Edge of the Orison (21 page)

The town is cruciform, architecturally promiscuous: complacent Georgian properties, rejigged coaching inns and a neo-Egyptian
Tesco Extra
superstore. It is our intention to track Templar Avenue, to search out the fourteenth-century flint church of St Mary the Virgin.

Baldock's former identity as a market can still be felt, our chosen café (reverse lettering on window, plastic cloths, views of lazy street) respects that tradition. Hours could drift while we fictionalise maps, swill coffee, nibble buns. SAND is projected over the bleached sheet of OS Landranger Map (No. 153). WICHES over nothing very much. Renchi sits, head in hands, trying to get a fix on what lies ahead. What is our project? We've lost Clare and discovered a captured Templar enclave. Our route, after we have settled on the point at which we'll snake across the A1 to the east, should carry us towards Biggleswade and Clare's Potton. But what is actually out there? Where are the significant features? Landranger 153 is not forthcoming. Renchi's feet are hurting, after only five or six miles; fresh blisters cropping on loose flaps of skin.

My feeling is that stories are waiting, but we are not a part of them, not yet. Sheltering from the sun, among the monuments in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Renchi doctors his feet, while I pocket a pine cone. Pineal eye. A small, dry, resinous grenade, which I decide to carry with me, to place on another grave. This is the moment to tell Renchi about the drownings, and how the next part of our walk will be dedicated, not so much to the drowned child or her drowned father (unknown to me), but to the person who recounted the story, and how it haunted her life. And how, in recent times, the placing of a new gravestone, names, dates, in a riverside church, near the Great Ouse, the site of the accident, has begun to diffuse a terrible memory.

Clare's account of his ‘Journey out of Essex’ was transcribed on his return to Northborough; the incidents fresh in his mind, before the blisters had deflated and the bruises healed. The spin of the road, the frenzy, set down without calculation, was a desperate attempt to keep alive a set of imposed meanings. The quest to bring Mary Joyce back to life. To recover his youth, the period before he began to write. Before this compulsion to describe a sweep of ground, horizon to horizon; seasons, moods, shifts, social changes. The autobiographies of slugs and stones. Human creatures who required nothing of the sort and damned him for his arrogance.

My own scribbled notes aren't much help: ‘St Mary the Virgin, Mary Joyce… pine cone, drowning… shadow of church follows us down undistinguished road… we're better fed but just as confused as Clare, the journal.’

I got to a village further on & forgot the name the road on the left hand was quite over shaded by some trees & quite dry so I sat down half an hour & made a good many wishes for breakfast but wishes was no hearty meal so I got up as hungry as I sat down – I forget here the names of the villages I passed through

Plodding down Norton Road towards a stone bridge that turns road into river, canted verges, rippling surface, no cars, my standard preoccupations are suspended: home, family, books, bills. Thirty-two years worrying at the fabric of Hackney. ‘Baldock Cemetery’, says the blue sign (white figure like a striding ghost). Then: NORTON. I'm advancing into abandoned fictions. Andrew Norton is my unreliable twin, alternate world fetch: a stand-in through many books. An awkward creature with a gift for disappearing; then re-emerging, burdened with useless knowledge, more confused than when he started. I'm walking, of my own free will, towards Norton's estate, a cemetery at the edge of a Templar manor.

Elizabeth Clare (as she would have been) died a few weeks after her birth on 13 July 1793. John's sturdier twin, Bessy: a potent absence. A stranger to the world (though better suited to it than the poet: ‘a fine lively bonny wench’). She stays with him. Helpston to London. High Beach to Northborough. Northampton to the grave.

My only sibling, an older sister, stays with me. As she stayed with my mother. A lost infant, named but barely present in the world: spoken of, remembered. Her place stolen by a bemused successor. Guilt at survival cannot be undone, unwalked. In suspension, it is managed.

Norton, the road sign, triggered memories of another map; a
chart produced by New Age geographer Chris Street. Street tells us, in
Earthstars: The Visionary Landscape
, that he ‘has been researching the patterns, alignments and sacred sites of London's Earthstars network for the last eighteen years… The revelations were initiated by a series of dreams, visions and psychic experiences.’

Energy lines produced by men of the suburbs favour the suburbs: Burnt Oak, East Barnet, Croydon. Lines forged by Limehouse labourers highlight Hawksmoor churches, blue-and-yellow murder sites, decommissioned hospitals and synagogues. Geography is personalised. A walk is a floating autobiography. Renchi travels in the footprints of Peter Bicknell, bearing his father's library of alpine journals, flower paintings, handcoloured English excursions. Writers improvise and iterate, roads reiterate: they are democratic, crowded, verge to verge – even when, as now, coming away from Baldock, we are in remission, no cars, no tractors, no funeral processions.

