Villager, page 14
By contrast, she sometimes felt she knew too little about him. His attitude was that his previous relationships had no place here in the present. They were like statues from previous centuries: they had been erected for old reasons, in a different cultural and political climate, and you wouldn’t want to drag them to a new place and erect them for the same reasons now. She accepted his reasoning, even though it meant she had to guess at some of the shapes of who he was and what was behind them. She knew he was northern, like her, but his northernness was more of a rumour embedded deep in him: seven years living up in Southport, from birth. She knew he liked wood and worked with it but it was only when she asked him what the strange T-shaped object with the redundant rusty hinge in the window of the upstairs toilet was that she knew he made things for his own pleasure out of it, too: useful things, like lamp bases and mirrors and coat racks, but truly odd things too, things from another dimension. She knew the job he’d lost the winter he met her had been as a lecturer in Film, but it wasn’t until they’d been together for close to two years that she discovered he also used to go into London to review movies for a magazine, one she used to buy.
‘No way! I probably read your stuff!’ she said.
‘Oh dear,’ he replied. ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that.’
He talked about the jaded newspaper critics at the screenings in Soho who would sigh and say ‘Oh, not another film’ as if they were stacking corned beef on supermarket shelves rather than being employed to do something others gladly handed over their wages to do every weekend, and about the quite famous one who fell asleep on Bob’s shoulder, and about the time Bob invited his music journalist friend Martin to a screening and Martin turned up late, still drunk from the night before, and, struggling to adjust his vision to the dark screening room, sat on the lap of a well-known radio presenter, spilling the presenter’s yoghurt, or was it ice cream. There were usually sandwiches and crisps laid on by the PR companies before the screenings but the famous radio presenter always brought his own yoghurt or ice cream tub and noisily lapped up the contents before the film started.
‘You don’t mean Irish Martin who lives in Barnstaple? The one you said you never see any more because he’s a recluse and just stays in his room meditating and chanting all day?’
‘Yes. That Martin. He’s not Irish, he just kind of… seems it. We met in London. He used to get me into gigs for free. He’s… different now. He wrote some books. He hasn’t been able to get most of them published, though.’
When Sally looked at the facts of Bob from a distance – the north-west childhood, the brief media career, the love of wood, the uncomplaining ability to be outdoors in all weathers, the grumpy resistance to change, the attentiveness to everything she taught him, the skill with his hands, the inability to detect when washed clothes were dry with those very same hands – it never seemed to quite make sense. But when he was in front of her, as Bob, real lumpy three-dimensional Bob, he made total sense. Nothing had ever made more sense to her. The following year – the first of the pandemic years – they decided she would move in to the river house with him. The national lockdowns gave them the extra nudge they needed. That, and the day a man who had asked her to tune an early 1900s Broadwood accidentally locked her in his house when he went out to work and Bob had to drive over and rescue her. Not that she needed a hero, but she looked at him a bit differently after that day, felt she was standing half a stride closer to him. In the car on the way home, she noticed a shard of glass was still sticking out of the t-shirted arm he’d used to smash the window. She carefully picked it out as he steered. She said the living room with the piano had been full of clocks, all set to different times, and their chiming had made tuning almost impossible. ‘Still,’ she said. ‘At least I got to work on a Broadwood. Those things are rare.’ He said they used the wire from them to make planes in the First World War. ‘Now how in god’s name did you know that?’ she asked. He told her he’d read it in one of her books one time when she was asleep.
She brought her piano with her to Bob’s. The removal men managed to get it in through the doors of the small light room on the end of the house nearest the lane without anybody wanting to murder anyone with knives, and there it would have to stay, which meant the room couldn’t be used for much else, but that was fine, because there were more places to sit, especially now she’d brought her furniture with her. Outside the world seemed to be ending. That’s what people kept saying. In less than a year ‘dystopian’ had become such an overused word to have been rendered near-meaningless. Early hopes when the pandemic first hit that nature was ‘healing’ had turned on their head and it appeared that in fact the virus was on the side of greed and destruction after all, annihilating all that was small and true and firming up the grip megalomaniacs and madmen had on the planet, in an attempt to push us more quickly towards the abyss. Social fissures spread out in all sorts of unanticipated ways. Making snap judgements online about the lives and personalities of people you’d never met had already been a fashionable form of stupidity for quite some time, but now it became an international sport. Fear leaked while people weren’t looking, crept through tiny gaps under doors and puddled. ‘It’s scary out there,’ people said. ‘Stay safe.’ But much of the time it felt like the problem wasn’t out there at all, it was in there, in the screens that everybody carried with them everywhere they went and nobody could stop looking at. Out there, David Cavendish had let twenty-four new sheep graze the field over the river. Out there, in the sky above the combe, there were marsh harriers and deer. When Sally and Bob stepped out onto the balcony and looked into the water, they did not see disposable masks and hand sanitiser bottles floating over the rocks. The air felt clear and quick and kept both of them looking six and a half years younger than they were. At night, during the hard pandemic winter, when everything accelerated, they did shiftwork spooning each other – four minutes each, then the changeover – and got no firsthand experience of the ache for physical affection that was pulsating in the chest of unattached people the world over, spreading like a pandemic within a pandemic. They existed in a little bubble of OK, and, as guilty as they felt about that, knowing the really calamitous state of everything, they protected the bubble fiercely, and would not have wished to be anywhere beyond it.
