Consequences

  A huge tractor confronted her. It filled the lane entirely. From somewhere high above in the cab, the driver gazed down at her, impassive. She understood that the ball was in her court—it was for her to back up. She did so, craning over her shoulder, lurching at one point into the hedge bank. She heard a concealed rock scrape across the car’s bodywork. She lurched out again, managed to straighten up, glanced ahead at the tractor, which was inching forward—politely, not putting on the pressure. She backed around the bend—what if there was something coming?—and found another straightish stretch without, apparently, a passing place. She weaved from side to side of the lane. At last she arrived at a gateway into which she could cram the car.

  The tractor roared past.

  From time to time, a signpost appeared, as other lanes diverged from this one—equally sure of themselves, equally enigmatic. Ruth had by now quite lost any sense of direction. The signposts pointed every which way, so far as she was concerned—Roadwater, Rodhuish, Withycombe, Luxborough. What is where? Where does which go? She had quite lost touch with the map now, and did not dare stop to try to work things out; what if another tractor came? Or something even larger? Once, a horse and rider appeared, a helmeted figure advancing at a spanking trot. Ruth squeezed the car into the hedge bank, stopped, lowered the window and started to call out, “Excuse me, I wonder if…”, but the horse and rider had spanked on before she could finish.

  She knew what she was looking for. She had a description. She was looking for an old cottage, with whitewashed walls and a slate roof, set back from the lane, approached by a short track, at a T-junction with another lane which plunged off downhill to a small hamlet. And, by her reckoning, she should have reached this point by now, but no such place had appeared. She went up, she went down, she went through a village, a hamlet, but the wrong one, it would seem—and then—oh horrors!—she was confronted once more by the A39, with its glittering conveyor belt of cars. She managed to turn round, she was absorbed once more into the lanes, she tried different signposts, she went down where before she had gone up, left instead of right and suddenly, there it was, there it must be, this surely was it. But she was well over an hour later than she had said she would be. She turned off the lane onto the track. A terracotta-colored metal five-barred gate stood open on to the graveled driveway of the cottage, and the scrunch of her tires brought Brian Clyde to the door.

  A tall man. Lean, a touch round-shouldered—a person who sat much at a desk, maybe. Craggy features. Glasses. Fiftyish.

  Ruth got out of the car. “Sorry to be late. I got a bit lost.”

  “Of course. Everyone does. Congratulations on getting here at all.”

  The cottage sat in a triangular garden, with high hedges all around. There was a shed to one side, beyond which Ruth could see a shaggy lawn and unkempt shrubbery, and then a little orchard of old apple trees.

  They went inside. The front door opened into a large kitchen with a gray slate floor, elegantly equipped, with a big dresser to one side, a long table, with a bench built into another wall. A staircase at the back. A door leading to another room.

  “Tea? Coffee?”

  “Tea would be great. Could I use your bathroom?”

  “Upstairs and turn right.”

  At the top of the stairs, Ruth glanced through the open door of what was evidently the main bedroom and saw through the window a sloping field, hills, a sliver of gray sea. There was another open door; she saw a desk with computer, and a couch. Alongside was a small bathroom, newly and neatly fitted out. The bathmat was on the floor. She sat looking at a damp, bare footprint, which seemed somehow oddly intimate. She washed, tidied her hair, went downstairs.

  He had a mug of tea in each hand, and indicated the room off the kitchen. “It’s more comfortable in here.”

  She followed him. “Oh!”

  The frescos. Ducks, in a procession around the walls. Willow trees that wept in each corner of the room. Quivery lines of blue water.

  “Oh…”

  He was smiling. “When I saw these, I knew I had to have the cottage. They were in a far worse state then—plaster coming off, I’ve had restoration people in. Of course, I had no idea then who had painted them. The place had been a farm laborer’s cottage for decades, but local people remembered there had been an artist who lived here, a young man who was killed in the war.”

  Ruth stared at the ducks, the tumbling willows, the rippling water. She looked for a park bench, but there was none.

