I opened Copsford again. With tea in my hand, I thumbed through the pages, ignoring the faint smell of disinfectant. Rereading familiar passages, looking for the real Murray hidden in the pages. I couldn’t find him: the writing felt somehow empty, as if I was looking at a naturalistic painting by Constable. Accurate and perfect in so many ways, yet missing the true essence of life, the darker, harder, painful edges that you know are there, hidden under the sunlit branches and sparkling waters of The Hay Wain. I closed the book. What could I possibly say other than it was a portrait of a young man’s experience of a year in the country?
Back in the farmhouse, scraping mouldy wallpaper from the walls became a task without end. A seemingly pointless endeavour when so much of the house needed repair and heat to win the battle with the damp. But it was almost impossible to prioritize where to start with the problems the house presented.
‘I think we should take out the hardboard walls and the sliding doors. If we rip them out and open up that room to what it would have been, take it back to the stone walls, it might help the air movement in that side of the house and get rid of some of the damp.’
‘Are you sure? Shouldn’t I finish that wallpaper first?’
‘There’s so much to do it doesn’t really make a difference, does it?’
Half a day of hammers, screwdrivers and a large bonfire pile later and we sat in a dusty empty space with an open staircase and exposed original bannisters. Everything was still, the commotion had stopped, but somewhere in the house a faint noise of scratching continued.
‘What is that?’
‘You don’t think we’ve dislodged a water pipe, do you? It could be a leak.’
‘No, listen, it’s moving. It’s gone into the other room.’
We followed the noise, not just a scratching now, more a running of many tiny feet.
‘What do you call a group of mice?’
‘A herd, a flock …?’
‘A lot of mice – no, a nest.’
‘That’s not a nest; it’s a whole village. Do you think we’ve disturbed them with all the banging?’
The hatch to the roof space was just a plank of plywood wedged in the hole into the loft. As we pushed it out of place a shower of mouse droppings fell into our hair and across the landing.
‘No, not a village, a town of mice.’
The tall airy roof space was hung with cobwebs; rolls of insulation were partly unfolded in patches across the centre of the room. Two sparrows flew around in alarm and then out beneath the open eaves. A carpet of mouse droppings lay thick across the insulation, but the roof was silent. The mice had heard us coming and frozen on the spot, hiding in their pink fibrous nests. We retreated from the space, carefully replacing the plywood and dusting the tiny brown pellets from our hair.
‘That’s a lot of mice.’
‘What do we do about them?’
‘I don’t know. Check there’s no way they can get into the house from the loft first, I think. Let’s seal around the water-pipe holes, then make sure there’s no other way in.’
I stood on the railway platform in Par, waving to the train as it pulled away east, choking on tears like a child parted from its favourite toy. Moth’s degree had consolidated a lifetime of knowledge, adding a layer of design skills that were now needed by an unexpected client two hundred miles away. We’d agonized for days over his decision to go. Could he make the journey alone? Would he remember where to go? Could he do the work when he got there? Should I go with him? He’d finally packed his bag and written out a list of train changes and phone numbers, addresses and names, deciding that if he couldn’t do it alone he shouldn’t do it at all. And now he was on the train, gone, out of reach already.
I headed back to the farm. Walking through the door, I realized it was the first time I’d been alone there and a strange damp-smelling sense of isolation hung over the place. Rooms that seemed full of possibility when Moth filled the space were now stripped of any veneer and displayed themselves for what they truly were. Cold, damp, dreary containers for mould. I wanted to leave, to return to the warm familiarity of the chapel, shut the door behind me and stay there until Moth returned. But I wasn’t alone. They were here: running, scratching, scuttling through the roof space; the house was alive, or at least the roof was. I put my bag down and found some kindling to light the fire. I was far colder downstairs than the mice in the roof, cosy in their home in the pink insulation. The fire burst into flames as a cup of tea warmed my hands and the mice settled down for a nap – or the smoke from the leaking chimney sedated them; I wasn’t sure which. I took the copy of Copsford from my bag, quietly turning the pages again, letting Walter’s summer days in the hedgerows push aside the memories that the book held for me. There at last, in his early days in the cottage, before his forays into herb-collecting, I began to see something of who Walter really was; something of the grittier edge of the young man was hidden in his battle with the ruined house.
