by Tim Pears
I’d not had a chance to talk with Holly yet that morning, but even if I had I’d no idea what to say. Perhaps she did. When I first saw her, when she came into the kitchen for breakfast, my heart missed a beat. And yet I realised almost immediately that what I felt for my cousin was not desire, but gratitude. The wonderful hour we had spent in the wardrobe, making our first blind discoveries of physical contact, prepared us not for one another but for intimacy with certain others we had yet to meet. Each of us, it turned out, had given the other a generous gift, and we had no further obligations.
As we rose higher, so that undulating upland country spread out around and below us. After the stillness of those last days, today was blustery: clouds scudded across the sky; the sun gleamed, then faded in sudden spurts; patches of hills and valleys lit up, then faded away, as dark shadows chased swiftly across the countryside.
Our grandfather always claimed the dogs kept him hardy. They had to be exercised every day, ‘and so do I’. He would push himself up from a chair with a grimace, and moved stiffly between rooms, his spine bent, his neck stiff. You could see that the skeleton of his frame was gradually seizing up. But once he got walking on the hill he just kept marching forward, dismissing the arthritic inconvenience of his ageing bones, and it was an effort to keep up.
We followed a grassy track over the shoulder of the hill, crossed a shelf of high ground on which sheep grazed for whatever sustenance they could glean from the winter grass. The dogs ignored them. Then we cut up through the heather and bilberries and made for the summit.
‘Rain in the west,’ Grandpa remarked, to no one in particular, the only words he uttered on the entire ascent.
Climbing – or walking uphill, I should say; I’ve not scaled a rockface in my life – is an incomparable experience, for our gaze across the landscape revealed by our exertions is itself altered by the oxygen greedily inhaled, given to our blood, carried to our brain. One’s muscles testify to the achievement and the view is one’s reward. We could see to the east a wide swathe of the western side of central England; west, the rugged uplands of central and southern Wales. To the south-east rose the Malvern Hills. To the north, beyond Wenlock Edge and the Long Mynd, stretched a broad plain interrupted only by the round blob of the Wrekin.
Grandpa was gazing north-west. ‘On a clear day,’ he said, ‘you can see Cader Idris.’
Aunt Lorna asked where Offa’s Dyke was from here, and Grandpa pointed down to a gulley between two hillocks below and to the west of us. Xan asked who this Dyke was. Baz made some crude, quick response, but Grandpa ignored him.
‘At the end of the eighth century King Offa of Mercia,’ he said, ‘the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in this country, before there was any unified rule, built the earthwork to protect the western limit of his kingdom.’
‘Who from?’ Holly asked.
It was blustery up on the top of the hill. We all had to lean in and concentrate to hear what another person said. People had cold ears, red faces.
‘From the British, who’d withdrawn from the Anglo-Saxon invasions, and the Welsh who were there already, and absorbed these refugees into their forces.’ Our grandfather turned to Baz and said, ‘A law decreed that any Welshman found east of the Dyke should lose his right hand. And, if he trespassed again, his head.’
‘Wow,’ said Baz, impressed.
‘I bet that stopped those Taffs,’ said Xan.
‘Of course it didn’t,’ Grandpa said. ‘The Dyke wasn’t enough. Nor were the castles of the Marcher Lords, thirty-two of them strung along the border. The Welsh swooped out of those Black Mountains over there in swift, marauding raids. Disputed land, all this,’ Grandpa said. ‘It was once, doubtless will be again some day. Come on. You all look like you’re going to freeze up here.’ And with that he set off back downhill, and the rest of us followed.
As we descended, finding myself off to one side of the rest of the party, my attention was caught by something below me, to the west: with the clouds shifting and skitting across the sky, and pools of sunlight forming and dissolving in the fields, there was something moving; gold or silver was flashing. I looked and saw a line of riders snaking in from the west, their armour shimmering, the metal in their horses’ bridles glinting. Amazed, squinting my eyes in the sun I watched and saw their Celtic spears; their bows and arrows; great iron swords slung over their shoulders. There could have been no more than ten or a dozen. A small raiding party.
