Rural Dreams Read online

  On my breaks, I walk. At first around the manor house and then beyond, through green fields and woods of oak and dappled shade. I pass through kissing gates and follow old bridleways. Sometimes I weep when I march through ancient forests though I hardly know why.

  Every step is a poem.

  Lady Jane watches me from her window and I take to recounting my walks. We bend in close, we pore over maps, we plot new routes. Over rambles, we bond. Lady Jane tells me of other, secret places she used to go when she was young. At her urging, I enter deeper in the woods to a place of twisted trees, where an old wooden bridge lies broken over the river. I rest with cheek on moss and think it’s worth it to take untrodden paths. I grow stronger.

  At night, we read poetry. We like Coleridge and Wordsworth and Keats. Lady Jane can grow confused; once during Shelley, she slapped me lightly on the face and said, ‘Ethel, you’re becoming a bore!’

  When I wash her silver hair, Lady Jane tells me stories. She’s only ever had one boyfriend and they kissed just once on a rainy beach before he left for war. She never saw him again. When I ask if she loved him, she says that she thinks she did and perhaps more with time.

  I’m 24 and I’ve only told one person I loved them and it wasn’t my family or the boy I went out with for a year. A memory: My friends and I are on the tube in peak hour. Londoners sit like dignified tombstones, we are colourful bats lining the sides. I’m wondering aloud what line Kilburn is on and a young man in a suit says, It’s this one, and I say thank you and then I say, good book because he has rock-pool eyes and he’s reading Far from the Madding Crowd and he says have you read it and I say, I have. Then my friends and I nudge one another, because he really is an absolute spunk. When he alights at the next stop, my friends sing him goodbye and at the last second I shout with reckless joy, I love you! and he turns and calls back, I love you too! and the Londoners smile into their laps and we in the carriage are carried in a warm glow all the way to Kilburn.

  Back in Kent, I ring the agency and tell them I’d like to stay on. Weeks turn to a month, then two, and when a car pulls up with niece and grand-nephew, it feels like a rude intrusion.

  The niece is a snob and her son, younger than me, talks only of stocks and property. He is still in thrall to his school and likes to mention parades and raucous dinners. He tells me all this when he’s followed me on one of my walks. I find a massive leaf in the shade of an old oak. I say I’m going to use it as a pillow and he looks at me as if I am very strange.

  I take him to the river and throw a rock in the water beside him. He jumps about, offended and wet. I suggest he throw a rock in beside me to make it even, but he refuses and walks across the field in a huff. His stick-figure is bent sideways in the wind as he struggles up the hill. ‘Ethel!’ I call out, ‘you’re becoming a bore.’

  Talk of property and stocks is the dullest thing in the world. Surely, I think, what is more important and infinitely more interesting, is this leaf I hold and this river, this wood. Stocks and property are terrible things to talk about, it’s the same with pets. Each day the visiting nurse talks at length about her pugs named Rodan and Roxy and I want to stick my head in the oven. And when she began recounting stories about her pets’ friends! ‘Rodan’s poodle friend named Joelene,’ and so on.

  ‘I can barely stand it when you talk about Rodan!’ I burst out in a fit. ‘Never mind Joelene!’

  ‘Well,’ the nurse said, unclipping the catheter. ‘You’re one for making your point.’

  But really – it’s of no consequence.

  All that matters in the end is surely this: the leaf, the river, the wood.

  When the son’s figure has disappeared, I find the old bridge. For the first time, I manage to cross it – at first by jumping from beam to splintered beam and then by crawling in the middle part where the current below is deep and strong. While I’m sitting, cross legged on the most solid beam, a white stag comes out of the woods. I hold my breath, suspended and watch as it drinks from the river, its antlers shimmering in the water. It is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen. Time slows. The trees are silent, the river flows on. Once finished, the stag lifts its regal head and observes me for a long moment before turning back to the woods.

  I exhale and leap back across the bridge to shore. Lady Jane is the only person I tell.

  The next morning, the Lady is in a jumpy, excited state. She refuses breakfast and declares that wants to go to Pevensey Beach. The niece and I eye each other across the room. It is a terrible day, grey and windy with rain. I suggest the following week, when the weather will be finer. But Lady Jane won’t be dissuaded and the niece, inheritance written over her grabby face, urges me to pack a thermos. To Pevensey Beach we go.

