At Hawthorn Time Read online

  He swung the craft light away and stretched his back. A beer before Kitty came home; why not? Not the Green Man, though, with its unfriendly farmers and local doleys; the Bricklayer’s Arms, in Crowmere. It was only ten minutes away, and it was a nice day for a walk. He fetched the paper from the sitting room, switched off the Kinks and set out.

  Lodeshill was barely a village; more a hamlet, really. As well as Manor Lodge there was a grand Elizabethan house with mullioned windows and a box maze at the end of a long private drive; a pretty church, largely overlooked by the ecclesiastical gazetteers; a Georgian vicarage (the vicar himself served several churches, and lived elsewhere); the Green Man; a dozen modern houses of varying quality, and a cul-de-sac of ugly bungalows inhabited mostly by the elderly. What had once been the shop and post office was now a private house, though it still had a red letter box set into one of its stone walls.

  Past the church the houses gave way to fields and the road began to climb gently as it passed the outbuildings of one of the four farms that surrounded Lodeshill. In places the centre of the road was faintly mossy, and here and there was dung, for the most part dry and pressed into the road’s surface by tyres. Bluebells and celandines starred the verges, and the leaves on the blackthorn hedges were very green.

  After a couple of hundred yards Howard turned left onto a footpath that ran through Ocket Wood. The path followed the line of a ditch and bank which had once marked the wood’s boundary, but which the wood itself had at some point in its long history overspilled. It was mostly oak, with some ash, alder and holly, and had been coppiced and felled on a regular cycle since the Dark Ages – though not for a long time now. In medieval times it had supplied the manor house with timber and the villagers with kindling for their fires; their pigs had been turned out in it each year to eat the acorns and mast. Later still it became a gamekeepers’ preserve, the public kept firmly out. Now it was mainly visited by dog walkers, and the understorey had not been cut for years.

  Jenny was always telling them to get a dog; she said the exercise would be good for them. But what his daughter hadn’t yet learned was that there was an age beyond which you stopped really caring about what was good for you – especially if, as in Howard’s case, you’d fucked yourself up pretty comprehensively when you were younger and were just waiting for the damage to become apparent. Now, every year that passed without cancer – or something worse – was a bonus, he told himself. Anyway, here he was, out for a walk. And he did it a couple of times a week. You couldn’t argue with that.

  The Bricklayer’s Arms had been extensively refitted and the inside was all blond wood and chalk boards. Howard leaned on the bar and nodded at the barman, who brought over a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale and a half-pint glass.

  ‘Wife not with you?’ he asked in his cheerful Australian accent. Kitty hated the Bricklayer’s, had only set foot in it once or twice, but it pleased both the barman and Howard to pretend that he was there more often with his wife than without her.

  ‘She’s at the shops,’ Howard replied, the merest hint of an eyebrow standing in for the hackneyed observations about women and shopping which had long since been exhausted between them. In fact, Kitty was not a woman who shopped for pleasure, and Howard had no idea where she had gone. She may well have taken her easel with her; he hadn’t checked.

  With a brief feeling of bleakness, quickly pushed away, he surveyed the available tables before making his way to a seat near the window and opening the newspaper.

  He left just before eight, as the sky outside started to grow dim. If Kitty had been painting she’d not outstay the light, and there was no harm in getting back before her.

  Ocket Wood was a shadowy mass on either side of the footpath, and although he’d only had three bottles of Brown the fact that he couldn’t see much around him made Howard feel drunker than he was. It was association, too, he thought, groping towards the insight; you were supposed to weave home from a pub in the dark, it was ingrained. Not that it was quite dark yet, but still.

  He found, to his surprise, that he still had his empty bottle with him, and with a growing awareness of a need to pee he struck off the path and made for a huge ash stool nearly six feet across, a ring-shaped remnant of a single tree that had been coppiced repeatedly many years before. The new trunks it had sprouted, now ancient themselves, leaned outwards as the crowns competed for light.

