Villager, page 17
‘I am sorry, Bob,’ she had said. She stared directly ahead into the ash and there was no meanness in her voice. ‘But I didn’t like that one.’
And then she got really ill, and was admitted to hospital. And he felt terrible that she was gone, and then he felt additionally terrible on top of that that he felt some relief about being able to be in the house without wondering where she was and where her mind was drifting to and what the next thing would be that she would set fire to. After the end, people talked to him like she’d been snatched from him but, although he never verbalised it, what he felt was that she’d been snatched from him a long time before that. Which was another thing that made that final instruction – that last burst of clarity and passion, when he almost saw who she used to be for a moment – so startling.
There had been a lull between the wooden posts first going in and the lodges beginning to go up, but now the construction work had begun, it was happening quickly. Within a fortnight, eight A-frames were up. Within a month, twenty. The foam on the edges of the river became different, tinged with pinks and blues. He did not see David Cavendish on the building site and did not expect to. Cavendish had not been interested in the field as a physical entity before and would probably be no more interested now, with the exception of the financial side of affairs relating to it. Bob wondered about his motivation, what could possibly come of this investment that would make the ultraworld the rich quasi-agriculturist lived inside more pleasurable and decadent. The pursuit of money for such people, past a certain point, seemed to be most of all a strident denial of mortality, and the more they were able to abrogate the nitty gritty of life via technology, the more emphatic that denial became. They used their wealth to protect themselves with bigger cars, to build more secure fences and walls to protect their three-dimensional living spaces, to build a digital wall around themselves to protect them from other parts of life. Finally, they seemed to want to use it to protect themselves against the banality of death, as if the cushion of power they had gained would secure a deluxe executive afterlife for them. But despite all science had achieved, and for all the money many had put into researching the idea, nobody had yet discovered how to live forever. In the end, the dust that would be David Cavendish would be no more exclusive or elite than the dust that had been Sally, the dust he had scattered on the hillside facing him two years ago. Dust that had immediately been washed into the river by the combe’s heavy rains and, if some of it had remained on the grass and was now beneath the lodges, had surely now sunk deep into the earth.
The changes in building regulations and planning permission introduced by the government in the second and third decades of the century had been devastating for natural habitats on the edge of the moor. Underhill – and, to an extent, its surrounding hamlets – had expanded rapidly, but a lull followed: nobody had built anything new around here for several years. This perhaps made people in the valley a little complacent, slower to realise what was happening with the lodges and the impact they might have. Martina Whittaker had been over to tell him there was a residents’ committee meeting scheduled to protest the development, to see if anything at all could be done at this late stage. He knew, because Sam had been over to invite him to the same meeting a day earlier. Bob said he would be there but when the night of the meeting arrived he found himself instead not at the meeting but on the balcony, a glass of whiskey in hand, watching the river. It was so full all the time now but tonight it was not angry. Its sound was more like the hushed chatter you get in an auditorium where people are waiting for an important announcement. Because the water level was now higher, more moss had begun to grow up the walls of the house, grey-green wiry wavy stuff. Autumn was happening and autumn never stayed long so you could more or less say it was winter and on winter’s darkest days the combe let in so little light, it was like living down deep in the gap between two sofa cushions. Days soon became all beginning and end, a couple of bookends you convinced yourself was life. The sun found it difficult to get down in the gap between the cushions and kill the frost there. To maximise the last of the daylight before it all happened, he opened windows and doors all over the house. The through-draught stirred up more hair. There was ever such a lot. It showed him that maybe he hadn’t really cleaned properly when he thought he had. Such a hairy place, the deep south west of the country. He thought of a film director, the only one he ever interviewed in his time writing for the magazine. Lived on a corner plot of land, a jutting elbow of salt soil, like a smaller replica of the far east elbow of the country where it was situated. Bald man. Immaculate house. No hair in it anywhere. But here, by contrast, you got hair on your walls, hair in your piano. One night in November there was a storm and Bob closed the windows. A long, sharp piece of concrete render fell from the roof, smashing outside the front door. If he’d been standing there, that would have been it for him, but