  Once there, we sit hunched on pebbles and look out to mutinous waves.

  Lady Jane brings up the fact that I used to be a lifeguard. I regret telling her this, I regret it very much.

  ‘At a pool!’ I say, ‘not the ocean.’

  Lady Jane says that I should go for a swim and that Australian girls are very strong and hardy.

  ‘No one would swim in that,’ the niece says.

  ‘An Australian girl would!’ Lady Jane says and I close my eyes.

  ‘No one would,’ the niece snaps her purse shut and pulls her scarf around her neck.

  Before I can change my mind, I’m kicking off my shoes and pulling my jeans down. I tear off my jacket and lift my jumper and long sleeve top over my head. The wind eats into me as I run across the pebbles and into the sea.

  It’s the worst agony I’ve ever experienced. The cold mauls, my limbs freeze up and I forget to breathe. When the water hits my stomach, I scream. Teeth explode when I dive under, my head shrinks. Purgatory is ice, not fire. I try to dive under once more but cannot, everything feels strained. I clap the sides of my face, one-two-three, then turn and run as best as I can back up the beach to the little party, sitting now with open mouths.

  The son asks, ‘how was it?’ and I reply, ‘cold at first, but lovely once you’re in.’

  When I reach down to pick up the blanket he offers, the son touches the crook of my elbow, rubs his warm fingers there lightly for just a second. ‘I thought your skin would be rougher,’ he says in a kind of wonder. I flick the blanket up toward me and throw it about my shoulders, but not before I see a mother’s dark look.

  On the way home in the car with my head aching– Lady Jane, still in high spirits, talks of poetry. I sit in the front passenger seat, trying to undress decently under the blanket while I listen to her try to recount the Ancient Mariner. Inspired by the sea, she wishes to hear it. She prods my arm, asking for help and after a moment I recite it – the whole first part of the poem. My jaw warms up with the recital. Blood surges through my body, I come to life.

  When I finish, the rest of the party is quiet.

  ‘Where on earth did you learn that?’ The mother asks.

  I eye her through the rear vision mirror. ‘Honours in English Literature. First class.’

  ‘Impressive,’ son says.

  His mother sits back in the seat, sniffs. ‘The accent grates,’ she says, and in that moment, I decide to sleep with her son.

  On the rest of the way home, we sit in silence. I let the blanket droop down low, low over my bare shoulder and hope the Pommy bastards note the lack of tan-lines.

  That night, I steal into the son’s room and sit on the edge of his bed. He’s wearing pyjamas and reading a book on historical buildings in Wales. Animosity toward him and his nation fades. I take the book, mark the page he is on and set it down.

  ‘Do you come here often?’ I ask.

  ‘I haven’t slept with many girls,’ he says, which I take to mean none and his hands shake like a young leaf.

  His mother in the room next door taps on the wall and calls, ‘how are you getting on in that hard-old bed darling?’ He shouts back, ‘Mother, I have high hopes,’ and we laugh and laugh into the pillows.

  After, we have a cup o
f tea and a hobnob. He tells me he’s never had a girlfriend and I suggest that he hold off on talking about his family lineage, or stocks or where he went to school. It’s boring, I tell him. Girls don’t care about dads who are Viscounts.

  Some do, he says and some want all that comes with it. Perhaps he is right. But not the girls I know, not me. What do you want? he asks, and I tell him, glow worms. Wordsworth, I add, and he says ahhh. But I don’t know if they taught poetry at his public school or talk about it much at his father’s bank.

  The next morning, I’m up early. I go right around the woods and past the restored church. I sit on top of a kissing gate and listen to the birds. I wait. The week before, one of my friends suggested in a glum voice over the phone that perhaps it was time we should start looking for boyfriends. I kick my feet against the wooden posts. Boyfriends can go to hell, I think. But the thought rests uneasy and doesn’t go away.

  When I get back to the manor, the visitors have gone and there’s a note on my bed, lying on top of the massive leaf:

  Australian girl

  Doesn’t like prissy blokes or stocks

  Only likes trees and walks

  And poetry

  In years to come, a friend will send me the section of a glossy magazine where his society wedding is featured over two pages. In the background, his mother scowls.*

  When I tuck her in that evening, the night is full of silver moon. Lady Jane is 94.

