Sandlands (2 page)

She's solid, thought Fran, with a pang that was almost disappointment. Fleshly; a thing of the flesh. They used to call meat ‘flesh', didn't they, back in those less queasy days?
Bring me
flesh and bring me wine
. For an instant Fran caught the flash of Renaud's hunting knife in the firelight of the castle kitchen. When she closed her eyes she saw the blade as it sliced through hide to part the tender tissue beneath – dividing sinew, jarring against bone – and Renaud's great wooden table, slick and darkly stained.

 

Yes, her mother would have been the one to tell. But it was six months now since the funeral and the cramped gathering back at the cottage, with too much turmeric in the coronation chicken and not enough chairs for the elderly to sit down. And then there was the bleak task of sifting through her things. Fran had cleared the bureau and one wardrobe before losing courage, then boxed and bagged the remainder without examination and moved them to the attic here, where their weight pressed down from above, heavy on her conscience and her heart. For once in her life she felt the loneliness of being an only child.

Libby would have lent a hand, but she had to get back to New York. ‘Let me help,' Mark had offered, and meant it. He would be bracing, she knew, robustly practical, piling black sacks for the tip. And she would be grateful for it – but not just yet.

 

Friends were coming for supper and Mark was thumbing his Fearnley-Whittingstall.

‘What is it, again, that Jo won't eat?'

Fran couldn't remember. ‘Prawns?' she hazarded. Something with shells, or maybe tentacles. ‘Squid?'

‘And is veal still blackballed, now they've stopped with the crates? There's a recipe here where you cook it slowly in milk with sage and lemon peel, and the lemon makes it thicken and clot. Mind you, it's a bit near the knuckle – boiled in its own mother's milk. Like that Mexican thing, or is it Filipino, where you serve the unlaid hen's eggs inside the mother hen. It's all enough to make you want to go kosher.'

Fran laughed. ‘Just as long as it's not venison,' she said. ‘I don't think I could stomach that just at the moment. Let's not have venison for a while.'

 

During dessert the conversation began to fragment, crazying like a shattered mirror into a kaleidoscope of jagged, disconnected shapes – a sure forewarning of one of her migraines. Mark somewhere in the far distance, telling an anecdote she had heard ten times before, about the first time she'd brought him home for tea. ‘Fran's mother was like a vixen with her cub. She wax-polished the shoes I'd left by the door. Her version of scent-marking.' Then Jo, drifting in and out of focus with some medical folk tale from the Internet of vanishing twins: of fetuses, dead
in utero
, reabsorbed by their surviving sibling. Jo's husband, Lucas, with a sudden flare of laughter, which appeared to Fran as vivid purple, shot through with scarlet. And Mark again, suddenly close at hand and abnormally amplified, asking her if she was all right.

The migraine took hold in earnest later that night after their guests had gone home. These episodes had been with her for as long as she could remember, but were worse since her mother's death. They began always in the same way, with a faint, unfocused tingling below her left temple, close to the joint of the jaw. The tingle would gather and locate itself into the first sharp pinprick of pain, bright as a point of light, experienced almost visually in her crackling nerve endings. Sometimes, just occasionally, she could halt its progress if she massaged the side of her head, tracing the hairline slowly with bunched fingertips, up from jaw to brow and back again, up and down, pausing only to linger now and then over the vestigial protrusion of cartilage. More often, the pain splintered and blossomed and spread until it exploded in a starburst of colour, depriving her of sight and filling her head with searing white fire, so that all she could do was retreat to a curtained room to lie down and wait for it to pass.

‘She's a martyr to her headaches, poor thing,' her mother used to say. ‘Always has been.' When Fran was small she would sit by the bed and make her close her eyes, laying a wet flannel across her lowered lids. Cold water would find its way in runnels down the sides of her ears, dampening her hair and soaking the pillow. But heat and cold were topsy-turvy, indistinguishable one from the other, as in the dislocation of a fever.

‘Mum,' Fran murmured now, though she knew that the figure by the shrouded lamp was really Mark.

