Disputed Land

by Tim Pears

  ‘I’ve seen foxes,’ I told Melony. The effect Grandma had on my shyness seemed to be continuing. ‘Seen a badger, tramping across the lawn in the moonlight.’

  ‘I wish your grandfather would give you one of his guns,’ Grandma said. ‘Blasted things destroy my plants.’ She looked to Melony with an expression that made the assumption of both understanding and support. ‘The young today have no idea how to shoot,’ she said, shaking her head in a long-suffering manner.

  ‘I say, Ma,’ my father interjected. ‘I wouldn’t have thought even you would be allowed to shoot protected species.’

  Our attention was diverted by a strange squeaking sound from the TV area. Then Sid called out, ‘Text from Matt. Message for you, Grandma.’

  ‘Well,’ Grandma demanded. ‘What is it?’

  ‘He’ll be here in the morning.’

  ‘Oh,’ said our grandmother.

  ‘He sends you hugs and kisses,’ Sid called.

  Grandma looked around at those of us assembled in her kitchen, nodding.

  Our grandfather then appeared, up from his study downstairs. ‘At last, my dear boy,’ he said when he saw me. Grandpa and I hugged each other like we were two foreign presidents: with a certain ceremony, little more than chest to chest contact. He stood back and looked at me. ‘I told your grandmother, after you left us in the summer, the next time we saw you you’d be taller than me.’ He looked from Holly to me. ‘Do you two youngsters want to get some air? Come and help me give the dogs a run.’

  * * *

  The drizzle eased as we climbed the drive and followed the lane along past the disused phone box, and turned off it up the track on to the hill. The dogs, who in the house lolled around as if drugged, came alive outside; they dashed about, noses to the ground, at great speed. They’d disappear from sight, then reappear in an unexpected place, full of mysterious purpose.

  Once we reached level ground, and followed a path that skirted the hill on its western flank, Holly asked us to stop so she could take some photos of the view. ‘I want to do a landscape painting while I’m here,’ she said.

  ‘Holly’s an artist,’ Grandpa informed me. ‘She emails me her pictures sometimes. Don’t you?’

  This information, and what it suggested of Grandpa and Holly’s relationship, surprised and, I admit, somewhat irked me.

  ‘Drawings, mostly,’ she said. ‘They’re rubbish, really.’

  ‘Not at all,’ our grandfather insisted. ‘I think they’re very fine.’

  We walked on in the direction of Nordy Bank, and Grandpa told us stories of the English Civil War. ‘This entire area, ripped apart,’ he said. ‘A mixed-up patchwork of loyalties to Parliament or Crown. But the folk I admire are those of Bishop’s Castle and Clun, over there.’ He gestured westward. ‘Right by the border. They had a thousand men at arms but refused to fight for either side. They were prepared only to defend themselves from aggression.’

  The soft rain resumed periodically. On our way back, still a mile or two short of the house, Grandpa paused, pointed to a tiny ruined cottage in the Corvedale below us – wet, grey stone and gaping slate – and said, ‘That’s where I was born, and spent the first years of my life.’

  I stopped in my tracks, and saw Holly had done the same. She must have known, as I did, the story of our grandparents’ extraordinary romance: how the clever local boy, orphaned, had been taken in by the lordly gentleman farmer – Grandma’s father – and became inseparable from the farmer’s daughter, and only child. They fell in love as children. Refused permission, at fourteen, to court her, Grandpa left without a word.

  He returned for the first time ten years later, having established a market garden business little more than fifty miles – an hour or two’s drive – away. Grandma’s father, in the meantime, had come to the end of his savings, his energy, his resistance. Grandpa married Grandma and bought the house off his father-in-law. I’d never seen the actual place where Grandpa was born, had not considered his very earliest years. To peer now through the soft rain upon the mean hovel he came from, so close to the big house, was odd, another unsettling moment, as if (like his relationship with Holly) Grandpa had kept this sight hidden all my life and conjured it now with a cunning sleight of hand.

