England and Other Stories (26 page)

In all his life—and he was sixty-nine—he’d never been first on the scene. Was this remarkable, a sort of achievement, or just the norm? In all his life with Lynne, in all their walks, they’d never been first on the scene either. It had never even occurred to them that it might happen. But he was now, for the first time, first on the scene. He was the one who ‘while out walking’ . . . It was another phrase that came to him.

He stood and looked. He also shook. But this was his Parkinson’s, his occasional and really not so violent tremor. It was another virtue of his solitary walks that this sometimes embarrassing symptom no longer mattered. It was anyway the lesser of his plights. He was so constituted now as to have from time to time a condition usually associated with strong emotion—and now he was under the sway of strong emotion his body had no separate way of signalling it. But he wasn’t sure what the emotion was. Was it fear? Or rather anger?

Whatever else this sight before him signified, it was something that had brutally interrupted—swept away, cancelled—his much-needed conversation with his wife, his being still with her though she wasn’t there. It had desecrated the memory of being here, in this same grassy clearing, with her in the past. It had made it impossible ever to walk this way with her (though without her) again.

It was hardly the appropriate emotion: anger. Yet he felt it. He would never tell anyone about it, though he understood that he’d have to tell people about other things. It was an inescapable consequence of his being here right now that he’d have to explain things and carefully answer questions. He’d have to justify his actions.

What were you doing walking in the woods? Why were you there?

She was in her twenties. If she were alive (and since he was sixty-nine) he might have called her a girl. The trainers were pale blue and white and had red laces to match her top. There was something impossible about the small swell of her ankle bone.

‘Stumbled upon’: that was another phrase. In all his life he’d never stumbled upon. He understood that his role in all this—though it was not as if he’d been assigned a role—was minor, incidental, the result of the merest chance, yet at the same time it was critical and would involve him a great deal. He might have walked another way, he might have caught a later train, he might not have come for a walk at all. This encounter might have been entirely someone else’s, but it was his.

If he gave an honest answer to why he was walking in the wood he might at once be thought to be a little peculiar. Why are you trembling? It’s Parkinson’s disease. I have Parkinson’s disease. Anyway, why shouldn’t he tremble? Who wouldn’t tremble at such a thing?

As the first on the scene, he might automatically—this possibility suddenly hit him—come under suspicion himself. Automatically and provisionally, yet almost definitely. A young woman, a girl. A retired man, a widower, with a tremble, walking alone in a wood . . .

What would Lynne think of this predicament he’d walked into? Suppose it had happened while he’d been walking with her. But he couldn’t now turn to his wife and say, ‘Lynne, what should I do? What should we do?’ Lynne, who just moments ago had seemed so assuringly to be with him, had now totally disappeared.

And that was really the worst of it all.

A great temptation came over him: to make the hypothesis, the other, not realised possibility be true. He might simply retrace his steps, go back into the woods, rejoin the main path. He might never, after all, have forked off through the undergrowth to this spot that only he, he and Lynne, and perhaps just a few other walking folk knew. He might just carry on with his walk. He might contemplate nature. There would be a story, a news story, which he might not even hear about, which would have nothing to do with him.

But he knew he couldn’t do this. It was true that he hadn’t gone near the body, let alone touched it, he’d only stood here and looked. Yet he felt that his presence, the path he’d taken, brushing aside twigs and stems, his tread on the ground beneath him were as indelibly imprinted as any scent an animal might pick up. There was something irrevocable about his being here. It was so much the case that the emotion afflicting him was perhaps neither anger nor fear but a sort of contaminating, trapping, but unjustifiable guilt. And he wanted to cry out suddenly to Lynne, who wasn’t there, to be his witness, his alibi.

The woman was not in any way like Lynne. She was not even like Lynne had been when she was, say, twenty-four. Except, of course, she was like Lynne in one fundamental way.

The trees, the ferns all around him were trembling, shaking in their way too. It was just the summer breeze. It was only for entirely extraneous reasons, an unlucky gene, that he was trembling himself. And yet he made a determined and futile effort—as if it were something both vital and within his power—to stop doing so.

