At Hawthorn Time Read online

  ‘I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien.’

  – Sergei Rachmaninov

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Also Available

  PROLOGUE

  Here’s where it all ends: a long, straight road between fields. Four thirty on a May morning, the black fading to blue, dawn gathering somewhere below the treeline in the east.

  Imagine a Roman road. No, go back further: imagine a broad track, in use for centuries by the tribes who lived and fought and died on these islands, and whose blood lives on in us. When the Romans came they paved it, and for a short while it was busy with their armies and trade. After they left it decayed, though it wasn’t forgotten; it came to mark the line beyond which the Vikings lived by their intractable Danish creed. Later it became a drovers’ road, trodden by sheep and cattle; then a turnpike, taking travellers, and mail, to Wales and beyond. Now, though, it is simply an A-road, known around these parts as the Boundway but marked on maps with letters and numbers alone.

  Imagine driving that ancient road. The light is rising behind you, the dim fields, on either side, are asleep. Soon you will pass a sign for the village of Lodeshill, a turn-off you note each time you come this way, but never take. But before you can reach it you see something blocking the carriageway half a mile or so ahead, something you can’t yet make out – though part of you already knows, because what else would it be? The straight road points to it like an arrow, and as you draw closer, as you slow and stop, it moves from the realm of the dreamlike to the disbelieved to the real.

  You switch off the engine, and as it dies you realise what every day of your life so far has led you to: two cars, spent and ravished, violence gathered about them in the silent air. One wheel, upturned, still spins.

  Hands shaking, you make a call. You fight down panic and open your car door, stepping out onto a million tiny fragments of glass. Reluctantly your legs carry you into the scene. Who else will do it, if not you?

  I see it all from where I am: the tyre marks, the crumpled metal, the coins and compact discs spilled across the road. The smaller car, with its huge spoiler and brash paint job, rests on its roof, displaying its brutal undercarriage to the sky; the other, a big Audi, has one door half open, and I can see the mundane, private cargo of the door pocket: tissues, a Thermos, a Simon & Garfunkel CD.

  I can smell the sharp grass of the churned-up verge, and I can see what it is that awaits you: a young lad in the custom car, upside down and veiled in blood; a slumped figure in the Audi, perfectly still; and beside its open door, a third body, face down, on the road.

  Seven slow minutes have passed since the crash. The sky lightens; the spinning wheel slows and halts; birds, one by one, are returning to the hawthorn hedges and shaking down the heavy blossom – although they do not sing. Life struggles and hangs; different futures intrude and unfold. The fact of the accident insists on itself.

  I watch as you move from one person to the next, from the injured to the dead. You hold a hand, gently, and it almost pulls me back. I linger as the sirens come, as we are all tended to, even you. At last I become part of the siren’s wail, part of the shimmer of air over the ambulance’s hood: neither earthbound nor quite free.

  Later, you will recall the things you saw only in fragments. And I will recall nothing at all.

  1

  Cherry blossom over, daffs turning. Hawthorn bud-burst.

  It was a mild, damp night in April when he escaped the city, though the forecast predicted fairer weather to come. It had rained a little, earlier in the day, and the moist night air had called out snails in their thousands to dot the grimy London pavements in ill-fated hordes.

  He put on his ancient army coat, took his pack from behind the door of his room and filled a plastic bottle of water from the tap in the communal kitchen. The pack contained seventeen tatty notebooks, some cooking things, a pup tent and an old brown sleeping bag. His bedroll was strapped to the outside, and the pack itself was studded with badges and pins; a few bits of cloth hung from the straps like prayer flags.

  He left the hostel and pushed the keys back in through the letter box; then he began to walk north. At least there was no ankle tag this time, and he knew himself to be invisible to the mobile phone masts he passed and unwatched by satellites overhead. The feeling of walking, after three months locked up, was like when a plane’s wheels break contact with the tarmac and it lifts up and away from the ground.

  You could dig out cuttings on Jack, if you wished. He was there in the very early days of Greenham Common, before the women drove him away; he gave a brief quote to a local radio reporter at Newbury and his grainy image – if you know what you’re looking for – can just be discerned in footage of the poll tax riots. The travellers talked of him at Dale Farm, too, though that could have been someone else.

  Mostly self-educated, once a haunter of libraries, Jack walked the lost ways from town to town, keeping clear old paths that no one used, avoiding company for the most part and living off the land when he could. Picked up again and again for breaching bail conditions, or vagrancy, or selling pot, he had done short stretches inside everywhere from Brixton to Northumberland, acquiring prison tattoos and learning the advantages of a Bic-shaved skull and a cocksure posture. When at liberty he mostly worked on farms, picking fruit and helping with the harvest; he avoided towns, slept rough, and slowly, over time, forgot that he had once been a protester – or, perhaps, came to embody his protest more absolutely. Born, so he said, in Canterbury, his life before he took to the road was obscure.

  Growing ever more unloosed from what seems to sustain the rest of us, more stubborn with every arrest and stranger and more elliptical in his thinking, Jack became, with the passing of decades, less like a modern man and more like the fugitive spirit of English rural rebellion. Or – to some, at least – mad.

