Spiderweb (3 page)

It was just as they’d known it would be. She came back from Carter’s so pleased with herself that she’d been in a good mood for the rest of the day. She’d given Carter what for and told him he could get stuffed, she’d take her business elsewhere. She was all wound up, buzzing, like an engine running at full throttle. It was always like that, when she’d had a row. And if it was a row with outsiders, then it meant she’d let up back at home. She’d be all smiles. You could relax.

She did bangers and chips for supper and got ice-cream out of the freezer. Even Gran got the treatment – jokes and teasing till she dropped that stupid hangdog look she usually had and grinned and cackled a bit.

Later, their father cashed in and went out to the pub. He didn’t often do that. Partly because she got ratty if he did, and partly because he wasn’t that bothered anyway. He hadn’t got any time for people, so he wouldn’t talk to anyone, but he liked a beer.

She put the television news on – she wanted to get the weather forecast. On the screen there were people running, women dragging children, and then the noise of gunfire. The picture changed and you saw bodies lying in front of a shop. The boys looked at this bit with interest. Michael peered at the screen. You could see an ad outside the shop for Coke, just like you’d see outside the shop in the village, but the writing on another ad was in a foreign language and the shop had a funny name.

‘See that?’ he said. ‘I dunno where that is but they have Coke, just the same as here.’

Their mother glanced at the screen. There was a dead person now, flies crawling on his face. ‘Of course they do, stupid. Some things you get everywhere, all over the world.’

Michael thought about this. He wasn’t really very interested, but her being in a good mood had made him feel like talking. But now do you know that? You haven’t ever been anywhere. Anywhere outside England.’

She snapped the television off. She stood in front of him, her hands on her hips. ‘Say that again.’

He’d blown it. He felt the familiar cold trickle in his insides. He knew that Peter had gone tense. ‘I just said …’ he began.

‘You don’t know anything, do you? You don’t know anything about what I’ve done and where I’ve been, do you?’

He picked up the
North Somerset Herald
and pretended to be reading about the Young Farmers’ Rally.

She walloped the newspaper so that the sheets flew out of his hands. ‘I’m talking to you, Michael. I said what do you know about what I’ve done and where I’ve been? And you can wipe that look off your face, Peter. Is something funny?’

They stared at her. This moment melted into all the other times she’d exploded like this, like a crack of thunder, throwing you off your balance so all you could do was stare and wait for it to finish. She’d done that when they were two and three, and four and five. She’d done that before they could remember. It was the first thing they did remember – her face close to theirs, shouting.

‘I’ve been to plenty of places you’ve never even heard of. I’ve been all over America.’

‘Well, I didn’t know that, did I?’ Michael mumbled. ‘You never told us.’

‘I don’t tell you everything, do I? I’ve driven all over America in a Cadillac car. Before you lot were born. Before I was saddled with you. I was six months on a ranch in California.’

‘Well, they’d have Coke there, I suppose,’ he muttered, too quiet for her to hear.

‘Shut up,’ she said. Just shut up. She walked out into the kitchen.

They were both of them as big as she was now, but it never felt like that. When she turned on them they were still half her size; she reared above them and their stomachs ran cold. They stiffened in expectation of the clout that might come, the whiplash of her hand. She didn’t clout them now, not any more, not for a long time, but the feel of it was still there, the anticipation, the shock when it came.

Once, they had had a Staffordshire bull terrier pup. Their mother had made a low plank fence to stop the pup getting into the yard where the rabbit pens were. When the pup got big it could have jumped over that fence easily, but it never did, because it thought it couldn’t. They were like that dog.

Sometimes they knew that but couldn’t say so, except in a certain way to each other. ‘This is her, right?’ they’d say, when they were knocking in a nail or chopping a log. ‘This is one for her …’ Wham! Smash!

After she’d gone out of the room they didn’t even look at each other. Presently Peter turned the television on again. It was the weather forecast and she’d missed it.

When the television news was over Stella switched off and sat staring at the blank screen for a moment, chilled by what she had seen. She had been to a conference once in a city near the place in which these things were happening, had driven through that landscape, observed and talked to people doing daily, ordinary things – filling cars with petrol and selling fruit and vegetables and serving coffee. Taking children to school. Dead now, some of them, with flies on their faces. She got up and delved for an atlas in the as yet unpacked boxes of books. She round the place that had been on the news. Names that she recognized sprang at her from the map. We went there, she thought, and there and there. Once I stood looking at wall-paintings in a church just there – or at least the person I then was did so. And now I am here, and some of those people are not anywhere at all. Possibly, back then, I walked past those very people so horribly seen just now.

