Mr Gregory looked doubtfully at the smirking horse’s head, but he climbed into the van slowly, not without pain, Peter noticed, and they shot down the rest of Braxman’s Hill and into their road.
‘You know I’m at the other end,’ Mr Gregory said into the embarrassed space that lay between them as they passed Peter’s house.
They both looked at the sagging roof, despite themselves.
‘I hope your mother is better now, Peter,’ Mr Gregory said, fixing his eyes on the road.
Peter could feel a scramble of words gathering in ragged formation. He’d nodded while he calmed himself. The old ruse. They drove in silence, thumping against the new speed bumps, which were too high.
They neared the slight bend that marked the road’s last houses.
‘Good, good,’ Mr Gregory said, as if Peter had just given him a full account of his family history. ‘Well, it’s been quite a day, Fenton,’ he said, as they pulled up beside his cottage.
A straight concrete path ran to the door, its edges lined with small, round stones sunk halfway, like rivets on a battleship. Mr Gregory thanked Peter for his help, unfolding his legs carefully and half-dropping down the side of the high van. Peter didn’t think Mr Gregory was going to speak again but he turned at the last moment and squinted back through the door.
‘Will you come for a light tea after work next week? Mr Gregory said. ‘Bring your brother. It would be nice to see Justin again. I’d like to thank you properly. Let’s say Thursday. Six? Excellent. Very good.’
He was gone, down the stone-flanked path. His head bent with a practised tilt at the door and he disappeared into the gloom without turning back. There had been no time to reply. Justin had until Thursday to be out of that ridiculous neck brace.
* * *
For a moment, Justin thought his brother was joking. ‘You’re kidding me, Peter. A light tea. He’s still living in the fifties, that man. I don’t want to go for tea with one of my old teachers’.
‘What was I supposed to say?’ Peter asked.
‘How about no?’ Justin’s neck was still throbbing.
‘He didn’t give me a chance to say no,’ Peter said, looking wounded. ‘Anyway, I think it’s only polite that we go.’
Justin sighed. ‘Of course you do.’
And they’d gone along on that Thursday evening, Justin still needing the neck brace, Peter eyeing him with a face that said ‘malingerer’.
‘I had a bit of a tip in the van,’ Justin told Mr Gregory, sheepishly, when he met them at the door.
‘Well, it’s the season for it,’ Mr Gregory had said, rubbing his own bruised chin. ‘Do come in.’
Justin found it a bit embarrassing at first, being in Mr Gregory’s place. He was still a teacher to him. It was alright for Peter, Justin thought, as he watched his brother chatting amiably, he’d never had to suffer one of his modern history lessons. Fridays, straight after lunch. Just when you’re dying for the week to end it was Mr Gregory and World War Two. And all too often, his particular favourite: the War in the Pacific, 1941-45. Who could forget?
Mr Gregory hadn’t changed much, Justin thought. Thin. Gangly. Pale. That’s how he remembered him from school. No vile nicknames, just Greggers to everyone. Except him, of course. He wasn’t really strict. Definitely not mean like some of the psychos. He was a bit of a clean freak, Justin remembered. He kept a cloth in his briefcase and always wiped down the desk before he got going. Bright blue silk. It would swoop over the table like an exotic bird, and then be gone, back into the brown bag, in the brown room. That thicket of drab.
Mr Gregory had small sandwiches ready, and sponge cake that he cut into generous slices and served on ornate, square plates. And tea. Long leaves of tea, wound tight into thin black sticks, a few of which crossed in the bottom of Justin’s cup like a symbol.
Justin remembered that Mr Gregory had always been surprisingly good at keeping boys under control, even vile Drury and his posse of hoodlums. Greggers was serious and he kept to himself, but everyone liked him, or respected him, at least. They kept their distance. There was always something a little untouchable about Mr Gregory.
Justin noticed that Peter seemed to feel comfortable in the old teacher’s house. He watched him stretch his legs out from his chair, like he did at home, absent-mindedly tapping his shoes together as he talked. He barely stumbled on a single word.