  ‘I remember my early childhood more as I get older,’ Grandpa said. Then he grimaced, and waved his hand, dismissing the personal. ‘Everyone does. One’s childhood becomes clearer. Rather like archaeologists revealing the distant past, or physicists working their way, as time goes on, further back, to the moment of the big bang. The moment before.’ He gazed through the drizzle at the small grey cottage, beads of moisture in his white hair and moustache, the skin of his face damp. ‘As if our memory is working its way back to the cosmic secret of our birth.’ He looked at us and chuckled. ‘You’ll see what I mean one day.’

  Back at the house, I took Holly to the stairs down to Grandpa’s study and showed her the vertical display case of rocks he’d taken from the Shropshire Hills around us, during his recent geological explorations. At the bottom was the oldest, a lump of sedimentary rock found on the Long Mynd, from the Precambrian period. Above it was a piece of green sandstone from the Cambrian, found on Caer Caradoc, with the fossil of a delicate fern visible on its surface. On each shelf was a small sticker with the information.

  ‘It’s, like, a museum,’ Holly said. I remembered with a stab of self-reproach for my idiocy that most teenagers view such places with disdain, as Holly surely would. ‘Cool,’ she whispered instead, and peered closer. Instantly it crossed my mind to invite her to Oxford and show her the Pitt-Rivers, which, as everyone knew, was the second greatest museum in the world.

  On the next shelf up was a hard quartzite rock from the Stiperstones, dating back to the Ordovician period, named after a Celtic tribe, as was the Silurian period, represented by a piece of limestone taken from Clun Forest. Grandpa, I explained to my cousin, had unearthed these stones himself with his own geological hammer. I told Holly – as Grandpa had told me that summer – how the Church Stretton Fault ran through the Shropshire Hills, revealing strata of rock from different periods.

  ‘It’s a mecca for geologists,’ I said.

  ‘A mecca? What, like they go there to that hill and all walk seven times around it?’ she said.

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. I might have even chuckled a little. ‘I like that. They go counter-clockwise.’

  ‘With their sacrificial hammers.’

  A lump of Old Red Sandstone, from the Devonian period, was dug from Grandpa’s own property, while the black coal and the piece of dark basaltic lava were collected from the land above, upon which we’d just walked: the summit of Brown Clee Hill was still pockmarked with the ruins of abandoned buildings and quarries, from which basalt was taken to metal the roads of the Midlands. They were the youngest stones, but they were formed long before the Ice Age, in which glaciers covered most of the Shropshire hill country. It was only when the ice retreated that man had been able to move north and establish around here the first human settlements.

  Holly got roped in to helping prepare something for supper, but I slipped out of the kitchen. I practised my guitar in the attic for a while, then I sneaked back downstairs, all the way to the basement. Rather like the locked room in the attic, Grandpa’s study was unvisited by Bronwen, with her vacuum cleaner and duster: he wouldn’t allow anyone to tidy up his den. Even in the mid-afternoon December gloom you could see what a mess the room was in, a clutter of books, maps, computer printouts, handwritten notes scattered across every surface. As I entered, Sel’s black tail beat on the carpet. The study had three walls covered in books, and one wall of glass looking out to the lawn. There was a pool of light on the desk, where books and papers were laid out. Grandpa sat motionless, upright in his chair. I walked around the front of the desk: my grandfather was asleep, breathing quietly. When he exhaled, the white hairs of his moustache quivered. His mottled hands were folded on his stomach. I tiptoed back out of the room.


  4

  The rain had once more eased. Two ropes hung from a branch of the sycamore tree on the bank between the stables and the outbuildings. One had a car tyre tied to its end, the other a stick you could sit or stand on. Holly grabbed hold of the tyre and I the stick, and we climbed the bank as far as we could before, on the count of three, launching ourselves into gaping space and, by the end of the arc, a vertiginous height. It made your stomach lurch every time. As she swung, Holly shrieked. Myself, I managed to quell the same urge and maintain a manly silence.

  Gradually, your body became accustomed to this gravitational surprise; the panicky swoon in your belly subsided. Swinging out, you looked down at the ground far below with indifference. Holly stopped screaming. The atmosphere was very still. Jockie was intermittently visible amongst shrubs in the garden below us; occasionally he took a forkful of stuff over to a bonfire, from which a weak pall of smoke rose. Otherwise the scene was deserted. Grandma had lied on the phone to me, or had perhaps forgotten: she had got rid of all the horses. On my summer visits there were always people around the stables: local kids whom Grandma let ride the ponies, and were mucking out or saddling up or hosing down the concrete yard. Now the stables, and the fields, were empty.

