it up?’

  ‘Saves me having to explain how we lost the house and became homeless – it’s just easier – but now they probably think I’m an ultra-wealthy mid-lifer having some sort of existential crisis.’

  ‘Only a minor misconception then.’

  I sagged into the chair with the relief of knowing he was where he should be. If only I could cope with this change in our lives the way he did. He just carried on being his full-on, outgoing, gregarious, story-telling self, despite occasionally not knowing where he was. The ragged, distorted threads of our lives were slowly beginning to re-form, but there was something eating into my peace of mind. Not just Moth’s health but something else, in the dark confusion of my own head in the early hours of the morning, when I opened the door and looked for the sky and saw nothing but a thin strip of grey between the chapel and the rock face, when I walked into the street and it was full of people and there was nowhere to be alone. On so many days like that, I followed the path to the cliffs to stand with my face in the wind and feel the force of the weather: something that felt real. And always the voice in my head growing louder, like an onshore wind bringing a storm from the sea. Or was it the voice of my mum saying ‘I told you so’? It was hard to say.

  Making my bed in the tent in the early days of the new year, I thought I’d solved my sleep problem: I’d simply been missing the familiarity of the tent; things would be absolutely fine now. I’d get more sleep; then I’d be stronger, more in control and able to focus my thoughts on living our new life in the village and making sure Moth didn’t get lost. I huddled in the green dome in the corner of the bedroom, away from people and the world, unaware that only a few days later I’d find myself in the middle of the country, as far from the sea and the tent as I could possibly be.

  3. Hireth

  Death paced the hospital ward, but didn’t stop at her bed. He cast a glance as she sat upright, her hair combed, her new blue cardigan clean and neatly buttoned. Not yet, not today, not on a Sunday. Today the deep, lung-shrinking wheeze of pneumonia had subsided and I sat by her bed as we thumbed through a glossy magazine. Moth was only a few days into the new term when I’d had the phone call. The hospital call that you always know will come one day, but never this day. Mum was in hospital with pneumonia, they thought she was slipping into sepsis and I needed to be there. Three days later and she’d shrugged it off and there was talk of her going home.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow you could bring some nail varnish and make me look glamorous like the girls in the magazine pictures? It’d give us something to do. I’m getting bored now.’

  After the stale air of the hospital, the dark cold of a late January night was a relief. I closed the van door, started the engine and headed back to Mum’s tiny cottage. Along the lanes of central England, lanes so familiar I could have driven without headlights, to the warmth of her kitchen and the familiarity of her things. Her home, but not mine. My home, the place that formed me, moulded me into what I would become, was in the valley below, hidden in the black stillness of unlit countryside. I could feel its presence like a body in the room. Tomorrow I wouldn’t go to
the hospital until later, maybe the afternoon. Before that I would walk across the land and follow my older, smaller footprints through the fields I knew so well.

  Stepping out into the winter morning and a comforting pocket of warmth in the open porch at the back of the cottage, I reached up and put the key on the ledge, careful not to dislodge the dry and dusty swallow’s nest. Such a well-chosen spot, where the morning sun takes the coldness of night at the earliest moment. They’d be back in the spring, squeezing new mud into the cracks of their old home, diving out in surprise every time the door opened. I followed the garden down through dewed grass and bare rose stems to the path that dropped into the mist in the valley. My vision was reduced, but I could hear the Canada geese on the lake. I didn’t need to see; I already knew what the view would be. The spring migrants were arriving, stirring the complacency of the geese that chose to stay and overwinter there. They wouldn’t be building nests yet, just squabbling over space and food.

  Beyond the lake, their calls followed me faintly through the fog, and then it was all around: my roots, my childhood, the source of everything I was, a land so familiar I could map it in my mind like my own skin. I wouldn’t go to the farmyard yet, I’d go through the fields first and look down at the farm, stall the moment, suck it all in.

  I passed the sawmill where generations of villagers had cut the timber for houses and fencing. The carcasses of huge oaks, elm and beech had lain here, to my child’s eye mountainous and never-ending. All gone now. The timber sawn, the saws gone, double-glazed windows where there had been broken dust-covered panes, roses by the door. The mist began to clear in the early yellow light as I walked out of the quietness of a copse of beech trees above the row of cottages and on to the Mountain. From the high point I could look down to the cottages where the estate workers had lived. The Scottish carpenter and his family in the larger cottage with the big garden, overflowing with vegetables to feed their five children; the plumber in the middle with the wife that no one ever saw; and the gardener to the big house in the last cottage. As I climbed the hill away from them the first car was leaving, a commuter heading to work in the town from a smart modernized house in the countryside. The grassy slope wasn’t a mountain, just a field on a steep hill, but we called it that. From there, I knew I could see it as I turned away from the tree-lined hill top and looked back into the valley. And there it was, glowing faintly pink in the morning sun. To anyone else it might have appeared as just a farmhouse in the distance, but I could see the details. The sash windows of the formal façade, the crumbling clay bricks and slate roof, and behind, out of sight, the main body of the house jutting out and forming a T to the front. I could almost hear its presence.

