Three
The following morning, after seeing Peter start work on the scaffold, Kate accepted Angela’s offer of a lift into the village and went to see Alec Braithewaite.
It was a cold, clear day, the grass around the headstones rimed with frost. A trail of muddy, trampled snow led up to the rectory door. She rang the bell and heard it clang deep inside the house, a vast, draughty Georgian mausoleum of a place. She wondered why Alec didn’t protest to the bishop and insist on being given somewhere more sensible to live. Justine was only left at home because the wretched glandular fever had kept her back for an extra year, and Kate found it impossible to imagine what it would be like for one person living here alone.
Justine’s mother, Victoria, had left eight years ago, in a scandal that rocked the parish, though as far as Kate knew no other man had been involved. Alec, pursuing her down the garden path, was supposed to have asked, as she heaved her suitcases into the waiting taxi, ‘Is there anybody else?’
‘Yes!’ Victoria had roared, at the top of her voice for the whole village to hear. ‘Me.’
Angela deplored this behaviour, which she regarded as unforgivably selfish. Kate secretly applauded. Everybody had thought that Alec would leave the parish as soon as another living could be found, but he’d elected to stay, mainly for Justine’s sake – the local girls’ high school had an excellent reputation and Justine had been very happy there. But she’d now left school, and Alec still showed no inclination to move on, though he often talked wistfully about his desire to do more obviously valuable work in some inner-city parish. Like opening his door in the middle of the night to kids off their heads on crack, Kate thought. He was probably safer here. She rang the bell again. The last time she’d spoken to him about his plans he’d seemed to feel guilty that his life had settled into an undemanding groove, ministering to the spiritual needs of what Angela called ‘green-wellie Christians’ – weekenders who wouldn’t have dreamt of attending church in the city, but who in the country dropped in to morning service on their way to the Rose and Crown, as if – Angela again – God was thrown in as a job lot with Labradors and waxed jackets.
There were the locals, of course, but they turned up only two or three times a year: Easter, perhaps, Harvest Festival and the Christmas carol service. All dates at or near the main pagan festivals, as Alec cheerfully pointed out. She rang the bell again, thinking she might as well be waiting for some little Victorian maid ninety years dead to get up from her grave and answer the door.
Instead she heard the slap of bare feet on lino. A disgruntled voice called, ‘All right. I’m coming.’
The door opened and there was Justine, flushed from sleep, big-breasted inside a too-tight Snoopy T-shirt, yawning, showing the pink cavernous interior of her mouth as uninhibitedly as a cat. ‘Dad’s in the church, I think. Do you want to come in and wait?’
Looking at Justine’s bare feet on the coconut mat, Kate said, ‘No, it’s OK, thanks. I’ll have a walk across.’
She trod carefully across the cattle grid at the entrance to the churchyard – put in, at some expense, to contain the sheep – clinging to the railings because there was nowhere to put her stick. She missed the mournful clanking of the sheep’s bells as they moved between the graves. Slowly, carefully, up the path, one step at a time. It was a struggle to turn the iron ring and push the heavy door open. That didn’t bode well – she must be weaker than she thought. She shuffled, in her new three-legged state, into the cold, hassock-smelling interior, with its fugitive glints of multicoloured light on the stone flags.
Alec was kneeling at the altar rail. He didn’t look round as she closed the door quietly behind her.
A sulky central-heating system, just turned off after Holy Communion, distributed the smell of warm dust evenly around the church, without making any noticeable difference to the temperature. Shivering, she looked up at the crucifix above the chancel arch and beyond that at the rose window: Christ in Majesty, surrounded by concentric circles of apostles, angels, prophets, patriarchs and saints. At the moment she hated all representations of Christ, impartially and with great venom. If they were good, they underlined the folly of her thinking that she had anything new to contribute to a tradition that had lasted 2,000 years. If they were bad – like the painting in the Lady Chapel of Christ in a chiffon nightie, its diaphanous folds failing to hide the fact that there was nothing to hide – they seemed to invite her mockingly to add to their number.
