When I last saw her in California, nearly a year ago, Lucinda looked a lot better than she had been. At her worst, her face was strangely clotted, her features mysteriously rearranged – like ice floes that had jostled each other – and her eyes had become small and defensive as though she was wary of some violence or maybe just some gratuitous unkindness. I wonder if I am not imagining this. Is it possible for eyes to become smaller? After twenty months of expensive treatments at a clinic overlooking a bay in Marin County, north of San Francisco, which was apparently made restful by the sound of the nearby waves, she has recovered, although she has a tendency to talk about herself and her karma relentlessly. She may still believe in positive energy; she has gathered it wholesale in California. Dr Hirsch, her psych and mentor, wrote to me, with her permission, to pronounce her clean.
Lucinda has never been to the beach house but I am hoping she will love it. She will be able to hear the waves falling on the beach and maybe that will keep her calm. It is encouraging that she has agreed to come at all; perhaps she has shaken off her torpor. As a child she was always cheerful and eager so the decline into drugs was terrifying, as if another person was inhabiting her delicate and familiar body without permission, a form of kidnap.
I find the crashing of the waves on the beach below my house uplifting, as though they are designed particularly to speak to me, to confirm that I live somewhere wild and elemental and dangerous. Larcenous baboons come to visit us occasionally. Once we found stranded whales on the beach, and three years ago a seventeen-year-old boy was thrown off his surfboard and driven by a huge wave into some enormous, egg-shaped rocks where his arm became wedged high up in a cleft. As the tide came in we tried desperately to save him. It was a nightmare, with all the helplessness that entails: each incoming wave rushed over him more strongly. He would soon be underwater. Three of us swam out to the rocks and for a few long minutes I had his arm in my hands, trying to pull it free, but as the waves grew more insistent his arm was wedged more tightly and I was dragged away by the giant swell. Less than half an hour later he was completely submerged and he drowned in full sight. It was appalling.
We commissioned a bench, made of driftwood, in his memory, all of us understanding that he had done something worthwhile in taking on the giant waves. We shared a sense that he had given up his life for others, by voluntarily taking on the unforgiving sea, perhaps trying to subdue it on our behalf.
We had a bronze plaque made for the bench:
Nothing of him that doth fade/ But doth suffer a sea change/ Into something rich and strange.
I suggested these lines from The Tempest, lines that also commemorate Shelley in the Protestant Church of Rome. Familiar lines, but comforting in their promise of continuity.
Now Georgina is forty-six. She is trying to have another baby with the unscrupulous encouragement of an in vitro specialist. She believes she can buy anything and, up to a point, she is right. The donor is her new partner. I have met this man: he is called Ranulph, a friend of the man she ran off with the first time. The image of Ranulph providing sperm for my ex-wife’s purposes makes me feel queasy; I see it as an act of aggression directed to me and to Lucinda. I can only guess how Lucinda will react to this latest betrayal.
I was a difficult husband, but it was because I hardly ever agreed with Georgina on any issue of taste or judgement. I would quibble about all sorts of things, not because I believed in what I was saying, but as a form of hostility. I had reached rock bottom. I was losing my humanity.
Our house was increasingly a source of distress to me: it looked like an advertisement for one of Georgina’s doomed boutique hotels, strangled by swags and plumped by garish cushions; the knick-knacks twinkled at night and the whole place had the feeling of a seraglio painted by John Frederick Lewis. I felt endangered as I sat on a sofa, as though a giant clam was about to swallow me. Georgina believes fervently in the supreme importance of design; for her it is a fundamentalist faith.
The things that were important to me, like books, were redundant to her – old school – as if there were exciting new currents of energy dashing about that I was not tuned in to. I remember something I read a few months before: ‘I have beliefs, but I don’t believe in them.’ I take this to mean that there are conventional beliefs – serviceable, everyday beliefs – which are handy but really no more than placebos. And then there are deeper questions about the unknowable mysteries, like death, the importance of great art, the impossibility of knowing another’s mind and the nature of culture.
Georgina is still keeping tabs on me and she pays close attention to any potentially lasting relationships. For instance my love affair with Nellie Erikson, who is Swedish and forty-one years old, nearly twenty younger than me. I met her at a dinner party given by my friend, Zoe. She told me later that she had been matchmaking: it was obvious that I needed a wife. Women do this so as to patch up the cracks in the human fabric. Nellie and her husband, Lars, were in the throes of a divorce because of his drinking. She told me about Lars and I told her about Georgina and I fell in love with her that evening. We were both adrift and clung together.
