Cryers Hill Read online

  Gor's party preparation would begin early in the evening. He would bathe, shave, and dress in his favourite green shirt and checked slacks. He would adopt a loose-hipped walk and a slow carniverous smile. 'I'm singing a higgity, haggity, hoggety, high. Pioneers they never say die.'

  Nobody else, as far as Sean remembered, was ever invited to Gor's parties. He enjoyed himself alone in his favourite armchair, checking the time on his gold wristwatch, in a fug of Wild Mustang cologne. Cath came once. She tried a jewel-coloured drink and tapped her finger to the music. She never came again. She stayed upstairs with her Avon catalogues. Gor didn't care. He was enough guest for any party, what did he need others for?

  The record he loved to play on these nights was Trini Lopez Live at the Cabana, which made it sound like there were a hundred people in their front room. Like Dr Jekyll, Gor would begin a transformation that started in his clicking fingers and jerked its way up his arms until it reached his head, which would begin to twitch and peck and bob, followed by elbows, shoulders, hips and finally one bouncing leg, until off he would go like a voodoo rooster. The banging on the wall from next door followed. 'It's only eight o'clock,' he'd protest to himself, consulting the gold watch, waggling his hips. 'Bunch of squares!' he would roar at the wallpaper. 'Live a little!' The whooping and cheering of the audience on the record made it sound jolly and wild. Sean had to admit the songs were pretty good. 'When the Saints', 'What'd I Say?', 'La Bamba', 'Marianne', 'Unchain My Heart'.

  'Marianne, oh Marianne,

  Oh, won't you marry me?'

  The dancing wore him out, so Gor was obliged to settle himself down to study the record sleeve under the lamp. 'I might get tight tonight,' he liked to warn with his third drink. He would grin and wink like he was Gary Cooper, as though perhaps he might tell a friendly joke, the way Americans did, or maybe sing something, 'That's Amore', Dean Martin style. Before he went to bed he always put his Trini Lopez record back in its sleeve and switched off all the lights.

  Eleven

  THE COLLECTED POEMS of W. H. Davies. On the inside flap of the book jacket, Walter noted, were some interesting facts about the poet's life. He felt extravagantly belittled by these, though he continued to read them as if to hammer home his own limitations.

  Mr. Davies was born in 1871 at Newport, Monmouthshire. He wandered, as a young man, across the Atlantic. He set out with a companion for Klondyke, travelling as a stowaway on trains, missed his footing, and lost a leg. He came back to England and South-East London, lived in common lodging houses, peddled laces, and gradually accumulated enough money to publish a small volume of poems.

  Walter was outclassed, he could see that. He was no writer, no poet, not he. He did not have nor ever would have what it takes to make the life of a poet. The thought remained, however, unlikely as it seemed, the idea of the writing life. The morning, afternoon and evening of the published poet. What did they do? Read, write. Rejoice? When did they write? After breakfast of course. When did they stop? Never. If there were even the remotest of possibilities, the merest chance of getting a collection published. A collection. Published. He would have a desk by a window. He would have pencils and tobacco. He would stop for a brief lunch. He didn't dare imagine what his own book-sleeve biography would consist of. And then he did. A right balls-up. He imagined it to punish himself for dreaming dreams in the first place.

  Mr. Brown was born in 1915 at Cryers Hill, Buckinghamshire. He did not wander as a young man, indeed he has barely left the South-East. Suffice to say he has not even managed to cross the English Channel. He once set out with a companion for High Wycombe. He has travelled on trains, but only ever with a purchased ticket, and though he has frequently missed his footing he continues to retain both legs. He lives with his mother, works for the Water Company, tends an allotment plot, and is gradually accumulating enough misery to rob him of his will to live.

  There. Pipe dreams gone to blazes. Good riddance.

