Spiderweb (7 page)

Occasionally Stella comes across this battered testament among her papers. If she glances into it she views its author with benign curiosity – this is herself, it would seem, but a self she finds it hard to recognize. Some of the experience cited she remembers; she reads of the rest with faint surprise. The place itself surges back, conjured up by those handwritten pages: the smell of dust and dung, the sound of carts and donkey hoofs and crowing cocks and raised voices, the blinding sun. She rather approves of this young woman who was reflecting so keenly upon the problems of being an anthropologist, but is bemused by other sections. The exchange in the fields is entirely unfamiliar. Did this really happen thus? The narrative detachment gives the episode a fictional flavour. When did I write this? she wonders. The same day? Or weeks later, grooming the raw material into this considered anecdote? And for whom was that young woman writing? Well, for this
alter ego,
as it turns out, in the quirky way of diarists. And if the pye-dog query is apocryphal or manicured, there is no question but that a lifelong ambivalence towards dogs stems from those months in the Delta.

This dog, then – this almost-spaniel – would serve to tame Stella. He would extinguish finally her atavistic dog-stoning inclinations. He would confer respectability and give her a conversational entry with those she met on her local walks.

How things would be between them became clear within the first few days.

Stella liked the dog. She found him vaguely companionable, the touch of his silky fur against her leg or hand was pleasant. But the dog did not like Stella – he adored her, he worshipped her, she was the pivot of his existence. Thrust into a position of unwilling exploitation, she felt an irritable guilt. There was an appalling imbalance of feeling. It was like associations in the past with men who had fallen for her but for whom she could feel nothing more positive than a mild affection. The dog watched her every move with liquid, fearful eyes lest she might be proposing to go out and leave him. Each time she approached the front door he would scrabble imploringly at her knees. If she did go out without him, she could hear his desperate howling as she got into the car, and when she returned he greeted her with an enthusiasm of welcome and forgiveness that left him too breathless to bark. Each time she passed him in the cottage he wagged his tail in propitiation. When she patted him he collapsed in ecstasy. Did all dog-owners spend their time subjected to this relentless emotional pressure, she wondered?

‘I’m not sure that this is working,’ she told him sternly, at the end of the first week. But by then there was no going back.

‘If you’ve had your fill of writing articles, try something more punchy,’ says Judith. ‘A memoir. Do a
fin-de-siècle
Malinowski.’

Stella pulls a face.

‘No material?’ This is guile.

‘Oh, I’ve got diaries and stuff like that stacked up somewhere. Photos, even. Cuttings …’ Stella’s voice trails away.

‘I didn’t mean that sort of material. I meant, surely it was interesting enough.’ The guile now is transparent.

‘Of course it was interesting,’ says Stella hotly. ‘Good grief, one hasn’t spent half one’s life pigging it in disagreeable climates for no good reason.’

Judith smiles complacently.

‘Oh,
you,’
says Stella. ‘Winding me up … All right, yes, I suppose I could write a memoir. But I haven’t the slightest inclination. And that’s not false modesty, either.’

Judith shrugs. ‘Suit yourself.’

‘Come to that, what about you?’

For Judith too has served her time in disagreeable climates. She is an archaeologist. When Stella first set eyes on her, she was squatting in a trench somewhere in Malta, so caked in dust and sweat as to be apparently wearing camouflage. She had squinted up into the sun from under the brim of a grubby bush hat and told Stella kindly to push oft, they weren’t taking on any more labour. Thus began an abiding friendship.

‘No way,’ says Judith. ‘Though I grant you that I may be in need of occupation. I have it in mind to cash in on the tourism boom in these parts – up-market archaeological tours. A kind of West Country Swan Hellenic, in a luxury minibus. Trouble is, where do I get the cash for the minibus?’

Judith and Stella have dropped in and out of each other’s lives according to circumstance for the last thirty years. Their friendship is elastic. It has withstood long periods when they have not set eyes on one another, and weathered also spontaneous holidays with shared rooms in spartan hotels.

Judith Cromer lives in Bristol with her partner Mary Binns. She has sporadic work with an archaeology unit, work which may well run out due to shortage of funds. Archaeology is not a growth area these days, tourism or no tourism. Mary Binns is better placed, as a radio producer. Stella is not all that keen on Mary Binns, who has green eyes and is convinced that there is something going on between Stella and Judith, which is far from the truth and ever has been.

Years ago Judith said to Stella, ‘Have you honestly never ever fancied another woman? Not even
a frisson?’

Stella reflected, trawling through a lifetime of sexual responses of varying degrees of fervour, and had eventually been able to come up only with the head girl at school on whose account she had felt weak at the knees for the whole of one term. ‘What about you and men?’ she retaliated. To which Judith replied that she tried one once and never again, thank you very much.

