The Heart of the Country Read online

  ‘What I wondered was,’ said Natalie, ‘if you would take the dog in payment of my account. He is valuable. He’s got a pedigree.’ It seemed, to Natalie, a fair exchange. Dog owners always overrate the value of their pet to others, and Natalie was no exception.

  Pauline waited for Gerard to speak, and Gerard for Pauline to speak, so Natalie spoke again, into the silence.

  ‘I can’t afford to feed him,’ said Natalie. ‘It’s silly to go on trying.’

  Gerard said, surprisingly, ‘Your children won’t like it. Children think, if you can give dogs away, you can give them away.’

  Pauline said, ‘How do you know a thing like that, Gerard? We’ve never had any children.’

  Gerard said, ‘But I was a child myself. You forget that.’

  ‘It’s years since we had a dog,’ said Pauline, who couldn’t remember her own childhood and so could scarcely be expected to remember his.

  ‘He’s a splendid animal,’ said Gerard.

  They were hooked. They were giving up the expected years of freedom: throwing away all they had gained by the non-having of children – look – suddenly – a pet! Madness!

  ‘He’ll eat up all the profit,’ said Pauline.

  ‘He eats anything,’ said Natalie.

  ‘Dogs shouldn’t eat just anything,’ said Gerard, severely. ‘They should eat a properly balanced diet.’

  ‘He could eat what we throw out,’ said Pauline. ‘Such as sausages, old quiche.’

  ‘He certainly can’t,’ said Gerard. ‘Far too much fat in sausages.’

  ‘So you’ll have him?’ asked Natalie.

  ‘Of course we’ll have him,’ said Gerard. ‘Tell the children he’s on loan. They can come and see him when they want. How much do you think he’s worth?’

  ‘A hundred and fifty,’ said Natalie, vaguely.

  ‘Your account is a hundred and forty-five,’ said Gerard, ‘approximately.’

  He took five pounds from the till and handed it to Natalie. Pauline gaped. Natalie did not refuse it, and left without Jax, feeling some predestined event had been properly and ritually accomplished. She found she did not miss Jax any more than she missed Harry, and concluded that missing people and animals was a luxury that could perhaps be afforded later, but not now.

  The Tessen filled up with customers as soon as Natalie had gone: the till pinged merrily. Even the 6 oz packets of Brie with capers sold, and Gerard got rid of three whole rounds for someone’s impromptu office party. Pauline patted Jax and Gerard said:

  ‘Do remember hygiene! Always wash your hands after handling an animal.’ But he said it amiably and even smiled at a customer and Pauline had the feeling that the shop would do better henceforth. She extracted the additive-free sausages, already rather high, from the cold shelf, and fed them secretly to Jax, who ate heartily and gratefully. She was glad to know he was not fussy.

  Peter told Natalie to go where the food was, and she did, and it just happened to work out all right. Or so Natalie says. I, Sonia, think it was more than that. It took courage on Natalie’s part to walk down Debtor’s Row and into the shop, and outface her own humiliation. She did it for Jax’s sake, not her own. Of course it turned out well. Unlike virtue, courage is not its own reward. It has results.

  Justifications

  I had better tell you more about the Bridgewater carnival. For one week every year, around the time of Guy Fawkes Day (that is to say at the beginning of November, when the pagans traditionally held their fire-and-rebirth ceremonies, and committed their grudge burnings and their human sacrifices) the carnival clubs, which have been secretly active all year, unveil their floats, and parade them in procession down the misty streets of small West Country towns, lights flaring and music blaring. They come a hundred strong, and each float can be as many feet long, and every one has perhaps ten, twenty, fifty souls on board, dressed as the theme of the float suggests, whether it be ‘Winter Wonderland’ (ice crystals), ‘Revenge of the Khan’ (warlords) or ‘Denizens of the Deep’ (Father Neptune’s slaves) or such. These glittery creatures parade or dance beneath the hot light-bulbed roofs, or pose, if a tableau is required, in frozen immobility in the icy November wind. Each float is pulled by a tractor (or two or three if it’s what you might call a major entry) and followed up by a generator (or two or three). Crowds fill the roads, charity boxes rattle, children skitter between hot-dog stands and the vendors of strange flat silvery balloons and translucent Force-Be-With-You wands, and the elderly pull their hats over their ears against the cold. Marshals push back the spectators as the first police cars appear, and the ambulance, and the noise of the leading girls’ band drifts in the wind and the first great unwieldy, noisy, brilliant box of delights eases round the corner and the carnival is here! There are no cheers from the crowd as it passes, dancing or singing, or other demonstrations of good cheer: this is not a participation show. No. It is a religious ceremony: applause when it comes is scattered and reverential. Those who live in the heart of the country are not swift or noisy in their enthusiasm. Feelings, nevertheless, run high, don’t think they don’t! Fights break out, strong words are spoken, a strange still drink is consumed – the local cider. It rots the brain cells quicker than any other form of alcohol, they say, and only 20p the pint.

