Edge of the Orison (24 page)

Frederick Martin:

It was proposed by the brothers Billing, tenants of the Hall, and adopted by a majority of votes, that a stick should be put firmly in the ground, in the middle of the room, and that they should dance around it in a ring till it fell from its erect position. The way in which it fell was to indicate in which direction the two emigrants were to go.

Swaying inebriates stamp a pattern on the dirt floor, a vortex of footprints. Fate will take the decision for them. Such rituals were denied us in Alconbury. Orange moustaches: two pints of sweet cordial fizzed with lemonade from a hose. It's come to that. Rehy-drated, we take our leave of the barman and his wife, grateful for their conversation. They'll be back on the road soon, a new gig in Sheffield. Now we have nothing except a long haul, shoulder to shoulder with Clare, out ahead of us; up Ermine Street, the Great North Road, to Stilton.

A decorated stone block beside the Great North Road. Hand pointing south: TO LONDON 64 MILES (through Huntingdon, Royston & Ware). To LONDON 72 MILES (through Cambridge). Here is an object we treat with reverence (the better for being unreadable by motorists). It is faded, masonic; a lost piece in a game of psychogeographical chess. Through his magnifying glass, Renchi watches a snail crawl up one of the grooves, following the vertical stroke of the T in ‘To London’.

Pawns advance one square at a time. As we do, hobbled, reconnected to Clare's exhaustion; he understands, pain has taught him, the quest is futile. There is no wife, no Mary Joyce. No cottage. Nothing behind him and no way back to London. Promised distances are lies. TO STILTON 7 MILES. Seven miles on a road that will exist for a single day.

Stilton was a border marker for Clare; finding the Peterborough road, he would be on familiar ground. Spirits lifted after the collapse of the previous night, the disorientation; feeling stupid, out of his knowledge. After Stilton, he had one task left: to learn to forget.

The promised seven miles were the hardest that we walked; one of my feet was shot, blistered. Shoulders were raw from the chafing of unsecured straps. But it was good to have a road again; a ghost highway little used by motorists, Eddie Stobart's fleet or the refrigerated monsters that service superstores.

Vetch, thistle, tares: the unconsidered bounty of disregarded verges. A diminishing white line, dividing vegetable and mineral zones, hauls us forward on a blindman's rope. The edge is innocent of animal corpses, squashed and splattered vermin.

Ghost roads belong to the vanished. They remind me of Chris Petit: who should, by now, be waiting for us at Stilton. With Petit, I've explored many roads that have abdicated their original identity: the A13, out of Rainham. And others. Traffic stolen by a flashier replacement. Leaving a microclimate of entropy and nostalgia. Off-highway enterprises that have run out of puff.

The B1043 is of that family. Pressed against a busy section of the A1(M), it retains a vagrant charm. You have to walk it to know it. Motorway travellers, heading south, visible over tall grass, don't notice you. You might as well be dead. I think of Petit's first feature,
Radio On
, made before he was thirty. It was when I heard that scoreline – ‘Norwich, two. Chelsea, nil.’ – as the Rover comes down the ramp into Bristol, that I understood. Another fantasy. A posthumous dream. The traveller, trapped on the road west, is dead from the start. Suicide in the bath. Subjected to morbid monologues (roadkill rockers, Belfast), Petit's driver can never come off the road – until it is time to rebury himself in a quarry.
Radio On
, shot in classic Ilford monochrome, is impossible to date, outside time. With every viewing, it seems more contemporary, and comes from a place that is further away.

Ermine Street, in late afternoon, is a catalogue of extinguished enterprises. Prefabricated cafés, overtaken by tumbleweed, have
chipped paint, cracked windows. Poppies, saxifrage, daisies burst through blackened pots and pans. Filling stations have drained tanks. Gates open into wilderness estates. Stone furniture: acanthus overwhelmed by green creepers. A Petit movie that was never commissioned. His stubborn cameraman, Martin Schafer, brought back from the grave.

We don't talk, we listen. We see bridges over the Ai, direction indicators, speed warnings, as a march of invaders,
War of the Worlds
tripods, heading for London. We sample ice-cream from the one surviving garage. We walk, in shared reverie, as distance stretches. The motorway is a temporary nuisance, choked into immobility; a conduit for the ‘M
II
corridor’. A preordained future of estate housing, retail parks and out-of-town shopping cities.

