The Road to Lichfield

by Penelope Lively

  She was filled at the same time with yearning and a deep sense of oppression. She stood at the table, the postcard in her hand, and thought of the immeasurable distances from Cuxing to Lichfield. She could hear David’s voice, but could not remember what he looked like.

  Twelve

  In the fourth week of August Anne took the road to Lichfield. It was twenty-seven days since she had last driven it, in the opposite direction. The fields had been harvested now; there were apples on orchard trees; front gardens were full of michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums. She stopped for petrol at the garage she had used on the first trip of all and which had then become her usual one (thus unwittingly are habits formed) and the attendant, handing change through the window said, ‘Things starting up again, now, after the holidays. You’re busy, I daresay?’ ‘What?’ she said, bewildered, and he went on, ‘Aren’t you in business?’ ‘Oh, no’ she said. ‘It’s just I’d noticed you going up and down regularly this year – I imagined you had business bringing you up here.’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s my father I go to see. He’s been ill.’ ‘Ah. Sorry to hear that. Hope it’s nothing much. Four ninety that was, thank you.’

  Her father lay with his eyes closed, breathing noisily. The nurse, moving from bed to basin, said ‘I don’t think we’ll get him to wake, dear.’ She leaned over and spoke to him, and shook her head. ‘Matron wanted a word with you on your way out.’

  The matron said, ‘The doctor saw him this morning and thinks he’s picked up again a bit. He had a crisis in the night and we thought he’d go then. I would have rung you, Mrs Linton, but there seemed little point. He wouldn’t have known you, and since you were coming up today anyway … It’s astonishing the way he holds on I’m afraid all this has been a strain on you, but I really cannot think it will be for much longer, poor old man.’

  Anne walked out through the gardens, past the old people arranged on chairs and benches as they had been in the April sunshine when she first came here. One woman she recognized, and smiled at. Most of them were anonymous; they might always have been there, or have just arrived. I am unobservant, she thought, unobservant and unperceptive. That matron was exhausted, there were grooves under her eyes, perhaps she had been up all night, while I lay awake in Cuxing. He nearly went last night …. How much does he know? Anything? Nothing at all?

  She wandered in the Starbridge garden, waiting for David. There had been a dry period and her flowers had withered and almost died, so that the imagined profusion of colours was a brown and wilting muddle. All that and in the end I never saw them, she thought. The car stopped outside the gate and she went chill with expectation and walked towards him with a stiff smile so that he said ‘What’s the matter? Aren’t I welcome any more?’. ‘Oh, David …’ she said, and felt herself near tears, turning aside so that he wouldn’t see.

  They went to bed in the afternoon, as on that earlier afternoon in May, and lay with sunshine slanting across Anne’s bare thigh, across David’s arm. She saw his hair dappled with it, as she looked down the length of her body, and thought, even at that moment: September sun is different, quite different, you couldn’t mistake it for any other, you can tell the time of year by the sun. Later, she said this to David and he answered that it wasn’t September.

  ‘Nearly. On Sunday.’

  ‘Well, don’t let’s have it sooner than we must. School, and everything else. How was Scotland?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I hardly noticed it.’

  He sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on his shirt. ‘The boys had a good time in Wales. I must say, they walk me into the ground these days. Tom did over twenty miles on one occasion.’ He looked down, and saw her face, and put his hand on her arm. ‘I missed you. I thought of you in–oh, in all sorts of funny places – I wished you were with us.’ He stared out of the window, and then said suddenly ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, Anne, do you …?’

  ‘Don’t know what, David?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve felt a bit low, lately, I suppose. But I’m not going to inflict it on you. Have you been to the nursing-home yet?’

  ‘They said it can’t be much longer.’

  He nodded, staring again out of the window.

  I tell lies, he thought. I distort. I evade. First to my sons. Now to Anne. I cannot, somehow, be honest. Lying – evading – is always just that much easier, that much less painful, than telling the truth. And I have always been craven in my personal life. Not in the public one – the school, the boys – I’m efficient enough there. But the rest, no.

