The Levels Page 12

  We had to take them to the road at Thorney and point in the direction of Langport. They had no idea. The road was as wide as a river and they’d missed it. ‘We saw you, thought we’d ask; this moor, gee, we’d have been lost if it hadn’t been for you.’

  ‘Langport,’ I said, ‘that way!’ I pointed. ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Have a nice day.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  It was getting late. I wanted her very much.

  ‘Next time,’ she said, ‘take me somewhere shady, warm and shady. You can then.’

  She left at Blackwood gate, and walked to Drove House alone. I stood in the road and watched her go. It was still light. I took the broody-box trap to the closest warren and baited it. Mother had found the remains of a mouse and matched these to the patterns on her mangle.

  ‘See this?’ she belted, holding the flat corpse an inch from my face. I did.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know who did this,’ she said, ‘and how. Where is he?

  ‘Who?

  ‘No games.’

  ‘I’ve been with Muriel. How’d you expect me to know?’

  ‘You’re his son.’

  ‘And you’re my mother.’

  ‌17

  Dick found Hector, and brought him to Blackwood in a basket tied to the back of his bike. He said he couldn’t find a crash helmet small enough for a dog. Hector stood in the yard and looked at me. I looked back. Sweat patched his ginger hair, he looked at the bike and whined. His tongue hung from his mouth and he dripped spit onto the ground. He walked to the workshop and lay against the wall, staring with mazed eyes at a spot in front of his nose.

  ‘Found the bugger,’ said Dick. The bugger looked up.

  ‘Lucky for him,’ I said.

  ‘He wasn’t lost at all!’

  ‘No?’ In the dry air, a swarm of insects bothered the dog. The old man was in a heap of trouble. He had blood on his hands. He carried a fork to the vegetable garden.

  ‘He was in the building on West Moor.’ Chedzoy owned a hay barn, the doors jammed shut and Hector had enjoyed a short period of rest.

  ‘Don’t tell me!’ shouted my mother.

  ‘Wasn’t going to,’ said Dick.

  She stalked to the store shed, banged the door and clattered the mash bin.

  ‘I’m glad you found him. Come here, Hector, happy now? Treating you all right?’ I patted him on the head, he rubbed himself on my leg, and looked past me at Dick, and the motorbike.

  ‘You ought to come down Jackson’s,’ he said, ‘we got smashed last night.’ ‘Other things doing.’

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘One day,’ I told him, ‘it’s your turn. A promise for you.’ I hadn’t cleaned the buckets. My mother slammed from the store.

  ‘Where’s my bloody buckets? You men! Save me.’ She put her arms to the sky, ‘Save me!’ she screamed. My old man looked up from his forking.

  ‘Coming!’ I said. ‘Look,’ I said to Dick, ‘not being funny, but there’s a cloud hanging over this place. The old man’s in it. I’m in it…’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Remember? He used the mangle to squash a mouse, she says I’m his henchman. I wasn’t even here, I didn’t know; we watched from the orchard, but she thinks I helped him.’

  After a quiet lunch, I walked to the phone box and called Muriel.

  ‘Billy!’ I said.

  ‘Billy! You naughty boy. What do you want?’

  ‘I thought it was what you want.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A warm, shady place?’

  ‘By a river of mud?’

  ‘If you like?’

  ‘I like.’

  ‘All right?’ I said.

  ‘Name the day!’

  ‘After market, Saturday?’

  ‘I could come, make a day of it.’

  ‘My mother’ll be there.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was a pause, I said, ‘You still there?’

  She came on down the phone. ‘You want them?’ she asked me, in a breathy voice.

  ‘What?’

  She laughed, ‘You know.’

  ‘Half past two, on the hill?’

  ‘Not a bit exposed up there?’

  ‘That matter?’ I said.

  ‘Depends on what you want to expose.’

  ‘And that depends on what you want me to expose.’

  ‘You!’ she went.