My family carried on without me, disappearing over the brow of the hill without a backward glance. I let them go, and stood waiting for the time-leaping Welsh guerrillas to come closer, curiosity outweighing my fear.
The riders followed a path towards me. Less than a hundred yards away the lead rider dropped into a dip. The others followed, until they’d all vanished, momentarily. Then the first one rose out of the hollow, no more than forty yards from me now. As they emerged, one after another, I saw that they had changed: were not warriors but young women, in thick coats and jackets, gloves, jodhpurs, riding boots. They came up the path, which veered away, and rode past me. I stood and watched them pass. It was striking that none of the riders were wearing riding helmets. As they reached the open heather moorland their single file disintegrated, they kicked their mounts and broke into a canter, their hair blowing in the wind.
I turned and ran downhill to catch up with the others.
2
I was the one who saw Auntie Gwen’s lime-green Berlingo bumbling along the lane below us. ‘Grandma’s home!’ I called out, and we quickened our pace down the track, our footsteps slipping on the soft turf, the dogs barking. The sun was shut out from the sky now, the colour of the landscape muted to sombre brown, green and grey.
The gate off the hill was only a few yards along the lane from the entrance to our grandparents’ property. We came down the drive, then cut across past the back of the house, coming out from behind the conservatory just as my mother was helping Grandma out of the front passenger seat of Gwen’s car. She stood, but ignored our party advancing across the patio. Instead, Grandma turned to lean against the roof of the car and watch what was happening over by the coach house: a tractor was parked there; connected to the back of it was the largest trailer I’d ever seen. It made the tractor look like one of those tugs that can tow a ship many times its size out of harbour. Another machine which was like a digger, with a great grabbing claw on the end of its hydraulic, retractable arm, lifted a rusting old plough, pulling it free from other wrecks with which it had become entangled, and dropped it into the giant trailer.
The noise was terrific: a cacophony of grinding engine and clanking, screeching, resounding metal. It was extraordinary that we’d not heard it as we came down off the hill, but I surmised that the blustery winds had carried the sound in the opposite direction, out into the wide valley below. Neither had we been able to see the activity, hidden by the coach house and by various trees in the hedge of the paddock above.
We stood in the yard, staring at this ghastly, impressive spectacle. One man stood on the running board of the tractor, leaning against his cab, a cigarette in the fingers of his trailing hand, watching his colleague operate the digger. Uncle Jonny stood with his back to us, watching the operation, hands on his hips.
My father started running in silence, his head low, gathering speed as he crossed the yard. Someone yelled, ‘No!’ – one of the women, I think, I couldn’t tell who. Dad ignored her. Uncle Jonny clearly couldn’t hear.
Perhaps he did hear my father’s footsteps, or sensed his approach in some other way. I don’t think so. I think he just happened to glance over his shoulder at that moment, that he’d been turning round every few minutes for some while now, hoping that these men he knew from childhood, and whom he’d recruited in the pub on Christmas Eve, would finish the job before we walkers, or Grandma, returned home.
Uncle Jonny turned his head as my father reached him, and took the full force of my father’s lunge on his twisting spine. The
y both hit the ground. Jonny was immobilised, but Dad scrambled to his feet and leaped on his brother and began punching his head and face.
The tractor driver, lolling on the running board, was oblivious to what was happening a few yards behind him, but the digger driver must have been able to see, because he switched off the engine, opened the door of his cab and gesticulated at his colleague, pointing at the struggling men.
Auntie Gwen, meanwhile, led the dash across the yard from our end, followed by Grandpa. Aunt Lorna and my mother remained rooted to the spot, as did we children.
The tractor driver, though paunchy and middle-aged, leapt nimbly down and rushed over, reaching my father at the same moment as Auntie Gwen, and together they pulled him off Uncle Jonny, who lay on his back on the ground. The dogs barked and jumped around them, excited, uncomprehending. Even from the distance at which we stood I could see Jonny’s face was cut and bloodied, and, now that the machines were silent, I could hear him groaning.