  He drove the car onto the strip of concrete in front of the garage and sat in it, in front of his darkened house, not wanting to go in. I hate this house, he thought, always have done. I’ve slept in it and eaten in it for five years or so, and never looked at it closely enough to be quite certain which it is without checking the number first. Only Tom’s bike by the hedge tells me now. I suppose she’s back, he thought, back and gone to bed. Tomorrow at the breakfast table she’ll look across at me to see if I’ve taken everything in properly. If I’ve read, marked, learned and inwardly digested it all.

  He sat in misery, phrases from her letter marching through his head: ‘ … better I think to get this down in writing before I come back. I want to make myself quite clear, and that doesn’t always happen face to face … imagine that this is not the first time, you were luckier other times in that no one was kind enough (or unkind enough) to inform me … found out a bit, mainly that she has children too … don’t want a divorce, for reasons of my own, we’ve managed for eighteen years and can go on doing so.’

  Eighteen and a half, actually, he thought, nineteen in December. But no matter.

  ‘ … apparently can’t stop you, under this new law, if that’s what you intend … might as well warn you now, once and for all … Tom and Alan … her children too … her husband … contempt … unlikely to have much respect … make things as unpleasant as possible, and I think you know …’

  Yes, I know.

  ‘ … owed something for eighteen years work, and a lot else besides … not always a great success but don’t see why I should take all the blame for that … possible to exaggerate the physical side, and personally I … and furthermore I don’t see why I should put up with the humiliation of … perfectly frank with Tom and Alan, and have no doubt they’ll feel as I do that you … so I would feel free and indeed under a certain obligation to contact her husband … don’t see why he should be left in blissful ignorance … their children too … if, on the other hand … prepared to wipe the sheet clean and go on as we were … make up your mind within the next few weeks which you want.’

  As we were. How were we? he thought. Because since April I haven’t known, having been in a state of disturbance. I can’t remember now how I was before. How it felt. Was I unhappy? I don’t think so. One got on with things: work, things with which one is involved, the boys. One day was much the same as another; there were few extremes of temperature. Was it so bad?

  Surely not, he told himself, surely not. He stared at the dark windows of his house, behind two of which his sons slept. I don’t know, he thought, I don’t know …

  ‘Oh, Graham,’ Anne said, ‘I am sorry. You poor old thing. But at least you know now what it is. And it could have been worse. Much. And it doesn’t mean an operation, does it?’

  Graham, down in London, said that a special diet of bloody baby food as far as he could make out and no alcohol at all sounded to him considerably worse than an operation.

  ‘Come to us this weekend – please do.’

  But there was this filming in Suffolk, apparently, and then he had to go to Berlin for three days for some European television jamboree, and then he had to be in London non-stop for some new series. ‘Come up and have lunch with me, Annie,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you a slap-up meal. I wish you would – I’d like that.’

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Right, I will. Week after next. And look after yourself, Graham. Be sensible about food and
things.’

  ‘Yes, auntie’ he said, and she put the receiver down thinking: that’s a bit more like it, he sounds a bit more himself now.

  Poor Graham. It’s not fun being ill all on your own.

  She had come back from Lichfield the day before. David had telephoned to say he would not be able to meet her in Lichfield for lunch, as arranged. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Someone has to take Tom and Alan to Birmingham and Mary can’t manage it. Sorry, Anne.’ ‘It doesn’t matter a bit’ she said, and after a fractional pause he went on, ‘When will you be up again?’ ‘I’m not too sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you know – I’ll give you a ring at school, or leave a message.’ She drove back fast, seeing little or nothing, surprised to find herself suddenly in Cuxing, outside her own gate.

  When Sandra called for her that evening, to take her to the Pickerings, Anne said, ‘Someone seems to have got it in for us, this year – for my family. Graham’s got an ulcer – my brother Graham.’

  Sandra said, ‘What awfully bad luck. I wouldn’t have thought he’d be the type to get ill, I must say.’