  I headed on through High Ways field, the largest field on the farm, always kept for arable crops. I’d spent summers there, following a potato spinner as it passed up and down the ridged rows, throwing white soft-skinned new potatoes on to the damp earth. Walking bent over, collecting the potatoes into a bucket, emptying the bucket into a bag, the bags on to trailers, off the trailers into the sheds, from the sheds to a lorry, from the lorry to the shops and the chip shops. And winters, in the cold, damp and frost, cutting tops off turnips with a billhook and throwing them into a small wooden trailer to take back to the farm and tip into a shredder to feed to the bulls in the pens. When the other children from my school were playing with toys, or in the playground, I was here. Mud on my hands, in the sun and the wind, alone with the thoughts in my head. On the rare occasions when I did spend time with the others, it was as if I viewed them from a distance. Later, as a young teenager, I’d thought I wanted to be the same as my school friends, to focus on make-up and clothes. But, hard as I tried, I couldn’t shake the sense of having one foot on the disco floor, one foot in the mud.

  Down from the arable fields, through the woods of tall deciduous trees, carpeted with bluebells in the spring and lined with campion and cow parsley in the summer. I’d spent days at the edge of these woods. Ten years old and I should have been playing with friends, but instead I sat alone where the woods became field and watched the rabbits moving across the grass. Hundreds and hundreds of wild brown rabbits grazing in the grass fields and moving across the winter corn like locusts. I’d loved the power of standing by the fence, almost obscured by the turning post, until I could see a haze of brown across the hillside, and then dashing out of hiding to clap my hands and watch the blanket of rabbits look up from eating before rushing towards their warren, like brown water sucked down a drain. As I grew older, I stopped clapping and instead spent hours just watching, observing the hierarchy of their brown world. The older ones venturing into the wider field, the young ones staying close to the mouth of the burrows, and the watchers. The rabbits that didn’t hunch over to eat, but stayed upright, looking, listening and then sounding the alarm. Stamping their strong hind legs against the ground, creating a thudding noise that connected all the others with its signal, causing them to stop eating and, as one, run to the holes on the hillside and vanish.

  When I reached the gamekeeper’s cottage at the edge of the wood, I scanned across the field, but could see only green. I stood and instinctively clapped my hands, waiting for the brown movement. There was none; the field was still in the cold, damp winter air. The gamekeeper kept foxhounds for the hunt here, in kennels with outside compounds made of high iron railings. They bayed in loud voices that echoed around the valley whenever anyone passed. Strong, muscular, powerful dogs, but the gamekeeper could walk among them as they licked his hands like pets waiting for a treat, not the ruthless killers they were. I’d seen them rip a fox apart and I didn’t need to be told to stay away; nothing could have made me go near them.

  The gamekeeper’s cottage stood at the furthest corner of the Park, a field where the sheep were held during the lambing season. The field dipped down behind his house, forming a corner between the kennel and the wood, and this is where the sheep would come. Sheltered by the woods, but exposed to the foxes living just beyond the treeline and right next to the hunting dogs whom they should have run from in fear. And yet, day after day, ewes chose that spot when their lambs were close to being born. Taking the risk that the foxes would be held at bay by the presence of their predators, they chose this place because when they were at their most vulnerable shelter was everything. A contradiction at the edge of the wood. But the railings are gone now, the kennels are a bungalow and a brand-new four-wheel drive stands outside the gamekeeper’s cottage. Something else has changed too. As I walk over the ground that’s so familiar I could have left it yesterday, something’s different. The villagers have gone, replaced by commuters and retirees, taking the working heart out of the estate. But they’ve been gone for years; it’s something more than that, something more fundamental that I can’t quite put my finger on. I shrug it off with the thought that maybe it’s me, and my response to the land; maybe I’m viewing it with different eyes.

  To the Park. When the old farmhouse was the main house on the estate this would have been its formal entrance, with a gravel drive lined by oak trees. But in the eighteenth century a new hall had been built, leaving the old one to become just a large faded farmhouse. Only two of the oaks still stand, bark split with age, branches distorted, but still pushing to the sky, still searching for that one last ray of sunlight. The roots lift in swollen mounds around the base of the trunks; one is so pronounced it forms a lumpy seat around the base. I sat down to take in the best view. I could hear the echo of my own footfall, circling the tree for hours on late-summer days, hopping from root to root as if they were stepping stones. Not bored or listless, something else – something like mesmerized.

  And there it was. In the dip below, at the base of the bowl, the bottom of the valley: the place from where all the paths of my life run upwards and away. The sun was higher in the sky now and the bricks had lost the pinkness, turning to their true orange-red. Whenever I took this walk and sat in this spot I was surprised. As I looked down at the house I still exp
ected to see the immense weeping willow tree that had stood in front of the façade, obscuring its face, keeping its secrets. With my eyes closed I can hear the clattering hush of its branches, swooping in tendrils to the ground. I’m running towards the curtain of green, my small hands reaching out and grasping bunches of whip-thin growth and swinging in the air through the height of the tree, or just hanging hidden in the leaves, watching. And my mum’s voice: ‘Get down from there! How many times do you have to be told?’ But I don’t get down; I swing through the green to the firmness of a branch and watch through the delicate whispering elongated leaves as they search for me, pushing the tendrils aside.

  ‘This needs cutting back. Cut it so it’s out of her reach.’

  So every spring the tree was pruned until the whips hung in a short-cropped bob. But the willow’s growth is like no other tree and by midsummer the leaves were sweeping the ground again and life inside the green dome was mine.

  The mobile phone ringing in my pocket brought me back to the moment. As I opened my eyes Mum’s voice trailed away and the tree was gone, the house face exposed. A perfectly proportioned face of five windows and a Georgian entrance with polished steps. Nothing to hide now, no secrets kept behind the leafy veil.

  ‘Your mum’s had a stroke. I think you need to come to the hospital straight away.’

  ‘But how? She’s coming out on Wednesday – you said she was better?’

  ‘Just come now; we’ll talk about it when you’re here.’