The Road to Lichfield

by Penelope Lively

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You won’t – you’re not going to say anything to Dad about it?’

  ‘Oh, Graham, what do you take me for?’

  ‘After all, it doesn’t make him a different person. He’s still exactly the same bloke you always knew.’

  For forty years, if you can count the first three or four as knowing. A person who, once, taught one to swim in a grey, foam-marbled sea off Suffolk; who hummed when content but out of tune; who ate boiled eggs narrow end first; who voted Conservative or occasionally Liberal; was usually in bed by eleven, could recite great chunks of Wordsworth, tied his own trout flies, served on many committees, and, it now appeared, had been able to love two women at once. Can you? she thought. Do people?

  ‘Not quite,’ she said. ‘No, Graham, not quite.’

  ‘Bugger it,’ said Graham. ‘It’s a pity you had to know this. Simpler if you never had.’

  ‘Much simpler.’ Outside, Don’s footsteps crunched past the window.

  ‘Forget about it.’

  ‘Oh, Graham ….’ She took his glass from him and re-filled it. Then her own. ‘You know a person, up to a point, how they react to things, what they’re likely to feel about something, to some extent even what to expect of them – you know all that partly from observation, partly from what you know about them, about what they have been as well as what they are. Where they’ve come from. What’s happened to them. But if you find suddenly that some large chunk of information has got left out – you’d never realized they had cancer, or had murdered their mother, or spent half their lives in a mental home – then you revise things a bit in the light of it. No, you don’t revise, not quite that. Everything just shifts slightly, nothing can be quite the same.’

  ‘You’re leaving me behind, Annie. I daresay you’re right.’

  Don came in. ‘What’s she right about?’

  ‘I said Graham should get married.’

  ‘And I said I know what’s good for me better than she does.’

  How easy to fall into a conspiracy of exclusion. Oh, she thought, I shall talk to Don about this at some point, of course I shall, it’s just that I need to sort it out for myself first before I can talk about it to anyone. I don’t even know what I think about it yet. She got up, gathering glasses.

  ‘Well, bed as far as I’m concerned. Get up when you like in the morning, Graham.’

  She lay awake, listening to the house settle itself around her; final closings of doors, flush of a cistern, sluggish creaks of contracting wood and metal. She clasped her hands behind her head and stared into the darkness of the room, beginning the slow re-adjustment of the past, roaming to and fro across the years, without regard to chronology, sifting through a jumble of events and occasions. What I thought was thus, was otherwise. Things that appeared so, were not.

  Four

  Don got up to buy his brother-in-law a beer and thought that he was the only person he’d ever come near to hitting and even so that wasn’t very near, and a long time ago. He couldn’t remember, now, the occasion, only the emotion, and that because it was such a rare one. As a national serviceman he had to do bayonet practice under a sergeant of astonishing ferocity: with a relish that was quite undisguised the man hurled himself at sacks and twisted the blade in their guts. One by one the platoon had to emulate him, eighteen and nineteen year olds summoning up astonishing histrionic powers to avoid being singled out for criticism. Don’s performance had been the most totally unconvincing. ‘All right,’ the sergeant said wearily. ‘Look, think of some bastard you hate. Right? And get stuck into it again.’ And Don had thought: but I don’t hate anybody, what does he mean, what help is that? But he had, once, thought it would be nice to hit Graham, and looking at him now, sitting there beside Anne in his combat jacket and denims (why the hell did people in his line of business have to dress as though for a bout of guerrilla warfare?) the spectre of the emotion hovered for a moment.

