The Woodcutter (11 page)

‘Twelve strangers!’ he interrupted. ‘Twelve citizens picked off the street! In this world we’re unfortunate enough to live in, and especially in this septic isle we live on, where squalid politicians conspire with a squalid press to feed a half-educated and wholly complacent public on a diet of meretricious trivia, I’m sure it would be possible to concoct enough evidence to persuade twelve strangers that Nelson Mandela was a cannibal.’

Wow! she thought as she studied him closely. That rolled off your tongue so easily, it’s clearly been picking up momentum in your mind for years!

His voice was still controlled, but his single eye sparkled with passion. What was it he said he felt about his ex-wife’s behaviour?

Contempt.

Revulsion.

Anger.

Dismay.

These were all necessary elements of that condition of self-awareness she was trying to draw him to. Perhaps by transferring these emotions away from himself to his ex-wife, he was showing her he was closer than she’d thought. His strained parallel with Mandela was also significant. A man of dignity and probity, imprisoned by a warped regime, and finally released and vindicated after long years to become a symbol of peace and reconciliation. It was as if Hadda’s denial could only be sustained by going to the furthermost extreme in search of supportive self-images.

Hopefully, if he continued far enough in that direction, he would eventually come upon himself unawares. And then it would be up to her to direct him away from self-hatred into more positively remedial channels.

Meanwhile it would be good if she could nudge him into a memory of Imogen in her fairy-tale princess phase. It was possible that by reliving that period when she had become the unique and obsessive object of his adoration, he might come to wonder whether it was in fact his idol that had fallen or himself.

Even if that admittedly ideal outcome didn’t materialize, this was the part of his life she had least information about, for there were few living sources but himself.

Now the passion had faded and he was looking at her assessingly.

He’s got something else for me, she thought. She knew how habit-forming this business of writing about your past could be. In many clients, it went beyond habit into compulsion. So of course since their last meeting he’d carried on writing.

But as what he wrote came closer to the most intimate details of his being, he naturally became less and less sure of sharing it with her.

So, show no eagerness. Do not press.

She said, ‘Wolf, time’s nearly up. I was wondering, is there anything I can get for you? Books, journals, that sort of thing? I should have asked before. Or something more personal. Something in the food line? Or proper linen handkerchiefs, silk socks, perhaps?’

He shook his head as if impatient at her change of subject, or perhaps at the silly notion that there could be something he might enjoy receiving, and said, ‘We were talking about Imo. I got to thinking about her after I wrote that last piece.’

She said, ‘Yes?’

He said, ‘That stuff about feeling hate, I mean it. Or part of me means it. But there’s also a part of me that hates me for feeling it. Does that make sense?’

She nodded and said gravely, ‘What wouldn’t make sense is for you not to feel it.’

That was the right answer. He pulled another exercise book out of his blouson.

‘You might like to see this,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ she said, taking the book. She opened it and glanced at the first page.

And she knew at once she’d got what she wanted.

Wolf

i

I was a wild boy, in just about every sense.

My mam, God bless her, died when I was only six. Brain fever, they called it locally. Probably some form of meningitis, spotted too late.

We had my dad’s Aunt Carrie living with us. Or rather we were living with her in her farmhouse, Birkstane. Up there in Cumbria they still expect the young to take care of the old. Not that Carrie can have been all that old when we moved in with her. Birkstane was all that remained, plus a couple of small fields, of her husband’s farm. Widowed in her mid forties, already in her early fifties she was getting a bit forgetful. Also she had arthritis which gave her mobility problems. Normally up there supportive neighbours would have kept her going quite happily till her dotage, but she was a bit isolated, several miles from Mireton, the nearest village, right on the edge of the Ulphingstone estate.

Dad was her only living relative so when word reached him that there was a social worker snooping around, he knew something had to be done. I was still in nappies at the time, so I can only speculate, but I suspect it suited him to move into Birkstane. As head forester to Sir Leon, Dad had a tied cottage on the estate but as I often heard him say later, only a fool lives in a house another fool can throw him out of any time he likes. Not that he thought Sir Leon was a fool. In fact they got on pretty well, and far from dividing them, my liaison with Leon’s daughter only brought them closer together.

