by Joseph Hone
Theirs was a job with the long view, pushing back man’s past before first vaguest speech into a time of signs, and before that to a moment when these small, hairy quadrupeds, down from the trees, had first stood up, erect, on two feet. It had been their ambition to date more exactly this miraculous change, this moment between animal and human life, when one had finally given way to the other and man had first set out on his long trail of upright destruction.
And here Willy Kindersley had apparently succeeded, his career among old bones in East Africa ending in great celebrity. For it was he who, nearly three years before, way up near the Kenya-Uganda border, had discovered the sensational bones of ‘Thomas’, as the part skeleton had been named: the fossilized remains, nearly four million years old, of a young man who not only walked on two feet but had used the sharpened animal bones found along with him to hunt and kill.
An irony never mentioned more than once (when Laura had first told me all about it) was that Willy, the victim of a hit-and-run accident, had been killed by a direct descendant of these men whose haphazard graves he had so painstakingly disturbed, by a Kenyan, an African (the man had never been traced), who had run over Willy, his car mounting the pavement out of control apparently, just as Willy had left a news conference at the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi two years before.
Though I’d never met Willy, I always felt very much as if I had: as though, through my subsequent close association with his friends and with his wife, the informal name they used for him belonged to me as much as them. Willy was always Willy, alive or dead: a small dark-haired man, as I’d seen from photographs, verging on the plump; a good deal of the professorial in him, by all accounts (he’d held a chair at London University), arcane depths which were decorated, though, with many surface conceits. He had a sharp wit, I’d been told, which often strayed over into the practical: as when he’d successfully offered his students an early hominid skull and jawbones, elaborately mounted on some snapping mechanism, a research project intended, as he explained, to pinpoint man’s first sense of the comic in life – for here, with micrometers, carbon dating and suchlike, they would at last isolate that initial earth-shaking guffaw …
Of course such academic drolleries can fall very flat for those outside the magic circles. And Willy, these scholastic jokes matched only by his intellectual depths, was perhaps an unlikely person to have married the more balanced, outgoing Laura who shared few if any of his professional concerns. But then she shared few of mine, and our marriage subsequently had been as happy as theirs had apparently been.
Willy was greatly missed of course. But his memory was never oppressive about the house. Laura and I, or their old friends down for weekends, would talk of him, when we did, almost in the present tense, as if he were upstairs and would come down in a moment to correct or comment on some opinion we had ascribed to him.
He wouldn’t, of course, ever come down or drop by in any shape or form now. But we didn’t mention this. Clare had ready ears everywhere about the house, and it had been enough of a business, Laura told me, explaining Willy’s death originally to the child, who had then relapsed for months into fearful outraged traumas. She had almost recovered since, we had thought, in the ease and security of our Cotswold cottage. But she had not yet come to see me as she had her father: as the miracle man, digging up old bones all over the splendid wilds of East Africa.
I was a duller thing by far: a schoolmaster of sorts, taking junior English at a pretentious minor public school five miles away. It’s true Clare had once paid me really startled attention: when she’d come round to the school one afternoon with Laura and found me involved with the archery club there, which Spinks, the games master, ran with some senior boys.
Spinks was absent that day, I remember: he sometimes was, suffering dire after-effects of the bottle. I was in charge, in any case, and Clare had watched the sport intently, eyes out on stalks, as the arrows thumped into their straw targets away on the far side of the games fields, where the fields gave out onto a rise with a beech coppice on top, only the empty Oxfordshire farmland beyond.
Clare had stared at me then, as I let off half a dozen shafts on the 40-metre range, as though the modern recurve bow in my hand had some profound old magic for her.
As indeed it had. Laura told me when I’d finished shooting. ‘In the Northern Frontier District once, in the very wilds on the Sudanese border we were on a fossil search, looking for some dried-out stream up there – and we came on this tribe, a lot of nomadic woolly-haired people with thin cattle, and butter in their hair, and some of the men had these old smoke-black bows with them, small bent things, like toys really. But with poisoned arrows, Willy said. Clare remembers, even though she was hardly four. One of the old men showed her how to hold it.’