She tiptoed down the aisle, away from Alec, who had still not looked up, and concentrated on the engravings of Green Men that decorated the roof bosses. What faces: savage, angry, tormented, desperate, sly, desolate. She’d noticed them first at Ben’s funeral and had been paying them regular visits ever since. Images of the Green Man were everywhere these days. A secular world sifting through pagan images, like a rag-and-bone man grubbing about for something – anything – of value. A symbol of renewal, people said, but only because they didn’t look. Some of these heads were so emaciated they were hardly more than skulls. Others vomited leaves, their eyes staring, panic-stricken above the choking mouth. No, she thought, wincing with pain as she craned to look at them, they were wonderfully done – some anonymous craftsman’s masterwork – but they were figures of utter ruin.
Looking up like this made her go dizzy. The faces filled her whole field of vision, a horde of goblins. Alec came up behind her, and she was glad to hold on to him and close her eyes until the walls stopped spinning.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine. I just went a bit dizzy.’
‘Oh, you were looking at the Green Men?’
‘They’re supposed to be symbols of rebirth, but actually if you look at them they’re quite horrible.’
‘I think it’s part of the cult of the head. Did you know the Celts used to cut off the heads of their enemies and stuff the mouths with green leaves?’
‘No, I didn’t. Not particularly optimistic, then?’
‘Not if it was your head.’
She smiled. ‘I really only popped in to thank you for sending Peter Wingrave round.’
‘Oh, he came to see you?’
‘Yes, last night.’
‘And you took him on?’
‘My dear, I jumped at him. He’s there now, putting up scaffolding.’
‘That’s good. You’re looking a lot better, Kate.’
‘I feel better.’ They sat in the pew behind the hymn and prayer book stand. ‘Have you known him long?’
‘Quite a while. Seven years, something like that. But not continuously. He’s travelled around quite a bit.’ He seemed to be debating whether to say more. ‘He’s an interesting person. I think you’ll like him.’
‘Why gardening, though? I mean, he’s got a degree.’
‘Plenty of graduate gardeners, Kate.’
That wasn’t fair. She wasn’t being snobbish about gardeners, she was saying, Yes, but something’s not right, something doesn’t fit, and she felt Alec had understood that perfectly well and decided not to acknowledge it.
‘We were very happy with him,’ he said. ‘The parish council. If we can’t get any more sheep, we’d certainly use him again.’
‘That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. Second choice after the sheep?’
‘We don’t have to pay the sheep.’
‘Do you think you will get some more?’
Alec shook his head. ‘I just don’t know. You notice the farmers aren’t restocking?’
Kate remembered men in white decontamination suits chasing squealing sheep around the graveyard. They’d been sent to the pyre at Ravenscroft Farm. Kate had stood with Angela, whose precious boys had been destroyed in the same cull, on a hill not far away from the farm and watched the fire burn. Clouds of foul-smelling black smoke had obscured the setting sun. The pitiful legs of cows and sheep stuck up from the mound of corpses and rubber tyres. A stench of rotting flesh drifted towards them over the valley, scraps of burnt hair and skin whirle
d into the air. Kate put her arm around Angela’s shoulders and was trying to persuade her to leave, when a flake of singed cowhide landed on her lower lip, and she spat and clawed at her mouth to get the taste away.
Alec was staring at her. She realized she must have been silent for too long. ‘I was thinking about Angela’s boys.’
‘Oh, yes. Thomas, William, Rufus…’
‘And Harry.’
‘And Harry. I knew there was another.’
‘I wish she’d get herself some more.’
Alec raised his eyebrows. ‘You think she needs sheep?’
‘You can’t buy people.’
‘You don’t need to buy people.’
