Edge of the Orison Read online

  Where did the Hadman house get its name? From the bricks, obviously, rosy and warm. I think we can discount William Morris and his National Trust stopover in Bexleyheath, too suburban. Too arty-crafty socialist. But I can't help thinking of A. A. Milne's one and only detective novel, published in 1922, The Red House Mystery. Julian Symons placed this bonbon in the tradition of Ronald Knox, an amusing yarn in which ‘the amateur investigator gets everything wrong’. The dead stage their own disappearances. Raymond Chandler had no truck with Milne's gentility, the flaws in his plotting. The detective's sidekick from The Red House Mystery is given clear warning of his place in the scheme of things, the required level of masochism. He knows what he's signing on for: a narrative with good manners – followed by the temporary immortality of instant reprints and cheap paperbacks with gaudy covers.

  The problem for our pedestrian trio (one of the problems) is that there are no sidekicks: or, we're all sidekicks but we won't admit it. Petit, drifting off the pace, hoovering up representations of the empty road, a second Nene, is jogging over the pedestrian bridge as I find (and photograph) a pair of oversized, handpainted roosters with fire-engine cockscombs: symbols of the new Glinton. Renchi's photographs are more like film, in terms of their narrative, than Petit's consoling video-meditations on distance: clouds, soft-focus traffic (moving through, moving on). Flip the pages of Renchi's album and the story of the walk flickers into life: my rear-view baldness, peeling ear-rims (disconcertingly like my father, returned and on the lurch). You can see the white shirt, the scarlet rucksack, the camera in my hand; Anna approaching. Broad grin. Grey top. White sunhat. She might be a villager, trowel at the ready, weeding the grave. Four o'clock. At Glinton. Just as I said.

  AV TITMAN, FAMILY BUTCHER.

  Anna is alongside the butcher's shop, this butcher of families, when we coincide, manoeuvre, embrace. The others, following discreetly behind, embrace her too. Grateful to come out of my fiction, always unpredictable, and back into something real and earthed and ticking in sunlight: the car.

  From the boot, I fetch out sandals, a fresh shirt. And then we return to St Benedict's (church locked, stone effigies in the porch, man and woman, fabulously weathered), and to the Hadman family grave. This is prominently positioned, at the south-east corner, close to the gravel path. The lettering is fresh and black (restored in 1995, when Anna's mother died). Clare's inscription might have faded – NOT MAD – while the gravestones of his wife and children, in Northborough, need to be traced by finger like Braille, but this part of the Hadman story is fresher than newsprint.

  TO THE MEMORY OF WILLIAM HADMAN CHURCHWARDEN OF GLINTON CHURCH 1921–1943 WHO DIED JULY 28th 1943 AGED 70 YEARS ALSO OF FLORENCE HIS BELOVED WIFE WHO DIED FEB. 4TH 1944 AGED 71 YEARS. “HOME ART GONE AND TA EN THY WAGES”

  Anna's grandfather. A farmer. Occupier of the Red House. Founder of the dynasty. That's as far back as we can go. Old William died a month after Anna was born. To be tagged with a quotation from Shakespeare. Chosen, so we assume, by Geoffrey Hadman, a once-a-year C of E man, dubious of the small print: so get what you can out of this life, every last drop, then invoice for everlasting bliss. A proposition vigorously contradicted by this landscape. Wages in hand, dues paid. No white mansions (like the Brighton seafront), no reserved clouds. Which play?

  The golden lads and girls who come to dust. Anna gets it: Cymbeline. An unexpected retrieval. On her journeys to school, an hour's ride across town, Anna was instructed by her father to crunch her way through Shakespeare – which, obediently, even though it gave her a pounding headache and left her queasy, she did: a brown book with minuscule print. This ten-year-old girl, pale, rather grave, travelling across Blackpool, from Poulton-le-Fylde to Lytham St Anne's. (When I went to Blackpool, once, with my parents, it was an outing: the Pleasure Beach, sideshows, candy floss, waxworks of Stanley Matthews and Stan Mortensen with their cup-winners' medals.)

  Fear no more the heat o'th' sun,

  Nor the furious winter's rages;

  Thou thy worldly task hast done,

  Home art gone and ta'en thy wages:

  Golden lads and girls all must,

  As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

  Legend has it that when Tennyson died, a copy of Cymbeline dropped from his lifeless hand. There was a spine-tingling moment at the memorial service of a later laureate, Ted Hughes, on 13 May 1999, in Westminster Abbey. A pre-recorded message. ‘Ted's rich, quiet voice,’ as Elaine Feinstein reports, spoke the first lines of the ‘Song’ from Cymbeline. A passage which includes the words on William Hadman's grave, sentiments respected by men who work the land.

