Sandlands Page 7

  On the laptop screen, my afternoon starts to rerun itself, sharper than my memory of it, precise in every detail. There is Raymond, greeting new arrivals from behind the bar with a ‘Town lost again on Sat’day, then,’ before pulling their pints in gloomy satisfaction. There, side by side at the wooden settle beside the bar, are the two regulars, the ones I met later over a supper of Raymond’s pie and chips, with Jim – or was it George? – telling some grumbling story punctuated by jabs of the forefinger at an imaginary antagonist while George – or was it Jim? – nursed his half of Guinness and shook his head sorrowfully. I must go back in a minute and see if I can spot them, youthful and floral-collared, in 1979. Then the music begins. Proceedings open with what must be a Ship standard, as from the velvet-seated stool a pianist, younger and slimmer than the 1979 model, leads the room in a hearty if somewhat ragged rendition of ‘The larks they sang melodious’.

  Behind the piano, the ledge and the photographs are all where they should be: the football team, the man and dog. The me behind the lens, like the other cameramen before me, pans right towards the end of the ledge, past the Toby jug, the man with the beard... and suddenly the me that’s here in the room sits up straighter against the pillows. The corner seat is empty. She isn’t there.

  Perhaps she only arrived later. But even as I think it, I know it isn’t true. Well then, she must just have slipped out to the ladies at this point and will be back in a minute or two. I pause the clip, slide the dot a centimetre to the right and release it to restart. But the focus here is on a younger woman at a table at the opposite side of the bar, near the window, singing ‘Aweigh Santy Ano’ and playing the melodeon. Impatient, I slide the dot further to the right, release it again. A white-haired man is on his feet and midway through lamenting his wand’rings in the woods so wild – and behind him, clearly visible, is the high-backed corner seat. Still empty.

  When did she do her spot? ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’ – when did she sing it? It was towards the end of the session, I’m pretty sure of that. I pull the dot a good way right this time, and yes, there are the three long-haired teenage girls with their unaccompanied harmonies. ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’ came straight after them, I’m certain of it. I let the tape roll on. But as the teenagers linger on their final major chord, modulating to a plaintive minor, and applause stutters around the bar, the scraping chairs and rumbling voices are interrupted not by my woman with the cleft chin but by the piano again, and the final item of the afternoon, a rousing general chorus of ‘New York Girls’. I must have missed it. Rewind, play. Twice more I watch back through the final section of the video, stopping and restarting, and still she isn’t there. Did I stop filming for a while, and I’ve managed to forget it? But I have the clearest recollection of standing there hearing her sing with the Sony in my hand – of watching her through the viewfinder, checking her image on the little screen. A malfunction? But there’s no jump in the action, no hiatus, no join.

  Frustrated, I close the file. My fingers are clumsy on the trackpad: why are they trembling like that? I return to the Suffolk folk website and the archived film clips. 1979: I’ll find her there – or her mother, rather. Searching through, I locate quite quickly the three melodeon players winding out their Morris tune. I let them play; she comes next.

  Damn it. Just as the music dies away and the low between-songs hubbub starts up, the picture freezes. Bloody buffering – though the pub’s Wi-Fi connection isn’t bad on the whole, and you can hardly expect superfast broadband out here in the sticks. I wait, watching the rotating circle, impatience mounting. Still buffering: it must be jammed. I exit then click back on, starting the video from a little way back, with the melodeonists still in full swing. They play their final bars, the last chord ebbs, conversation resumes— and the blasted screen freezes again.

  Give up, I tell myself, aware that my left hand is tightly balled, the nails digging into my palm. It’s just a glitch. Leave it alone, come back to it later. Closing the link, I go back instead to the earliest clip, back to 1954 and the smoky black-and-white. I start it at the beginning. At least this picture is moving, but for some reason now there’s no sound, only mummers acting out silently the scene in the bar. The spry little fiddle player, fingers scampering, taps his foot to a noiseless jig. Then his bowing slows, and the man in the cloth cap opens his mouth and mimes the first verse of ‘Fathom the Bowl’. The camera swings round, and my stomach lurches. The corner chair is no longer empty.

