The Road to Lichfield

by Penelope Lively

  I know that, she thought with a small flare of irritation. You don’t have to tell me. And come to that I thought Tom … ‘I wish you’d seen her a couple of years ago – she was such fun. So interested in everything, always chattering on. And of course this is just a phase. Surely you must have had problems with Tom?’

  ‘Oh, on and off,’ said David. ‘Mind you, girl children are rather alien territory to me, not having gone in for them either professionally or privately. What did you do in Coventry?’

  ‘I looked at the cathedral. Of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘catch you missing out on a cathedral.’ And as he put his hand on her arm, smiling, Judy and Tom were quietly relegated, or so it seemed, and the present re-asserted itself with immediate problems of where to park the car and what to do.

  They had gone to Tamworth. ‘We haven’t quite exhausted the possibilities of the area,’ David said. ‘But it could happen, before too long.’

  ‘We don’t always have to go somewhere. I should have made you help me with the sorting out at Starbridge. There’s still an awful lot to do.’

  ‘Oh, come now,’ he said. ‘It’s July. It’s the summer. We’re entitled to a holiday. We shall have lunch and take an intelligent interest in the history of Tamworth.’

  His school term had finished the day before. The year, suddenly, was at one of its natural watersheds. From the parapets of Tamworth Castle the landscape wheeled around them in a circle of fields already bleaching and hedges darkened into the heavy greens of high summer. The grasses on the verges had flowered; the trees began to stoop; the summer was over that point when growth passes into decline.

  David said, ‘Well, the holidays loom. You go to Scotland on the twenty-third?’

  ‘That’s right.’ And you to Wales for a week’s walking with your friend Jim Hilton whom I do not know (as I know none of your friends, nor you mine). And with your sons.

  ‘I must say I’m rather looking forward to Wales. We’ve got a route planned out and it looks like some fairly spectacular countryside. And then the boys thought they’d like to do some of the castles.’

  ‘Oh, are you,’ she said, ‘Good.’ I can’t say the same of Scotland.

  Silence hung for a moment. ‘What does Mary do?’

  ‘She goes to see her mother,’ David said, ‘in London. And she’s got an old school friend down in Kent I expect she’ll call in on for a day or two.’

  Ah. It can’t be asked, of course, at what point holidays ceased to be shared, or what Jim Hilton thinks of Mary (or any other of your friends). Or what she looks like or what you call her or if, and if so, how often, you make love to her or any of the things that would bring instantly that shuttered look I have become more than a little afraid of. I am excluded, as I have to exclude you.

  David said, ‘What’s the nursing-home saying, if anything, about your father?’

  She told him. The matron had come in that morning, while she was there, and explained that the doctor considered that he had deteriorated, though he did not seem in any way changed to Anne, drifting from moments of near-lucidity to states of semi-coma. His heart was weaker, it seemed. He must, the matron said, be very robust. She implied, gently, that most people in his condition would not have survived that long; that there could not be long to go. As she spoke the old man had suddenly turned towards them, staring, and said something about coffee. ‘Four of us there are’ he said, looking towards the matron. ‘Coffee for four, we’ll want.’ And the matron had smiled and said to Anne, ‘He’s not quite with us, this morning, is he?’. And then to her patient, ‘That’s tea you’ve just had, Mr Stanway. Would you like another cup?’ But he had gone again, his fingers creeping to and fro on the sheet in front of him, his eyes closed.

  They spent a muted afternoon at Tamworth, as though affected by the apathy of the landscape. Anne had a slight headache; David seemed to her unresponsive. They went early back to Starbridge and found, then, that they would not meet again until after both their holidays.

  ‘But I’d thought you’d be up again next week.’

  ‘I did say, actually, David. You must have forgotten. Judy’s got this friend staying – I can’t very well leave them on their own. I didn’t realize you had to go back now – I thought you were staying this evening.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Anne. I promised the boys I’d take them in to Birmingham. I didn’t realise then that you’d be here.’ Kissing her, he said, ‘I’m going to miss you dreadfully.’

  ‘Have a lovely walk in Wales.’

