Don’t hunch your shoulders. That’s what me mam always said. We’re prone to a hump, the lasses in our family. Mam’s started when she were not much past fifty. Looked like a question mark by the time she died. I always try to hold myself straight, though you don’t want people thinking you’re looking down your nose. Takes an effort, remembering. Some people never manage it. They grow old staring at their shoes. Spend their dotage walking along looking like they’ve dropped a tenner.
Were hard to keep my head up that day. Rain was falling straight down and every drop seemed to be looking for the back of my neck. I were probably wearing the headscarf that John had brought back from Carlisle. Nice silky material, all gold and red, like a fire. No bloody good in the rain but it was better than nothing and if I’m honest, I think I liked being the only splash of colour in that sea of grey. The sky looked like a coalman’s bathwater and the streets had rivers in every gutter. The leaves had been falling for a couple of months so there was no end of muck and mulch being carried in the gullies and it didn’t take long for the drains to fill up. Even at the bus stop by the post office I could hear the River Irthing, gurgling and mumbling like a sleeping drunk.
‘You think it’ll come?’
Pat had to ask it twice before I realized she was talking to me. My head was full of Fairfax. Full of footprints in dust and crumpled pages that smelled of smoke. Full of dead Frenchmen and hot coins.
‘Got your head in the clouds, Felicity? Be careful, you’ll drown.’
I told myself to smile. I’d always got on with Pat. Weren’t her fault she were born a little hard of thinking.
‘Sorry Pat, load of things on my mind. What was you asking?’
‘Brampton bus,’ she said. ‘Think it’ll come?’
‘Came last winter when we had five feet of snow,’ I said. ‘It’ll manage rain.’
She seemed relieved at that, as if I were the wireless and given her some official bulletin. In truth, I wasn’t sure. Didn’t even know if I wanted it to turn up. I should have spoken to John first off. Told him what I’d found and what I’d read. Should have walked up the hill and knocked on Cordelia’s door. Mrs Green in the post office said she’d been at Samson’s the previous night, bold as brass. Asking questions. Giving Chivers a pasting behind his back. She wasn’t letting it drop. She should know what I knew. She should at least be allowed to give me her opinions on the scraps of paper I’d found hidden in the church floor. She’d been to university, after all. Had a good big brain. I think I was just frightened of seeing the look on her face. I hadn’t supported her. Had been too busy snivelling and trying to make it all into a lie.
‘You’ll be needing some bits and bobs, I’d imagine,’ said Pat, huddling back into the protection of Debbie’s cottage opposite. Some days Debbie would let you wait in her house until the bus came. Today she hadn’t poked her head out the front door. Pat and me were soaked to the bone.
‘This and that,’ I said, and wondered to myself why I was being vague.
‘Aye, I’m short of that meself.’
Pat was in her early sixties with a face like yesterday’s rice pudding. She was small and round and had worn the same burgundy overcoat for as long as I’d known her. She was a hard worker though. Her husband, Keith, had taken ill a few years back and their son had no interest in taking on the family joinery business so it had fallen to Pat to make ends meet. She cleaned at the school and for a few of the big houses out towards Lanercost. Polished the silverware and glassware for the big fancy club on the Longtown road. She usually cycled but the weather had made that impossible. She needed the bus to come. Needed to deposit her savings in the Brampton bank before Keith could find where she kept them and limped his way down Samson’s.
‘Oh, there she is,’ said Pat, suddenly, under her breath. She raised a hand and waved at Mrs Parker, who was emerging from the post office with an empty basket over her arm. ‘I wonder if her halo keeps the rain off.’
‘She’s a kindly soul,’ I said, not really paying attention. ‘All those letters to write. Food parcels to send. She’s one of the good ones.’
Pat gave me a look like I was daft.
‘Short memory, Felicity,’ she said, a bit harsh for my liking. ‘Might be a saint these days but she were a terror when she were a girl. That poor brother of her’s had to bugger off to university just to avoid her. That were a daft thing to do cos he barely came back and he ended up shot to bits in the war. She can send letters and butter and bacon to half the starving families in Germany and she’ll still always be that nasty cow from the big house as far as I’m concerned. Anyways, Germans are doing better than we are these days. All the POWs are making a fortune over there. What’s she still bother with them for, eh? They may have worked her farm but I reckon twenty-two years later it’s time to pack it in.’
‘Maybe she’s being kind,’ I said, and it sounded feeble. I blushed a little and turned to the street, where Mrs Parker was climbing into her expensive car. As usual, she had a face worse than the weather.
‘Kind? She’s maybe doing penance. She’d have been in the poorhouse if not for her husband and his bright ideas. More to the Swiss than yodelling and cuckoo clocks, believe me. He aint pretty but he’s interesting. Gave a good lecture at the Women’s Institute, which you’d have known if you bothered coming along.’
