Gordon Williams (3 page)

He went out of the kitchen door into the porch, carrying the
Aga
rakings in its ash-shovel; he put down both lots of ash to pull on his rubber boots. These had tractor type soles and had been left behind in the coal-shed by a previous tenant. He had bought special felt sole-linings but even with those he still thought there was something unhygienic about wearing another person’s castoffs. If it had not been for certain ridicule by Louise – who tended to laugh at his awareness of germs – he would have burned them and bought himself a new pair. He felt this sort of detail might possibly help towards creating the right mental attitude for writing the Branksheer book. Squire and scholar and diarist as he was, Branksheer had lived in what could only be described as squalor. George Magruder just could not tune in on the wavelength of a man who was at home in Latin and Greek and corresponded with Europe’s leading classicists, and at the same time took head-lice for granted and the pox as almost inevitable. He and Louise often
argued whether it was sophisticated to desire clinical sterility. She took the view that the truly mature man would not have a complex about dirt.

He opened the porch door and walked through a foot of snow towards the corner of the house, passing the kitchen window. Between the corner of the garage and the house there was a heavy wooden partition into which was set a door. He slid back the bolt and backed through, both hands occupied with ash. He let the wooden door slam behind him. He walked along the end wall of the house to the corner, where the frozen surface of the snow now glinted in the bright December sun.

In front of the house there was a small paved forecourt in which a few rose-bushes and shrubs grew in beds cut out of the paving stones. These were protected by a low brick wall which ran the length of the house front. With six inches of snow on top of the wall, it looked like a slice of Christmas cake topped by sugar icing.

Previous tenants had dumped their ashes in untidy heaps across the road behind an old shed, but he had seen a more useful and tidier way of disposing of them. Every morning he brought the two lots out to the front of the house and put them in pot-holes in the track road. Already he had levelled up most of the larger holes in front of the house. The distance between the house and the real road was about four hundred yards. He had a curious little ambition – to see their track completely smoothed off by waste from the two fires. Occasionally he would try to work out how long it would take. The answer varied from three to five years. But it was a useful task to launch and he could only hope future tenants would carry on the good work.

That morning he could not see the pot-holes for snow and after
some thought he dumped the contents of the parcel and the shovel roughly opposite the garage door. When the snow melted he could sweep the ash into the nearest hole. Only then did he think of looking at the scenery. As usual he was offended by the rickety old shed across the road. There was something slovenly about people who would spend a lot of money putting in new heating and electric wiring and modern bathroom fittings – and then leave a tumbledown shack like that right smack in line with the house’s front windows.

He was learning a lot about the English. For one thing they were not the cosy little islanders they were pictured in the States. Of course there
were
odd characters around who looked as though they’d come straight from a Peter Sellers film, but for every tweedy old gent like Colonel Scott there were others; old women who muttered as they moved silently about the dark gardens of the village cottages; the dark-haired, unsmiling man who walked the road secretively, as though making for some age-old pagan rite under an oak tree.

One of the impressions he had gathered was of an unsuspected brutality. When he looked at the cold slopes of Torn Hill he thought of the big, prison-like building which stood beyond it; Two Waters they called it, officially described as Two Waters Institution for the Criminally Insane, a grim stone fortress rising out of the bleak slopes of the moor. He could never believe that a people who had split the atom and produced Robert Graves could be primitive enough to put their mentally sick in a place like Two Waters. Quite apart from the fact that no building erected during the reign of Queen Victoria could possibly be suitable for the treatment of extreme forms of mental illness, it wasn’t reassuring to think of murderers and perverts of all kinds only ten
or so miles away. There wasn’t even a wall round the place, only high barbed-wire fencing. And that had only been erected out of public indignation after an infamous escape.

The English, he often thought, could yield to no people in their ability to accept various manifestations of unconscious barbarity...

