“Here?” I was starting to have my doubts about Garth Bentham.
“I had her buried here,” he nodded, which explained what he’d said and produced a certain sensation of relief in me. “There was a Methodist church here once over, with its own burying ground. The church went a donkey’s years ago, of course, but the old graveyard was still here when Lily-Anne died.”
“Was?” Our conversation was getting one-sided.
“Well, it still is – but right on the edge, so to speak. It wasn’t so bad then, though, and so I got permission to have a service done here, and down she went where I could go and see her. I still do go to see her, of course, now and then. But in another year or two . . . the sea . . .” He shrugged again. “Time and the tides, they wait for no man.”
We finished our coffee. I was going to have to be on my way soon, and suddenly I didn’t like the idea of leaving him. Already I could feel the loneliness creeping in. Perhaps he sensed my restlessness or something. Certainly I could see that he didn’t want me to go just yet. In any case, he said: “Maybe you’d like to walk down with me past the old timber yard, visit her grave. Oh, it’s safe enough, you don’t have to worry. We may even come across old Ben down there. He sometimes visits her, too.”
“Ah, well I’m not too sure about that,” I answered. “The time, you know?” But by the time we got down the path to the gate I was asking: “How far is the churchyard, anyway?” Who could tell, maybe I’d find some long-lost Lanes in there! “Are there any old markers left standing?”
Garth chuckled and took my elbow. “It makes a change to have some company,” he said. “Come on, it’s this way.”
He led the way back to the barrier where it spanned the road, bent his back and ducked groaning under it, then turned left up an overgrown communal path between gardens where the houses had been stepped down the declining gradient. The detached bungalow on our right – one of a pair still standing, while a third slumped on the raw edge of oblivion – had decayed almost to the point where it was collapsing inwards. Brambles luxuriated everywhere in its garden, completely enclosing it. The roof sagged and a chimney threatened to topple, making the whole structure seem highly suspect and more than a little dangerous.
“Partly subsidence, because of the undercutting action of the sea,” Garth explained, “but mainly the rot. There was a lot of wood in these places, but it’s all being eaten away. I made myself a living, barely, out of the old bricks and timber in Easingham, but now I have to be careful. Doesn’t do to sell stuff with the rot in it.”
“The rot?”
He paused for breath, leaned a hand on one hip, nodded and frowned. “Dry rot,” he said. “Or Merulius lacrymans as they call it in the books. It’s been bad these last three years. Very bad! But when the last of these old houses are gone, and what’s left of the timber yard, then it’ll be gone, too.”
“It?” We were getting back to single-word questions again. “The dry rot, you mean? I’m afraid I don’t know very much about it.”
“Places on the coast are prone to it,” he told me. “Whitby, Scarborough, places like that. All the damp sea spray and the bad plumbing, the rains that come in and the inadequate drainage. That’s how it starts. It’s a fungus, needs a lot of moisture – to get started, anyway. You don’t know much about it? Heck, I used to think I knew quite a bit about it, but now I’m not so sure!”
By then I’d remembered something. “A friend of mine in London did mention to me how he was having to have his flat treated for it,” I said, a little lamely. “Expensive, apparently.”
Garth nodded, straightened up. “Hard to kill,” he said. “And when it’s active, moves like the plague! It’s active here, now! Too late for Easingham, and who gives a damn anyway? But you tell that friend of yours to sort out his exterior maintenance first: the guttering and the drainage. Get rid of the water spillage, then deal with the rot. If a place is dry and airy, it’s OK Damp and musty spells danger!”
I nodded. “Thanks, I will tell him.”
“Want to see something?” said Garth. “I’ll show you what old merulius can do. See here, these old paving flags? See if you can lever one up a bit.” I found a piece of rusting iron stave and dragged it out of the ground where it supported a rotting fence, then forced the sharp end into a crack between the overgrown flags. And while I worked to loosen the paving stone, old Garth stood watching and carried on talking.
“Actually, there’s a story attached, if you care to hear it,” he said. “Probably all coincidental or circumstantial, or some other big word like that – but queer the way it came about all the same.”
He was losing me again. I paused in my levering to look bemused (and maybe to wonder what on earth I was doing here), then grunted, and sweated, gave one more heave and flipped the flag over on to its back. Underneath was hard-packed sand. I looked at it, shrugged, looked at Garth.
He nodded in that way of his, grinned, said: “Look. Now tell me what you make of this!”
He got down on one knee, scooped a little of the sand away. Just under the surface his hands met some soft obstruction. Garth wrinkled his nose and grimaced, got his face down close to the earth, blew until his weakened lungs started him coughing. Then he sat back and rested. Where he’d scraped and blown the sand away, I made out what appeared to be a grey fibrous mass running at right angles right under the pathway. It was maybe six inches thick, looked like tightly packed cotton wool. It might easily have been glass fibre lagging for some pipe or other, and I said as much.
“But it isn’t,” Garth contradicted me. “It’s a root, a feeler, a tentacle. It’s old man cancer himself – timber cancer – on the move and looking for a new victim. Oh, you won’t see him moving,” that strange look was back on his face, “or at least you shouldn’t – but he’s at it anyway. He finished those houses there,” he nodded at the derelicts stepping down towards the new cliffs, “and now he’s gone into this one on the left here. Another couple of summers like this ‘un and he’ll be through the entire row to my place. Except maybe I’ll burn him out first.”
“You mean this stuff – this fibre – is dry rot?” I said. I stuck my hand into the stuff and tore a clump out. It made a soft tearing sound, like damp chipboard, except it was dry as old paper. “How do you mean, you’ll ‘burn him out?’”
“I mean like I say,” said Garth. “I’ll search out and dig up all these threads – mycelium, they’re called – and set fire to ’em. They smoulder right through to a fine white ash. And God – it stinks! Then I’ll look for the fruiting bodies, and –”
“The what?” His words had conjured up something vaguely obscene in my mind. “Fruiting bodies?”
“Lord, yes!” he said. “You want to see? Just follow me.”
Leaving the path, he stepped over a low brick wall to struggle through the undergrowth of the garden on our left. Taking care not to get tangled up in the brambles, I followed him. The house seemed pretty much intact, but a bay window on the ground floor had been broken and all the glass tapped out of the frame. “My winter preparations,” Garth explained. “I burn wood, see? So before winter comes, I get into a house like this one, rip out all the wooden fixings and break ‘em down ready for burning. The wood just stays where I stack it, all prepared and waiting for the bad weather to come in. I knocked this window out last week, but I’ve not been inside yet. I could smell it, see?” He tapped his nose. “And I didn’t much care for all those spores on my lungs.”
He stepped up on a pile of bricks, got one leg over the sill and stuck his head inside. Then, turning his head in all directions, he systematically sniffed the air. Finally he seemed satisfied and disappeared inside. I followed him. “Spores?” I said. “What sort of spores?”