  Not long after the turn of the millennium a sympathetic journalist tracked him down to a wood near Otmoor; but Jack, by then, had little he wanted to say – certainly not the grand narrative of protest and exclusion that the writer had in mind. He spent two days with Jack, broken by a night at a Premier Inn where he was much disturbed by drunken wedding guests, but his piece, when it came out, barely mentioned Jack at all.

  Away from the main arteries the night-time streets were quiet: the odd dog walker, a few revellers, foxes, cabs. Here and there flowers nodded dimly to Jack from front gardens as he passed, blanched by the sodium lights to a uniform paleness: irises, tulips, early peonies dropping their petals over the walls.

  He crossed Vauxhall Bridge on foot, stopping for a moment to look down at the black water below, full of ship’s nails and clay pipes and broken bottles and bones. Briefly, he wished for the keys back so he could cast them in, a kind of offering or parting gift – though they would have been swallowed up by darkness long before he could have seen the river take them, and he was far too high up to hear them fall. Where these arcane impulses came from it was impossible to say.

  Finding his way through the centre of town was easy enough. Pimlico was quiet; he skirted busy Victoria before pushing on, Green Park invisible behind a high wall to
his right. How was it that the names seemed so much more than mere streets, or confluences of streets? Belgravia, Park Lane, Marble Arch, Marylebone: you would not think that such places could be so easily abandoned, yet one by one they fell behind him.

  He stopped at a petrol station in Hendon in the small hours, walking across the floodlit forecourt to the little window and handing up coins to a Bangladeshi man who seemed all the more vulnerable for the bulletproof glass between them. Two boys and a girl were hunched on the kerb at the edge of the forecourt, pupils dilated, talking quickly and disjointedly among themselves. The girl had glitter on her temples; one of the boys kept clenching his jaw.

  Jack ate the crisps and chocolate he had bought and walked on. For a long while there was hardly anyone around: shift workers, cabbies, bin men. He kept to the same road northbound, crossing side street after side street, all untaken.

  By the time it began to be light he knew he was leaving the city behind. Later, inured, almost, to the rush-hour traffic, he passed superstores, car plants, playing fields, a golf course, wasteland; then, with the roar of the M1 somewhere ahead, the straight road broke north-west between fields.

  It was enough. He pushed his way off the tarmac through a belt of trees and tangled undergrowth where years of sun-faded litter had blown and caught: beer cans, dog shit in bags, crisp packets, hubcaps. Twenty-odd paces through the wood he emerged into a tussocky field from which two rabbits fled, their white scuts bobbing away into some trees on the far side. He let his pack fall from his shoulder and sat down with his back to an oak.

  Listening to the traffic behind him he felt the breeze play on the hairs on his arms and watched the sun rise slowly from a distant reef of cloud. Looking at it made a bluish bruise on his field of vision that jumped and twitched, and he shook his head like a horse trying to shake off a fly, finally squeezing his eyes shut and waiting for the insult to his retina to subside. When he opened his eyes again the horizon swam briefly and the light seemed very bright.

  Just to be able to go where I like, he thought. Just to live how I see fit. I don’t do any harm, God knows; and there are plenty out there that do. So let me go now, please; just leave me be.

  After a while a blackcap sang from the scrubby field margin and the morning sun began to dry the dew from the grass. Jack picked up his pack and began to look around him for somewhere to sleep.

  The field itself was almost entirely without distinction, a nondescript trapezium bordered by overgrown hedges. It had not been grazed or mowed for a long time, and pioneer saplings – scrub oak, sycamore, ash – were stealing a slow march on the grass. There were no paths through it, unless you counted those made by rabbits and foxes, and it harboured no species of special distinction, no orchids or rare butterflies. Yet in summer its edges foamed with meadowsweet, and in autumn it bore clutches of mushrooms like pale golden eggs.

  Jack chose a spot in the shade of the far hedge and rolled out his mat. He took a sandwich and a can of Coke from his rucksack, the last of his shop-bought food, and with his back to the city he sat down to eat.

  It was still possible to find work on the land almost all year round: picking daffs began in February, and farms often wanted help with lambing; in summer there was hay to mow and soft fruit to pick – although he hated the polytunnels with their close, stale air. You could usually get work picking apples in September and, later, felling Christmas trees; he had once spent much of December making holly wreaths. But fieldwork was what he loved best, and it was spring: nearly asparagus season. He thought back over the farms he knew, and that knew him: he wanted to keep his head down, didn’t want to sign any papers this time, and that narrowed the options a little.

  He’d set out from Devon in January to walk vaguely north-east. He’d never meant to come to London, but the arrest and the sentence – for breaching an order not to trespass, although all he’d wanted to do was walk an old cart track between villages – had blown him off course.

  Now he decided to keep to the old Roman road north out of the city. Eventually it would take him to a little village called Lodeshill which had four farms with asparagus beds clustered around it. There was one he’d promised himself never to set foot on again, but he felt sure that one of the others would take him on for a few weeks with no questions asked. There was some lovely countryside up that way, quiet and slow and unvisited, and not too busy with day trippers – not like Cumbria or Cornwall. It was an in-between, unpretentious place.