‘Thank God for you,’ I said to Zoe one day. ‘Nellie has changed my life.’
‘I was worried about you. Now you look happy again.’
‘Was it that obvious?’
‘Yes. Sorry to say so, but yes, it was. In fact you looked miserable. You weren’t shaving properly either. That’s a sign. Frank, there aren’t many good men about, but you are one of them. Georgina was horrendous. We all knew. We all felt sorry for you.’
‘Thank you. Thank you, Zoe.’
Even so I felt a little affronted that she and her friends should feel free to pass judgement in this way. Nothing in a marriage is what it seems to be.
Georgina sends emails filling me in on Nellie’s past; at various times she has said that Nellie is an obsessive and that she is the daughter of a Swedish fraudster. Also, according to Georgina, Nellie is one of those women approaching middle age who spend their whole lives in spas and gyms because they are insecure. But her letters are mostly reserved for more serious charges against me; I really belong in jail for stealing her money. Her worst charge is that I drove our daughter away. This accusation upset me for days. I had thoughts of killing her. I called, breaking my rule of never starting a conversation with her.
‘Georgina, look, can I ask you not to make wild accusations about what I did to Lucinda?’
‘Oh dear, are we upset? What can I say? You threw her out. That is the fact. You did it to get at me.’
‘Oh Jesus, this is borderline certifiable. You had no relationship with her, she loathes you, you ran off with that fruitcake, and all her life you were always putting Lucinda down.’
‘You threw her clothes out on the street.’
‘The psychiatrist said we had to get her out of the house so that she could try to work out her problems herself. He said it was the only way forward. You know what he said. We discussed it many times.’
‘You just wanted to get rid of her for selfish reasons. You hid behind the psychiatrist. Out of sight, out of mind. That was your policy.’
I felt as though a stroke was coming on. I didn’t speak to her for months.
She still calls me, ostensibly to talk about Lucinda, which of course I can’t refuse, but she quickly returns to the subject of Nellie: ‘What do you think she is looking for with all that yoga stuff? Mental stability?’
She is also dangerously thin, apparently, verging on the anorexic. I wonder why Georgina, who tells people she hates me, is so interested in my life. And I wonder where Georgina gets her information. Maybe she manufactures it to order. While accusing Nellie of these crimes, she is proposing to have a baby via a test tube, with Ranulph, who is a failed estate agent. And this is a baby whose only purpose will be to increase Georgina’s self-esteem, which is already, if you ask me, dangerously inflated.
The New Forest in winter is faceted with dew so that the gorse and the grass sparkle in the late, low sunshine. The ponies are lively; at this time of year a few select stallions, highly sexed little boulevardiers, are released onto the forest for a short time, to launch a kind of horsey bacchanalia which will improve equine diversity.
As I pull up in front of the house, Nellie comes out. She is holding a huge bunch of coppery hydrangeas and wine-dark sedum. Her blonde hair is tied back loosely. My dark thoughts fade away. She always looks happy to see me, and my heart lurches in response – I am conscious of the overburdened heart, responsible both for our blood supply and our emotions. Her chin is large and her blue eyes are some way apart, an almost feral arrangement which I have learned is typical of Swedes. She looks in this regard like Agnetha of Abba, beautiful in an elusive way. When she kisses me I feel blessed. As her softly pliant mouth meets my rough cheek I am keenly aware that we are made of different materials. I am built for another sort of life, a life long gone.
‘Hold me: you are like a bear.’
‘A bear?’
‘Yes, and you see many things.’
‘What things?’
‘All sorts of things. You are unravelling the secrets around you. You are always on a journey.’
My arms are around her slender, responsive body; I am strangely flattered by what she said even though I don’t know what she means. I take it as a compliment.
The flowers are squeezed between us for a moment. There is something so serene and reasonable about Nellie that, after all the years of reproach and criticism and argument and silent rage, I am at last calm. Her body has a natural talent for fitting itself very closely to mine, hugging the contours; I told her that she was like a gecko on a wall, but she didn’t know what a gecko was. Apparently they don’t exist in Sweden.
