Waterland (16 page)

And was it the same God, looking down on us then, who spoke to you—?

Once upon a time there was a history teacher’s wife called Mary, with blue, curious eyes and brown hair, who before
she was a history teacher’s wife was the daughter of a Cambridgeshire farmer. Who lived in a stark, sturdy, sallow-brick farmhouse, amidst beet fields, potato fields and geometrically disposed dykes. Who during the years of the Second World War attended the St Gunnhilda (Convent) School for Girls in Gildsey, thus furthering her acquaintance with the future history teacher, then also attending school in Gildsey. Who, to her widower father’s delight and pride, was praised by the sisters of the St Gunnhilda School for being a bright and eager pupil with a thirst for knowledge, but who, to her father’s bitter disappointment, could not keep from exercising her curiosity out of school hours, particularly in matters sexual. Whose investigations, in this area, did not stop with the future history teacher. Who was adventurous, inquisitive, unrestrainable. Who was the last person one could imagine imitating the patron saint of our local town and shutting herself up, hermit-fashion, for over three years in that stark farmhouse; though she did, to her own mortification and her father’s mounting dismay, in the autumn of 1943, her curiosity – and much else – having come in that same year (her seventeenth) to a sudden halt.

Many years ago there was a future history teacher’s wife who resolved upon a certain drastic course of action. Who said to the future history teacher (causing consternation to engulf him, for he had no notion what he, in the circumstances, would do): ‘I know what I’m going to do.’ Who said to him, at a later date, much having occurred in the interval: ‘We must part.’ And then buried herself in that lonely farmhouse – as he buried himself in history books.

Some would say that this withdrawal of hers was not so much a voluntary act of penance as a punishment inflicted by her shamed and angered father, a man capable of stern measures, who, having once had hopes for his daughter, but being now only too aware of her wickedness, determined to lock her away from further mischief. But your history teacher (frightened witness to his wife-to-be’s
resolve) knows that the father, punitive though he was, played only a secondary part. He knows that Mary locked herself away of her own free will. Though he does not know, being denied at the time even the rights of visits or written communication, what occurred during that three-year period. Whether God spoke to her (then too) as He spoke, above the howls of demons, to St Gunnhilda; whether she found Salvation; whether, perhaps, she was visited by the ghost of Sarah Atkinson, the Brewer’s Daughter of Gildsey, who, so local lore has it, offers companionship to those whose lives have stopped though they must go on living … Or whether the truth of those three years was that nothing, nothing at all, occurred and that the future Mrs Crick, gazing day after day from her farmhouse cell at the level fields, was only, wittingly or unwittingly, preparing herself for her later marriage – which would be a sort of fenland.

Whatever the truth of the matter – for the future history teacher’s wife is destined never to disclose it, and the future history teacher, called away early in 1945 to do military service, is in no position to glean anything at first hand – whatever the truth of the matter, true it is that Farmer Metcalf’s shame and anger relent and turn, in three years, to anxiety for his daughter’s health and her future welfare.

Swallowing his pride – resigned to the fact that his daughter is not to rise in a world whose natural propensity appears to be to sink – and breaking a vow never to speak to the man again, he pays a visit to his neighbour, Henry Crick.

Though Harold Metcalf is, like Henry Crick, a widower and has grown accustomed to the ambience of seclusion, he is struck by the ramshackle solitariness of the lock-keeper who now lives alone in the lockside cottage and whom he finds, perhaps, mending eel-traps or conversing with his chickens.

Henry Crick receives him with an apprehensive and
round-mouthed stare. They beat about the bush. The one laments the declining river traffic, the other the iniquities of the War Agricultural Committee. They avoid more tender spots. Farmer Metcalf, at length, asks Henry if he has heard from his son, now stationed in Cologne – and so broaches his subject.