To our right is a country we barely notice: encroaching Fens, rivers, the old island town of Ramsey. Fields and woods where Whittlesey Mere, with its armadas of pleasure boats, once gloried in scale, impregnability, nationwide reputation. The Mere was drained on a whim in 1851: in the perverse way that the area around Grafham was flooded a hundred years later. Holme Fen, which we passed, all unknowing, at the end of the third day's walk, was somewhere to which I would return. By car. With Anna.

The woods of Holme Lode Covert are the strangest in Britain. Draining an expanse of water like Whittlesey Mere throws time into reverse. A notice beside two metal posts boasts that you are standing at the ‘lowest place in England’. So low that you breathe through your gills; you breathe earth, dark fathoms of the vanished lake. Water is a magician's medium, a substance with its own memory: you cannot simply pour it away and ignore the outcome. The post crowned with a small pyramid is a marker, set in 1852, to measure peat shrinkage. A second pillar was erected in 1957. The cast-iron column was apparently taken from the original Crystal Palace (built for the Great Exhibition of 1851), before it was removed to Sydenham. So here, in this obscure wood, favoured by dog walkers, antiquarians, adulterous lovers (two cars kept apart), is a
piece of Victorian London, a high rib of Empire. The post is not sinking; it is rising, inch by inch, out of the soft black ground.

We abandon the car. Nothing, nobody. The feeling persists: we are watched. I persuade Anna into the woods, over a gate; our path is soft, springy. Pools of friable earth around the roots of fallen trees: run it through your fingers. Sniff them. Damp sawdust, stagnant water. An eros of decay to overwhelm invaders. Better not to come too close, touch or embrace, the consequences would be irreversible. Whittlesey Mere takes no prisoners.

Peter Ashley, the Oundle-based photographer and writer who alerted me to the Crystal Palace post, also suggested that I investigate Engine Farm. A sinister location protected by a steep metal ramp, locked gates, a sluggish irrigation channel: Holme Lode. The map offers no inducement to carry on. A car out of nowhere pulls up alongside, the driver is mystified by my search. ‘Engine Farm? Nothing there but stones.’

Stones? Stones are good. You cross a bridge, make yourself known to the farmer: ‘Don't want to take no bugger by stealth, boy, not out in the Fens.’ You dodge potato lorries: to discover a group of limestone blocks, thirteenth century, intended for Ramsey Abbey. Moving in, you register masons' marks (arrowheads). Embedded fossils. The blocks, lost in transit, had been shipped down the Nene, in flat-bottomed boats, from the Barnack quarries. They had sunk in Whittlesey Mere, deep sediment, for five hundred years. Then, Mere drained by Victorian engineers, they floated to the surface. Peat levels fell away. In brackish hibernation, the Engine Farm stones outlasted the dissolution of the monasteries, the execution of Charles I. Epochs of revolution and restoration. The sanctified blocks, so ley line enthusiasts assert, emerged from the Mere in perfect alignment with Barnack and Ramsey Abbey.

‘When we first moved up here in 1996,’ Peter Ashley told me in a letter,

we went to a local pub that sits on the banks of the River Nene. It was a crowded Sunday lunchtime and we all sat round a table where a man with wild staring eyes (we've got used to that round here now) quietly supped his beer. I got into conversation with him and he started to recite yards of Clare, the syllables dribbling out with drops of ale into his grey beard. As he got up to go he told me he had been a patient in the same Northamptonshire asylum as Clare, and I watched him slowly cycling away up the street in the rain.

Under a quilt of cloud, we crossed the Ai, by way of a splendid bridge. Evening light picked a thread of gold from fading fields. We walked the length of the village, south, to the Bell Inn. Where Chris Petit was already established, bathed and fresh, ready for the final day's stroll to Glinton.

In the courtyard for the evening meal, we suffer nothing worse than a troop of compulsory Morris Dancers (the sort that turn up in the Rigby Graham film). This side of Ermine Street, away from the Fens, dancers are inoffensive hobbyists working up a thirst. Not like the revenant mob, the drunks and madmen of my Welsh youth; the Mari Llwyd rhymers who pranced, house to house, on New Year's Eve. Excavated horse's head, scarlet-lipped, draped in a white sheet. Bells. Footsteps in the snow. The dead try to gain entrance. To fire, warmth, cakes and ale. Improvised poetry, verse for verse, is the only way of keeping them out. The Stilton bell-jinglers, stick-bangers, are not the Shitwitches or Molly Gangs of the Fens. Wild, black-faced, travestied. Unemployed ploughboys taught to beg, midwinter, brick in the hand, by near starvation. Such creatures, displaced from the drained Whittlesey Mere, roam the back-roads. Waiting their time. At Stilton, spectral riot disturbed the broken Clare: ‘I heard the voices but never looked back to see where they came from.’