  Her chin is the same, and the hair, and even the dress: dark, long-sleeved and austere. Her face is angled down, partly shadowed, but I can see her lips moving, and as I watch there’s a pop and the soundtrack crackles to life.

  So drink to Tom o’ Bedlam,

  he’ll fill the seas in barrels.

  I’ll drink it all, all brewed with gall,

  with Mad Maudlin I will travel.

  To the left and forwards of her I can see the fiddler, still plainly fiddling, although no sound of a violin can be heard. It’s all wrong, all nonsensical. She shouldn’t be there, not in 1954; she should only be there as a photograph. She’s like some sombre Russian doll: remove the layers one by one but her face still reappears. The shot moves back towards the left and there at the side bench is the cloth-capped singer, his lips still wordlessly moving, while instead of his song there is only the woman’s soft, insistent voice.

  Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys...

  Computers can play stupid tricks. The other video must have re-started, and that is the soundtrack I’m hearing. That’ll be it. But when I quit full screen and check the other link, it’s still locked, still buffering. Yet her voice twines on.

  Spirits white as lightning

  shall on my travels guide me...

  I click on the double bar to halt the video and the violinist’s arm is arrested in mid-motion, but not the woman’s song.

  The moon would quake and the stars would shake,

  whenever they espied me...

  With sudden urgency I click to close the whole page, leave the archive website, shut down the browser. I’m back to my familiar desktop wallpaper, but still the crooning voice won’t stop. I go to the main menu, drag the cursor to ‘shut down’. Yet something makes my hand hesitate, arrested above the keyboard. Perspiration slicks the creases of my palm, and my finger joints are stiff, incompliant. The sense floods back over me of the self that’s inside the machine, the recorder recorded, contained within my own past. The notion is more powerful now, more urgent, almost engulfing. It’s as though I’m trapped. I am the disappearing image, shuttled to infinity between two mirrors. I am the smallest Russian doll, enclosed inside my earlier self, and I can’t break out. More than that, there’s a tightening conviction that if I shut down now I will somehow be extinguished, will somehow cease to be. If I shut down now... if I shut down...

  No gypsy, slut or doxy

  Shall take my mad Tom from me...

  There’s no choice, no other way out. I have to stop the voice. I steel myself, select ‘Shut Down’, and press.

  Nothing happens. Again I press, twice, three times, jabbing savagely at the trackpad, until an error message appears. It’s the browser that’s failed to quit. She won’t go. Why won’t she go?

  Wresting my eyes from the screen, I glance across to the far wall, where the Wi-Fi booster winks at me, two green lights and a red. Around it, after the brightness of the computer screen, the blackout is almost complete.

  Almost, but not quite. From the shrouded oblong of the window comes a faint greyness, and as my eyes adjust I see it there, above my coat where it hangs on the back of the chair, the pool of deeper black, the shadow where no shadow should be. I mustn’t look. Whatever I do, I mustn’t look.

  My hand shakes. Reopen or force quit?

  I’ll weep all night, with stars I’ll fight...

  The room pitches. Force quit. It’s one of us or the other. The woman, or me. Force quit.

  I close my eyes and press.

  Stil
l I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys,

  Bedlam boys are bonny,

  For they all go bare and they live by the air...