  The plot of Cymbeline is impossible to summarise: multiple identities, runaway daughters, ‘clownish’ sons, Cambrian caves, the dead returning to life. The Oxford Companion to English Literature has a brave stab at it:

  Under the name Fidele Imogen becomes a page to Bellarius and the two lost sons of Cymbeline, Guiderius and Aviragus, living in a cave in Wales. Fidele sickens and is found as dead by the brothers, who speak the dirge ‘Fear no more the heat o'th' sun’. Left alone she revives, only to discover at her side the headless corpse of Cloten which she believes, because of his borrowed garments, to be that of her husband Posthumus. A Roman army invades…

  It probably plays better than it reads. Brothers lamenting an apparently dead girl, Welsh weather: waiting on an invading army. Some bright spark will set a revival in Afghanistan (clever use of monitor screens).

  Florence Hadman (née Rose) was too ill to attend the funeral. She watched the procession from the bowed window of the Red House, but she never recovered her strength and died within seven months of her husband. There were substantial obituaries for William in several of the local papers, with smaller notices for Florence, commending her for rearing turkeys and taking prizes for her butter at the Peterborough Summer Show.

  Anna spent an hour in Glinton before we arrived, enough time to weed the family plot, to plant salvias in the gravel (they failed). There was an additional plaque for her father and mother, though their ashes had been scattered in the north, Thornton (she thought) and Ullswater. With a second plaque for her father's sister, Mary, whose urn – when the stone, with some difficulty, had been taken up – was placed at the foot of the grave. This day, 20 July, was her father's birthday.

  Next, Anna tried the pub – in case we had sneaked in while she was labouring. Renchi's wife, Vanessa, was also expected: she had a Glinton aunt. All the bloodlines of our story were converging on this village. The Blue Bell, astonishingly, was open. It was almost four o'clock. Anna walked towards the Helpston road, past the Titmans' butcher shop. (The graveyard was packed with legible Titmans.) Figures were advancing, from the Helpston haze, at a gallop; she recognised them. One in particular.

  After a subdued session, sitting outside at green tables, slow pints and no Vanessa, we climbed into the car, leaving Renchi in the pub. Chris, returned to Stilton, left immediately for London. Vanessa, stuck on the road, was delayed – but arrived, with Renchi, in time for another courtyard meal (without Morris men) at the Bell.

  At breakfast, next morning, I asked Anna about the haunted room. She said it was nothing like the one in Whitby. That attic, though busy, shapes pressing against her bare legs, was benevolent, ‘filled with children’. As were her dreams: a nursery of spirits, active and warm-breathed. Curious little things. Stilton was very different, the proportions, the weight of the furniture. Nothing floated, it dragged. A sufficiency of brandy took care of sleep, pushed the dreams too deep for retrieval. But they were still there, unappeased. Living faces in an album of cancelled topography. Backgrounds fade, gardens disappear, the eyes of those who have once been photographed continue to search out an audience. The ceiling of the disturbed bedroom was so low, she felt, that the plaster took an imprint of your sleeping face.

  Flying

  Wrapped like something precious, a bundle that might shatter, the feverish child was taken from her bed and driven to the airfield. Not
quite seven years old, she thinks. All the details are still there, vividly so. The emphasis in her voice when I question her. ‘The back seat was round, like a bucket.’ Arms thrown wide – ‘so’ – as she enfolds an imagined space. No smell of fuel in the cockpit. The leathery closeness of a borrowed coat. The plane lurches into the air, wind pushing against the perspex bubble.

  Anna frowns, the sequence of events is vague. It was so long ago. She is careful not to betray her own memories or the memories of those who were with her.

  Three children, Anna the eldest. Her brothers, William and Robert. They were born, one after the other, at yearly intervals. And they were all sick: whooping cough. Has it gone out of fashion? Not much in evidence when our own children were young, but making a comeback, I'm sure. The name fits the period: postwar, National Health Service ready with corked medicine bottles of sweet orange juice, a sticky spoon of Radio Malt, liberty bodices, kaolin poultices for mumps (cooked and hot). Nasty business, whooping cough, acutely contagious. Bouts of paroxysmal coughing followed by the involuntary drag and scrape of breath (the whoop): a feeling of helplessness on the part of parents, listening from another room, or fussing at the bedside.