She turned to the British Isles section. The west of England. There am I, she thought, just there alongside the thread of that road, at the foot of that brown range of high ground. And there is the pub where Dan and I stayed long ago.

When Stella contemplated her own progress through time and space, she saw lines – black lines that zig-zagged this way and that, netting the map of England, netting the globe, an arbitrary progress hither and thither. And sometimes these lines crossed one another. The intersections must surely be points of significance – these places to which she had been twice, three times, many times, but as different incarnations of herself, different Stellas ignorant of the significance of this site – that she would revisitit as someone else. But this progress of hers took place on two different planes. The web was not flat but of three or indeed four dimensions – it had to incorporate both time and space in the way that only physicists can imagine. Stella thought of those spiderwebs that form an airy complex density of minutely connected strands. Her space–time progress was something like that, the whole thing shimmering with these portentous nodes at which the future lay hidden. You walk blindly past the self that is to come, and cannot see her.

So, Stella, now. Standing in an unfamiliar house, an atlas in her hands – a tall spare woman, dressed in trousers and a sagging sweater, her hair a gingery profusion spiked with grey, perfunctorily twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck and skewed with a plastic clip. Narrow feet, long limbs, thin, elegant fingers that turn the pages of the book. Her face is thin, too – long pointed nose, wide mouth, blue eyes with a fold of skin dipping down now above and a web of wrinkles below. Never a conventionally beautiful face, you would decide, but arresting. You might glance, then look again.

Michael said, ‘Did she go to America before we were born? Was she on a ranch in California?’

Ted Hiscox swung his head round from the innards of a tractor. ‘She said that?’

‘Yeah.’

Their father dived into the engine again. ‘Maybe she did. If that’s what she says. Get me a can of oil.’

They had not always lived here at the bungalow. The boys knew that because both carried in their heads murky images of an elsewhere, a number of elsewheres. They did not compare these images, perhaps because it did not occur to them and also because it was as though that time had never been. There was a door slammed shut. ‘What d’you mean?’ she’d say. ‘Where were we before we came here? We were somewhere else, weren’t we, stupid? What’s it got to do with you, anyway?’ Their father was much the same. ‘I dunno when we came here. Ten years ago, something like that. What’s it matter?’

These patchy visions of other places were in any case dominated always by her presence. They were just the blurred background to her hectic action. She was having a row with their father, or bawling them out for something they’d done. Sometimes there were other people involved. Once she had had a dust-up with a man in a car-park who’d taken the space she wanted and when he’d gone she got a screwdriver and scraped lines on the man’s car. Then she’d let them have a go at doing that and it had been brilliant. They’d done it since, several times, and both knew that the other remembered.

They both carried, too, the time she banged their heads together and then left them crying on a dusty pathway somewhere. Her hands grabbing them and the raging pain in the skull and each other’s red ravaged face and her not there any more, just the dusty empty path.

So they had not always been here in Somerset. This fact did not particularly interest them, but they considered it from time to time. And every now and then, she would go on about things she’d done or things she knew about. Like the ranch in California. But then if you talked of that again, she’d lash out, like as not, and say you were talking nonsense. They’d start wondering then if she’d said it or she hadn’t. She could get them so they weren’t certain any more if she’d said something or if they’d imagined her saying it, like they were confused sometimes between things she’d done and things they knew she might do, was capable of doing.

You never knew where you were with her. She flew from mood to mood. And in good moods she said things that no longer held at other times. Or else she’d never said it. Like the business about agricultural college, last week. Michael had asked her about it.

‘When am I going, then?’

‘Going where?’

‘To that college.’

She was sorting through a pile of bills in the place she called her office. She didn’t look up. ‘You’re mad. What are you talking about?’

‘You said I’d got this scholarship.’

‘You haven’t got any scholarship. When did you take any exam?’

He stood there. She went back to the bills. ‘Get out of my hair and go and help your father. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

He could hear her voice in his head, telling the woman in the shop in Kingston Florey: ‘Michael’s got one of the scholarships to the agricultural college, one of the top scholarships – we’re going to have to learn to do without him.’ In a loud voice, so people looked round at her.

‘You said it in the shop, this morning.’

She turned. ‘You’re mad. I didn’t say that. D’you think you’re being clever or something? Why would I say something like that?’