One map in Chris Street's book catches my eye: four lines meeting in a cross. From Prittlewell Priory, Southend: down the A13 to London. And on, by way of Silbury Hill, to Brean on the Bristol Channel. A reprise of Chris Petit's 1979 road movie,
Radio On
. Then: from Rottingdean (in the south), up through London, to the section we are now walking. At which point, Street's alignment becomes the plan of our once and future journeys: Stevenage, Norton Church, Buckden Palace, Alconbury, Glinton. Sacred signifiers: ‘Lines of spirit’.

Alconbury is a favourite of mine, a truckers' all-day-breakfast stop: rapid service, modest prices and as much coffee as you can drink. A hill between the A1 and the A14 link. I used to spread research papers on the Formica and plot future books. I bought all my clothes in the Alconbury shop; shirts, jeans, boots. Tapes, maps. True Crime shockers. You could take a shower, have a shave. Get a bed for the night. Alconbury, in its pomp, offered roadside hospitality of the kind once available at Buckden Palace. A Travelodge for Templars following England's psychic highways.

Street makes no direct reference to Clare. His north-flowing ley
line peters out a mile or so beyond Glinton: at Patty Clare's Northborough cottage? There is some mention of a conclusion at Robin Hood's Bay, ‘not far from Whitby Abbey’. A provocative coda that will have to wait for a future occasion. (Renchi is chasing geologist William Smith's limestone reef in that direction.)

WELCOME TO BEDFORDSHIRE, A PROGRESSIVE COUNTY.

Borders come and go. The sun climbs. Side roads are empty. We march along, stopping to take note of anything that confirms our theoretical progress. Renchi addresses a clump of daisy-like wild flowers on a steep bank at the edge of an extended village. ‘Greater Stitchwort,’ I pronounce (on the authority of the Ladybird primer). Red berries. Haws, rose-hips. Renchi snaps his shutter on a person who looks very much like my father: same set of jaw, the tilt of a man leaning into the wind. A self I don't recognise: older, stripped of pretension. I never saw my father with a rucksack, but my adult life has been a long wrestling match with burdens out of
Pilgrim's Progress
: lights, cameras, book bags, children. When there is nothing to carry, I feel that I'm cheating.

RAILWAY SLEEPERS £15.95.

A hunchback hooked over a wheelchair. He'd crumple without it. His forward-pitching momentum is just enough, when added to the pull of a tiny dog, to advance the old lady in the chair. She grips the dog's leash. The dog sniffs at the verge. The wheelchair tips, veers, lurches into Stotfold, a helmet-shaped settlement on the banks of the River Ivel. We can hear the acoustic footprints of the A1.

40 MILES FROM LONDON TO STOTFOLD. BURGLARS BEWARE. OUR PROPERTY IS POSTCODED. (Notice designed, in red and yellow, to look like a book of stamps.)

Churches: Norman, Saxon. Monuments. Leaded windows, blackened beams. Memorials to children: ‘Daughter and sister, aged 7 years, lent not given.’ Fields of barley, fields of rye. Banks of daisies. Water towers. We glug at plastic bottles. Renchi repairs his
feet. An unpeopled landscape with broad paths cut through cereal fields for hikers who have business elsewhere.

We cross the Ai, before Biggleswade, and feel wave-movements, ripples in the land: hillocks, woods. This is encouraging. We hear sheep but don't see them, perhaps they're lost in the high corn. There are no farmers, farm-labourers or livestock. We notice pig sheds, military detritus, bunkers swallowed in undergrowth. Agriculture is a top-dressing to disguise past and present airfields. Ballardian concrete in haze of summer heat. Abandoned hangars, limp windsocks. Corrugated outbuildings, smelling of vanished cattle. Crickets active in long grass.

After hours of dreamlike walking, Renchi is aroused by the distant prospect of St Neots. But it's not St Neots, it's Sandy. There are still railways to cross, a Roman road to relish. Slavering dogs guarding empty properties. Artworks (tin peacocks) in places where nobody will see them.

Clare inserted a footnote into his account of the walk: ‘The last Mile stone 35 Miles from London got through Baldeck and sat under a dry hedge.’ At Potton he knocked on a door to ask for a light for his pipe. Renchi requested a fill for our water bottles. Questioning villagers in this district was fruitless: ‘They scarcely heard me or gave me no answer.’