Allez, ma mère, allez bien promptement lui dire
... Go, my mother, go at once and tell him, to call off his dogs until tomorrow at noonday.

But still she was brought down; at the third blast of his copper horn, she fell.

 

Some days later Fran was in the attic, hunting out some old jackets of Mark's for the church jumble. Not that she was a congregant herself these days; recently with greater distance the mysteries of the broken flesh seemed morbid to her: grotesque, the ritual sharing of the body and the blood. But the rector was young, female and highly persuasive. Pushed low under the eaves along one side was the line of boxes from the clear-out at her mother's. Just a quick start on one or two while I
'
m up here, is what she told herself. Little by little: it might be more painless that way.

The nearest box, which had once held twenty-four packs of Cadbury's chocolate fingers, surprised her with its weight when she dragged it towards her. Books, was it, from the sitting room bookcase or the many piles beside the bed? Only six months, but the packing was a distant fog. When she slit the parcel tape with her fingernails and raised the flap, she saw that it was filled with assorted fat brown envelopes, the mainstay of her parents' filing system. The top one disgorged nothing of greater interest than a decade's worth of insurance documents: car, vehicle breakdown, home and contents. The next looked like old bank statements. But the one beneath that was bleached with age, soft as tissue and worn at the corners – altogether more promising.

The first thing to slide out when she tilted it towards her was a small index card, printed across the top with the name and crest of the Ipswich Maternity Hospital, pale pink ruled in grey, filled in by hand with a blue-black fountain pen. Pink for a girl: it must have been how they catalogued them then. It bore her own name, Frances Ann, together with the date and time of delivery and her weight at birth: 6 lb 12 oz. Babies were so small, so fragile. Libby had been 7 lb 9 oz.

Attached to the card by a paper clip, which left behind a double rust-edged groove when she pushed it aside with her thumb, was a small passport-sized print – her first ‘official' photograph. Staring down into her own infant eyes, Fran was struck, in the angle of the brows, the familiar lines of nose and mouth, by something she must always have known but had never really seen before, or never this clearly. Her own asymmetry; her own essential incompleteness.

 

The final encounter came towards the end of March. A long-delayed spring had finally crept in and taken the woods unawares. The carpet of moss bordering the path had brightened in a matter of days from khaki to emerald, and the creak of timber in the wind had given way to birdsong. The early warblers would be returning soon; last year it was not yet April when Fran heard her first chiffchaff. The tired winter celandines would be smothered by swathes of wood sorrel and pink purslane.

Everywhere buds fattened, but for now both canopy and scrub were still as sparse as January, letting through broad shards of sunlight to warm the forest floor. It left the deer with little chance of camouflage and she saw them straight away, clustered in the coppiced clearing. For a moment, just long enough for anxiety, she thought the white doe was not with them, but then the group shifted and she became visible, standing slightly apart from the others, away to the rear. Her head was raised and turned in Fran's direction, her ears alert with communion – or warning.

The pain arrived from nowhere, a sledgehammer blow. No migraine had ever come like this before, detonating all at once in an intensity of brilliant light, which arced and leapt in tongues of flame from its source at the left side of her head. Every nerve receptor, every synapse was on fire. She clenched her eyes tight closed and clamped her hand hard over her ear but nothing could shut out the pain, the unbearable, all-consuming pain.

Nor could it hide the slash of the hunter's knife, the slice of the surgeon's scalpel, which parted flesh, which severed, divided. She felt its full force, the fatal blow: the final cutting away.
My heart is cleft in two
. Then she sank to her knees, there on the path among the trodden, rotted leaves, and doubled over, both hands clawing to bury themselves in the crumbling mould. Earth to earth.
My bones lie charring on the black coals.

And slowly, slowly, as pain released its grip, so her tears at last began to fall, tumbling to join the moisture of the dark soil, while away in the trees, half hidden now, the white doe lowered her head, exhaled a soft, sweet breath, and nosed with her muzzle at a clump of coppiced twigs in search of the first green hazel shoots.