Louise Magruder (
née
Hartley) watched her husband from the upstairs bedroom window. An attractive woman of thirty-five, she was doing her hair in the currently fashionable Jane Austen cut, severe lines over the ears and a bun at the back. She thought she would wear the white blouse with the frilly front and leg-ofmutton sleeves. Perhaps she was a little too
mature
to be dressing up like a teenage girl but stuck here in the wilds of nowhere there was little else to provide amusement. It didn’t help her general state of irritation to know she had been largely responsible for bringing them to live at Trencher’s Farm.

“Karen, aren’t you up yet?” she called into the wardrobecupboard set into the wall of their bedroom. On the other side of the wall was Karen’s wardrobe, both cut into the clay and straw wall. Voices carried clearly through the thin wood that separated the two cupboards.

“Coming, Mummy.”

Knees slightly splayed, as though that would bring her hair nearer her twisted arms, she put a pin into the bun at the back of her neck. George had dumped his ash on the snow. She knew she was being unfair but there was something essentially silly about him. The shape of his head, for instance. He insisted on having his hair cut short although she told him his large, pointed ears should be made less obvious. In Philadelphia, where she had been the foreigner, she had never thought of him as anything but a normal husband; now
that they’d been living in England for three months she could see things about him,
American
things.

It wasn’t just that he made a great fuss about making ice when they had people in for drinks and it wasn’t just that he couldn’t make a simple telephone call without remarking on the
dreadful
British phone system. She was used to ice in her drinks and she wasn’t the hysterical patriotic type who had to defend the indefensible – American telephones made English ones seem like something out of the Middle Ages, if that wasn’t an anachronism or something. Anyway, she knew what she meant.

No, it was his mind she could now see as being different. In America she’d almost forgotten what Englishmen were like but since she’d come back she’d found herself continually comparing George to other men, Colonel Scott, for instance, and Gregory Allsopp the doctor. In some ways George was more mature than them – he could hold his liquor better for a start, not like Colonel Scott who, judging by the colour of his face, should have had enough practice. Yet there was something infantile about the seriousness with which he took things like drinking. He hated anything facetious and when he fell into the trap of taking their little jokey remarks seriously he tended to sulk when he realised they had not been serious.

Driving was another of his weak spots. He was a good driver and he saw no reason for saying otherwise. Gregory Allsopp was probably just as good but like most intelligent Englishmen she’d ever known he continually made himself out to be a blundering buffoon who’d only escaped serious accidents by a lifetime of phenomenal luck. George didn’t like that kind of affectation.

He took the
stupidest
things seriously. Like his weight. If he went over his hundred and fifty pounds by so much as one pound he
would first complain about the undependability of British bathroom scales, then he’d cut down on potatoes and bread and
everything.
He didn’t smoke – of course. Impeccable, that was it about Americans, they had a neurotic fixation on health and hygiene.

She thought of the one lover she’d had since their marriage. Patrick had bad breath and a severe case of body odour and was even given to farting in public. She giggled into the mirror. She could imagine the hilarious look on George’s face if someone farted out loud at dinner. The more she thought about it the more she laughed to herself.

“I’m up, Mother,” said Karen. Not for the first time since she’d come back to England, Louise Magruder had to remind herself that her daughter was not pretending to be an American. She
was
an American...

Louise was pouring cold milk on their breakfast cereal when Karen said the cat’s saucer had not been touched during the night. The cat, a half-grown tom they’d acquired from the Knapmans, had not come back from its evening run the night before and they’d left its saucer of tinned meat in the coal shed.

“I wouldn’t worry, he probably got caught in the snow, he’ll be holed up somewhere snug and sound, cats can take care of themselves,” said Louise.

“Cats don’t like snow,” said Karen. “To a cat snow is a drag. Cats are very fastidious, Mother.”

“I know, dear. That’s why they always come home, they can’t
stand
other people’s houses.” Like George, she thought.

Her husband came into the porch, where he carefully removed his rubber boots and put on leather moccasins before stepping onto the kitchen linoleum.

“It’s a funny old country this,” he said. “Karen, you’ve never seen real
English
snow. It’s peculiar, you know that? It’s
warm.”

“Snow isn’t warm, Daddy.”

Louise remembered when Karen had insisted on calling him Pop. It had taken time to cure her of
that.

“English snow is warm. Isn’t that right, Mother?”

