Salt (16 page)

The sleepwalking continued even after my father fitted a lock on her door. She would bang on it, waking us and herself, and as she was in such obvious distress he removed the lock and let her wander free. Sometimes I'd hear a noise from outside and see her standing on the back lawn, looking silently out over the fens until my father came to guide her back inside, being careful not to wake her.

 

The storm at Bedlam Fen had been the start of it, but now the silence descending on the house and my mother's gradually worsening illness seemed to spread across the entire landscape. It was called Dutch elm disease, but to me the sight of these trees dying in an agony of curling leaves and peeling bark - it all seemed part of the same marsh fever that had claimed her.

The great elm trees at the estate were monitored weekly, then daily as the disease spread. When it was spotted, the branches would be lopped, cut up and burned. Leaning against the wet wood of a five-bar gate, with me sitting on top, my father told me these were some of the tallest in the land, the trees that had made England strong because the wood never split, and that this was a disease sent from the Continent in revenge. That was when he could still joke about it. Goose's take was that the elm suffered from a great arrogance. Like the oak, they had little sense of humour. It was a simple matter of them changing their ways. Whatever the reason, the country was gripped with hysteria as the landscape changed so brutally, and my mother's marsh fever went unnoticed. In the silence over the dinner table at one of our increasingly rare family meals, my father eulogized the dying elm as the saddest, most tragic thing he'd ever witnessed. He couldn't imagine a land without elms. And at a moment of real frustration he spat out God! Why not the ground elder! Even my mother smiled at this, then served the food in silence, the muted stab of the wooden spoon against the sides of the casserole dish the only sound. It was clear - from my side of the table - that the real tragic loss in my father's life was happening right there in that room. Under his nose. But unlike his efforts to conquer the elm bark beetle, he did nothing to save his wife from fading away. Unable to contemplate a land without elms, a land without her was swiftly approaching. Entire country, my father continued, only tree I care about's that elm in the forty-acre. Two hundred year, maybe older. Ain't going to get that one.

But it did.

It happened, even though he thought he could outwit the beetle. Even though he tried to become a scientist.

Parcels and books had been arriving wrapped in brown paper and smelling of glue and ink. Sometimes he made a phone call to London, and I'd sit in the corridor pretending to practise my writing while I listened to him pronouncing Latin names in his Norfolk accent. Ceratostomella ulmi had too many long vowels for him to say convincingly. He often had to repeat what he said, altering the pronunciation and sounding nervous.

Other times the phone would ring, I'd hear my father laughing, but when I went in the living room he'd say hang on a minute into the phone then cup the mouth-piece and snap at me to go out and shut the door behind me.

I took letters to my father from Antwerp and The Hague, and he let me stand in his study while he read them. A new feeling of importance for him. It felt quiet in there; the books silenced the air. I smelled their spines and their dusty paper and saw the corners of the pages where he'd nibbled the paper as he thought. Every one of those books, partly eaten. Tacked to the window frame was a solitary cockchafer, held by a pin. I touched its wings and they felt like paper and my father said careful you don't break him, he's fragile. He flew a long way to get on that pin. It seemed strange an insect might fly anywhere only to be skewered on to a piece of wood. On his desk was his pipe and several twigs of elm with the bark stripped clean. He had a glass demijohn full of elm leaves. There was a strange metal toy he called a gyroscope, which he used as a paperweight, and he let me spin it while he read the letters, and after he finished he tore off the stamps and gave them to me.

Leaving the study one evening, putting the stamps in my pocket, my mother looked at me from the scullery. Her eyes were glassy. And I knew that while I'd been in there her own disease had spread.

 

A car has drawn up in the yard. My father rushes out to meet one of the farmhands and hears the news he's been dreading. The lad says something about the forty-acre and my father hitches up his trousers and picks a burr off his shirt. Preparing for the worst. He drives off in the car and doesn't come back till after dark, and when he does it's only to tell us he wasn't hungry and get in the car - we've got to go right away.