They were getting into one of those conversations that threatened to become pastoral, and as always Kate avoided going any further. ‘I’d better be going. Angela’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’
The door creaked open, letting a shaft of sunlight fall across the stone floor, and Angela appeared. She blushed when she saw Alec, though she saw him at every service – Holy Communion, Matins, Evensong, she was never away. The three of them chatted for a while, then Kate thanked him again and watched him walk down the aisle, genuflect in front of the altar – a bit more of an effort these days, she noticed, he held on to a choir stall to lever himself up again – and stride off into the vestry.
Angela went ahead to get the car. She’d parked outside the chemist’s, she said, and that was too far for Kate to walk. Kate followed more slowly, testing the rubber tip of her stick on patches of ice. Alec hadn’t been particularly informative about Peter, but in a way she didn’t mind that. The closer Peter came to being simply a pair of hands, the better she’d be pleased.
At the gate she turned and looked across to Ben’s grave. The air was iron cold and still. She would never, never, never be able to accept his death, and she didn’t try. This wasn’t an illness she would recover from; it was an amputation she had to learn to live with. There was a great and surprising peace in acknowledging this.
She took a deep breath, wondering if she could possibly walk as far as the grave, but then Angela called her name, and she limped across the cattle grid and down the grass verge to the car.
Four
On Stephen Sharkey’s last night in London he went to the leaving party he hadn’t wanted to have, and ended up getting thoroughly drunk.
He woke at five the next morning with a mouth like a dustbin, and had to ferret around with his tongue to work up some spit before he felt human enough to stagger into the bathroom. One look in the mirror said it all. Lids crusted, eyelashes matted, the whites of his eyes criss-crossed with red veins, a Martian landscape. Contact lenses left in. After several painful attempts he managed to get them out.
He forced himself through washing and shaving, made coffee, ate two slices of dry toast for breakfast, then started to pack. He had a busy morning ahead of him, seeing his solicitor, then his publisher, and he couldn’t possibly do either looking like this.
On his way to the first appointment he stopped at a chemist’s, bought eyedrops and selected one of the few pairs of sunglasses they had in the shop. He looked, he thought, peering at himself in the mirror above the display stand, like a soon-to-be divorced, almost middleaged man, sweaty, frightened, uncool and desperate to prove he could still pull. Which, he informed his reflection waspishly, is exactly what you are.
By two o’clock he was on the train to Newcastle. He slept intermittently, woke, watched the backs of other people’s houses rush past, then travelled two hours through a rain-sodden landscape. Ploughed fields with flooded furrows like striations of sky. Once they stopped in the middle of nowhere, and a herd of cows came trudging over to the fence and stared at the train, chewing, in a mist of their own breath.
At the station he lugged his cases on to the platform and stood with them, one on either side, like inverted commas, he thought, drawing attention to the possible invalidity of the statement they enclose. Invalid, or invalid, whichever way you cared to pronounce it, that was how he felt. A man who’d sacrificed his marriage to his career, and, now that the marriage was over, had turned his back on the career as well. Stop beating yourself up, he told himself, shifting from foot to foot, but it was hard not to. He felt anxious, but that was partly the drink. If this cottage turned out to be too claustrophobic – too close to Robert, in other words – he could easily find somewhere else to live. And he wasn’t going to starve. He had a network of contacts. If the book took longer than three months to write, he could keep himself going on freelance work.
No sign of Robert. Just as Stephen was thinking he’d have to find a phone – he’d forgotten to charge his mobile just as he’d forgotten to take his contact lenses out – he caught sight of him, threading his way across the crowded concourse with that hospital doctor’s disguised run of his.
Striding towards Stephen, Robert opened his arms. They embraced, awkwardly, their preconceptions of each other failing to accommodate the reality of muscle and bone.
Robert held him at arm’s length, wincing and throwing his head back – a comment on the sunglasses.
Stephen took them off and ogled him.
‘Oh, my God, you look like a terrorist.’ He picked up one of the cases. ‘I’m parked just outside.’