And then he wasn’t sure any more. He told Peter: ‘You were there too. You heard her. Didn’t she say that – about the college?’ And he saw in Peter’s face that he was uncertain now, too. She had always been able to do that – get them so that they didn’t know what had happened and what hadn’t happened. She’d tell them they were lying till they supposed they must be.

Their father wouldn’t help. Never. He’d either back off or clam up, like with the ranch in California. ‘If that’s what she says …’ They hung about while he fixed the engine and then he drove off and they went to their place in the hedge and banged around with sheets of corrugated iron. They were making a shed. They’d been making it for a long time, mainly because they liked the feeling of swiping away at the metal.

They were going back to the house when the new woman from Vine Cottage turned in from the lane and came walking down the path towards the mineral line. When she got to the track leading to their dad’s work sheds she stopped and stood staring across at the big tractor. They went to pass her, not looking at her, but she started talking.

‘Which of you was it I saw going past yesterday? Tell me something – are all tractors either Massey-Fergusons or Fordsons?’

Grinning away at them. Silly old cow. The way she talked got up your nose.

‘Is it true they come kitted out with stereos and central heating these days?’

Still grinning. Thought she was being funny. They swerved past, left her standing there. Staring at the tractor. A Fordson, but they weren’t going to say.

She had been thinking about tractors in Orkney. In Orkney they have the oldest tractors in existence. Pared-down rusting frames, nothing but an engine and a seat and a steering wheel and two great tyres. She used to notice the names when she was working on the island – flowing letters of chrome pinned to the radiator. Massey-Ferguson and Fordson and something else. What was the something else? She had noted them at the time as though the prevalent makes of tractor were also data of some kind, to be filed away along with the complexities of relationship between Fletts and Scarths and Rendells. She stood in piercing winds talking to men with leather faces who sat on their battered hulks of tractors and mildly answered her queries about their grandparents because they were amiable people and you didn’t get a lot of visitors on the island. She was a change from the archaeologists and the bird people, they told her. And yes, my grandfather married a Flett, but my father’s father, now he married an incomer, a Shetland girl … They’d sit on their Massey-Ferguson or their Fordson and the wind blew the pages of her notepad and the sea birds rode above her head calling. Oh, social anthropology is a joyous thing, she had thought, summering among these kindly folk, burrowing in their rich ancestral compost. In her roaring forties she’d been then, her head boiling with ideas and enough energy to walk off the horizon.

The tractor upon which she now gazed bore litde resemblance to those old crates driven by Orcadian farmers in the seventies. This was a shiny scarlet affair, its cab high off the ground and screened behind perspex windows, its dashboard a marvel of dials and levers. What is that central lever for? she wondered. It occurred to her that this must be the state-of-the-art development of a gear stick she remembered on the Orkney bangers. What was that third trade name? She needed suddenly to know. And so when she caught sight of the two boys she called out to them: ‘Tell me something – are all tractors either Massey-Fergusons or Fordsons?’ She smiled encouragingly. They were sullen-looking boys with crops of dark hair that hadn’t been washed recently enough and a hunched way of standing. Mired in adolescence, poor lads, she thought. She’d been sprayed with muddy water yesterday, as the tractor roared past without slowing down, but never mind.

No answer. Forging ahead, determinedly avoiding her eye. Not a forthcoming pair, it would seem. She tried again. They walked away, silent.

No joy there, she thought, mildly put out. She had always got on well enough with the young. She glanced after the boys. In order to reach the mineral line, you had to leave the lane some way beyond the cottages and the Morgan farm and strike off across a field which gave access also to the Hiscox business. A sleazy place, the bungalow and work sheds stuck in the middle of a shaggy area rife with netdes and thistles. A rough track led from the lane across the field to the group of buildings alongside which were ramshackle wire enclosures and wooden hutches. On another occasion, she had glimpsed ducks huddled in one pen, another heaving with rabbits. There were bits and pieces of machinery scattered around, a great pile of rusting metal and corrugated iron, another of old tyres. A couple of carcasses of spent cars. A decayed combine apparently sinking into the ground. Muddy puddles, oil spills. The bungalow was shabby – a stucco job, put up presumably before the time of such refinements as planning permission. A concrete path running up to the front door, the garden a perfunctory affair of unmown grass and some leggy shrubs.

Mrs Hiscox was a small skinny woman with blonde hair tied back in a pony-tail. She had stopped her car in the lane a few days after Stella moved into the cottage.

‘Finding your way around?’

‘I am indeed. I haven’t walked so much for years.’

