The Road to Lichfield

by Penelope Lively

  She cleared the bed and scattered the seeds in random groupings, raking soil over them. It occurred to her that they were an odd mixture, inappropriately chosen: her garden would be gay and tasteless, like a child’s garden. She snapped some sticks from the hedge and threaded them through the seed packets like flagstaffs, and stuck them into the earth. As she knelt to do so, there came again a memory of that holiday as a child in Southwold, crouching on damp sand to build a castle, and her father making a flag for the battlements from a piece of driftwood and the green paper of an unfolded Woodbine packet. She saw her father’s face, his pipe tucked sideways in his mouth, the smoke streaming away in the sharp East Anglian wind. Further back on the beach, her mother sat on a rug and knitted. Graham stood at the water’s edge with bare bony torso and shorts that reached to his knees. It was the summer of Munich. Ahead, off-stage, lay the war, her father’s move to the Ministry, evacuation to Wales for the rest of them. And off-stage too, not far ahead, she supposed, was Mrs X, with whom her father had stood on a windy day, in Dorset in 1940 or thereabouts, the hair blown across her face confusing her identity until you knew, and looked more closely, and saw that this was not mother’s shape or stance, but that of a stranger.

  She stood for a moment admiring the tilled brown surface of her seed-bed. It seemed amazing that its anonymity should be charged with the latent energy of all those seeds. ‘Flowering period July–August,’ the packets had said. The seeds affirmed the inevitability of July, of the summer, of other times.

  She walked from the car park and he was standing outside Samuel Johnson’s birthplace, looking away from her. (Thus, time out of mind ago, Don waiting under the clock at Paddington. No, no – not like that at all.) She walked past Boswell, dapper in bronze on a stone plinth, and past Johnson’s brooding back. Separated from David by a shunting lorry, she tried to scour from her face the look that really would not do, and, the lorry moving off, found him confronting her across the road, seeing her now at last, his face reflecting hers.

  Not a ghastly mistake. True, quite true.

  He said, ‘I can’t think at all where to take you.’

  ‘Anywhere will do.’

  Sitting on the shiny red vinyl of some Lichfield Lounge Bar, flanked by sales reps, choice of Ploughman’s Lunch or Sandwiches (Ham, Cheese, Beef), a jukebox Out of Order in the corner, he said. ‘I suppose you’re going back.’

  ‘Yes. Now. Soon. I said I’d be home for supper.’

  ‘I was afraid of that,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be back.’

  ‘Yes. Then that will have to do.’

  They walked round the cathedral and Anne said, ‘It’s not all that nice, as cathedrals go.’

  ‘I suppose not. Better inside than out.’

  ‘I like Norwich best. Then Canterbury. Then Durham I think. No, York Minster perhaps.’

  ‘Gloucester’s well spoken of.’

  ‘I’ve never seen it.’

  ‘We’re going there together.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, so we are.’

  Squadrons of ducks patrolled the water beside the car park, their wakes fracturing the surface into diamond patterns. David said, ‘I don’t want you to go. How long does it take you?’

  ‘Three hours, usually. Five minutes more, and then I must.’

  They sat on a bench and were contemplated by the ducks. He reached out and took her hand and Anne, looking at ducks, water and red sandstone thought: I am quite wrong about this cathedral, in fact it is marvellous and eliminates Norwich absolutely, once and for all.

  ‘I do really have to go now,’ she said. ‘Look, it’s nearly four.’

  She drove out of Lichfield into rain. Huge apocalyptic rainbows straddled the landscape. Storms battered the windscreen and then swept away to right or left. She drove faster than usual, from the A446 to the A452 to the A41 to the A423. The road unreeled behind her, taking with it Lichfield, Coleshill, Kenilworth, Banbury. She stayed in Lichfield, sitting on a bench with ducks quacking in front of her on choppy water that reflected trees and red sandstone while someone else, some efficient automaton, good with indicator and accelerator, drove the car to Cuxing, put it away in the garage, got out coat and handgrip, and went into the house.