I unpack the car and join her in the house; she is arranging the flowers now in a blue-tinged Kosta Boda vase; a swirling blue infiltrates the clear glass in streams, like offshoots of the Northern Lights. Nellie goes in for the simple and the seasonal. Georgina ordered single hothouse stems of tall red amaryllis in bud and she arranged them in glass bowls. Sometimes she cut off the stems and launched the amaryllis heads in huge shallow dishes – an oriental touch – dotted with small candles floating on the surface. My Tannie Marie had just a few prickly pear flowers in jam tins and, deep down, I still see perfect, over-bred and cosseted flowers as pretension, a sort of indulgence.
Nellie has lit a fire in the Swedish stove, and the scent of wood smoke fills the house. She has brought herring and yellow peas for soup and gravadlax and meatballs.
‘Thanks for all this.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asks.
‘You know Nellie, you know. I am so completely happy just to be with you. I long to see you when we are not together.’
I am taken by an intense feeling of joy. She smiles. She looks very young; she has a son, but she has escaped the ravages of childbirth. After childbirth Georgina became drawn; sleep deprivation manifested itself in the spaces under her eye sockets, where fine curlicues appeared. This ageing terrified her; she had been a model and minor actor when she was young. For Georgina no minor wrinkle could be tolerated. She patronised clinics in Switzerland, which administered Alpine plant extracts, she travelled to expensive plastic surgeons in America and she spent hours in the gym with a personal trainer. Lucinda was neglected when I went to my office in the City.
As a child she was left with a succession of nannies. It broke my heart when she called for her mother. Early on I understood that I was no more than the necessary husband, qualified only to bear witness to the sacred relationship of Madonna and Child, something which existed mostly in Georgina’s mind. And it was then that I understood fully that she preferred image to reality in every possible way.
I have the comforting idea that Nellie and I can come even closer, that we can share our essences, even though I don’t know how that would happen. I am aware that there is still something a little awkward in my expressions of love for Nellie, as though I am learning from a guidebook about a distant land, but I need to tell her how happy she has made me; I may be a little insistent in my neediness. I excuse myself on the grounds that what lovers say should be kept private for fear of ridicule.
Now Nellie is busy, making supper. She directs a smile my way. Her clothes and apron are pale blue and white. I have seen that blue is a colour Swedes cannot live without.
‘Can I help you, darling?’
‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘I am just making simple meatballs, Swedish style. Just as good as Ikea by the way.’
‘I love them. I love meatballs. I love herring. I love Ikea. I love you. You are so kind. And so beautiful. Are you looking forward to Cape Town?’
‘Yes, I am. I can’t wait to get there and I am longing to see Lucinda again.’
‘Lucinda will need you.’
‘I know, but really, she needs you more.’
‘I can’t do it without you. I love her but she always manages to upset me.’
‘We can handle it, I promise. She adores you and she knows what you have done for her. Now, are you hungry?’
‘Always. We had no food as children. Just a bowl of mealie-meal once a day.’
‘I feel so sorry for you. Poor you, it must have been terrible.’
‘It was.’
‘But you are not very thin now, are you?’
Nellie and I went together to California to deliver Lucinda to the clinic, and she and Lucinda have become close. Nellie has written to her or emailed her virtually every week since. She sometimes sends Lucinda articles she has found in papers, not spiritual stuff, but serious pieces by scientists and writers. I am happy to believe that the two of them have secrets that they don’t share with me.
Nellie lifts the heavy lid of the casserole and looks at the meatballs; her face is wreathed in steam for a moment.
‘Nearly ready. Frank, about Lucinda, you are her father. As I said, she adores you. But I will do my best.’
‘I am relying on you. I can’t do it alone, Nellie. I want to show you and Lucinda everything.’
‘I want to know about where you come from. It will tell me a lot about you.’
She says ‘lot’ with a minor glottal explosion, which I find endearing.
I am not thinking of the sights, spectacular though they are. I want her to see why, for all its violence and poverty and corruption, I still have a powerful connection to South Africa, an irrational connection to the mountains and the landscape and the language. I could tell her about my ambivalence towards Piet Retief. I could tell her about my father fetching me from Tannie Marie’s farm and how he and I wept in the Dodge, pulled over on the roadside. I could tell her that I left my tears in South Africa when my mother died and was buried in the churchyard of St Martin’s in the Veld. And I could tell her that, when my father died, exiting characteristically politely, his ashes were buried in a small niche in the wall surrounding the churchyard where my mother is buried. This was as close as they had been for some years – my father had never visited the grave. He said visiting the church would cause him distress. I wondered if it was because of some lingering resentment to do with her lover.
