Pieces of Light

Hamlet – still green and fresh after eight weeks. My actors are like racing-drivers: the roar of lethal passion is icily controlled by technique, formal gesture, the second-to-second changing of gears, liquid oratorical movements, a precise dance with danger, with inward heat and explosion and death. Alan G. went chalk-white at the sight of the Ghost tonight, as Betterton once did. It has taken him – us – twenty years to arrive at that blenched face. Blood draining right out. Yet no loss of control: the hand gestures still precise, not a metrical beat muffed. Audience quite hypnotised. Sheer enchantment. Will I ever be as happy again? As now, writing this in the empty theatre, my cheeks still smeared with their make-up, with their kissing joy? All these silent seats. All that sound suspended, not quite gone.

Nothing but boxes for the last two days. Turned down offer to front a series for the BBC on the ‘Great Tragedians’. I cannot delay the book any longer. Awful day of meetings, admin., minor balls-ups. I felt like one of those nineteenth-century actors who watched Charcot’s patients for examples of hysterica passio – only the patients were all around me, fussing about nothing. Snatched lunch with Linus F., who asked me if my actors were literally possessed. Of course, I replied, but they also know it and control it. Without technique, they would either look ridiculous or go mad. He is writing a biography of Garrick and can’t understand how I’ve managed to make the old style work. But Garrick replaced the old style when it was hollowed of all meaning, mere stiffness and declamation. I have pumped the blood back in, the vital spirit. He nodded diplomatically. I got so excited that the tall menus couldn’t take the wind from my gesticulations.

Clearing the study. Found at Sumerian level my childhood memoir rolled up in a ribbon, like an old map. First few pages missing: begins in medias res with the ‘gorilla incident’ – never quite sure what that was, in the end. Thirty-odd years ago I was writing about my life thirty-odd years before that – and in thirty years’ time? I will be a hundred.

Morris called. Appalled by how much I am not throwing away. And I thought I was being ruthless.

I would give the rest of my life (after the book’s done) to stand among the apprentices and artisans and dusty soldiers in the Globe in 1604 and watch, say, Othello. I think I would still be surprised and astonished by what they did with it – for all my efforts, my fidelities. Morris called me an obsessive, when I admitted this. ‘Isn’t Shakespeare our contemporary, like that Polish guy said?’ Shakespeare is a monster, I replied, a monstrous genius of the past whom we strive to comprehend from inside whatever tiny present we inhabit. Put it another way: we wade towards him through thick time. It is a battle against time. A terrible battle against time.

A throat from the dust off the tops of the books, which leaves permanent spots. Morris said should use a feather duster regularly. Enormous yellow skip almost full by teatime. Jamming things in on my tiptoes, was chatted to successively by a red-faced Irish woman, a Cockney bag-lady, a dapper little Indian and a wrinkled African-Caribbean with white hair. Like a bad sketch. These people have all lived around here for years yet we only talk when I’m leaving. When it’s safe to, I suppose.

Last night of King John and big party after. I gave a speech that made everyone cry – ‘Ripe for exploits and mighty enterprises,’ etc. John G. on very good form, told a couple of Larry jokes relatively new to me. Got back inches before dawn with Diana changing lanes each time she roared with laughter at something I’d meant to be serious. Old memories. End of an era. Feel suitably frayed. Or ‘overripe’, as Ronald Watkins used to say of himself when I was still firm and green.

Thumped the skip as I passed and it sounded hollow. By dawnlight from my window it is. Even the awful polka-dotted lampshades. I feel dispersed.

Mostly asleep in my bed in a strange, bundled-up place that was until yesterday my dear home. A dream: I am in New York, in an abandoned block-turned-theatre, watching a famous hippy theatre group taking all day to set up, the show changing as members have rows and leave, or new ones join. The name of the group is Swan God Feel Like Missionary, but I persist in calling it Swan God Merein Missionary. I am desperate to be given a part, the teeniest-tiniest part.

I will miss London, yet I can’t wait to tear free. Of course I might even come back for good. Though a cottage in the country, a sort of Pascalian existence full of pensées and pruning, has its lure.

Two large wheezy men in fluorescent overalls came and carted everything off to Morris’s huge attic in between police-like conversations on a mobile phone. The flat looks even more estranged from me, empty, walls much less white than I thought – except where the furniture’s blocked the pollution. The panic of being in your own home without the means to make a cup of tea. Fifteen years and the only familar note is next door’s mindless dog, yet not a day has passed that I haven’t wished its painful death. My last entry here, on my knee, looking out at the top of the turning linden. O mea cella, vale.

Later. Writing this in the hotel in the village, late. Dropping the keys off at the estate agent was definitely the pulling of the anchor. Train down with two large suitcases and my box of reference books opposite an area sales manager for Spud-U-Like and I said I didn’t, though she was young and bonily attractive.

Taxi to the village. Looks as if someone’s run off with the real thing, leaving a fake. The Old Barn Hotel where once the Jowett rusted, full of chickens, has carpet for wallpaper and lavender pot-pourris everywhere, though home-owned and friendly: pleasant room up in the beams overlooking the square, church tower, glimpse of the mild downs. The country is so fresh, but always looks as if it’s been rather indifferently waiting for you. London never does; you have to hop on as on to a moving train.

The house broods as ever: a maiden aunt in rictus of sexual fervour or slow, agonising death. Most of its windows still blocked by Aunt Rachael’s strips of carpet and squares of lino: she used so many nails it looks like stitching. Garden a scramble to explore. Aunt Joy’s champion rose bushes a mess of blown thorns, summerhouse a clump of nettles and a sandwich of window-frames. Beechwood glorious in the setting light. The cows in the same old field next door (but not the same cows) all huddled in a line the far side – as far away from the house as they could get, it looked like. Sensible, sensitive creatures. Though the wildwood’s fence is down I didn’t go in, just hovered on the edge. Conjuring her, as she was.

The key worked in the back door and I ventured in as far as the stairs. Trod on a few sweetpapers, but otherwise saw very little and had to grope, stupidly without a torch. The sitting-room appears to have a hole in the window so I suppose recent visitors have entered by that. Musty smell and droppings of rodents everywhere. A bottle of gin, empty. Chilly place, still. Could hear Aunt Rachael say, in that sodden, tobacco-blasted voice, So here you are.

Awful night full of wrong trains. Groping for a piss I brained myself on one of the beams, once high up in a dusty darkness.

Visited the house again with my pocket torch and this time made it to ‘my’ room. Pulled away the lino from the window and the old view appeared but as if it had come back from the dry-cleaner’s not quite the same: garden, woods, field, tumuli like two breasts on horizon, blank white sky. The house is stripped bare but on peeping into the attic I saw where it had all gone to or not been removed from: a choppy sea of junk. I have to confess to a vague feeling of being watched, throughout.

I will just tell someone to open a plug and empty out the junk, swirl it away. I don’t even want to see it.

Pitter-patter of rain out of a white sky. Leaves dropping, rain dropping. They’ve stuffed a bungalow into the orchard, but a few of the trees are still up one end, all mossed. Returned here with a wet collar and am ensconced again in this lounge, alone. Fake log fire but old comfy chairs and an antique school desk on which I’m writing this. Lots of time for you now, dear fitful diary. Hotel frigid but comfortable. So far in my sorties I’ve met no one I once knew but then I’ve not sought them out. Village Stores still there, new butcher’s, Bint’s Bakery now something called England Made Me with squadrons of lead farm animals in an elegant whatnot, old grain-measurers, mahogany stools, swathes of printed throw-overs hung like a harem: always shut. People passing almost recognisable and then turn out not to be, or are much too young though not young at all. The warty old pavement in front of the Post Office almost frighteningly familiar down to the last fissure, but about to be ripped up, from the look of it.

Reading my childhood memoir like watching a man and his son fishing on the opposite bank. Forty was such an awful age, but then things got going and I didn’t think about age until about last week. Did Dr Wolff ever read what I wrote, in the end? Wet, steaming red earth of Africa: smell it as I read. Otherwise, it’s all happened to someone else before recorded time.

Netherford Public Library just the same with colourful posters and carpets instead of lino but people looking like they’ve drifted in from the bus-stop. Aunt Rachael’s solicitors have vanished in the intervening twenty years since her death. Too lazy or tired to find out why. Can’t even recall why the will wasn’t enacted immediately. Some turgid legal reason with no one bothered enough to push. Am I bothered enough now? But hardly a day has passed over the last twenty years when I’ve not pictured the place ‘deteriorating’, as estate agents put it.