In fact, Mr Gregory scarcely knew Peter, Justin thought. His brother had left school forever in the first week of term. It was supposed to be his final year, until everything changed.
Things hadn’t been going well for Peter back then, and his speech problems seemed to be getting worse. When their dad ploughed his new bike into the junction box near the old railway, Peter just fell apart for a while. Well, we all did, Justin thought, but Peter was the worst.
Old Charlie Webster at the saddlery felt sorry for them. He had known their mother for years. Some connection with horses, way back. Mum’s never been much of a smiler, Justin thought, but Charlie’s bluff manner seemed to jolt her into good form. He offered Peter a job at the saddlery and he started there soon afterwards. Grandma wasn’t best pleased. Kept going on about the thought of Dad being alive to see his son leaving school early to go and work in a shop.
Justin remembered the day his mother snapped. She was turning chops in the pan, trying not to listen to Grandma carrying on. Then she suddenly started shouting, waving the spatula like a mace, shiny globules of fat flicking through the air. If Grandma hadn’t pandered to her son’s every whim, she shrieked, he wouldn’t have been off making a fool of himself at fifty-two, getting himself killed and leaving his family stony broke. Grandma didn’t say much after that. She took to quilting, and kept to her room.
Peter loved the saddlery from the start. Justin thought it had probably saved his life. He got into horses, loved seeing them, talking about them. His stammering and hesitation died down almost completely. He only ever got tripped up when he was nervous, when he was dealing with tricky customers like that insufferable polo bunch, braying to each other across the shelves.
Justin was surprised to find that he enjoyed that first trip to Mr Gregory’s house. Their mother had been worried when they said where they were going. She wondered whether Mr Gregory might be, you know, she said, a bit funny. But she needn’t have worried. He just seemed to be lonely. He was interesting to talk to. They told him about their dad, and all that came after that. He really seemed to care about what happened to them.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, either, Justin thought. Sometimes Mr Gregory could be quite funny. Well, witty, not funny rolling around. Clever. You couldn’t see it coming.
They always sat in the same room when they went to his house: the long sitting room at the front. The windows were ruled into small squares by lead lighting so it could be dark, though Mr Gregory kept a huge fire burning, often well into summer. He liked the heat.
The room was painted an odd colour, a kind of dark orange. There were walls of ancient books in heavy covers, broken only by a small, framed photo here and there. One picture looked like Mr Gregory as a young child, grasshopper legs in white lawn shorts, his head on one side, squinting into a bright sea.
Once, Peter spotted a black and white photo in a small ebony frame, high up on one of the shelves. ‘Is that your father?’ he asked. The man in the picture looked like a younger version of Mr Gregory.
‘Yes. Gone now,’ Mr Gregory had answered in a tight voice, and Justin remembered him rubbing his own shoulders as if the room had suddenly chilled. Peter, always sensitive to some small transgression, changed the subject immediately. When they next visited, Justin saw that the little ebony frame had been taken away.
Mr Gregory tried to teach them chess but they were both hopeless, despoiling his beautiful wooden set with their clumsy moves. Mostly, they just chatted, leaning into the hard-backed chairs, the brown leather cracking along the seams, the fire bright and spitting in the grate. Above the fireplace, three mo
del cars were parked on the mantelpiece in a neat line. Justin half thought the cars must be boyhood toys, afforded pride of place in a lonely man’s front room.
When Mr Gregory eventually told them about his own years in the Pacific, they understood the strange, sad look that sometimes swept across his face, the way he’d stare through the thick-glassed window, down the path and away towards some terrible place. At school, Justin remembered, Mr Gregory had tended to stick to the facts, pretty dryly, but when he eventually started talking about the war, his own horrific years in a POW camp, Justin thought it was a shame that he couldn’t speak of it as a teacher. But he couldn’t. There were many things he couldn’t speak about.
Justin and his brother had been calling fairly regularly, for well over a year, before Mr Gregory told them, eyes fixed on the model cars, what happened to his father. But the thing he kept from them the longest was what was happening to him.