I have been to the churchyard a few times. It is perfectly possible for an atheist to love churches and what they stand for, which is hope. I haven’t told Nellie that I feel increasingly alien every day. Now I feel an urge to go home, even if the home I have in mind is mostly imagined. I still think that my failed marriage is a disgrace, as if I were careless about these things. I am free now, but, like an escaped criminal, I often look behind me.
Last December when we were staying at the inn on Grinda in the Stockholm Archipelago, to celebrate the festival of Sankta Lucia, I saw what it meant to Nellie. It was not simply a question of nostalgia, as she suggested. Sankta Lucia celebrates light in the long northern winter. Young girls in white with candles in circlets on their heads processed into the church and sang traditional songs. Light and dark are represented by elves, both of the benign and the malevolent persuasion. There are plenty of creatures in Norse mythology that live a liminal existence, hovering between the spirit and the flesh-and-blood world. I think my Cousin Jaco imagines himself in a liminal world; even now he is somewhere roaming the universe with his special Scientologist’s powers.
We travelled to Kiruna to see the Northern Lights swoop down almost to the ground, whirling restlessly, as if desperate to make land, to achieve some stability and permanence. Nellie said that the Sami believed that the lights are the souls of the dead looking for release. Children are required to act with respect to the departed when the aurora borealis fires the sky. On Grinda I was keenly aware that I didn’t have a culture of my own and I was aware, too, that in South Africa people hold values and beliefs that are irreconcilable. Some whites have come to speak of themselves as ‘white Africans’ in an attempt to belong, but this is an affectation: very few of these people speak any African language or have any deep understanding of their black fellow countrymen and women.
‘I suppose there must be wonderful fish in Cape Town,’ Nellie says.
She gives the word ‘suppose’ a Swedish twist, as if it contains an extra, slippery consonant, ending in a gentle plop, like a seal sliding into water.
‘Yes, there are fish, wonderful fish. We can go down to the harbour to buy tuna and lobster for nothing, straight off the boats.’
I am happily animating the idyll to come. It isn’t the moment to tell her that, not too far from my house, my Cousin Jaco narrowly escaped being eaten by a great white shark.
In his incoherent emails, Jaco has taken to addressing me as ‘Oom Frank’, which I find intensely irritating from a man who is my remote cousin. He is in California, and has been designated a ‘Clear’, and now he is perfecting the skills that will allow him to visit Mars, propelled there only by mental forces – his. He says he has acquired the traffic-light skills already, so that he is able to change the traffic lights in his favour. No waiting for Jaco. I wonder if it isn’t dangerous to have Jaco loose on Rodeo Drive – or on any other highway. All this he has told me in his confused and illiterate emails.
There are also intimations that his tales of shark encounters are beginning to lose traction; no television company or radio station has called him for months, despite the fact that quite a number of surfers have been attacked recently. Some of the survivors are willing to talk. Even a man with only one remaining leg is happy to tell the world about his experience. After the attack, his leg floated to the surface, and was seized by a second shark, never to be seen again.
Jaco emails to say that he is deep within the organisation, hush-hush, doing something important to secure his special powers and his immortality. And, although he is not supposed to speak to him, Jaco tells me that he has met Tom Cruise, who is not as short as people say, and is a very nice person, more than willing to swap a few words with a fellow Scientologist. As Jaco puts it, Tom is his bru.
Outside it is dark. This is the primitive, rural version of dark, quite different from the fractured dark of the city. In the middle of the forest the darkness is intense; it has a texture that I imagine I can feel. The light spilling from the house is powerless up against the overwhelming night. The deer creep closer, in a nervous game of grandmother’s footsteps. In the light spilled from a window, I can now see the white of their muzzles, as they come to the garden fence to graze. The bottom third of their muzzles is white as if they had drunk from a pail of milk. Their eyes glow. In the morning a few ponies will be waiting at the front door; against all advice I give them carrots. As soon as they see the house is occupied, they come for a hand-out. I own a few of the ponies on the forest, a right only a commoner can exercise. When I bought the house it included the right to run my own animals – excluding pigs – on the forest. I also have the right to gather and chop firewood; this is known as estovers. I have no plans to do anything with the ponies, but the knowledge that out there my four ponies are roaming happily, bearing my unique tail mark, gives me secret pleasure. The rights and duties are medieval in their origin. When I arrived in England I was eager to belong and that urge hasn’t gone; I was happy to be away from turmoil and strife and from the endless, never-to-be-resolved, argument.