‘Okay,’ my father said, in a hoarse, rasping voice. ‘Okay.’ But the tractor driver wouldn’t let him go. The digger driver and Auntie Gwen were bent over Uncle Jonny.
A commotion behind me made me turn: Aunt Lorna was shepherding the twins towards the front door. I caught Holly’s eye. We looked at each other, without expression. On the other side of me my mother was encouraging Grandma to turn away and head for the house as well. ‘Theo,’ she called to me.
I looked back across the yard. Grandpa told the tractor man to let my father go, and he obeyed. Grandpa put his hand on Dad’s shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Rod,’ he said. My father had started trembling, shocked by what he’d done; of what he was capable of. ‘It’s all right, son.’
‘Theo!’ Mum called again. I ran over and took my grandmother’s other arm, and we escorted her across the patio towards the house.
3
Aunt Lorna drove the Land Cruiser, Uncle Jonny in the passenger seat, in the reclined position, his face swelling, the twins in the back. They were gone within the hour.
Grandpa had told the men to finish their job, and he paid them himself. Grandma went to bed. The rest of us ate a lunch of leftovers. No one had much to say. My father felt so bad about what he’d done he went back outside, and the dogs had a second walk under the dark, glowering sky. There were no more clouds, only a huge blackening bruise moving in over the border from the Welsh mountains.
In the afternoon, we drove home through the rain. Auntie Gwen had decided to stay through the New Year, up until the girls had to go back to school. Melony, it seemed, was prepared to come back.
When Holly and I hugged farewell, we did so without awkwardness. I felt the fullness of her body in my embrace, smelled the skin of her neck.
‘Good luck,’ she whispered.
‘You too,’ I said.
‘I’m always there if you need me,’ she said, which was the sweetest way of saying goodbye I’ve ever heard. I knew she would be. We were related, after all.
‘Me too,’ I said.
The wipers laboured to and fro across the windscreen, clearing, along with the headlights, the way ahead, water washing against the glass, splashing off the tarmac. I read my book from Grandpa, The Stories of the Greeks, with surprised relief as it became apparent that I could do so without an old familiar nausea rising from my stomach, and then with deepening absorption, introduced in the stories of Pyramus and Thisbe, of Daedalus and Icarus, to a further – epic – dimension to our stories.
In the front, hands on the steering wheel, plasters on his knuckles, my father drove steadily, past Bridgnorth, cutting across country to the M5, and along and down the other motorways home. Neither he nor my mother beside him said a word, until we’d come off the M40 and were on the A34 to Oxford.
‘It’s the strangest thing, Amy,’ he said. I suspect he’d forgotten I was there, in the back of the car; at the rear of their lives. ‘I’ve wanted to do that all my life. Ever since the little bastard invaded our family when I was five years old. And now that I’ve done it, I feel like such a fool. You know? Just so, so stupid.’
I could see my Mum’s right hand. She placed it on Dad’s thigh. ‘You’re a man, Rod,’ was all she said. I could hear no intonation in her voice. Did she mean he was a human; or a foolish male; or a hero? To this day I don’t know what she meant.
Our grandmother died the following March. She had refused ever to leave the house again and go into hospital. A bed was brought into the drawing room, and a rota of nurses were on hand. But Grandpa couldn’t bear to watch her suffering as the disease grew worse, and when she became unaware of her surroundings he had her taken into the hospice in Shrewsbury, whose doctors and nurses administered sophisticated medication that eased her ordeal: she lapsed into a coma, my mother assured me, and slipped away.
We returned, all of us, to attend our grandmother’s funeral. In such circumstances, and with our behaviour as constrained as the mourning clothes we wore, my relatives appeared odd to me. It was as if we’d come back together for the purpose of performing a coda to the drama of that Christmas. We played our parts, burying Grandma in her family plot in the small churchyard, then left.