  When he got back to the path the image of his piss puddling hotly on the dead leaves between the trunks remained in his mind all the way home, as if spotlit somehow in the otherwise black and secret spinney.

  Kitty’s car was reversed in next to the Audi when he got back, and inside he found her in the sitting room, ironing. ‘Good day?’ he asked, edging past the board and switching the TV on. ‘Gin and tonic?’

  ‘No thanks,’ she replied. ‘Have you been to the pub?’

  ‘I popped in,’ Howard said. ‘Did you paint?’

  ‘No, I went to see Claire. I did tell you.’

  Claire was an artist Kitty had met not long after they’d moved to the area. She exhibited at local galleries and craft shows across the county, pictures of dogs, mostly, and the odd group of cows. She wore copper bracelets on both arms and thick-soled flip-flops that she claimed were the same as going to the gym. Howard disliked her.

  ‘So you did,’ he said neutrally. ‘Are you sure you won’t have a drink?’

  ‘Perfectly sure. There’s a pork pie in the fridge if you want it, and some potato salad. I went to the good butcher’s.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Howard had poured himself a whisky and subsided into a chair, from where he sat flicking irritably through the channels. ‘Christ, there’s never anything on.’

  ‘Switch it off, then,’ Kitty said.

  ‘It’s all bloody repeats,’ he said, before slyly assuming his wife’s long-standing position: ‘I don’t know why we even have one.’

  Kitty didn’t reply.

  Howard was at the fridge door eating the pork pie when Kitty called out to tell him that Jenny had phoned. ‘She asked to speak to you. I told her I thought you were at the pub,’ she said.

  Jenny had a year’s internship at an investment bank in Hong Kong, and although she would be back for a visit in less than three weeks’ time Howard missed her terribly. That Kitty had delayed telling him was, he knew, a kind of subtle revenge for him having gone for a drink. Why it should bother her what he did with his days was beyond him; it wasn’t as though he ever drank to excess. Not any more.

  ‘So how is she?’ he called back carefully from the kitchen.

  ‘She sounded fine.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Despite himself, Howard had drifted through.

  Kitty appeared to relent, and looked round at him where he hovered in the doorway of the sitting room. ‘She said to give you her love.’

  ‘Right.’ Howard looked down. ‘And . . . she’s still coming?’

  ‘As far as I know.’ She turned back to the ironing. ‘I’m doing your shirts, by the way.’

  The pork pie finished, he wiped his hands surreptitiously on his trousers and passed Kitty to reclaim the armchair. ‘Thanks. What are your plans for tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh, I thought I might do a walk. I don’t suppose you’ll want to come.’

  ‘Are you taking your painting things?’

  ‘Just the camera for now. I’ve finished the one of the bluebells, so I’m looking for something new. I want something with a bit more history to it this time. A bit more meaning.’

  Howard grunted, changed the channel on the TV. Since they’d arrived Kitty had thrown herself into local history, and now she was full of facts about local churches and pollard oaks and ruined castles. It was she who had wanted them to retire here; she had spent the last two decades dreaming of a life in the country, and Howard had always known that their life in Finchley wouldn’t be for ever.

  The kids and the business were what had kept them in London. Howard had run a small haulage firm, and for a long t
ime he’d needed to be at the depot every day: managing the drivers and mechanics, purchasing fuel, doing the books and dealing with the day-to-day running of a fleet of lorries, a warehouse and a yard. Once he took on a general manager he could have reduced his hours, true; but he enjoyed it, and by that time the kids were doing their exams, so there was no danger of them moving anyway. Nevertheless, Howard had always known that he was keeping Kitty from what she really wanted, which was something obscure, a connection with place that he found hard to understand. ‘But you were born in Hemel Hempstead,’ he’d said, more than once, as she leafed through the property pages of The Times. ‘You’re not even from the countryside. You’re just picking somewhere pretty out of a hat; you won’t belong there, not properly. You’re a townie, you know, like it or not.’ But she’d just shake her head and look away.