  It is against the carnival rules for commercial firms to enter floats, but of course they do. How can you not let the local tractor dealer have an advertising float, when you’re using his entire range of second-hand tractors to pull the collecting floats? For all this, allegedly, is in aid of charity. People throw money: even the meanest. People can’t just enjoy themselves, can they! They have to have an excuse.

  Why am I describing all this? Because last year someone burned to death on the WAEADA float, and I it was (well, and Ros) who set the float on fire, and I am trying to feel remorse in order to get out of here. So I have to set up the background properly. ‘Here’ is the Eddon Hill Psychiatric Hospital. My psychiatrist’s name is Bill Mempton, Dr Bill Mempton, and at the moment I have a positive transference towards him which means that if he doesn’t shave I think he looks rather good, and if he’s late I worry in case he’s done himself in. This latter is not an insane worry: quite a few psychiatrists at this hospital have killed themselves by what has become known as the Eddon Method: that is to say, in the home garage, engine running, hose pipe from the exhaust to the window crack, to be found by the spouse and/or children. They have even managed to out-suicide their own patients. Since there are 30 psychiatrists and 1,200 patients, and the latter are watched in case they do escape this jolly old world, I think that is a pretty appalling statistic. Something like 10 per cent of psychiatrists committing felo de se to only .005 per cent of patients. Who needs watching most? I ask myself. Since the patients are insane and the psychiatrists are sane (I am not arguing this point: few of the latter bark like dogs or chew their underlips away altogether) I think what the dead are trying to tell us is that to stay alive is insane when death is available.

  Bill (how cosy! how almost intimate we have become) gets furious when I make this point, talks about the low wages, high stress, falling status, family difficulties and so forth endured by medics in the psychiatric branch of the profession. All I reply is if you can’t stand the patients, stay out of the ward! You do them no good by knocking yourself off in this way. What sort of example etc., etc.

  You see? I can heap coals of fire on psychiatrists’ heads, but not do the reverse: can’t allow them to heap coals on mine. Murder of the self seems to be reprehensible and disgraceful; the man – or woman – slaughter of another as the high point of a carnival quite another matter – merely the final event of an ancient ritual, consciously or unconsciously consented to by the victim.

  Living Rough

  Well, at least I never had to live rough, as did Flora, Natalie’s cleaning girl. Her address was The Caravan, The Rubbish Dump, Eddon Gurney, where the crows wheeled and the flies swarmed. She lived there with her boyfriend Bernard. They’d spe
nd the cold weather in the caravan’s double bunk, and so didn’t really suffer, as others would, during the winters. But the old felt the cold that year; they had no love to keep them warm; they died like flies of hypothermia. It was in all the papers. Flora’s mother was fifty-three. That to Flora seemed old. When the temperature fell below freezing she would ring her mother in her council flat in Leeds to see how she was. She didn’t put money in the box. She used Harry Harris’ phonecard, which she’d nicked. At least she had a mother. My mother had a continental background, and was never very healthy (the war, I suppose) and died when I was three. My father was a journalist and drifted off into nowhere: he was an alcoholic, more or less; well, as I say, he was a journalist. I was a bright child; got a degree in Eng. Lit., married Stephen, a West Country engineer, and thought, all that is behind me. My mother, my mother’s terrible memories: my father, my father’s weakness. Stephen and I will be happy for ever in the heart of the country. We will start from here on down. That’s what I thought.