  ‘Pint?’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  It was partly that he brought out the worst in Anne. Either they were spatting at each other, or involved in some kind of undefined conspiracy. At least, that was how it seemed to be, back when he and Anne were first married. Nowadays, of course, they hardly saw him from one year’s end to the next, just large cheques blasted off to the children at Christmas (too large) and some peculiar present for Anne. A nightdress, once. An absurd diaphanous nightdress. She never wore it, on the grounds that it was too cold. Surely, he thought, people don’t give their sisters nightdresses? He had no sister himself and felt on uncertain territory. Wives one knew about, children, colleagues, secretaries, people one dealt with in one way or another. Sisters, no. He bought a lager and a couple of pints of bitter and noticed they’d been tarting up this pub, putting in strip lighting and wrought iron and a thicket of potted plants in the fireplace. He carried the drinks over to Anne and Graham, and sat down to hear Anne say‘ … and it used to be so nice, stone-flagged floors and benches with high backs like church pews. A real pub.’ Here we go, he thought, all change is for the worse …. And switched off, as it were, so that he could sit there with his foxy smile, to all intents and purposes one of the company, in fact hearing nothing and doing a bit of work on some stuff he was involved in at the office. It was a most convenient knack, this; without it, he often thought, paternity would be quite intolerable, and marriage, too, from time to time. He had no idea if other people did it, and didn’t care. He sat and thought about Sadler v. Baines, and watched Anne and Graham open and shut their mouths like goldfish.

  Judy said ‘Why were you ringing up the Pickerings? I thought you weren’t all that keen on Mrs Pickering.’

  ‘Oh, just about Splatt’s Cottage. I’m not, really, but …’ Anne shrugged, but, she thought, we all have to suffer in a good cause, or some such nonsense.

  ‘What about Splatt’s Cottage? Do you mean that place down past the Span houses?’

  ‘That’s right – where we used to walk when you were little. It may be going to be pulled down – we’re trying to save it. Do you remember how you always had to be held up to see inside the windows? What did you think there was there?’

  ‘Eels.’

  ‘Eels! Why, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Because once we saw an eel in the ditch there, Paul and I, and I thought it came out of the house. I thought it was full of them and they came out into the ditches. I hated going there.’

  ‘But you never said a word.’

  ‘Is’pose it was too horrible to talk about even. And anyway you mightn’t have taken any notice.’

  ‘I wasn’t that heartless, surely?’

  ‘Jolly good that it’s going to be pulled down,’ said Judy. ‘Why do you want to stop it?’

  ‘It isn’t good at all,’ said Anne crossly. ‘You shouldn’t just destroy old buildings, that’s vandalism ….’ She lectured, and saw the child’s eyes glaze over with inattention, her fingers prodding a pattern of dents into the rolled pastry on the table. ‘Judy, do leave that alone – your hands are filthy.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘Bacon tart. When I’m away tomorrow.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Lichfield. Did you listen to a word I was saying - about Splatt’s Cottage and places like that?’

  ‘What Mum means,’ said Paul, turning suddenly from some private communion with the transistor radio, ‘is it’s posh to like old things.’

  ‘I don’t mean anything of the kind.’

  ‘Antique furniture and houses with beams everywhere, and vintage cars. And old maps. Dead posh. It shows you’ve got nice taste.’

  He sat at the table, disembowelling the transistor, for some reason, hair flopping over his face, flopping, mercifully, over the spot that blazed like a beacon above his right eye. He didn’t look like her, nor much like his father, a lank dark boy, but staring at him now she saw for a moment that uncanny reflection of herself that most people see, if only once or twice, in a c
hild, as though for a moment one glimpsed oneself in a state of fission. There am I, but not I.

  ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I like things up to date. Your modern, today world, see?’ He peered at the innards of the radio and said, ‘Aha! All is revealed.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ Anne said ‘we all do, up to a point. But the thing is you have to be selective, you have to look at buildings, and objects or whatever, and ask yourself whether ….’

  ‘Mum,’ said Paul, ‘you were being teased. You don’t want these bits of pastry, do you? Thanks a lot. See you later ….’

