Authors: David Wingrove
‘Good Lord, no! My husband, hah! I had three husbands and a fat lot of good any of
them
were, especially the last! First
he
ran off, and then his son!’ She gave a snort
of exasperation, then, after a long breath and more calmly she said, ‘No, my love… Mattie was my secret. We’d meet as often as we could, in his room, sometimes, but more often in
hotels. Sixteen years younger than me, he was, and I knew it couldn’t last, only…’
Jake frowned, seeing how deep the pain still was, and felt a moment’s regret at having raised the subject. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I…’
‘No… don’t be. It wasn’t like that, you see. He didn’t leave me. Or rather, he did, but not through choice. He said he’d love me forever. But then he died.
In a car crash. It was awful. I didn’t know what to do with myself. His family didn’t know, you see, and if they had they wouldn’t have approved. But the funeral… Oh, it
was terrible, Jake. I couldn’t stop crying. And no one there knew me. No one even bothered to ask who it was sitting there at the back of the church sobbing her heart out. No one.’
For a moment he felt like holding her, comforting her for what was clearly still an unhealed wound, even after all these years.
‘How old was he?’
She wiped at her eyes. ‘Twenty-six.’
Jake caught his breath. It was the same age he had been when it had all come crashing down.
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.’
She reached out and touched his arm.‘No. No, you should. I like talking about the past, even if it hurts. Even if…’
She shook her head.
‘What?’ he asked gently.
‘Oh, it’s nothing, Jake. Just that some days it feels like some dreadful illusion. That none of it really happened and I imagined it all.
Dreamed
it.’
He nodded, understanding. It was exactly how he felt some days. How most of them probably felt, those who had survived the world coming apart at the seams. Simply to be here now seemed something
of a miracle.
Jake got to his feet.
‘You got to go?’
He nodded. ‘I’ve got a lot to do before tonight. You goin’ along?’
She laughed. ‘Not me, boy. My old bones aren’t up to it any more. The walk there would do for me.’
‘You sure I couldn’t come get you? You could sit on the cart…’
‘It’s very kind, my love, but no. You need to enjoy yourself, and how could you do that if you had to keep an eye on me, eh?’
‘But Ma…’
‘
Margaret
.’ Her voice had an insistent tone to it. ‘And
no
. I’ll be fine.’
Jake kissed her, held her to him a moment, then quickly hurried away, before he saw the tears welling in her eyes. But halfway up the long slope that led to Church Knowle, he turned and looked
back, noting how the cottage seemed embedded in the landscape, the thatched roof the same brown as the surrounding fields.
He turned away. What he’d said to her was true. He had been thinking about Anne a lot these past few days, and he felt he needed to do something about it. As it was he felt haunted, and as
a rational man he felt uncomfortable with that.
I should go see her
.
Talk to her
. Yes. But first he’d pack, ready for tomorrow.
The farmhouse was a long, low building, set back off the main street, the grey of its slate roof peppered with small patches of green and orange. It was a sturdy house, an
unfussy house, functional in a way so many of the local houses weren’t. They were more picturesque, more pretty, but Jake had chosen well. It was warm in the winter and the roof never leaked.
And besides, it had cost him nothing.
The front door was unlocked. It was never locked. Not these days. If you couldn’t trust your neighbours, then who could you trust? Jake stepped inside, into deep shadow. The kitchen was at
the back, overlooking the yard, the living room to the left. Both bedrooms were upstairs.
He went through. There were long shelves both sides of the hallway, crowded floor to ceiling with books. Like the house, he had ‘inherited’ them, and again, like the house, he had
come to appreciate with every passing year just how carefully they had been chosen.
The kitchen was neat and clean. The skinned and washed rabbits that the women had prepared had been hung up in the larder. Fresh wood had been cut and stacked. The oak table had been wiped, the
breakfast things washed up and put away.
Jake smiled. Peter was a good boy. A dependable boy. He worked hard and never complained.
He crossed the room, standing there a moment at the sink, looking out through the long window, wondering where Peter was. Only he knew where he was. He turned and saw at once that the bucket was
missing from the hook.