Clare had been happy in East Africa, apparently. I’d heard tales of this sort from Laura often enough, memories of wild adventure. Clare had lived with her parents all the time then, wife and child out of town and up country for months on end, following Willy across the bush, through long hot days to evening tents under the stars; travelling by Land Rover or, in the great desert stretches to the north, moving by camel, even, to distant waterholes.
Animals shimmered on vast horizons for Clare in those years. Flamingoes had paddled in pink waters, hippos rose from crystal pools – and she’d become as much a part of this natural landscape then, I gathered: an animal herself playing beneath the thorn trees. Her world, for the first three or four years of her life, had been a world before the fall: literally, in fact, for there is another painful irony here, in that Clare’s malady, her complaint, that strange mix of frenzy and vacancy which is autism, never shows itself for the first two or three years of its victim’s life, when the child appears perfectly normal. And thus with Clare it happened to emerge only after she had left the plainslands and the deserts of the Great Rift Valley, when she had returned with her mother to London.
Her freedom out there was suddenly over. Walls replaced the tents, stones the grass, the sun was mostly put away – and Clare fell down some deep hole in herself. Of course, it seemed to Laura at least, as it did afterwards to me, that Clare’s problem might have come as a direct result of this deprivation as much as through the death of her father. But the experts had denied this. Autism, they said in their typically equivocal manner, had a physiological, psychological, or parental, but not an aesthetic, cause. It was something deeply inherent in any case, implicit from before birth perhaps, and not brought about by a change in landscape. Clare’s arrival in London, they said, had no bearing on her illness, which would have occurred as readily in Timbuctoo as Hampstead.
Laura had thought, she told me, to take the girl back to East Africa and see if a return to paradise might work a cure in her. But the images of her latter unhappiness there were too much for her, and certainly I, when I married Laura, had no skills which would take me to, or fit me for, those wild parts. Besides, we thought, surely the Cotswolds might work instead as a natural remedy, the high sheep pastures beyond Woodstock where we lived, lost in the hills: was this not an equal grace, a balm of classic English fields and trees and dry-stone walls which would set Clare free at last from whatever bound her, release her soul from the tower of silence where it was so often imprisoned.
We had hoped the Windrush valley and a Welsh pony through the autumn stubble might form a cure. And gradually, it’s true, under Laura’s intensive care, helped by Judy from the Post Office, and with her special school when it opened, she had seemed to get better. The tantrums, the silences, diminished and Clare had found threads again to lead her back into life.
Yet it was clear from her behaviour that Sunday morning that her progress might always be subject to dramatic collapse. George had been right: it was disheartening. One foresaw all the possible years ahead, the pain that lay in wait, forever on tenterhooks over this child, who would become a woman, still carrying the hidden plague, which might erupt again at any time, in a bus or in a marriage bed, or which m
ight eventually lead her permanently to an institution.
Clare’s brightness, her beauty seemed so provisional that Easter morning, a wonderful light threatened with extinction – now or ten years hence. And I suppose it was this that made me short-tempered at lunch with the Bensons on that Easter Sunday, angry at life, taking too much wine with the meal, so that the others had to rescue me afterwards, force me away from the fire for a tingling afternoon walk.
Ours is a manorial hamlet, set quite on its own, high on the wolds, isolated near the top of the western escarpment, without shops or even a pub, largely owned by a celibate aristocrat, the last of a long line, a recluse who lives in the manor at the far end of the single street. My cottage, once the sexton’s, which I bought from the Church Commissioners eight years before when I was ‘retired’ from the Mid-East section of the Service, is not part of his honey-coloured empire. A quirky red brick neo-gothic affair beside the churchyard, it looks out over the narrow road in front with a small lawn and vegetable plot behind, bounded by a dry-stone wall and beyond that a great empty expanse of typical rolling Cotswold country, most of it still open sheep pasture, but lined here and there with high ridges of beech sunken laneways and crossed in part by an old Roman road, now largely overgrown, but which, if you manage to follow it correctly, takes you near to the school I teach in, four miles away. I knew this landscape intimately, and quite often in summer, even walked to work through it.
