The American Lover Page 12

  Yet there it lay.

  Smithy’s heart was beating like a tired dog’s. Who had put the mattress there – and why and how? There were padlocked gates at each end of the lane, to stop cars driving down it, and only the farmer, Gerry Woolner, had the padlock keys. Someone, then, had lugged it by hand over the stile, then carried it or dragged it eighty or ninety paces. Smithy’s gaze returned to these eighty or ninety paces, because he still thought that some answer had to lie on that bit of the lane, yet the lane appeared exactly and precisely as it always did on a winter afternoon, with the sun low in the sky and the grass muddy at its edge and the shadows of the poplars narrow and faint across the path. It was as if the land were saying to Smithy, ‘There’s no explanation in hedges and trees or stones, boy; the explanation is in you.’

  He mumbled aloud that it wasn’t his land. He’d never owned any part of Blackthorn End. How, then, could he be expected to take responsibility for it? All right, he was the self-appointed guardian of the place. Out of affection for it, and because he preferred things to be orderly and clean, he tried to keep it litter-free. But a purple mattress was different. It was too large and heavy a thing for him. In childhood, he’d been skinny and prone to fear; now, he was old. And in between these two, there had been only work, a succession of days, the rushing by of traffic on a motorway.

  He called Gerry Woolner and Woolner said: ‘You still alive, Smithy? Crikey.’ Smithy asked Woolner to pick up the mattress on his trailer and take it to the council dump, but Woolner said, no, he wouldn’t bother doing that, he’d see to it in the spring, when he could dry the thing out and burn it. Then he told Smithy to keep warm because a cold snap was coming, and hung up.

  Smithy didn’t know what else he could do, so he lay down on his narrow bed and covered himself with his old green eiderdown.

  He felt shivery and full of pain. He would have liked some unobtrusive person to come into his room with a bowl of custard.

  He lingered in his room as days and nights came and went.

  He saw ice on the window and couldn’t bear to move. He heard the roof timbers of his cottage creaking under the pantiles and the wind harrying the sycamore trees. Through his mind tumbled a reckless counting of all the small things he’d tried to achieve in eighty years.

  On the fourth or fifth day, Smithy noticed pale sunlight glancing on the eiderdown and he got up and dressed himself and went to the range to get warm, but the range had gone out. So he knew then that what he’d been postponing couldn’t be postponed any more.

  He went in search of his coat and boots and found them, creased and muddy, under his bed. He put them on, then discovered a pair of old leather mittens balled up among his underwear, and tugged these on and a woollen scarf that snagged against the stubble on his neck. Then, with slow steps, he walked out of his door and down to the garden gate.

  The quarter mile along the road seemed to take Smithy a ridiculously long time. He saw that when he reached the stile, the sun had already gone from the lane and was dropping towards the horizon, under a vault of green sky. Smithy tried to walk faster, but his legs were weak and he couldn’t make his body move as he wanted it to. The lane, once he reached it, lay all in shadow, but he could see, nevertheless, that the mattress remained there, exactly as it had been.

  Smithy felt warm now – hot almost – from the exertions of his walk and he could hear his own breath, like the breath of the horses in the dark. Mustering all his strength, he bent down and took hold of the two cloth handles on the side of the mattress and tugged it towards him. It was far heavier than he’d imagined, but he kept pulling and straining until he got it clear of the grass and onto the rough stones of the path. For a moment, he waited and rested, then, instructing himself to endure, he hauled the mattress upwards till it was standing on its edge. He hoped that, in this position, he’d be able to shuffle sideways with it, step by slow step, till he was back at the stile. Then, he’d let it fall against his body as he heaved himself over the stile, and from his elevated position on the further side of the stile, be able to haul the mattress up onto the cross-post and from there, pull it onto the road. Once on the road, Smithy told himself, the relative smoothness of the tarmac surface would help him. He might be able to drag the mattress behind him like a sled, drag it through the darkness till he reached the cottage gate, and then, when daylight returned, he’d douse it with petrol and burn it and bury the ashes deep.

