Still, if he was allowed to do it . . .
He was a city animal, used to the heady anonymity of busy streets. Setting off along the bumpy track he felt watched, conspicuous in his black shoes and fashionably baggy suit. As a concession to the countryside he removed his tie and stuffed it in his pocket.
In spite of himself he had to concede it was a glorious morning, with that shiny, new-minted quality to the sunshine which you only got in England where such days were rare. The field he crossed was empty, but there were signs (he circumnavigated them fastidiously) that it had been used for cattle. The low, tangled hedge to his right was laced with dog roses, and heraldic-looking thistles sprouted between the cowpats.
At the far side of the field the path petered out uncertainly – bolder ramblers than he had obviously passed this way and thought better of it – but he was determined not to be deflected. A walk needed an objective, and he wanted to climb the hill to a point which commanded a view. Allied to this was the barely acknowledged idea that to overlook his surroundings might be to gain a calmer perspective on his problems. In the corner of the field he discovered a place where the hedge had been breached, and he went through, the blackthorn spikes catching at his sleeves, and began trudging up the slope.
He breathed heavily, keeping his eyes on his feet. He wasn’t fit, and what with no sleep either, the ascent took it out of him. For the umpteenth time he told himself it was time to get his act together. Practise what he preached: give up the weed and the whisky. Sex could stay. If he was spared – Christ!
Starting to sweat, he took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. His sinewy arms looked alarmingly white – townie’s arms – but his blunt, short-nailed hands were more like those of a navvy than an eye doctor. Working hands, there wasn’t that much difference in it. He might not win any prizes for temperance and clean living but he could, he reminded himself, restore sighted life to other people for them to fuck up as they wished.
As usual this thought invigorated him as he plodded on. His job was always the weight he placed on the other side of the scales, balancing all the shit and shambles. Good work was what he believed he did, in both senses, well done and worthwhile; and handsomely paid which didn’t hurt. The thought of losing it was intolerable to him. He permitted himself a look up the hill and was pleased to find he’d made reasonable progress, and that there was only one more field, with a strange tumulus to the right, before he’d be on the open slope of the White Horse.
He stopped. For a split second his whole system seemed to cut out in a micro-death, like a silent sneeze. In the watercolour wash of these surroundings the pink car was as conspicuous as an alien spacecraft. Hot pink, the in-your-face colour of Brighton rock and candy floss and tarty lipstick.
The second after, his system went from pause to fast forward. His heart pattered dangerously and his lungs heaved, gulping in air. A few metres in front of him was a wire fence. He lurched towards it and grabbed one of the posts, leaning both hands on the top of it to steady himself.
It had to be her. But where? At his approach a couple of horses which had been grazing near the barrow began trotting about with heads lifted and tails like flags, prompted by some atavistic herding and defending impulse.
He scanned to the left.
There she was.
He was so attuned to her, he knew her so well. Even from several hundred yards away he could tell the expression on her face by the angle of her head. She was worried, and cross about being worried. Her arms were folded over her thin diaphragm, hands tucked into her armpits. As he watched she pulled off her glasses and with the inside of the same wrist rubbed her face and the top of her head, making her hair stick up even more. From this distance and in these surroundings she looked like a rather radical scarecrow. The beloved scarecrow of his most secret heart.
There was a large object lying at her feet. He thought perhaps she had been carrying something up the hill and been forced to put it down, which would account for the air of dejected frustration – she hated to be beaten.
But now she sank to her knees, as though praying, and as she did so he recognised with astonishment what it was in the grass.
Spencer had reached the top of the White Horse. He wasn’t in such bad shape for his age after all – not too puffed and the hip was holding up well.
