44
“So you’re off today,” whispers Uncle Stan, at breakfast. Aunt Isobel has gone to see off the grandchildren, so Vanessa finds herself cutting up his toast, and feeding it, patiently, morsel by morsel, in through her uncle’s trembling jaws. There is a cavern of blackness behind his false teeth. He dribbles, slightly, from the corners of his mouth. She tells herself she is glad to do it. It makes her feel better, after last night. She is being useful, as a niece should be, and she’s never known what to do for him, she’s never done anything for her family, she left them behind, all the aunts, the uncles, her elderly parents, her school, her friends…Mary is watching her from the doorway. There is an odd moment when their eyes meet. Vanessa has a moment of deja vu, remembering how Mary used to sit and feed Justin, when he was little, spoon after spoon.
“You should take your friend to see where you lived,” Stan wheezes, as Vanessa gets the last bit in, and then he coughs it out again. She picks up his coffee, and tests it for heat. “Still standing, I hear. Just about. Apparently they’re going to demolish them all. All the old tied farm cottages. Wouldn’t mind a last look myself.” But he knows he will not get to the village again. What would that mean, to be imprisoned?
“Odd to think we never owned that house,” says Vanessa.
“Oh no. It was one of your mother’s complaints, that he never paid for the roof over your heads. But of course that’s how it was with farm workers. That was how they paid them, with those old tied cottages.”
“I don’t really know if I can bear to see it,” says Vanessa, wiping her uncle’s chin. “Maybe we should get off back to London.”
“Vanessa, I think we should visit your home,” says Mary, and comes round and pats Vanessa’s shoulder. Vanessa sits passively and lets Mary touch her.
“Vanessa, I will drive us. I think you are tired.”
“Of course not, Mary. I must have exercise.” And, just like that, she is Vanessa again.
And they do walk, although the car’s already packed, and Mary has found the errant glasses in her pocket, and actually popped them on her nose to prove it, little gold moonlets that make her look younger.
The cottage is along the old main road. Vanessa sets off at a swinging pace, plunging off the lane into the river of traffic. “Don’t worry. There’s a pavement all the way,” she instructs Mary, who looks doubtfully at the dwindling strip of tarmac where they have to walk in single file. Mary hangs back behind Vanessa and watches the stick-like figure of her employer battling forwards in the autumn wind.
Though every so often, Vanessa half-turns and gives a boisterous ‘thumbs up’ of encouragement, the truth is, she isn’t enjoying this either. The tarmac is cracked and overgrown with weeds. Every two seconds, another loud vehicle screams past her shoulder, and the air buffets her. At first the hedge on their left looks pretty, scattered with red hawthorn berries, fat wild rose-hips, old man’s beard and the last blackberries, but within a few paces it becomes her enemy, reaching out thick savage tentacles of bramble that block the pavement and wave towards the road, forcing Vanessa out into the traffic’s lethal slipstream. The brambles she manages to bend sternly forwards spring eagerly back and whip at Mary’s face.
Everywhere they see enormous notices. ‘SLOW THROUGH THE VILLAGE’, ‘40’, ‘SLOW DOWN’, and one forlorn THANK YOU FOR DRIVING CAREFULLY’. But in fact all the cars are doing 70 or 80, and Mary, sullenly bringing up the rear, fervently wishes that she could join them, that she could be part of this giant rally that cuts the English fields in two, instead of a tiny, deafened walker with snakes of vegetation clutching at her ankles.
Now Vanessa has turned, and her mouth is opening, and she is pointing and shouting something, but a full-tilt, cliff-high furniture van carries her words away into the future.
“Over there!” Mary finally makes out, and with that Vanessa darts with staccato urgency into a narrow gap in the traffic, and reemerges, to the squealing of brakes, across the road by some kind of hut. Taking her time, to express her disapproval of this whole life-threatening manoeuvre, Mary picks her way across to join her.
“This is where I grew up,”, says Vanessa. Not looking at her, looking at the ground. The place is half-boarded up, and half broken-into. Some windows are smashed, and some are nailed shut. But it is not possible, Mary thinks, Vanessa can never have grown up here. The walls are covered with purple graffiti, the same crude signs that she sees in London.
Whatever its present state might be, this house can never have been other than small. In fact, it is more like a hut than a cottage. The roof is low. The front door is mean. Even in Mary’s village, this would not be much.
The garden is half the size of where they have been staying, and it is entirely overgrown with weeds. There is the remains of a bird-house like Stan’s, but its wood has turned green, and bits of jungle throttle it. There is a pond, but it is full of dark leaves. Beside it, a rusted tangle of chicken-wire.
Suddenly Vanessa begins to cry. Mary has never seen her cry. Vanessa walks away firmly, her face averted, but Mary can see Vanessa’s shoulders are shaking. After a minute, she follows her. She does not touch her, but she stands near. “Are you thinking about your parents?” she asks. Mary herself once cried for her parents. Not so long ago. Three years ago.
“No no, not exactly…Yes. My mother always used to put bread for the birds. Even when she was really ill. Mum liked all of that, frogs, squirrels. She worried about them more than people. And the chicken run — she liked getting the eggs. Her lawn, and the beds…her garden. Poor Mum — you see, she loved her garden. She would be so upset to see the garden.” Each time Vanessa says ‘garden’, she sobs.
And Mary says, “I see. I am sorry,” but in fact, she thinks crying for gardens is silly. Birds eat your fruit, and frogs are disgusting. Mary herself has much worse things to cry for, but she would rather die than tell Vanessa. Slowly she begins to feel angry again. Up country at home there are more things to cry for, and yet Ugandans rarely cry in public. Her own village, half-emptied by AIDS. The nearby villages wiped out by war.
They cry for their parents, we for our children.
How did she end up in this strange part of England that seems as if war has never touched it, where growing old is normal, and many have white hair? (And at last night’s party they were dancing to the band, the white-haired couples, or holding hands, as if they had a right to a long life together.) Where nobody seems to have the Slim disease, and the cars on the road are all four-wheel-drives, even though the road is flat, and straight, and smooth, and none of them walk, because they are too lazy, and if you do walk, you might get killed?
Mary thinks with longing of the roads of Uganda, the straight red roads that sweep away to the horizon, and vehicles come, two or three an hour, but the people throng all along the roadside, the mothers in gomesis, the girls in bright frocks, the babies tied to straight backs with strong cloth, the bicycles loaded with green bananas, the boys with yellow plastic cans of water, the skinny cows with their enormous horns, and everyone talking and laughing and staring, where there is still time, and space, to move, and if one of the jeeps, full of tourists, or soldiers, comes along too fast, there is no problem, there is all the world to spill across and fill, there are fields and forests, not hedges and pavements, and everyone walks and runs and pedals…The British have caught themselves in a trap. Soon their bodies will no longer move. Perhaps that is why Vanessa is so frantic, driving herself to go faster and faster.