Silver Birches Read online

  “Of course, very understandably, the poor man laughed with the shock, didn’t he, as though I’d cracked some hilarious joke. And then his laugh suddenly froze solid on his face and in the space all around his head, like they say hot water freezes before it hits the ground if you throw it up in the air in places like Siberia. He was so embarrassed. Felt sorry for him. My fault, not his. Funny, eh? Black, but funny.”

  “And — now she’s gone.”

  I resisted a sudden impulse to stop and kneel so that I could lay one hand flat on the earth, something I had found myself doing once or twice recently when I was alone. There was a sense of being safe and anchored when the entire flat of my hand was in such closely aligned contact with the earth, this colossal globe spinning endlessly beneath my unsteady feet in dumb submission to forces beyond imagination. It felt saner to go with it, as opposed to tottering around on top of it. My fear that onlookers would not share this view did, I suppose, show that I was still in the land of the living or, at least, in the land of those wishing to remain alive and at large.

  “Yes, now she’s gone. Jessica’s dead. Apart from the business with Chris that’s probably the first time I’ve said it so bluntly. She’s gone. I know this sounds silly, but when you lose someone you get this nagging, misty idea that if you were to just look hard enough in the right sort of places it must be possible to find them. That’s how I felt for a while, but in the end I was forced to face the fact that it wouldn’t make any difference how hard I searched for her. Even if I devoted the rest of my life to scouring every last tiny corner of every single country in the world I would never find her because she’s dead. There is no Jessica to be found any more. I’m not going to see her again because she doesn’t exist anywhere.”

  “Is it too dreadfully crass to make the point that you will be seeing her again in... you know... in heaven?”

  I might easily have said the same thing if I had been in Jenny’s place, and no doubt I would have regretted it as much as she probably did immediately afterward. Her words sent me leaping over some cliff-edge of anger that I’d been flirting foolishly with ever since my wife’s death. I pressed a hand against my forehead and clenched my teeth as I spoke.

  “I don’t want to see her in heaven. I want to see her now! I don’t want her to become something that isn’t properly human. Something bright and unphysical and non-confrontational and angelic. I don’t want to be met by her in thirty or forty years at the gates of heaven smiling ethereally at me and telling me to come farther in and farther up or anything like that. I’ve never hated all things mystical as much as I hate them now. I want walks in the wood and having to wash your wellies afterward. I want trips to the supermarket and arguments over what we’re going to do on weekends and underwear hanging in the bathroom and getting into bed together and one of us having to get up again because we’ve forgotten to lock the back door, and hands and touch and food and clothes and Christmas and talking about people and — and praying together about the future.”

  A pair of lying magpies flew overhead, pirates looking for plunder on a freezing, foodless day. I lowered my hand and my head, sighing heavily.

  “The dead have to give up their membership cards, don’t they, Jenny? They can never belong again. Willing or unwilling, they’ve gone pioneering off to the next stage, and they’re changed by that act of exploration into beings who don’t have any place with us and our weather and our pubs and our feeble attempts to say what we feel. How can they do that to us? How can they?” I smiled bleakly as Jenny spontaneously took my arm and laid her face comfortingly against the sleeve of my coat. “Yes, of course you’re right. Jessica has gone to be with Jesus, and thank God for that. Just right now, though, I can’t rid myself of the notion that they’ve both done a lot better out of the deal than me. Don’t worry.” I placed an arm around her shoulders and patted her reassuringly. “It’ll all get sorted out, but there’s no point kidding myself. I’ve got a long way to go. By the way, speaking of deals, do either of us owe the other any change?”

  Jenny pondered this.

  “Are you going to say anything to the others? Only, that was supposed to be the point of the weekend, in a way, wasn’t it?”

  “You think I should?”

  “Something, yes.”

  “And you’ll tell them you were madly in love with me over the washing-up, will you?”

  “Of course. It’ll make them laugh and it might make them feel sorry for me.”

  “All right then. I will — tonight.”