  But Smithy was, as yet, a long way from the road. He managed his sideways shuffling for only a few paces and then the whole weight of the mattress seemed to fall against him, so that he almost toppled backwards, and, to save himself, had to let go of one of the cloth handles, to push the thing away. But his balance was poor. His feet, in the heavy boots, seemed to tangle with each other, and when the mattress tipped away from him, he fell onto it and lay there with his face pressed into the purple brocade.

  He remained like this for a moment, inhaling a fusty smell, a smell that was of the earth, but also had about it the stench of human dreams. Then, he pushed hard down with his elbow and with his right knee and eventually managed to turn his body, so that he was lying on his back. He was breathing hard.

  Smithy lay there and didn’t move. A voice, familiar through time, shouted at him to sit up, sit up! But although, in his exhausted heart, he knew that a stained mattress, heavy with damp, was a fearful thing on which to be lying, what he now began to experience was a comforting stillness of body and mind. He couldn’t explain it to himself, but it was almost as though, quite unexpectedly, he’d arrived at some extraordinary place, a place that – perhaps – had been near him all his life, but which he’d never dared to visit.

  After a while, Smithy could gauge, by the brightness of the winter stars, that the night would be very cold, and he knew that he should rouse himself and go home. Yet somehow, he didn’t feel inclined to do this. He remained where he was on the mattress and began repeating aloud the three syllables of his old name: Reginald. And the saying of his name made him smile and he thought of the boy on the beach, bumping along on the pony, and the roaring of the waves as they came in, and the pity of the flying years.

  BlackBerry Winter

  It was getting towards Christmas. The day had been bright in London, but by the time Fran reached the house in the wood, the air was freezing.

  The house in the wood was her mother’s house and her mother’s name was Peggy, and Peggy was becoming old and angry and rude. Fran didn’t want to be there, but she had no choice. Peggy had broken her right arm, when she tripped over ‘some bit of dreadful metal dumped in the wood’. She’d said to Fran: ‘It could have been a gin trap! I could have been cut in half.’

  She wasn’t cut in half, only made helpless and cross by the plaster cast and the pain. She said to Fran the moment she arrived: ‘I can’t do a thing. I’ve got no balance. I can’t even walk properly. You’ll have to take over.’

  Fran went to embrace her mother, but Peggy fended her off. ‘No, no,’ she cried out, ‘I can’t be touched. You’ll crush me.’

  So Fran left her and went upstairs to her room, which was the room she’d always had, right from when she was ten years old and the family moved to Norfolk, to the house in the wood. It was cold in here. Fran turned on a little two-bar electric fire. Then she went to the window and looked out and saw the December sun declining behind the oaks and sycamores and putting a light like moonshine on the narrow river that skirted the wood, known as ‘The Trib’. Long ago, Fran and her brother James had paddled down The Trib in a canoe and pretended to be Tahitians, and Fran now remembered that pretending to be Tahitians had made them so stupidly happy that it had been difficult, in all the years since then, to come by such gladness again.

  Right now, all that Fran could see in her life was a possible route to happiness (or what politicians liked to call a Road Map), but the truth was that this road map, like so many others in the wider world, had been in place for two years and hadn’t yet led to its destinati
on. This destination was to become the wife of her lover, David.

  Disappointingly for Fran, David, who was a professor of English and a part-time poet and a person with a velvet voice, remained with the wife he already had, a parliamentary lobbyist called Maeve. He trembled always on the precipice of leaving Maeve, but he did not leave. And it was now Fran’s belief that, to make David leap from his present life to a future life with her, something was needed that would make her suddenly stand out in magnificence in his mind. David prized achievement above anything else, and what held Fran back from winning him, she knew, was her own lack of it.

  ‘You’re not far off fifty,’ Peggy was fond of reminding her, ‘and what have you done with your life? Made Christmas decorations out of sacking.’