Took my shoes off and pretended Reference was all a wing of my château, then detected awful smell from my shoes which of course I washed in the bath last month. Someone came up to me thinking I was someone who was dead, but not Hugh Arkwright. Someone he knew personally, drowned in grease. In grease? Or did he mean Greece? Reminds me of a friend of Jean’s who really did think I had died but quite a few years ago. Convinced he’d read my obituary. I think the same about Bernard Levin, then he pops up again.

Browsing, fell upon a thick report of Keiller’s Windmill Hill excavation. Ah, I remember Keiller. He came to dinner at Ilythia several times, with dirty fingernails. Gained his fortune in marmalade, Aunt Joy would say, which made me think of him as sticky. She kept pronouncing his name wrong, it came out like ‘Killer’ and Nuncle would tell her off in front of the poor chap. She was so pale yet she blushed so deeply, like an electric ring. Drawing of chalk phallus on one page that I’m sure I remember turning in my little hand. Shaped like an hourglass or a pair of testicles. Made me feel peculiar – today, I mean, looking at the drawing. I would hear Nuncle and him rumbling on about witches through the study door, but he wasn’t in any way creepy.

Thought inevitably of the book, though Morris advised me not to until after Italy. A fortnight here, some six weeks among the cypresses working through Bulwer, Heywood, Greg, Granville-Barker et al, then David’s cottage in Cornwall until sheer loneliness drives me to finish. Of course it must be done: otherwise after my death there’ll be no blueprints. But I hate writing. Like being a composer but having to tune the piano, too.

Had a drink in what was the New Inn, now officially the Never Fear – its old nickname. The disgruntled locals now call it the New Inn, of course. Interior completely unrecognisable: could have been in Chertsey. Ghastly soft music like an airport. This man I took to be Indian at the bar said, ‘Hello Mr Arkwright. I know you. I knew Mrs Arnold, too. The second one, that is.’ He said the last with a sort of leery grin on his podgy face. He wasn’t Indian at all but a coalman, semi-retired, dyed dark by his trade. He delivered coal to Aunt Rachael for many years and they always shared a pot of tea. My eye-patch usually gives me away like this. Didn’t know him from Harry, and can’t even remember his name now. Perry? Potter? Another old boy claimed he knew me as a nipper, so I pretended to recognise his sunken cheeks and warty nose. One had the feeling this happened every day and they’d all been slumped there in silence since I left in my teens a few hours ago.

Everyone was in general agreement that the house was ‘troubled’. Troubled! What a marvellous word, an old worn penny still circulating in this God-forsaken place, and tendering nothing beyond it.

Breakfast near enough to another area sales manager for him to engage me in enthusiastic talk. He was in frozen foods and had an earring. I said Bejam made me think of mortuaries and he looked ever so surprised. Lonely, I think. He calls it ‘chilled food’, which is worse.

Interview in the Telegraph as if dictated by a tipsy secretary while I was out. Under the sub-heading Authentic Bard: The Man Who Came in from the Globe, I am referred to as ‘the infamous director who sports a piratical eye-patch and believes in humours, vital spirits, and actors learning lifeless hand gestures by rote – because that, he firmly believes, is how it was done in Shakespeare’s time. While admittedly different, even strange, his efforts haven’t enchanted everyone: tourists, for instance, are staying away in droves, and that’s got the Arts Council very worried indeed.’ Headless chicken sort of journalism, but it still has such a debilitating effect. What will happen when I’m not around to reply?

A Damascus moment followed from this, however: while over at the house, still irritated, suddenly saw it as a sort of brain, balancing the more muscular practicals up in Eilrig Lodge. A fine reference library, dorms, intimate performance space on the usual lines, lectures on Elizabethan acting from renowned specialists, seasonal courses on rhetoric, wit, rhythm, the science of gesture, theatrical decorum, court manners and so forth, lovely garden and good meals, retreat weeks for harassed actors, with cornettos and crumhorns (or even the odd Jacobean masque) on the tended lawn. The Eilrig Foundation’s a charity and we could say it’s for ‘young people’ with our hand on our hearts. The local authority will fight it but who cares about them? I’ll phone Barry about it tomorrow. Pull out the plug and sluice away the junk, everything to do with that past. What an unhappy place.

Found an old cigarette card on the stairs: Betty Nuthall, Wimbledon star of around 1930! Must have been mine, once. Didn’t notice it yesterday. She’s playing around the baseline with bobbed hair, sexy white stockings, loose blouse; a neat hedge and glimpse of mock-Tudor beyond, but no leaves on the trees. As if someone had propped it on the top step, just for me.

All the wallpaper’s the same except some dribbly stuff in the ‘morning-room’. Scared by a bat floundering in front of my face for a moment in Mother’s room.

Interview over the phone for Kaleidoscope. Interviewer ‘A man in all the world’s new fashion planted/That hath a mint of phrases in his brain’, but without Don Adriano’s panache. He kept saying I was turning the clock back and why? I said I’m not turning the clock back, I’m taking it off the wall and mending it. He drawled the word ‘musical’ as if he meant the noun, not the adjective, and quoted my enemies who claim my theories are built on inhibitions and I said that’s absolutely right, early acting is built on control and inhibition as early instruments are built from seasoned wood. It only encourages me to write my book as a sense of mission, like Tyndale’s Bible. Finished with my favourite: ‘As M. Clemenceau said, passing a pretty girl at the age of seventy – Oh, to be sixty again!’ He laughed, aged I should think thirty.

Barry thinks my ideas feasible in terms of the conditions of the will but it means putting the Social Services appointment off until late next week. He said he’d ‘sort it’, anyway. I hope they don’t smell a rat. Their disturbed youngsters can find somewhere else to disturb, surely. I suppose I’m flying in the teeth of Aunt Rachael’s post-mortem intentions but draw succour from the thought that a Historical Performance Research Centre (working title) would go so completely against Uncle E’s desires. Like sitting on his face, to use a yobbish expression.

Organised a handyman to clear the garden, but he didn’t turn up. Gorgeous, sad time of year, this, hazy with bonfire smoke: leaves falling, conkers bulging from their gourds like blind eyes staring up at blue sloes, red hawthorn and beechmast and scudding swift skies. Rather cold today. Stripped elderberry bushes and ate the berries raw as I did sixty years ago. Crab-apples on same old gnarled tree at lane’s corner. Walked through the beechwood at bottom of garden and on into the field: stubble freshly burned and one of the tumuli badly scorched. Lots of equally cindered crows above it, still with bad throats shouting ‘hodge-podge’, as of yore.

Country feels empty off the roads, these days. Just the odd machine doing something agricultural, and distant high-powered noises. Stood on the charred left tumulus for a bit. The shallow depression around it presumably all that remains of Uncle E’s trench.

After supper, took a moonlit walk to the house. Pungent sludge of windfalls in the orchard on the lane made me feel sick. House like a great black cliff against the moonlit sky. Thought I could hear more bats so stopped myself going in. No whiffs of wild garlic on the lawn or anywhere else. Defied my own silly fears just by walking about in the garden with my back to the mournful old face. Bloodshot eyeball watching me through a tear in the lino, of course.

Writing this in bed. Obscurely excited. It must be the project, or the fact that I dared myself and won.

A good breezy walk over the open downs, at least seven miles. Touched when a bent old man in front of the shop said, ‘Hello, Hugh boy.’ Identified himself as Jimmy Herring, the pimply clerk in the Post Office who’d save me first-day stamps – and suddenly quite obvious under the wrinkles and creases, as if all that he needed was a good airing. A few threads of belonging, though I never felt I belonged. Some good times here, mostly when Mother came back on leave. The memoir makes her oddly remote: when I think of her these days she’s almost stiflingly close, as if my head is buried in her skirts. Starch and woodsmoke and sweaty legs. I think when I was forty I still felt betrayed by her leaving us so abruptly.

Lunch anyway at Pottinger’s Mill aka the Mill House Restaurant, pricey-posh. Strolled there by the old muddy path now officially entitled ‘The River Walk’, with stone or metal sculptures covered in graffiti called things like Isopod 2 next to fogged-up display boards of herons, otters, obscure waterfly, etc. Didn’t see any, of course, and therefore felt let down.

