That evening, Teresa serves roast lamb, followed by fruit salad. They eat in the kitchen. World’s End blinks and hums around them, its appliances in fine fettle. Outside, there is quiet. Just the sound of the wind in the hedge and, if you listen hard, the distant murmur of traffic on the main road. By the time they reach the cheese course Maurice has opened a third bottle of wine.
Teresa is wearing what she has worn all day (the shoulder of her shirt is dappled with food stains – evidence of Luke). So do the men. Pauline has put on a different sweater. Carol has changed into cream silk pants with loose apricot tunic top and a pair of hanging silver disc earrings. Her face is tinged with pink. James, looking at her fondly across the table, says, ‘You’ve caught the sun, you know.’
‘I meant to. That’s what you come to the country for, isn’t it?’
‘This is a great place,’ says James to Pauline. ‘How long have you been here?’
Pauline tells how she acquired World’s End, ten years ago. Hitherto, the conversation has centred upon Maurice’s book. Maurice has been entertaining about some of the issues raised. He has been quizzical and provocative about his exhaustive examination of contemporary museum strategy. There has been an animated discussion about what the book should be called – Profit from the Past is the putative title right now, apparently.
‘I aspire to somewhere like this,’ says James. ‘You don’t know if it’s summer or winter, stuck in London all the year round.’
‘Ah,’ says Maurice. ‘Interesting.’ He gives James a thoughtful look. ‘You feel better in the country, then?’
‘Well, yes – of course.’
‘Why?’
‘Fresh air,’ says James. ‘Space. All that.’
‘Closer to nature?’
James is wary now. ‘If you want to put it like that. Surely most people feel that way, at some point or another?’
‘Of course,’ says Maurice. ‘We all do. Deep conditioning. Centuries of cunning sales talk, from Chaucer to Wordsworth.’
Carol laughs appreciatively. James looks a trifle put out. He helps himself to another glass of wine and says he’s glad to hear he’s not the only one to have been sold the natural scene, and he’d still fancy a place like this if it came his way.
‘Tedious stuff, nature,’ says Maurice. ‘A process of weary repetition. The ultimate conservatism.’ He is a little drunk, Pauline realizes. Nothing unusual. Maurice drinks a fair amount, fairly often.
Carol laughs again. ‘That’s original.’ She too is perhaps a little tipsy. She is enjoying herself, anyway, that is clear.
‘No,’ says Pauline. ‘It’s been said before. Anti-romanticism, that’s all.’
‘You’re a rotten cynic, Maurice,’ says James amiably. He seems to have recovered his good humour, if it was ever really lost.
Teresa now turns from the sink, where she has been stacking plates. ‘Maurice is showing off, I’ll have you know. He woke me up this morning to tell me to listen to the cuckoo.’ There is an uncharacteristic asperity here, both in tone and content. Only Maurice and Pauline are aware of this. Maurice appears uninterested. Pauline takes note.
‘Ooh … you fraud, Maurice,’ says Carol.
Maurice grins – undismayed, it would seem. He drinks some wine, and looks around the table. ‘Everyone all set for Bradley Castle tomorrow?’
‘Definitely,’ says Carol. ‘It sounds hilarious. Can we go to the Medieval Feast?’
‘Only available on Saturday nights, alas,’ says Maurice. ‘We shall have to make do with the Robin Hood Experience. Ten o’clock start, Pauline?’
‘No thanks,’ says Pauline firmly. She rises. ‘I have other things in mind, I’m afraid – you’ll have to excuse me. And I’m off to bed now. Goodnight, all.’
Outside, she pauses for a moment on the track. It is a fine night, with a quarter moon hanging above the hill – insubstantial, like a scrap of paper. At various points the blue-black sky flames with orange, just above the horizon, marking the nearest centres of population. World’s End itself stands amid the dark mass of the fields, glowing with light, incandescent, inviting. There is no other light to be seen, except the occasional moving beam from the road. Pauline goes inside and locks her door.
