To the River (27 page)

There is no possibility of permanent tenancy on this circling planet. It isn’t part of the deal. And though I know no more than Bede, I’ll wager there aren’t any sunlight fields waiting
without and beyond
, and that should one reach them one would anyway doubtless find, like the warrior Achilles, that it’s better to be the meanest ploughboy on this green earth than emperor of all the dead. This is it, this brief wheeling life, and between darkness and darkness the light of noon fell on the real, withering blooms with which the chalk had been festooned, and then, as I reached the crest of the hill, it fell on the rolling breakers of the English Channel, which had been lent for that moment the blue of heaven; the colour, as Derek Jarman said in his film
Blue
, of the terrestrial paradise.

VIII

SALVAGE

T
HERE WAS A RAT ON THE
road down to Piddinghoe, resting on its side, paws tucked primly beneath its chin. It must, I thought, stooping to examine it, have been killed very recently, though I could see no marks of injury upon it. It looked in the pink of health, coat gleaming, black eyes unveiled by the scrim that shortly follows death. A few yards on I found another, thoroughly mangled and reeking to high heaven. They were prodigiously large rats and I wondered if they might be related, if the first glossy individual had been killed while mourning at the grave of a parent or a spouse, though it seemed more likely that it had been feasting upon the corpse when a car swung round the corner and sent it voyaging through the air.

I took the low path to the river, skirting the village and coming out by Piddinghoe boatyard. An old man in a blue shirt was sitting on a deckchair there, eating a sandwich from a plastic tub. As I drew closer I heard him say
Mullet. Looks to me like they’re feeding in the mud
. He was speaking to a couple standing a little back from the water and as I passed the other man laughed and said
You been catching them all before I got here.
They stood companion-ably in silence for a while and then began to swap fishing tips, in the slow, halting way that elderly men pass time together. I couldn’t hear all that was said, but some sentences or parts of sentences lifted my way as the first man baited his hook and swung his line into the calm uprushing water.
I was after the bass. I use a little
– but this word was unintelligible –
and catch mullet with a fly. I was getting them at Beddingham, on the river there. Beddingham Reach? Yeah, I sometimes pick up tiny bass on fly. I’ve never picked up a really decent one on the river. Thought we’d give bread a try today. What I normally do, I use white maggot.
The woman interjected here, laughing meaninglessly, and then they took their leave, calling
Might see you again, bye now
as they lugged their own rods up the path.

Big pale clouds were riding overhead, sculpted into scoops that hardened as I watched into cumulonimbi with their threat of thunder. There was a funny riddle about Piddinghoe that I wanted to remember. Something about magpies. Yes, that was it: they shod magpies, fished for moonshine and hung their ponds out to dry. Magpies, it is supposed, were the local pied cattle and hanging the ponds out relates to the process of making whitewash from chalk. As for fishing for moonshine, it derives from one of those rustic excuses used by locals when found with smugglers’ booty. The longer village version tells of a shepherd caught in the act of pulling barrels of pilfered brandy from one of the dewponds that pit the Downs hereabouts. When challenged by the Excise men he cried
The moon be drowning, I must fish her out
and with this declaration of idiocy succeeded in saving both himself and the booze.

Piddinghoe used to be an isolated little place, in which the main trade was brickmaking, but Newhaven is sweeping ever nearer and the village has long since lost the brickyard, and with it the cobbler and blacksmith, the Royal Inn and the Royal Oak, with only the boatyard to preserve it from becoming little more than a commuters’ outpost. The river was changing too. Three red cranes rose behind Denton and beneath them the suburbs had come into view, the hills covered with the creep of houses that Virginia Woolf once railed against, calling them ‘spot & rash & pimple & blister; with the incessant motor cars like active lice’. Discarded Coke bottles and crumbs of polystyrene were mixed in with seaweed on the shoreline, and above me a reddish kestrel held its place in the air, wings flexed; then, as the breeze turned, rowed fiercely forward for a beat or two before arcing back into its hunting stance.

What could it see among the bladder campion and knapweed, with those fine globed eyes? A mouse? A vole? A tiny and ferocious shrew, itself hard on the heels of a beetle or a slug? It is bedlam down there, in that part-visible world beneath our feet. A shrew sleeps for minutes at a time and if it doesn’t eat twice its own body weight each day it will not survive the night. Imagine living with that kind of hunger: sixteen stone of meat to daily pillage and consume, your single set of teeth wearing to stumps; and when they break you’re done for.
Allez-oop
. I gritted my own teeth. At least I had some oatcakes and the sweaty remains of last night’s cheese.

The tide had turned while I’d been up on the hill and as I walked towards the cranes the light fell as it had all week on the tangled mirror of the grasses, to be absorbed or flung back to the sky. I could hear a grasshopper fidgeting its song and further out there was a siren testifying to some disorder in the human realm. It struck me as curious then, the idea of a whole town of people attending to their business, a whole town of people driving cars or walking the streets, their faces only partially betraying the magic lantern show that flares in utter privacy within the confines of each skull. Do animals think in these bright spools of colour, I sometimes wonder? Do they walk in their minds through landscapes known and unknown, both during waking hours and within the course of dreams? They do not replay conversations, or add great registers of numbers in their heads, but do they revisit past emotions or think on faces that have gone? It seems astonishing to me how alone man is, though he can touch and talk and gaze on others of his kind. But that picture theatre within his head: no one but he will ever see it played, and there is no medium on earth that can accurately catch its luminosity or speed.