  Holly and I were probably both becoming bored – and one of us might have had the gumption to say so before too long – when the third and final family arrived. A large grey tank-like vehicle with tinted windows and a blunt nose like that of a giant pug dog cruised along the drive below and up past us and around to the parking area. Set high off the ground, it looked like a bullet-proof, militarised people carrier. The front door opened and Dad and Auntie Gwen’s brother, Uncle Jonny, climbed down from the driver’s seat. He stood, hands on hips and legs astride, gazing towards the outbuildings and shaking his head – ignoring Holly and I, who were surely within his peripheral vision.

  In a voice that rumbled out of his barrel chest and across the yard, Jonny said, ‘I can not believe it.’ He wore nothing warmer than blue jeans and a white shirt, its top two buttons undone, dark chest hair sprouting from the gap. He gave the impression he didn’t feel the cold. His siblings had emerged from the house and were trotting cheerfully towards him. By this time Aunt Lorna had got out from the passenger side of the car, and so had the twins, one after the other.

  ‘I can not believe this,’ Jonny growled, emphasising the third syllable through gritted teeth.

  ‘What’s up?’ Dad asked as he reached his brother. They each turned to face each other and hugged, then Gwen did, too, before she moved on to Lorna, who was coming around the front of the vehicle. Holly jumped off the tyre and I followed her over.

  Uncle Jonny pointed to the far end of the coach house. ‘Pa promised me,’ he said. ‘Gave me his solemn bloody word he was going to find someone to get rid of all that crap.’

  We all gazed across the yard. What Uncle Jonny was indicating with his accusatory finger was a collection of remains of old farm machinery. Relics of generations of scratchers of the land: ploughs, wagons, tractors, carts. Rusting sheets of metal and odd shapes of iron; rotting sections of wood. This pile, this quietly disintegrating museum, this clutter, must have been there all my life. I’d never really noticed it before. Now that it had been pointed out by my uncle, however, I felt a tingle of indignation, if only on his clearly aggrieved behalf.

  ‘How’s anyone ever going to be able to develop anything around here with that mess there?’ he said, but then abruptly shifted focus. Before Dad could say anything, Uncle Jonny exclaimed, ‘Holly! Not seen you for months. Theo! Good God boy, you’re as tall as your father. Give me a hug.’

  I felt myself enveloped in Uncle Jonny’s bear-like, aftershave-musky embrace. ‘And just as weedy as he was, too. Another skinny ribs. Amy!’ he yelled at Mum, who was coming out of the house with Melony. ‘There’s no meat on this boy!’ He let loose his embrace, but gripped my right shoulder with his left hand and grasped my left cheek with the fingers of his right hand. Actually, I was wrong: my uncle wore his shirt with the top three buttons undone – four if you count the one on the collar. ‘We’ll fatten you up, boy, don’t you worry.’ He let go of my cheek then patted it, before turning towards the others.

  My uncle was utterly unlike his brother. I felt sorry for being so bony. We’d recently been given leaflets, and a cautionary talk, at school about obesity, which had made me wonder why it was that most academics, to whom the idea of exercise never seemed to cross their preoccupied minds, were thin as pencils. Apart from the obvious fact that most of them walked and cycled around Oxford, as my parents did, I’d come to the conclusion that they would have stuffed their greedy faces between meals like normal adults, but simply forgot to do so.

  * * *

  Aunt Lorna had jet-black hair, black eyes, brown skin. She was, Holly whispered in my ear, one of the most glamorous women in London. When she kissed me she stroked my cheek with her right hand, as if reluctant to let go of this agreeable moment of intimacy. ‘So wonderful to see you, Theo darling,’ she confided, in her voice with its trace of a foreign accent, a trace that mingled in my mind with the delicate scent of her perfume.

  The grown-ups, laden with luggage, moved towards the house, leaving Holly and myself facing the twins. Since the last time I’d seen them I’d forgotten, I now realised, how to tell them apart. There was a definite if tiny physical distinction between them, a series, in fact, such that could be circled in a Spot-the-Difference double portrait, but I couldn’t remember for the moment, scanning their cherubic, corpulent faces – cloned mini-versions of their bullish father, prettified by their mother’s genes – what these were.