  “The farm had changed hands—the people from whom I bought the place. They came in the sixties and knew nothing. And then I found the blocks and the maquette, and set about some research and…you know the rest.”

  There was a sofa along one wall, facing the square window that framed another view of hills, and sky, and a golden field. A crammed bookcase, more books piled on the floor alongside. A small perfunctory television. A stack of newspapers. Pictures—carefully hung so as not to encroach upon the frescos.

  They sat down. On the coffee table in front of the sofa were the blocks, and a little chunky figure carved out of rose-colored stone. Brian Clyde picked it up, and put it into Ruth’s hands.

  “I found this under a pile of leaves just outside the old shed. I suspect it had been used as a doorstop. It’s pink alabaster from down on the beach at Blue Anchor. And I suppose your grandfather made it.”

  A female figure, seated, body and limbs all in one, the head without a face. Like, Like…

  “Makes you think of those little prehistoric votive figures,” he suggested. “Or, I suppose, Henry Moore.”

  She nodded.

  “Anyway, there you are. Yours. And here are the blocks. They were at the bottom of a box in the shed, which had been used as a dump for discarded tools and stuff. Amazing they’ve survived. Evidently none of the folk who lived here over the years had been great on clearing out.”

  Ruth lifted each block, studied them. “I can see now more exactly which they are. I’ve got an engraving of this one—Dandelion Clocks. And these with the figures are from an edition of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare that he did for a fine press—the Heron Press.”

  “What happened to all the rest?”

  “Lucas had a lot. Lucas was the Heron Press. He married my grandmother after—after Matt was killed. I suppose she must have taken them when she went from here, but overlooked these.”

  “In a minute,” he said, “I’m going to show you something else. But first you need to recover from that drive. Everyone arrives here in a frenzy—getting lost in the lanes is a rite of passage.”

  He told her that he had had the cottage for a year. “There was a lot of work to be done. The farm had modernized a bit over the years—agricultural workers require higher standards of comfort these days—but the bathroom and kitchen fell somewhat short. The wiring was ancient. And I wanted a study that would double as a guest bedroom, and central heating seemed in order. Then the local builder suggested the slate floor for the kitchen.”

  He talked with beguiling enthusiasm. He had known this area well for a long while. “I’d always dreamed of having a foothold here. And then there was a bit of money suddenly—my poor old dad died—and I started looking around. Of course I can’t be here all the time. It’s my bolt-hole.” An academic at a northern university, he had to return for each term.

  His trousers were stained here and there with pink earth, as though he had been doing something outside; fingernails a bit grubby, too. On top of the bookcase, a little carriage clock ticked, a mere whisper. Ruth read the titles of books: The Travel Journals of Celia Fiennes, John Leland’s Itinerary, The Mediterranean in the Ancient World. There was an old map on the wall, framed. She was listening to him, but everything around seized her eye. To be in this room, where they must have been. And her mother. The window was open; there came birdsong, and then a melancholy whistle.

  She said, “The train? I saw it at a station.”

  “That’s right. Reinvented in the service of t
ourism and the local economy. More tea?”

  “I’d love some.”

  He went through to the kitchen. She looked at the pictures on the walls while he was gone. An etching of Dunster Castle. An old Great Western Railway poster from the early twentieth century. A framed photograph of haymaking with haywain and shire horses.

  He returned. “Did you stop off on the motorway?”

  “Twice. If only to touch ground. Motorways are insane. It’s like flying. They make a nonsense of real distance. You hurtle from county to county.”

  He laughed. “Not always. Not on a summer Saturday. Not going past Bristol at rush hour.”

  “But you know what I mean. It’s time and space gone mad. You think in terms of hours, not miles. So many hours to Exeter, when really it’s a great expanse of land—fields and woods and rivers and towns. I always think that. It’s a distortion.”

  “Is it?”

  “Well, yes. I mean—you think of the…the intensity of all those places, of the baggage they carry, of how they’ve been the only place, for thousands of people, and now you whisk past—they become scenery, and the last half-hour.”