Jake washed his hands and dried them, then stepped out, into the yard. From there he had a view down the lane towards the well. He could hear the pigs snuffling in the shed at his back, the
chickens restlessly clucking. Bessie, their Jersey, was in the barn nearby, sleeping no doubt.
Jake shielded his eyes to look.
Peter was sat on the broad ledge of the well, Meg beside him. They were holding hands, staring at each other in that lovesick fashion Jake had noticed of late. Boy lay nearby, one eye open,
looking out for his master.
Again Jake smiled. In that too they were lucky. To have met such people as the Hubbards, here at the end of things.
Normally he would have left them on their own for a bit, but there was much to do. And besides, there would be plenty of time later on for them to gaze adoringly at each other.
He walked down the sloping lane towards them, his booted feet crunching on the gravel. Hearing it, their hands fell apart. Snatching up her bucket, Meg hurried away, giving Jake a smile as she
went.
Embarrassed, Peter jumped down. He lifted his own bucket and began to walk towards his father, Boy jumping up to follow.
Jake smiled. ‘It’s okay, you know… holding hands. You
can
hold hands. It
is
allowed.’
Peter didn’t look at him. He was blushing now. But Jake, studying his son, saw how tall he’d grown, how close he was to being a man.
How his mother would have loved to have seen that.
They were at the gate now. Jake watched as Peter expertly nudged the old latch and pushed through, the heavy bucket swaying in his hand.
‘You know what, lad?’
‘What?’
‘I thought we’d go see your mum, later. Once everything’s done.’
The young boy turned, meeting his eyes. ‘You all right, Dad?’
Jake looked away. It was his turn to be embarrassed. ‘I’m fine…’
‘Yeah…?’
‘Yeah…’ Only he didn’t have to say. Peter was watching him now, a perfect understanding in his eyes.
‘I’ll cut some flowers for her.’
‘That’d be nice.’
Only what he felt at that moment couldn’t be contained in words. To have been so lucky and unlucky. To have found her at all and then to have lost her. No. Sometimes words – even
whole hallways full of words – were not enough.
St. Peter’s Church stood on a mound at the turn of the road, as it had since the early fourteenth century, a neat, solid-looking building of grey stone. Old as it was,
it was merely a replacement for the old Saxon church after which the village – Church Knowle – had first been named. Priests had read the ancient services in Latin long before the great
castle had been built a mile or so to the west, and there had been a rector resident since 1327. It was here that the locals gathered every week, not to sing hymns or say prayers like their
ancestors, but simply to talk – to air grievances, seek help, to raise any problems they might have, and generally to keep things ‘ticking over’, as they liked to call it. Few
among them were religious in any special way, yet they shared a feeling of connection to the land that was almost pagan in its intensity – a sense of
belonging
.
It was over there, on the far side of that lushly grassed space, near the back wall, that they had buried those who had died six years back. And it was there, now, that Jake and his son came, to
put flowers down on the neatly-kept mound that was Anne’s grave.
Jake had carved the headstone himself from a solid slab of oak, fashioning it in the shape of a tree. It had taken him all of three months, but it was a fine piece of work, one of which he was
immensely proud. Back in the old days he would have struggled to have finished such a task – things were so easy, so ‘throwaway’ back then – but this was something
different. This was something
meant
, his own small monument against Time, and he had poured all of his feelings for her into the simple design. As for the words…
Jake gave the smallest shake of his head, thinking about it. He had never found anything quite so hard as choosing what to carve into that smoothly varnished surface. After all, what did you
say? ‘Passed in her sleep’? No, because she hadn’t. She had been in torment until the last. It had been agony – sheer hell – to see her suffer all of that. So what
then? How to express the utter totality of his loss, his grief? And there were Peter’s feelings to consider, too, for it was
his
mother who had been snatched from him so brutally.
Jake had felt honour bound to make sure his son had his say. Because this mattered. How you honoured the dead, how you remembered them after they were gone,
that
mattered. He understood that
now.
And so, between them, they had honed it down to the simplest of words. Words which might somehow prove a vessel into which all of their grief, all of their painful memories, might pour
themselves:
‘Our darling girl. Missed beyond words.’