When first she began to use the cottage, at weekends and for holidays, she was a little worried about the isolation. So far, the only intrusion has been the theft of a lawnmower from the outside shed when Pauline was absent. The thieves were presumably deterred from having a go at World’s End itself by the prominently displayed burglar alarm which links the cottages to the police station. The police attributed the theft dismissively to local boys, and the shed is now kept padlocked.
The burglar alarm often surprises visitors, fresh from the perils of the inner city. ‘Here?’ they say, looking round at the placid landscape. There is an assumption that tranquillity of scene must reflect a comparable muting of criminal propensities. Presumably they expect the occasional outbreak of apple scrumping, to be dealt with by a village bobby on a bike. The countryside, for some, is still locked into a time warp, a benign nirvana of eternal summer in which you might come across a party of hikers in shorts having a picnic by a haystack, under the blue skies and puffy clouds of a Shell poster.
Maurice, of course, pounces with glee on such nostalgic misconceptions. His concern though is with the fostering of such mythologies in the interests of commercial exploitation. Pauline is more taken with the gulf between the image of the country and the actuality, perhaps always more startling to those who live there for the wrong reasons, themselves duped by the truth. The countryside is a landscape of mayhem, and always has been – a place in which birds and animals are being shot, strangled, chased or dug up and bashed to bits. The countryside is deeply traditional, as is well known, and these are the deep traditions. One can of course be thankful that nowadays beggars are no longer dying in ditches or foundlings being abandoned in churchyards. Inhumanity flourishes still, but at least there is official mitigation of conspicuous distress. Even the hunted foxes and the battered badgers have their lobby, for what it’s worth.
On Saturday nights the local young go marauding in the agreeable centre of Hadbury – ‘… no. 14 High St (now Barclays Bank) of mid 18c, with handsome portico, the Ship Inn late 17c with mullioned windows and some pargeted plasterwork …’: Pevsner. Mainly they smash car windows and throw beer cans at shop fronts. Last month a posse of youths intent upon destroying the façade of the Co-op with a hammer were interrupted by a sixty-one-year-old man who was unwise enough to remonstrate with them. Affronted, the lads turned the hammer on him instead. He was beaten unconscious and remains in hospital with fractured skull and multiple injuries.
Pauline reads of such things in the local paper, alongside accounts of school fêtes and wrangles about planning permissions. A photo of laughing toddlers in the paddling pool donated by the Rotary Association is lined up beside another of the heap of compacted metal which records the latest pileup on the main road which runs through the valley – the World’s End valley, the valley of the wheat field and the hill crowned by a line of trees. The road is an old road with single lanes, too narrow for the volume of traffic it now carries, traffic heading north for such places as Birmingham and Coventry as well as the vehicles of local residents like Chaundy, making his way from one industrial enterprise to another, or Pauline, heading for Hadbury to do her shopping. Tourist coaches ply the road, going to Stratford. The ranks of heads swivel as the coach passes through the valley, its occupants riding high above the landscape that they observe through tinted glass from their air-conditioned container. And what do they see? A landscape that is beautiful? Or quaint? Or merely alien? Is their attention seized by buildings, or the crops grown, or the names on road signs or the logo of the Happy Eater on the roundabout?
Pauline has lived in many places. She does not consider herself as deriving from anywhere in particular. Her voice does not define her, as it defines many of the people in these parts. She gr
ew up on the south coast, at Worthing, where her father had a medical practice. Subsequently, she has lived where circumstances have taken her. A northern university. A job in Manchester. During the Harry years she was in the south again, living in the cathedral town which found itself host to one of the new universities of the day, at which Harry was a rising star. Harry was in the right trade at the right time. Academia had become fashionable all of a sudden. The academic was no longer a shabby figure, respectable and profoundly tedious, but a bright and brittle fellow beloved of the media, game for television discussion programmes and swingeing pieces in Sunday newspapers. The student was born, as opposed to the undergraduate. And Harry was the man to seize the moment. He revelled in it. He was in demand everywhere. His particular line of popular history struck a fashionable note. The Americans got to hear of him – there was a sabbatical term at Harvard, jaunts to conferences in California. He played the system, juggled with job offers, and swarmed the promotional ladder. Senior Lecturer, Reader, Professor at thirty-eight.