  She got up at six and drove down to Cuxing in the early morning, through alternating bands of sunshine and sombre clouded skies. Judy, when she arrived, announced with grim satisfaction (‘Sandra Butterfield’s in an absolute stew, rushing round ringing everyone up, she even got hold of Dad last night when she found you weren’t here …’) that Splatt’s Cottage had been razed to the ground during the night. In the afternoon Anne walked down the lane to see, and found a bulldozer pottering about around a mound of plaster, lathes and bricks, far larger, it seemed, than the cottage itself had been. Splintered timbers, riddled with rot and woodworm stuck up from the rubble of shattered brick and chunks of plaster. It was as though, in its destruction, the cottage revealed the secrets of its infirmity and gained, somehow, in sheer bulk. There was an awful mess. It would take days to clear it away before the site could be prepared for building. The bulldozer picked at the foothills of the rubbish, shovelling away into the maw of a waiting lorry. Anne stood watching for a few minutes, and saw half a china sink, a smashed door, a load of roof timbers, go crashing down into the lorry. A mini was parked on the grass verge by the field. By the gate, a rose-bush had come into bloom, the flowers powdered over with dust. There was an estate agent’s sign at the roadside, advertising the freehold sale of five bungalows, a select private development. At one end of the rubble mountain, a section of undestroyed walling leaned against a heap of thatch, its structure of timber, lath and plaster shown in section as though in a museum example of country crafts. Anne picked her way round to examine it while the bulldozer driver took the vehicle into the lane and switched off the engine, evidently packing up for the day. She pulled at the longest piece of timber, and the whole wall lifted towards her with surprising lightness. Plaster fell from it, showing the skeletal framework of laths, from the cracks of which trickled husks of corn. The bulldozer driver, appearing suddenly a few yards away said, ‘Some nice bits of timber there – help yourself if you’re looking for a bit of kindling.’

  ‘I was just seeing how it was made. It seems to have been infested with mice.’ She pointed to the corn husks.

  The man laughed. ‘I daresay. But that’s insulation – not mice. They packed those old walls, see, to keep the heat in. Anything that was handy – peapods, straw. Chicken bones, I’ve seen once, in another place like this.’

  Anne said ‘Oh, I see.’ She felt slightly foolish. The driver turned away saying, ‘Mind yourself on that broken glass.’

  She pulled some nails out of the timbers and put them in her pocket. Fifteenth century nails, possibly? They looked, on the other hand, extremely modern. The bulldozer driver had got into the mini and driven away, leaving the bulldozer crouched beside what remained of Splatt’s Cottage. As Anne walked up the lane she turned once to look back and saw its yellow bulk blazing in the sun. She was surprised to find that she felt really quite unemotional about the whole thing. It was bound to happen, she thought. Stopping it was never really possible at all though of course they were perfectly right to try and I have probably been half-hearted about it, which was wrong. The bulldozer’s claw had cast a long toothed shadow across the rubble, like some prehistoric monster. Perched on top, she now saw, and flashing in the sun, was one of those glass lampshades that had been in an upstairs bedroom. It really did make an amazingly large mound of rubbish, for one small cottage. But, trying to remember the structure of the place, she found that, irritatingly, she no longer could, although it was only a co
uple of months since she had been inside it. Had there been two bedrooms, or three? Doors at back and front, or only the front? One should have drawn a plan of it, she thought, or taken a photograph. One should at least have recorded it in some way before it went.

  Eleven

  In Scotland, the distances on the sign-posts were always in double figures: Inverness 31, Fort William 48, Edinburgh 70. Nowhere was ever close by. In some brown and purple glen, one road leading in and the same one out, a place tethered to the real world only by the string of telegraph poles marching away to the horizon, Don said, ‘Well, what’s the plan? Do we head north, or west?’

  In the normal way of things, Anne thought, it is I who would have taken charge of all this, said today we do this or that and then wouldn’t it be nice to go there, and I’ve always wanted to have a look at those. Instead of which I sit here like a zombie with things moving past me at either side, hills and rivers and villages and snatches of dramatic scenery which have very little impact. Anyone else but Don would wonder why, I should think. Anyone else might feel a little peeved at driving around a wife and daughter both locked in silence.

  She said to Judy, ‘You’re very quiet. Don’t you think this is lovely? Look at the colour of the heather up there.’ And Judy, hunched in her corner of the back seat, nods and glowers for a moment at Glen something, and returns to her own impenetrable preoccupations.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘Nothing’.

  The Welsh hills are gentler than these, of course. Somewhere among them, a cheerful male party, two young, two middle-aged, is picking its way from one bit to another by ordnance survey map and consensus of opinion. Who is saying what to whom? What do they see? Is the wind, down there, cool on the face as it is here, with a faint damp brush of mist, and a smell of peat? Ahead, for them, is the prospect of some pub with beer and chat (of what?), and later in the week a look at the odd castle.

  ‘Why don’t we,’ she said to Don, ‘find something other than scenery to look at? You can have too much of it.’

  ‘Scotland doesn’t go in so much for stately homes.’

  But the A.A.. book’s helpful appendix on What To See has suggestions to make. ‘That’ll do. I’ve never seen a broch. It says those are the best preserved, except the one in Shetland. Let’s go and see them.’

  The journey to the brochs took hours (or possibly, in this time-suspended state, days); hours of driving or being driven through mile after mile of landscape apparently primeval in its arrangement of scree and moorland, punctuated by the startling intrusions of petrol station or caravan site. Sometimes, in a procession of slow-moving holiday traffic a slice of loch or mountainside would hang cinematically beyond the interiors of cars – shirt-sleeved drivers, clambering children, thermoses, coats and cushions – as though devised simply as a backdrop for the more compelling affairs of travellers. Waiting in the queue for a ferry, Anne stared apathetically through the window of the car to where, a few yards away, sheep slumped on the edge of the tarmac and wild flowers grew as though in a rockery up the brilliant slope of a hill. Shut off by the glass, they had the clinical interest of a nature film. It would have been too much trouble to open the car door, get out, and inspect them. But for the observer, studying them through the glass, they had the therapeutic quality of the scene beyond the window to an invalid; interesting but undemanding. The wild flowers were visited by quantities of very small bees; the sheep had undecipherable tattooings in deep russet; the pink rocks were marbled with a grey lichen as long and webbed as seaweed. This is really quite all right, she thought, sitting here thinking of nothing at all; so long as this goes on there is no problem, absolutely none.

  The brochs, when reached, were like dour stunted industrial chimneys (or cooling towers, presiding over a reach of the A446, just after the Brownhills roundabout, on the road to Lichfield ….) ‘This is the objective, is it?’ said Don. ‘Do we have a guide-book or something?’ But no guide-book is offered by this silent valley, locked between sea and sky and mountain. No explanations are to be had (for Anne cannot remember, now, anything about brochs – when, or who, or why) from the spread of heather on which they park the car (gingerly, for fear of getting stuck) or the pine trees grouped beyond the brochs or the large black bird circling above (which may or may not be a raven). The brochs must be inspected without guidance; anyone’s guess is as good as anyone else’s. Judy, sitting on a rock a hundred yards away, reading the book she bought in Oban, has no guess. Anne has one or two, but does not make them. Don supposes they must be medieval or possibly earlier. He returns to the car to prop up the bonnet and cool the engine; the hills have been steep.

  From the top of the broch you could see right down the valley to the sea. Which, Anne thought, is of course why they are where they are. She stood for a moment, looking down, slightly dizzy, and saw Judy, foreshortened, turn over the page of her book. Don, hands in pockets, looked up and called, ‘Be careful.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m being careful.’ He watched her come down and met her at the bottom. ‘All right?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Fine.’

  ‘Rather a nice spot.’

  ‘Yes, lovely.’

  ‘Anne?’ he said.

  ‘Mmn …’

  ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk about.’

  You can see down the valley from the foot of the broch also, and to the sea, a grey-blue curve between the purple mountain flanks. A very nice spot, yes. Except that the mountains, hitherto such tranquil presences, give a disconcerting lurch. And there is a cloud that seems to threaten rain.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If this is a good moment.’

  ‘Oh, I think this is as good a moment as any.’

  ‘You’ve been a bit detached these last few days.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I have. I’m sorry, Don, you see I …’

  ‘Did you give the nursing-home a ring last night?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d leave it till tomorrow, I thought it might be …’

  ‘This summer,’ said Don, ‘has been a bit of a strain, hasn’t it?’