Then he saw the whole truth of what must ensue, of what he and no one else must inescapably instigate, the truth of what was embodied before him—setting aside the immense riddle of why it was there at all. This was someone’s daughter, someone’s . . .

He reached for his mobile phone. It wasn’t easy. Mobile phones aren’t designed for people with Parkinson’s, but he still carried one, even on solitary walks, and would have said that it was in case he got into difficulties, in case of emergencies. And this was certainly an emergency. Even before his symptoms had appeared he hadn’t been a great user of his mobile and had called it his ‘walkie-talkie’ because he used it almost solely for communicating with his wife. Walkie-talkie: he should never have used those mocking words. When Lynne died he wished he hadn’t recently deleted all her inconsequential voice messages. But how should he have known?

It took time and was a struggle, with the shaking of his hand. But then others in his circumstances, without his condition, might have found this to be the case. He had no choice but to remain here, to be fixed to this spot. He even resolved not to budge from his position among the ferns, to stay as still as possible (setting aside his tremor), as still as that woman over there. Look at the ferns, the green ferns. Look at the butterfly, the woodpecker. Look—

He looked at the woman in her red top and saw, almost with a longing, the absolute absence the dead have even as they are there.

A voice crackled in his ear. He hadn’t a clue how to begin. He hadn’t a clue how to describe his situation or to pinpoint exactly where he was. What a terrible thing it can be just to be on this earth.

H
E CAME OVER
the familiar brow and saw at once the red lights of the solitary vehicle, perhaps half a mile ahead on the otherwise empty stretch of road. It wasn’t moving, it had pulled up. Then, as he drew closer, he saw the odd angle. Its nearside wheels had lodged in one of the treacherous roadside gullies where the tarmac stopped.

It was not yet five. His watch began at 5.30. Only minutes ago, while Ruth still slept, he’d eased the car, in the dim light, from the garage. At this hour the straight stretch of road, the only straight stretch in his short journey, was normally all his own. He seldom rushed it. It was so starkly beautiful: the mass of the moor to his left and up ahead, in the scoops between the hills, the first glimpses of the sea. He told himself, routinely, not to take it for granted.

It was dawn, but overcast, there was even a faint mist—a general breathy greyness. The sort of greyness that would burn off, to give full sunshine, by mid-morning. The weather was in his professional blood. Fair weather, calm seas, late July. But it was the busy season.

He looked at the dashboard. He could spare perhaps ten minutes. He slowed and pulled over—not too far over, taking his warning from the car ahead. In it he could see a solitary figure in the driver’s seat, who must be amply aware by now that help was at hand. It was a blue BMW, but of a certain vintage, not a rich man’s car. Exmoor, these days, was full of rich men’s cars. Every species of plush four-by-four. Well, it was four-by-four territory. The joke was that since they drove the things around Chelsea, then here, surely, they should use their dinky little town cars. He didn’t quite get the joke, never having been to Chelsea.

He stopped. He could, in theory, have driven on. He was under no obligation. But how could you? In any case rescue was in his professional veins too. He understood at once what the situation might look like—he was even wearing a dark uniform. It must be why the driver didn’t open his door and, back turned, seemed almost to be cowering.

He walked forward, inhaling the cool air. A thin dreamy envelope of sleep still clung to him. There was the tiny cluck of water in the gully. A stream, barely more than a trickle through the grass, came down off the hillside and, in the slight dip, cut away at the edge of the road. It was a dodgy spot.

The driver’s window was down. He was met by a sudden blast of the foreign.

‘Fookin’ ’ell. Fookin’ ’ell!’

The driver’s face was black. He had, in silently noting the fact, no other word for it. You might say it wasn’t deep black, as black faces go, but it was black. This was not a place, an area, for black faces. It was remarkable to see them. There was, on top, a thick bizarre bonnet of frizzy hair. It looked cartoonish in its frizziness.

‘Fookin’ ’ell.’

‘It’s okay,’ he quickly and pacifyingly said, ‘I’m not a policeman. I’m a coastguard. It’s not a crime to be stuck in a ditch. Can I help?’

‘Co-ahst-guaard!’