And now it was twenty-two years later and she was two years in the grave – or technically not in the grave at all, but in the earth, certainly, by now – and he was seventy-three and the world was not yet quite over. He had become the dropout he hadn’t quite been able to commit to becoming when he was a young man or a middle-aged one. It was easier now to do it, and harder, because every bit of alleged progress in society always made everything easier and harder. When the visors came in, he refused to have one fitted, and that made it simpler than it ever had been to step outside of it all, with no half-measures. No rudimentary pay-as-you-go phone. No Gmail address he begrudgingly checked once a week. Nothing. He was in the minority as a result of his choice to live visorless, but he was not alone. It made him part of the Resistance and the Resistance made ways for themselves to exist on the cultural borders: they opened small shops, supported one another by sharing produce, lived in their own voluntarily insular way. The fact that the mortgage was now paid off made it more possible to live as part of this section of society, as did his choice to heat it solely with wood, to insure nothing in it and to plant a little veg in the field over the river every spring, to no longer travel abroad or drive. He was living in one of the easier places to be an outcast and it permitted him to not think much beyond the ensuing twenty-four hours in his immediate surroundings. There was no point. Everyone knew the state of play now, the chorus of denial of two decades ago had fizzled down to a low hum, and, while plenty was being done to stop the acceleration into the void, the two major obstacles standing in the way – corporate greed, and the illusory drive towards convenience – could not be circumnavigated. The planet as it had been known for the last few thousand years would end soon. It would end after Bob ended, but not long after. So in the meantime what you did was grab the good days with both hands.
In truth, he had become very unaware what was going on, in a wider sense. That was the choice he had made, in an era of infotainment tyranny. He rarely had any interaction with the people with visors, who remained plugged in. Vague bits of news drifted his way via encounters on footpaths and in the community shop and the free pub: the evacuation of west California, a few encouraging advances in sustainable building regulations, the closing of the French border, war across most of Eastern Europe, Shropshire drowning under deeper water every winter, a plan for the redistribution of wealth and second homes. But it was all a muddle, factoids spinning like dust in sunlight. It was a decade since the visors came in, thus a decade since he had switched on a machine to consult a news source. His news sources were the moor and the river, but they were reliable messengers, in their own way – perhaps no less reliable than anything else. During a long walk he passed the reservoir a couple of miles north of home and noticed a bridge in the clouds a few miles north west of that and realised they were rebuilding one of the old branch lines. When there was a storm now, it crackled with more electricity. Microwaves and multisockets and chargers in people’s houses blew up, which made him even more glad to have none in his. Always prone to tempests, the river now had that bit more to say when it was incensed. He put his faith in the tiny seventeenth-century bridge behind the house. The water level had never risen high enough to overflow the mossy stonework but the December before last it had come close. The dog had still been alive back then, Jim, a Patterdale he and Sally had taken off Sally’s cousin Beth when Beth moved to Ireland. Around 2 a.m., with a whimper and a nose forced into Bob’s armpit, he had raised the alarm. The water had been steadily rising for hours, on a day of the most persistent rain imaginable which followed several days of other rain that by any normal standards would also have been classed as extremely persistent. Bob had never heard the water scream louder than just before he went to bed that night, as it raced past the living-room window, but by the point, four hours later, that Jim stood on the bed, nudging him awake, the noise had pinned the whole house in a headlock. It was not unusual for Jim to ask to be let out for a slash at this time but when Bob went downstairs and opened the back door, the little dog just looked up at him in terror. It was clear what Jim thought, which was that there was a huge monster outside, and he was not wrong. Bob could just hear a higher note within the water’s experimental dirge and realised the piano was vibrating. He went out and stood on the balcony. The writhing white shapes beneath him looked like livid swimming ghosts: all the river’s dead, raised in fury, on their way to the sea to seek the most terrible revenge. The water would have needed to rise another three feet to reach the balcony, but he had never felt more expendable. Within the white bar of howling sound, he could hear the grinding of the boulders on the river bed, as the current forced them against one another, again and again.