  The twins were a year younger than Holly and myself, and I wondered whether they would remain identical through the fermentation of their own imminent adolescence. Would their voices break in unison, acne erupt in the same places; would they wake at night from the same sticky dreams?

  ‘Come and see the car,’ one of them said, climbing back into their vehicle.

  ‘You already showed me,’ said Holly.

  ‘That was ages ago,’ he replied.

  ‘You haven’t seen this one,’ said the other. ‘We only had it delivered last month.’

  I gathered that the two London families, who lived on opposite sides of the capital, saw barely any more of each other than they did of their Oxford relations. Between us we comprised a triangulation of families whose sibling parents had, I supposed, little in common beyond having grown up together, so that I’m not sure it occurred to them how much we cousins, their children, might enjoy spending time together. Once everyone was inside the vehicle one of the twins slid the door shut, and we squeezed on to the back seat. There was a large space in front of us, like in a London cab, only bigger.

  ‘We removed a row of seats this morning,’ one of the twins explained.

  ‘Look behind you,’ said the other. ‘Two more seats swing down from the sides when we need them.’

  I wondered why this family of four travelled around in such a comically exaggerated vehicle. It was as if the parents would have preferred to have twice as many children as they did and in some way imagined that if they bought a spacious automobile it would suddenly, magically, fill with extra children. Which in a sense it did. The twins informed us that their people carrier was necessary to transport their friends with them to archery class, bridge club, Mandarin lessons, etc., etc. I knew at once that they were skitting us, that neither of the twins had friends of their own, such was the exclusive nature of their relationship.

  ‘We had extra large screens installed,’ said one, pointing a remote at the roof, from which two flat-panel monitors, each larger than our TV at home, opened out of an overhead pod. ‘You can adjust the angle,’ he said, making them swivel.

  ‘Slot-loaded DVDs,’ said the other. ‘Integrated for CDs and MP3s too.’

  ‘High brightness screens,’ said the first. ‘LCD.’

  ‘Naturally,’ his brother agreed. ‘I mean, it’s the
atre-quality performance.’

  ‘A cinema experience inside your car.’

  ‘You ought to get one,’ the first twin said, looking straight at me with a blank expression, so that it was impossible to tell whether or not he was being serious. It was an attractive prospect – perhaps watching telly in the car, unlike reading, wouldn’t make me sick – but I wasn’t sure what Dad would think about all this stuff clamped inside the chassis of his beloved Morris Traveller.

  ‘We can watch the same film,’ said one twin, ‘or different. We have our own headphones.’

  ‘Artiva T5S,’ said the other, holding his set up. ‘Wireless.’

  ‘Obviously,’ his brother added.

  I’d been staring at my cousins as much as was politely possible, but I still couldn’t spot any of their distinguishing marks. Finally, I ran out of patience and asked them straight out, ‘Which one of you is which?’

  ‘It’s simple,’ said one.

  ‘Straightforward,’ his brother agreed.

  ‘Xan has a fleck of green in the pupil of his left eye.’

  ‘Baz’s ears are larger than mine.’

  ‘Xan’s ears are too small, in other words.’

  ‘My eyes are closer together, too.’

  ‘He’s got a mole on his neck, just there, see?’

  ‘And Baz has an extra freckle or two on his forehead.’

  Holly was nodding. ‘That’s right,’ she said, and the thing was that once you’d identified each of these miniscule features – Xan and Baz facing helpfully towards me, so that with quick glances I could compare one with the other – it was indeed easy to distinguish between them.

  We climbed down from the car and the twins began walking towards the house. ‘Don’t you want a hand with your stuff?’ I asked.

  Neither stopped walking, but Xan threw over his shoulder, ‘Oh, someone else will do that.’

  ‘Hello?’ Holly mimed a theatrical flourish of her arms to either side and raised her shoulders, a gesture rather wasted on her cousins, who had their backs to us. ‘Like, who, for instance?’ she demanded, and I recalled that Uncle Jonny and Aunt Lorna had all sorts of either daily or live-in help (or ‘servants’, as Mum referred to them) in their north London home.