  One kiss in all that time.

  In her blue night dress in the narrow bed, she looks like a tiny bird. She touches the side of my face with her thin hand and I press my cheek on hers. I think; she’s not long for this world.

  In my own bedroom, I take the blanket off the clock and wrap it around my arms. From my window, I look out to where the twisted trees and river lay and wonder about Lady Jane and her lost love. Three months ago, I would have cried weak tears for all that she has missed.

  But Kent has made me a romantic. Now, I see glimmering lights everywhere I look.

  And perhaps that that one kiss of Lady Jane’s was worth it, worth all the drunken, glorious trysts I have had. Perhaps it was the kiss to end all kisses. You could live on such a kiss for fifty years or more, it would fill whole days and restless nights.

  A kiss on the beach, a letter on a leaf, a declaration from a train.

  Like glow worms on a cold English night, we are lifted up, carried along and placed.

  We burst and fade, we burst and fade.

  *He married an Australian

  BINKY

  It was hard to hear Vanessa’s voice over the phone. The coverage from his end wasn’t great and she was at a champagne breakfast so there was a bit of background noise. Peter wanted to hear how it was all going, what she thought of his new play and how much she missed him but all she kept talking about was Binky.

  Binky. He asks her if Binky’s parents are koalas, but she doesn’t find it funny. Binky, she answers, has just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and everyone is reading his work. It seems to resonate, she says. People are yearning for this type of thing. Peter had read the blurb for Binky’s book. It was about a retired cold war spy moving to the Lake District and falling in love with a woman who raised goats. He couldn’t imagine how anyone could relate to that – apart from retired spies or goat fans – especially when the author was some sort of weirdo marsupial.

  But Vanessa wouldn’t listen. She said that Binky’s writing was beautiful, his descriptions of the landscape so evocative that local hotels couldn’t keep up with avid readers rushing to find the place where Spencer McLaren first spied the beautiful Maisie Jones and her goats.

  Peter holds the phone away from his ear. He can’t stand this type of talk and the thought of Binky makes him want to punch something very hard. Had Binky cast some sort of stupid spell on Vanessa? She wasn’t normally so inarticulate. She must be drunk, he decided, and when he asks her, she says that yes, she is – very much so – and she must hang up the phone because she wants to drink some more.

  He says goodbye, puts the phone back in his pocket and feels for the first time the full force of distance between them. Five hours drive to Melbourne, a day on a plane and an hour on the tube to Kilburn. Thirty hours, say, not including wait time for some storm hovering over the city or a terrorist scare. He squints toward the drive. It was even a good twenty minute walk to get to the gate. He sighs. ‘I may as well be in Pura Pura,’ he says in his best theatre voice. ‘But hang on a minute,’ he continues, ‘I am in Pura Pura. What a fucking coincidence!’

  He laughs a kind of crazy laugh and remembers when Vanessa last called his work beautiful. It seems an eternity, but in reality, it would have been five years ago, when he first moved to London. He’d written a play called ‘Prints’ about a dying man, looking at photographs of the landmarks that surrounded his home, reliving his past. A low hill, parched paddocks, dank dams and the troubling scars in the canoe tree. ‘Prints’ was an instant success. He won the Australian Emerging Playwrights’ prize and within a week was on a plane to London, economy class packed with Contiki tourists, business chocked with cricketers and ex-‘Neighbours’ stars, all headed for the Euro dream.

  He picks up the bottle of scotch beside him, stolen from his father’s house, and takes three large slugs. Bloody Binky with his fluffy ears and his big paws trying to write his next book. Good luck with that one mate. He drinks more, coining some advice he’d give to Binky if he had the chance: stick to your own country and write about things that your fellow country men and women understand. The Brits get cold war spies. They don’t get isolation unless it includes a serial killer and they don’t get beauty unless there’s a little cottage and a running stream or some girl reaping wheat. It’s got to be manageable beauty for them, beauty to behold. The French don’t get humour. The Saudis don’t get fun. Stick to what you know, isn’t that the great tenant of writing after all? ‘Prints’ had been popular among the judges and acclaimed throughout the Australian literary scene. His one success. But, he knows, a major part of the appeal for the metro critics had been his rural charm. His kid-from-the-sticks freckles and his big handshake, his ‘how you going mate?’ type conversations. It was more than that, too, because in their pale critic eyes, he could see a kind of longing. In this country, doesn’t every man secretly want to be from the bush, like Clancy of the Overflow? What greater honour is there in Australia than riding down some mountain on a brumby at breakneck speed? What greater honour? He takes another slug, alarmed to feel a sob coming on.