And thus Pauline has learnt to acclimatize, to live in a leafy suburb or a city street, to up sticks and move on when need arises. She has preferred some homes to others, but is not fettered by bricks and mortar. She now divides her time between her London flat and World’s End, suiting inclination and convenience. She can work from either place, with equal ease.
She thinks about all this, lying in bed waiting for sleep, a little too keyed up by wine and talk. She thinks of the anachronistic shell around her, the accommodating stone which slips imperviously from century to century. She thinks of all those others who must have sought sleep in this room – or fell into it, most likely, clobbered by toil. It is midnight, and she is restless, thinking no longer of the place or the people but stirred by something nameless, some apprehension she could not possibly identify. She switches on her bedside lamp, and the room is filled and warmed by its dusky light. She turns on the radio: the newsreader is talking of events in India, in the United States, in the Philippines. The world is at her fingertips, here at World’s End. She can sense it, reaching away out there, in darkness and in light, empty spaces and seething cities, all of it talking, talking.
Once, in another time, she drove across the United States with Harry. The trip seemed to go on for weeks. Now, it is reduced in her head to conflicting impressions of space and intimacy. The infinite horizons and that endless road vanishing beneath the bonnet of the car, sliding up once more in the rear-view mirror. The car itself, bulbous and finned, an exotic monster. The blanket of trees in New England, wheat fields the size of an English county, canyons, mountains. The faces and voices of people in motels and petrol stations. The car radio was their lifeline, their access to this astounding and mysterious place through which they crept. Its voices sang and babbled hour after hour, seeming outrageous, sophisticated, absurd and unreachable. They felt as though they had arrived on another planet. Pauline was twenty-two. Harry was a year older, working on his doctorate, heady with achievement and ambition. Each night they fell on to the bed in sleazy motel rooms and made ferocious love. Pauline would wake to stifling dawns on mangled sheets that reeked of sex, hearing bizarre bird sounds from beyond the window. At three o’clock one morning, somewhere in Colorado, Harry said, ‘We’ll get married in the autumn, shall we?’ He lay smoking a post-orgasmic cigarette, his hand resting friendly on her crotch. ‘I’m crazy about this country,’ he said. ‘One day I’m going to fetch up here, for keeps.’
Pauline switches off the Radio Four news and extinguishes the world. Now she is alone again with the sounds of the night – the distant rumble of an aircraft, the wind in the apple trees. She consigns Harry to another night in Colorado, more than thirty years ago. She hears a window open next door – someone else is awake, restless.
5
‘The Robin Hood Experience was really stupid,’ says Teresa. ‘You walked through this wood and people in fancy dress kept bobbing up among the trees and shooting arrows at each other.’
‘Do they hit?’
‘Oh, no. And anyway they weren’t proper arrows. James picked one up and it had a rubber tip. There were horses, too. Luke enjoyed that. Maurice loved it, of course.’
‘From a scholarly point of view, presumably?’
‘Oh yes. He’s doing a whole section on these over-the-top tourist places.’
Pauline and Teresa are driving to Hadbury. Teresa needs a sun hat for Luke and some household things. Pauline must stock up on fax paper. She wants also to replace a cracked glass shelf in her bathroom cabinet and to buy a new toaster. Hadbury will supply all these requirements. Luke has fallen conveniently asleep in his car seat as they move from the World’s End track to the main road and thence past the cornfields and the sprout fields and the oilseed rape and the ochre stretches of set-aside, the villages and the petrol stations and the Happy Eaters until at last they reach the maze of roads and road signs that indicate that they have arrived at the market town.
Hadbury is held in a vice of ring roads, bypasses and industrial estates. In the centre of this expansive layout – roundabouts, dual carriageways and an acreage of tarmac – crouches the town itself, with its market cross, its two churches and its high street of prosperous eighteenth-century houses, most of them now doing duty as banks or building societies. This nucleus is quite eclipsed by a satellite empire, tidily signposted at each outlying roundabout: Willow Way Industrial Estate, Oxpens Hypermarket, Meadowlands Trading Estate. Plenty of room out here – a glittering savannah of car parks, encircled by ranch-emporia. Tesco, Allied Carpets, Comet, Homecare. It is as though the original town were now protectively encased within this cordon sanitaire of commerce, preserved as a curiosity though patently long past its sell-by date.