By the horse’s poll he sat down and rested his arms on his knees. Lord, but it was pretty. God’s little acre. Or rather man’s – all history, artefact and modification, not much left of what the Bronze Age warriors, let alone the Almighty, would have looked out on from this point. He could see some landmarks he recognised – the village of Fort Mayden, the big house on the opposite hill – but the horizon in any direction seemed no more than a few miles away. From the mountain road behind his house in Moose Draw, Wyoming, he could see, on a clear day, for fifty, sixty miles. Still, this place had a magic of its own, and he was susceptible to it. He shortened his focus and looked down at the white stuff near his feet. He’d read about it. It wasn’t, as was commonly supposed, a design created by simply removing the turf but a deep pit filled with chalk rubble. Those Ancient Brits hadn’t been scared of hard work – this place, Stonehenge, weird circles, more darn great forts and castles than you could shake a stick at . . . And I’ll be . . . There was a cigarette end lying right there on the surface of the chalk. Incensed, he stretched out one leg and scraped it towards him with the toe of his shoe. Then he scrabbled a small hole with the fingers of one hand and buried it, patting the ground tidy and flat on top like a grave.
There was a little pink car parked beside the road about half a mile below where he was sitting, he’d noticed it earlier as he began his climb. Someone – he thought a young man – had got out of it, to take a leak probably. Now he could see whoever it was down in the field beyond the road where the horses were. The figure had gone over to the one that was on the ground asleep and was studying it. Then looked up, casting around. Actually he could see now it was a skinny woman – something in the angle of the head – which would explain the pink car. Her attitude was one of anxiety, concern. She probably knew nothing about horses, he could remember as a kid thinking they looked dead when they lay like that. She could see him up here, could even holler if she wanted help, so he didn’t wave. On the other hand it was time he began the descent. He rose laboriously – knees, feet, backside, eeeasy does it – and that wiped the silly grin off his face. It wasn’t the walking, it was the seizing up got you every time.
The head was already emerging – slick with fluid, webbed with membranes, steaming from the hot secrecy of the womb. Stella watched with a kind of awe this process which all her life she had striven to avoid both as participant and helper. Here was the real meaning of travail. The mare’s body surging and convulsing, subject to this ferocious physical imperative, her head stretched in a concentrated agony, eyes staring but unseeing, focused on the birth.
Should she do something to help? Leave well alone? Stay, go, tell someone else? If so, who? Her fear and ignorance were humiliatingly complete.
At that moment the foal’s head moved a little farther out, and twisted slightly. The movement made Stella think of its flailing legs, still inside the mare. She winced. Was all this normal? Some dim memory of a film seen in childhood suggested that a foal came out feet first, what in humans would be called a breech birth . . . or had the film got it wrong? The mare snorted violently, struggling for breath. Instinct overrode revulsion and with a groan of anxiety Stella knelt down, pushed up her sleeves, and prepared to engage with matters of life and death.
Robert had to pause again. He was too short of breath to call and she seemed too preoccupied to have noticed anyone else. Besides which he reminded himself that he was the last person she would be expecting to see, so she would be unlikely to identify him. In the middle distance another lone walker was making his way down the slope with short, careful steps, following the back of the White Horse. An elderly chap, Robert surmised, chary o
f his joints. But at least the old bugger had got up there without having a seizure.
Spencer shielded his eyes and took another long look at the woman in the field. She was on her knees by the horse. Something was wrong. He went so far as to cup his hands round his mouth to holler, but thought better of it. There was a guy a bit closer to her than he was who she could ask for help if help were needed. Spencer was old, with quite a way still to walk and a plane to catch. If he reached the road and an offer of help seemed appropriate, he’d make it. Otherwise – when in Rome – he’d mind his own business.
Stella knew that she had to overcome her squeamishness and apply brute strength. The other option was to run back – uphill, she reminded herself – to the car, and put the mobile phone to use. But the signal had been weak when she’d tried to ring George en route, and even if she were able to locate a vet through directory enquiries, what was rural protocol vis à vis unilaterally summoning help for someone else’s horse? She entertained visions of a man in a cap and gaiters carrying a gun and asking what in blue blazes gave her the right to interfere?