Stephen followed him out of the station, head down into an icy wind that snatched the breath from his mouth. His trousers, too thin for the weather, flattened against his shins.
‘What you going to do for a car while you’re here?’ Robert asked, as he unlocked his own.
‘Buy one.’
‘Nerys got yours?’
‘Yup. To be fair she used it more than I did.’
Robert settled himself into the driving seat, hauling the belt across his chest. ‘How are you?’
‘Tired.’
‘Hung over.’
‘And tired.’
Robert turned the heater on, and within a few seconds Stephen felt himself start to grow drowsy. Blinking hard, he opened the window and gulped the moist air.
‘So that’s it, then?’ Robert said.
‘Yeah, that’s it. Last assignment.’
‘And you actually mean it this time?’
‘I’ve handed in my resignation.’
‘Because last time –’
‘It’s the same as any other business, Robert. You get typecast. When I got back from Afghanistan, I said, Right, that’s it, finished. I don’t want to do it any more. And everybody said, Right, fine. No problem. And the next thing I knew I was being measured for another flak jacket.’
Robert was smiling. ‘You could’ve refused.’
‘Yeah, if I didn’t mind not working.’
‘And where’s the flak jacket now?’
‘I don’t know. On a peg somewhere.’
‘Waiting to be worn.’
‘No.’ Stephen’s face felt numb as if he’d just come out of the dentist’s. He rubbed his cheeks and shivered inside the too-thin jacket. ‘How’s the family?’
‘Fine. Beth’s a lot happier now she’s got somebody reliable to look after Adam.’ He braked, drove slowly through a huge puddle, water curling up on either side of the car. ‘God help us if this lot freezes.’
Looking out over the sodden fields, Stephen was aware of winter in a way that he almost never was in London. There was a rhythmic squeal as the windscreen wipers swept to and fro, creating triangles on the mudspattered glass. Robert pulled out to overtake, and for a second the windscreen was blind, marbled with flung spray. Stephen made himself keep quiet, remembering how competitive they’d been as boys, how furious Robert had been when Stephen passed his driving test first time. Robert had managed it only at the second attempt.
‘So you’re definitely out of it?’
Why did everybody find it so hard to believe? ‘Yeah.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Fine. It’s the right time.’ Actually, he thought, not fine. More like an unshelled nut lying on the ground,
any hope of future germination a lot less convincing than the prospect of being snuffled up by a passing pig. ‘Anyway, that’s enough about me and my problems. How are you?’
‘Fine.’
He hoped Robert’s ‘fines’ were a bit more honest than his, otherwise the whole bloody family was up the creek. But Robert was all right, of course he was. You only had to look at him – happiness and success oozing from every pore.
‘I’ve just applied for a research grant of three million pounds.’
‘What for?’
‘Possible treatments for Parkinson’s and dementia.’
When Stephen didn’t immediately reply, he added, with a slight edge, ‘I’m afraid my line of work’s a bit less glamorous than yours.’
Stephen was wondering if Robert had as many doubts about the coming weeks of proximity as he had himself. They’d never been close, even as boys, and since their mother’s death had met only at weddings and funerals. And yet, when he had rung Robert and told him his marriage was over and he needed somewhere to live, Robert offered the cottage, immediately, without hesitation. Shared genes, Robert would have said. The biological basis for altruism.
They were driving by the side of a lake, its water pockmarked by falling rain. A moorhen picked its way across the boggy ground and disappeared into the shadow of some willows whose bare branches overhung the water. Beyond the lake an immense dark stain of forest spread over the hillside. As they came closer, he could see that it was already dark beneath the trees, and would have been darkish even at noon. No life on the forest floor, or none that he could discern, though a sign warned of deer crossing. At intervals along the road there were small, crushed bundles of flesh and fur: rabbits, mainly, but here and there the gleaming iridescent plumage of a pheasant.
‘Carnage,’ Robert said. ‘The speed people drive through here. They’ve only got to hit a deer and it’d be the end of them.’