  Chris had taken over the business a year or so before they moved to Lodeshill. He’d worked there for five years at that point, he knew the ropes; it wasn’t complicated, though Howard didn’t tell Kitty that. She’d got serious about house-hunting once Jenny had finally gone to university after her gap year, the family home strange and silent with just the two of them knocking about in it; and when she found Manor Lodge Howard had known, deep down, that he owed her: that despite his affection for their scruffy, gobby corner of north London, their time there was coming to a close. And would it be so bad, a fresh start somewhere new? Without the business to run he could really get into the radios, give it some proper time. And it wasn’t as though he went out much in London any more. He was practically a pensioner, for God’s sake. Not that he felt it.

  The Lodge was very handsome; even he could see that. The previous owner, a Mr Grainger, had sold it to pay for his care fees but prior to that it had formed part of the Manor House’s estate, although these days a conifer belt stood between its back garden and the Manor House’s remaining two acres. It wasn’t as old as the big house, and dated from the time when it was being remodelled; it had probably been intended for guests or, perhaps, the gamekeeper. It was built of warm red brick, with three pointed gables and two sets of ornate chimneys; Virginia creeper covered a third of the facade up to the gable, green in spring but deepening to crimson every autumn before falling away to leave a ghostly tracery on the bricks. Their surveyor had advised them to get it stripped, but Kitty wouldn’t hear of it.

  She had gone to a series of local auctions when they’d first arrived, buying old furniture she wouldn’t have looked twice at in London but which, Howard had to admit, seemed to work here: a Welsh dresser, two battered oak chests, a semicircular hall table with spindly legs. She’d also picked up half a dozen pictures in old-fashioned frames to fill the extra wall space they now had: botanical prints, a county map and an oil painting of someone else’s ancestor who looked down disapprovingly at Howard while they ate. ‘It fits with the house,’ Kitty had said, shrugging. ‘It’s got history.’

  She was right. There was a proper scullery with a chipped butler’s sink, a coal hole with a lead chute cover by the back door and, until they’d had it repainted, a series of marks on the kitchen door showing the heights of what looked like generations of little Graingers – probably including the old man they’d bought the house from. But now it was theirs, and it was clear that Kitty loved it fiercely, and the countryside around it. She was happy now; anyone could see it. It was what she had always wanted.

  Now Howard stood on the drive in the dark, an empty tumbler in one hand, a cigarette in the other, as the parallelogram of yellow light cast on the gravel by her bedroom window disappeared and made the darkness press closer around him. He didn’t smoke any more, not really, but every so often he had one outside, after Kitty had gone to bed; and even without one he liked to come out for a moment in the fresh air before sleep. Now and again as he smoked he could hear the distant whine of a car changing gear far away.

  Did he love it here? He wasn’t sure. Manor Lodge was an achievement, certainly; something to show for all those years building the business up. It was proof that he’d made something of himself: he, Howard Talling, who’d left school with four O levels and had started his career as a jobbing roadie for bands nobody now had even heard of. He thought about the invisible village around him: the old people in their beds; the half-dozen families; the rich people who lived at the Manor House, who nobody ever saw; the unguessable farms. Did they all have a proper reason to be here, more reason than him?

  A breeze drew a sigh from the massed leaves of Ocket Wood, and two hunting bats rode a breath of wind over the house into Lodeshill. Howard saw them flit across the flung stars of the Milky Way above him, their tiny calls, like a wet finger on glass, inaudible to him as he slipped the cigarette butt back into the box and went inside.

  3

  Wild garlic, dog violets, sycamore bud-burst. A cuckoo calling.

  Jack could cover twenty miles in a day when he wanted to, but once he’d left London behind his pace had slowed. He walked the old Roman road north as thousands had before him: Diddakoi, tinkers, prophets, fools; the footsore army of men who once tramped England’s byways looking for work.