  Apart from the road, the quiet concatenation of the drink inside its can, when he opened it, was the loudest thing Jack could hear. When he had finished he lay back, thankful for having eaten, thankful for the weather, wondering when sleep would come. And then he slept.

  As the sun rose slowly over Jack’s head a hawthorn in the hedge behind him felt the light on its new green leaves and thought with its green mind about blossom.

  2

  Horse chestnuts, swallows, blackthorn (sloe).

  As soon as his wife had left the house Howard went about shutting all the windows. It was a warm day, but not so warm they all needed to be open, and anyway, he couldn’t bear the sound of the road. Flies were getting in, too; he’d swatted one in the kitchen earlier. Kitty would only complain at bedtime, when there were insects in her room.

  It wasn’t the road through Lodeshill he minded; there wasn’t much traffic on that. Why would there be – there was no shop any more, and the Green Man was hardly the type of pub people sought out. Even the church only got a few of the faithful, and those on foot. Kitty one of them now, of course.

  It was the Boundway that bothered him. Straight as a ruler it ran, passing the village less than half a mile away, and the local louts all gunned their muscle cars along it – especially at weekends. You could hear them changing up from miles off, the whine of it; you’d think they’d find a better way to spend their time, but no. Still, he reflected, putting an old Kinks CD on the hi-fi in the living room, it could have been worse: he’d heard that there’d once been quad-bike racing somewhere nearby, though the track had closed down long before they arrived in the village. Et in arcadia arseholes, he thought, and went to the pantry for a drink.

  He knew there was a six-pack of lager left over from the last time their son Chris had visited, but it was a brown ale he was after. He’d need to get plenty of booze in for next month, when their daughter Jenny was flying back from Hong Kong and both kids would be with them for the first time in ages. Vodka for Jenny, he thought. Probably.

  There was no brown ale. Sighing, he turned and climbed the stairs to the radio room; there was a Marconi 264 that wanted a new valve. Downstairs, a bumblebee knocked twice against the kitchen window before lurching away into the warm spring air.

  Most of the time Kitty had the master bedroom to herself; Howard usually slept downstairs, in what had previously been the study. Before they moved to Lodeshill from north London, a year ago, it had only been an occasional thing; now, apart from when the kids visited, he was down on the sofa bed every night. It was something they did not discuss.

  There were three bedrooms upstairs; one was Kitty’s, one had briefly been Jenny’s until she left university, and still was when she visited. The light was good in the third, so when they moved in Howard had taken the old pink carpet up and built a counter around two sides, set his tool chests underneath. Then he bought a craft light and a stool, carried the radios up from the garage – he had just four, then, and one in bits – and got to work. He had thirteen vintage wireless sets now, all pre-war; good working examples, not boot sale stuff. Five more he’d sold or traded. Where do you stop? There were people who had two hundred.

  You could find them easily enough on the Internet, of course, but he felt – obscurely, though with some certainty – that it wasn’t the right way. He went to swap meets and the odd show, but preferred local auctions and private sales to buying from other enthusiasts, despite the extra legwork it entailed. Admittedly, most of what came up that way was rubbish –
either cheap to begin with, bodged about or beyond repair, good only for parts – but not always.

  Word of mouth had got him more than one tidy example: ‘I know a bloke who’ll take that off your hands.’ He had a Ferguson 366 Superhet that was found by a local family in the attic of a house they had just bought; it came to him covered in dust for five quid. The Marconi he was working on now turned up in a barn near Deal, and had barely been touched the cabinet full of mouse shit, the dial clogged with cobwebs and chaff.

  As well as finding them, doing the work himself was what he loved: replacing the knobs, restoring cracked Bakelite, a new valve here and there. He wasn’t an expert, not yet, but he did OK, and his experience with guitars and amps helped. There was something almost magical about taking an old wireless and bringing it back to life: the way they could be woken, no matter what state they were in, to pull living sounds from the air. The lovely old cabinets hiding such comprehensible innards; the simple heft of them in his hands.

  It was gone four when the letter box banged; he was trying to get at the capacitors, deep under a block of resistors, and was working carefully and with minute concentration. He considered ignoring it but it rattled again, followed by the slap of something landing on the mat. After a moment he carefully set down his tools and went downstairs. For God’s sake, a telephone directory. As if anyone used those any more.

  Back upstairs he peered again through the magnifier at the circuit, but found he couldn’t narrow his focus properly, failed to feel again the thread of the stubbornly absent current and its likely pathway and hindrances. He replaced a capacitor, but even as he did so he was remembering knocking on doors after school when he was a child and running away; and he thought, too, of the time he picked May blossom from the churchyard, with its ripe and heady scent, and brought it home to his mother, who had chased him, cursing, from the door. Half a century ago, but still like yesterday. That such moments could remain latent somewhere in the intricate cortices of the brain; that he, not far off sixty years of age now, should still detect their resonance. It was a mystery.