  Walter sat between two pillars of poetry volumes, hands on his knees, and grief in his heart. It was not that he expected his life to be any different to any other ordinary fellow's. It was not that he felt he was owed or deserving or special. It was merely that he wished to belong to writing, to be put right by it. He wished to sit beside it through all the afternoons of his life until there were no more afternoons left, and then he would read Byron's 'Fare Thee Well', and slip off.

  Walter Brown was not an educated man. Not like those young gentlemen in the cathedral towns, with their quotes, Latin and Greek, from the kind of obscure texts not found in Wycombe Lending Library. He did not even know French, apart from au revoir, and in lieu of. He did not know why he liked poetry, or why he preferred some to others, or which poems, in learned circles, were considered superior to others, or why. He only knew that a poem could redeem an afternoon in the same way unexpectedly good weather might. For a moment you could look upon the world with fondness, with wonder, and it would look back at you the selfsame way.

  He had been struck, on occasion, by inspiration, though not often. He was probably not very good. He suspected this was the case, likely even to be the cause of his heartache, though many of his poems were as good as William Daviess. Weren't they? Well, perhaps not.

  'You can't eat words.' His mother had been particularly pleased with that one. She had banged the pots down, as though the statement warranted a drum roll.

  'What a relief,' she had explained brightly to a neighbour. 'What a relief Walter has no talent, else what would we eat?'

  Humble pie, he had thought; though he could not bring himself to dislike his mother altogether, in spite of everything. They had enjoyed many peaceful, dark Christmases, the two of them. She was a widow. She had looked after him, and his best suit, and fetched the doctor when he was ill. And she was his mother after all, and he suspected there were worse than her.

  'I'm fond of you, you know,' she once admitted beside the last fireside embers. 'You're a good boy.' And he allowed her to take his hand and then astonish him when she wept into his palm.

  He read her Wordsworth's 'Near Anio's stream I spied a gentle Dove'. It was worth a shot. She remained more or less impassive throughout, perhaps mildly disgusted. For her part, she was anxious that her only son took care over his good job with the Water Company. She was anxious that he should not do anything rash, that he should not spoil his life, or hers, by reading too many maudlin poems. Hilda Brown, after all, did not want things described, compared or identified, thank you. She wanted them dealt with and put away. Where possible, ignored, preferably forgotten about. The whole messy business of feeling was something she was keen to avoid. How much better to have a tidy-up and get on. Strong tea and a slice of cake repaired the majority of woes. There was the parish church for anything more serious, there was Father Blagdon; and if all else failed, there was God. Anyone who wanted to start feeling and then find it necessary to describe it, compare it and rhyme it with ceiling could go to the dogs.

  'Your father showed no interest in you,' she mentioned breezily in response to Wordsworth's poem. 'He never took to you. I think he would have preferred a girl.'

  As children, Walter and Mary had been taught by Miss Randall. Miss Randall had been let out of an asylum and so tended to please herself. She was a committed if unreliable teacher who was obliged to grapple with her physical tics as well as the classroom timetable. Her mouth appeared to move quicker than the words she was speaking and her arms jerked up and down as though she were playing an invisible drum. Sound and movement ran against one another inside Miss Randall, seeming to produce a new law of physics in her girlish body. The overall effect left the children spellbound. Words came out in triplicate, stammered rows of them. It set the children laughing, and Miss Randall would have to bang bang bang on her table and fire her voice over their heads. 'Beek-wat!' Her direst affliction – her involuntary habit of letting off a short sharp scream – was tolerated with good humour, though it always made newcomers cry.

  Miss Randa
ll took little pills she kept in her bag, the click of its fastening raising all the rows of heads. Miss Randall found their interest impertinent. It vexed her that her defects should prove interesting to the children when her lessons were not. It seemed that Miss Randall's problems were all in her head.

  Miss Squires, who taught the next class up, took regular complaints concerning Miss Randall to the headmistress, Cordelia Snell – who had once, famously, snubbed a bishop. Miss Randall, it was alleged, made the children wear blindfolds during their country-dancing class. This was deemed unacceptable. It encouraged concentration, Miss Randall responded, they picked up the steps quickly, it never failed. It was impractical, countered Miss Squires, irresponsible. Miss Squires wore a piece of fox fur around her neck and high-buttoned boots, and consequently her advice was always well received but never acted upon.