  First tedious, then absurd. Once upon a time, she thought, sweeping flour from the table, rinsing her fingers under the tap, once upon a time parents are just a great omnipotent presence; immutable, heroic personalities beyond analysis or criticism. They simply are, and could not be otherwise. Only later comes the reduction to universal proportions; they are strict, unreasonable, unpredictable (or too predictable), they are stupid or sarcastic and should not wear the clothes they do or have the occupations they have, their friends are dull or mad and their tastes perverse. Everybody is diminished, she thought, as their children grow. She wiped her hands, looking out of the window at the translucent leaves of the chestnut tree (unfurling visibly, it seemed, in the sunshine) and remembered the day she had discovered that her best friend’s father did not object, apparently, ever, to people jumping downstairs. And you could walk on his flowerbeds. And the mother of the family next door, she had presently observed, was pretty. Thereafter her parents had been flawed, as are all parents.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Judy, ‘about the eels. I had no idea you were frightened.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ said Judy graciously. ‘Why are you going to Lichfield again?’

  ‘To see grandfather.’

  ‘Will you be back for the school fete?’

  ‘Probably.’

  Too late, she thought, much too late, thinking not of the school fete but all those mistakes and misunderstandings, eels and harsh words or no words or offences against the awful vulnerability of children. One of her friends, haunted by the warnings and admonitions of books on child psychology, had spent most of her time explaining and apologizing for her actions to her children. ‘So long as they know why one is doing what one is doing, and why one behaved as one did, then it must be all right,’ she would say, desperately. ‘Mustn’t it, Anne?’ The children, bored, seethed around their feet. And presumably, in the end, digested their mother’s behaviour as her particular flaw, as such flaws are digested and become, in the end, familiar things one could not do without. Like, she thought, mother’s flights from decision; father’s array of dislikes. It would have been entirely disconcerting, in the end, to find mother make up her mind lightly whether to shop in the morning or the afternoon, to have father announce an admiration for Picasso. In the end it is consistency you want in people, not perfection. Betrayal is to find them do what you would not have expected. Just that.

  She drove north again, the next day, through kaleidoscopic weather. The landscape blazed in sunlight, or sulked beneath leaden clouds. When it was not raining, the wet road shone as a mirror image of the sky. She was distracted by the beauty of it, removed from the purpose of the journey so that sometimes she seemed to be travelling simply for the sake of moving like this along gleaming roads, between towns and villages that existed only as names on signs. Again, places that she had never visited – Tamworth, Stafford, Warwick – offered themselves as legendary and significant, detached from the real world of housing estates and supermarkets. The spires and towers of churches flamed where the sun caught them. Time and again her attention was arrested by the antiquity of buildings; timber-frame and mellowed brick seemed to dominate the landscape. And it had assumed an extra dimension, expanding with the spring, the flatness of fields turned into exuberant relief by greenery: she found herself driving slowly to examine the shape of a tree, the sparkle of flowers on the verge. With regret she reached the outskirts of Lichfield, threading through the streets that led to the nursing-home.

  Her father was out of bed again, sitting up in the armchair, wedged in with pillows, a rug across his knees. The carpet was rolled up and a woman on hands and knees swabbed the floor energetically around him, pausing only for a moment to say good morning to Anne and remove her dusters and polish from the other chair. When she gathered her things and departed the room was very still and empty without her brisk presence. Beyond the closed door, in the passages, the comings and goings of the place, footsteps and voices, seemed also to abandon the neat room and the hunched figure in the chair. Anne wondered how far her father was conscious of all this. She said, ‘Are they looking after you well, father?’ But had to repeat it many times before he took in the question, and then he only mumbled something she could not follow. They sat together in silence, Anne read the newspaper and made out a shopping list. From time to time she looked across at the old man, staring at him intently and with a kind of guilt. It seemed wrong to watch him in this way, when he barely knew one was there, his head nodding, moisture creeping from his eyes, as though one were spying on his senility. Once, she got up and adjusted the rug that was slipping from his knees, and held his hand for a moment. The fingers clutched hers.

