BRIAN HODGE
Now Day Was Fled as the Worm Had Wished
We would know it as soon as we got there, Vanessa insisted — and more than once. We would know the right place when we found it and not one moment before, so there was no point in second-guessing ourselves. Stop trying so hard. No formal itinerary and that was just the way we should keep it.
‘How about here?’ Heather had suggested a couple of weeks ago at the Tower of London, before we’d left the city for the countryside. Forty-eight hours before that we would’ve still been somewhere over the Atlantic.
‘Absolutely not, you can’t be serious,’ Vanessa had vetoed. ’Are you?’
No reply, just Heather and her puckish little smile, betraying nothing. Even I couldn’t be sure, when I’d known her so much longer. It wasn’t often you could catch Heather giving away anything more than only as much as she wanted.
‘It was the ravens, wasn’t it?’ I asked her later, on the Tube, starting to feel as though I might be catching on to the way she was thinking here and now, in this world instead of the one we were trying to leave behind. Not that it looked all that different yet — those butt-ugly American fanny-packs and the murderous stress of business commuters look the same everywhere — but we at least felt the potential unfurling before us.
Ravens live at the top of the Tower, we had discovered. Live up there under ceremonial guard. Very serious business, those ravens. Tradition holds that the fate of England hinges upon them. Should the ravens ever leave the Tower, fly away, England will be sure to fall.
‘Maybe something about them did make me think of my parents’ marriage,’ Heather said.
‘I thought you wanted to do this.’
‘I do. I just don’t want to do any of it like they did.’
‘In that case, I’d say you’re off to a flying start.’
See, the catch with the ravens is that they can’t soar away even if they want to. The feathers at the ends of their wings are clipped — prisoners, as surely as any heretic or rightful heir to a stolen throne who’d ever been a guest of the Tower when it was operational. It’s possible that if one of them wanted out badly enough, it could tumble off the edge of the parapet and fall like a glossy black stone. But I suppose they’re more apt to simply spend their days pecking at the free buffet and eyeing the sky with longing.
Naturally I hesitated to share this insight with her — the considerate thing to do, given the way her mother had leapt from a hotel window when Heather was fourteen, half her lifetime ago. Which hadn’t done her father’s political career any favours, coming as it did during a re-election campaign. He’d soldiered on in the race, claiming that this was what his poor beloved late wife would’ve wanted, but even his tarnished silver tongue couldn’t sell that one to anyone who wasn’t already lining his pockets. By election night, the Senator was a historical footnote.
Heather had told me that it was the only justice she’d ever really seen in the world, but wouldn’t you know: it had had to hit so brutally close to home.
Oscar Wilde referred to England and America as two countries divided by a common language. While it may not be the most conspicuous example, this is no more significant than in those words applied to the land. Words that you really don’t hear in the States, words like heath and hedgerow, glen and dale, moor and weald and bracken. It’s as though in crossing the Atlantic our ancestors undertook some great divestiture, stripping away the luxuriant wealth of how they might speak of what was beneath their feet and tilled by their ploughs. If it could be semiotically reduced, then it might that much more easily be plundered.
But that’s America for you. Take what you need, then take as much as you can hold or lock away because God forbid anyone else should have it.
Used to, once upon et cetera, when I thought about Europe and someday travelling there, as soon as I had the time, the only way I could imagine doing the Continent was in as much ostentatious style as possible. Five-star hotels, chauffeurs, restaurants that would break the wallets of everyone I ever wanted to prove I had surpassed, eclipsed, outshone. But now that I could afford it, I found that I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for this route. These were the dreams of a twenty-year-old, and a decade later as relevant as the telegraph.
One decade later, the only thing making sense to me, to all three of us pale, long-boned Anglos — admittedly, at Vanessa’s prompting — was to instead walk this ancestral island of ours, and try to drum up any connection that might still be buried deep in our New World bones, along with the trace elements of cesium and mercury and everything else we ingested without intending to or having much say in the matter.
And so walk we did. We’d bought rail passes to train our way into whichever area we felt like exploring, but once there, it was England at a grass roots level. Naive dreamers, perhaps, hoping to find something that we feared might no longer exist, if it ever had, but we wanted an England of standing stones and the Cerne Giant and the Uffington Horse, not an England trampled by the same old cigar chompers who would just as soon bulldoze a burial mound as look at it.
And so. We walked. Backpacks on our shoulders, hiking boots on our feet, extra support in Vanessa’s — uncommonly high arches, she has — and, just to make it interesting, an additional agenda in our hearts. Figuring for this one we’d be entirely on our own, and just as well, since most people frowned on the sort of thing we had in mind.
At least that’s one good thing about lots of money:
You get to say ‘Fuck you’ like you really mean it.
A grand place for hikes, rural England, as though the glaciers of the last Ice Age had carved the land for feet and walking staves, and nobody can bear to challenge that. You can go virtually anywhere, cut across great tracts of farmland and tarry as long as you like, and with the farmers’ blessings, too, as long as you remember to shut the gates behind you so the sheep don’t stray out. Just try that in the US without risking buckshot or worse.
Denied that level of freedom to roam the eastern county of Suffolk, surely we would never have found the old manor house. Well off any road of consequence, a few miles from the nearest town of Lavenham, it sat entirely by itself, surrounded by a quilt of tilled fields and wild meadows and pastures. It was the sort of place that becomes invisible to those who grow up familiar with it, seen but no longer noticed, as much a feature of the landscape as the oldest yew tree or some far-off tor, and given just as much thought. Even from a distance we could see that it was in ruins, bricks overrun with vines and ivy, one end’s outer wall collapsed inwards, and two of its five chimneys crumbled halfway back to the many-gabled peaks of the roof.
‘Well, look what we have here,’ Vanessa said. ‘Stumbling onto a place like this can make an eight-year-old out of anyone.’
And for the moment she reminded me of one, tall and lanky though she was, and older than I was by a couple of years. It was the eager flush of excitement that did it, and how she seemed somehow smaller beneath hair gone mad in the moist air of early autumn. Streaks of colour had been dyed into it these past few months, then thickly braided… one purple, one green, one the same blue shade as her eyes.
She cupped a hand to her ear and cocked her gaze sideways to the sky.