Human Croquet (42 page)

I last saw him in a pub in Fulham, in 1967, when he was very drunk and morbid but none the less, when he suggested I stay the night at his place I did, because that was 1967 and in 1967 I slept with anyone.

He was completely different, of course – I suppose he’d become the person he used to have to hide inside himself.

In bed, in his staggeringly untidy garden flat in Chelsea, his limbs were marble, his flesh was ice. Sex with Malcolm Lovat was like the dance of death. ‘I always wanted you,’ he whispered, ‘I just never knew how to tell you.’ Of course, it was too late then. ‘We’re so alike,’ he sighed. But I don’t think we were, not really.

He died six months later in circumstances so squalid that the inquest became a
cause ceéleèbre
. Afterwards, I carried him around with me in a small secret place inside me (the heart, which was the same place I kept my mother). Just because you can’t see someone doesn’t mean they’re not there.

My daughter, Imogen, came up to stay with me and then joined a self-styled tribe of tree people who were camped out in Boscrambe Woods preparing to fight the road contractors who were building the Glebelands Outer Ring Road. I drove out there sometimes, taking food parcels, video cameras, e-mail, anything else they wanted. When the time for the final battle drew nearer I lay in bed at night fretting over my aerial child hanging high up in the trees, climbing on webs and suspended by harnesses like some grubby Peter Pan. She was arrested several times and was finally bound over to keep the peace and when she refused was sent to prison for a while.

By that time, the contractors had moved in and trees that had stood for hundreds of years were felled in an afternoon. Not long after they’d started clearing the first trees someone spotted a long bone poking through the soil in the shovel of a JCB. The forensic pathologists eventually recovered nearly a whole skeleton from the spot that must have once been in the heart of the heart of the forest. A woman who died a long time ago, they said, too long for them to be able to say how she died, everything but the bones had decomposed and foxes had disturbed the body. Imagine – small animals eating the flesh, pulling at the bones, the eyelids closed by drifting leaves.

Hilary, who was having an affair with one of the forensic pathologists, told me that they had found a gold ring still circling one of the fingers. She said the ring was set with diamonds and emeralds and inscribed with the words ‘
To EF with all my love, G
’ and that that made her feel very sad somehow.

I believe my mother had such a ring but I knew she couldn’t be the forgotten body in the wood for I never thought of her as dead, and anyway she had made herself manifest to me not long before. I was standing in the queue in Tesco’s and the woman in front of me – in her late twenties, immaculately dressed in a tweed suit, narrow belted at the waist, high-heeled shoes and seamed stockings, black hair in a French pleat and makeup like an actress. She was just paying as I lifted out a plastic bag of fruit to put on the conveyer belt when the bag burst suddenly and the fruit went tumbling everywhere. We both bent down and scrabbled around picking up the apples – Red Delicious, waxed and polished so that they didn’t look at all real. I was so near to the woman that I could smell her grown-up scent –
Arpege
and tobacco. My own perfume by then. She stood up, teetering slightly on her heels, and handed me the last apple and she said,
There you are, darling
.

And then she was gone and I knew there was no point in saying anything to the check-out girl about her because some things are known only to ourselves.

Time carried on its thievish progress towards eternity. Imogen became a mother, and so I became a grand-mother. Mrs Baxter met a mysterious end, the only person who truly disappeared – walking, they say, into the side of a green hill one day. Some say that at the moment she vanished she was transformed into the Queen of Elfland and wore a dress of finest green and a crown of glittering gold. But that was just rumour.

The world carried on spinning. So many stories to be told, so little time.

Or in ice? With no cataclysm, only slow decay, the stars burning out, the black holes sucking in everything around them and the slow gravitational dance of death stretching the elastic universe further and further apart. A slush of sub-atomic particles. Pea-soup.

Or in green? Imagine the wood at the end of time. A great green ocean of peace. A riot of trees, birch, Scots pine and aspen, English elm and wych elm, hazel, oak and holly, bird cherry, crab apple and hornbeam, the ash and the beech and the field maple. The blackthorn, the Guelder rose and twined all about – ivy, mistletoe and the pale honeysuckle where the dormouse nests.

On the forest floor the insects work hard – click beetles and the robber flies, weevils and hornets, slugs and snails, the spiders and the patient earthworms. And the invisible life, the amoeba and bacteria cleaning up and recycling.

The sound in the world now is birdsong – the joyful treble of the mistle thrush announcing spring, the chaffinch singing for joy, the beautiful trilling of the wood warblers. Blackbirds and robins, soft wood pigeons and pied flycatchers, the long-eared owl and the greater spotted woodpecker, the world belongs to them now.

And also to the voles and the badgers, the squirrels and the bats, the hedgehogs and the deer and the little foxes that play untroubled by hound or man.

And, finally, the wolves come back.

Here and there in the green and gold of the sunlit wood flicker the fragile purple emperor, the white admiral, and the Duke of Burgundy fritillary. Soft moss and ferny green and the splash of toad and frog in the dark ponds in the cool glades. The song thrush in the trees spins his threads of song three times. Lilies of the valley and heart’s tongue fern crowd the shade. The tiny wren bird hops from branch to branch and the pearl-bordered fritillary kisses the strawberry and the wild thyme. The smell of sweet musk roses and eglantine.

Colder and colder. One day, the last bird sings its feeble farewell and drops like a stone. On another day the final leaf falls and no more buds come. In the beginning was the word, but at the end there is only silence.

Each ‘ball’ is a person who is blindfolded, and who does not move except when ordered to.

Finally, there are the ‘players’, each in charge of a ‘ball’.

As far as possible the game follows the style of ordinary croquet. Each player has one stroke in turn, and is allowed an additional one when his ball passes through a hoop or hits another ball.

To begin the play the first player gets his ball on to the starting line, standing behind him gripping his arms, and aims him at the first hoop – which of course the ball cannot see. Then the player says ‘Go,’ and the ball trots forward, until his owner calls ‘Stop.’ If the ball has passed through the hoop another ‘stroke’ is allowed; if not, the second player makes his attempt.

Every ball must run in a straight line, and must promptly stop when ordered. When two balls collide the one that is struck stays where it is, but the other is given another ‘stroke’, and ordered off afresh. No player may speak to his ball while it is in motion, except to stop it, nor touch or re-direct it in any way.

That player wins who first gets his ball through all the hoops, in their proper order, and back to the starting line, or to a post at the middle of the ‘court’.

Interest and fun is added to the game if each player and his or her ball are made to wear some distinguishing colour – either ribbon or hat or rosette, so that couples are more obviously linked.

Hoops must never move from their stations, and must give no indication of their whereabouts to oncoming balls. When one game has been played the players and balls exchange roles.