  Saturday morning at the market, I stayed with my old man, on orders, like glue, to stop him breaking things. We stood in one of the rings and watched some cattle being sold, shit covered, cowered animals beaten into the hall, for a thousand bloodshot eyes. We found a pair of young billygoats penned in a sheep row, their young owners weeping by the gate. A brother and sister, whose parents assured them Biff and Boff would go to a good home, where the hedgerows were long and green, the nanny goats many and accommodating, and a hundred children, just like them, skipped and jumped alongside Biff and Boff. A pair of Dogmeat boys gave them the once over and a tick on their sheet; infant billy goat equals veal.

  When a pile of china crashed to the market hall floor, I looked for my father, but he was next to me, holding a cheap knife.

  ‘Caught anything for me?’ he said, running the pad of his thumb down its edge.

  ‘Working on it,’ I said.

  ‘Hard enough?’

  ‘I’ll check tonight. It’s baited well enough.’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ he said to the stall holder.

  ‘And you won’t regret your choice.’

  ‘Good.’

  My mother was arguing with a man about eggs. Swallows flew over the market buildings but even in the sun, a cold wind blew down the avenues of pens.

  ‘What you bought it for?’ she shouted at my father, but he didn’t answer, he was by the ticket machine in the car park, stuck like a pair of scissors; his back had locked.

  ‘I’m stuck,’ he said, ‘help!’

  ‘He’s locked,’ I said to my mother.

  ‘Then get the bloody fool in the back!’

  I couldn’t lift him. ‘Keep your legs together,’ I said, ‘how you expect me…’ The car park was filling with people leaving market, straw wagons and cattle trucks. Mother held the doors while I manoeuvred him into a good position. ‘Take his legs,’ she shouted, gripped the armpits, we lifted and laid him on his side in the van.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Give me a fag.’

  We put him on the kitchen floor and I went to the box to call Doctor Evans. He took a long time to answer the phone. I could hear a cricket match on his radio, and when he spoke, it was with drawn-out words, whether I knew if this had happened to my father before. I said he had arthritis. Doctor Evans shouted, ‘Where’s my pencil? I left one here, I have to have one by the phone, Marjorie, find me something, it’s a patient in a box.’ I had to wait. ‘Apologies,’ he said, ‘but if you come to the surgery, I’ll sort something out, to ease the pain; just make him comfortable, lie him on something hard.’

  ‘He’s on the kitchen floor.’

  ‘Is he warm enough?’

  ‘We haven’t taken his coat off.’

  ‘And he’s not complaining?’

  ‘Not when I left.’

  ‘Quarter past?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  Like the wind, I drove the van through the flat lanes across South Moor to Langport. There’s a sign on the doctor’s house that says ‘PRIVATE’. His surgery is held in a building down the alley; these days I know it well. He counted fifty yellow tablets into a bottle. I looked at the clock. I was late for Muriel. Whenever I thought about her, my knees swelled and my calves felt tight. The soles of my feet burnt in my shoes, and I had to curl my toes to stop falling over.

  ‘Get him to take two straight away, then two more before bed tonight, then follow the instructions on the bottle.’

  ‘Thank you.’

 
‘And you are well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You look a little pale.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘I’m a professional man,’ he said.

  ‘I’m in a hurry,’ I said.

  It was twenty to three, ten minutes late already, I worked it out; the time I’d take getting home, feeding the old man his pills, levering him into a more comfortable position, giving the doctor’s instructions, getting back in the van, driving to Higher Burrow, getting up the hill to find Muriel had got fed up waiting and gone home.

  ‘Take two of these,’ I said.

  ‘They’ll make me get up and walk?’ he said, ‘Our Lord living in these pills?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get me a glass of water.’

  ‘Where’s mother?’

  ‘Catching tomorrow’s lunch.’

  ‘Here!’

  I propped him up and fed the pills. ‘You want moving?’ I said.

  ‘What you asking him for?’ She came back with a dead chicken tied to her belt. ‘What about me? You expect me to spend the rest of the day with him lying on the floor? Move him in the front room.’

  ‘Doctor Evans said... Okay.’

  I dragged him out of the kitchen, down the hall to the front room, and laid him with his head against a chair.

  ‘Want the telly on?’