I turned my sigh into a cough and then shivered, exaggeratedly, as a silence began to stretch between us.
‘I were sorry to hear of Fairfax,’ she said. ‘They say it was sudden.’
‘Aye,’ I said, and it sounded too much like a shrug to be decent. ‘Janet and me were opening the curtains at his place this morning. Was all I could do not to run out the door.’
‘Was a good man,’ said Pat, nodding approval. ‘Knew him since I can remember. Always had a twinkle in his eye. You find the envelope?’
I shook my head. ‘Don’t think the bugger ever planned on dying. The place is a pigsty.’
‘No wife these past years,’ said Pat, shaking her head at this sorry state of affairs. ‘Kept himself smart though. Always shaved and scrubbed.’
‘That silly car,’ I said, falling into the easy back and forth.
‘Bought it for Christopher, if you ask me.’
‘Aye, that’s what everybody said. Maybe he just wanted it for himself. Either way. Least he died driving something he was proud of.’
Pat considered this. ‘You think he would still be alive if he had a more sensible car?’
‘I don’t know much about cars,’ I said, wiping rain from my face. ‘But you can still die if you drive a tank. Sometimes accidents happen.’
Pat nodded her head in agreement. ‘Was a shock for poor Ern,’ she said, widening her eyes.
‘Ern?’
‘Ernie Glendinning. Works at the base. He found Fairfax, did you not know?’
I thought back. Had John told me? Had Chivers mentioned it? Did I even ask?
‘Aye, he’d taken a late lunch and was heading back for the afternoon shift. Saw the car there in the middle of the road, windscreen smashed. Got out in the middle of the gale and found Fairfax on the road. Sorry sight, so I heard. Went right through the windscreen after he hit the tree.’
I closed my eyes. Couldn’t help but picture it. The Spadeadam road was a desolate place; a curled grey rope dropped into acre upon acre of forest and bog.
‘He got some of the men down from the base soon as he found him,’ said Pat, pushing herself further back into the wall as the rain redoubled its efforts. ‘He was already gone. They called Chivers from the base. Harland came and towed the car. Ambulance came from Haltwhistle. You’ll be looking after the arrangements, I presume.’
Would I? Had that already been assumed? I supposed there was nobody else. I was the closest thing to family that Fairfax had.
‘Was the car damaged though? I mean, if he went through the windscreen …’
‘Knowing the details won’t bring him back,’ said Pat, looking down the road in the hope of seeing the sturdy, familiar shape of the bus. She sighed and checked her watch. ‘I’m starting to worry about getting back.’
‘You haven’t got there yet.’
‘The bus will come. But what if there’s no bus back? I’ll have to stay over with Meg and that’ll lead to blood on the walls.’
I managed a smile. Pat and her sister had never seen eye to eye, though when I said as much to John he told me it were due to the fact that Pat was a wee thing and Meg was a tall, long-limbed creature. We would have never said it in company but there was always a few suspicions about whether their mam had stayed entirely faithful to her old fella when he was away in the merchant navy before the first war.
‘Who you got today?’ I asked.
‘Mr and Mrs Dolan at Talkin. He’ll pick me up in Brampton but said he wouldn’t come all this way. Thinking of the mud on his Rolls Royce if you ask me.’
‘Is that what he drives?’
‘I don’t know. Looks posh, though. Not as posh as the brothers drive at the hall, though. He hasn’t got their manners, neither.’
I didn’t push her on that. Nobody asked what went on up at Kirklinton Hall but it was fun to tilt your head and put an ear to the wind and snatch the few whispers that drifted east. The hall had been a stately home and a private residence for the gentry during its long life. A hotel during the war and then flats that nobody wanted. Then some Londoner with plenty of money got his hands on it. He put in a glass-floored ballroom and turned it into a private casino. Spent a small fortune filling it with the sort of luxuries you would find in a sultan’s palace. Rumour had it there were dancing girls who wore nowt but feathers and that there were no shortage of local farmers had gambled away their children’s inheritance while lasses with lips like a folded quilt whispered in their ears. I had no wish to see the place but I’d have washed all the dishes in Denton to know which locals had crossed the threshold. Rumour had it that the two well-dressed brothers from the newspapers were regular visitors. It was only a couple of years later that the brothers got locked up and the place went out of business. Turned into a wreck within three or four years. Last I heard about it, some lad from Longtown was on the wireless, remembering how he and his mates used to break in and steal the furniture when it was all boarded up. Got a phone-in going on Radio Cumbria. All these reformed bad boys telling the world how they used to use priceless old antique wardrobes as rafts on the Eden.