She didn’t really know why she felt so irritated.

After breakfast they went outside to throw snowballs. Louise felt confused. Karen was far too dignified for a child of her age. She wouldn’t run and yell like a normal child, at least like normal children Louise remembered from her childhood. On the other hand George’s antics seemed forced and unnatural, as though he didn’t really understand why people threw snowballs but was willing to imitate the actions. Rather like his jokes.

Louise determined to suppress this recent tendency to criticise her husband and daughter. She allowed Karen to hit her with a snowball and then ran, screaming, through the door by the garage. They were standing in the snow on the road when George let out a horrified yell. He stood still, his face transfixed in horror, looking down.

“What’s wrong, dear?” Louise cried. “Did nasty snow go down your boots, you poor old thing?”

He didn’t answer.

She thought he might be having a game, tricking her into coming near so that he could rub snow down her neck, but he wasn’t that good an actor.

“I stood on
something
,” he said.

“It’s all that ash,” she said, smiling.

“No, it was soft. I felt it.”

She went across and poked the toe of her Wellington boot into the hard snow where he had been standing. There was something there. She scraped at the snow with her instep. Karen threw a snowball which spattered on George’s tartan shirt. He didn’t seem to notice.

Her toe uncovered something brown. She scraped some more. She uncovered a piece of tabby fur and then a leg.

“It’s the cat,” she said. “It’s dead.”

“Our cat? Is it our cat, Mother?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. Lift it up, George, I wonder what killed it.”

“Lift it? I don’t want to touch it!
You
lift it.”

It didn’t seem important. She scraped away the rest of the snow round the cat’s body. It was lying fully stretched on its side. She bent down and picked it up, her finger and thumb holding the very tip of its tail. It’s head swung round gently, the whiskers dusty with snow. Something hung from its neck. It was a piece of thin rope, the tail end of a noose which had been pulled tightly into its neck.

“It’s been strangled,” she said angrily.

“Maybe it got caught in a trap,” said George, who had backed away a step or two.

“They use wire for snares, not rope. Look, there’s a knot in the rope. Somebody did this deliberately.”

“Kids, probably,” said George.

“Oh, Daddy, I don’t want to look at it,” said Karen. Not tearfully, as Louise remembered herself when her dog, Billy, had been run over by a car when she was young.

“Yeah, get rid of it,” said George. He looked at his wrist-watch. “I’m going in to start work. Toss it behind the old shed, we can bury it later.”

Louise carried the dead cat to the dump behind the shed. She
dropped it on the snow-covered mound of papers and other rubbish which they burned once a week. She hoped they would be able to bury it or burn it before it began to smell.

When she came round the shed both Karen and George had gone inside. She thought of winter days when her father went out with nets and guns and ferrets and came home carrying dead rabbits with blood on their soft grey fur. She’d often stood beside the sink and watched him skin and gut the rabbits...

Once a week Niles had to be taken to the county hospital for his kidney injections. That day there were no other patients for the ambulance run and Senior Male Nurse Frank Pawson thought the trip might be cancelled because of the snow. However Doctor Tindall said the road had been cleared by a County Council snowplough and Niles must have his injection and check-up.

“Come on, Henry old chappie,” said Pawson to Niles. “Time for your weekly jaunt.”

“Can I look out of the window?” asked Niles. He always did ask, although he’d been going back and forward to the county hospital for years and was always allowed to look out of the window.

“Sure, Henry, you can look at all the lovely snow. Nature’s magic carpet.”

When Pawson had first transferred to Two Waters Niles was still a big name and he could remember the male nurses sweating every time they had to take him for a bath or to the clinic. They weren’t afraid of Niles, no grown man had ever had reason to fear Henry. They were terrified in case they made some mistake and he escaped again. People had been dismissed the last time Henry had escaped. After the public inquiry into the security system a fence had been
put round the grounds even though no inmate was ever allowed beyond the high wall of the exercise garden at the rear. Niles had been put under twenty-four-hour surveillance, not allowed to sleep without a light on in his room, inspected every half hour to make sure the sleeping figure was not a dummy.