Nellie loves the trees and forest around us, possibly because so many Swedish myths have their origins in the forest. The Old Norse word, myrkviðr, means murky or dark wood. It is deep in the Swedish psyche. Nellie is strangely pleased that we have the right of estovers, and that the wood scenting the house is our own. Here I sleep well: my dreams of drowning never assail me. I don’t believe that dreams contain urgent messages or tidbits of wisdom or appraisals of the unconscious, but I wonder why my dreams are so vivid when I am in London.
Nellie and I sleep in sheets scented by lavender. We are cosseted by scents and freshness. I tell her that, years ago, the black women washed and dried our sheets on rocks in the Mooi River. I can’t stop; I tell her that the women carried the bundles of clean clothes from the river, bound up in the sheets, balanced on their heads. I tell her I can see them now, walking in single file back from the river, singing in harmony. Nellie says she wishes she could see that; it would be a window on my childhood. She wants to know about me and the life I have lived.
She never passes judgement on Georgina, however vindictive she becomes. Nellie believes, and I agree with her, that no one ever really knows what happens within another’s marriage. Her own marriage was happy; when Lars turned out to be a serious alcoholic she was devastated. She was angry when he said he had given up drinking. It was as though, Nellie told me, he no longer knew when he was lying: he mistook the intention for the action. He would arrive home at four in the morning, smiling pointlessly, ready to be forgiven, and she would have to drag him to bed after removing his urine- and drink-sodden clothes. Then he denied that he had been fired from his job as an engineer. Although she knew he was unable to quit drinking, she tried to persuade him to sign up for AA, but he never attended. They separated, reluctantly, and six months later they were divorced. He has terminal liver failure now and is often on dialysis. Everyone knows, says Nellie, that he will die soon. His face is yellow, signalling his death like a plague flag. I have seen pictures of Lars in his prime; Nellie’s son, Bertil, is very like him – unmistakably a man of the far north. I ask questions about Lars sometimes but I avoid any hint of jealousy and I don’t make comparisons.
A few months before I met Nellie, I had a brief relationship with a young woman, Imogen Cross, who was barely thirty.
We were sitting in a café. She asked me, ‘Can we talk?’
‘Of course.’
I sensed it would be one of those questions you know in advance is going to be painfully unanswerable.
She composed herself with difficulty. She said, ‘Do we have a future?’
I was silenced for a moment; it had never occurred to me that we might have a future together. She seemed to be asking if we could spend the rest of our lives together and she suggested that I owed her something. I had treated sex with her as a kind of harmless entertainment and now I saw not a wonderful future so much as a middle-aged man parading a young wife and opening himself to all kinds of ridicule.
I wondered, for a start, how I would be able to introduce her to my friends. And it might have appeared to be lending credence to Georgina’s widely advertised views of my lack of sensitivity, which she attributed to an early diet of biltong. In her view a meat diet is synonymous with brutish masculinity. She favours foodstuffs that have symbolic and spiritual qualities, so that quinoa is, in some unspecified way, good for you and soya milk contains a kind of innocence and salads are major cultural indicators. Many men don’t take this seriously, in that way opening themselves to charges of wilfully inviting heart attacks and courting early senility. A friend said that, when he asked his wife what the point of salad was, she accused him of passive aggression. Salad as weapon.
As it happens, I have never liked biltong, although it has symbolic qualities for my countrymen. On the farm strips of meat, beef or game were soaked in brine for days before they were hung from a camel thorn tree in a small cage behind my Tannie Marie’s house. The cage was like something you might use to house a canary, with smaller mesh. Flies had to be kept out, but circulating warm, dry air was required to dry the strips of meat. Hungry flies were always crawling over the mesh eyeing what was within. It put me off for ever.
I am thinking about all this as I walk across the forest before breakfast. It’s another clear, cold day; in my mind my new happiness has made me a far more sensitive person. I worry that I may have been too harsh with Imogen. I told her we had no future at all, not because she wasn’t a wonderful person et cetera, et cetera, but because I didn’t want to ruin her life. I said I had far too much baggage, including a daughter who needed me. Imogen made some cutting remarks about using her. I assured her that it was not the case. She was married soon after to a man of her age who works in the City, and her tone has changed; she seems to be content. She has introduced me to her husband, perhaps as a kind of exorcism. His hair is gelled upwards at the front, in miniature stooks, a fashionable look for young men in retail banking.