‘Wonder if Fairfax’s book will be published now he’s gone,’ mused Pat. ‘Would be nice to see what he’s actually been working on all these years, though I feel like crying knowing he’ll never see it on a shelf.’
I shivered. Felt somebody walk over my grave. Held my elbows in tighter and clutched my handbag tighter, as if I’d seen a stranger on a country road.
‘The house is full of old papers and scribblings,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘If there is a book among that lot it will be the size of a sideboard when it’s typed up. Loads of notes and mile after mile of handwriting. I don’t know what will become of it all.’
‘Be sad to see it on the fire,’ said Pat.
I shook my head, hard. ‘That won’t happen. I’ll read every word, given time.’
‘Make sure you only glance at my boring old stuff,’ said Pat, laughing. ‘Honestly, it will put you to sleep.’
‘He interviewed you?’
‘Interviewed every bugger. Spent plenty time with me and my Keith. Must have been ten years ago he got round to me. Asked questions he already knew the answer to, like where I went to school and where I lived and where I met Keith. His pencil was a blur. I don’t know what he got out of it. I talked to him about both wars though I felt uncomfortable about it. He was off fighting in the first one and his son died in the second so why he’d want to remember, I don’t know.’
‘What else did he want to know?’ I asked, and the query sounded unfamiliar on my tongue. It suddenly struck me as odd how rarely I asked such honest questions.
She scratched her head. ‘Wittered on about the drama society during the war. The athletics team from the camp. They built the first 400-metre track in this country, did you know that? Some of it’s still there. You ever go up the castle? You can see the old buildings. Old cells, too.’
I realized I was chewing my lip. Did it matter? Was it in some way connected to the words beneath the church floor?
‘Why did he ask you about it?’ I said.
Pat screwed up her face. I swear, her lower lip almost touched her forehead.
‘I think I were just there to make it chatty,’ she said. ‘You know my Keith. Ask him how he is and he’ll tell you “fine” – even if there’s an arrow sticking in his forehead. I get him talking even if it’s just by correcting the bits I get wrong.’
‘And what did he want to know about from Keith?’
‘Well, you know as well as I do that his father was a master mason and afore the sickness, Keith was no slouch. They did a lot of the work on the big buildings around here. Manor house, castle, vicarage, churches.’
‘Churches?’
‘Of course. Magdalene and yon church at Denton. Out Longtown way, too.’
‘What was he asking?’
‘Designs. Whether he still had old draftsman’s sketches and whatnot. Then he got onto talking about the camp.’
‘The POW camp?’
‘O’course. Keith and his father were among the contractors who put the place together. ‘Twere just a field, if you remember it. Next thing it had to accommodate thousands of men and not all of them were happy to be out of the war. Some wanted to keep scrapping. Fairfax was asking Keith about what he saw. About the men who came. Where they were from. What countries. What languages. What uniforms. Honestly, this went on an age.’
‘And this was years ago, was it?’ I asked, unsure of the relevance.
‘Aye, well, Fairfax started his research around the time the Romans left but there were never a time when he weren’t pestering us for little bits we might have forgotten.’
I stared at the stream that gurgled in the gutter. Watched a clump of leaves spin and twirl on the current. My brain felt like that – as if all I could do was give myself up to the direction of the wind.
‘Did he ever mention a Frenchman?’ I asked, and the words were away into the air before I could suck them back. ‘Ever ask questions that made no sense …?’
Pat changed her face. Hardened it a little. ‘What you asking for?’ she snapped.
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘Not asking. Just wondering. Some of his papers mentioned a little place in France. Seemed important to him but who’s to say? And Fairfax never interviewed me, y’see. Just wondered why not.’
‘Oh,’ said Pat, and the tension went out of her. ‘Well, you’re as best being in the group of lucky ones. There’ll be no shortage of folk worrying about what Fairfax did with their words.’
‘It was just a local history book,’ I said, shivering as the rain finally found a route from the tip of my spine to the bottom of my left leg.
‘Aye, but there’s some history you probably shouldn’t speak on. Nobody wants other people reading what they did in the war or what they thought about the prisoners working their land or those who stayed and married the locals. They’re personal thoughts. And Fairfax did push, God rest him.’
As she spoke, I felt, rather than heard, the approach of somebody behind me. There was no sun to cast a shadow but I suddenly felt somebody at my back. Then I smelled him too. Dogs and dark places – like a bleeding Alsatian at the back of a cave.
‘Hello Felicity,’ said Pike, as I turned.
He wasn’t smiling. Pike never smiled. He was saving up for new teeth, so he said, and in the meantime he preferred to hide the black stumps that were stuck in his gums like bits of charcoal pushed into rotten fruit. His nose was halfway across his face, like he were trying to sniff his ear, and his eyes were sunk deep in his head beneath the sort of brow that made me think of a shark. He was wearing his camouflage coat and his ginger hair had gone black in the rain.