Ate desultory poulet basquaise quite possibly on the same spot Mother saved Ted Dart in asthma attack by holding him like Jesus but no identifying points – huge picture window where door was, false walls, hired bric-à-brac, not even a case of ‘thereabouts’. Weedy yard now full of white gravel and smart cars. Recognised by discreetly cultivated couples, but by staring back at them I clearly wasn’t Hugh Arkwright, despite the eye-patch. Not all ship’s cooks with peg-legs and parrots are Long John Silver.

Sudden momentary conviction on the loo that I should forget the research centre idea and simply hand over the house as agreed. When I told Barry about sluicing away the junk, he went on about me being entitled to the ‘chattels’ – but I insisted I didn’t want to start burrowing. If there’s a chest of doubloons up there then let Oxfam have it, or whoever. Certainly the terms of the lease mean the place has to be empty. Feel pushed about by this damn will – presumably not Aunt Rachael’s aim. Just that I shouldn’t have the house, only the responsibility of handing it over to the Good Cause. Can’t say it’s vindictive, exactly.

Anyway, let the Good Cause be Shakespeare. The English poetic drama. Nothing finer, in the end.

Nuncle will be writhing in his grave. Or wherever in the wildwood his ashes landed on that gusty wet morning. I think he really did believe it would leap over the fence and smother us all under its melancholy boughs, smother our silly chatter and din, the moment his burnt offering touched the mould – and it hasn’t spread an inch, just grown scruffier at the edges. Rather an attractive notion, Britain as one great greenwood, when I think about it! Oh dear. Morris asking me once why I loathed my uncle so and me saying I might tell one day – on my deathbed. I told Dr Wolff, but that was different.

Missed church service, wandered about around the graveyard looking for Aunt Joy’s stone and two more ancients on a bench greeted me as if I’d been away a week. They’ve usurped names belonging to rough lads from my past, big crop-headed bullies who’ve just stayed here, growing older and older until the choice not to not leave has gone and soon they’ll be part of the wind.

Good roast for lunch. Friendly couple run this place: Jessica and Roger Marlow. Told me she was a fringe actress, once. Lovely throaty laugh.

Passing posh country residence that used to be a tatty farm off the Fogbourne Road, I saw a youngish man in the garden peeing into an immaculately clipped privet. He had a three-piece suit and tie on. Swing on the lawn but no sign of kids on this lovely day. All packed off to school, leaving him free to piss with abandon into his privet.

Organised another handyman-gardener, one John Wall (of the unpleasant Wall clan, though he said there was only his mother). ‘Hello, Mr Arkwright,’ he said, as if he knew me from somewhere. He has a limp and is pasty-faced and looks as if he’s about to snigger all the time, but I think it’s shyness. He likes to use weed-killer and wants a big sit-up mower to tackle the lawn but I put him right on the last two counts. He’s about forty but could be a barely-pubic fifteen (especially his voice, poor thing), and I guess he’s gay but has never been allowed to realise it and so remains with Mum accumulating hang-ups. We found cobwebbed tools in the main shed but I don’t know if he’ll use them. I said if he wants to hire a motor-mower that’s up to him, but I have no car. All I want is the garden to be de-jungled so that I can see things more clearly. These people are always in love with technology, anything that smokes and makes a big noise.

I stood in the attic for a while. Vaguely recognisable bits and bobs, like lines from long-ago reps. Some African souvenirs dumped by Father on his ignominious return: masks, stools, skins of snake and crocodile and the big leopard pelt he spent weeks tanning, an awful job. Something terribly creepy about old animal skins, too bestial by half and completely dead and vanquished but still grinning.

Beyond the decades’ broken furnishings spotted one of the big bamboo-ribbed trunks we’d had in Bamakum. Locked. I think it was there not long after Mother left us. The dust was awful every time I lifted something and my ankle-bones are bruised. Nothing induces me to ‘sort it’, and anyway it would take weeks. No leaks in the joists and no bats, only mice which I don’t mind. So the roofs intact. Perhaps what we need is a big pyre.

A pint literally to lay the dust in the Never Fear and to take soundings on John Wall. A man in braces said he’d heard I was to get John a big sit-up mower and something called a bush-cutter. ‘Oh dear,’ I replied. A hairy man with as high a voice as Wall said that the trouble with John boy is that he thinks he’s Damon Hill and then Braces made a jerky movement with the flat of his hand on the bar, growling. Everyone laughed: the jerkiness was the limp and the growl a racing car. Thirty years ago it would have been Graham, not Damon. With another cripple to rag.

Sitting on a bench in the square, studying the pond’s ducks. A disturbing day, as they say.

Popped into the village stores this morning and Marjorie Hobbs was behind the counter. Actually she’s now a Rose, married one of them a generation back and come through to widowhood without my seeing. Same pleasing pre-war smells of wax polish and dry goods, and still all basically dog chews, woven name-tapes, metal hairgrips and mopheads, plus the usual tinned groceries and some feeble-looking greens. Fluorescent bits and bobs for kids but otherwise no concessions to progress. Remembered how I used to fancy Marjorie’s mother when I was pimpled and now the little daughter in ribbons is a fat fifty-odd. An old bird hunched up in a basket chair by the door leading off to the living quarters but I didn’t make the connection. Marjorie said she had seen me pass the window and how was I doing?

‘It’s Mr Arnold, Ma,’ she called. I mumbled Arkwright but saw that Gracie was responding so went over to her and shook her hand, all soft folds of skin yet bony like a little bird’s. She has the same twinkles for eyes, but everything else has gone as it was based on a sort of yeasty plumpness, leaning her full chest on the counter and smelling of split peas and tea as she strained to hear my blushing thruppenny orders.

Of course I’ve seen her since, but how many times have I been back in the last fifty years? A handful, and not at all since 1974.

Gracie genuinely pleased to see me – I am still the little boy. We somehow got on to Mother. She liked Mother, called her ‘handsome’ and ‘a proper lady’. This doesn’t mean posh, it means charm and treating the shopkeeper as a person. No mention of Uncle E. Then she leaned forward, whispering. I didn’t catch it at first: her false teeth loose, my ears going. Something about walking. My mother liked walking and was deaf? Was staying where?

I nodded as if she’d told me the price of bacon was up. My hand was gripped in hers.

‘How did she look?’ Daft question, but Gracie replied, ‘Famous.’ Serves me right.

Reflecting on it now by the pond. The most moving fact is that Mother is still present in the collective memory. Much more important than the fact that it’s all whimsical nonsense. There was no death, for a start. I’d have asked more daft questions but Gracie started to choke on a cough and Marjorie ushered her away into the shadows. One truly wonders if it is less tiring to be a duck than a human.

Guardian article by Emma Murphy fine except for a sudden veiled attack on our use of boy-players, as if we’re denting the feminist cause in the name of authenticity. Even the early music brigade would admit that a decent treble beats a decent soprano in terms of limpidity and poignancy. Our boy-players are expert virtuosos after five years at Eilrig; if choir schools do it, so can we. Then they grow up and are as finely honed as any opera-singer.

She also mentioned the new Globe going up, as if I had something to do with it. I had said that if it had been erected anywhere else, I might have done – but where it is will mean block-bookings by Americans and a lot of compromise. Like the RSC not getting the hell out of Stratford, despite all my efforts. I don’t believe in spirit of place. Not a word of this appeared, of course.

Have just read that nasty paragraph again. It’s a little like that chap from the lighting union who went on in the name of his members about our sticking to steady ‘daylight’, whingeing away about our usual absence of effects bar the winched awning and the flaming torch: As if keeping some truculent Sparks happy is more important than honouring Shakespeare.

I wrote a letter after breakfast and then tore it up. Other more pressing tasks. Mainly wandering about the house and imagining its new role. Have removed some of the looser coverings from the windows but the dust is too awful. Let it rest in its gloom until we’re certain.

Spent the rest of the day on the phone to all the people who have to be activated if the new project is to work. Andrew Barnes said that the Lottery is going to reap a windfall for the arts. I said we’ve always been a nation of wasters and spenders: it’ll just mean everywhere will be covered in scaffolding and closed.