  Dr Bill Mempton asked me today why I identified so with Flora? Flora, who sat on that float as Mrs Housewife Princess 1986. Talk about false pretences! Flora, who lived in sin, with Bernard? No Mrs, she! Housewife? The nearest Flora ever got to housewifery was sloshing a too-wet mop over Natalie’s floor! But never you mind details like that. This is the heart of the country. Flora was the prettiest and youngest of us, and Angus and Arthur wanted her to be Mrs Housewife Princess, so she got to sit in the gold conch shell at the carnival, as half-Madonna, half-Virgin. Both the mother who loves her child, and the girl who looks forward to love.

  What I did inherit from my mother, who as a young girl was in Dachau, is the vision of the charnel house inside my head, the spitting devils and the piles of dead human flesh. It’s a race memory, that’s all. Nothing important. Nothing, good Dr Bill Mempton, that you should have to fear.

  Bargains

  This is how Arthur first encountered Flora. Picture her a week or so after Harry Harris had left Natalie. Natalie had failed to turn up at Arthur’s antique shop on a Tuesday and a Thursday and a Tuesday again; and Arthur reckoned that was about that, and didn’t want things stirred up anyway because an affair with a securely married woman is one thing, if you are securely married yourself, and an affair with a woman whose husband has left her is quite another. But he missed her: he was partly grateful she hadn’t seen fit to make emotional demands on him and partly aggrieved.

  Arthur went up to the tip one Friday morning, after a restless night, to see if anything had turned up. Now well-established antique dealers such as Arthur don’t regularly visit local rubbish tips. They leave that to the runners, knockers and totters, those scurrying people at the bottom of the trader’s pile, those whose function it is to locate, recognize and rescue the scraps and remnants the past has left behind, anything from a broken leg by Chippendale to a farmer’s pig bench to a piece of cracked Lalique to an old postcard. Some of it – not much, but some – does escape their searching fingers, their greedy eyes, and ends up on the local rubbish dump, tipped there by the innocent, those who think an old fireplace is better ripped out and replaced by a modern one, and that flat doors are preferable to panelled ones; indeed that anything new must be preferred to something old. And though it was not any more Arthur’s role in the complex structure of the antique trade – he who had risen to have his own shop, and actually sell to the private punters, and not just to others within the trade – to go scavenging, but to leave all that to those whose business it properly was, he sometimes did. He stopped the Citroën by the tip in the early morning, and took a stroll, just to see what was in there. He couldn’t help it. He loved the excitement.

  This morning he was surprised to see a caravan parked some little distance from the row of skips where the public came to dump their black bags of peelings, eggshells and cat hairs, their old fridges, shoes, bottles and occasionally their rather good sidetables, not to mention their deceased grandma’s bentwood rocking chair. The semi-official totter at the Eddon Gurney tip was a certain Hopalong, recently taken into hospital, as Arthur knew well enough.

  The caravan had, as it were, its back to the tip. It looked up towards the cliff, quarried unnaturally out of the hillside some twenty years back, and now awash with creepers and flowers. A pretty enough place, if you didn’t look back over your shoulder, and held your nose in high summer. Just now, in the spring, it was at its best.

  A young man came sauntering round the side of the caravan. He had cropped blonde hair, brushed upwards – the modern style – wide eyes, and a chiselled, handsome, rather cold face; he wore tight jeans and a T-shirt and was pulling on a leather jacket with many zips. He seemed aggressive. He walked towards Arthur and didn’t stop walking, or talking. ‘Any old iron, any old iron!’ he jeered. ‘Any old Georgian chairs, any old stripped pine washstands, left over from last year’s November 5th? No, buster, is the answer: no straight off. If there’s anything going, I get it, and you and your sort are not welcome up here.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m a dealer?’ asked Arthur.

  ‘I can tell them from a mile off,’ said Bernard. ‘Scum of the earth.’

  At that moment, as Arthur stood his ground – he was not a coward and had his dignity to think about – Flora came out of the caravan. She was wrapped in a silk kimono and her hair was dishevelled. She seemed to Arthur entirely beautiful – the Virgin and the Madonna mixed in one – as young, bright and careless as the flowers which draped the cliff behind her, and with entirely the wrong man, that is to say Bernard of the many zips and uncouth attitude. Bernard turned to see what Arthur was gawping at and saw Flora.

  ‘Get the coffee on, Flora, for God’s sake,’ Bernard said. ‘Stop trolling about not properly dressed.’ She went back inside, giggling, but not without a flash of bare white breast beneath black and red silk. As I say, Arthur was a fine figure of a man, and beneath the leather Bernard could seem quite weedy.