The man’s voice had changed in an instant. The first voice (the normal one?) had a strong accent which, nonetheless, he couldn’t place, because all northern accents eluded him. The second voice was a foreign voice in the sense that the accent wasn’t English at all. He couldn’t place it exactly either, just that it was broadly—very broadly—Caribbean. But the man had slipped into it as if it were not in fact his natural voice. It was turned on and exaggerated, a joke voice.

On the other hand, since both voices were alien to him, both voices were like joke voices. That wasn’t a fair-minded thought, but he knew that people not from the West Country made a joke of the West Country accent all the time. It was one of the standard joke accents.

‘Where de co-ahst, man? Where de co-ahst? I is lookin’ for de co-ahst. You guard it, you tell me where it is.’

He felt at once compelled to comply.

‘It’s over there.’ He actually lifted an arm. ‘You’re looking at it.’

The man wrinkled his face as if he couldn’t see anything.

‘I is lookin’ for Ilfracombe, man.’ Then he pronounced the word at full-pitch and with declamatory slowness, as if it were a place in Africa.

‘Il-frah-coombe!’

Then the voice broke up into little screechy, hissy laughs. He couldn’t tell if it was nervous laughter, panicky laughter or a sort of calculated laughter. Or just laughter. It was like a parrot. He couldn’t help the thought. It was like a parrot laughing.

‘Ilfracombe is over there.’ Again he felt the ridiculous need to raise an arm. ‘You’re in the right direction. You’ll need the thirty-nine, then the three-nine-nine. An hour, at this time of day.’

The man peered, putting a visoring hand to his eyes. ‘I no see it, man. I no see no three-nine-nine. Ilfracombe, Deh-von. We in Deh-von, man?’

‘We’re in Somerset.’ (He almost said, ‘We in Somerset.’) It surely didn’t need saying, but he announced it, ‘This is Exmoor.’

‘
Ex
moor! Fookin’ ’ell.
Ilkley
Moor, that’s me. Ilkley Moor bar tat. Ilkley Moor bar fookin’ tat.’

The voice had completely changed again. What was going on here? He was used—occupationally used—to the effects of shock and exposure. He was used to the phenomenon of disorientation. To gabble, hysteria, even, sometimes, to the effects of drug taking.

He wanted to say a simple ‘Calm down’. He wanted to exert a restorative authority. But he felt that this man, stranded in what seemed to be, for him, the middle of nowhere and talking weirdly, somehow had the authority. He peered into the car’s interior. He saw that on the not unroomy back seat there was a grubby blanket and a pillow. It was five in the morning. He got the strong impression that this man, going about whatever could possibly be his business, used his car as at least an emergency place of overnight accommodation. Having just affirmed that he wasn’t one, he felt like a policeman. He felt out of his territory, though he couldn’t be more in it. He knew this road like the back of his hand. But he was a coastguard, not a policeman.

The voice changed again. ‘I is in de right direction, man. But I is goin’ nowhere.’

‘No. I can see that. What happened?’

‘Fookin’ deer.’ It was the other man—the other other-man—again.

‘What?’

‘Fookin’ deer. Int’ middle of road. Joost standin’ there.’

‘You saw a deer?’

‘Int’ middle of road. Five fookin’ minutes ago.’

He looked around, over the roof of the car. It was Exmoor. There were deer. You saw them sometimes from the road, especially in the early morning. But there was little cover for them here and he’d never, in over twenty years, come upon a deer just standing in the middle of the road. If they stepped on the road at all, they’d surely dart off again at even the distant sight of a vehicle. This man had come from—wherever he’d come from—to see something he’d never seen in decades.

He had the feeling that the deer might be another symptom of disorientation. A hallucination, an invention. Yet the man (the other one again) spoke about it with beguiling precision.

‘A lee-tal baby deer, man. I couldn’t get by he. I couldn’t kill he. A lee-tal baby Bambee.’

He looked over the roof of the car. Nothing moved in the greenish greyness. It was just plausible: a young stray deer, separated and inexperienced, in the dip, in a pocket of mist, near a source of drinking water. It was just plausible. He was a coastguard, not a deer warden. He asked himself: Would he have had any sceptical thoughts if this were just some unlucky farmer?

‘I see his lee-tal eyes in me headlights. I couldn’t kill he.’