Entering Copsford for the first time, Murray describes a feeling of absolute isolation, a sense of the cottage rejecting him. He’d stood in the house, frozen by a deep loneliness that pervaded the ruined walls, unable to shake the feeling. I put another log on the fire. I couldn’t let that happen here. No, while Moth was gone I would get a hold on my feelings of doubt about the move and strip everything from the house that felt unwelcoming. I wouldn’t be Walter, in the icy grip of a house that seemed to resent our presence. But he’d had more to deal with than a roof full of cute but smelly mice. Copsford teemed with rats. Rats that climbed down the walls and out of the fireplace, that ran across his bed at night and lit the room with a thousand eyes reflected in his torchlight.
Dealing with a few mice shouldn’t be a problem. We’d had a rat infestation on the farm when I was a child, rats that were invisible in the daylight but came out like a plague as soon as the light began to fade. Attracted by the grain stores full of wheat, oats and barley, they thrived in their thousands. Eating the corn, spoiling the animal feed, growing fat and lazy until they didn’t bother to hide during the day but sat defiantly on the beams of the barns and watched. I followed at Dad’s heels as he laid traps and rat poison, and then encouraged an army of cats to live in the grain barns. Yet still the rat population didn’t reduce. Despite my protestations he became convinced that the rats came from the holes in the riverbanks and poisoned every furry thing that moved. He resorting to hunting them with an air rifle at night when they came out in hordes. Always by his side, I would shine the torch to target the rat while he shot and reloaded, and reloaded, and reloaded. Eventually his poisons became stronger and he laid them out in greater and greater quantities, until the rat numbers reduced along with some of the cats and a dog. So surely I could get rid of a family of mice?
Walter solved his problem by getting a dog. A borrowed dog called Fluff who ended his rat invasion in a night of noise and bloody execution. That wouldn’t solve my mouse problem, but neither would poison. We were aiming to increase the wildlife here, not poison it out of existence. There had to be another way. I replied to a message from Moth, reminding him where he’d put the list of train times. I had to do something, or I’d spend the next week checking my phone and worrying. I scraped more wallpaper until the light began to dim, finally heading out into the cold air and straight into the evening flight of the first owl I’d seen at the farm. His broad wingspan seemed to frame his pale round face as he flew straight towards me. The owls, of course! The answer was obvious: the mice just needed to be outside. But how to get them there?
‘I’ve almost made it through this, but I can’t wait to get back on the train. I fell over this morning. I was surveying the final section of the garden, standing still on a patch of completely flat grass, and without warning I just fell over. I couldn’t stop myself.’
‘Do you want me to come and pick you up? I’ll leave now.’
‘No, I’ll be okay. Anyway, I’ve got a return ticket. I’ll be back tonight.’
I sat on the small wall outside the house, suffocating in the silence. Not a breath of wind, or a bird call. Not a voice. Not his voice. This is how it would be without him, without his constant conversation and ideas and action. CBD was changing him. Not with the instant destruction of an illness that spread like wildfire, but with a slow loss of form and connectivity. Imperceptible until you compared him to how he was before. Less wildfire, more a slow, insidious, climate change of lost functions. His was becoming a flatter, emptier place. His body a world of hedges without birdlife, of rivers without fish and orchards without insects, as his tongue forgot how to taste and the feelings slipped from his hands. I shivered in the winter sun. I had no interest in a life without him providing the backing track. A silent void of existence.
I had a few hours before he came back; I couldn’t spend it sitting on the wall waiting. No, I’d solve the mouse problem instead. Killing them wasn’t the answer when raptors were outside in need of food; no, they just needed to be removed. I stood in the loft with the head torch and a face mask on. I could remove all of the insulation and shake them out, but that would probably result in them falling out as I went down the stairs, so filling the whole house with them instead of just the roof. I’d roll them out instead. Walking across each beam, I shook the previous piece of insulation on to the next, occasionally spotting a brown body falling on to the next layer of fibre, until I reached the final stretch. I dragged the end of it to the eave, pushing it out into the gutter, then rolled it from the other end, shaking it as it I went. Brown furry forms spilt out in all directions until the gutter was full of mice that slid to the downpipe and on down to the ground. I ran outside as nests of mice scattered across the grass and disappeared into the nettles. Smug that the mouse problem was solved without a granule of poison, I put the kettle on and went upstairs to the bathroom. The house was quiet again. Quiet, until a faint shuffle of tiny feet passed above my head. They were still there. Maybe we’d just have to learn to live with them. I found the silicon gun and resealed the holes around the water pipes. They could live in the roof, but nowhere else.