  Miss Snell had a lazy eye and a quick right hand. The children were required to gather around her desk with their work so that she could slap the legs of anyone who submitted a poor effort without having to leave her chair. She wore a locket around her neck and her unusually long fingers made her frail hands look like wings. Cordelia Snell, it was said, was the victim of unrequited love.

  Mrs Tarbox taught the infants. She could knock you over with the back of her meatier, altogether stubbier hand while looking the other way. Around her neck hung a playground whistle that could be heard in Wycombe.

  So it was that Miss Randall had failed to develop any interest in the outside world, even declining a trip to Amersham. The village school taxed her to the very borders of her hysterical best, and was all the world she could bear to tolerate. At home under lamplight and magnification she crafted intricately detailed miniatures to the steady fizz of the fire in the grate. Some of these she fashioned into brooches that proved popular at sales of works and church fetes. Nobody could explain how a woman of such an agitated disposition, such innate jerkiness, a sufferer from not one but three different varieties of nervous disorders, could achieve such perfection.

  Walter loved Mary then. As with his passion for poetry, he had not meant to. Mary Hatt was the girl nobody invited home, but cautiously admired nonetheless. For children she was thrilling to be around: feral, fearless, her head stuffed with deplorable thoughts, her mouth full of curses and higgledy teeth. Sometimes Mary got her hands walloped at the start of class before she'd had a chance to misbehave. However, the occasion when, in front of the whole class, Miss Snell fainted clean away (a light crumpling as though she had mistimed the swing of a trapeze) found Mary's hand on her head and Mary's harlequin grin above her, while the rest of them, many in howling tears, simply ran away.

  Can you see the ewe with her lamb under the yew tree? They must copy it out; they must note the different spelling of U's. Mary laughed. 'There's no yew trees up in sheep pasture!' she called out. She was proud to know something. Yew trees didn't grow on hill pasture. Idiot idea that was. Daftie. Yew grew where it was sheltered, along lanes and tracks, in churchyards and gardens. 'Yew don't grow in sheep pasture!' Hurled out the side of her mouth, like you'd call to your working dog. 'That's idiot, that is.'

  'Mary Hatt, you are disturbing the peace and calm of my classroom with your inanities!' Miss Randall's last word swung into the air, high over the heads of the others, and remained airborne for several seconds: mysterious, unfathomable. Mary was walloped and sent from the classroom. Miss Randall reached for the back of her chair to steady herself. She hummed the first line of 'The Morning Stirs the Sternest Heart', something musical was always good. She could feel the curiosity of the children as she tipped forwards and backwards into her spasms that she pretended were coughs. How alluring she was to them this way – defenceless, peeled open, jumping like a hare in a gin trap; how absorbed they were by her diminishing authority, her sudden inability to command them further. She would take her pill, if she was able. Up came the heads as she gulped her water. She waited, her angry chin raised, until the last head went down and the scrape of chalk resumed.

  Mary had not gone far away. They could still hear her voice barrelling in the corridor, in the schoolyard, on Cryers Hill Road. She would wait for Isabel Hatt, her elder sister, who was in the class above.

  'There's know-you trees up in she-pasture!' On she went beyond the hedgerow, over the road by the Widmer barns, between the squeak of chalk letters on slate.

  'You know there's trees up in she pastor! Yoo-hoo!'

  Walter would look for her all the way home. She was often somewhere on his route, perhaps in the woods, though he had also discovered her floating in the pond, lying in a ditch, and spreadeagled across the roof of the Grange Road Stores, shouting down unpleasantries to the aunt of the grocer below. She got lashed for that. Seven or eight slate tiles she brought tumbling with her and a lot more language. Language, mind, you wouldn't want your mother to hear, nor your daughter neither, never heard like it before, not in all the district. Many of the women claimed not to understand it, supposed it must be foreign, though each had mastered it fluently in childbirth.