  ‘Sacking,’ Fran had responded, ‘is an honest and lovely fabric, but you’re not being honest, Mother. I’m a working partner in a successful gift shop, which happens to specialise in homecrafts.’

  ‘Well,’ said Peggy, ‘if you want to glorify a bit of sewing, that’s up to you.’

  Fran unpacked her clothes and put them in her old wardrobe, which used to creak and grumble in the night, like something alive. Then, she sat down on the single bed and took out her BlackBerry and emailed David. She told him that she almost wished Peggy had been sliced in half by the gin trap; she told him that the moonshine on The Trib had made her long to be a Tahitian again; she told him that her love for him was as dark and familiar as the wood. When she signed off and contemplated her evening alone with Peggy and the TV, she experienced thirty seconds of wanting to be dead.

  In the night, came a harsh winter storm, blowing out of nowhere, tormenting the trees, sending a month’s rainfall in six hours to swell The Trib till it flooded over and swept the debris of the wood down into Peggy’s garden.

  Tired from her drive from London, Fran slept so deeply that she didn’t hear the storm, nor her mother crying out from her bed. Then, she was woken by something beating on her shoulder, and it was Peggy’s walking stick pounding her, and she saw Peggy as a huge shape in the dark, like the shape of a horse and rider that had come into the room.

  The electricity was out. Fran got up and groped for her dressing gown. She helped Peggy into the single bed, still warm from her own body, and covered her gently, as she might have covered a child. Then she went down to the kitchen to find candles and a torch. She stumbled about in the dark, shivering, violently confused by the arrangement of the kitchen units and the arrangement of her life. She yearned for David.

  She found two candles in silver candle-holders and lit these and carried them up to Peggy, who turned her terrified face towards them and said: ‘Not those! They belong in the dining room.’

  Fran set down the candles and said nothing. She took an old blanket from the wardrobe and covered herself with this and sat in a chair, and they waited for morning. By Fran’s chair was a bookcase and Fran took out a book at random and saw that it was called The Circus in the Attic and Other Stories by Robert Penn Warren, published in 1947, and she said, ‘I’m going to read to you, Mother. It’ll calm your nerves and help time to pass.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Peggy. ‘Not unless you read very well. Reading aloud is a lot more difficult than sewing.’

  Fran ignored this and said: ‘This is a story called Blackberry Winter. Are you listening?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Peggy. ‘I have no choice.’

  ‘Right. Here’s the story: It was getting into June and past eight o’clock in the morning but there was a fire – even if it wasn’t a big fire, just a fire of chunks – on the hearth of the big stone fireplace—’

  ‘Chunks of what?’ interrupted Peggy. ‘Chunks of what?’

  ‘Peat,’ said Fran. ‘That’s my guess.’

  The morning revealed the devastation.

  Rotting leaves, moss, beech-nuts, toadstools, broken branches, tangles of briars and stones had been swept out of the wood by the swollen Trib and were piled up like trash all over Peggy’s lawns and flower beds. In between the piles, were pools of water. The Trib flowed on in its new wide path. The wind had died.

  Fran didn’t want her mother to see this. The only thing, animate or inanimate, Peggy loved was her garden. Fran told her to stay put in the bed, but she refused. She had to be helped to the window and she stood there, leaning on the stick and cursing.

  ‘Where’s Thomas?’ she said at last. ‘Where the hell is he? Go and get him and tell him to start putting everything straight. The sight of this will kill me.’

  Thomas lived alone in a bungalow beyond the wood, and, since losing his wife, had scraped a living tending other people’s gardens. But he was old now, and as stubborn as Peggy and forgetful and sad.

  When he opened his door to Fran, he was wearing his pyjamas. In his mouth was a thin cigarette. On his kitchen table was a colander and a muddy stem of home-grown Brussels sprouts.

  He lit a small gas burner and made Fran a cup of tea. Then, he started picking off the sprouts and said: ‘Listen to me, Miss Fran, and don’t take umbrage. Your ma, she’ll be the death of me. Crikey, she will. The miz’ry she give me, you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘I would believe,’ said Fran.