They both thought it was a lousy idea.

But that was a long way in the future.

Everything seems to have worked fine to start with. Birkstane was almost as handy for Dad’s work as the tied cottage had been. Mam got to work on the old farmhouse and dragged it back from the edge of dereliction, while Carrie, in familiar surroundings with someone constantly present to keep an eye on her, got a new lease of life.

All this I picked up later. Like I say, I was so young that my memory of those early years in Birkstane is generally non-specific, but I know how blissfully happy I must have been, for I recall all too clearly how I felt when they told me Mam was dead. No, not when they told me; I mean when it finally got through to me that being dead meant gone for good, meant I would never ever see her again.

I was in my second year at school. It had taken a whole year for me to come to terms with the daily separation from Mam; this new and permanent separation was a loss beyond all reach of consolation. I was far too young and far too immersed in my own pain to observe what this blow did to my father, but as I have no recollection of him finding the strength to try and comfort me, I’d guess he too was rendered completely helpless by the loss. I suppose if I’d drawn attention to myself, someone might have tried to do something about me, but I think I must have moved in a bubble of grief through which everyone could see and hear me behaving apparently normally – in fact I suspect that many people observed what a blessing it was that I was clearly too young to take it all in and the best thing was for everyone to treat me as if nothing important had happened.

What they didn’t realize was that within that bubble I too was as good as dead, and as I slowly came back to life, I think I unconsciously resolved that never again would I be in a position where the loss of any single individual could cause me such pain.

Because there was still a woman in the house, no thought was given to the need to make any special arrangements for me. And because of Carrie’s apparent return to her old self during the five years of having us to live with her, nobody doubted that she was a fit guardian and housekeeper.

The reality was very different. Her mobility problems made it hard for her to keep up with a wild young boy, and without my mam’s corrective presence, the old memory lapses (the result, it was later diagnosed, of early-onset Alzheimer’s) now became much more significant. As for Fred, my dad, he went out to work and rarely came home till it was time for his tea. This is the generic term we gave to the early evening meal. As Carrie got more forgetful, the combinations of food offered to us grew increasingly eccentric, but neither of us took much notice – me because I was too young to make comparisons, Dad because he prefaced the meal with a couple of bottles of strong ale and washed it down with another two before driving down to the Black Dog in Mireton. He successfully avoided the attention of the local constabulary by driving his old Defender along the forest tracks, which he knew like the back of his hand, and leaving it on the edge of the estate and walking the last quarter mile to the Dog.

Sorry, I’ve gone on a lot more than I intended about all this early trauma stuff and I know all you really wanted was an account of how me and Imogen got together. But I started off trying to explain the kind of youngster I was, and to understand that, you need to know the rest.

To cut a long story short, because of my instinctive reluctance to get close to anybody and because of the almost total lack of any meaningful supervision at home, I ran wild. Literally. Every free moment I had I spent roaming the countryside. Some streak of natural cunning made me realize the dangers of too much truancy, and I trod a line between being an internal nuisance and an external problem. But I usually turned up late and when I could I bunked off early. As I said, Aunt Carrie was ill-equipped physically or mentally to cope with me. Indeed, as I grew older and wiser, if that’s the right word, a combination of self-interest and I hope fondness for the old lady made me cover up for her as best I could.

Of course my behaviour did not go unremarked, but unlike in the towns where suspicion of child neglect prompts people either to look the other way or at best to ring Social Services anonymously, in the countryside they deal with such problems in-house, so to speak. Looking back, I see that I was probably watched over much more carefully than I understood then. The postman was the eyes and ears of the district, the vicar dropped by a couple of times a week, and there was a steady stream of local ladies who found a reason to call on Carrie, and help with a bit of tidying up. Also for some reason I never really understood, everyone, teachers and locals alike, seemed ready to show a remarkable degree of tolerance towards my aberrant behaviour.