  Nightingale's Return

  Two hours sitting folded like a grasshopper on the aircraft and several more waiting at the terminal on those wretched moulded plastic seats, plus three trains and two taxis at either end of his day, had left a niggling soreness in Flavio’s lumbar vertebrae. Or maybe it was the forty years before that with insufficient regular stretching, spent behind a desk at the sede del Municipio, because his knees were also stiffer than they had any right to be. Sixty-four was no age at all these days; the old cashier at the Banco Popolare who must be five years his senior had run the Ravenna marathon last year. But that man was short, with the compact springiness of a Piemontese while Flavio was tall, and height was nothing but a curse as you grew older. He could almost feel the protesting grind of cartilage discs unaccustomed to any greater exercise than the short walk to the office and back, with a regular detour on the way home to Maurizio’s sports bar on the corner for a grappa and to catch the news headlines. Not that the news was ever anything but grim these days, but a man had a duty to keep on terms with the world he lived in. No – he’d been stuck in the same triangular groove for far too long, stretching to an elongated quadrilateral on a Saturday for his regular treats: a trip to the barber’s for a proper wet shave or to the Trattoria dall’Oste for braciole di maiale and a carafe of house red. This trip to England was just the shake-up he needed.

  Perhaps walking would dispel the stiffness. It was too late to change his mind now in any case, as the taxi driver he had paid off and sent ahead to the inn with his suitcase had already pulled away and disappeared from view between the convergent banks of cow parsley, which marked the curve of the lane ahead. He hoped he could trust the man, who had volunteered precious few words on the short ride from the station, offering in particular no account for why the little halt should call itself ‘Wickham Market’ when it was at a place called Campsea Ashe. Flavio’s father, Salvatore, had always spoken warmly of the people of these parts, as being straightforward, honest folk. ‘Veri contadini,’ he’d called them; guarded, it was true, but flintily fair-minded, even towards a man who was their enemy. But the world had changed in seventy years. Who was to say they might not take the opportunity now to rob an ageing foreigner with a bad back and halting, schoolroom English?

  Nightingale Farm the place was called, and his father said they were really there, back in those days, the birds that gave the place its name. Flavio remembered hearing nightingales at his grandparents’ house at San Cesario in the countryside of Emilia-Romagna – hearing them but never seeing one. They were anonymous little brown birds according to Papi, plain as Franciscan fustian, with a drabness quite at odds with the extravagance of their song, and they kept to the densest thickets, nesting deep in the heart of gorse or underscrub. There was, besides, some quality about their song which made its source and direction impossible to gauge. ‘That’s because it comes directly from the throats of angels,’ his nonna told him, ‘and not from the larynx of a bird.’ Flavio himself had no religion, though he would soon be reaching a stage of life when he might start to wish for its solace. But it was true that the small bird’s music expanded and swelled until it filled the air on every side, so that it seemed to rise with the dew at daybreak and descend from the stars at night.

  Nightingale Farm. He’d written ahead of time to inquire about a visit. The name of the people was the same as when his father was sent there: Beck, one of those solid Anglo-Saxon names. He had no other address apart from the name of the farm and village but it had been enough for his letter to find its destination. Perhaps in England, too, they had no street addresses in these country places, and the postman knew the house and family just as everybody did, the same way it had been in San Cesario. It was a woman who wrote back to him, and he wondered what relation she would be. The couple his father spoke of back then had been the age of his own parents, Flavio’s grandparents, so that might make his correspondent now a granddaughter, or a great-granddaughter? He’d arranged to call tomorrow afternoon – had received a gracious invitation to tea and no doubt some English cake – and was putting up tonight and for the few days following at the village inn. He would ask for directions from there. The Ship, it was called, which was also the same inn his father had mentioned – the ‘pub’ was the word that Salvatore used – where he’d drunk beer at sundown alongside the other village farmhands and learned to join in the choruses of their songs. Flavio recalled it for the curiosity of its name, which Salvatore said made no sense at all when the village was fully ten kilometres from the sea. It was probably some English joke that neither of them understood.