  Mr Geoffrey Hadman, industrial chemist, lateral-thinking businessman, occasional artist, had a theory: on everything. Assembly-line chickens in a shed at the bottom of the garden. Indoor mushroom plantations. Asbestos insulation. A central heating system that, like the footballer Martin Peters, was years ahead of its time. Outboard motors were tested (and failed) on the deeps of Ullswater. Money-making schemes of great ingenuity (and lethal consequence) imported Fenland self-sufficiency into the refined suburbs of Blackpool. A gardener from the works took care of the lawn and tennis court. Works' plumbers installed car radiators throughout the house. Copper pipes, heated from a coal-fired stove, passed through the children's bedrooms.

  Anna woke to a ‘sweet smell’ and had the wit to rouse her father. Who sprung from his bed. ‘Robert was nearly dead.’ Fumes. Father, faced blackened, was not discouraged: teething faults, nothing wrong with the theory. Pipes were re-routed to an exterior wall. ‘The house was still freezing.’

  Two of the coughing children, William beside his father, Anna in the green leather seat at the rear, were placed in the Auster. Squire's Gate Aerodrome, Blackpool. Or they might have been taken up one at a time. Mother waiting in the clubhouse. The idea was: altitude. Fly as high over the sea as the small plane would go. Relieve pressure on the lungs. Relieve? Some version of the bends, knowingly induced? A struggle for breath to punish infection? There is a primitive magic to it, energetically homoeopathic. Let the bacteria in the air passages fight for life. The shock, looking down on white-capped waves, would kill or cure.

  Austers were most frequently used in aerial surveys, for reconnaissance; skimming telegraph wires, hedge-hopping. I've seen photographs in reference books. I've seen Austers, blue-painted, dressing Miss Marple costume dramas, swooping over Gothic turrets; ex-Battle of Britain chap, goggled, flinging open the door, hopping out in time for the final act. (The slightly blunted young blade fulfilling this function in the TV adaptation of 4.50 from Paddington was David Beames. An actor who played the lead in Chris Petit's first feature, Radio On, and never quite recovered.) I've seen larger planes, assembled from kit, hanging in juvenile bedrooms.

  The adventures of childhood seem reasonable at the time. Somebody is in charge, this is how they behave; we lived to tell the tale. An Auster, co-owned in the era of photo albums featuring motorbikes (racing circuits, golf courses, ski slopes, punts, picnics), is itself a statement. Another theory: of private enterprise, freedom to travel, faith in the machine (cavalier disregard for diminishing fossil fuel reserves). Pipes, cigarettes, cigars. Hats, furs, car coats. German cameras to record (and retain) English scenes. Memory is competitive, siblings play back the same events in different ways. Robert Hadman calls up flights to northern France, casino towns, jollies. Anna associates the Auster with holidays in Cap d'Antibes: 1947 and the next five summers, two months at a time, rented villa in a discontinued resort (the ghosts of Scott and Zelda had decamped). Disputes with Madame the landlord. Swimming trials for ice-cream rewards. Morning lessons and the confinement of afternoon rests. Bill Hadman remembers the short, homemade boleros the children wore and the blocks of ice he had to carry from a flatbed truck into the cool room. There were no fridges. Now Anna understands the peculiar odour in the next property, the two Dutch women and their little weakness, opium. The family (absent father) might be accompanied by a BBC man, rather fey, who penned silly-season detective novels. In scrub woods, on a slope behind the villa, the

  children discovered an unexploded shell (as tall as they were) and rolled it down the ramp towards their horrified parents. It was placed in an earthenware pot to await the police.

  The highlight was always the gathering on the terrace – mother and children having driven down, the long haul, camping on farms – searching the sky for a first sight of the circling plane, the Auster. You heard the characteristic sound, this lawnmower of the clouds. A tip of the wing. A wiggle of the pipe clenched between the pilot's teeth. Mrs Hadman was off to collect her husband from Nice airport, leaving the kids with a helper, a woman friend. And the detective-story writer who had excellent French.