 

By the time we reached the estate a crowd had collected round the great elm tree in the forty-acre pasture. Car headlamps had been trained on the tree while wooden pallets were piled round the trunk. When that was done, my father went forward with a jerrycan of paraffin and poured it round the base. The lights from the cars overlapped each other on the trunk and the wood and on my father's back. Above him, the silent tree rose motionless.

He said something to the tree in the timber man's custom of asking forgiveness for what he was about to do, then he lit a ball of newspaper and threw it at the wood and I watched the sudden whoosh of blue flame erupt like a ghost of the tree. The blue flame rose and vanished into the feathery mass of the leaves and with it I hoped this one act might cleanse the tree. But soon the pallets were alight and crackling with the sound of the wood splitting. The fire rose and the people moved back from its heat. The leaves singed, curled and withered as the whole tree seemed to shiver like a fountain.

My mother watched from the passenger seat with the door open, her face warmed by the death of the tree. I imagined the fire reflecting in her dark eyes, and I wanted it to burn there, purifying her while above us the tree filled with the strange haunting sounds of fire. Of sap boiling and fizzing, of the breath of gases through the canopy, of twigs spitting as though a sudden rage had gripped the tree after two hundred years of peace. One of the cars began to reverse across the pasture and I watched it weaving into the darkness. Beyond it, about a mile away, another elm was on fire; its blaze a golden candle of yellow against the black woods.

My father made his way over to me, his face stern but his emotions under wraps because he was there to tend the fire and not make a scene. He bent down to me and I smelled the fire in his hair and he told me never to forget what we were watching, and then he walked off wearily towards a group of people standing by a Land Rover. I wondered if he felt he'd failed everybody; with his demijohn of leaves and his half-eaten books and his letters from Europe.

I followed him, trying to step in his footprints in the long damp grass while I watched my own shadow flicker round my feet. The people by the Land Rover were staring at the tree and chatting to themselves, smoking cigarettes. My father went to the rear of the car. It moved down as he sat on the back step, then a woman came to him and the car bounced down again, slightly less this time. She was on his lap. And then her voice.

‘You smell of smoke.'

He didn't answer.

‘George.'

‘Yeah, s'pose we all do.'

Whoever was sitting on his lap shifted closer to him.

‘It's got to be this way,' she said.

‘I know.'

‘Saw you say something. What was it?'

‘Wish.'

‘George, what we going to do?'

I ran off into the dark middle of the pasture and looked back at the scene. At my mother, in her car, by herself. At the raging fire of the still-burning tree. At the Land Rover. My father, with the girl from the fondue evening sitting on his lap. Her head nestled in his shoulder, and I imagined her - like me - smelling the fire and the paraffin there. My father seemed limp with exhaustion, his arm round her waist, leaning into her, the wounded man. His hand on her leg. Never forget, I heard him say.

 

Fire, which punctuates my life so often. My father kept that blaze alight, burning all the other diseased wood in his life, starting the next morning, when the
Mary Magdalene
was dragged into the yard and set on fire. Straight after breakfast, with little fuss, as if he were bagging up rubbish. My mother showed little interest, knowing intuitively he was testing her. Challenging her to do
something
.

He waited for that moment when a fire can't be extinguished to save the wood, and then left for the estate. Gull, excited by the fire, followed his car as it slewed through the mud. I was the only one to stand in the yard while the boat and the dreams of my parents went up in flames. Those clouds, painted on the hull, blistering and peeling like bark, exposing the dark green of the undercoat before that too burned through. I began to think of a small rowing boat amidst the muddy swirls of a large, powerful river. Of a man standing up in it. Of an engine dragging idly through the water. I thought of a young woman slipping off the seat and lying supine on the planks. Of thin summer dresses and the lapping of water.

And slowly the scene replayed through the jaws of the flames. As the wood split. As the keel crashed softly in two.