That summer I was invited to join a schoolfriend’s family on their holiday abroad, and I accompanied my father on only one weekend visit to the Shropshire hills. The garden was flourishing, tended by a new gardener after Jockie’s retirement, and the house was clean and tidy: Bronwen came in every day, and cooked meals which she left for Grandpa with precise heating instructions written on notes stuck to the dishes. But the dogs greeted us with a strange restraint when we arrived, and plodded about the house with Grandpa, flopping on the carpet beside his chair. He admitted that he rarely took them on the hill, so I spent hours with them, running in great loops around the valley, improving my fitness for the team I’d joined at Norham Gardens Tennis Club.
Back at the house, Dad asked Grandpa how his history book was coming along, and tried to encourage him.
‘If there’s any research you need to do, you know, you could always come and stay with us,’ he said. ‘I could get you a visiting reader’s ticket for the Bodleian.’
Grandpa sucked on his pipe, and gazed out of the window.
‘Not much point now, old son,’ he said.
In the autumn Grandpa took the dogs, Leda and Sel, to the summer house, and shot them. He then turned the gun on himself. He left no suicide note. Had layers of sadness, or disgust, built up in his soul? The loss of his orchards, life without his beloved, conflict between his children. The deeds to the house had been handed over in lieu of interest on a loan, with Grandpa given one year in which to leave. I don’t know. He had reinvented himself once. He couldn’t do it again.
After his funeral my mother and I came back to Oxford. My father, Auntie Gwen and Uncle Jonny remained at the house for some days, conferring with solicitors, estate agents and auctioneers, and wrangling with each other. Uncle Jonny promised he’d build his business up again, and pay them their due share of the house value one day.
The contents of the house had now to be divided. When Dad returned I asked him about Grandma’s crazy idea to put coloured stickers on the furniture, and he said he thought the stickers were a grand idea, which would have worked well. In the event, Uncle Jonny had the sense to withdraw from the ‘division of spoils’, as my father put it. Dad let Gwen choose what she wanted. He and Mum took a desk of drawers. The rest was auctioned off. I told him how sad I thought that was, that Grandma had tried so hard to ensure things worked out after she and Grandpa were gone.
Dad told me not to be downcast. ‘Harmony exists only in music, Theo,’ he said. ‘And then rarely. A single family can no more sort out its legacy than society can,’ he said.
He also informed us that Grandpa had bequeathed me his library – and his desk, at which I type this now. What remains of his books surrounds me, scattered now on the shelves. I remembered the story, which Grandpa had first told me, of the library of Leofric, a Cornishman who
was educated in Lotharingen in the Rhineland, and returned to England in the early ten-forties in the entourage of Edward the Confessor. Anointed Bishop of Exeter, he had a new cathedral built, the one that stands there to this day, and established his library. In that library there survived a verse collection, known as the Exeter Book, that is one of the principal sources of knowledge of Anglo-Saxon poetry.
I never did ask my father what he was doing with my beautiful Aunt Lorna that Boxing Day night. Did something take place between them? My parents’ marriage was the most companionable I’ve known, but did it offer either of them every shade of happiness? What marriage ever can?
What he could give Aunt Lorna is less obvious. A shoulder to lean on, someone to listen to her tell him that the dynamic man she had married had lost his power for her. That’s what I suspect to be the prosaic fact, and I’d rather let my imagination loose a little. For I am my father’s son, and I feel no disloyalty to my mother’s memory to wish for him to have kissed a woman such as Lorna.
As you yourself may know if you’re reading this, books need to be treated properly if they’re to burn well. If you toss them on a fire, the outer edges char, but little else. You have first to rip off the covers – which, if a decent hardback, can be torn up and used for kindling – and then soak the bulk, returning it to pulp, before pressing it tight as it dries. That way you get a solid, quasi-wooden brick that burns as slowly as peat.
I select which books to burn. Once I had accepted the necessity of so doing – which a cold house in winter made easy – the process has been one of increasing difficulty, and weighed heavily on the heart. Recently, precious volumes have been burned. The only consolation – if I can call it that, which I can’t, really; it is more a distraction – is the notion that I am discarding superfluous books as I work my way towards an essential library. Which, ultimately, will be those precious books that I would rather pass on intact to my own grandchildren than use to stop them shivering, their teeth chattering. Does that make sense? Perhaps, soon enough, we shall discover there are none.