  It was a beautiful evening for a walk; he could have no complaints on that score, at least. He’d packed his case with a thought to rain, which was what he was told you could expect in England in any month of the year, including high summer. The lush vegetation of the verges bore some testament to the truth of it as they were certainly far greener than you would see in Italy in June. But beneath them, tramlining the lane, lay a powder of fine, pale sand, and the air was warm and moved by a breeze as crisply dry as a glass of good verdicchio. His back seemed to loosen a little as he walked but his left knee joint kept locking unaccountably. The knees of an office clerk, he thought, of a funzionario. Once, he knew, he had enjoyed his job in the local business services department, had taken a quiet satisfaction in his own efficiency, but he knew it in a distant, abstract way. It was too long ago now to remember what the enjoyment felt like. He had never married. There had been girls when he was younger, and several of them would have made agreeable companions to warm his bed and share his table, but when it came to husbands they seemed to prefer men who were better dancers or had faster cars and livelier conversation. Girls, back then, and women, too, more recently – though none, admittedly, for quite some time. But as they all grew older, marriage (to him, or their own to other people) no longer seemed to suggest itself as a consideration. You could scarcely blame the women; he was no kind of catch.

  Then Maria had died – his sister, Maria Chiara, aged only fifty-two, who’d had a lump in her breast for more than a year. They weren’t the kind of family where such a thing was talked of between sister and brother, so he’d known she was sick but thought it some stubborn infection she would shake off when the spring weather came. Instead, the returning sunshine brought only jonquils and mimosa for her coffin. After that it fell to Flavio to move back in with Salvatore and their mother, Giuseppa, both of them now ailing and housebound. He’d pulled in his horns then, like the snails he used to hunt for in the damp orchard grass at Nonna and Papi’s in San Cesario as a youngster, whose glistening antlers swayed in a slow dance like something under water but retracted with surprising speed the moment they were touched. Like them he had retreated into the calcified prison he had built for himself. But it was four years now since Giuseppa had died, and Salvatore had been gone a year, the house cleared out and painted and the top floor rented out so that he could afford at last to take his modest municipal pension and live quite comfortably according to his measured habits. Now it was time to crawl out from his shell and reconnect, to see a little of humanity and the world before he was old and bedridden as his parents had been in those last narrow months and years.

  Pausing for a moment to straighten his spine and let his eye absorb the vista of well-tended fields and tidy hedges, it came to Flavio how little, at heart, this country was different from his own. Idly, he brushed one hand through the feathered tops of oat grass and meadow foxtail at the laneside, releasing a mist of weightless seed and lacing the air with honey. Then he slipped open the top two buttons of his shirt and, shaking free his locked knee, moved off again towards the village.

  * * *

  Planting potatoes was back-breaking work under any skies. All day long Salvatore had bent to his task, lifting from their pallets the chitted tubers, flaccid-skinn
ed and small as a bantam egg, and burying them a hand’s width deep in the raised seams of earth, with their sprouting eyes towards the warmth. Now, as the low grey cloud, which had drooped overhead since morning, finally banked up and away to the east to let in slanting from the west the golden evening sunlight, he stacked up the empty pallets, straightened the kink from his lower spine and set off up the lane for Nightingale Farm.

  Would they be singing tonight, the nightingales? It was almost the end of April and they had been back for a week or more: two cock birds, one who had staked his claim to a tangle of hawthorn and thick brambles between the lane and the corrugated pigsties, and one in the gorse bushes on the piece of sloping scrubland behind the farmhouse which led down to Stone Common. They sang in the morning when he set off for the fields and again at his return, and on into the dusk after supper, and if he stirred in his bed at night, the sound of their voices still drifted in beneath the open sash. You’d think they never stopped, but if these English birds were like the ones at home in San Cesario then they took a siesta in the heat of the noonday like good Italians. Could a nightingale have a nationality, though, the way a man had – be he soldier, sailor or farmer – when they split their lives between two countries, spending summer and winter three thousand kilometres apart? They arrived, and sang for six or eight short weeks, and found a mate and raised their young, and then they would be off again, to follow their ancestral airborne tracks to warmer climes. Perhaps these Blaxhall birds, though English born, had also the scarlet blood of Africa running hot in their veins. And who could say that they had not flown through Emilia-Romagna on their journey here, stopping off to rest their wings in the woods at San Cesario?