  ‘Any chance of a beer?’

  ‘Not when you’re taking medicine,’ she screamed, ‘and where do you think you’re going?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Out?’

  ‘I’m late already.’

  Late. The sun was shining. As I parked the van by the stile, two miles away a bird flew onto the bait and sprang my trap. It flew in the dark for a minute, beating itself against the box until it died. No one heard it, from a hundred yards the scene would have looked peaceful.

  I walked down the hill, towards the house, a window opened, a carpet appeared, to be draped off the sill and hung down over the wall. Muriel put her hand out. She waved when she saw me.

  ‘My old man got stuck!’ I shouted.

  When I got closer, she said, ‘And I didn’t.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. She kissed the side of my face. I was hot. ‘We had a little trouble.’ I told her the story. She found a brush and did her hair. Crescents of white skin showed behind her ears, she wore a necklace of gold wire and a pink dress.

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘I put him in the front room. Propped against a chair.’

  ‘And he didn’t mind?’

  ‘Not much.’

  She made some tea, we sat in the garden while the sun set. I had never tasted anything like it. She hadn’t used milk, it was the colour of mud and tasted like burnt wood. It was Chinese, came in cups the size of eggs, but did not spoil the moment. When shafts of yellow and blood-red light bathed the moor the pools and rhines burned like huge flat fires, thousands of swarming flies and gnats blurred the view and we held hands. Hers was small in mine, her fingers even and clean. I have hard pads on my palms, and basketmaker’s thumbs. We arranged to try again the next day, I left her standing in the shade of the angled trunk of a withered apple tree, while the insects burst and swarmed again over different spots. With silent beats, an owl quartered the lonely places, the moon rose behind me, and a night breeze wavered at the withy beds.

  ‘He’s no better.’

  I eased him back to the chair, and smoothed the carpet where his feet had rucked it.

  ‘You sure he gave you the right pills?’

  ‘Counted them in front of me,’ I said.

  ‘Yellow ones?’

  ‘Yes, fifty; two straight away, then two more before bed.’

  ‘I think I’ll go to bed now. Give me an excuse to take them.’

  ‘You shouldn’t.’

  ‘You telling me?’

  ‘Would I?’

  We couldn’t get him up the stairs, so I fetched a mattress from the spare room and my mother made a bed up on the floor downstairs. He liked the idea of having the fire close.

  ‘You fall in that fire,’ she shouted, ‘and you’ll get it hotter from me,’ but she closed the curtains quietly, and tidied the blankets over his chest while he slept.

  ‘Leave him,’ she said. ‘We can use the kitchen.’

  When I undressed for bed, I could smell Muriel on my clothes, so I slept with my shirt on the pillow. I rubbed and crushed the material, put my hands to my face and looked across the bed at the wall. No shadows moved across its surface, no terrible noises whispered in that night. My sheets were warm and clean, the blankets just loose enough to let me breathe. My father snored below, my mother squeaked her bed in turning, but these sounds and the wind, gathering itself, were friendly.

  ‌‌18

  On a bright Sunday afternoon, we met at Isle Abbots, in the shade of the most perfect church tower in Somerset, the building warm from worship, beneath a statue of the Blessed Virgin with Bambino. It’s a lonely village with this jewel at its heart, like a huge stone radiator, a place visited by scholars and students of Architecture. The basketmakers have left though not the ghostly echo of their working, in the tumbledown sheds and lean-tos at the backs of houses. The Church of Saint Mary, the Virgin, Isle Abbots.

  There are few places in the county which exert such a fascination as this remote moorland church, which sits like a queen with her court ranged around her in widening circles. The closest of these is formed of Curry Mallet, Beer Crowcombe, Ilton, Stocklinch, Kingsbury, Muchelney and Swell... Isle Abbots is the innermost shrine, the heart and core of so much beauty. Moreover, it is the most intact. Ten of its ancient statues still fill the niches of the perfect tower. The chancel, doubtless built by the monks of Muchelney, the owners of the church, survives from the thirteenth century... Around the base of the tower, beneath the Virgin and the Risen Christ, the lichen and the sunlight add ever new tones to the golden surface of the box tombs, the buttresses, the niches, the wall and the churchyard grass. All else in the stillness of the centuries.