We set off in this direction across the fields that afternoon along a bridle path, Clare on her pony which we’d saddled up for her in a garden outhouse made over into a stable. It was bright but the wind was cold, whipping up the valley to the west, long wispy streaks of mackerel cloud running high above us. From the back windows of our cottage you could see out over most of this great stretch of open sheep pasture, divided only by a few dry-stone walls, gently shaped here and there by small folds in the land.
Apart from a stand of beech on a rise half a mile ahead and lines of dead elms, old windbreaks dotting the western perimeter, there was little immediate cover. And since the bridle path led only to a farm a mile away, there were rarely other people to be seen out in this pasture. A local farmer took hay to his stock in winter and once in a blue moon a trail of serious city hikers, with maps and bobble caps, thick socks and ostentatious boots, would wind their way impudently across the landscape. So it was that Laura, who saw the tall man first, was surprised.
‘Look – down there.’ I couldn’t see anyone. ‘There, just by the corner of that wall. I can’t see his face – he’s got a pork-pie hat on. And something round his neck.’
We saw him then. But only because he was moving quickly away from us, at right-angles to our bridle path, climbing a wall, heading out from the village. He had field glasses and a streaky, mud-and-green army type anorak, which was why we hadn’t spotted him at once against the spring grass.
As far as I knew there was no footpath along the direction he was taking. Yet he wasn’t the local farmer, who was a burly man, and the hikers always went in groups. He didn’t look back, just scuttled expertly away, a query in the placid landscape. We never saw his face.
Now I can see him well enough, though. He was one of Ross’s henchmen, sent down by Marcus to spy my land out, and the same man, in the same pork-pie hat and old army anorak, was responsible for the subsequent disaster. But then, on that bright spring afternoon with our friends, after nearly a year of such peace, we took no more notice or thought of him. He disappeared from our minds completely as we strolled away down the pasture, Clare trotting a little ahead on the pony, Laura with her arm in mine, the Bensons behind, talking about Cotswold long barrows and Iron Age forts.
‘On that rise there.’ George pointed ahead. ‘With those beech trees. I’m sure that’s one. You can just see the vague shape still, a ditch like a crown all round the top. There’d have been stakes above it as well in those days of course. They’d have brought the animals in at night. Wolves, other predators, rival tribes. A different world.’
‘Do you find artefacts?’ Annabelle asked in her neat scientific voice. ‘In ditches? Implements, pottery?’
‘Or bones?’ George added with interest.
‘I haven’t,’ I said, clutching the flesh of Laura’s hand for a moment. How pervasive the sense of happiness was that afternoon.
Later, when we got back, we burnt some old elder branches and trash, making a bonfire in the corner of the garden. The days were lengthening rapidly now. It was light till nearly eight o’clock, a violet sky, streaked with red on the horizon. The wind had died and the smoke went straight up into the air, but there was cold in the twilight and we warmed our hands on the embers before going inside and eating again, in the kitchen this time, a sort of Spanish omelette which Clare had always liked: she was quite calm now after her earlier distress.
Afterwards, when Clare had gone to bed, we finished most of a bottle of port, all of us together chatting by the fire, and I was glad I’d already corrected the fourth form’s English essays, due next morning.
I found this school work something of a drudge, taken up nearly three years before, back from Yugoslavia, in desperation for some activity, some money. But I still had my slim academic qualifications, last used in Egypt twenty years before, and the Headmaster at this school, a naive Anglican cleric, had liked my face; and more, I suppose, the evidence in my curriculum vitae and some formal letters that I had worked for several years in the information department of the Foreign Office.
I didn’t, of course, tell him that in fact I had been with British Intelligence, a clerk, if not exactly a spy, thumbing through Arab newspapers in the old Mid-East section in Holborn, and afterwards unwillingly involved with David Marcus, now Head of the Service in a wild goose chase through Europe that had ended three years before in every sort of folly and disaster.