  ‘I know why you’ve come – to ask me to put everything right. Your ma wants all that muck swept back into the wood. But some things can’t get back to where they were. Crikey, no. So you tell her this: it’s beyond me, Miss Fran. I know we’ve got Christmas soon, but I can’t help that. I’m an old man. You tell your ma Nature’s done her job and that’s the end of it.’

  ‘So you won’t be coming any more, Thomas? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No, I won’t be coming any more. I’m saying it. That storm talked to me loud and plain.’

  Fran walked back slowly through the wood. Pale sunlight fell in thin cascades along her path and the air felt suddenly warm, like spring air, when the winter has come and gone. She felt tired, strangely peaceful, content to drift. When her BlackBerry bleeped, she was startled, and her heart began to beat faster, as it always did when she saw that there was an email from David.

  Are you OK up there? he wrote. What a fantastic storm! Replicated here at home when Maeve found your poem on my BlackBerry. Never mind. I think it has the makings of a good poem. What d’you say to becoming a two-poet household? I love you. David.

  Fran sat down on the grey roots of a beech tree. It seemed to her that few moments of her life had been as beautiful as this one.

  She sat without moving for a long time, imagining all the future Christmas Days she would spend with David, walking by the Thames, visiting friends, drinking mulled wine or champagne, exchanging presents at twilight. Then she scrolled to her Sent Messages on her BlackBerry and stared at the mail she’d sent to David the previous evening, describing the moonshine on The Trib, her longing to be a Tahitian again and her love for him ‘as dark and familiar as the wood’. And she saw that, as occasionally happened, the BlackBerry had broken up her lines in peculiar places, so that what had been prose had suddenly, fraudulently, taken on the density and seeming economy of a poem.

  Fran laughed. Perhaps, she thought, if you live with someone you love, everything becomes easy and accessible to you – even writing poetry. She replied to David’s mail with the one word, Yes. Then she walked back to the house in the wood and made breakfast for Peggy on an old camping stove, whose blue flame threatened always to flicker and die, but never did.

  While she spooned eggs into Peggy’s mouth, she told her that Thomas was too ill to work today, but that she, Fran, would spend the day clearing the garden and that by evening, everything would be better.

  ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ said Peggy. ‘You can’t do it. You don’t know a thing about gardens. I’ll wait for Thomas.’

  ‘Thomas isn’t coming back,’ said Fran.

  ‘Of course he’s coming back.’

  ‘No,’ said Fran. ‘He’s not. The storm talked to him. He’s made up his mind.

  Luc
y and Gaston

  Southwold Beach, Suffolk, England, June 1976

  When the others decide to go swimming, Lucy stays in her deckchair. She watches them run towards the ocean – husband, daughter, friends. They’re the dearest people in the world to her.

  The day is hot and Lucy’s head is sweating under her straw hat. Lucy’s daughter, Hannah, tries to persuade her to come with them to the water, ‘just as far as the edge, Mum, just to paddle and cool off’. So she gets up from her deckchair, wondering whether, this time, in this affectionate company, she’ll be able to bear it and not shrink from it any more: the chill of the sea. But then, she raises her head and sees it complete, the vast and heartless, shining bay, and she sits down again and says to Hannah, ‘No, sorry, darling. I’m not ready.’

  Hannah, who is an almost-beautiful young woman of thirty-two, takes Lucy’s hand in hers. As the others begin a little joyful race towards the breaking waves, she says gently, ‘Do you think you ever will be ready?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Lucy. ‘I keep thinking something will happen, and then I won’t feel it any more and I’ll be OK. But that day doesn’t seem to come. I’m fifty-six and it still hasn’t come. I know it’s pathetic. I really am sorry.’

  Hannah kisses the hand she was holding and returns it tenderly to her mother’s side. ‘You don’t need to be sorry. Nobody minds. It’s just you we’re thinking about.’

  ‘I know. And on a day like this, in this heat, it’s ridiculous, but there we are.’