‘I’m Karen Hiscox. Our place is along the lane – you’ll have seen. Well, walking’s not something I’ve got time for myself. Family round my neck and a business to run.’ She seemed a person charged with some kind of manic energy; her foot continued to rev the car engine as she talked.

‘I’m the idle retired,’ said Stella.

‘Plenty of you round here. Well… have to get on … give those louts of boys their dinner. By the way, if you want rabbit for a casserole, or fresh duck, you know where to come.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ said Stella to an already moving car.

Conversational exchange in these parts was most usually carried out between open car windows, Stella had learned, or from window to walker. She now knew by sight and by name the other inhabitants of this small hamlet, but had rarely seen inside anyone else’s home. The Hiscox business was at the end of the lane furthest from her own cottage – in between were three other cottages and a farmhouse. Her nearest neighbours were an elderly couple whose stumpy home of cob and thatch seemed to act as a bulwark to prevent its steeply pitched back garden from cascading down into the road. Old Mr Layton could be seen there, day in and day out, fossicking among his rows of vegetables, while through the front window his wife was visible sitting peaceably in front of the blue glow of the television. Both were born and bred a mile from here, Stella had been told. Their daughter lived in Kingston Florey but their son – well, their son had moved away. Moved right away. To Bridgwater – all of fifteen miles.

In nice contrast, the neighbouring cottage was inhabited by weekenders – a family from Bristol. Dormant through the week, the place erupted on Friday evenings as the loaded Renault Espace arrived. Whooping children, the smack of a football, whiffs of interesting cuisine. Later, the windows would flare and the garden floodlights snap on. The parents were Tony and Linda, both IT consultants and loudly amiable. They plied Stella with local information – the best pubs, the sources for organic vegetables. They declared themselves absolutely fascinated by her former occupation and wanted to be given a run-down of a field trip. Egypt they knew well – they’d been on a cruise up the Nile to Luxor. She must come round and tell them how it was for her. But when she accepted an invitation to Sunday brunch the occasion was so corroded by fractious children and the problems of a sulky barbecue that her tentative account of the Delta back then was rapidly quenched. The relationship was diminishing to one of determined bonhomie whenever they passed in the lane.

The Morgans were the sole farmers. Genial enough but busy – and no wonder since John Morgan appeared to be cultivating much of the surrounding landscape single-handed, save for the considerable efforts of his wife Sue, who was never seen out of gum-boots, stumping resolutely around the barns. Such encounters as Stella had had with either were primed with the sense that some urgent task had been suspended and she would feel obliged to curtail the conversation.

There was also Stan, who lived in a cottage of such dilapidation that its walls seemed in danger of simply melting into the muddy pitch that passed for his garden. Stan was in business as an odd-job man, occasional hired labourer to John Morgan and purveyor of fuel. The yard behind his house was piled high with logs and sacks of Coalite. Stella had availed herself of this resource and was thus on greeting terms with Stan. They would exchange the mandatory comments on weather and temperature, but that was about as far as it went. Further intimacy was not encouraged.

That, it would seem, was local community life. As a connoisseur of such, she felt mildly disappointed. Oh well, she thought, it’s no skin off my nose – I never was one who depended on a nice chat over the garden fence.

‘Ah,’ said Richard Faraday. ‘Marks and Spencer’s leek and bacon quiche. One of my favourites. You’ve discovered the Taunton shopping facilities, obviously.’

She had forgotten what a tall man he was. A long, lank figure, his knees awkwardly bumping her too-low table. He had always towered over Nadine. Small, neat Nadine – dumpy in later life.

‘If it’s any help, I can let you have a list of local suppliers. There’s a good baker in Williton.’

‘Thank you – that would be very useful.’

A pause. The conversation kept withering. He had arrived on the dot, bearing a bottle of wine. A house-warming present. Not to be drunk now. Unless of course you want to. Personally I don’t drink in the middle of the day.

‘I am a member of the local chapter of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England. And the Exmoor Society and the local history group and that sort of thing. You may want to follow suit. It gives one a context. I can send you the addresses.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Stella. ‘I’ve never been much of a joiner.’

He wore a tweed jacket and grey flannels – the self-conscious leisure wear of a man who has worn a suit all his life. Poor old Richard. You spend forty years manipulating the economic life of the nation and then end up being the treasurer of the local history society. I bet he’s the treasurer.

‘Anyway … you’re settling in all right?’

‘Fine,’ she assured him. ‘Just fine.’

Or you cruise the globe, trying to find out why human beings do what they do, and then … Poor old Stella?

‘Anything I can do to help – just give me a ring.’