‘It’s the liver, I’m afraid, Fenton. All but done in. Worst cancer to get, I hear. Typical. It’s a legacy of the camp, they tell me. And it’s going to get painful. Nothing to be done, of course. Too late for any of that treatment hoo-ha. Probably just as well, Justin, don’t you think?’
That’s how he told me, Justin thought. Just me. Mr Gregory wanted to protect Peter as long as possible from his own soft heart, from his tangle of words. So he asked Peter to go and check the back gate for him. Justin stood at the kitchen window while Peter made his way across the damp grass. Mr Gregory was stirring his tea, the spoon striking the cup with small, melodic chimes. Justin watched his brother fumble with the heavy chain on the gatepost. Peter will not be told, Justin knew. Peter will be sheltered from the truth as long as possible.
And I had to deal with it, Justin thought. The younger brother. Look after Peter as I’ve always done. He’d got overly fond of Mr Gregory; he was not going to take another loss well. I was sorry, too, Justin thought, but there was no space for my feelings. Never was.
‘Everything alright? All clear, Peter?’ Mr Gregory called down his long garden. He had a morbid fear of vandals, their blighting words on his smooth, clean surfaces. He put his cup on the window ledge. ‘I’ll need your help, Justin,’ he said quietly, without turning his head.
From that moment, as Peter walked towards them, smiling and wiping his hands on his jeans, Justin sensed a kind of trap. He wanted to run from that room, from the saddlery, from home, from everything that kept him locked in this town, sorting and protecting other people.
I was the one who took the full weight of Dad’s death, Justin thought. Not Mum, not Peter. I identified his body. Barely eighteen. Old enough, as it turns out, to see your father lying dead with half his face stoved in, the roots of his teeth showing on one side. I was just a boy, Justin thought.
It was too much to ask.
* * *
Peter thought there must be a point, in all bad things, when people ask themselves how it came to this. How a person who thought they were good and sensible and ordinary, a person who just wanted a plain life, a plainspoken life, could be here, at this terrible moment.
Justin went first. Peter followed him, stepping carefully into the soft indentations made by his brother’s boots.
It was raining.
There was wind, of course, but the rain was a surprise. It had been dry for weeks. That was the plan: dry earth, no slips, no footprints. There was a little bit of light, more than they’d expected. Enough to keep them safe. They’d walked up in single file, keeping close to the seam of trees that ran beside most of the path. Mr Gregory followed, quite a way behind, head bowed, long legs working hard. They didn’t speak.
Speed. That was the plan.
‘No silly nonsense,’ Mr Gregory had insisted in their final meeting. ‘It’s in everyone’s interest for it to be quick.’
When he said this, in his crisp voice, he was dipping his biscuit in his tea. He would dunk the shortbread and then hold it up and stare at it for a moment, as if he were surprised to find it half wet. An odd habit, Peter thought, for a man with his noble demeanour, his flaring, patrician nose.
Peter stopped just before the angled bench, Justin almost beside him. They let Mr Gregory pass, as planned, and watched him sit, staring ahead, for what seemed a long time. His back only had a hint of sorrow in it. The longer strands of his hair, caught by the wind, stood on end before flapping to the wrong side of his head. Peter wanted to step forward, tidy the ungainly hanks, make it right for him.
But Peter did not move. He and Justin did not look at each other. There was a thin shrieking in Peter’s ears that he thought was the wind, until he realised that this is how horror sounds. That the worst part of it is the waiting.
When Mr Gregory stood again, that was the sign. The rain had slowed to the lightest mist. He stepped off the concrete plinth and made his way to the edge with unbearable slowness. It was not fear, Peter felt quite sure, but pain.
Close to the chosen point, Mr Gregory’s feet skidded, then halted abruptly on a tuft of wind-hardened grass. He half turned his head. In the dim light, Peter thought he saw a tilt of ghastly humour in his profile.
Peter would not look at Justin, although he felt his eyes on him, could hear him breathing hard, above the wind, above the shrieking in his head.
Mr Gregory had thought of everything. They were to look behind to make sure there was no one watching. Strange, given how important this was, that later, when they spoke that one time, neither could remember whether they checked.