Late drink in the Never Fear marred by a big slow man in a smelly flared suit producing little squares of paper on which he wrote apothegms in laborious block capitals. My pockets are now full of them: YOU CAN STAND AND TAKE THE PISS BUT EVERY TIME YOU SHOOT YOU MISS, and so forth. GIVE INSTRUCTIONS TO A WISE MAN HE WILL BE YET WISER AND TO A FOOL IT IS WATER ON COLD STONE. Perhaps he meant to be threatening, but otherwise he never said a word. No sign of our leery coalman, thank God.

Rain, rain, rain. Depressed and strangely exhausted. Suddenly no deadlines, no opening nights. No strung terror that it won’t be ready or any good. Just the fear that without me the enemy will close. What was it Pascal said about each one of us being everything to ourselves, because when we die, the whole dies with us? That is the illusion, anyway.

Dreams about Mother, droll rather than pleasant or sad. She gives me used-up ration-books and there are sirens and she disappears, that sort of thing. I showed her the searchlight this morning (which turned out to be the sun through the curtains), and she was impressed, but I kept looking out for the Junkers over the Humber. She left us six years before all that nonsense.

This comes of reading the childhood memoir, which I finished after lunch. Stops abruptly at the bad news. Seems like another life, another person. But I’m behind the same mask, playing the same story. On looking out a few minutes ago through the streaming blur I saw a chap in cricketing togs sheltering in the bus-stop and assumed, before I could check myself, that it was Herbert E. Standing.

Ten days here and it feels like three, I’ve achieved so little. Have made appointments in London for early next week. Hamlet is sold out for the run: appreciative Japanese tourists who are used to Noh, probably. If only Burbage or someone had preserved it all like the Shogun did at exactly the same time. Alas, we have no equivalent of Zeami’s Kadensho. Seven books on how to achieve the ‘flower’, that mysterious and supreme beauty of performance. My own effort is merely a shoring of scattered fragments with the glue of intelligent surmise. A 5,000-piece puzzle left out in the rain, scattered through the dark woods of neglect.

Today dank but not raining. Showed Barry and Andrew Barnes around the house. John Wall has made cursory inroads into the tangle, but both came in only their prissy city shoes and Andrew wore his long cream gaberdine – which of course got spotted the moment we entered the house, groping about with my little torch. I didn’t prise away any more lino and carpet doping as there are broken windows and it would invite natural and human invaders. Anyway, Andrew and Barry agreed it was only feasible if the place was gutted.

What a place to be a boy in, they said. Not sure whether this meant that I’d been lucky or unlucky.

Have made new living arrangements for myself. Wanting to avoid that mute Dr Johnson in the Never Fear, tried the Green Man at the far end of the village. Except for the neon strips, hasn’t budged an inch since it was my occasional furtive haunt just before the war. Buttoned horsehair seats, Player’s floor mats, bedraggled dartboard, bleach-and-beer smell, fat tabby curled on a bentwood chair. Farm-labourer types in camouflage jackets, no music. Ted behind the bar in Roy Orbison specs and cardie has to be since my era. It came up that he had an attic room which from time to time had been used for guests – workers on six months’ contracts in the area, etc. He did a decent breakfast. One of the customers said he should get Maisie to do the fried eggs. Ted didn’t like that – mumbled an explanation that his wife did the breakfasts when this was a proper ‘inn’ but she went and ‘let him down’ – i.e. ran off with a lover, I presume.

We went up to have a look and it really is a garret but not without charm, split in two by a thin partition. The bathroom’s just below on a floor otherwise populated by empty numbered rooms. The deeper room has only a tiny skylight – Ted said he’d find a lamp. He also reckoned he had a solid table somewhere and a little cooker, otherwise the furnishings are what one used to call humble and the floor is joyfully to boards with only a frayed rug. Will pay half what I’m charged at the Old Barn and it’ll feel less hotel-like, more like digs. David confirmed the villa’s free through the winter. I told Ted I’d take the room to November and then we’d see.

A lacklustre day scribbling ideas about the research centre. I took the deposit to Ted and to check if the place was quiet in the evenings. The awful coalman and John Wall were in there, playing darts. They seem to know each other. I mean, they seem to be friends. Even in the pub John Wall looks as if he’s never had to fetch his own slippers. Morris’s gay-detecting radar (or gaydar!) would bleep feebly next to him but I don’t suppose the poor chap himself has any idea.

I couldn’t avoid them, of course, and the subject of the house came up. The coalman’s name is Frank Petty. ‘However, I am knowed as Muck.’ I’m not surprised. He went on again about ‘nice Mrs Arnold’, and then had the cheek to ask me ‘ezackerly what relation’ she was to me. Again with that horrible leer. I can’t imagine that there was anything between them, even twenty-odd years ago – the man is like a little tub with a flat gristly face and a swollen mouth in which his front teeth are so worn as to be virtually missing. Tiny eyes, reddish from drink and weather and some tainted vehemence. Smells of public lavatories and foxholes. Mind you, age does awful things. I replied that she was my uncle’s wife, and no blood-relation of mine. Then this preposterous wink, and a snigger from John Wall. I am not trowelling down any further: Aunt Rachael was a sad, bitter mystery to me. Leave well alone.

More on the house being ‘troubled’, however. John Wall threw a dart into the upper division but it dangled from a loose piece of felt. ‘That counts,’ he said. Coalman Muck, turning to me, said, ‘Hark at the old boy, he reckons that counts.’ I replied that it would if it didn’t fall, whereupon the man stamped hard on the floor and the damn thing fell out. To my surprise, John Wall calmly lowered his score without counting the offending dart. Muck clearly felt uneasy and turned to me again; ‘Fair, weren’t it, Mr Arkwright?’ I said that I reserved judgement, as Mr Wall didn’t seem to mind. Muck then pointed his dart at me and said, ‘That’s what all clever chaps say. That’s what you’d say about your bogyman, Mr Arkwright.’

Muck threw his dart angrily into the bull and was so flushed with his success that the bogywoman vanished as quickly as she’d appeared, to my relief. Something about its name made my heart’s little flame flare up for an instant, as if I knew it from my childhood. But I’m sure I don’t.

Stood at the back during the Family Service and tried not to think too much about ghosts. The fragments of medieval wall-paintings are wonderful, I’d forgotten how wonderful they were. We have something to thank the German bombs for, since it was a bomb that cracked the whitewash. Maybe I only saw them that one time, when the plaster was still all over the pews. Fewer hats, but even more old ladies, including Gracie. Insurance policy, I suppose. Eager kids making a lot of noise, harmless sermon on beasts. Do beasts have souls? That has always struck me as Christianity’s fault-line. The fat, jolly vicar hopped over it with aplomb and kept to pandas.

People looked at me but I slipped out afterwards, wandering between the graves again. No official death and nothing to bury, even. Mother, I’m talking about. Somehow the plot in Ulverton churchyard never marked with a stone, a memorial stone. I have no idea where this plot was or even is, perhaps it was mythical or used up by some complete stranger: we somehow never gave up hope and then forgot. No sign of Aunt Joy’s, though I’m sure it was near the kiss-me gate into the paddock.

Spotted Gracie between the stones, with a bunch of flowers. Herbert Hobbs’s grave, of course, space on it left for her. I mentioned this business about Mother’s plot – felt empty-handed with nowhere to go. She mumbled something about singing carols. ‘That’s when I saw your mum, clear as day,’ she said. On the way back from the village carol-round, as far as I could gather. Mother always loved carols. I wanted to cry.

The junk is in layers, every time I move one thing, another appears or falls out of it. They must have got rid of much less at the auction than I realised. Kept stopping at the thought of a bat about to flutter out blindly towards my face. The thought worse than the deed. I know they’re protected and all that, but have a horror of their fat little bodies and complicated rodent faces, let alone their leathern wings. Not even sure what I’m looking for, but you never know.

A long walk to clear my head in indifferent milky weather, returned via the house. No sign of Wall though half the lawn is cut.

Begin to see the bones of the exploit flesh. Once the windows are unblocked and the nettles and brambles cut away from the walls and front door, it will blink and open its eyes and breathe. Had no heart to go inside and anyway left the key in my room.

Tried to penetrate the wildwood and remembered the strict injunctions of Nuncle not to. Stood on the edge where the old wire fence lay rusting in nettles and stared for a little while, thinking. Then I walked deliberately in.