  ‘Does it go in types?’

  ‘Well, I mean with some people you just aren’t all that surprised to hear they’ve gone down with something – it seems somehow in character. Like poor little Mrs Hedges’ husband having a heart attack at forty, when she’d just had a new baby and he’d lost his job – I mean, it all fitted. And the kind of child that’s accident-prone. Actually,’ she went on, ‘I’d have thought you’d be the type, more than your brother, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me,’ said Anne. ‘Nothing to speak of, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean you look unhealthy. It’s just there’s always something a bit kind of unrevealed about you. I mean, you’re just not as obvious as most people, somehow. Actually, I don’t mind telling you now, but when I first knew you I was a bit frightened of you. You seemed awfully clever.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Anne, ‘I didn’t mean to be. I hope I don’t still.’

  Sandra said ‘Oh, no. And of course one changes oneself in how one kind of reacts to people. Goodness, I hope I’m not seeming frightfully rude.’

  ‘Not a bit,’ said Anne. ‘I rather like the idea of being unrevealed – so long as we’re sure it’s not unrevealed disease.’

  Sandra said ‘Oh, I shouldn’t honestly think so.’ She turned into the Pickerings’ drive, gravel spraying up from under the car. ‘Look, they’ve got their engine up, isn’t that fun!’

  Spot-lit from a lamp mounted on the side of the house was a massive piece of industrial machinery. It had been sunk onto a base of concrete which was carefully masked with pots and tubs of summer flowers. The white-washed wall of an outbuilding made a background to the shining, oiled, polished and painted machine, its pistons and wheels projecting sharp black shadows in the spot-light. Brian Pickering came out of the open front door as they got out of the car and Sandra said, ‘I must say it’s awfully effective, Brian – I do think you were clever.’

  ‘It is rather nice, isn’t it?’ he said.

  Anne said, ‘What is it?’

  ‘A beam-engine. Early industrial revolution. They were dismantling this factory somewhere in the Black Country and a mate of mine heard about it and went up to poke around for bits and pieces of stuff for sculpture, and told me about this. So of course I beetled up there and they let me have it for a hundred quid. It’s got a few parts missing or it would have been worth a lot more, for a museum or collection or something.’

  ‘How did it work?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Brian. ‘Now there you have me rather. Engineering’s not my strong point. Those things go up and down, of course, and turn that. I’m a bit vague about what that bit’s for. The inside of my own car’s a mystery to me, frankly. But I couldn’t resist it.’ He ran his hand affectionately over the shiny surface of the machine.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ said Sandra. ‘Well, I suppose we’d better get started. Is everyone here?’

  They went inside. Mary Pickering said, ‘I thought your husband was coming, Anne?’

  ‘He couldn’t make it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Miss Standish isn’t coming either. She said she thought there wasn’t anything more she could be useful about and sent apologies.’

  ‘Of course one really only had her on the committee to be tactful,’ said Sandra. ‘She is a bit out of touch, poor old dear. Still, we’d better let her know what we do with the money. Hugh, are you going to just run through things?’