It was the kind of thought I had frequently in the bleak months in Brighton after Matthew had left, when it began to occur to me that the whole story of love might be nothing more than a wicked lie; that simply sleeping beside another body night after night gives no express right of entry to the interior world of their thoughts or dreams; that we are separate in the end whatever contrary illusions we may cherish; and that this miserable truth might as well be faced, since it will be dinned into one, like it or not, by the attritions of time if not by the failings of those we hold dear. I wasn’t so bitter now. I’d begun to emerge into a sense of satisfaction with my lot, but it would be a long time before I trusted someone, for I’d seen how essentially unknowable even the best loved might prove to be.

I’d begun to enter, as I thought these dark things, into the fringes of the port, an industrial no-man’s-land where things in transport were briefly processed or broken into constituent parts. There was a wharf on the far bank and a swooping oystercatcher drew my eye to a building site populated by figures in fluorescent jackets and the red, yellow and white hardhats of Lego men. They had a radio with them but as I tried to make out the song more oystercatchers rose into the air and by the time their clear
pew pew
had passed the music was gone. A fleet of Palletline trucks was parked by the site, and beyond it a scrap-yard filled with crunched-up cars and glittering mountains of rusting metal gave off in the light the same black-gold glint as the owl’s pellet I’d found in the wheat. I couldn’t make head nor tail of this place, which was furnished with all manner of funnels, chutes and holding tanks. It looked as if it had been abandoned, the machinery branny with dust, but I mistrusted my perception, for I was on the wrong side of the water and gazing towards the sun. These places that are outside the human scale maintain anyway their own kind of invisibility: the eye drifts past them; their purpose is mystifying and their workings hard to name.

The path on my own side of the river had been travelling alongside a patch of wild or waste ground that the map reported was a disused refuse tip, but the land came to an abrupt end then and beyond the Yorkshire fog and the blackening skeletons of cow parsley was a broad lead-coloured side channel filled with gipsyish ranks of trawlers and barges. Many of the boats had peeling paint or were patched with sheets of blue tarpaulin slung over ruined cabins, but despite this air of decay the place was jumping. I passed a woman sprawled on the deck of a houseboat, smoking a cigarette while a black dog stretched out beside her, and further back I could see other people fiddling with painters or resting dreamily in the sun. A man in a red dinghy had got stuck in the open water between two pontoons and was turning an engine that refused to catch. After a few spluttering tugs he gave it up in disgust and began paddling in with a single oar. A boat! Why didn’t I have a boat? I began to pick out my favourites, settling at last on a little white trawler with four blue portholes and a dinghy tied up at its bow. Dreaming away like this – sleeping in a cabin! Scrambled egg for breakfast! – I walked almost directly into a massively pumped-up man with two Rottweilers whose necks were almost as broad as his.
Sorry
, I mumbled, and he bowed his head magnanimously at me, like a politician or a king.

The channel must have been one of those old loops of the river that the navvies had sliced through, creating Denton Island. Boys in sports shirts were playing football on the bank, and the noise of their shouts and the barks of the dogs mixed up with the clattering stays of the boats seemed so pure a distillation of the place that I thought I would know it blindfolded. The Ouse Way, which I was still loyally following, left the water then and turned up a road lined with various river-businesses: Cantell and Son, which proclaimed
boat repairs
,
moorings and ship chandlers
; Blakes Approved Osmosis Centre with its window full of red and white buoys; Newbury Engineering,
boat builders
; and among them Bridge Press,
fine lithographic printers
. Opposite these sheds and barns were the backs of council houses, and the path all of a sudden ducked between them, running up an alley between the yards.

I didn’t like this alley, but it plunged out dutifully enough onto the edge of the dual carriageway, where pink valerian was growing flyblown in the verge. I’d come out at the other end of the loop, where the channel rejoined the river. There were two tanned barefoot boys in swimming trunks standing on the bridge to Denton Island, one slender and one very fat, and as I watched the first one leapt from the railing into the muddied river and swam to the bank in a speedy, splashy crawl. The fat boy hopped off too, landing with an almighty whump, and then a girl climbed up, dressed in shorts, a T-shirt and mismatched fluorescent green and pink wetsuit boots. The second boy struggled up the bank, yelling
Do you want me to stand next to you?
but his chivalry was misplaced, for she toppled as effortlessly as a marsh frog into the murkish water.

I crossed the Ouse on the wide road bridge that opens twice daily to let the boats in and out. I hardly knew it now: an industrial river, dark as oil, its surface opaque and unrevealing. There was a hideous sculpture of a cormorant on the seaward side, planted on a ramshackle jetty with its wings splayed up to the sun. The ferry from Dieppe docked just past it, and it was here that Louis Philippe, the last king of France, arrived in exile after his abdication on 6 March 1848, travelling with his wife under the name of Mr and Mrs Smith. They stayed in the Bridge Hotel, eating what
The Times
recorded to have been an enormous breakfast, and then were borne off by the local aristocracy to complete their days in genteel decline. ‘The Orleans family in England are literally in poverty,’ wrote Victor Hugo. ‘They are twenty-two at table and drink water.’ Louis Philippe had been a profligate king and his property in France was held against his debts, which, Hugo adds, included 70,000 francs to his market gardener for butter. All the court had managed to salvage were their clothes and a little jewellery, and even this was a tortuous process.

Three long tables were placed in the theatre of the Tuileries, and on these were laid out all that the revolutionists of February had turned over to the governor of the Tuileries, M. Durand Saint-Amand. It formed a queer medley – court costumes stained and torn, grand cordons of the Legion of Honour that had been trailed through the mud, stars of foreign orders, swords, diamond crowns, pearl necklaces, a collar of the Golden Fleece, etc. Each legal representative of the princes, an aide-de-camp or secretary, took what he recognised. It appears that on the whole little was recovered. The Duke de Nemours merely asked for some linen and in particular his heavy-soled shoes.