 

Either he lost interest in taking me to the estate, or he had his own reasons for not wanting me there. It suited us both - he went off in his car, chased by the dog, and I rode around on a bike. Three Holes was eight miles away. When I first cycled there I leaned the bike against the brick bridge and walked along the top of Popham's Eau till I was behind the house. I sat, tying grasses together and wondering what to do. There was no movement from the house. I pulled out my father's gyroscope and spun it, watching the centre wheel revolving so fast it looked like an insect's wing. It pulsed drunkenly in my hand. It was early spring and the Holbeachs' acre was immaculate. The soil was as dark as treacle, prepared, turned, broken, turned again and raked flat. And in its centre, the house looked like it had landed there overnight, without proper root there, waiting for the moment when hundreds of prize tulips would break the soil.

When Mr Holbeach came out he didn't see me. He only ever had eyes for the tulips. I watched him loosening soil around their stems, counting how many had broken the ground, examining an area where there seemed to be no plants growing and then marking off a patch of earth with a length of white string. When he pushed bamboo canes into the soil I imagined my mother pushing candles into a birthday cake. My ninth birthday. Pushing candles into the cake and asking me whether I was going to tell her any secrets. Just a whisper now, that's all we need. And then Mr Holbeach was straightening up with the sound of his knees cracking and I was back in his dismal fen, feeling more determined than ever to see Elsie.

Elsie. There she was, standing on a stool in the bathroom under a bare light bulb, her hair as bright as copper wire. On and off went the light, several times, then I slid through the grass so old Holbeach wouldn't see me, and as I reached his picket fence Elsie was there at the back door. I sprinted over the soil and was still wondering about my footprints when I noticed the door closing and she unexpectedly pushed me against the corridor wall and kissed me. On the lips, like an adult. I tasted her breath and felt her hair brush quickly against my face and it wasn't copper at all and I jolted back and knocked my head on the wall. She was pulling me forward then, and we were running up the stairs and through the window I saw the crouching figure of Mr Holbeach still scratching away at the soil with his finger. Elsie pushed me into her room and shut the door.

Before I really knew what was happening she's dived at me and together we fell against her bed with a big soft crumpling sound and her head knocked clumsily against mine. There was a sudden pain in my ear and I panicked because I knew she'd bitten me there. Only a year since I'd seen her being carried up the slope in my father's arms in the rain. Now she was big, with arms that were powerful and long and strong.

‘I
wrote
to you,' she said, urgent and hushed. ‘And to Aunt May.'

I tried to reach for my notebook, but it had twisted behind my neck, so I had to shake my head in answer.

‘You never got the letters?'

No!
I gestured, completely at sea as to what was happening. A crazy girl.

Elsie read the look in my eyes and started to giggle. She quickly pulled her skirt up so she could sit on my stomach, a leg either side of me, then grabbed my wrists again so I couldn't move. I'd never been this close to a girl before. Tiny bronze hairs were growing above her knees. She seemed heavy and boisterous. I could still taste her breath.

‘Shall I kiss you again?' she said, then abruptly she let me go and swung herself off me and sat on a chair. She got some paper and a pencil for me from her desk.

‘I'm nearly sixteen,' she said, and gave me the paper to write on.

Get off me!
I wrote, then crossed it out and wrote
Mum's ill
.

I showed it to Elsie, then wrote as fast as I could, describing the silence and the time I'd seen my mother crying when she was making jam, and then about how weedy the garden was and when was Elsie going to come to see her.

While I was doing this she rested her chin on her knees and pushed her lips into a pout.

‘I can't,' she said. ‘Mum and Dad would go mad. They said I could've died that night in the fen. I can cycle as far as the Ouse but not any further, and you can forget about going in any boats.' When she stopped talking she re-formed her pout, sucking in her chin till it made a tiny crease below her mouth. Her lips were red and I knew there must be lipstick on my mouth and its film felt sticky and I thought I might sweat and I knew I couldn't wipe it away, not while she was staring at me.