‘All right, Pike,’ said Pat. ‘How’s Mam?’
‘Still alive,’ said Pike, still staring at me. ‘Still bane of me bloody life.’
‘She’s tough as old boots,’ said Pat, and God bless her, she moved to stand beside me. Everybody knew that Pike was not to be left alone with a woman or a kiddie. ‘You’re a good lad to look after her as you do.’
Pike finally gave her his attention. He wasn’t a big man. Maybe that were his problem. He was always making up for the fact he wasn’t as big as the other blokes. But he had something. Some viciousness. He’d always been the same. Even at school he was uncontrollable. He’d say nowt at all for weeks on end then one day just go and bite the headmaster or start carving words in his bare legs with his pocket knife. Scared the life out of all of us. Parents too. His dad had run off when he were just a baby. Left him and his mam in a house that was already falling down a century before they moved in. They had animals but didn’t seem to know what to do with them. Sheep and cows and a family of ducks lived in the house with him, I swear to God. Great holes in the roof that the rain came through. Three different vicars tried to help them but they didn’t want none. Didn’t need charity and saw nowt wrong with how they lived. Pike poached. Took salmon, trout and deer. Made friends with the lads who built the air base and always seemed to know how to get his hands on cheap cigarettes or cases of bargain booze. Grew up to be a man to be feared and word had it that he knew people in Newcastle and Belfast who would be only too glad to hurt people if he asked them to. Not that Pike would ever ask. He preferred to do the hurting himself. We’d never had cross words and he’d never put a hand on me but I still remember what I saw him doing to himself the first time I went to put flowers on Mam’s grave. Curtains open, shirt off, watching me walk past his door to the church, big leer on his face as I held my carnations and skipped through the puddles. I’ve never told anybody that. Don’t know why I’m telling you.
‘I were sorry for Fairfax,’ said Pike, to me. ‘Sorry about his car as well.’
I suddenly remembered Fairfax telling me about that. He’d found Pike admiring the new vehicle. Had spent twenty minutes talking to him at the kerbside – a pleasant enough chat about tyre pressure and engine sizes and whether it were wrong to buy a German car.
‘There’ll be a funeral,’ I said. ‘Maybe at Denton.’
‘Don’t like funerals,’ said Pike.
‘Well, that’s up to you,’ I said, and suddenly didn’t care whether the bus came or not.
‘I liked Fairfax,’ said Pike, jerking his head. ‘Talked to me like a person.’
‘And how does the rest of us talk to you?’ asked Pat, and her body language suggested she was ready for a dust-up.
‘Who’s getting his machine?’ asked Pike, ignoring the question.
‘Machine?’
‘Tape player with the microphone. I saw him sticking it in plenty faces.’
I turned to Pat, confused. She nodded, understanding better than I did. ‘Aye, he were a menace with that. I never liked speaking into it. Like having a telephone conversation with yourself.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, colouring. ‘What machine?’
‘He had one of those recorders,’ said Pike, and I glimpsed the ruination of his mouth. ‘For recording stories, he said to me. Thoughts and memories. Asked me to say my name into it then played it back to me. I didn’t sound like I thought I would.’
‘I never saw it,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t I see it?’
‘Like you said, he never interviewed you.’
I looked from one to the other. The mulched leaves in my brain had come to a standstill, wedged against the kerb. I needed to push. Needed to make things happen.
‘Never mind the bus,’ I said. ‘I was daft to bother. I’ll leave it.’
Pike shrugged. Put a hand in his pocket and brought out a carton of Player’s Medium. ‘Your John still smoke these?’
I nodded. Took the pack and managed a smile. ‘Give my love to your mam,’ I said, and couldn’t look him in the eye. He nodded. Started trudging away up the road.
‘You really off?’ asked Pat. ‘You’re already soaked.’
‘I was daft. I’ll get home. Start on Fairfax’s place properly,’ I said.
‘Aye, well, if you find owt saucy just bin it off. After you’ve showed me, of course.’
We parted on a shared grin. I walked slowly. Saw one or two faces flicker at windows as I trudged up past the old vicarage and the clumps of Roman wall that stood out from grassy tufts like wrecked ships. Gilsland. The place I grew up and which, on that day, looked like a photographic negative – as though the whites and darks had somehow switched and all the colour had bleached into the soil.
I started running when I reached the Denton road. Didn’t stop until I had reached Fairfax’s place.
I was still panting, still soaked through, an hour later – sitting in an avalanche of paperwork holding the memories of people I had known since the cradle. My head was fizzing with secrets and stories.
Looking back, that’s when I accepted it. That’s when I let myself believe that somebody had killed my friend.