  Don, of course, is not given to emotion. The remark is made in as cool and level a tone as he might, not to promote undue alarm or anxiety, point out that the neighbouring house is on fire, or that war appears to be imminent. It might mean anything, or nothing. The distant mountain quivers still, and one feels out of breath, which might of course be because the climb up to the top of the broch was moderately energetic.

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Things just have to take their course, you know, Annie.’

  And that, she thought, is what my shrinking stomach supposes that they are doing. Several courses, for several different things. And all of a sudden, staring distractedly at a clump of bee-hung heather, she remembered her seeds planted down at Starbridge, in her father’s garden – ‘flowering period July—Aug.’ – and pictured love-in-a-mist, calendula and lavatera, obediently blazing away there with no one to take note.

  ‘What I really wanted to talk about,’ Don was saying now, ‘is this question of a house. I haven’t mentioned it before, but in fact Jim Thwaites has decided to retire early, which means that my senior partnership comes up rather sooner than we’d expected, so that we could think of a move to something rather bigger, outside the village maybe, now instead of in a couple of years’ time. How do you feel about that, Annie?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I think that would be a good idea. Yes, do let’s, darling, if that’s what you’d like. Yes, of course.’

  The mountain, now, is quite steady, and that black cloud the size of a man’s fist which had certainly threatened rain had dispersed. The weather is back to what it was, neither one thing nor the other; indifferent.

  Don now sounded, for him, surprised. ‘I’d thought you might not be so keen. You weren’t too enthusiastic once before – but if that’s all right by you then we’ll go ahead with looking out for something when we get back.
Around, I thought, the thirty-five thousand mark. If you’re sure that’s what you’d like.’

  ‘I’d like that very much,’ she said. ‘Really I would.’

  ‘It might be a good thing, just now, to look ahead.’

  And what does that mean? Anything, or nothing? Is the glance that accompanies it simply because they are moving now towards the car and Anne stands between Don and the driving-seat, so that he must turn to her because she is in the way, or does it pry out a response? ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ and gets into the car, turning to open the back door for Judy, who has marked the place in her book with a sprig of heather (which will fall out, years later, and snatch back for an instant the afternoon of the brochs, to which she did not pay much attention). ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Anne says. ‘I’ve always been bad at remembering that things go in two directions – forwards as well as backwards. I don’t think history’s ever done me much good.’ And Don, sensing a joke, pats her knee and says, ‘Come on, you’ve had a lot out of it, one way and another.’

  They drive back down the valley, leaving the brochs, which have served a purpose, of a kind, to their own inscrutable affairs, both past and yet to come.

  Graham lay on a plastic-covered table in a darkened room and stared up at a ceiling swagged with flexes and pulleys and tracks for this and that. A white-coated man said, ‘Quite still, now, please, Mr Stanway. Deep breath in and hold it.’ Machines whirred and clicked. ‘Breathe out now,’ said the doctor. ‘Relax,’ and Graham, obediently, relaxed and took a furtive glance at his watch. Just past twelve, back in the studio by two, with any luck. ‘I’m just going to tilt the table a bit,’ said the doctor. ‘If you turn your head to the right, you’ll see the picture on the screen; the fluid picks out the intestines.’ And Graham, swooping gently forward and then back, stared with fascination at his own incandescent stomach, displayed on a ten-inch television screen. Christ, he thought, not a pretty sight, good thing we keep that to ourselves, in the normal way of things. ‘Quite still for a moment,’ said the doctor, and the table swooped again, the screen in a merry glow now, packed with pulsating coils. ‘Nearly finished, Mr Stanway, we’ve got some nice clear pictures.’ ‘Fine,’ mumbled Graham, feeling sick and wondering if that too would be apparent on the screen. And now what? he wondered. Off to the cutting-room with the picture for a nice bit of editing? The captions should be interesting. The inner world of Graham Stanway, our Play for Today. Or maybe they’d do better to use it in a documentary. We took our cameras deep into Stanway and brought back some amazing film of the secret rituals and bizarre customs of an unknown region. Not actually all that bloody funny, he thought, what was that black bit at the top right, for instance? And the doctor, bringing the table gently back to horizontal said, ‘That’s all, Mr Stanway. Thank you very much. The nurse will show you back to the changing-room and Mr Hicks will see you again before you go.’