  The Splatt’s Cottage Preservation Committee heard, over some rather nice home-brewed beer of Brian Pickering’s, that there were four pounds seventy-five pence left in the fund, which it decided, without argument, to donate to the Council for the Preservation of Rural England. The professor, in his capacity as secretary, deplored the fact that the committee must be said to have been unsuccessful in its aims. Nevertheless, he felt that it could congratulate itself on having made a firm stand in defence of a principle in which its members profoundly believed. We’ve shown, he said, that certain people in Cuxing are not going to sit by and see the past tampered with or destroyed without putting up a fight (there was a murmur of agreement, around the room) and even if, in a sense, we lost this time, we’ve shown our muscle, as it were, ready for the next occasion. (‘Absolutely,’ said Mary Pickering sternly, her head bent over her patchwork.) We didn’t perhaps, in this case, rally our forces quite early enough: next time we must be in a position to go into the offensive almost before the enemy make a move, as it were. He would like to suggest that, rather than disband itself, the committee should be re-formed, or metamorphosed, or however anyone liked to put it, into a watchdog group for Cuxing and the surrounding area: it would list and record everything that was old and might at some point be endangered, and stand by for action. ‘Super idea,’ murmured Sandra, ‘but aren’t we going to overlap with the C.P.R.E.? One doesn’t want to tread on toes.’ But no, the professor thought not: what he had in mind was something frankly rather more militant than what some people might feel to be perhaps from time to time a rather lack-lustre organization (here Sandra nodded sagely). Perhaps on second thoughts they might hang onto that four pounds seventy-five (Sandra nodded again). And, he said, I think we should assume an altogether more educative role, too. I suspect that ignorance lies behind a great deal of indifference and vandalism. That chap Pym, for instance —local boy made good, plenty of drive and initiative there. We need people like that on our side, we don’t want to be fighting them. It’s a question of opening people’s eyes – showing them the world they live in. Teaching them how to appreciate their own past instead of just ignoring it. We must have lectures and exhibitions. We must bring history into the market place. We must make people feel its relevance to their own lives. (‘More drink, anyone?’ said Brian Pickering, sotto voce, opening the glass front of the bread oven to reveal bottles and glasses. ‘There’s whisky, if anyone would rather?’) We must make Cuxing a bit more au fait with modern sensibility.

  ‘The modern sensibility I’ve come across,’ said Anne, ‘finds history an outdated concept.’

  ‘You agree with that?’ said Hugh Sidey sharply.

  ‘No, of course not. It’s just that there seems to be a bit of confusion about what it should do, or shouldn’t do. Or how to take it.’

  ‘I don’t quite follow.’

  ‘Well,’ said Anne, ‘I lost my job at the comprehensive because apparently my way of teaching history isn’t acceptable any more. Looking at it chronologically won’t do – children can’t grasp it. So you don’t teach it to them at all, or you give it to them in nice digestible chunks, as themes or projects. You teach them about revolutions, or civil wars, or whatever.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sandra, ‘the old way of teaching was deadly boring, dates and all that. I mean, that’s why I’m so jolly ignorant, I’m sure – if I’d been taught the way my kids are one would have been able to get inte
rested.’ She looked round the room for support.

  Anne said irritably, ‘I’m not talking about tables of dates, or the rights and wrongs of different ways of teaching. I’m talking about paying attention to what actually happened.’

  ‘I think perhaps we’re straying just a bit from the matter in hand,’ said Hugh Sidey. ‘Anyway, I imagine you’re with us in all this, Mrs Linton?’

  Anne looked round the room, from Brian Pickering fiddling with drinks beside the blacksmith’s anvil, to his wife sitting cross-legged on a cushion, sewing, to the professor (it was English he had professed, it seemed), to Sandra. She noticed again the collection of Victorian portrait photographs, other people’s relatives as agreeable decoration, and the display of agricultural implements and the collection of china mugs and plates with A Present from somewhere or other on them, in sloping nineteenth century script. She said, ‘What are you going to do with the buildings you save?’

  ‘Well, obviously it depends,’ said the professor. ‘Presumably most things can be adapted to contemporary use of some kind. One will have to see. What would you suggest?’

  They were all looking at her now. Oh dear, she thought, I’ve brought dissension into their nice comfortable evening. Not really what I meant. She said, half apologetically, ‘I don’t think I have any strong opinions about that. I’m fairly muddled about it myself. It’s just I feel worried about indiscriminate hanging onto the past – in the form of buildings, or – or anything else. Sometimes I think we’re not too sure why we’re doing it – and we may not even be quite clear what it is we’re hanging onto. But at the same time I think it’s very important to know about it – but to know properly, not just to have a vague idea or even to adapt it to suit your own purposes.’ Oh Lord, she thought, I shouldn’t have said that last bit, she glanced guiltily at Brian Pickering, but he was looking puzzled rather than annoyed.