She was giddy and nauseous with apprehension as she took hold of the foal’s head. But it felt surprisingly solid, a proper horse in miniature and not the slimy unformed thing she’d feared. Also to her surprise it didn’t fight her touch, though with her peripheral vision she saw the mare’s head lift in consternation before sinking back submissively.
Instinctively Stella knew that her own strength must be used with that of the mare – it was like singing, taking a deep breath and letting your voice ride out on it. What she must not do was to work against nature, she must go with the flow. When the mare next went into a contraction Stella heaved at the foal’s head, trying to ease it a little farther out, feeling the angle at which the rest of the body lay. On the first occasion nothing happened. On the second there was a slither, a rush of fluid and the folded knees appeared, followed by one leg. Stella experienced a release of pressure in her own body.
I’ve done it, she thought. Together, we’re doing it.
‘Well done.’
That voice – so familiar, so longed for, so often imagined that she thought she must have imagined it now. ‘Not bad for an amateur.’
‘Bastard.’ Beloved.
‘Here we go. All hands to the pump.’
She hadn’t so much as glanced at his face, she hadn’t needed to. His hands came down to join hers and, hand over hand, shoulder to shoulder, they worked together.
CHAPTER TWO
‘Back to the front,
Back to the old campaign
Out to the bad old fight once more
Off to the war again . . .’
—Stella Carlyle, ‘Back to the Front’
Stella 1990
Gordon Fellowes was patient, generous, undemanding and infatuated. In other words he was a thoroughly nice man, and Stella was starting to despise him.
For almost a decade Gordon had attended her shows, anywhere south of Birmingham being his catchment area. She’d arrive on the first night and there would be the note, the flowers, the mildly worded invitation to dinner, all perfectly polite and proper, the lace cloth draped over his bulging, burning need to have sex with her.
He was never importunate. She had never, over the eight years of their intermittent association, felt in the least threatened by his attentions. His was a pathetically selfless devotion.When he caressed her it was with hands which, though no longer moist with awe, were cautious and beseeching. She found this gentleness both touching and infuriating, a tension which prevented her from being totally indifferent to his lovemaking, so that she never got round to telling him to push off. On a day-to-day level he was acquiescent to a fault, never raising a murmur of complaint when she refused him, nor failing to rise to the occasion when she was demanding. Timorous as a schoolboy, priapic as a satyr, Gordon’s combination of servility and ardour preserved his place in Stella’s life – just.
The club he belonged to was far from exclusive, though he had senior-member status. Stella’s admirers were legion, and most took her stage persona at its face value. Alone in the spotlight, eyes closed, barefoot and wasted, the fabric of her skirt scrunched in her thin hand, swaying to the beat, keening into the microphone her songs of squandered passion and squalid betrayal, she was every halfway-feeling chap’s shot at redemption She was the little bad girl with the big broken heart just waiting for the good guy from Esher to come along and wrap her up safe in his arms. It was the persona that denied the spirited, conscientious working wives of the fans the conjugal attention they deserved after the show, as their husbands lay wide-eyed and spellbound in the dark.
Most of the chaps recovered pretty soon. They never even got as far as the stage door, and after a couple of days they returned to reality and saw once again how attractive and admirable – not to say faithful – were the women they’d married. Those who did continue to carry a torch tried to do so casually. ‘Ever see Stella Carlyle live on stage?’ they’d ask in the Fish and Ferret over lager and fajitas with their colleagues. ‘If you get the chance, sell the house for a ticket, she’s absolutely – well, I won’t spoil it for you, just see for yourself, it’s an experience . . .’