  Cloudless skies, blue water. Bougainvillea, pine resin. It doesn't fade: that colour. Warmth in the blood after seven years of Lancashire monochrome, shivering on windblown beaches, being asked to carry out impossible exercises from their father's cramped script. Schooled at home on scraps of unrelated information: foreign capitals, distance to Jupiter, king lists, vocabulary to be learnt by rote. The horror of struggling with Archimedes' principle. Powers often. Periodic tables learnt by mnemonics. ‘Little bees beat countless numbers of flies.’ Lithium, beryllium, boron… ‘Nations migrate always, sick people seek climbs.’ (You needed lithium to survive the experience.) Anna can never forget the terrifying squeak of chalk on the blackboard in the schoolroom. The challenge that would be sprung, months later, when the list was entirely forgotten. ‘Sick bees migrate always.’ Fear was the contract, the price of this privilege, French beach, rundown villa, coastal strip with its fascinating detritus of war.

  On the day of their departure, bags packed, the children were marched to the beach to dive from a raft and collect weed from the seabed. Previous attempts had failed. Another spluttering return, empty-handed to the surface, and they'd be abandoned in France. Refusal was never an option. Pleasure was programmatic. A solitary dish of ice-cream you taste for the rest of your life. The triumphant child licks and luxuriates, the others are confined to quarters.

  But they look happy in the yellowing photographs, the sexagenarian Hadmans who were naked kids on the French Riviera (protected from the sun by a quick dab of Nivea on the shoulders). Photographs have wrinkled, taking the blight that should have distressed their overexposed subjects. Older prints trap the family dead in eternal wedding parties. They grin or frown from sidecars and wingless planes. Large adults clambering into the scaled-down transport of Blackpool's Pleasure Beach. Revellers with drunken hats on flights that never leave the ground.

  Black albums, interleaved with grey tissue, have a potent smell: sometimes camphor and closed bedrooms, sometimes a bonfire of autumn leaves. Dust of pressed flowers. Pages marked with faded ribbons. Sticky corners that have worked loose. Inscriptions in

  white ink on brown paper. Anna in Antibes. Sitting on the sand, clutching her knees. Salt-sticky hair curled to the scalp. She is glossy and dark; a grave child with a private agenda (the look of Evonne Goolagong). Whooping cough defeated. Unexploded shells planted in terracotta pots. Beakers of pink Grenadine waiting on the terrace.

  Around this time, before school or knowing children other than her immediate family, Anna flew with her father from Squire's Gate, across England, to the Hadman farm in Glinton: a summer field, a bumpy landing like one of those French Resistance films with Virginia McKenna. Wings on struts; single prop
loud enough to leave passengers, shaky from vibrations, deaf. ‘Everyone who talked to you was very far away.’ The soothing cup of tea on arrival rattles in your hand. Lips move but you can't hear what they say. Is this the same country? No passport control. No radio. Register your flight plan, follow major roads; when in doubt drop down to read the signs.

  A flight recovered from a child's dream. Memories retained by a woman revisiting a place that is no longer there. She is confused, not by the parts that have disappeared, but by the buildings that are almost as they were: Auntie Mary's Balcony House, Uncle Lawrie's Red House, the post office, the school. Anna wants this to be what she wants, a slow life under pressing skies, a village organised around church and the passage of the seasons. Paths walked with cousins and aunts. With dogs.

  Her father flew back. She stayed in Glinton. She wrote a letter to her brother William. ‘I am going to treasure island on Saterday, it is a play… You will be able to rite in ink one day… With very much love, Anna.’ Now she understands the distance between Blackpool and Glinton, she has witnessed it. The lurch, the vibration, the forward momentum of the Auster hauling itself over hedges and huts. She has never been on a commercial flight. Fields, she remembers, the pattern of them. But it's not the landscape, looking out on miniature farms and cars, it's reverie. Infiltrating that old dream of a life that is always there. Roads are white arms, rivers glitter. She is with her father, they can't speak. She's too deep in the seat, the leathery smell, to see out. It's not alarming. It takes a few days for the noise to fade.

  She finds herself in a mirror country where, for the first time, other girls have her colouring, shape of eyes, generous mouth; sweet natures that snap, on the instant, flare and forgive. Photographs. Anna and her cousin Judy as children, on the farm: they could be sisters. Kittens. A keeshond called Woolfy. A strange, floppy, hairless doll sagging from her grip: more like a thing used for practice by expectant mothers. A hooded and mittened child in the leafy lane outside the Red House. If Anna was lost and I had to search for a duplicate, I'd launch my quest in Peterborough. They are there still, in arcades, by the river, the ones with that Glinton look. Dark eyes that put the beam right through you. The Hadmans have stayed in one place for a long time.