The scratches still painful on my ankles and knuckles, though I didn’t get very far. A fat, familiar face passed me in the square on my return and I beamed back and of course it was the Vicar in a polo-neck. Had never heard of any of us Arkwrights or even Arnolds, yet gave the impression that he had considered our souls all week. I mentioned the two plots and he said that he’d get his parish clerk to look up the relevant documents. The Vicar’s name is Oliver, Eddie Oliver. Sounds like an extinct music-hall act, with whistling solos and imitations of animals. The type Ulverton Village Hall used to host. He mentioned something about a Mrs Prat and mummers, when he understood that I was ‘on the stage’. Vicars are much too hassled by life and death to concern themselves with earth-changing characters like me.

Unbelievably, the Mrs Prat (whose name fits her like a hat) accosted me in the village shop about an hour ago. That damned eye-patch again. Planning a traditional Xmas festivity with mummers, folk dances, etc. Could I pop in to give a professional hand with the mumming play? Now and again? Reminded me that my uncle had started the Ulverton Folk-Life Society. I looked steely and said that if I were to help, it would be in my capacity as a theatre professional, not as Edward Arnold’s nephew.

Evening: Bush-telegraph, my word! A Malcolm Villiers, the director of operations, has just phoned and invited me to tea on Thursday. Sounded nervous and/or depressed. Told him that Hardy’s proof of an authentic village folk ritual was the bored, miserable look of the participants. He chuckled and sounded jolly.

Took a deep breath and mentioned the Red Lady to the agreeable Jessica Marlow before supper. It’s because I can’t get rid of this flary little flame in my chest, every time I think about her (the Red Lady, not Jessica). She said I should meet Ray Duckett, the local history man. She’s got his book on Ulverton’s ghosts somewhere; will lend it to me. Duckett, she added, is very ill with cancer in a private nursing home outside Netherford. He’s bound to pass away minutes before I reach him.

An unsteady centenarian on stork-like legs entered the bar and it was none other than old Moon, the strapping blacksmith whose anvil used to vie with the church bell. He’s stone deaf. The yard’s now an up-market garage, but still Moon’s. Perhaps he’ll just go on and on, his heart wrought in iron.

Writing this in Morris’s spare room with that gorgeous rumble of London below. Rumbling river of life.

Arrived at Paddington in a fluorescent-jacketed bombscare and everything terribly loud after the country. Everyone shouting over unoiled moving parts. Throbbings, stinky smells, the air stinging the eyes. Cypriot taxi driver bawling his opinions. But a relief. Unpleasant sense that back there in the country everything’s paused, waiting for me. Even the leaves not dropping or even trembling. Even Mrs Prat of the flowery cravat not bearing down on anyone. Everything just suspended and waiting for me to come down the road as if back from the war. Like my uncle did, apparently. Actually walking down the lane in uniform and dusty face, backpack, wheezing from the gas and not in possession of all his marbles.

Interrupted Morris installing the Internet – which is just more displacement activity and will end up being taken over by the disturbed, but he disagrees and thinks it’s the most important advance since Gutenberg. Tried Arkwright, Hugh: forty-two entries. Fourteen for some baseball player called Hugo ‘Choppie’ Arkwright Jr, the rest a mixed bag of adulation and nastiness, mostly out of date, and mis-spelling Eilrig. We went to an Italian with tiles as green as old Burkett’s the poulterer’s in Brompton Road and talked of that old drab half-lit London, whether it was better than the bloodshot star-shell frenzy of today’s. Decided it was because now we’re old and less able to jig about.

Morris spent his first night ever here in the long-gone Cavendish Hotel, but I couldn’t remember where I’d stayed with Mother, only that it was near Peter Jones – where only four years later I went shopping with her for the very last time, buying that fancy red coat for Buea. Twirling in front of the mirror between all that stifling cloth and saying she was tired of looking ‘bush’, she was going to look ‘fancy’, but would it clash with the hibiscus? Such a happy image, and the shopwoman saying how lovely she looked. I don’t suppose she ever wore it. Of course she never wore it. She vanished before Christmas, just before their Christmas up in chilly Buea. Morris let me talk because he was just as sloshed. He told me that I never talk about my mother. He has decided to abandon his hair to whiteness and it makes him look blacker and very dignified, like an ambassador. I said the great shock on arrival in this country was the milling multitudes of white faces. Morris recalled Missouri and his childhood just like a Faulkner novel, the Americans so awful and unbelievably racist while in Africa itself the English were racist in a weak well-meaning way, but the effects were in the end the same. I do understand now why he never went back apart from falling in love with a Cambridge chap, and perhaps why he’s my closest and most loyal friend. Mutually loyal. He reminds me of my friend the servant called Quiri sometimes, whose servantness was like an irritating obstacle and Morris has done away with that. Quiri is probably dead now.

Feeling horribly furred up inside, had to spend the whole day meeting people individually or in meetings trying to stir up enthusiasm. Much emphasis from everyone on ‘youth’, ‘multi-ethnicity’ and of course ‘accessibility’, which I keep thinking means having ramps. Dan Hartley questioned my record on blind casting which is absurd, I have never once picked an actor for a role on account of his or her colour and he’s confusing critics (attacking our ‘authenticity’ on just this basis) with our own policy. Imelda Tupp (pure coincidence) then pointed out that my Othello was a white actor blacked up and I said, ‘Exactly, Ms Tupp, and my Iago was of Asian origin, the brilliant Nadeem Rafiq.’

Want sometimes to say shuddup very loudly but these people hold me in their sweaty palms. Always the implication that one is guilty and on trial to prove it, with nothing registered of one’s achievements that doesn’t fit into one of those silly little boxes on the forms. They have never liked the fact that I only use actors who’ve been trained in Eilrig which Bill Saynor, that awful old potato-faced pseud, keeps calling the All Right Method. The only clever idea he’s ever had, yet he’s up there at the top doling out the dosh, with immense powers to create and destroy.

Now I’m back in the dark, quiet countryside with murmurs from the hotel bar below and an owl that sounds as if it’s been wound up. Odd swish of a car. Feeling a bit drained and old. The moment your back’s turned! New young bucks who are deliberately letting rip at our achievements; if they take over in a few years or so at the RSC we’ll weaken our hold there and will again be seeking our own space.

The Research Centre shall be another little flame at the heart, keeping our blood clean and scarlet.

Social Services meeting in Netherford’s new overheated council offices. Much humming and hawing re feasibility of turning Ilythia into home for maladjusted youths (money, basically) and still awaiting architect’s report, so we have a bit of grace. Kept mum in meeting but had already warned Brian Padmore, the jolly but ineffective solicitor here, that I was considering setting up my own project, charitably within the terms of the will. Row of neckties like bellpulls facing me, plush room furnished by racked-up rents. Emerged feeling jaded and dull, like them. These places cast a malign spell.

Tea with Malcolm Villiers. Lives next door to John Wall and his mum, one half of same double-cottage. Jed the bilious gamekeeper had it in my time, patrolling woods now criss-crossed by public paths behind the new private housing estate. The spirits of him and his mucky little spaniel must be having a fit.

Malcolm a nice shy chap with a beard and the usual roster of views to go with it, but we didn’t fall out. He’s divorced with a little girl whose presence was in the withered flowers in a jam jar on the kitchen table and some rather disturbing paintings. He blamed his neighbour for his marital breakdown: some extraordinary story about Wall’s father falling ill and being treated with Chinese herbs by Mrs Villiers. They then fell out over an incident with the Wall’s vicious little dog until Jack Wall came back one day covered in blisters and with streaming eyes, demanding to see Mrs Villiers. She stayed with him until he was taken off to hospital and he died there the next day. Whereafter she was regarded as a murdering witch and under that pressure their marriage fell apart. Wall Senior was a nasty piece of work and a well-known badger-baiter. The official verdict was arsenic poisoning. Malcolm relieved to hear that I hadn’t heard it already and I think by telling me he was pre-empting false versions. It was probably rat poison carelessly used against some harmless woodland beast. Country ways haven’t changed, I said.

Our conversation revolved otherwise around Nuncle, for whom Malcolm has an unhealthy admiration. Most excited when I told him about I, Nubat, of the Forest People as illustration of just how childishly dotty Edward Arnold was. He wondered if he could get hold of a copy and I told him it was very rare. He looked shocked suddenly at something over my shoulder and on turning round I saw John Wall staring in at the window.