  It was mid-afternoon before she got out to the house, and flung herself into more clearing and sorting, glad of the activity. Graham, she found, had done nothing. His brief presence showed only in a couple of empty beer cans on the kitchen dresser and an ashtray of cigarette stubs; they felt oddly companionable. He seemed not to have touched the study; the papers on the desk were exactly as she had left them. The cardboard carton in which she had put stuff relevant to him personally was almost as she had left it. A school report on top had been picked up and dropped again beside the box; the pile beneath was unpenetrated. She could not understand such incuriosity. For the next couple of hours, she went through files of her father’s letters and papers, copies of official correspondence about schools and educational projects. The vigour and fluency of the language seemed to come from someone quite other than the man she had just left. She realized that he had been very good at his job and thought also that this was something she had hardly ever considered before.

  At last, at seven or so, with the sun slanting low through the windows, she put the files away, tidily sorted into those examined and those not, and labelled according to whether she felt they could, eventually, be destroyed. She went upstairs, changed into a pair of old trousers and a warm sweater, and tied a scarf round her head. Standing before the mirror for a moment, staring at herself, she picked up a lipstick, and then changed her mind. She combed her hair and wondered if the fringe she wore (had worn, heavens! since she was sixteen or seventeen) was too young a style. The rest of her hair rose and fell by a few inches every year or two, according to whim. The fringe, dark brown, showing now the neat furrowings of the comb, was exactly the same as it had been twenty years ago. The grey hairs to which Graham had referred did not in fact exist. Oh well, she thought, next year, sometime, we’ll have a re-assessment, consider the matter of the fringe. All in good time.

  In the cloakroom, she found a pair of her mother’s old gumboots and put them on. Then she set off briskly through the garden, stopping once only to inspect the bed she had weeded two weeks before. It was peppered with weed seedlings again, and the roses were in full leaf. There must have been rain, up here. She ducked under the fence at the end of the lawn and struck out across the field.

  Lapwings lifted from the grass ahead of her, retreating waves of black and white against the green. The evening sky was a deep and vibrant blue, orange-rimmed at the horizon, bare except for the crescent moon poised like a feather above the telegraph pole by the roadside. Her father’s house was at the edge of the village, the last in a row of unappealing pre-war buildings; now, more stringent planning laws curbed its further expansion. Even so, the surrounding countryside was faintly scruffy, scarred by the corrugated iron of shed
s and barns, dumped down in the corner of a field or the apex of a lane. Lines of telegraph or electricity poles severed the brown sweep of plough or the green furrows of winter wheat. The skyline of the village was a jumble of television aerials and wires tethering roof to roof, pole to pole. Only the church spire showed a clean, neat outline. The flatness of the landscape eliminated much sense of distance. It was hard to realize that the Derbyshire hills lay not far away.

  By the river there was a sense of something more natural, less man-made. Here, it was possible to understand the appeal this place had held for her father, over thirty or forty years. It was a trout stream, winding between banks that rose high in some places, crowned by willow and alder, and sloped to shingly beaches in others. For long stretches the water ran shallow and clear, river crowfoot pouring just below its surface, already spattered with the first white flowers. In others it slowed suddenly to the dark stillness of pools. Anne, standing beside one of these, where the river turned and wound away out of sight, masked by the bank, saw the exploding circles of a rise, gilded by the setting sun. She peered into the water, searching for fish, and saw only her own face, split and refracted by the ripples.

  She began to walk along the bank. Here, often, she had walked with Don during weekend visits to her parents. The children had fished, ineffectually, with bent pins, or paddled in the icy water, teetering from one shore to the other on weed-covered stones. Out of sight, round a corner, on some undisturbed stretch, her father would be about the serious business of the river, his stocky figure bisected by the stream, up to the waist in his waders, the line hissing in the air as he cast, slung about with the paraphernalia of the fisherman.

  It could have been him she saw now, standing on a spur of shingle there. There was merely the possibility, she told herself, and of course I did not know he would be here and would have walked down to the river, in all probability, anyway – it is chance, just mere chance, and nothing else.