he wasn’t. The A-frames withstood the storm. Martina Navratilova – the lady who’d invited him to the meeting; he thought that was her surname but couldn’t remember for sure – saw him when he was down the lane, looking for kindling. Her granddad had once punched a bull who charged at him. That’s what Sally, who’d heard the story from Fleur, had once told him. Martina Navratilova said they’d all been disappointed not to see him at the meeting last week. Whittaker! That was it. Not Navratilova. That was someone else. He opened the gate leading to the field. He didn’t like the latch on it: it was one of the ones with a coil, not yet bestowed with character by time. The wood made a nice sound but not the metal. He could see the highest of the lodges poking out over the hillside. It wasn’t the most ugly set of buildings. You could convince yourself it was all quite rustic and pleasant if you blocked out all the beetles and dormice it had slaughtered. It was quiet now, no drills or hammers or diggers for several days. Some men in hard hats still wandered about with clipboards, not doing much. As, back at home, he pissed into the toilet with the blind up on the window facing the river, he saw one of the men looking straight at him from across the water. It might have been Jac but it was hard to tell due to the condensation on the glass. The man continued to stare and Bob continued to piss and then the man turned away and right then Bob knew Bob had won.
She used to say she wanted to run away.
‘But you are away,’ he’d say. ‘Look where we live. We couldn’t be much more away. Maybe if we lived in northern Canada or Finland or something, but not here.’
‘Yes, I know, so why does it feel like that?’
There’d been a man, a customer, some bloody weirdo, who wouldn’t leave her alone, kept wanting his piano tuned over and over again when the thing was totally fine, could not have sounded better, then when she told him she couldn’t work for him any more, he contacted her via a fake identity on social media, tried to book her services again. It wasn’t quite frightening enough to go to the police about but it had scared her. But it wasn’t even that. It was a prevalent feeling at that particular time: a feeling that it was all in your face, everyone, everything, all the time, on your screens. They both had dreams about total strangers filing into their house, telling them what was wrong with the way they lived. It wasn’t his fault and it wasn’t hers; it wasn’t most people’s fault. People’s brains – everyone’s – were still pre-industrial village brains, brains built for the nineteenth century, and the eighteenth century, and a lot of the centuries prior to that, and could not be expected to cope with this overflowing rush of world, this full spate river of statement and opinion. But then after that they had felt like they had finally run away, for eight years, and maybe even for the two different years that came after. She, he knew, had felt more like she was in a place. And that made him more confident that sprinkling her remains over the thing – he forgot what it was called now, but it was green, and directly across the river from the house – was the right course of action. It had been a good time, that period. But he could not say if it was her best time. He could not even say if it was his best time, even though he told himself it was. A lot of it was guesswork, how you remembered your own life. He could not feel his body and mind as it had been on a day on a Tuesday afternoon in 1998 or a Thursday morning in 1982 or a Saturday evening in 2006. But sometimes when he went away from the present and swam about in snapshots of memory, he got close to it. Music helped. She told him about that once: how melodies worked, stimulating neuro-pathways that other things couldn’t. In the orchestra she was in, they played old songs for people who had the illness. The big disease with the little name. No, that was a line from a song about something different. The little disease with the big name. No, not a little disease. A horrible thing, anyway, and music somehow penetrated it, took them back to something, revived something.
He wanted to play the piano. It shouldn’t just sit there, gathering hair. The desire had come over him out of nowhere. Would it be too late to learn? Why had he never asked her to teach him? Was that neglectful of him? Could he have taken more of an interest? At least found out how it all worked? He opened the lid and wiped the hair off a couple of the keys and pulled some more out of the gap between them and hit the keys experimentally. He noticed starlings, more of a plume than a murmuration, out the window and as he did he felt this had all happened before: the opening of the piano, the slight cough caught in his throat, the birds, the bottle of Baby Bio on the window ledge. It was a kind of déjà vu he experienced now, but different to what déjà vu used to be. It always felt like he was experiencing the reality of a dream he’d dreamed and that he also knew what happened next but couldn’t touch it. It was as vivid as when he got sucked into the past but it was different: it sucked him into the present, as imagined from the past. The moment always felt weighted equally with significance and banality until he lost it, like a small precious object dropped in a toilet bowl just as you’d pulled the chain.
