His words are muffled, as if he is chewing on a mouthful of wet paper, but I obey his directions and he settles back and says, Isn’t this nice?
I agree it is. He beams and places a hand on my arm. Oh, isn’t it nice? Going back?
It’s lovely.
Going back together, he says with satisfaction, and we drive on until I have to start singing to keep myself awake. I wind the window down to let in some cold air. We’re climbing higher; the rushing wind has lost the oily tang of the main roads and has the magical pricking sweetness of cut fields and a heavy, early autumn dew. Arthur laughs and joins in with “Green Grow the Rushes-o” and when we finish that he starts up at once with “Jerusalem,” as if he knows a hundred songs and can pick one without thinking. The words come easily, and give him delight.
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountain green?
Remember, Ruth? Jerusalem?
Just in time, I do.
Fourteenth of June, 1972, I say, and he smiles at me and squeezes my hand on the steering wheel.
But still I can’t stay awake, and although it’s very nearly light and it can’t be far now, I pull off the road into the opening of a rutted track. Across it just a few feet back from the road there’s a barrier of barbed wire and baler twine, stretched between fence posts set in old concrete-filled paint cans. An electrified livestock fence is drawn across a couple of yards behind that. Beyond it, at the horizon, the sky is solidifying to a pale solid gold, like cooling beeswax. I tip the seat back and close my eyes. Arthur sighs and settles beside me and takes my hand. Except for the occasional soft buffeting of air as a vehicle roars past us, it is quiet and still.
The sun on my face wakes me up. There’s a tight ache around my ribs. The day is already garish but when I get out of the car to stretch my body, I discover it’s also windy and cold. By the side of the track, sparse and stemmy weeds dusky with exhaust fumes wave back and forth, and here and there in the ditch the meagre yellow stars of a wildflower dip among cigarette packets, bottles, and shreds of paper and buckled cans. Miles above us, a few birds fleck a giant, chaotic sky.
Arthur wakes in a bad mood. Of course, he says, peevish and flatulent, he will remember the turnoff out of Netherbarn Cross for Overdale, but we drive three miles too far before he admits in an injured voice that I have missed it. His stomach is upset; he wriggles and scratches and fidgets with the window. I turn the car around and we crawl back the way we came but still he can’t find the turnoff because, he says, he can’t be expected to recognize it approaching from the wrong direction. We persevere, but after more studying of the maps and the tattered hand-drawn directions from nearly forty years ago, twice he chooses the wrong track. One takes us into a farmyard; the other ends at a barred and padlocked brick building stuck with aerials and antennae, property of the electricity company, sitting at the base of a pylon.
It’s not as if you, Arthur says sniffily, as I reverse the car and we start to bump our way back to the road, were ever a natural at map-reading.
I’m too exasperated to reply so we drive on saying nothing for a while, back in the direction of Netherbarn Cross. We pass the same small garage we’ve seen half a dozen times; the situation is getting so desperate that I am steeling myself, if we have to drive past it again, to go in and ask for directions.
Still, he says, I suppose you’d better take a look.
I park at a disused turning that looks as if it might once have led to a hopeless golf course that never prospered. It’s a derelict little place that we’ve passed and repassed in the last hour, but while I’m peering at the map Arthur is staring hard out the window.
Those trees are new, he says eventually.
It seems we’re here. We’ve found it by accident. It’s the trees that threw him, a line of conifers on each side behind low, curving brick walls that also, he says, never used to be here. The old Overdale track has been transformed into an entrance, and the entrance is now in disrepair; in front of each of the two trees nearest the road stands a pair of upright, rusting metal struts, buckled and stricken. One set is quite bare and from the other hang the stiff plywood shreds of a sign long ago ripped away.
And another thing, Arthur grumbles, waving a hand behind him: How could I be expected to find it when everything else is so different? The garage never used to be there, either. And they’ve widened the road and stuck those things in the middle.
There are barriers between the two traffic lanes and a long white-hatched space in the road where coaches can wait before turning. His memory of the old hazardous junction is useless, and the old directions no longer make sense.
They’ve flattened out the bend, he says, aggrieved. No wonder I missed it. After all, you missed it, too, didn’t you?
I start the car again and we set off up the track. The posts of the brick entrance have fallen away and lie crumbled and biscuity on the ground, and across the walls zigzag fissures in the mortar skew the brickwork. There are gaps in the rows of white copestones. Where the conifers end, the way reverts to a country track through fields. A tall green line of weeds grows down the centre of it and swishes the underside of the car. Every few yards we drive over ruts that have been filled with stones or patches of tar, but not recently; thistles and dock sprout through puddles and cracks. I have to stop and get out to move a coil of wire and a sheet of corrugated iron out of the way, and about half a mile on we come across a burned-out, rusted car, tipped halfway into a field. The front wheels and bonnet are missing and its boot gapes open. Nettles stretch up through the engine.
Gradually we leave the tussocky fields behind. The hills on either side of the way begin to climb towards the sky. As they rise into slanting mounds and suave, tilting cones they assume new distinction and character; they acquire the presence, even sentience, of sculpture or of people standing peripherally and very still, alone or in deliberate clusters. Light brims over the shoulders of the eclipsed hills to the east and pours itself over the opposite side in cold, showy pinks and yellows. The track rises ahead and then dips, and in the distance disappears round a curve into the dark swell of a valley. I glance at Arthur. His eyes are running with tears and his mouth opens and closes wetly.
Nearly there, I whisper, and he nods.
After another mile or so the wide pebbly stream that is now running alongside the track veers away extravagantly. We round the next curve and Arthur cries out. I stop the car on the edge of an apron of pitted tarmac tatty with weeds and the mangled remains of benches and litter bins. The building before us is a small redbrick mansion with a miscellany of dark elaborate turrets and impractical chimneys and gabled windows, set into the hillside in front of a sparse plantation of twiggy shrubs and trees. Even derelict and vandalized, it looks pompous.
The whole place is surrounded by high chain-link fencing, bearing warning signs about trespass and the hazardous state of “these premises.” I leave Arthur weeping quietly in the car and walk the fence. I go as far as the ruin of a modern single-storey extension, not visible from the car, that abuts on the far side of the lodge. Here is where two sections of fencing have been forced apart and where, against the walls of the extension, fires have been set. Smoke stains snake up the boards nailed over the front doors as far as the asphalt overhang of the flat roof. The blistered, prefabricated panels under one of the windows have sheered off and now curl outward. Like all the others, this window had been boarded up, but now it’s a jagged dark rectangle. Traces of another fire on the ground underneath it reach as high as the sill. The window board itself, prised off and split and partly burnt, lies nearby in a bed of broken glass.