  Mention of the rest of the group brought an abrupt end to our short-lived physical closeness. In fact, as we continued on our way, both of us stayed as near to our own side of the track as was possible without letting our feet stray into the straggly, flint-strewn field.

  It had been a hard, risky exchange between Jenny and me, but, as my father would undoubtedly have pointed out if I had been a small boy and he had been walking beside me today, despite appearances, the pathway doesn’t really get narrower and narrower the farther you go. On reaching the other end of the field, he would have made me stop and turn to look back the way we’d come. I would have been surprised and fascinated to discover that, even after walking the entire length of the path, we still seemed to be standing on the widest part of all.

  Angela was right about the Old Ox, of course. It was perfect. Threading our way in single file down a narrow, tree-lined chalky track that dropped steeply from the main hilltop path, Jenny and I came across the pub quite abruptly. Arriving at any public house for lunch at the end of a lengthy walk on a cold and brittle sunny day is a meeting with an angel in the wilderness, but in terms of location and physical charm alone, this was something special. A pleasingly irregular nest of ancient brick buildings, the Old Ox was set at the base of an angle formed by two planes of the same hill. The original house must have been well over three hundred years old. From our first sighting the place crackled with the warmth that good pubs send out like welcoming rays to weary travelers.

  Maybe, I mused irreverently, as I ducked my head to follow Jenny through the low front entrance, the whole heaven operation should be shifted down here. Paradise could consist of an endless succession of relieved, hand-rubbing arrivals at warm pubs on ice-cold days. It could certainly be worse. Temporarily it was hard to imagine anything better, but only, I stipulated sternly to God, if Jessica was allowed to be my eternal walking companion.

  Inside, a huge fire blazed in the hearth. The immediate impression was of clean, faded quality. Expensive, threadbare carpets covered the floor. Woodwork and brass gleamed. There was a loud buzz of animated chatter but no shouting, the sort of atmosphere that my father once called “carpeted high spirits.” The deeply satisfying thunk of brimming pint beer-mugs being deposited on the polished wooden bar was percussion to my ears, and the staff who were pulling and serving the drinks actually looked interested. On a board above the bar a long list of available meals was listed in yellow chalk. The choice looked excellent. Not a fruit machine in sight.

  Yes, I thought, not for the first time, if options are offered, I will definitely put in an application for the new earth rather than the new heaven.

  Frantic hand-waving from the other side of the crowded bar alerted us to the fact that the other four members of our party were already present. Having arrived in Angela’s roomy vehicle, presumably only minutes before us if they had stuck to schedule, they seemed to have been lucky or forceful enough to bag a circular table next to the window in the bar itself rather than in a modern restaurant extension that had been built out into the garden at one side. We made our way over to where they sat in a pool of sunshine. After coats had been disposed of, greetings exchanged, and two more chairs annexed from elsewhere and squashed in to enlarge our circle, I commented to Angela on how fortunate we had been to get such a well-placed table in what was clearly a very popular venue.

  She laughed. “Fortunate? Fortunate, my foot! I booked weeks ago. Good heavens, those are the easy things
, David.”

  “And the hard things?”

  She thought for a few seconds, staring into the distance.

  “Dealing with rats,” she said unemotionally, “that can be tricky.”

  I was quite pleased a few minutes later when Mike and I were delegated to take the food orders up to the bar and sort out drinks at the same time. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to make him feel better, and I wanted to feel better about myself. A wise man had once told me that wrong motivation is one of the devil’s favorite red herrings. Zacchaeus only had to come down and get the tea on. Obedience was what counted, this man had said.

  I had been uneasy about my attitude toward both Mike and Peter ever since the weekend had started. I was all too aware that I had indulgently allowed my ever-present misery to sour the way in which I viewed them. A substantial part of me had been ready, uncomfortably like Andrew in his brief, dramatic dealings with Mike, to summarily discount them as meaningless, hollow people, so trapped by the prison of their limited selves that they were hardly worth bothering with. Who on earth did I think I was? And whatever happened to the mind of Christ, a topic on which I had soulfully addressed large groups of people on far too many occasions?