The last person who’d played the piano had not been Sally but Fleur, not long before she died. In her seventies, she’d taken a younger lover – a town councillor of just forty-eight – and it had been the talk of the combe. Bob, now at a similar age, would do nothing of the sort. Firstly, how would that even happen? And secondly, it had not occurred to him as an ambition. He had met Fleur’s younger man just once, a reedy human with a nervous chuckle who, even though he was of a roughly equal width and height to Fleur, gave the slight impression of living inside her coat. The encounter had been on the lane, around this time of year, and Fleur had talked about how late the bats were staying around now, and how much it worried her. Now they stayed around even later. December, sometimes. ‘GO HOME, bats,’ Fleur had said, to the bats.
Bob had never put a blind or curtain over the large skylight Fleur had installed in the bedroom, since it would have been too tricky, and waking up with the dawn light had never been much of a problem for him. But it could be confusing, on nights when the sky was clear and the moon was at its fullest. It could make you as confused as a bat who should be hibernating. Waking up to the bright white light, he had been known to head to the kitchen and put the kettle on, only to then look at the clock on the dining-room wall and realise it was somewhere around 2 a.m. So when he woke again tonight, with the moon full and the bedroom flooded with light, it was not initially perturbing to him. Two subsequent factors made him realise there was something extra at play: the glow was much more orange than usual, and the room was warm. Before he stepped out onto the balcony, before he’d even seen the deeper orange light, its spinning shapes, through the pane of the kitchen door, he knew what was happening, and with that came the knowledge that he’d always known it would happen, forever.
The fire was well under way, past the point of reversal or rescue. Five of the lower lodges had been brought to the ground and the flames were licking their way up the valley, deep into the bowels of the dwellings on the terraces above. The pure rage of it reminded him of the river when it was at its most unstoppable. It was not something that could be reasoned with. But standing on the balcony he did not worry for a second about it reaching him, or even about the smoke troubling his lungs. The river was at a brimming, tumultuous height – a height that defied the logic of the last few days’ rain – and provided a protective barrier, a barrier even more inarguable than the conflagration. It splashed up high and wild against the walls of the house, splashed against him too. He realised, belatedly, that he was naked, but he was not afraid. He decided he could happily, very happily, let it take him: the river, the trees beyond, the valley, the moor, everything. He would be more than OK with that. He realised he was singing but he had no idea what the song was, only that he knew it. He grabbed his whiskey bottle from the kitchen sink and drank from it. The air smelled good and rich, like something being turned over and exposed, and he thought for a moment he could hear a siren in the distance, but then thought maybe he had imagined it, and he wasn’t able to tell because his singing was so loud, and the river was loud too, and he had no wish for either to stop. On the right-hand side of the valley, where one of the higher A-frames – one of the taller, more high-specification lodges, which was to be rented at a greater price to the ones nearer the river – had fallen, the fire had also opened up a gap in the trees, but had not reached beyond that to the bigger trees where the valley began to get mossier, which would reject the advances of the fire with their immense moisture. The gap and all the light from the moon and the fire allowed him to see one particularly memorable, wide-armed oak and he thought about the time he had walked past it with Sally, which had been the same afternoon they’d walked past the abandoned house and she’d talked about people destroying the pianos in the fifties and sixties: thousands of them, kicked and smashed to fuck or set alight. It had actually been on this same walk that she’d told him about Martina Whittaker – yes, he had her surname now, and would not let it slip away – and her grandfather, who had punched the bull in the face when it charged him. There had been an old faded ‘BULL IN FIELD’ sign still up there at that point, which must have triggered the story. He recalled now also that he’d somehow got the details twisted: it was Martina’s great-grandfather who had punched the bull in the face, not her grandfather. Standing there naked, illuminated by the flames, staring at the tree, he remembered everything Sally had told him; he did not forget a thing.