It is for this discredited centre that Pauline heads, ignoring the allure of the tarmac savannahs. She achieves a parking space. Luke is decanted from the car, put into his buggy, and they set off for Businesslines and Mothercare, both of which are slotted into the redevelopment of the Buttermarket. Hadbury is active, even on this Monday morning. The pedestrian precinct at its heart is busy with people – most of them women, most of them young, many of them pushing a buggy. Pauline and Teresa fit nicely; there are similar groups all around – mother, daughter and small child out shopping. Babies and toddlers on all sides – lolling asleep under sun canopies, gazing regal from frilled pillows, lurching along the pavement or carried in slings.
‘I thought there was supposed to be a fertility problem these days,’ says Pauline.
Teresa agrees that this is not evident in Hadbury. ‘Maybe the country’s different.’
‘Ah,’ says Pauline. ‘Urban blight again.’
For something has happened to reproduction, it seems. The sperm count of the European male has significantly declined. Young women no longer conceive as a result of one kind look. Or some young women don’t. Teresa’s friends sail childless through their twenties and then fly into a panic as they hit thirty. Their child-bearing years are ebbing away and now that they are good and ready nothing happens. They fail to get pregnant, month by month. It is all the fault of the pill, apparently. The great good pill, which has bared its teeth and turned nasty on the women it once saved.
Listen, Pauline says to Teresa and her friends, you think you’ve got problems? What do you imagine it was like for us? Always in a stew about getting pregnant. Checking your pants every half hour if your period was a day overdue. And then the pill came along and straight away they start muttering that it’ll give you blood clots and you’ll die at forty. So you’ve got to choose between babies or an early death. Some of us have never taken the pill.
And they look at her blankly. The climate of anxiety is as fickle as sartorial fashion, she sees. They cannot know about the freight that word once carried. Pregnant. To be spoken fearfully to a girlfriend. Confessed to a parent. Owned up to at clinics and doctors’ surgeries. If these young women are pregnant they say so, loud and clear. It is a physical condition, not a state of
mind.
She says to Harry, ‘I’m pregnant.’
He looks at her. She cannot tell from his expression what he thinks or feels. She could have been announcing that she was off out to the corner shop.
‘You’re pregnant?’ he says. ‘Well, well, well. What happened?’
They have been married for eleven months.
‘What happened! What on earth do you mean?’
‘You’ve been using a diaphragm, haven’t you?’
She stares at him. She realizes that she is talking about one thing and he about another.
‘They sometimes fail, don’t they?’ she says. ‘Eighty per cent reliable, that’s all.’
‘So …’ says Harry. ‘Surprise, surprise.’ He reaches for the coffee pot, fills his cup, waves the pot questioningly over hers.
After a moment she says, ‘I’m having a baby, Harry. A child.’
Teresa is manoeuvring the buggy through the open doors of Mothercare. They move amid a forest of tiny garments – Babygros striped like rugby shirts, miniature boiler suits, doll-size anoraks and parkas. Infancy is a serious matter, today. Beyond are thickets of equipment – cots and buggies and high chairs and playpens.
‘And another thing,’ says Pauline. ‘What’s become of abortionists? There’s a whole profession been wiped out. They were everywhere, time was.’
Teresa has paused to inspect a display of sun hats. She shoots Pauline a reproving glance. A Hadbury granny is observing them through a rack of minute trainers.
Pauline lowers her voice a notch. ‘There were two kinds. There were cheapo ones who hung out in flats south of the river or semis in Enfield or Hackney. Cheap and nasty, you took your life in your hands. Anyone who possibly could – who could scrape together a hundred pounds or more – went to one of the bent doctors. Brass plate and a West End address. A hundred pounds was a hell of a lot of money, then. The world was full of people running around desperately trying to raise a hundred quid. Cash, on the spot, in pound notes in a plain envelope. Hand it to the receptionist when you arrive.’