  Perhaps all that clear, clean air on top of the hill had brought me to the beginning of a dim understanding that these attitudes were actually indicating an unwelcome return to the way my mind and emotions had worked when I was a much younger man. Jessica had helped me in those days. I had been her ongoing project. She battled and cajoled me into facing the fact that I had developed something approaching a neurotically negative response to what I perceived as self-deception in others. Being anywhere near people who, in my view, were kidding themselves drove me mad. It provoked feelings of anger, affront, and scorn. In the end, I was likely to dismiss them from the highly privileged court of my esteem and tolerance.

  It hadn’t taken any very profound working out to realize that this deeply destructive tendency was directly related to feelings about my tormented and tormenting mother, who had come close to destroying family life with her insane possessiveness and jealousy toward my father. No wonder he had gone out of his way to teach me about perspective. He must already have been an expert on the subject by the time I was born.

  Only those who have personally experienced such horrors can understand the explosive suddenness with which a jealous fit can rip apart a happy hour or a whole day or a week or a month. As a young child it was commonplace for me to witness wild, vicious, terrified invention and accusation from one of my parents, and a response of non-combative, grieving patience from the other. Decades later there were still times when my childhood fear and fury at the foolishness of the adults that I lived with would grip my throat with suffocating intensity. As a human being my mother suffered the fate of becoming a strangely pointless, unreal figure in my memory, amounting to nothing more than the miserably insubstantial sum of her own foolish delusions. If only I hadn’t stuck my big foot into the trap of feeling sorry for her as well. Anger and sadness. Siamese twins who can’t stand each other. I had asked God many times to take it all away, but he hadn’t. Instead he gave me Jessica, and he taught me how to steer round things with sharp edges that would hurt if I crashed into them.

  I certainly wasn’t about to explain all that to Mike.

  “Recovered from last night okay?” I asked as we stood next to each other in adjacent food and drinks queues.

  Mike shrugged, screwing his mouth up and bobbing his head from side to side as if to say that, weighing it all up, the whole matter was of little consequence, but his eyes still bore traces of the inward bruising that Andrew’s words had inflicted on him. Today he was wearing heavy brown cord trousers and one of those faded black leather jackets that, for some reason, always reminded me of my teaching days. Into my mind popped one of Jessica’s interestingly wild generalizations. “Men who wear leather jackets are telling the world that they have no skin.” Not a very good idea to pass that one on, I told myself, especially not to someone who had only just lost most of whatever skin he started out with.

  “I comfort myself,” said Mike, with the air of one who has been up all night composing epigrams, “that when your Jesus delivered his famous Sermon on the Mount, he never said ‘Blessed are the horses’ behinds.’ ”

  Viewed as the product of a night’s work this was a little disappointing on the epigram front, but Mike’s comment, crass and crude as it was, struck me as being very interesting. At some later date I would let my mind explore the idea and see where it took me.

  “It was an extraordinarily nasty thing to do, Mike. But, look, I just want to tell you that I thought the way you controlled yourself was really impressive. You could have gone mad or — or launched yourself at him or something, but you didn’t. You must have been devastated, but you handled it so well. Goodness knows what I’d have done.”

  He nodded and looked pleased. But why does a revival of good humor so often lead to a blast of unpleasantness from people like Mike?

  “Well, of course, at the end of the day, your problem, David, my old mate, is that you can’t afford to put a foot wrong, can you? What I mean is, purely on a commercial basis, public sin would be a very bad career move for you, wouldn’t it? I guess the invitations would dry up pretty sharpish if you were in the papers for tearing the innards out of someone in public or getting pissed and having to be peeled off the pavement by coppers in Leicester Square. Am I right?”