By the banks of the Leem, rapidly coming to an accord, less rapidly overcoming mutual shyness, the two men stammer, sigh, nod heads sagely (Henry Crick rubs his knee) and agree that enough is enough of anything, it can’t go on, and that Time, after all, is the great reconciler. In short, Farmer Metcalf proposes that Henry Crick write a letter to his son, hinting that a second letter, of a certain drift, be sent in turn from the son to the Metcalf farmhouse. And though Henry Crick, being no letter-writer and no master of diplomacy, inwardly blenches at this undertaking, he agrees; for (to judge, indeed, by his own experience) he believes that marriages are made by Destiny, and Destiny is a great force; and where Destiny lends its hand even the most daunting tasks may be accomplished.

Yet he need not have agonized over that momentous letter. Because his son, a member of His Majesty’s Army on the Rhine but now approaching the term of his period of service, is already, as the two fathers meet, resolving to put pen to paper and break a long, prohibitive silence. He writes, indeed, the sort of letter in which Destiny impregnates each word. But he too beats about the bush. He describes, with faltering eloquence, gutted cities, refugees, soup kitchens, mass graveyards, bread queues. He attempts to explain how these things have given him a new perspective, have made events by the River Leem seem, perhaps … Though he leaves out how they have deepened his desire to fathom the secrets of history and aroused, moreover, a belief in education. He hints that he has undergone his own penance, though does not dare to suggest that this is of a kind that can possibly match hers,
or that two years’ of life in barracks and fitful meditation on the ruins of Europe can offer absolution. He makes no allusion to the wider future, but only asks that, upon his forthcoming demobilization and return to England, they should, at least, meet.

And, as if to prove the hand of Destiny, it is only two days after he posts this letter that he receives another, tortuously and painstakingly composed, from his father. So that Farmer Metcalf is amazed, taking from his mailbox an envelope marked Cologne and addressed to his daughter, at the speed and efficiency with which Henry Crick has carried out his mission. Thereafter (since neither is disabused) he is inclined to take fresh stock of the lowly lock-keeper whom he had always regarded as a credulous simpleton (brains bashed about in Flanders) who had made that preposterous marriage.

Thus it is that in February, 1947, the future history teacher’s wife waits at Gildsey station for the arrival of her husband-to-be. Thus it is that ex-serviceman Crick (now fully determined to become a teacher) makes his journey home in the guise of the returning Prince ready to pluck aside briars and cobwebs and kiss his Princess out of whatever trance has possessed her for the last three years. He expects to find – and accept – a nun, a Magdalen, a fanatic, a hysteric, an invalid … But he sees, even as he steps from the train, a woman (no girl) who impresses him with her appearance of toughness, endurance, as if she has made the decision to live henceforth without any kind of prop or refuge. And he realizes that though this three-year separation has fostered the illusion that, should they reunite,
he
would be a prop to
her
(the specious sense of having grown up, the hardening effects of army life, acquaintance with the wide – and devastated – world), it is quite the opposite: that she will be a prop to him; that she will always be, just as she was in those days when she lost her curiosity, stronger than him.

It is a freezing winter. Hard snow covers the Fens and
though, on this February day, the sun shines brilliantly, the air bites. In the White Rose Tea Room, near Gildsey station, in a scene evoking for the outsider but not for the protagonists certain cinema-screen reunions (no moon-faced café proprietor observes with a wink that they haven’t touched their tea), the future history teacher’s wife and the future history teacher deliberate their life together. It is clear that bonds exist between them stronger, and sterner, than those which link many couples who rush into wedlock; it is clear that if they are not meant for each other, then what other persons could there be for whom each of them, separately, is meant? It is clear that though certain things must be, though they cannot dispose of the past …

He breaks off his stumbling speechifying. They look into each other’s eyes. Hers are still a smouldering blue: she is – has she forgotten it? – a desirable woman. She wears (to fuse the image of ex-schoolgirl and ex-soldier?) a simple black beret. He talks to her through wreaths of smoke from his Camel cigarettes, several packs of which he has specially hoarded to prepare the ground with Harold Metcalf. It is clear that if they have not been lovers in deed for three and a half years, they are still lovers in spirit.

They leave the White Rose Tea Room (tea untouched) in order to be free to kiss and twine arms. Their breaths form a mingled cloud. They cross Market Street, walk down Water Street. On the Ousebank they embrace. Heavy winter clothing muffles and mutes unfamiliar closeness. They kiss. It is not a kiss which revives drowned curiosity, which restores the girl who once lay in a ruined windmill. But nor is her kiss, so it seems to him, the kiss of a woman who still seeks Salvation.