A very few were braver or, like Gordon, simply more starstruck. They told themselves that she might be a noted chanteuse but she was only human, and it was a bloody lonely life on the road if the documentaries were to be believed. No woman could possibly take offence at being offered a nice dinner by a respectable bloke who admired and fancied her half to death. The worst that could happen was that she’d turn him down. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
These bold individuals were astonished and gratified to discover they gained a great deal more than they’d bargained for. They came upon Stella all wired and skittery after the show, libido in overdrive, judgement (though they didn’t appreciate this) suspended. She ate their dinner, smoked in their faces, drank prodigiously, fucked their brains out and finally sank into an exhausted death-like sleep, curled skinny and hot against their still-heaving chests. It was impossible not to believe that they’d made a difference. In fact they were generally so shell-shocked by the whole episode that like those sworn to honourable secrecy about encounters with royalty they never even boasted about it. They had been used, chewed up and spat out – and felt privileged. Thenceforth they submitted to her use whenever she was performing within easy reach of where they lived. Each of them knew he wasn’t the only one, but knew too that he was special.
Gordon’s claim to uniqueness, apart from his persistence, was that he thought no such thing. Humbly and realistically he acknowledged that the only special one was Stella, and that he was just a stupid, bumbling, bedazzled moth. It was one of the few songs she sang that she hadn’t written herself – the old Dietrich number ‘Falling in Love Again’. Her audience could have wept for pity. They wanted only to save her from the terrible fate of being desired too much, a butterfly bruised but as yet unbroken on the wheel of adulation.
So Gordon, to his credit, knew his place, and Stella kept him in it.
On the occasion in question, though, he was treated more cruelly than he deserved or could possibly have anticipated. He had no way of knowing, on this freezing pre-Christmas night, that he had walked into a viper’s nest.
The showdown had been coming for some time. It had stalked the band like a stealthy predator, haunting even their moments of elation. If they celebrated, their celebrations had a feverish edge. When they laughed, their laughter seemed a cover for something else. If they told each other how great they’d been it was as if they were saying goodbye. If there was a confrontation it was brief and savage and swiftly stifled, like the flash of a flicknife. The women were afraid of their own potential to wound, and they were right to be.
The performance that proved to be their last was the third and final one in a converted Victorian settlement off the Kilburn High Road. The Curfew was one of their regular haunts, a venue where there was never an
y doubt they were playing for a home crowd, the people who’d liked Sorority when they were nothing, and who presided over their current success benignly and with a certain satisfaction in having been on side first. The audience profile had scarcely changed over the ten years of their association. Apart from a decade’s worth of marginally altered style and well-managed ageing they were the same civilised, liberal, silk-and-denim people they always had been, mostly couples linked by commitment if not by marriage, with children now at the exam stage. They laughed readily and with a sense of ownership. Sorority was their band.
Stella had always taken the view that this cosiness was to be fought.
‘Fuck the warm fuzzies,’ was her line. ‘We rang their bell because we were different, so that’s how we need to be now.’
She insisted on trying new material at the Curfew, and no matter what the pressure of foot-stamping would only do one encore which she ruled should be something off-beat rather than an old favourite. There was generally a certain amount of half-hearted wrangling on the subject before her view prevailed, but it had never before been a serious bone of contention. The audience always responded positively, perhaps flattered by the notion of being used as a sounding-board: they were being accorded the respect they deserved, and they reciprocated.
Sorority were four, of whom Stella was the leader. She it was whose fierce, hungry talent and vision had attracted the others and kept them together through the initial two years of attrition. It was Stella who’d driven the battered camper-van from hall to hall, crisscrossing the country like a gnat in a paper bag, singing, swearing, begging and bullshitting, getting them there somehow and setting them on their feet for the performance. She created for herself a role that was part slave-driver, part den-mother, part mad-eyed general, an over-the-top leader for whom anyone would go over the top. A historic drinker herself she banned booze before any performance, and had no truck with hangovers. Even genuine illness had to be of disabling severity before she gave it any credence. She herself led from the front. A dose of the ’flu that would have sent strong men whimpering beneath the duvet she set to work for her, giving a performance of ‘Bloody but Unbowed’ and other torch ballads that those who were there still talked about, and working up a fever-busting sweat that flew in fine arcs over the front row.
The Grass Memorial Page 3