  He could already see that his new play would be a failure. No one wants to read comedies, especially satirical ones set in Syria. What did Vanessa always tell him? Write about what you love.

  Suddenly, Peter crumples like a third-world building. His poorly constructed self lies broken on the earth and he cries a little through his nose. He kicks off his shoes, wriggles out of his black jacket and discards his tie. He lies in the brown dirt feeling the sun warm his face. He runs fingers through the soil and thinks about nothing. He moves his arms up and down, he digs his heels into the dirt. He makes little castles in the dust. He rolls onto his stomach and back again. He rolls onto his stomach and back again. And then he’s rolling, rolling in the dirt. He’s rolling, rolling in the dirt and it’s just one of the best things he’s done in ages. His face is getting gritty and there’s bits of sharp grass digging into his face and granules in his eyes. He’s flattening the earth, roughing it up, getting it all over him. His black pants and white shirt are brown now and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t bloody care! He turns onto his stomach, pokes his tongue out and tastes the earth. It’s gritty and hard and it gets stuck in the back of his teeth. He spits a globule into the ground and pokes it about with his finger making a dark red paste. He remembers doing this as a boy. He pokes his tongue out again and has another taste. It’s no better, but it’s no worse. He lies on his side, knees up to his chest like a child and once more he thinks of nothing. He feels the little stones in his m
outh and ears and the sand trickling between his fingers and the sky is big and blue and the wind is low.

  ~~~

  It’s been two weeks since his mother’s heart attack. She wouldn’t like to see him roll about in the dirt like this, but still he doesn’t get up. Maybe he is his father’s son after all. Heart attack in the roses as she staggered out to sprinkle them with grey water from the shower. Collapsed among the Holy Toledos, the Yvonne Kennys and the Wedding Belles. Years ago, she’d visited him in England, and he’d taken her on a tour of the famous rose gardens of London. Although they’d enjoyed their time together, he sensed her fretting the whole time, for her garden. He suspects that when the time comes she would prefer to be buried under her roses, making herself into compost for them – but he doesn’t suggest the idea. Not yet. His father has taken the heart attack badly. It’s a rare farmer that considers the health of his wife before the farm and now his old man is facing the thought of what the next few years may hold. Like it or not, he’s come to the realization that it wasn’t only the roses she kept alive all this time. And that question this morning from the family lawyer; What Do You Want To Do With The Farm? – the deflated way his father looked at him…it’s another reason, he admits, why he finds himself drinking scotch and rolling about on the bare earth.

  Peter can’t decide whether that look from his father is an improvement on the wary one his mother gave him when he visited her in hospital. He bent to kiss her and felt her move away, slightly, as if he was being overly familiar. Had they really been strangers for so long? Her hands looked paper thin and he touched one of them, feeling the dry skin crackle under his touch. He remembers those hands rubbing big circles on his back to help him sleep when he was a boy. Big warm circles and a half-remembered song about a mouse. In the hospital, with all the tubes and machines, it would have been difficult to attempt a big warm circle on her, impossible really, but he did think about it. Instead, he tried to regale her with gossip from the London theatre scene and news about his latest play, but this fell flat. It was only when he mentioned Vanessa that his mother’s face seemed to loosen and her eyes focus on him. The two women got along very well when they met in London. Because, of course, it was grandchildren that she was after, little people running around the farm and feeding lambs with a bottle. ‘Wedding bells?’ he thought he heard his mother whisper, but he wasn’t sure whether she meant marriage or her rose bushes. In any case, he had no answer – he hasn’t fed her plants the whole time he’s been home. He digs his fingers into the soil, he makes circles in the dirt.