He entered and told us that his mother had ‘taken a fall’. Malcolm groaned and looked fed up so I went round and sure enough Mrs Wall was bleeding profusely from her nose and forehead, swearing like mad at her son as he came in. Plop, plop, plop went the blood on the table’s oilcloth: dark red on green. I dabbed her with a wet flannel and was struck by whiffs from her cardigan of expensive perfume. Big telly blaring, cheap fittings, lino below and bare bulb above, yet fundamentally the house is a mirror-image of Malcolm’s, which is put to pine and a cosy scatter of antique junk, rugs, etc.

John Wall looked on benignly as his mother swore at him and then the two tottered off down the lane to the doctor’s, she not changing her boots or donning a coat. Dark blots all over the table and the floor – I had half a mind to clean it up. But didn’t. Malcolm said on my return that it happens regularly and it’s probably somehow John Wall’s doing. My hands still smell of the woman: sour and sweet. There really is so much blood in the forehead, right against the bone.

Maybe the howling of wolves at a bomber’s moon, but have unearthed something rather startling. To mix a metaphor.

On my way to the house, popped into the doctor’s surgery (bright, like a kindergarten, with no horrible maps of the body’s regions these days) and checked up on Mrs Wall’s welfare; receptionist amused that I’d bothered.

Saw thick smoke from the lane and thought the house was on fire. John Wall burning leaves in the garden. No mention of yesterday, so I didn’t hang about but disappeared into the attic and put away some bits and bobs using cardboard boxes from the shop. Seeing Wall had gone home for lunch, I went down once more to the wildwood’s edge.

Pungent smell of wood garlic, no doubt about it. Rich and vegetative and profound, like nothing else, not even much like French cooking. Have confirmed in flower book here just now in the hotel lounge that wood garlic or ‘ramsons’ (Allium ursinum) is over and done with by July, like the bluebell. (Aunt Joy always called them ‘ransoms’, I remember.) The smell was in a sort of invisible cloud which after a few minutes had passed away. I walked back and forth along the ferny edge in the rain but there was nothing.

Went back for a spirit-summoning Scotch in hotel bar and Jessica came up very excited with Duckett’s book, Ulverton and Her Ghosts. Crudely drawn illustrations of ghostly shepherds with lamps, big black dogs, skeletal shadows, etc. However, the passage on Ilythia and the Red Lady so shook me that I ordered a double. Here it is.

Further up the lane, past the old apple orchard, is a large, rather gloomy house, long empty, once the home of the well-known author and mystic, Edward Arnold. I remember him as an eccentric old man, sporting in all weathers an old tweed smoking jacket and a bamboo-handled umbrella – which would stay rolled even in rain! He died in 1965, and was survived for several years by his much-younger widow, a recluse in chronic ill-health. I believe the property has now passed into the hands of Arnold’s nephew, the theatre personality Hugh Arkwright [sic]. The house is called ‘Ilythia’, the nameplate still legible on the gate.

An empty house is as inviting for ghosts as it is for wasps, as we have already seen. But ‘Ilythia’ – the name of an obscure Greek goddess, in charge of child bearing – is certainly haunted, and was so long before the shutters went up [shutters?]. Apart from the odd but unconfirmed sighting of lights burning in the windows at strange hours, several people have seen a ghostly lady walking in the grounds – but only, apparently, in snowy weather. In each case, immediate investigation has shown no footprints. She is dressed in a red coat, with black hair, and has the peculiar quality, for a ghost, of having a dark skin. Both Miss Eva Oadam and Mr Frank Petty maintained that her skin was tanned, as if she had been sun-bathing. The late Miss Eva Oadam saw a bright-red coat gliding over the lawn on a snowy day in the early 1970s, though she also saw an accompanying pair of bloomers and three hovering brassières – I am tempted to conclude that a washing-line might have played a role! Mr Frank Petty’s report is more interesting: in his own words – ‘I was delivering coal to the late Mrs R.S. Arnold, when I looked up from the bunker, where I had just emptied my sack. I saw a woman – certainly not Mrs R.S. Arnold – walking across the lawn. She was at some little distance from me, and it occurred to me then that she might be the so-called Red Lady. I didn’t feel frightened, but unfortunately the coal dust made me cough, and she vanished, as if I’d startled her. She must have the hearing of a deer! She’d been walking towards the wood at the bottom of the garden, across thick snow. The snow was undisturbed, however: the only prints on the lawn that I could see were those of birds. I didn’t talk about it to Mrs Arnold, for fear of causing her alarm, as she was of a nervous disposition.’

Another witness, Mrs Enid Bradman, saw a red-coated lady walking down Crab-Apple Lane during snowy weather, probably in 1982, but cannot recall whether it was in the vicinity of the Arnold house or nearer the village centre. She was already aware of the previous sightings.

Mrs Grace Hobbs (who runs our general stores), says that she believes the ghost to be that of Mr Arnold’s first wife [sic], who died at the same time as Mrs Hobbs’s sighting, which took place in the early Thirties. The first Mrs Arnold spent much of her time in Africa, which might account for the tanned skin; she eventually died out there in mysterious circumstances, many thousands of miles from her home. However, there are various anomalies in this case. First, Mrs Hobbs saw the ghost, not by the house but in the snow-covered lane, gliding swiftly towards the gate. Secondly, it is usually someone very close to the deceased, and not a bare acquaintance, who receives a vision of the person at the moment of his or her death. Thirdly, the ghost in such a case does not usually return.

I have not been able to track down any other witnesses . . .

He then ‘field-tests’ the snow theory himself, crouching behind a bush on the lawn, but is merely troubled by cold and the whining of his dog. Of course the dog has to whine.

Jessica tells me that Enid Bradman died last year after being pushed over by a mugger, and was full of tales. But what a nice woman – she saved the old barn from being demolished, for a start. Mugger never caught, but they think it was someone local. She trod on so many toes. That’s one thing I won’t be doing, I said. Mugging, or treading on toes, Hugh? I do like Jessica, I really do. Maybe Enid Bradman’s something to do with Herbert Bradman. Nuncle was very keen on him – almost as dotty, as far as I recall.

Anyway, I need to see Gracie again. I’m sitting here at the sloping desk with my heart flaring and my forehead sweaty like a frightened, excited little boy.

I need to ask her about the redness of the Red Lady. Whether it was close to vermilion. Whether it would clash with the hibiscus, as it were.

Jessica wondered when I would be staying to and I confessed that I was moving to the Green Man next week. She seemed relieved not sad – there’s a big party of geologists coming and it looks as if they’re under-booked, so I’ve had to hurry Ted up.

Went into the Green Man to see Ted and again Mr Muck and John Wall were there. I don’t know how but the tale of Jack Wall’s demise came up. Muck whispered to me conspiratorially while John Wall grinned inanely yet with cunning in his eyes that arsenic had been found on Mrs Maddy Villiers’s fingers and that she’d actually been arrested! Released for lack of evidence, apparently. One can see why this was left out by Malcolm but then what else was left out?

Muck was a bit past it on barley wine, drawly accent even drawlier, but I did mention his ‘sighting’. He said it would cost me a glass of same to know more. I relented, of course. He then gave me an idiolectal version of his appearance in Ray Duckett’s book, but with no extra facts. I thanked him. There was a pause, and he said, leering at me: ‘Oh yes, we have some fond memories of young Mrs Arnold, don’t us, John?’ John nodded, beaming. ‘I expects you do, too, Mr Arkwright,’ the coalman added. There was something so horrible about his look, the way he eyed me then, that I felt physically sickened and had to bid them a hasty goodnight. I find their company more irritating than picturesque and will be coldly polite from now on. No reason why John Wall shouldn’t continue doing his bit for me, however.

Rehearsal in the village hall, still a corrugated tin shed lined warmly inside with waxy wood, but painted green, not brown. Spare the details of the pudding of a ritual drama that Malcolm’s struggling to produce, except that he’s throwing in dollops (or wallops) of a Sword Play, a Wooing Play, and a Hero-Combat Play and stirring hard. Mrs Pratt (apparently with two ts) introduced me as ‘terribly famous’, and everyone (including me) chortled with embarrassment. Felt so sorry for Malcolm as the débĉacle proceeded that I invited him to dinner at the Old Barn.

