The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  She read my father’s letter, frowning in concentration, then read it again. ‘Weird,’ she said at last and handed it back to me. ‘A box in an attic, eh? Do you think your mother’s corpse is in it, mouldering away? Perhaps she never died in France at all.’ She made a Gothic face at me. The eyeliner beneath her left eye had smudged. I itched to reach over and wipe it away, not out of any lesbian urge but purely for the sake of tidiness.

  ‘Oh, she went back to France, all right.’

  As soon as I left to go to university, as if abnegated of all responsibility for me, my mother had sold her share of the house back to my father for some astronomical sum (I had not realized they were even in contact) and gone back to France. I visited her there twice before she died; and each time she was as distant and polite as a passing acquaintance. Each time I sensed dark shadows gliding beneath the composed exterior, and knew that if those shadows were to surface they would emerge with monstrous teeth and the power to destroy. It was probably a relief to both of us that I decided not to visit again.

  Eve put a consoling hand on my arm. ‘How are you feeling about it all?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It was true.

  ‘Oh, come on, Iz. It’s me: emotional trainwreck Eve. You don’t have to stay buttoned-up with me.’

  ‘To be honest, it was a bit of a shock to hear he was dead. The last time I saw him on TV he looked fine. But the money from selling the house will come in handy.’

  For a moment she looked appalled. Then she gave me the bright, forced smile you might give a three-year-old that’s just inadvertently (or not) stamped on a frog. ‘You’re probably still feeling a bit numb, from the shock of it all. Some people grasp the enormity of a death at once; it just takes longer with others. The grief will kick in later.’

  ‘Honestly, Eve, I don’t think so. He walked out of my life when I was fourteen. This wretched letter is the first time he’s been in contact since. How are you supposed to feel about a father who did that to you? No matter how rich he is.’

  My father might have ended up as a rich man, but he hadn’t started out that way. Archaeology isn’t an occupation known for making fortunes. He had a genuine passion for the ancient past, having spurned the modern world as a thoroughly bad lot, which was not an entirely surprising attitude for a young man coming of age immediately after the Second World War, with all the horrors and inhumanities that liberation had revealed. When he met my mother on a dig in Egypt in the fifties he barely had the price of a meal. She, however, came of aristocratic French stock, with a smart house in the first Paris arrondissement and a small chateau in the Lot. They travelled together all over the world, from one ancient site to another. They visited the excavated ziggurat at Dur Untash and joined for a while Kelso’s dig at Bethel. They saw the Neolithic plastered skulls unearthed at Jericho and marvelled over the rose-red city at Petra. They saw Imhotep’s stepped pyramid and the city of the dead at Saqqara, spent time walking amid the Roman ruins of Volubilis and visiting the ancient capital of the Hoggar at Abalessa. They were, as they loved to tell me, academic nomads, always on the trail of knowledge. And then I came along and put a stop to their joyous quests.

  My father got work as a researcher just as the new medium of television was taking off; soon every family in Britain was basing its evening life around its television set. Not long after, he got a lucky break and ended up presenting an hour-long segment when the regular presenter fell ill. He was good at it; he was an immediate hit with the public, with his slightly old-fashioned academic air. He was handsome without being overly distracting, a man whom women enjoyed watching and men would listen to, and infectiously enthusiastic about his favourite subjects. He was the David Attenborough of archaeology: he made history entertaining, and the British have always loved history – they lay claim to so much of it. On the screen he radiated bonhomie and a generous delight in sharing his passion. I remember him on one programme horrifying a British Museum curator by trying on the Sutton Hoo helmet and getting it stuck on the crown of his head. Ancient peoples were smaller than we are today, he spluttered, struggling to wrestle it off, leaving his dark hair standing up in tufts. People loved him for gaffes like this: they made him human and accessible, and by association brought the subjects of his programmes closer to them. It was exceedingly odd to see him still walking and talking on television even after he’d left us, as if nothing had happened. The worst of it was that you never knew where he’d pop up next: he was a public institution, a national treasure. It was easy enough to avoid programmes about history and archaeology, but turn over to watch a charity appeal for some godforsaken corner of Africa and you’d suddenly be caught out as he appeared, running a hand through his increasingly mad hair and making an impassioned plea for funds.