  ‘I don’t want to tread on any toes,’ said Arthur, mildly enough. ‘I was expecting to see Hopalong.’

  ‘I live here now,’ said Bernard. ‘I know you! You’re the geezer up at Castle Antiques. You’re the feller having the affair with my old lady’s employer. Hopalong said you sometimes came up.’

  ‘You can’t have a caravan up here,’ said Arthur, ‘it’s illegal. And you can’t make insinuations like that, without finding a knife between your ribs one of these dark nights.’

  ‘We’re all illegal these days,’ said Bernard. ‘Even the police, and it wasn’t so much an insinuation as a congratulation.’

  ‘In that case you’d better come up and see me some time,’ said Arthur. Totters need dealers and dealers need totters in the same way as bread needs cheese and vice versa. It is better for the cheddar not to quarrel with the slice.

  Arthur looked over Bernard’s shoulder and saw the source of Bernard’s temporary unwisdom, a rather good Georgian chair on top of the skip marked ‘cardboard only’ in Hopalong’s crabby hand. Poor Hopalong, dead a day, and already someone filling his shoes! But there’s a good living in totting: it was bound to happen.

  ‘Let me know how it goes,’ he said.

  ‘I have my own contacts,’ said Bernard.

  ‘I doubt that,’ said Arthur, and drove off.

  ‘You shouldn’t have said that about him and Natalie Harris,’ said Flora, back in the caravan, taking off the kimono. ‘It was only I saw her go in there one Tuesday.’

  ‘Hit the nail on the button, if you ask me,’ said Bernard. ‘Good to know the wrinklies are still at it. There’s hope for us yet.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Flora.

  The general hopelessness of their lot was Bernard and Flora’s theme song. They sang it happily as the sun rose and the sun set. Even when they were both working, him on a tractor or down the school gate selling smack (only once: he got frightened), she up at the Harrises or doing school dinners (only for a week: she couldn’t stand the grease and heat), the
y saw themselves as irrevocably and permanently unemployed. They had their little home and it was knee-deep in flowers. It was better than a cottage any day because all you had to do was move it an inch here or an inch there and you didn’t have to pay rates. They got by; they had each other: they got by very nicely.

  There was a screech of Citroën brakes. Better to make friends than enemies. Besides, he wanted another glimpse of Flora.

  ‘Would you like a job?’ Arthur asked Bernard, who appeared naked in the caravan door.

  ‘Who, me? I’ve got a job. I’m totting.’

  ‘Totting’s part time. This is a proper job.’

  ‘What sort of proper job?”

  ‘Down Avon Farmers. New trading company. A hundred and twenty a week.’

  ‘What’s the catch?’

  ‘Hard work,’ said Arthur. ‘Long hours. Holding your tongue and minding your own business.’

  ‘Make it a hundred and fifty,’ said Bernard.

  ‘A hundred and thirty,’ said Arthur, ‘and I don’t know why I bother.’ But a sharp bright boy was needed up at Avon Farmers and Arthur knew a sharp bright boy when he saw one. Nor did he want too many insinuations, let alone congratulations, floating around the countryside. He had his wife to think about.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll bring up that chair some time,’ said Arthur. ‘Bit of old rubbish but might be worth something.’

  ‘I will,’ said Bernard.

  And that’s how Bernard got the job at Avon Farmers – where presently he was to meet up with Natalie – by knowing too much and speaking his mind.

  Arthur drove on to meet Angus, who was looking over the new Avon Farmers Trading Estate. This consisted of a corrugated iron barn and a group of Portakabins at the end of a farm track, to the north of Glastonbury Tor. Here Avon Farmers – a nebulous grouping of farmers, farm suppliers and businessmen – were to sell cheap imported agricultural chemicals and foodstuffs. By the time the Ministry inspectors got to hear of the existence of the warehouse, it would have evaporated, or, if it proved very successful, have moved on to the next county. Such subterfuge would not have been necessary had unreasonable EEC regulations not prevented the sale of certain fertilizers, growth promoters, hormones, insecticides and fungicides – used to advantage and without harming a soul in various parts of the world – to the detriment of British farmers. As it was, the home producers deserved the best deal they could get, and Avon Farmers meant to see they got it.