And so, by the icy Ouse, as they walk arm in arm between piles of cleared snow (watching spies, had there been any, might have scurried back to inform a relieved Farmer Metcalf and Henry Crick that all is well), it is decided. And it is there too, on the Ousebank, that the future history teacher’s wife says two things. Firstly (looking at the
heaped snow): ‘There’ll be a bad thaw. Father can’t move his cattle. Those idiots at the Catchment Board will have a lot to answer for.’ And then (looking straight at him): ‘You know, don’t you, that short of a miracle we can’t have a child?’

Once upon a time there was a future history teacher’s wife who wore a rust-red schoolgirl’s uniform and wore her deep-brown hair in a straight fringe, in the regulation fashion, under a schoolgirl’s beret or straw hat; but who – wearing little or nothing at all – invited the future history teacher to explore the intricacies of her incipient womanhood, to consider the mysteries of her menstrual cycle – and to offer reciprocal invitations. Who liked to find things out, to uncover secrets, but then ceased to be inquisitive. Whose life came to a kind of stop when she was only sixteen, though she had to go on living.

Once, long ago, there was a future history teacher’s wife who, though she said to the future history teacher they should never meet again, married him three years later. And the future history teacher took her away with him, in 1947, from the Cambridgeshire Fens where they were both born, to London. Though not before in the spring of that year a great flood had drowned the larger part of those same native Fens. And not before this same flood, which caused Henry Crick to contract bronchopneumonia while he kept, tenaciously, vigilantly, in a half submerged cottage, to his post of lock-keeper, had brought about the death of the future history teacher’s father.

But that is another story …

They move to London. He becomes a teacher. And she, after some years as only a history teacher’s wife (seeing him off to school each morning – the inevitable ironies, the
mother-son charades this prompted), finds work, for reasons never fully explained, in a local government office concerned with the care of the elderly.

They settle in Greenwich, a suburb of London noted for its historical features: a Royal Observatory; a park where Henry VIII once hunted; a former palace turned Maritime Museum; not to mention the dry-docked Cutty Sark, bowsprit permanently pointing to the Isle of Dogs. He teaches at a Grammar School (resited and reincorporated as a comprehensive in 1966) in Charlton. She works at the municipal buildings in Lewisham.

They acquire regular habits, spiced with unspectacular variations. Sunday walks in the park (the Observatory and back). Exchanges of hospitality with his teaching colleagues and her age-care associates. Joking comment is passed (do the couple accept it as joking?) at these sociable occasions about their respective professional spheres – he amongst schoolkids, she amongst the senile. (What has become of the middle bit of life?) A visit, approximately every six weeks, to her father (who won’t leave his farm, who won’t have any of this nursing-home nonsense) in Cambridgeshire. A meal in a restaurant every birthday and wedding anniversary. Trips to the theatre. Weekend excursions. Holidays: he, true to form, prefers historical associations; she is incurious.

Not having a family – and inheriting, in 1969, part of the proceeds of the sale of a Fenland farm – they do not lack for money, indeed are almost embarrassingly comfortable: the ‘enviable Greenwich home’ (Regency, porticoed front door) of which much will be made in certain newspaper reports.

They acquire regular habits and regular diversions. So much so that three decades pass as if without event, and it does not seem long before they are both in their fifties: he a Head of Department who refuses a headmaster’s desk; she having decided, for reasons no more explicit than those which made her begin, to give up her work with her Old
Folk. And as they take their Sunday walks in the park (walks during which it might be observed that should they lean on one another, it is he who leans on her rather than she on him), they are joined by a third party – a golden retriever, called Paddy. It lopes and fawns about them and causes them now and then to smile and utter words of encouragement or command. A golden retriever bought by her for him on his fifty-second birthday, for which the official justification (a prod at his stomach) is the inducement to more exercise in sedentary middle age. But brief consideration of the fact that when the wife made her sudden decision to leave work it was during the onset of a late and troubled menopause, suggests a different explanation …