Folks who aren't from hereabouts – seedypuffs, as my old neighbour Kezzie Hollock calls them, blown through on the wind like dandelion down – always make out that Suffolk's flat. Well, it might be true of some parts, over westwards past Bury or up there in the Breck. But my Suffolk's not flat at all. There's no field I know without some kind of a rise to it, a top hedge and a bottom.

You only have to think for a minute to know there's nothing flat about us round here. There's not a lane you can take when you walk out from the village that doesn't have a climb in it here and there – enough to notice on a warm day when you've got to my age and have a bag to carry – and between the climbs there's always a dip. There's the valley itself, of course, where the land slopes down to the Alde. But even to the south and east, away from the river, there are places that lie low, stubborn places where sand collects in summer and where the water backs up murky brown in the mornings after a night of rain. Oh, yes, you'll need your wellies on, whichever road you're taking, if it's come down heavy overnight.

It's why I like to be out and walking, even though I'm on my feet all day with the hoover, at my various houses. Not the puddles, I mean; I could do without them. No, it's the ups and downs I like. Always a new view round every corner. Not what you'd call a view, of course, if you went on those coach tours like Mrs Fitzpatrick does with the Air Vice-Marshal, and shows her slides at the Mothers' Union: Switzerland or the Italian lakes. But still, there's always something to look at that's not just flat to the sky; when I stay with my sister Barbara up near Lynn it fairly drives me crazy, all those miles and nothing to see. It might not be the Matterhorn but to my thinking you could go a long way and not see anything as pretty as the bit of a sweep below the road to Snape: the river winding through the flood-meadows between its stands of reeds, and often as not half a dozen wild geese, grazing alongside the cattle.

The village itself is a cheerful sight, too, on its little hill that's more of a hummock, with High House sticking out at the top. I say ‘the village' but ours is a village with no proper middle; if seedypuffs stop in their cars and want to know, ‘Where's Blaxhall?' I never know quite what to tell them. There's Stone Common and Mill Common and Workhouse Common, and the row of flint cottages on the road down to Parmenters. Then there's St Peter's with the rectory, the Yews and Church Cottage, and another cluster by the village hall, not to mention all the outlying farms. But when I picture ‘the village' it's the houses between the pub and the old school that I have in mind: the nearest we have to a street. They're on both sides of the road there for a short way, before you come to the allotments, and added to that there's the stretch along the lower road from the pub to where the post office used to be. There must be twenty or thirty homes in all in that small patch. Whichever way I'm coming at it, that's the view I think of as Blaxhall, with the L-shaped red roof of the Ship Inn at the bottom and at the top that double oblong of High House with its barn at the side.

‘You can't miss it.' That's what Mr Napish always says to people, with that sudden awkward laugh of his that he smothers in his beard so fast, you can't quite be sure if it wasn't just a cough. It's what he said to me, that first time on the telephone when I rang about his advert. ‘I'm at High House,' he said. ‘You can't miss it.' Though in my case, of course, I knew the place already, as I pointed out: I've lived in Blaxhall more than sixty years, I told him. ‘Well, if you ever forget,' he said, ‘you'll be all right. Just look upwards and there it is.'

He's not one of the snooty ones, isn't Mr Napish. He might be hesitant until he gets to know you, but he's never been standoffish. It must be two years now since I've been doing for him, and he'll tell me anything. He talks about all sorts. And he always makes me coffee, every time. Not like some I could mention: there's one or two who'll put the kettle on and make a cuppa for themselves and it's like I'm not there, even though I'm right beside them polishing the taps. I'd rather get on by myself in an empty house than work round some of them – and it might as well be empty for all they speak to me. But Mr Napish makes a pot of coffee every morning sharp at eleven o'clock. It's one of those smart Italian chrome contraptions that heats on the gas, and he's liberal with the coffee measure, too. I've never liked to tell him that I like my Mellow Bird's. The first time, I took a sip and started on the kitchen worktops, but he wouldn't be having that. ‘No, no,' he said, ‘it's break time. Elevenses. Come and sit down,' and he opened a packet of garibaldi.