ME (NOW)
The village of Wychcombe is recorded as ‘a manor call Wickcoomb’ in the Domesday survey of 1086. By the thirteenth century, the parish could boast two churches: St Constantine’s, situated precariously and impractically on a granite escarpment 730 feet above the main street and now no more than two ruined walls, and the still-standing St John’s. By the 1500s, Wickcoomb had split into two settlements: Wychcombe and Underhill. After this point, Underhill expanded and Wychcombe stayed more or less the same size, coming to resemble, from above, a densely wooded forked tail attached to the posterior of the larger settlement. The 1921 census recorded the population of Underhill as 666, causing much merriment in the four alehouses the village then possessed, although by the census of 1961 that figure had dropped by 98: a reduction often assumed to be down to the human cost of the fight against Hitler but in fact down to the progress of agricultural machinery and the subsequent decrease in rural employment opportunities, resulting in an exodus of residents to urban areas. Many in the village would come to remember the war as the most fulfilling period of their lives. Most of the wealthier households by this point had a wireless, which had invariably been sold to them and repaired by a Mr Henry Salter of Plymouth, a small man who rarely paused for breath while imbibing liquor and telling his many embellished stories of life on the road and who, on his trips over to charge people’s wet batteries, would often stay on for a few days and organise sing-arounds amongst his drinking companions. Always matriarchal, the village in this period became even more so. Social gatherings were organised by Land Army girls who had taken occupation of the outlying farms and Wychcombe Manor. The manor had until late in the previous century been the ancestral home of the Bambury family, who during the late 1700s kept fourteen parrots and England’s last house jester: a man of barely four feet three inches in height whose routines included chewing the feathers off live sparrows to see if they would still fly (they didn’t). These days the mainline train barrels over the viaduct past the luxury flats the manor has now been converted into, as passengers strive to stifle their irritation at the sound of one another’s antisocial mastication and shrill offspring. Sometimes, a fox, hare or a deer will be visible from a window, but it is a rare commuter who will notice, since most are too deep inside the more compelling universe inside the screens they take with them everywhere. Few look up to admire the abandoned but still very attractive Wychcombe Junction station where some of those very foxes who run alongside the train have been known to sleep and breed.
The passenger railway arrived here in 1847, although it was predated by almost two decades by another, which took granite across my flanks, down to the coast, where it was shipped off and used to make bridges and walls. Before it fell under the infamous axe of British Railways chairman Dr Beeching in the 1960s, Wychcombe Junction – and its now defunct adjoining branch line – brought many a carless traveller to the moor. The station might also be considered partially responsible for an openness to outsiders not common to all villages in the area. Many who have visited Underhill have remarked upon a feeling of being ‘protected’ or ‘watched over in a kind way’. It is thought that this can largely be put down to the presence of Underhill Tor, towering over the village at 1,350 feet, from whose summit it is said, on a clear day, both coasts of the south-west peninsula can be seen. Home to an acclaimed golf course and once believed to be the site of volcanic activity, the tor is not subject to the hype of some of the other more talked-about hills of the south west but is every bit the match for any of them in terms of history and natural beauty, and outdoes most of them in terms of height and girth, making, for example Glastonbury Tor, at just 518 feet, look kind of weedy by comparison. The tor is distinguished by the pile of rocks at its peak which have been variously likened to ‘a step stool’ (not totally inaccurate), ‘a bumpy kind of nose’ (maybe), ‘some piled pony poo’ (way off), and ‘a small mystic staircase’ (yes!). On its rear slopes is found some of the most beautiful ancient woodland in the country, hosting an abundance of wildlife, including roe deer, marsh fritillary butterflies, woodcock, bog asphodel, ring ouzel, cuckoo and kingfisher.