  ‘Of course none of us imagined they’d move so fast,’ said Sandra. ‘I mean, we knew perfectly well time wasn’t on our side but nobody thought they’d be getting the bulldozers in quite so soon. The field’s practically a building-site already. Are you feeling all right, Anne?’

  ‘Yes, fine, thanks.’

  ‘I just thought you looked a bit washed out. But anyway Professor Sidey’s been most awfully efficient and done some detective work and he reckons they’re going to pull the cottage down after Whit – he’s been chatting up the contractors’ men and that kind of thing. So that’s where we move in.’

  ‘Move in?’

  ‘Do something. In fact, we think, demonstrate. Always assuming more passive methods have failed and we haven’t managed to get the planning permission revoked.’

  ‘Yes, I see.

  ‘I assumed you’d want to know, that’s all. You seem a bit detached, I must say.’

  ‘Sorry, Sandra. Actually I haven’t been sleeping too well.’

  ‘Oh, bad luck. So we’re warning everyone they may have to turn out at the drop of a hat – I mean, we shan’t get much notice. We’re putting leaflets round now and Brian Pickering’s getting some banners and things done, ready.’

  ‘Are you going to sit down in front of the bulldozers?’

  Sandra said suspiciously ‘It’s not a laughing matter, you know. Anyway, I take it you’ll be there yourself. You’re still on the committee, aren’t you?’

  Anne thought: I’ve no idea when Whit is. I don’t really know when anything is, except next week. I’m sorry, I’m sorry – I’m in love, you see, it takes up all my time.

  ‘I must say the Pickerings are the greatest asset,’ Sandra was saying, ‘and Professor Sidey. Of course poor old Miss Standish is a bit of a dead weight, but one doesn’t want to hurt her feelings.’

  She said to Don, ‘Did you ring on Thursday night?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Just I went out for a bit – I thought I might have missed you.’

  ‘It’s fifteen pence now for three minutes, you know, to Lichfield,’ Don said. ‘No point unless there’s something particular to say.’

  Quite.

  ‘That’s all right then,’ she said. ‘So long as I didn’t miss you, that’s all.’

  The children, when young, she remembered, used to challenge you to an impossible feat whereby you put one hand above your head and rotated it in one direction and the other in front of your stomach and rotated it in the other. It couldn’t be done: the brain rebelled. But the brain – or whatever controls these things – does nothing to hinder the co-existence of emotions. How is it possible to experience, in quick succession or even both at once, joy and guilt? With an intensity hardly felt since childhood.

  Or since, at any rate, about 1956, for the first, and for the second, further back yet.

  Once, knowing quite well that it was forbidden, one went into father’s study and fiddled the papers on his desk (ah! there, then, is the taboo ancestral to the uneasy feeling that accompanies the sorting-out, now). And in so doing one knocked the jar of ink (Quink, blue-black) and in one appalling, stomach-shrinking moment it had fallen and blue-black Quink coursed over blotter, papers, desk, floor … And one fled, shrivelled, and lurked at the furthest end of the garden, waiting.

  Waiting for what? Retribution? Or peace of mind?

  Since then, guilt has been experienced in only a very desultory way. The occasional lapse from maternal or housewifely duty; the class at school scamped because of a headache or boredom; inadequacies (minor) of friendship or relationship. The emotion, in its full, hot-blooded state, was almost forgotten.

  As for the other.

  The loose spoke of a bicycle wheel; Leckford Road; a hotel in Kensington (
now, apparently, pulled down). Shadows, merely. Echoes. Documentary evidence of what was. As are also Paul and Judy evidence, of a kind. ‘Bacon?’ she said to Paul. ‘Mushrooms? Fried bread? The lot?’

  ‘Yes, please. What’s all this? I thought it was only cooked breakfast on Sundays?’

  ‘I’m feeling generous.’

  ‘Suits me. I thought I’d been told off or something.’

  ‘Told off?’

  ‘It’s what, Mum’ he said, ‘you used to do when we were young and you’d belted us or bawled us out. Be specially nice for hours and hours afterwards. To make up, I suppose. Can I have an egg too?’