DROWNING

I will not remember. I will not remember anything. She is all memory – she remembers so much, she remembers the memories that are not her own.

Iris Murdoch,
The Italian Girl

Salt Green Death

After a period during which Anna suffered from troubled dreams, and I felt myself torn between the attractions of Hackney present (slo-mo apocalypse) and Hackney past (i.e., Hastings), we settled to our double life. Familiar routines of work in the old house, occupied since 1969, and snatched excursions to a flat in a Thirties cruise liner, seafront building in St Leonards. A crumbling white monster that should never have been built, carving as it did through a substantial portion of James Burton's Regency development. The guilt was piquant. Such easy-paced pleasures, morning swim, hours on a balcony, no phone calls, leisurely walks, shouldn't be allowed.

At home, I tinkered with a novel; on the coast, sliding doors open to the light, the English Channel, I let it all drift. After a dip, a wallow, a tumble in the waves, I did my bit to support local trade (Hungarian minimart) – NO CASH KEPT ON PREMISES OVERNIGHT – by carrying home an obese Saturday newspaper. ‘The habit of newsprint,’ Charles Olson called it. He's right. Worse than cigarettes. Fouling the fingers, muddying the mind. Passive browsing, addiction. The degrading of our ability to concentrate, evaluate, make independent judgements. I used gloomy noise, growling and screeching on a cheap sound system, as an antidote to cultural grazing: the sorry parade of puffers, fudgers, backscratchers. With the occasional gem chucked in to justify the experience.

And Anna's dreams, what were they? Anticipations of another life: London houses flooding, floating away. Previsions of the novel I was about to write: husband split into separate entities, both with my face. Husband carrying her, in miraculous flight, star-high above a black sea.

Saturday, 21 January 2004, was one of the good days. The
Guardian
offered a W. S. Graham poem: ‘Put on your lovely yellow/
Oilskin to meet the weather… Hold on to me and stop/ The world's thorns.’ (A walk with his wife, Ness, on Penwith moor.) And a lead piece by the biographer Richard Holmes on the drowning of Shelley.

Drowning and flying were themes to be resolved in the Clare book that I was plotting, preparing to write. Drowned villages, flights across England. The painting by Renchi, from his walk to Land's End, undertaken between 1990 and 1997, hung on my Hastings wall. A memory he summarises as: ‘Pilgrim setting out on journey beneath guardian tree with Greensand Goddess towering above.’ An overpainted word (in loud red): ‘Drownings’. Drownings in earth. In chalk. In Wealden clay. Flying, dreaming, walking, drowning: that would be my underlying structure.

Then there were lines I marked, for possible Clare insertion, from Chris Petit's novel,
Robinson:
‘Sometimes the road disappeared under water, and the surrounding fields became lakes.’ A sentence from a
Guardian
review of a Bram Stoker biography: ‘The worst he did was wave his stick and shout at the sea.’

That's one of the things I liked about St Leonards. I lay on the sofa, picking out volumes at random, books I hadn't seen in years, and noted down paragraphs, prompts, phrases that might become titles of unwritten poems. I cultivated a notebook. I watched fishing boats, small yachts. And plotted voyages.

Holmes tested material from his 1974 book,
Shelley: The Pursuit
, against a sharper sense of what the act of biography now meant. The interplay of one life on another, the risks. He polished a myth, teased out connections. He fingered mementoes of the drownings, 8 July 1822, in the Bay of Spezia. Holmes loves thanatology: ‘An astonishing array of pictures, poems, inscriptions, memoirs and Victorian monuments.’ A death cult. ‘Shelley could always fly, but he could never swim.’

Flight is a shamanic fugue (when practised without aeroplane or wings), an involuntary or induced lifting of the imagination into another register: vision. Hallucination. The lip of the world. Swimming is abdication, universal memory; weightlessness, supported
struggle. Learning to let go. Passengers in Shelley's homemade skiff, stitched canvas and reeds, were frantic to escape; they leapt over the side at the first glimpse of sand beneath clear water. The poet struck out for the open bay with the cry of ‘Now let us together solve the great mystery.’ Feeling himself a ‘glowworm’ beside Lord Byron's dazzling sun, Shelley swore that he would abandon verse (while heaping up mounds of unfinished translations, historical dramas, projected epics). He wrote to Trelawny asking if he knew anyone ‘capable of preparing the Prussic Acid’. Suicide: my mail-order bride.