  We sat on the churchyard grass, in that stillness, the sun warming our backs. She wore a blue shirt, unbuttoned to her chest, and shorts. She picked a buttercup and held it to my chin, I didn’t even look at it, I pushed the hand away, and kissed her. She thought I was a bit eager, should wait until we had privacy and besides, a churchyard was not the place. I was her pupil, I listened to her, but it was me who took her inside, and at the altar of the lady chapel, watched by a painting of the Madonna of the Goldfinch, told her she meant more to me than anyone. She didn’t want to hear this, I could tell. She had taught me well.

  As we walked out of the village, east to the Isle, she made me tell her about basketmaking. I said it was a boring thing to talk about.

  ‘Go on then, bore me.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s...’

  ‘Bore me.’

  I told her they’d found a piece of basketwork I could have made, but four thousand years old. ‘I sometimes used to think, I’m sitting in the same place where people sat four thousand years ago, doing exactly the same thing they did.’

  ‘With the birth of Christ as far in their future as it is in our past.’

  Quite. I watched a swan drift by. ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘So it’s the oldest craft, we’re the oldest craftsmen. No one can touch us for what we did. There had to be baskets for everything. People couldn’t gather nuts and berries without baskets, and when they had to harvest crops, what did they need? Baskets for fruit and veg., animals, bees, eggs, chickens, fish, cheese, traps, bricks, muck, clothes, masonry. They couldn’t build a cathedral without basketmakers. Think about it.’

  We held hands across the moor and sat by the river in the shelter of a hedge, where it ran off the field to the water.

  ‘Life couldn’t go on without us. We were needed. When they stripped willow by hand, before machines, all the kids in Somerset got time off school to help. Basketmake
rs were responsible for the first men who flew. Balloonists. They couldn’t do without us. There’s huge drawings of animals in Peru, they only found out what they were after aeroplanes had flown over the place and seen them properly, so people think the only way they could have drawn was with balloons, thousand of years ago; I’ve got a book.’

  ‘On basketmaking?’

  ‘The Book of Great Mysteries.’

  ‘Great Mysteries?’

  ‘That’s why it’s a mystery. They knew they were thousands of years old, but didn’t know what they were because they were so big. So how did the people draw the animals in the first place? They had balloons. Balloons means baskets.’

  ‘It’s a bit tenuous. And you’re one of the last basketmakers?’

  ‘In England. But there’s basketmakers in every village from Peru to Thailand and back.’

  I didn’t want to talk about basketmaking. I tried to steer the conversation to what she looked like, and asked where she bought her clothes. The ground was warm, the river low and the mud at its highest, cracked and pale. A pair of ducks paddled against the current, a breeze took the edge from the heat, I took my shirt off and she laid her head on my chest. A flock of sheep, anxious to find themselves where they were, cropped the grass.

  ‘The Falkland Islands, where men are men and sheep grow nervous.’

  ‘What?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. She wrinkled her nose and tweaked mine.

  ‘You’re innocent,’ she said. I thought I wasn’t. I had had experience. I watched a wren hop down a log, hunting spiders, and in the clear blue sky, a buzzard, clean and preened in its summer feathers, wheeled over the field, an easy vole its prey, or a fat rabbit.

  ‘The innocent,’ she said. I didn’t mind. Her idea of what innocence was had nothing to do with mine; she could whistle, but she could not talk. I could have been a pianist, or a speaker, but never had the chance. I inherited my innocence, she had lost hers so young she’d created a new one for herself. In that long, hot afternoon, when the buttercups blazed like stars and the falseness of her innocence was not apparent to me, she followed my example and took off her shirt, in front of me, as if I wasn’t there. She wore nothing else but shorts. I had never been so close to it before. The sun bounced off her skin with the silent tones of a thousand invisible bells, and in that afternoon, while her eyes dampened at their corners, we made love. It was my first time.