  ‘Did I?’

  And outside the kitchen window the spring is more exultantly green by a week, and the kitchen garden path leads to the road which leads in turn to the village street from which you reach the A423 and from thence the A41 and the A452 and the A446.

  David Fielding sat beside old Mr Stanway’s bed and said: I love your daughter, that’s the problem. I really don’t know how this has happened, he said, it is not a condition with which I am familiar. Not for longer than I can remember, and perhaps never.

  I am emotionally disturbed, like some of the children with whom I have had to deal.

  James Stanway saw the shadow at the foot of his bed quiver and spread and disgorge a second shadow which hovered above him and then settled at his side. He turned his head to examine it and a man’s voice asked him how he was.

  ‘I am not well.’ he said. ‘I am not well at all.’ But the shadow was silent now and presently he forgot it. He floated from this indistinct place to another, where his wife stood by a gate before a mountain, and to others, where small children heaped sand upon his feet.

  Seven

  In a school hall in south London, hired by the television company for rehearsals, Graham sat on the edge of the stage and watched the floor manager chalk out the set dimensions. At the far end of the room, actors arrived, eyed one another, and took coffee from the machine. The new girl, he observed, was small, bright and blonde. He dropped from the stage to the floor and walked down the hall, stopping to check a camera angle, and said to the girl, ‘Hello there – I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Graham Stanway.’ And she turned to smile (the eager, actressy smile already and only nineteen) but for not quite long enough nor hard enough. ‘Everything O.K.?’ he said. ‘Just give me a shout if it’s not,’ and at that moment Jenny his assistant came up to say over her clipboard that there was someone on the phone, passed on from the studio. He padded through cloakrooms forested with empty coat-hooks and found a phone with receiver displaced out of which his sister’s voice said, ‘What on earth are you doing in some boys’ school?’ ‘We work in these places,’ he said. ‘I’m lumbered with a new series, eight episodes of steaming history. Is anything wrong, Annie? Dad?’ ‘No, he’s still the same. I just thought I’d let you know I’m going up to Lichfield tomorrow, that’s all.’ ‘Right you are,’ he said. ‘You’re a good girl, Annie. Is it on, all this commuting up there, with the kids and everything?’ ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘I can manage.’ ‘Don’s accommodating, is he?’ ‘Don’s accommodating, yes. Try to get down to us again soon.’ ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Right you are. Will do. I’ll have to go now, love. Let me know how he goes on, the old man. ‘Bye then.’

  He went back through the coat-hooks and saw the new girl sharing her coffee now with the leading man. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s make a start, shall we? Ready, everyone? The castle scene, Jenny, O.K.?’ His stomach ached already, and an eight-hour day to go.

  I have never before, Anne thought, realized that cooling towers are beautiful. Or that the front gardens of houses are infinite in their variety. Or that clouds piled on the skyline take on the shape of castles and cathedrals. If fields are always that colour in late April, then it seems to have escaped me hitherto. And never have I sat in a traffic jam, sandwiched between two shuddering lorries, and hummed or tried to all I can remember of The Marriage of Figaro. I have never particularly enjoyed driving. I have certainly never realized that roads one has known for years could be sanctified in the course of three weeks.

  She drew up outside her father’s house, got out of the car, opened the front door, and the envelope on the mat was a brown one from the Post Office, addressed to her father, acknowledging no doubt her payment of the phone bill. She went into the kitchen and as she stood looking at the shrivelled daffodils picked the week before the telephone rang in the hall.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You’ve come. When did you get there? I didn’t know – I tried earlier. I thought perhaps …’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Lichfield. I could come straight out to Starbridge,’ he said. ‘Should I do that?’

  She said, ‘You can hear the lapwings in the field. I’ve been using this bed for twenty odd years and never noticed that before.’ She picked up his hand, lying across her breast, and ran her finger over the puckered scar along the thumb. ‘It’s quite healed, hasn’t it, that cut? I never thought, when it happened, I never for one moment imagined this. Did you?’

  ‘Yes, frankly. I’ve thought of little else.’