  Mary lay in brine after those lashings. Her mother warmed water on the stove and filled a bath with a salt rock in. Mary's sister Isabel added zinc paste from a dark glass bottle. You had to lie still long enough for the mixture to work on the abrasions. If you lay till the water was all turned pink, so much the better. Mary held in her breath then. She floated, red and white like a dappled fish, sinewy against the pain. She lay till the pink lapped, cloudy with zinc, around her ears. And Mary cried, though she did not scream, not like the first time, nor did her mother neither, for Ida had seen it all before and had lain in zinc brine herself too. She waited until the tincture did its job and Mary's cries had settled and then Ida let her thoughts slide along the floor till they reached the wall, and rested them there, in the wall, in the bricks and mortar her great-grandfather had built.

  Twelve

  A FALCON CAME drifting over the estate. It came in a lunchtime lull, while the machinery lay ticking in the heat. Sean was watching Daniel Sharp crying. Daniel could cry for hours, Sean didn't mind it much. He found it diverting rather than irritating. Sometimes he patted him on the head and sometimes he just watched the tears moving the dirt around his face, and sometimes he would give him something to really cry about.

  Daniel stopped crying and looked up, and this made a silence, an absolute quiet, like just before a thunderclap. Sean looked up too and there it was: a falcon, hanging in the blue on frayed wings. The boys looked up at the sky and the bird looked down at the earth. An angel, Sean thought. The bird waited and the boys waited. They held themselves still in case there might be a revelation or a message, a command even. The bird flapped its wings once, twice, and dropped like a stone. Daniel and Sean ran down the slope in between the dry ruts and channels made by the giant tyres of the diggers. The bird swooped steeply to the left and then seemed to rise again before dipping over a brick mountain and out of sight. The boys ran towards the brick mountain, they called out after it, and they were still running long after it was gone.

  'We saw an angel,' Sean panted.

  'How big?' Jason Smith was the expert. They had watched the sky for the rest of the day, but the bird had not returned. Now the machines were groaning again and the visitation seemed distant and unlikely.

  'A bird of prey.' Jason announced it with authority. He knew all the right terms for these and suchlike. Sean and Daniel gasped. A bird of pray. A bird of pray was here. Sean goosebumped. He had known it was an angel. He had hoped for a revelation and it had come. Let us pray, the vicar always said that. Now a bird of pray had come to them. Things were bound to change.

  'I've seen it before,' Jason said. 'It's a falcon. Falcons are a bird of prey. Everyone knows falcons.' Jason strolled up and down as he instructed them. He said the bird sat on a pylon by Spurlands End. It always sat there, he said; that was its perch. He said the bird's voice was loud as a scream. The boys waited, mouths slung, crouched over their knees for the message that Jason would tr
anslate for them. What did the bird want to tell them? What did the bird have to say? It only ever said one thing, Jason explained. The bird simply repeated it over and over, he confirmed. It said, 'The Martians are coming, the Martians are coming, the Martians are coming.'

  Sean had to admit they were no closer to catching the killer than they were to landing on the moon. He said this to Ann because it sounded good and somehow it suggested this was her fault. When she didn't respond he leaned his arm against a tree, like a detective.

  'I know where he is.' She said it plainly, same as she would say, 'P'sof, Spaz.'

  Sean recalled his dad saying that the first thing to remember about women is they are all liars. 'It's just their instinct,' he explained. 'They can't help it.' Sean wondered what the second thing was.

  'I've seen him.'

  Sean couldn't decide how to respond. He wanted to say, 'Liar,' but he also wanted to say, 'Where?' And he also wanted to say, 'So have I,' plus, 'I love you, do you love me?' He said nothing.

  'D'you know what a prick is?'

  'Yes,' he lied.

  'Right, well.'