  Usually he navigated by a kind of telluric instinct, an obscure knowledge he had learned to call on even when the land he walked through was unfamiliar: the wind on his face; the pull of the water table deep beneath the ground; the change from chalk to greensand to lias under his feet. Yet in the land just north of the capital it was hard to feel those things, though he couldn’t have said why. There were towns in which he could still sense the soil beneath the streets and feel the land’s scars and sly take-backs and reburgeonings; here, though, it was as though the green acres were half mute, and it made him uneasy.

  The road ran like a ruler through paddocks, arable fields and golf courses; from a car it probably looked bucolic, accessible, but in fact every acre was fenced off, divided up, used; it did not welcome walkers, and almost everywhere, apart from the busy road’s wind-thrashed and perilous verges, was private.

  It was trespass that had landed him inside the last time. He’d set out in late January from the farm on the edge of Dartmoor where he’d spent the winter dry stone walling, heading roughly north-east at a slow couple of miles an hour and hoping to bring spring weather with him. The first arrest happened in Somerset as he was crossing what turned out to be some rock star’s estate; the second was in Wiltshire, for damaging a crop – or so they said – and after that it was over and over. He was pretty sure the police in one area had warned the next to look out for him, or maybe word had just spread among the locals – who could say? They cooked up some kind of order in the end, telling him to stay off private property, but it had just made him more determined. Eventually he’d ended up in a magistrates’ court in Berkshire and had been given a four-month sentence, which had been a shock – though he’d only served two.

  He could have made it easy on himself, cooperated with the police, pleaded guilty; he could have agreed to get some of those maps that showed rights of way in green and stuck to them. But there was a principle involved. All he wanted to do was walk the land in which he’d been born, peacefully and subject to no one else, and if you compromised that idea, he thought, you might as well give up.

  Years back he’d lived for a few months in a van belonging to a Marxist called Tommo. The van had been parked up, with a few others, on the derelict forecourt of an old Elf petrol station. Tommo did evening shifts as a pot-washer in the titty bar across the road where the lorries stopped, and Jack had always wondered how he managed to square the cash he took from the bar with the ideals of freedom and equality he’d espoused. He’d talked a lot about land ownership and private property and the Inclosures, and about The Man who kept the English proletariat – by which he mostly meant Jack – down. Passive resistance was what it was all about, he’d said. Eventually Jack had moved on because he couldn’t stand to see the girls come and go; but he still thought of Tommo now and then, and about some of the things he’d said.

 
Jack felt the spring sunshine warm on the back of his neck, felt the beginning of a poem flicker tantalisingly somewhere, just beyond the place where he could think about it. But that was OK, he could wait. Perhaps he would get his notebook out later, if it had shown itself by then.

  Although the Roman road ran, in one form or another, nearly all the way to Lodeshill and its farms, after a couple of miles walking he struck off it, preferring to take his chances on private land again than suffer the lorries’ constant roar at his back. He wasn’t in a rush, and there was more to see that way, anyway: a fugitive stand of wild hops; a thrush’s nest in a hedge with four blue eggs; spoil from a rabbit scrape rich with little shells from deep in the soil. He’d found an arrowhead like that a long time ago, vicious and beautiful; where it was today, though, was anyone’s guess. Perhaps it had found its way into the hands of some policeman’s child after one of his many arrests.

  Jack found it hard to keep track of all the things he owned, although in fact they were very few: his notebooks, two biros, his cooking things, some stones and feathers and a few coins. In prison he’d had nothing, not even the sad, private little collections of matches and sweets and oddments that the other men guarded so jealously, or the curling photographs they stuck to the cell walls with smears of toothpaste. And when he left he hadn’t wanted to keep anything from there, nothing that might bring with it that shut-in, musty smell.

  In one field the young oilseed rape had been decimated by pigeons and slugs, a victim of the wet winter and late spring. In the next, the rows of beans were small for the season, despite the pellets of fertiliser like hailstones in the furrows. A row of pylons strode away from him, their cables slack in the sunshine, and the shadows of hobby aircraft raced across the soil, their whine drowning out the wrens and great tits singing in the thickets and raising Jack’s hackles as he walked.