Mary Binns is mistaken, but to this day she hovers suspiciously on the outskirts of the friendship, greeting Stella with exaggerated warmth when they meet, treating Judith to pained silences when she has been with Stella. Judith makes light of this and says simply that Mary has her difficult side, don’t we all? She sounds like the archetypal spouse stoically making allowances, and Stella is sometimes surprised that it is Judith and not she who has ended up in a state of tetchy domesticity. Judith is not the homely type. She is restless, maverick and enquiring. What she likes best is to be scratching in the dirt with a trowel somewhere hot and ancient. But here she is, now in her mid-fifties, living with Mary Binns in a flat in Bristol, doing the occasional hurried survey when excavations for a new motorway or hypermarket turn up inconvenient material of archaeological interest.

‘Grounded,’ says Judith suddenly. ‘I suppose that could be said of both of us. And one should resist. Your dog seems to have some problem with its foot.’

They are heading back to Stella’s cottage after a walk along the wide grassy track which marks the course of the old railway line that once carried iron ore from the mines on the hills down to the coast. The mineral line. This physical relic of a forgotten industry cuts through the fields and becomes on the flanks of the hills a thickly wooded track which climbs to the ruins of the old winding-sheds. The mineral line can be reached on foot from Stella’s cottage by following a bridlepath leading from the field beside the Hiscox place. It is a good place to exercise the dog.

But the dog, today, is behaving like a recalcitrant child. Too far, he is apparently saying. Too hot. Now he is limping. He plods reproachfully at Stella’s heels. ‘He comes from a broken home,’ she explains to Judith in extenuation. ‘He’s used to a suburban back garden.’

‘I can’t think what’s come over you,’ says Judith. ‘You avoid commitments for forty years and then land yourself with this.’

‘He confers respectability. Everyone has a dog in these parts.’

‘Most people in inner cities have dogs, as far as I can see. Preferably the kind that are just a set of fangs on legs. At least this creature isn’t that.’

They have left the mineral line and are now crossing the field. The dog has perked up, home within reach, and veers off in skittish pursuit of a pigeon. The Hiscox boys come rattling in off the lane on their bikes, narrowly missing him as he runs across the track. One of them yells, ‘Sod off!’

‘Hmm …’ says Judith. ‘Is this local form?’

‘By no means. These lads are just disaffected adolescents, I take it.’

‘What we’ve been spared … Do you ever wish you’d had children?’

‘No. You?’

‘Well, no. Does this make us freaks? And truth to tell, I get on a storm with the young. But I’d rather they were someone else’s.’

‘My sentiments entirely. But it’s aberrant behaviour. Distinctly freakish. The norm is to stake out your claim in the kinship network, establish your credentials by way of offspring. Get yourself into the gene pool.’

‘Not at all,’ says Judith. ‘It’s simply a system to ensure a controllable labour supply. Children are useful disposable goods – barter their services for essential commodities, if the opportunity offers, stick them out on a hillside at birth if needs must.’

‘Extreme behaviour,’ objects Stella. ‘The product or complete social breakdown.’

‘Not at all. Common practices in antiquity.’

And thus, by the time they reach the cottage, the Hiscox boys are quite forgotten, subsumed into one of those pleasurable arguments that have always been a feature of their friendship.

‘The trouble with us,’ says Judith over a lunch of bread and cheese, ‘is that our trades have put us out of touch with the real world. The one we have to live in. I think in terms of funeral practices, weaponry and ubiquitous bloodshed, and you see people as components of kinship networks and lineage patterns.’

‘That sounds precisely like the world as I know it. I only have to switch on the telly or read a newspaper.’

‘Oh, well, the royal family are doing you proud.’ Judith laughs. ‘And global violence is nicely up to standard. Point taken.’

‘But you’re right in another sense. We don’t conform to social expectations. Unmarried, no children. We’re the sort that would have been burned as witches, in other times and places.’

‘Or consulted as oracles,’ says Judith. ‘You have to pick your moment, if you’re inclined to nonconformity. As it is, I’d say we don’t do too badly.’

The phone rings. It is Mary Binns, who greets Stella effusively and says that she just needs a quick word with Judith, if it isn’t too much of a nuisance. Judith, returning to the table after a brief exchange, looks sheepish and explains that Mary wants her to pick up some groceries on the way back. It is silently understood that the issue is that of the establishment of possession, not a stop-off at Tesco.

‘You’d better not leave it too late,’ says Stella. ‘Or you’ll hit the rush hour.’

‘Huh …’ says Judith. ‘Trying to get rid of me, are you?’

Back in the Malta days there had been someone called Rosie – a nut-brown girl as wiry, fiery and maverick as Judith, so that she seemed some kind of providential clone. Stella, herself emotionally preoccupied, had enjoyed their company and felt a benign empathy. But Rosie had vanished and now there was Mary Binns, and Stella would not presume to ask how Mary Binns had come about. Or what had happened to Rosie. But in her mind’s eye she sometimes sees Rosie and Judith, sprawled in the shade of an olive tree, drinking red wine – vibrant, sun-baked, light-years from today and a Bristol branch of Tesco.