  “How very odd,” said Brian Clyde.

  “Odd?” Ruth became a touch defensive.

  “Odd because that is very much what interests me.” He paused. “I’m writing a book about something rather similar.”

  “Oh?” And I am probably about to get out of my depth, she thought.

  “I’m interested in…the way in which elsewhere—the other place—has been perceived, over time. Whether it is of no interest, or territory to be acquired, or just an area over which you move. Anyway—you don’t need to hear about that.”

  I might, she thought. Definitely I might.

  “…and I just want to show you something else. Come.”

  He led the way upstairs. On the small landing he paused outside the open door of the bedroom. “Tidy, I think. Now look at this.”

  The walls. Dancing figures. Pink. Nude, but discretely so. Male and female. Who hold out their arms to one another, link arms, swirl around the walls of the room.

  He said, “They had been covered with distemper. I never realized they were there until the decorator began work, and spotted something. I wasn’t here. They rang up and said, you’ve got people on the walls of your bedroom, you may want to take a look. When I got here, and saw a leg, and an arm, I got busy tracking down the restoration people—and there you are.”

  Ruth was amazed, transfixed. It was as though the room were filled with life—a mysterious, silent celebratory life that danced on and on, had done so ever since…ever since they were here. Him and Her. Matt and Lorna. She felt a rush of happiness, a burst of joy, as though something flowed through time, from then to now, from them to herself. She turned to Brian with a great smile, and saw that he too was beaming; for a moment they seemed to be complicit, an alliance of delight.

  He said, “Aren’t they wonderful? Every morning, they remind me that life is to be enjoyed.”

  She said, “My mother was born in here.”

  “I feel an intruder.”

  “No way. You rescued the paintings. I wonder who covered them up.”

  “Some previous occupier? They’d have been seen as a bit…indelicate, maybe.”

  “Sort of Matisse-ish, aren’t they?”

  “Yes. Or Bloomsbury. Very much of their day. But sui generis, too. His style—crisp but also suggestive. The shapes, the depth he achieved—like the ducks downstairs.”

  “And large-scale wasn’t really his thing. He was an engraver.”

  “Quite.”

  They stood in silence. The room danced.

  Downstairs again, Brian said, “Come and have a look at my jungle garden. That is the next restoration project.”

  Outside, he paused beside her car, frowning, and pointed at the windscreen—the little star of shattered glass. “When did this happen?”

  “Oh—not long before I got here. A stone flew up. Luckily it didn’t do more damage.”

  “But you can’t drive on with it like that, you know.”

  “Surely? It’s just a chip.”

  “No. The glass is weakened. It could all go. And it’s bang in front of you. Not safe.”

  “I didn’t realize. Oh, goodness…”

  “I’ll get on the phone. We should be able to sort something out. Go and look at what will one day be the garden.”

  She wandered through the long grass, thought that perhaps the apple trees were here back then. Was that a quince?

  Presently he joined her. “I’ve found the people who do windscreens around here, but the man was off on a job. He’s going to call back in an hour or so.”

  “Look, I’m so sorry,” said Ruth. “I’ve entirely taken over your afternoon.”

  “It was going nowhere in particular, anyway. Fighting the bracken was rather losing its appeal. Would you care to go for a walk? I’ve left the answerphone on.”

  The lanes were different now. They had become friendly and inviting. They offered sprays of yellow honeysuckle, twists of vetch, bright ferns. Walking between the high banks, Ruth and Brian were a part of the place, it had digested them, there was mutual purpose—the lane was going that way, and they would go with it. When they heard the sound of a car, they stood against the bank while it went by, and endured its passage with resentment.

  Ruth said, “The scale changes when you’re walking.”

  “Exactly. You have to get on equal terms with landscape, and that means like this. I live with an Ordnance Survey map in my pocket.”

  “What’s that purple stuff called?”

  “No idea, I’m afraid. I haven’t got to the Teach Yourself Botany course yet.”