They were to walk down just to the right of where Mr Gregory stood, where the last remnants of an ancient stone wall still clutched at the rocky edge. From there, they could move towards him in relative safety, as the ground was softer and flatter. Mr Gregory would not look at them, they knew, even though they were close, approaching almost from the side. Nearly close enough to touch him.
Mr Gregory’s right hand was up, palm facing out to sea.
The Light of the World, Peter thought. The painting in the refectory at school. William Holman Hunt. The fish pie on Fridays, watery when Mrs Grant was on. The smell of boiled potatoes curling into the classroom, so thick you could almost catch it in your hand like a rope. We ate under that picture. Had to write an essay on it. Did you know that the model for Jesus was a girl?
The rain stopped.
Peter could hear the roll and crash of the sea. Endless. He thought if he ever heard it again, after this, he might go mad.
Mr Gregory lowered his hand. But Peter could not move. The wind, the sea, all shrieking now, the clamour raking at his ears.
Peter was afraid that Mr Gregory, waiting there on the edge, would turn his head. Would turn his death-mask face on them. That he might speak. Might plead with them in his beautiful, even voice. ‘Now, boys,’ he might say, tilting his head.
And Peter stood, staring at the thin frame, feeling, in the end, only the sprigs of wiry grass that tunnelled at his ankles, scratched at his calves.
Beside him, Justin was telling him something, close to his ear, loud above the wind. But to Peter it sounded like a foreign language. Unknown words floating, unheeded, lost in the shifting air. Too late, now, ever to know them.
Peter felt the solid corner of Justin’s shoulder as he pushed past him. He glimpsed a snatch of his brother’s face as he moved ahead, towards the edge, towards the lean shape, waiting. Peter wondered, in that last dizzying moment, whether anything that came later, anything good, could take the grief in his brother’s face, and refashion it with healing hands.
Then the spinning earth flattened, and was still. Peter reached out, grasped the ancient tussocks that waited there, buried his face into the precious, wet ground. Tiny stones pressed into his nose, his cheeks, cutting the skin with cruel, pointed teeth.
* * *
They painted out the smirking horse on the new van. A pair of backpackers, tired of walking, bought the old blue bomb. Justin watched it groan up Braxman’s Hill and out of their lives.
The new van isn’t
so new anymore, Justin thought, looking out on the street, busy for market day. We’ll need to have it repainted again soon. And retrace the fine lettering on the side: Fenton’s Produce and Saddlery. Peter will do it, Justin thought. He has a steady hand these days.
Justin was stacking some of the new products into the big front window of the shop. He would never admit it, but this was one of his favourite jobs. Sealed in, alone, behind the broad expanse of glass, he loved the silence, the soothing hand-over-hand of boxes and bottles going onto the shelves. Sometimes, customers would knock on the window as they passed, wave a greeting. But there could be no talk. They would smile from the other side, then head on in, down the narrow aisles, where Peter would be waiting with a handshake and all the right words.
Justin could see Charlie Webster parking his car. He still slots his Ford into one of the staff spaces, Justin saw, smiling to himself. Charlie retired a few years back, and sold the place to them. But he can’t keep away for long, Justin thought. He still comes in most days to chat to the regulars. When he spots any improvements he berates Justin and his brother for what he calls their spendthrift ways.
And he still sees Mum quite a bit. When she tells Justin about her Wednesday expeditions with Charlie, searching for the perfect pub lunch, she always shows a wisp of a smile. But she sticks to her old house and keeps him at a friendly distance.
Justin feels proud of what he did for her up at the old place. He fixed up the kitchen himself, paid for the roof to be done. She’s happy there. After Grandma finally died—she hung on, sniping and stitching until she was nearly ninety—Mum had peace for perhaps the first time in her life. She’s not going to give that up for Charlie or anyone else.
Anyway, I’m just up the road if she needs me, Justin thought. The little cottage with the grey-brown stones studded along its front path. It looks just the same today, except for the room they added at the back when the babies were born. Mr Gregory’s old chair is still in the orange sitting room. Dark apricot is the colour, apparently. They had the chair re-upholstered in good leather. Justin never sits on it himself.
The Canals Of Anguilar / Legacy Page 4