  ‘I’m lying, I suppose – I couldn’t believe it, that’s all. I thought it was just me – being a bit unhinged. Back in Cuxing I feel as though I’d imagined you. I’ve thought I’d come back here and find you’d never been real at all.’

  ‘I’m real all right,’ he said. ‘Look. Feel.’

  ‘I’ve felt. It was lovely.’

  And extraordinary. To do something in itself so utterly familiar, to lie under, and upon, and beside, another naked body and do things one has done a thousand times and find them new and strange. To lie with thighs clamped round unfamiliar thighs (not hearing, at that point, the lapwings) and be at one and the same time joyously involved and a detached and amazed observer of what is happening.

  David said, ‘Not was. It isn’t finished.’

  ‘It’s two o’clock, and we haven’t had any lunch. Shall I go down and make an omelette?’

  ‘Later, possibly. Not now.’

  ‘I’ve never done this before,’ she said. ‘I just wanted you to know that.’

  ‘Then you’re very competent, for one so inexperienced.’

  ‘Don’t tease me. You know quite well what I mean.’

  ‘You mean that you don’t make a habit of getting into bed with people. Neither do I, Anne.’

  In Cuxing around this time one would be clearing up in the kitchen and about to sit down for a while with the paper and a cigarette. But one is a thousand miles from there, in every sense, and indeed unsure now that it exists.

  ‘More?,’ she said. ‘Again? Oh, David …’

  ‘Turn round, I can’t see you. I told you, I’ve been thinking of nothing else. What do you expect?’

  Drugs are said to intensify experience of the physical world. I wouldn’t know about that, she thought, but I know what does all right. I knew that this morning, driving up here, and I know it now, walking across this very ordinary field, across which I’ve walked innumerable times before.

  Standing on the river bank she looked down into the water and saw trees and bushes reflected with total clarity, perfect in every detail, as was her reflection and David’s, fore-shortened and faintly quivering. She could see the glint of his watch, catching the sunlight, with ribbons of weed trailing underneath it, and his face transparent over the bark of a submerged branch, and his eyes, looking at her.

  ‘What I hate,’ he said, ‘is that there’s so much of you I’ve never known. Years and years of it.’

  ‘Come now – I’m not that old.’

  ‘I mean as you quite well know that I have to put up with being ignorant about practically everything that’s ever happened to you. What did you look like when you were eighteen?’

  ‘Like now, only more so.’

  ‘And the other thing is that when you go away I haven’t the faintest idea where you go to. What kind of house you li
ve in. You go into a kind of limbo. You disappear.’

  ‘I go to a somewhat dull bit of Berkshire, into a rather ugly Edwardian house.’

  ‘With people in it who have always known you.’

  She said, ‘Let’s not talk about that. Not just now.’ And lobbed a stone into the water; the reflections dissolved into concentric rings.

  ‘Have some respect for the fish,’ said David. ‘Your father would be appalled.’

  ‘Could we go back to the house soon.’

  They went together to the nursing-home but David waited outside in the car while she sat with the old man for half an hour or so. Coming back across the car park she could see the shape of him in the driving seat, his head bent over a book; she walked slowly, spinning out the fifty yards of tarmac.

  Driving away he said, ‘How is he?’

  ‘Worse, a bit, I think. I saw the Matron. Apparently the doctor says there’s no change to speak of, but he seemed to me different. They still say it could be months, even.’

  ‘I’ve rung up home and said I shan’t be back till late – very late.’

  ‘We’ve got all evening, then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They sat in the middle of Lichfield, trapped by rush-hour traffic. The cathedral, picked out by a shaft of sunlight, blazed gaudily above the buildings. David said, ‘It was Tom who answered the phone, which was a pity. I’ve never deceived him in my life.’

  ‘Would it have been better if …?’

  ‘If it had been Mary? Yes, it would have been better if. Do you want me to explain why, or not?’

  ‘I don’t think, really, I do.’

  ‘Then I won’t. Or not now, if at all. Because I don’t want to hear or even think – though I do – about your husband.’