  They were at the top of the hill now, and had stopped at a gateway. The land fell away down to the sea, a few miles off: the long gray reach of the Bristol Channel with two perched islands and the far rim of the Welsh coastline.

  “Flatholm and Steepholm,” said Brian. “Margam roughly opposite. The steelworks.”

  “Elsewhere. What people here must have thought—across the sea, miles away.”

  “Exactly.” He looked at her, with a slight smile. She felt complacent. For some reason, it was necessary that this man should approve.

  He went on, “But what would you have wanted to do about it. Go there? Stay away?”

  She considered. “It would depend on circumstances…on when it is.”

  “Ah. Just so.”

  “If I’m prehistoric, I think I’d want to make a raft or something and go and see if there’s anything useful there. Later on…maybe I’d wonder if there’s more work over there, better opportunities.”

  “Actually,” he said, “in the nineteenth century it was the other way round. Welsh miners were coming over here to work in the iron ore mines up on the Brendons.”

  “Then maybe I’d marry one of them.”

  He laughed. “You undoubtedly did. Plenty of Welsh names around here. I say…you’ve quite latched onto this, haven’t you?”

  They turned into a lane that plunged steeply down, walked through a hamlet—scattered cottages, farm building—and stopped by a little whitewashed church that sat above the hedge bank. Brian looked at his watch. “I suppose we have to be getting back. That chap should be phoning soon.”

  They walked slowly. Ruth talked about Lorna and Matt, about what happened, about Lucas. He listened intently.

  “I had no idea the cottage came with so much baggage. I feel a gatecrasher.”

  “You shouldn’t. You found the paintings. And someone else might have junked the blocks, and the figure.”

  “I shall be the custodian, then.” He shot her a glance. “And what about you? You mentioned you’d be on your way to Devon. Holiday?”

  She explained Sam. She lightly sketched the children, the gallery, her work. No need to overload the man.

  He spoke of his own work. A grown-up daughter was mentioned, studying in America. They were walking up the
side of a field now, the roof of the cottage visible at the top of the rise.

  Ruth went upstairs to the bathroom. When she came down, he was standing in the kitchen, the phone in his hand. “Message. There’s a nuisance I’m afraid.” His expression was not that of a man who is finding any great problem. “They can’t get the right screen until tomorrow. I don’t see any alternative but for you to stay here overnight.”

  “Oh, heavens…” she said. “Look, I can’t do that. I’ve imposed on you quite enough as it is. There’ll be some local B and B…”

  “No way. I’m already considering the dinner options. I’ve got some lamb chops in the fridge. Or there’s the Indian in Williton.”

  “Oh dear…I feel awful about this. Well—thank you.”

  She took her mobile outside to call Sam, and stood there in the late afternoon sunshine.

  She found that she was not feeling particularly awful after all.

  “Sam? I’ve had a bit of a hitch…”

  She sat on the sofa in the sitting-room, looking through a local publication of old photographs of the area, at Brian’s suggestion. “Nostalgia industry. But there are some that give you an idea of how it was in your grandparents’ day.”

  Farm workers in shirtsleeves and open waistcoats. Flat caps everywhere. Horse-drawn farm vehicles. Many bicycles. Women’s Institute members in flowery pinnies. Little boxy cars.

  Ruth peered at this black and white world, which, of course, for them had not been black and white at all but rich color, and normal, expected, unexceptional—the world as it was, and how could it be otherwise? Very young Lorna wore a pinny, perhaps. Certainly they had bikes.

  She could hear the creak of floorboards as Brian moved around overhead. He seemed to be doing a lot of moving. He had vanished upstairs a while ago on some unstated mission, leaving her with this booklet.

  She looked around the room again. It was a comfortable room, and would be cosy in winter, with that big radiator under the window. On this summer evening, all the doors were open. In the kitchen, the table had been laid for supper, and there was wine in the fridge—Ruth had insisted on bringing some out from the box intended for Sam.