We talked theatre history, over the candles. Or theatre prehistory: hobby-horses rooted in centaurs, mumming in fertility rituals, all that misty-moor stuff. He mentioned that in Nuncle’s Harmonies of the Primitive there’s a photo of the Ulverton mumming troupe and the hobby-horse has a leopard skin draped on it. This is apparently because the Babylonian centaur was always depicted on vases and so forth with a leopard skin and wings. Uncle Edward dispensed with the wings, I said, because wings have a habit of falling off.

Malcolm didn’t smile over his vegetarian quiche. He wants to resurrect the leopard-skin practice. I didn’t say anything about my find in the attic – even though it must be the same skin. Instead I told him that this was a falsely exotic touch by my uncle, that no real mummers’ troupe in this country would ever have sported such a thing. I also repeated my assertion that most of what Edward Arnold wrote was second-hand tripe. He asked me over the pudding why I hated my uncle so much, just as Morris had asked me once. I gave a flustery sort of non-answer and we ended up talking about something else – music, I think. He teaches music and a bit of drama in various primary schools but with no great enthusiasm. He whinged on about everyone believing teachers are lazy whingers and I stopped myself making the obvious comment. A middlebrow touched with leftish views, which makes him think he’s radical: Mozart less ‘relevant’ than a rap song, Shakespeare an old dud, kids better off with a triangle and a couple of tom-toms than a violin. I’m amazed he talks to me at all.

Mother’s birthday. The day before the Feast Day of St Francis, we were reminded by Eddie the Vicar. A great number of little birds in the air but not much song yet. She’d have been easily still alive, not yet a hundred, a dear withered old thing with twinkly eyes. I wish there were candles to light in parish churches (but anyway they’re mostly locked). I did offer up a prayer in Holy Communion, and relished the taste of the wine. Perhaps it isn’t just wine. The arguments about this remind me of the arguments about the actor and his part. Passion is not less passionate for being feigned. One can be both possessed and in possession, both the mask and the face behind. The wine can be both plonk and blood.

Joined the coffee and biscuits afterwards in order to corner Gracie but was cornered in turn by Eddie, clearly thrilled by my zeal. I almost found myself in charge of hymn-books for the next few years, or something, but at least he introduced me to a snorty, snuffly little man called Mr Quallington – the parish clerk. Mr Q said he was terribly busy but at some point we could ‘go through’ the old sextonian documents for the whereabouts of the two plots. He made it out to be the greatest of chores. An ex-schoolmaster, is my guess. Gracie gave me the slip.

Afterwards I felt a sort of ancestral loneliness, unrelieved by walking (grisly grey weather, mashed-up leaves everywhere) or by reading. If I’d had children, then I would still have them, however ghastly or unsympathetic they’d turned out to be. Like Tom Everett’s daughters. Walking the Heath with someone calling you Daddy, gentle remonstrances, arm in yours, leaning on you at least.

Should I let a girlfriend happen? Someone of Jessica’s strength and maturity and jolly smile, easy ways, straightforward beauty? There are women who like old and difficult men who are gifted, have power. Play the sage.

But then I would be spoiling whoever I plucked, a ghastly parody of my one and only love. The old goat who spoiled it now played by me, buffoonishly. Can memory – a memory – be blighted in the same way? I have expended so much energy on dividing those golden memories of her from the Fall, and it has worked so far. She is two different people, and now she is dead anyway. Long dead. Her beauty can hang intact in my head and along my arms while her blighted second self can be decently buried.

Old goat? He was only in his early forties, then. My mother was not even that, she was thirty-nine when she left us. If she left us. This still seems old, because even to my boy’s eye she seemed physically younger, almost like a young girl, with the smooth skin of a young girl. Might have been to do with the soft, humid air of the out-station. She had shadows under her eyes and a thinness – but that was fever, that was Africa.

Watching a mother and her son over lunch today at the Mill. She rotund and wobbly, big laugh, probably has enormous house and dogs; he about ten, assured, probably at boarding prep, perhaps his birthday, but blue around the eyes and wearing a baseball cap over what looked like baldness. Maybe mortally ill.

I’m reminded by the childhood memoir how Mother never looked at me properly. This must have been because she knew she was going to lose me to England. Easier for both of us: buckling down her maternal instinct as cargo was buckled down in the steamer’s hold. She wasn’t the reserved type, otherwise. Jigging about to all those records. Laughing with the men at the Club in Victoria. Kissing Father.

But if England had been replaced by Death, she might have looked at me as the mother in the restaurant kept looking at her son. I did nearly die, of course, that time – that winter of snow. And that was the time she disappeared.

Later. Very pleased to be here, in Ted’s attic room, out of the hotel and into something I can call my own domain. He has found me an old table, an old round pub-table he removed years ago because it had accumulated obscene graffiti. He thought I wouldn’t mind and I don’t. There were obscene scribbles in Pompeii. He brought up the ‘lamp’ very proudly and it was one of those glass columns full of tumescent fluorescent ectoplasm that make me feel sick. And far too dim. Perhaps he thinks I have ultra-violet sight under my eye-patch (or knows I was an observer in the war). I thanked him, anyway.

The room smells of bleach, nicotine and underarms beneath the beer because Ted’s cleaning lady has only just done it. Ted is pleased to see me installed, but is nervous about breakfast, I can see that. Joe the Gelatine Was Here pencilled next to the door: the whole place, even the rooms below, occupied by a film crew shooting a documentary a few years back that I never even noticed. He said they drank him dry, sounding nostalgic. Not my thing, I’m afraid, I said.

Have made enquiries about Ray Duckett: he is installed in the Hazeldell Rest Home just south of Netherford. Am in no hurry. If I hurry I will screw things up.

My investigation into the mystery of the Red Lady, of course. Good grief, sounds like something Wilkie Collins might have put on in his drawing-room, for the delectation of the ladies. Or Now Showing at the Criterion Theatre. Six-foot letters in red on a black background, all over London: THE RED LADY MYSTERY. To what have I descended?

Anyway, I look upon this room as the show’s headquarters. Its sloping ceiling reminds me that it is an attic and I feel nicely high up. There is another attic less than a mile away and perhaps that holds a clue of some sort. There are suitcases and boxes and the big bamboo-ribbed trunk and piles of papers, mostly newspapers, and African souvenirs. So far I have found nothing.

But archaeology, I remember Keiller saying, is 99 per cent mud and boredom and wet winds up one’s back. Much like theatre.

Feel I am sitting here piloting a craft that is pitted against the great lump of the other thing, that if I tear open that lump I will find what I am looking for. Quite seriously, dear diary. But I can’t set it down yet. Not in so many words. I do have a few grains of superstition left.

Wrote postcards this morning: there is only one of Ulverton – the main street with lots of Ford Cortinas and women in dumpy coats and head-scarves. One of the coats is bright red, of course.

Went straight to the house after lunch, straight up to the attic, and then couldn’t bend over for indigestion. First things first, and first things are in there. I have of course made inroads but now I am more alert because more convinced. Found a pile of Mother’s warped gramophone records, mostly jazz, mostly cracked or broken in their paper sleeves. That might be a clue. I don’t know. I’m no detective. My heart is my magnifying glass: I thought of that while up there, coughing on the dust.

Finally cleared a path to the big trunk. On the way I found the fetish box, the one that looks like a stool or a drum. Father bought it off some trader. Said to contain many powerful fetishes. A lid but jammed tight, cloaked in cobwebs. Pandora’s Box, Mother called it.

The trunk had an Elder Dempster label on it with a picture of the steamer behind some palm trees and on the label was not only our name but a very faint date in ink: December 21st, 1933. I nearly passed away, of course.

This is the most likely date for Mother’s disappearance, around the solstice. Midwinter in England. Sap right down. Hardly any light. The blurred stamp over the date was of the port authorities, perhaps in Victoria. When I was a boy here I was forbidden to go up to the attic, as I was forbidden to go into the wildwood. The truth seems to be dropping into my hands. The trunk was locked. Horribly, thoughts of Ginevra entered my head. Climbed for a joke into a trunk on her wedding day and years later, when it was opened, was found as a skeleton in her wedding dress. Ginevra! Ginevra! Ginevra! the bridegroom had called, running up and down the corridors. Now he too was long dead.

There was a creak behind me and to my horror my torch-beam found John Wall’s head. I thought for a moment it had sort of rolled there – that it was just resting there after decapitation. So pasty. Then a sheepish smile broke across it. The rest of him emerged from the trap-door while I controlled my annoyance and made some joke about the junk. On clambering back I tripped over the leopard skin and its big skull flopped into view, snarling at us both.