Ahead of me is the little golf course. Ponies graze on the greens. The locals say you should try to land your ball right on the ponies’ rumps; the ponies don’t feel it, and the ball drops dead. One of the members claims to have had a hole in one after his ball bounced off a pony and into the cup. This may be a local myth. From here the course runs down to a point where the course drops away and emerges again at the other side of a clear stream.
Before I enter the house I can smell Swedish coffee – mörkrost, dark roast. Nellie hands me a cup.
‘How was your walk?’
‘Great. This is a wonderful time of the year. Actually I like the forest all year round.’
‘Frank, good news, I just had a text from Bertil. He would love to come to Cape Town.’
‘That’s terrific, what a good idea. I am so glad. I have lots of space and he could learn to surf and all that stuff. It would get him out of himself a little. It could also be good for Lucinda to get to know him.’
‘I am not sure he needs to get out of himself, but, yes, a happy holiday would be great.’
‘Sorry. That’s really what I was thinking about, his happiness. I think he has been a little down at times.’
‘He takes Lars’s problems to heart. He loves Lars, but seeing Lars is very difficult for him. It still makes me angry, as though he wanted to throw his life away. But I can’t say that. In fact you are the only person I have ever told.’
‘I think it could be good for Bertil and Lucinda to be thrown together. I hate to say it, but both of them are wounded and they need to be carefree.’
‘It will be fine,’ Nellie says reassuringly. ‘They have a lot going for them.’
I am not sure just what it is that is going for them, but I have learned to trust Nellie’s judgement in these matters. Still, I wonder if Bertil will accept that his mother is sleeping with me, although of course he knows already:
In the rank sweat of an unseamed bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty.
There is something of the Hamlet about Bertil. He has been in my house in Notting Hill from his boarding school in Kent a few times and in his sullen withdrawal I saw a kind of passive resistance – perhaps not directed to me as a person, but to me as a substitute for Lars. There can be disgust and resentment in children whose parent has taken up with another.
For breakfast we have blueberry buttermilk pancakes and freshly gathered mushrooms on toast. We are going riding. I had my own horse, stabled near by, but he died of colitis last year. He was a lovely seven-year-old gelding – a bay – honest, even charming, and always eager. It was this eagerness that endeared him to me. His name was Bismarck when I bought him; I changed that to Rocket because I had read My Friend Flicka so avidly. I wanted to live in Wyoming.
As a boy in Johannesburg I used to ride during the school holidays; the high point of my holidays was always the Pony Club camp. About twenty children went to spend a week on a farm, riding our own ponies. The attraction was meeting girls, some of whom I later had sex with. As you get older your relationships with people you have slept with take on the aspect of something warm and innocent, something to be cherished, even if in reality the sex back then was casual and had some of the qualities of a treasure hunt.
Even now I can remember little details – the fine hairs on Jeanne Gallo’s arms, Fran Cheesman’s erotic teeth, Deborah Nutting’s freckled nose and cheeks, with their endearing natural rain spots. Last year a friend emailed me to tell me that Deborah Nutting’s first husband beat her up and she married again, to Dougie Nash, and he had a heart attack and died. Deborah emailed me: she has come through it all a stronger person. And she wants to meet up with me again.
Email has freed many people to rewrite their partial versions of their lives. Many of the emails sent to me are concerned with their highly successful children, who have emigrated from South Africa to Canada and Australia; they also tell of the struggles with life which have fortuitously revealed undiscovered artistic talent and self-sufficiency.
Nellie rides as she does everything – she is neat, uncomplicated and eager. In a way I am dreaming myself back into my Retief heritage: I ride like a Boer on commando, my feet thrust defiantly forwards. The horses are from our local stable. The stable girls looked after Rocket, and they were as upset as I was when he died. They still seem to think I need condolence. They talk to me in a solicitous whisper; they believe in the grieving process. I admire horsey people for their dedication, for embracing a world of mucking-out, tack cleaning, picking hooves, summoning vets, feeding and schooling the horses. In their minds I think the girls have the model of a kind of equine heaven. At the same time I feel that we patronise them as we sweep into the run-down and make-do yard in my Mercedes, where the horses are already saddled, waiting, resigned.