Jake knelt there a moment, his fingers tracing the hand-carved words. Then, taking the special scissors from his jacket pocket, he began to trim the grass.
He was just finishing, wiping the surface of the slab with a damp cloth, when he grew conscious of another presence close by. He turned, looking up into the sunlight.
‘Mary…?’
She stood there, staring past him at the headstone, a faint wistfulness in her expression. She was Anne’s sister, three years her elder, and as Jake looked at her he could see reminders of
what he had lost in Mary’s face: her eyes; her long, dark, curling hair; in the very way she stood there, her weight on her left foot, her head slightly tilted. It was precisely how Anne had
always stood.
She was holding a small spray of flowers. Lilacs. Anne’s favourites.
‘It never seems to get easier, does it?’
‘No... No, I…’
He left it unfinished. Then, realizing that he’d done all he’d come to do, he clambered up, brushing the grass clippings from his knees.
Mary spoke again, quieter this time. ‘You know… I always thought it would be me. I always expected her to tend
my
grave.’
‘Really?’ Yet even as he said it he saw the truth in it. Anne had always been the healthy one, the more vigorous of the two. Even if Mary had not already been Tom’s wife, he
would have chosen Anne, had it come to it, purely for her vitality. She had possessed so much life. Yet it was Anne who had succumbed to the fever, not Mary.
‘Have they decided?’ he asked, changing the subject.
A smile lit her face. She knew without asking what he was referring to.
‘
Far From The Madding Crowd
. You know, the old version, with Alan Bates, Terence Stamp and Julie Christie.’
Once a month, as tonight, they would haul out the old generator, fill it with oil, and show a film. Something from the Past. ‘Who chose that?’
‘The women. We wanted something
romantic
for a change.’
He nodded to her and made to leave, calling Peter and Boy to him. But at the gate he looked back and saw her, kneeling by the grave now, talking to her sister as he so often did, holding the
lilacs out to ‘show’ Anne, a strangely fragile love there in the muscles of her face.
So fragile, and yet so strong. Jake turned back, looking to his son, noting, as he so often did, how he too carried the familial genes.
‘I am the family face…’
‘Dad?’
Jake smiled. ‘Old words, boy. Just old words.’
Darkness had fallen. In the long, high-walled garden of the Bankes Arms Hotel, a massive bonfire cast its warm, flickering light over the crowded scene, bathing everything in
an ever-changing cloak of gold and black.
Above the chug-chug-chug of the ancient, oil-powered generator, music played, struggling to make itself heard against the babble of a hundred voices.
Every one of the big bench tables was filled to overflowing. People had come from miles around, bringing their families. Relaxed now, their faces shining, they ate and drank and talked, while
all about them their children ran and played, carefree and happy.
Jake and Peter were seated at the table closest to the generator, sharing it with Tom, Mary and their daughters, Cathy, Beth and Meg. Boy, as ever, lay hidden in the shadows beneath, his jet
black eyes reflecting back the firelight. From time to time he would lick his chops, a faint whine escaping him as he sniffed the air, taking in the mouth-watering scent of roasting meat that,
mixed with the strong burned-chemical odour of the generator, filled every breath.
The music was much louder where they sat, close by the speakers, but Jake didn’t mind that. Music – especially music from the old days – was his passion, one that he shared
with Old Josh Palmer, the landlord’s father. Josh was in his eighties now, but he was still fit, still sprightly. He lived in the attic of the hotel, in two large rooms with sloping eaves
that, apart from his bed and a small sink in one corner, were crammed floor to ceiling with his ‘collection’. It was offerings from that collection that they were listening to now, a
collection that anyone would have been proud of, even back in the old days. In these latter days, after the Collapse, his boxes of ancient plastic-sleeved CDs and even older vinyl seemed an
absolute treasure trove, most of it irreplaceable; things you’d never see, or ever dream to see, at market. Things that were old before Old Josh was born. Now they seemed even more precious,
for these were the last remaining vestiges of an easier age. An age that had passed for good. That, but for this, Jake would never have guessed existed.