He was most impressed and offered to clean the thing for me, then carried it down on his back. For all his weedy appearance, he did this without apparent effort, the big furred head bumping on his greasy hair. Laid out on the kitchen table it looked rather fine, for all its dirtiness and moth holes. Most of the claws are intact, as are all the teeth in the upper jaw. No lower jaw, being originally a ritual costume in its untanned life. Whiskers mostly bent or broken, alas, which would have upset Father.

He insisted its use was never sinister, never for murderous practices in a leopard society, but how could he have been sure? Still loath to touch the fur, even though musty and cobwebbed now.

I left the label where it was. I’ll only lose it to the cleaning woman here. How shall I open the trunk without a key? Force seems wrong. Bad throat from the dust. I need a brandy and Jessica’s ordinary cheeriness.

Awful dream: entering some sort of warehouse or church and stumbling on Nuncle with a butcher’s knife, pleaching some complicated basket out of human flesh. I pretended I hadn’t noticed, I was so terrified. Woke up with the sweating realisation that not only do I own the rights to his forgotten works, but that I have never more than dipped into them – as one might dip into the limus niger of the Styx, I suppose. Certain early passages have stuck only because I had to endure their interminable repetition on those wireless-less evenings of my youth.

Breakfast alone in the big back room full of gaunt cupboards: six fish fingers along with fried eggs, cereal, toast, served by the pimply youth who helps Ted behind the bar now and again. Can Ted keep this up? He appeared at one point and I expressed my admiration. The table is all by itself in the middle of the room, the pool table pushed to the side, and I feel like Louis XIV. Pimply Adrian, bleary-eyed and not very bright, clicks across the floor for ages before he gets to me. Or so it seems.

Mrs Pratt sidled up to me in the street this morning and suggested I’d upset Malcolm, apparently by not leaping up and down with admiration at the mummers’ rehearsal. Then I bumped into Malcolm himself in the shop (no sign of Gracie) and he did seem morose. He said he had tracked down a copy of I, Nubat through a specialist friend. What was I supposed to reply? He asked me how I reckoned drama had actually started and I replied that since there is a blurred line between drama per se and metaphoric gesture, one could trace it at one extreme back to the casting of petals on to the Neanderthal graves and at the other to the strutting about of the shamans. Between the loo rolls, Persil packets, hot-water bottles and crummy greens, the discussion felt ludicrous, and since we were both holding wire baskets I also felt obscurely effeminate. Asked me to tea again tomorrow and I said yes, scarcely believing it’s a whole week since the last time. Caught a glimpse of us both looking short and swollen in the huge fish-eye mirror above the door and had a stupid thought: this is how the dead see us.

Went to the house armed with a screwdriver but of course it was the wrong size for the trunk’s screws and I fouled one of the heads. On trying to lever the left lock away from the wood the cheap tool actually snapped in two. I measured the screws with a bit of paper and then, on hearing John Wall’s strimmer or bush-cutter starting up, retired from the fray. I don’t want him coming up here again and anyway I had a spat of breathlessness like last month – it’s nerves and over-exertion and irritation.

Completely ridiculous but on arriving in Netherford at the hardware shop I couldn’t find the bit of paper I’d marked the screw size on. Bought an expensive complete set and, on the advice of the helpful owner, a fierce-looking sort of jemmy with a claw at one end. Then to the library where I gazed on microfiched pages of the local paper for 1930 to 1935 and found some interesting stuff on Edward Arnold in the Ulverton column, written mostly by his acolytes. The Thule Society visit in 1933 is mentioned, along with the midwinter ritual.

Copied it and also confirmed the weather for late December 1933: basically, there was snow and a lot of it. On a sudden whim I checked when the Manor’s carol-singing jaunt had taken place: it was on December 23rd in very fine crisp weather followed by a high tea. Gracie must then have seen Mother on December 23rd at about 7 o’clock in the evening – if she left no later than anyone else. Perhaps if the stamp on the label, showing George V’s smudged head over the date, was not of the Victoria port authorities but of Liverpool’s, then Mother, with her trunk buckled in the hold, arrived on the Elder Dempster steamer two days before. Anonymously. In disguise, perhaps.

It fits. Her son was very ill. It fits. Her son wasn’t very ill when she set out, but maybe I have the dates of my illness completely out. Maybe I was ill in November. Maybe that particular Thule Society visit, after which I collapsed, was another year’. Memory is a patchwork of unreliability, after all. Why otherwise would she have left Africa in such a hurry?

And what on earth happened to her once she was here? Because – I have to remind myself – she disappeared and for ever.

Working backwards, then: Father’s bush tours were generally three weeks or longer in duration, so it’s quite possible that she vanished or made off around December 1st and the servants were lying, all of them, on her instructions. I know they loved my mother and my father had already started drinking too much. Anyway, not much baksheesh would have sealed their lips or persuaded them to fib.

I’ve been reading what I copied out in the library and one article in particular troubles me.

It dates from December 14th, 1931, and is only initialled. The opening is harmless enough: justifying ritual as a sharing in the ‘daily miracle of existence’ via references to Wordsworth’s ‘motion’ and ‘spirit’ rolling through all things, and the native belief that ‘everything partakes of the same essential mystic reality’. No quarrel with that, though its dark side is nowhere evident: trees with designs on you, spirits behind every bush, ancestors waiting to enter your head. I was about ten when I first started reading Shakespeare and reckoned that the tragic vision might have something to offer over animism (not even Nuncle’s cod sort). It explained my loneliness. Morris says I should write my Life and put all this in but I’m still shy about it, still nervous of being watched or overheard through the trees.

Anyway, the piece then advertises Edward Arnold’s own ‘ancient ritual’, one of those winter solstice things to encourage the sap back up: the mention of the ‘resuscitation’ dance performed by the village mummers around a bonfire, ‘in which a young lady, dressed all in red (the symbol of life), is ritually “killed” and “revived” (all volunteers welcome, skull guaranteed unbroken!)’, brought it all back, of course. No recollection of this specific one – they’ve mostly rolled into a muddy mass flitted over by long white gowns and flames and leering faces. But that mass is vivid enough and of course there again is a red lady. A Red Lady. Nearest and dearest. Oh God.

Well, what would he have stopped at for the sake of that blasted wildwood? Absolutely nothing, probably. Absolutely nothing. Agamemnon killed his own daughter for a fair wind. Abraham and Isaac. His only begotten Son, all that. Something so precious it can’t be counted. If the stakes are high enough. Oh dear God. One great rustling greenwood on the back of it. ‘I’d have to please the gods an awful lot, wouldn’t I, Hugh?’ Yes, they’d have been pleased all right, Nuncle.

Have organised my visit to Ray Duckett’s ‘rest home’ for tomorrow morning. Cliff’s Taxis will take me there and back. I won’t tax him, I told Jessica. Just as long as he can still talk.

Tea with Malcolm a tense affair since I was in no mood to lavish lying praise on his efforts. He said he felt a complete failure and started to needle me about my method, finding it restrictive, anticreative, anti-political and so on. I didn’t feel like fencing and just answered by rote, head whirling like a dervish with other thoughts. His coup de grace was to accuse me of being antiquarian, so I said, ‘Well, I’ve always hated quarians.’ He just blinked. I don’t think he has much sense of humour. Then seeing the sun beaming through the window, we went out for a walk. Caught up short by the sight of the leopard skin hanging on John Wall’s washing-line.

Malcolm’s mouth fell open and so did mine. The thing was very striking against the dull bricks of the cottage – as shiny as silk and the spots inked so clearly the Ethiopian had clearly just pressed his fingers to it. The head dangled morosely but the teeth were shining and the glass eyes flashed in the sun – they’d been filmed with dust and filth before. It was very much a crucifixion. I told Malcolm the story of David’s little girl in Umbria, who pointed to a roadside rood and asked why they’d hung that man up to dry – but he didn’t laugh like everyone else does, he was too overcome by the sight of the skin. It was like a gift from the gods, he said, it was uncanny, he’d been wondering how to get hold of a leopard skin just that morning. When I pointed out that it was the same one as in the Arnold photograph (mentioned over dinner), he made a sort of strangled noise. Had to explain how it had ended up on John Wall’s washing-line and then fibbed: ‘I’d intended it to be a surprise, of course.’