Since that night, he often wondered what would be the first to go: the bridge, the planet, or him. He decided that if the bridge did go, it probably meant the planet was going with it. And if the bridge went, it meant the house would almost certainly go too, and, since he went out increasingly rarely these days, it was highly likely he’d be in there at the time. He could think of many worse ways to die. It would also save him from the Alzheimer’s that had taken his dad, which he increasingly worried was his fate.
Today, though, the river was a pussycat. It purred around the boulders beneath his feet. The water level was low enough for him to plot a route across the bendy line of stones to the field in summer shoes and barely get wet. The deep pool, up by the bridge, where he sometimes spied trout, was mild phosphorescent green. Through the hole where one of the planks of the balcony had rotted, he could see a leftover semicircle of peel from the orange he’d eaten yesterday, gyrating behind a rock, the current not strong enough to wash it away. How much citrus had he thrown in here over the years? And what of the rest? The ash from the fire, the rotten lettuce leaves, the nail and beard clippings, the curdling hummus, the avocado skins, the peanuts, the matted dog hair, the garlic skin that flew away on the breeze like the butterflies Jagger released into the crowd in Hyde Park in the year of Bob’s birth? Of all the river’s dark magic, its repeated vanishing acts were perhaps its most impressive. Again and again, that crystal-clear current renewing itself, making things that had existed not exist any more. This story had been going on a long time and it never stopped, still went on down below, even on the rare occasions the surface iced over. When he died, he would be part of this story, one of the water’s innumerable voices, and nothing more. He had no children or grandchildren. His cousins Rachel and Sheila up in Stroud stopped getting in touch around the time the visors came in: they had not joined the Resistance. Martin in Barnstaple, whom he’d only seen a couple of times a year anyway due to all the chanting and meditating, had met a Hungarian lady – a songwriter – and moved with her to a house on the great plains in her homeland. He’d written Bob a letter to say the place was disturbingly flat but the sex and music were excellent, but that had been over a year ago. There was Sam, the young ecologist from the village he sometimes walked with, who quizzed him for moorland knowledge, who would remember him for a while, he supposed. But Bob’s stamp on the earth would soon fade, his sculptures remaining for a while in the houses of the people who’d bought them and then in other houses and then in dusty shops and then in other houses but with nobody who owned them having a clue about the person who made them. He would just be part of the river’s story, just like Fleur – now five years dead herself – and everyone else who’d lived on its banks, including Edna, and Edna’s tree, and that was fine, because life wasn’t about what happened when you were no longer alive, it was about grabbing the good days with both hands, and probably always had been.
It seemed very likely that the tree, in fact, might even go before him, the bridge and the planet. It leaned at a twisted rheumatoid angle now, almost painful to look at, no longer yielding apples, thrashed and browbeaten by storms. It was an incongruous gothic leper on a frivolous spring day like today. Just below it, Bob could see something else incongruous: some new low wooden posts with string tied between them, stretching up the valley. He’d first spotted them about five days ago, although he’d not seen who had placed them there. They bothered him, bothered him probably more than anything else in his life that was currently bothering him, more than the pain that diagonally knifed from his left hip to the middle of his back more obnoxiously every morning when he got up, more than the fact that when Sam had come over for a cup of coffee last week to talk about some rare beetles he was researching Bob had entirely forgotten his name for two whole minutes.
Not for one day since Sally’s death had Bob not thought about her final instruction to him. Leaning over the bed and putting an ear to her mouth in that wretched room which said nothing about the life she had lived, he had not been surprised that she had not said ‘I love you’, since she had not said that for a long time. But the vehemence and volume of the request, more of an order than a request, the ‘bloody’, the clarity of it, after weeks of no clarity at all, took him aback. It was a subject she’d not mentioned for years. He’d supposed she was thinking about his own welfare, wanting to know he’d be OK and have the best possible life without her, but more recently, when he thought about it and tried to coax himself into action, it was her interests he felt he was acting on, not his own. It was just a field; looking at the way it changed from season to season, growing produce in it, reading in it, seeing animals mooch about in it, all enhanced his day-to-day existence, but who cared who really owned it? That was his take on it a lot of the time. But then he remembered her face, the last time he ever saw it, tasted the texture of her words in his head. It was several months since he’d last been up to the Cavendish farm, which was barely a farm at all now, and spoken to the younger David Cavendish about the field. Nothing concrete had come of it, just as it hadn’t the time before. These new posts and string, though, nudged him into action. He would head up there again; not this afternoon, maybe not tomorrow, but certainly the day after. He would be firmer and stronger this time, even though there were few prospects he relished less.