Judith gathers herself to leave. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I can see you’re nicely dug in. Incidentally, I’m still not quite clear why you plumped for here rather than anywhere else.’

Stella hesitates. ‘Happenstance, I suppose. Richard Faraday sent me stuff from an estate agent – you remember Nadine, my old college chum? And I came this way once with Dan.’

‘Pure fluke,’ says Judith. ‘So it goes. That’s how we all live. Now for a bout with Tesco … See you soon.’

But when she has gone Stella looks again – back to that olive grove of the sixties – and sees that it is not so at all. She sees that time as inextricably entwined with this one. They are both woven into a tapestry, united by an inevitable thread of circumstance. There is a fourth figure present on the day of the olive-tree picnic, he who will subsequently say, ‘Anywhere … so long as it’s somewhere rural and blindingly English.’ The roof under which she now lives was already hinted at then, along with the line of hills at which she looks, along with the metamorphosis of herself. Not happenstance, she thinks, not happenstance at all, but the way that the future is implicit within the present, did one but know. The signals are already there but we cannot read them.

Stella was finding that she lived now on two planes. There were all the familiar references of her own past and present, tapped into daily by way of visitors such as Judith, by letters and phone calls. But there was also this new backcloth, this social and physical landscape of which she was now an element. She eyed it with interest, and saw that she in turn was watched.

She talked, she walked, she drove. She looked and she listened. She did what she had always done in pursuit of her work and would now be incapable of not doing – she noted everything she saw or heard, and the place began slowly to take on a further dimension. The invisible swam into sight, like the hidden shapes in a child’s magic drawing book.

First she learned her way around. She visited Minehead and Dunster and Williton and Watchet. She learned the structure of the place, its systems of linkage and dependence. She saw what people were doing now and she dipped into the ubiquitous past, proffered in the form of brochures and pamphlets and murky postcards, to discover what they used to do. She wandered around villages, read the names on the war memorials, leafed through the local papers and saw the same names. She pottered in churchyards. She followed footpaths around the edges of the fields, along mysterious sunken tracks or over bracken-covered hillsides. She drove down lanes that became green tunnels between the high hedgebanks. She pored over the map, which served up names that could have furnished some pastiche of a perished country-side: Dumbledeer, Felon’s Oak, Sticklepath. And wherever she went, whenever she could, she fell into conversation – sometimes with people she would never see again, sometimes with those who became a circle of acquaintance.

A couple in a pub at Watchet told her that
they’d
thought it would be more like Ilfracombe, and these narrow roads were a menace. A potter in an Exmoor village (every village had its craftsperson, she soon realized) had fetched up there after spells in Crete and Provence and thought the light was amazing, but had to avert her eyes every time the hunt passed by.

The postman told her much. The postman bore a Welsh name – his forebears had probably crossed the Bristol Channel to work in the iron mines up on the Brendon Hills. He told Stella who was married to whose sister and which farmer’s daughter worked at the NatWest in Williton and why the agreeable cottage on the edge of the village was falling into decay (an executors’ dispute over ownership). He defined the neighbourhood. He told her who was a bona fide product of this place and who was not. She saw herself defined as he spoke.

And thus Stella learned. There came beams of light. The place took shape. It ceased to be a landscape, a backdrop, and became an organism. Stella perceived the intricate system of checks and balances by which things worked. She saw that there was a continuous state of negotiation, of dealing, of to-and-fro arrangements. Everyone stood in a particular relationship to everyone else, often literally so in terms of marriage connections or distant ties of blood. People employed one another, or sold things to each other, or exchanged services, or simply rubbed shoulders here, there and everywhere. Each casual encounter in a lane or at a shop entrance reinforced this subtle and elaborate system, as hard to penetrate as any she had met.

For there were two layers here, she saw. There was the basic and significant layer, which went back a long way – two, three or more generations. These were the people whose parents and grandparents looked out from here and who continued to do so themselves, for whom these parts were the hub of things and elsewhere was … elsewhere. Though, admittedly, a rather more familiar elsewhere nowadays, thanks to several decades of mass communications and package holidays. But grafted on to this layer was a further one, the layer of subsequent settlement – some of it transitory, some more permanent. Most transitory of all were the summer visitors – a valuable source of revenue for some, a confounded nuisance for others. Then there were the more abiding setders – the retired, the owners of holiday cottages, the potters and the woodcarvers and the weavers. These were digested, up to a point and depending upon their personal achievements in terms of participation and commitment. But they would never be truly attuned. They would never be able to plug into the elaborate communication system which hinged upon intimate knowledge of how things stood, how things had changed and why, and what this implied in terms of expedient response and reaction. They would always tramp around wearing blinkers. They would always speak with a foreign accent.