Yellow hallucinations of early evening. Acres of Kansas corn. We advance on another mysterious hangar, another perimeter fence: JORDANS (‘Real Ingredients, Real Taste’). Breakfast of choice. The workers were at the back of the factory, in clusters, practising their smoking. Bored CCTV cameras watched them, watched us. We waved, they waved. A mesh fence made conversation difficult, but it was a relief, after two days on the road, to contact live humans prepared to acknowledge our presence.

Clare headed for a pub called the Ram (‘looking in vain for the country mans straw bed’), while we pondered our choice of the Wrestlers at St Neots (a blind booking). And now, at last, my 1,000-mile-guaranteed-no-blister socks were wearing through their
double layer. Invisible skin rubbed and puffed. Visible skin was tightened by the sun, the effect of two days blundering across England.

I describe the approach to St Neots, in notes transcribed that night, as a zone of ‘busy leisure’. Shooting ranges. Golf courses. Four-wheel drives with kangaroo bars. Red sports cars taking the bends hard, leaving white trails of disturbed dust. We're hitting the wrong Ouse town: hard-living St Neots with its marina, rather than Bunyan's Bedford with its sects and secrets.

There is plenty of town to get through before we reach the river. English dissent is a residual presence: Cromwell and his associates, soldiers, bible-punchers, republicans. Tip your cap to Hampden Way. (John Hampden, 1594–1643, Parliamentarian. One of the five members accused by Charles I of inviting the Scots to invade England. Took part in the Battle of Edgehill. Mortally wounded at Chalgrove Heath. Died at Thame.) ‘The King chastised us with whips, but Cromwell chastiseth us with scorpions,’ wrote the radical John Spittlehouse. His words are inscribed on a stone in Huntingdon. Renchi scrapes dog shit from his boots on a sign for Levellers Lane.

St Neots conforms to nonconformity, liberties of the Ouse. Neot was a saint without portfolio. ‘He has baffled all researches,’ says Donald Attwater's dictionary. Possible association with Glastonbury? After death, it is thought, Neot's corpse was removed to a monastery at Eynesbury (we are plodding through there now, an official suburb). Neot had his apostrophe painfully amputated. Leaving: an imposing stone bridge. The usual squabble of coaching-inns. An ivy-choked Victorian vicarage. Monastery ruins. Boat yards. Generic restaurants.

Feet gone, sunburnt, overdosed on Roman roads, cracked airfields, we need a haven. A bed. People. We need: the Wrestlers. Drug notices plastered around the entrance. Prohibition or advert? Early drinkers, the detritus of rubber afternoons, are varnished into place. They surface, from a voluntary catalepsy, just far enough to notice shapes at the periphery of vision. The drama of two men
struggling across a darkened room towards the only vertical element.

‘You want to stay?
Here
?’

Jaw hits puddled bar. No garlic available, so he makes a defensive gesture with a bunch of heavy keys. Then issues us with complicated instructions.

‘Red door. Alley. Mind the bins. Another door, right? Stairs. Go up 'em. Careful like.’

One of the ladies, perched on a leatherette stool, unsticks her skirt and volunteers to act as guide; she needs the exercise. It looks like a long evening. Smirnoff (by the bottle). Garishly coloured mobile phones laid out along the bar like surgical implements. Cigarette bricks in cellophane wrappers. Plastic lighters: auxiliary thumbs. Flick flick flick. Black-and-white posters of Paris bohemia.

Female drinker, slipping off stool, to landlord: ‘It's my birthday. What shall I do?’

‘Get pissed. Then shagged up the arse. Like every other Wednesday.’

One of the phones goes off. The woman taps the rim of her glass with a chipped red nail. Chews ice. The landlord fires her cigarette. It wouldn't be fair to call them binge drinkers. To be a binge drinker you have to stop at some point. In the gloom of the Wrestlers, it is slow and steady. Like the slap and pull of the river. These are professionals, in the zone. Dedicated to soft focus.

Our rooms aren't too bad. They have beds, nicotine-muslin drapes across the window. A pink tablet of soap: in which is embedded a black question mark of pubic hair. A bath would be good (available, on request, at the end of the corridor). Rinse out the evidence of a recent dog-washing ceremony, sink into sodden carpet, as into the peat of Whittlesey Mere. Feet squelch, up to the ankle. It's quite soothing. I may be able to limp into town, the pub doesn't do food (not even breakfasts). There is something decadent in the idea. Food takes the edge off serious drinking.