  He leaned across to give me a playful punch on the shoulder. I took a deep breath and managed to make myself smile and nod in response. After all, no one had ever claimed that doing the more useful things would be easy. I had been living with worse things than this.

  “I don’t suppose you saw Andrew again before he left?” I asked, hoping to change the subject. “He’d gone by the time I got up.”

  “As a matter of fact I did.” Mike rubbed the very top of his head with the knuckles of one hand. “Didn’t sleep all that well last night, so I came trekking down at some unearthly hour to make a brew, and there he was, dressed and packed and whatnot, all ready to clear off now he’d done the dirty deed. I thought, well, no point leaving things all up in the air. I know he said that stuff about how I used to sulk, but that’s one thing I don’t do any more. I don’t — honest Injun. And if you say I do I won’t speak to you for a week. Joke! So, anyway, I stuck my hand out like a good sport and said some stuff along the lines of, ‘No hard feelings, mate. Good luck with whatever you do,’ that sort of thing. And do you know what he said to me?”

  I was intrigued. “What did he say?”

  “He said — I think these were his exact words — he said, in a voice that sounded like it was being squeezed through a chicken’s backside, ‘Sentimentality is the bank holiday of cynicism.’ And then he picked up his bag and cleared off out the door without shaking my hand.”

  “ ‘Sentimentality is the bank holiday of cynicism’?”

  “That’s the feller.”

  “And how did that make you feel?”

  “We-e-ell,” Mike shifted his weight from one foot to the other and frowned, “I’m not all that sure. To be honest, on the spur of the moment, what with being a bit worn out and everything, I couldn’t work out if it was an insult or a compliment. Know what I mean? So I was left standing there, not sure if I ought to run after him, wring his hand, and thank him, or catch hold of the blighter and smack him one. I mean, I’ve thought about what he said but I can’t seem to make it mean anything. What d’you think?”

  “Er, I don’t think it’s a compliment.”

  “No, I had a feeling it probably wasn’t.” He shrugged. “Oh, well, never mind.”

  “I seem to remember it’s something Oscar Wilde wrote in prison. It’s from that long letter he wrote to his lover, Alfred Douglas, the one he called Bosie.”

  Mike whistled in surprise. “Well, swipe me!” he said, “I’d never have figured that Andrew for a woofter.”

  My head was beg
inning to spin. Thankfully I was nearly at the front of my queue.

  “I don’t think he is, Mike. By the way, why did you call Jesus ‘my Jesus’ just now?”

  “Why did I — ? Did I?”

  “Yes. You said ‘when your Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount,’ didn’t you?”

  “So?”

  “I just wondered if that meant you don’t think of yourself as a Christian any more. From what you were saying last night I’d have said it’s still very important to you. You were—well, you were deeply passionate about wanting God to be real, about wanting him to be a real father. You told us you wanted all those things we used to say in the past to come true. Didn’t you?”

  Foolish of me really. Near the front of a queue in a crowded pub was not the ideal place to embark on such discussions. Looking rather embarrassed, Mike pulled a packet from the inside pocket of his jacket. Selecting a cigarette, he tapped it on the back of his hand before lighting it with a bright blue disposable lighter fished out of the opposite pocket. Throwing his head back, he blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling.

  “That Andrew bloke was probably not far off the mark last night, Dave,” he said unexpectedly and dismissively, “I was half-cut and just looking for a spot of attention. No real harm in that, is there?”

  “Well, no, but — ”

  “Your turn’s coming up, look. I’ll get the drinks. See you back at the table. Don’t forget my pepper sauce. On the side, not on the steak. Now that is important.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Saturday Afternoon

  Later that day I found myself involved in an activity as bizarre and unusual as anything I had ever done. And it nearly resulted in my death.

  Never a particularly adventurous sort of person, I was generally incapable of resisting what one might call “leads.” Jessica rudely maintained that it was just a case of me not being able to keep my nose out of other people’s business, but it was more than that really. In my experience little things could easily lead to great things, and that was precisely what happened on Saturday afternoon.