  ‘Come on,’ Eve said, leaping to her feet and grabbing up her handbag. ‘We’re going to the house.’ She saw my face and added quickly, ‘We can make an assessment in preparation for the sale. Instructions for the agents, stuff to be cleared, that sort of thing. You’re going to have to do it some time or another, so why not now, while I’m here? Bit of moral support, remember?’

  I stared past her shoulder into the rain-sodden courtyard, where a pair of cats were squaring up to one another, one on the wall, the other on top of the shed. The one on the shed roof had its ears laid flat to its skull; the tabby on the wall looked ready to spring. I walked quickly to the window and tapped on the glass. Both cats turned to stare at me, their yellow gazes inimical. The cat on the shed stood up and stretched its back legs, then its front legs, and leapt neatly down on to the patio. The tabby started unconcernedly to lick its paws. Humans: what did they know?

  Abruptly, I remembered the cat we had owned in my youth – Max, short for Doctor Maximus ibn Arabi, a lithe beast with huge ears and a sleek, sandy-brown coat like a fennec fox – and how he would lie stretched out in my sandpit at the bottom of the garden, blinking at the sun as if he had located himself in a tiny yet infinite desert. At the age of eight I asked my father why our cat had such a strange name. My friends’ cats were called simple descriptive things such as Blackie or Spot or Socks. ‘That’s not even his real name,’ he told me solemnly, as if imparting one of the world’s long-hidden secrets. ‘Nor is he even just a cat. He’s the reincarnation of an ancient scholar and his real name is Abu abd-Allah Muhammad ibn-Ali ibn Muhammad ibn al-Arabi al-Hatimi al-TTaa’i. And that’s why we call him Max.’ Which left me none the wiser. But every time that cat looked at me I sensed it regarded me through the veil of hundreds of years of acquired wisdom. Other children might have been unnerved by such a concept, but I was fascinated. I would lie nose to nose with Max out in the garden to see if that wisdom would leap the gap between us, inter-species. I had completely forgotten not just that cat, but the entire sensation of magic and promise and possibility it had represented to the child I had been.

  Remembering now, I felt like an entirely different person to that naive and trusting eight-year-old; but perhaps her shade was waiting to be reunited with me under the eaves of my childhood home. ‘All right,’ I said, making what felt like a momentous decision. ‘Let’s go.’

  2

  We took my car. On those rare occasions when other people drove me, my right foot hovered constantly over a phantom brake pedal; I had to grit my teeth to prevent myself from yelling ‘Watch out!’ or ‘The light’s changing!’ I watched other road-users in the rear-view mirror, and out of the corner of my eye, anticipating their every move. My fingers itched to change the gears or take hold of the wheel. I was not what you would call a relaxed passenger.

  We crossed the river at Hammersmith, manoeuvred around its clogged-up roundabout and took the A40 into the West End, overtaking the slow weekenders in their family saloons. As we were cutting up through the backstreets around Regent’s Park we came upon two men loading a camel into what looked like a glorified horsebox. Or were they taking it out, delivering it to the zoo? It was hard to tell. The camel was single-humped and looked as if
it had reached the end of its patience. It had planted its wide, padded front feet sturdily on the wooden ramp and wasn’t budging an inch one way or another. Just before we turned the corner into Gloucester Gate, I looked in the rear-view mirror and it was still there, as immobile as a statue.

  We reached the house twenty minutes later, having toiled through the clogged traffic of Hampstead Village. I hadn’t been back since I’d walked out of it at the age of eighteen, with any illusions I’d had about the benevolence of the world lying in tatters around me and with only the hundred quid I’d raided from my mother’s study to sustain me until my university grant came through. ‘Give me a couple of minutes, will you?’ I asked Eve, and left her sitting in the car on the driveway.