I once gave the owners a thousand pounds when they couldn’t pay the feed bill. A truck was parked in the yard; the driver, who had long Victorian sideboards, said that the suppliers were not able to unload without payment. I took the company’s details and made a payment by phone. The driver ordered his assistant, who was drinking a Lucozade, to unload. The driver said he was very sorry he had to put us in this position, but the high-ups in the firm insisted: since 2008 many people had been selling their horses or even giving them away. First thing to go in a recession, he said. Some of these horses ended up in curries or meat for hospitals, he said. He spoke with an almost lost accent, the Hampshire dialect, which was almost driven out by the Cockney influx to the new towns which were built forty years ago.
‘We’re ’anging on bouy the skin of’ve ow-er teeth,’ he said.
It was beautiful to hear all those extra vowels. Like so many aspects of English life, they will be missed when they are gone for ever. I have a private sense of the country’s increasing coarseness.
Nellie and I ride for an hour and a half. As we arrive at the old airstrip, unused since the war, the horses know what’s coming: this is the gallop, the last hurrah. Off we go with a bound: soon my ears are cold and my nose is stinging as the horses’ hooves thrum on the ground; this thrumming is one of the most thrilling sounds imaginable. And also one of the most feared in history. I think of cavalry charges in films and Cossack pogroms and country racecourses where you hear the horse-timpani rising from a distant hollow and coming ever closer until the horses themselves suddenly appear at the top of a hill, a mist escaping from them into the cold air.
On her first visit to the forest, Nellie introduced me to wild mushrooms; she spotted morels peering coyly from a hollow under beech trees. For her the natural world is a gift we must honour; it may be that up in the Nordic lands there is a more recent memory of the importance of relying on nature to survive. After all, the Vikings were the last pagans of Europe. When I dreamt of Nellie a few nights ago, I saw her in forests of spruce, weaving through the trees and leaving tracks in the snow. Nellie told me with pride that the oldest tree in the world, Old Tjikko, a spruce, is in Sweden. Over nine thousand years old. Beat that if you can.
Now the horses begin to slow down; soon they are trotting and then walking, at the same time snatching at their bridles in the eagerness to get home. I wonder sometimes how we came to enslave horses and other domestic animals. The somnolent sheep on my Tannie Marie’s farm walked listlessly, heads down, like slaves, like inmates of a gulag.
Josie, one of the stable girls, is waiting. She holds the horses as we dismount. Her cheeks are very red – the redness is symmetrical, forming perfect red discs – like Victorian German dolls.
‘Was he all right, Blaze?’ Josie asks.
‘Lovely. We had a great ride.’
‘Nothing will replace Rocket.’
‘No. And I wouldn’t want it to.’
‘He was a one-off.’
I am touched. The kindness of these girls, expressed through their concern for horses, moves me. I understood some time ago that many English people in the countryside see talking about their dogs or horses as a kind of overture to conversation, or even a ploy to avoid serious conversation.
Nellie takes my hand as we walk to the car. She wants to see the Rufus Stone. Not far from here, William Rufus, the son of William the Conqueror, was killed by an arrow in 1100 when he was hunting. His death was probably an assassination, the arrow fired by Walter Tirel on the orders of the King’s brother, Henry, who succeeded to the throne.
The Rufus Stone purports to mark the exact spot where William Rufus was killed, but there is no certainty. The hunting party galloped away, leaving the body where it lay. The plaque reads:
Here stood the oak tree, on which an arrow shot by Sir Walter Tirel at a stag glanced and struck King William the Second, surnamed Rufus, on the breast, of which he instantly died, on the second day of August, anno 1100.
Nellie holds my hand insistently. Two hikers arrive, striding in blue and green cagoules, as though they are expecting a blizzard. The English love to dress up for a hike; outdoor clothing is popular in these parts. They say hello grudgingly, giving the impression that they think we have cheated by coming here in a car, without the requisite seriousness of purpose. I imagine that they think we are insensitive to the events of a thousand years ago. The man reads part of the inscription out loud, as if his wife can’t read: ‘King William the Second, surnamed Rufus, being slain as before related was laid in a cart belonging to one Purkis and drawn from here to Winchester and buried in the Cathedral Church of that city.’
Purkis is a minor player in this drama, standing for the common man.
‘History is so much about murder,’ Nellie says.
From what I know of my ancestor’s life, I would have to agree with her.