Maybe I’d have turned out better if someone had been ready to skelp my ear a bit more frequently!

Sir Leon was another one who missed the chance to sort me out. I remember when I was eight or nine I got caught by his gamekeeper. I was never a serious poacher, though if the odd trout or rabbit came my way, I regarded it as the peasant’s tithe. The day I got caught peering into Sir Leon’s newly stocked tarn, it was the fact that I had no criminal intent that made me vulnerable. I was stretched out on the bank, raptly viewing the tiny fry at their play, when a heavy hand landed on my shoulder and I was hauled upright by Sir Leon’s head keeper.

When he realized who he’d got, he threw me into his pick-up and drove me through the forest to where my father was supervising a gang of loggers. Sir Leon was there too, and after the situation had been explained, he stared down at me and said, ‘This your brat then, Fred? What’s your name, boy?’

‘Wilf,’ I blurted.

‘Wilf?’

Then he squatted down beside me, ran his fingers through my hair, opened my mouth and peered in like he was checking out a horse, then winked at me and said, ‘Sure you don’t mean Wolf? Looks to me like you’ve been suckled by wolves. That might explain things! Suckled by wolves, and here’s me thinking they were all dead.’

He stood up, laughing at his own joke, and everyone else laughed, except me and Dad.

Thereafter every time Sir Leon saw me he called me Wolf and gradually the name stuck. I rather like the notion of being suckled by wolves, maybe because Sir Leon with his long nose and great mane of grey-brown hair looked like he might have a bit of wolf in him too. His name, Ulphingstone, certainly did.

Dad, however, hadn’t cared to be shown up in front of his workers and his boss. That night he stayed home and paid me more attention than I think he had since Mam died, and he didn’t much like what he saw. When I responded surlily to his remonstrations, he skelped me round the left ear, and when I responded angrily to that, he skelped me round the right.

After that I was obliged to mend my ways for a while, but as well as developing a taste for the wild life, I was already well grounded in the art of deception, and I continued on my independent way pretty much as before, only taking a little more care.

I suppose I was a bit of a loner, but that was through choice. At junior school I never had any problem getting on with the other boys; in fact most of them seemed keen to be friends with me, but I always felt myself apart from them. Maybe it was because I didn’t give a toss about who was going to win the Premier League, maybe it was something deeper than that. A lot of the girls were keen to be friendly too, but I reckoned they were a waste of space. At least with the boys you could run around and jump on top of each other and have a bit of a wrestle. It was a long time before I realized you could do that with girls too.

Then came secondary school. There was the usual bullying, but I’ve always had a short fuse. Neither size nor number made any difference – if you messed with me, I lived up to my name and reacted like a wild beast, wading in with fists, feet, teeth, and head till someone lay bleeding on the schoolyard floor. Eventually the physical bullying stopped, but there were still scores to settle. One day, aged about twelve, I found someone had broken into my locker and sprayed car paint all over the stuff I kept there. I had a good idea who it was. Next morning I smuggled in the cut-down lumber axe my dad was teaching me to use and I demolished my chief suspect’s locker and everything in it. All the kids thought I’d be expelled or at least excluded for that, but the Head just settled for giving me a long lecture and getting Dad to pay for the damage.

I didn’t get a lecture from Fred, but an ear-ringing slap which he made clear wasn’t for damaging the other boy’s gear but for ruining a perfectly good axe!

After that, helped by the fact that I got bigger and stronger every month, I was left strictly alone by the would-be bullies. I wasn’t thick, I did enough work to keep my head above water, and for some reason the teachers cut me a lot of slack. I never sucked up to any of them but most of them seemed to like me and I suspect I got away with stuff another kid might have been pulled up for. I never made any particular friends because the kind of thing I liked to do away from school, I liked to do alone. But I was always one of the first to get picked when my class was split up for schoolyard games.