I tried again to find a way to write an introduction for Copsford, but there seemed no way in. Murray describes the young Walter as a believable, almost recognizable twenty-something, embracing an adventure as he tried to find a way to live in the ruined house. But when he moves on to Walter’s new career collecting herbs to sell to manufacturers, and takes him into the fields and hedgerows, he gives the young man an almost spiritual quality as he flits through the countryside of post-war Sussex. A landscape where herbs, flowers and butterflies grow in abundance and peace and tranquillity override all else. What was there to write about? I couldn’t do this; there really was nothing of any depth to say. I could hardly write an introduction that said, ‘Walter was luckier than most because he barely saw the war, then he had a lovely time in the English countryside picking flowers.’
I drove to the railway station with almost teenage excitement. Paced on the platform in anticipation until the train pulled in. There he was. For a moment I’d expected the young man who’d waited for me at the station the first time we’d been apart, when I’d been the one on the train willing it to go faster, to take me back to him a few seconds sooner. Who’d grabbed my hand as we ran from the station, vowing never to be apart again. But I couldn’t see him.
Moth stepped from the train, tired, hunched, moving slowly and deliberately, his uneven walk more pronounced, his face grey and tired.
‘I’m so, so glad you’re back. Give me your bag.’
‘Am I actually here? I thought that journey would never end.’
‘Yep, it’s you, you’re definitely here. Let’s get back to the chapel and put the kettle on.’ The young man who had held me so tightly that afternoon that I thought no air would ever pass between us again? He was still there. Somewhere.
‘Let’s not move into the farm until after Christmas. We’re never going to get the place dry enough by then, so let’s just enjoy Christmas with some heating and then move. Can we afford to pay two rents for another month?’ Moth was exhausted after his journey; he needed to rest not move house.
‘Just about.’ Suddenly this was feeling like the most ridiculous decision we could have made. When we’d signed the tenancy agreement we hadn’t accounted for it taking us two months to clean the house and get rid of the damp. Two months of paying two rents. The advance on the book couldn’t last forever and there was no way of knowing if the sales would increase, or if it would disappear into obscurity. ‘But by mid-January we have to be in. We can’t do this for much longer.’
‘Good. I’ve had enough of painting – I’m going to strim. If I can remember how to get this started.’ Moth was fiddling with an old strimmer that we’d stored in a friend’s barn, dusting off straw and cobwebs and refilling it with oil.
‘How are you going to be able to use that? It’s going to really hurt your shoulder.’
‘I don’t know, but I’m going to try.’
I walked away; I couldn’t bear to watch. I went back inside to continue scraping wallpaper. The ring of an email arriving on my mobile broke through the familiar thrum of Moth trying to start a pull-motor that refused to work. The reluctant chugging noise that, if I closed my eyes, would take me straight back to our home in Wales and sunny afternoons when the beech trees were full of bees and swallows filled the air. I kept my eyes open and read the email.
‘Hi, Ray, just wondering how the introduction for Copsford is coming along. It’s going to print soon, so when you’re ready …’
Had I absolutely agreed to do this? Somewhere in the confusion of book events and coming to the farm I’d obviously committed to it. But how could I? What could I possibly say? I’d recently bought a small, obscure biography of the life of Walter J. C. Murray; maybe if I actually read it I could find something more to Copsford than it superficially presented.
The strimmer was humming and Moth disappeared into the undergrowth leaving a mown path behind him. The biography was in the kitchen cupboard. I’d had it posted to the farm, expecting to have moved in weeks before, so I put the wallpaper scraper down, switched the kettle on and found the book. Written by a man who clearly adored Murray’s writing, the pages explored the events of his life and his Christian beliefs. A life in which he loved nature but didn’t allow that feeling to surpass his religion. I couldn’t quite see what it was, but there was a contradiction between the man in the biography and the young man in Copsford. An impression that I wasn’t reading about the same person. It made no sense, but I continued reading anyway.
An hour later Moth stood on a broad patch of cut grass. A muddy, scrappy expanse covered with the cut stalks of nettles, thistles and tufted grass. An expanse of possibility; a garden in the making. He came into the house, took off his goggles, sat on the deckchair in front of the fire and went instantly to sleep. How could I possibly have thought coming here was a good idea? I watched him sleep, his chin resting on his chest, his head moving rhythmically with his breathing as I closed the book. I realized I’d found them: Murray and Walter, the writer and the young man he wrote about. I finally understood they were one and the same, and entirely separate. I opened the laptop. Darkness fell and firelight flickered colours across the walls as I began to write the introduction.