But I’d left all that nonsense then, had returned to my cottage, and was in bed now with Laura. That past was largely forgotten. In my early forties I was living again at last, as Laura was after her own tragedies, five years younger than I.
I said to her ‘Remember all those old books and magazines the villagers left in with us for the book stall at the church fête, which got all damp out in the garage?’
Laura was sitting up in bed still, arms behind her head letting her hair out. It wasn’t that long but in the daytime she usually wore it up in a small knot at the back of her head, where it splayed out in wisps over her neck. She nodded now, some hairgrips in her mouth.
‘I was burning some of them today, a lot of old useless books, all soaked through. They smoked a lot. But then I saw one by R.M. Ballantyne in the flames – do you remember him at all? Marvellous Victorian, sort of Boys Own Paper author.’ Laura shook her head.
‘The World of Ice it was called. Some polar adventure. I’d never read it as a child. Coral Island yes, but not this one. I’d have rescued it from the fire but it was no use, all charred and the pages mostly stuck together. I just managed to see the beginning of one page: “The men gathered round the huskies for the last time …”’
‘Well?’ Laura broke the silence at last, the grips out of her mouth.
‘I don’t know really. But you remember George was talking about that Iron Age fort this afternoon? “A different world” he said. And I suppose he meant adventure: hunting, basic survival and all that, like that World of Ice story.’
‘So?’
‘I was thinking, it’s only children who have that sort of instinct now, when they play Red Indians and games in trees and hide and seek and so on –’
‘Men too,’ Laura interrupted sharply, ‘when they go to war or play those silly spy games like you used to do. It’s all still there, isn’t it? Just under the surface. Why? Do you think it’s a valuable instinct?’
‘Not valuable – it’s vital, surely.’
‘But we don’t have to survive that way any more.’
‘No. So we fight just as badly – between ourselves – in more subt
le ways, all those natural instincts frustrated.’ I didn’t say any more.
‘We don’t fight,’ Laura said.
‘No.’
‘Well, le voilà …’ She turned the light off, and settled down for the night.
I thought afterwards that I didn’t know quite what I was trying to tell Laura, that I hadn’t really told her anything in fact. But much later I woke in the pitch black and heard Minty barking downstairs. And later still, just before dawn, I dreamt of dogs racing across an ice floe, where I was a helpless, terrified child again pulled by them wildly on a sleigh going headlong towards some frozen water, where I couldn’t control them, where I knew we were all about to be drowned. And yet there was a tremendous sense of excitement in the ride, a thrill of sheer pace where we seemed to be airborne, the dogs and I gliding like valkyries towards disaster.
Laura told me how I’d tossed and turned in bed unusually that night. I told her of the dream, explaining it as a common mix of repressed fear and longing, where the two are inseparable. Later, before anyone else was awake, we made love first thing that Monday morning, and I was no longer alone then, but in the midst of life again after the nightmare.
Now, a month later as I write this – certainly alone perched in this oak tree – I remember the dream again, and the book, The World of Ice, burning in the fire. I remember the afternoon, Clare riding away over the pasture: the Spanish omelette, the evening’s port, next morning’s love. The nightmare and the reality were so utterly opposed then. Now they are one; indivisible, inseparable.
Still, I have escaped, have remained free so far, cradled in these branches. I am alive up here in the air, living what many would describe as a perfectly childish existence. Well, with this licence, I may at least freely plot my revenge. What would be unthinkable in ordinary, adult circumstances is now constantly on my mind: revenge, to kill, to make brutal amends.
As someone liberal enough in the old days, who certainly hated any kind of physical threat, I find it difficult to understand the depth and breadth of this violence within me: at Marcus, at Ross, at the world generally perhaps. Even on a philosophical level my reactions may seem extreme, for one can say that, in any case, an end is implicit in even the greatest happiness and to have had such at all, even as briefly as I had, is to have had a sufficient share, in a world where many have none. One could argue that quality, not duration is the significant thing in love. But I can’t argue that, not at all, not for a moment.