  The house regarded me furtively through its shuttered windows. If it recognized me it gave no sign. But I remembered everything about it: the pattern of the creeper as it wound up around the eaves and how it turned to crimson in the autumn, then became plague-spotted and finally a sickly yellow before littering the garden with its annual death. I remembered the rhododendrons whose contorted branches hid the dens of my youth, and the smooth patches on the slate path up to the front door that had been worn by the passage of thousands of feet. It was a Georgian house and its proportions pleased the eye of the adult who regarded it now. As a child, it had seemed vast to me; now it seemed substantial but hardly enormous, impressive but not ostentatious, as if it had somehow shrunk over the course of the intervening years. I looked at it steadily, and knew that I would sell it. I did not even want to go inside. Too many memories waited for me, and not just in the box in the attic.

  Instead, I took the path that led around the side of the house to the back garden and gazed at its familiar landscape, hardly breathing, as if to move or make a sound might frighten away the delicate shades that lived there still. I felt that if I were to slip past the screening cover of the dense yew hedge I would surprise my six-year-old self, barefoot and sun-browned, my hair braided in untidy squaw-plaits, victoriously flourishing my latest find: a slow-worm or a toad unceremoniously disinterred from the rockery. Or that if I closed my eyes I would hear the whoops and howls of our little band as we chased one another between the flowerbeds with spud-guns. But the only sound I heard was the alarm cry of a blackbird high up in the cedar tree, liquid and shrill.

  I walked on, into my past.

  The pond where I had lain on my belly for hours on end, spying on the lazy meanderings of the ornamental carp through the murky depths, was now matted with weed and overgrown with convolvulus and meadow grass. There was the rockery, now little more than a random pile of stones overrun with ground ivy, nettles and dandelions. My father had been no gardener even in his youth; it was my mother who had set about keeping nature at bay. Armed with long-handled loppers, her gardening gauntlets and a pair of secateurs, she seemed like a medieval knight going out to do battle with a small but annoying dragon. Clearly no one had done anything to the garden in years. Wandering through the long grass, I half expected to find the remains of my old wigwam: tatters of faded yellow cloth flapping from skeletal poles like a becalmed Marie Celeste, my old rag-rug and toys still scattered where they had been suddenly and mysteriously abandoned. I walked over to the spot where it had stood all those years ago, but there was not even the tell-tale crispy brown circle it left on the lawn when dismantled and packed away for the winter. It might never have existed; and neither might that laughing, bright-eyed child.

  Dark clouds had gathered overhead and as I stood there, remembering, it began to rain. Sticking my hands deep into my coat pockets, I trudged back to Eve.

  ‘Come on, then,’ I said. ‘Let’s go inside.’

  I avoided the subject of the attic for as long as I could, though I kept catching Eve casting her eyes towards it every time we passed through the hall, with its winding baronial banister. By the end of three hours we had made a rough inventory of the contents of the house, concentrating on the furniture, the paintings and the more valuable artefacts my parents had collected from around the world. I could not bring myself to enter what had been my parents’ bedroom. My own room was along the corridor. Gingerly, I pushed open the door.

  Everything was just as I had left it all those years ago, except that it was now rather dusty and faded. On the walls were posters for The Slits and Crass and The Rezillos, angry music for an angry girl; inside the wardrobe, a jumble of clothes that were probably back in fashion in the seedier streets around Camden. I closed the door. That was an era of my life I never wanted to return to, a chapter of a book I wished to leave closed for ever.

  Back out in the corridor, I found that Eve had pulled the attic ladder down.

  ‘You know you’ve got to,’ she said gently.

  I knew she was right. There was no avoiding it. Up I went.

  I have heard of people with a morbid fear of attics. There are countless tales of ghosts and mad folk lurking in the hidden, dark spaces of our houses: all good psychological symbols for the Self and the Other, for the dark side of our personalities that we fear, for the irrational part of the world that we cannot understand and so feel threatened by. It was not the attic that made my hands shake on the ladder. I had no fear of ghosts, as such. I’d scared the kids at school half to death with stories of vengeful spirits and the walking dead. I had no idea where I got such stories from, except that as a child I seemed to be possessed of a ghoulish imagination and a strong stomach. When next door’s terrier was run over in the road and I saw its guts spilling out on to the tarmac like great fat white worms, I didn’t run away and cry but stood there, gripped by my own fascination. Who knew a dog’s body contained such things? I elaborated my next ghost story with these gruesome details and Katie Knox was sick in a rosebush. But since then I’d spent a very long time suppressing my overactive imagination, straitjacketing it into the world that accountants and other such grown-ups inhabit. My fear as I went up into that dark, cobwebby space was of giving the dead power over me in the form of things that would prey on my mind rather than on my body.

  At the top of the ladder I reached for the flashlight that my father stowed to the right of the hatch; and there it was, in the same place it had always been. The memory of the last time I had been up here jangled at the edge of my consciousness and I pushed it away into the dark place it had come up from. I clicked the switch and a beam of light swept over the attic space. Boxes. Boxes everywhere.

  What had I expected? A solitary box sitting in the middle of a great void, waiting just for me?

  I climbed up over the edge and walked the boarded floor in search of the one with my name on it. I’ll say this for my father: he was organized. I supposed I had inherited that trait from him. I wondered, scanning the neat labelling and the clarity of his archiving, whether he had known he was going to die, and, if so, for how long? There were boxes of books, by subject; boxes of shoes; boxes of archaeological records; boxes of old papers.

  At last I found it. I had probably passed it two or three times, as it was a lot smaller than I’d been expecting; perhaps I’d been influenced by Eve’s ghoulish suggestion about it containing the remains of my mother. I crouched down. Isabelle, it said on the top in my father’s striking italic scrawl. The paper on which this had been written was yellow with age, and the ink was faded. I wondered just how long the box had been sitting there. It had been carefully closed with packing tape so that I could not simply rip into it then and there, tip whatever it contained over the floor and walk away. I picked it up. It was light, but as it tilted something inside shifted position and fell to the other side of the box with a dull thud.

  What on earth could have made a noise like that? I stared at the box as if it might contain a skull, or a withered hand. Oh, stop it, Iz, I told myself firmly, and tucked the thing under my arm. It was hard descending the ladder with one hand, but I managed it without mishap. Eve eyed the box greedily. ‘Go on, then, open it.’

  I shook my head. ‘Not now. Not here.’

&nbs
p; 3

  London encompasses a vast space, covering well over fifteen hundred square kilometres. Into that space the best part of eight million people are jammed: in Victorian and Edwardian terraces, in seventies council blocks, in modern steel-and-glass towers, sprawling out into endless suburbs. In the past twenty years I had bought and sold flats all over London, forever on the move, forever moving west. I never stayed in one place for long, loving each new property for a year or two, then feeling restless, unsettled. Once I had finished renovating and redecorating and moved my focus outward to the world again, I felt uncomfortable. No matter where I was, no matter how attractive the area or how pleasant the neighbours, I never felt as if I fitted in. Each time I had itchy feet, I would find myself looking in estate agent windows and know that the time had come again to up sticks and move on. I was lucky: the property market moved with me, onward and upward. In the process I managed to trade up from a bedsitter in Nunhead with mushrooms growing between its bathroom tiles, to a one-bedroomed apartment in Brockley, to smarter two- and three-bedroomed Victorian conversion flats in Battersea and Wandsworth, to a mews house tucked away in the backstreets of Chelsea; and had finally ended up in a substantial property in the far south-west of the city, about as far away from my parents’ house as you could be while still remaining in London.

  Less than forty minutes after we had speeded away from Hampstead we were back in Barnes, having gone from one overpriced middle-class village to another. Both areas reeked of money, old money and new; and for a few sickening seconds, as I drew the Mercedes into the drive, I hated my own version of my parents’ house almost as much as I had the original.

  I said nothing of this to Eve: she wouldn’t have understood even if I could have put it into words. Eve loved things, loved them in a visceral, sensual way, as if they filled the void in her life that should have been filled by a husband and kids. She’d had two husbands, but had never been able to have children. I wondered sometimes if I filled part of that void as well, for she could be bossy with me when I was being slower off the mark than she liked, as if she was playing the mother she had never been and I her child.