Whirligig (12 page)

He had woken with a swollen and aching head. Having provided no insulation during the night, the thin glass windows of the Land Rover had, after sunrise, quickly heated the inside of the vehicle to a temperature that Claypole calculated was probably sufficient to boil small rocks. Having emerged from the Land Rover and given it a hearty kick, he drank from and washed his face in a dribbling but icy-fresh waterfall and braced himself to be hungry for a while before setting off along the rough road.

It was a pleasant morning. Warm enough to dry his ditch-soaked trousers and erase some of the more nightmarish memories of the night. He felt like he hadn't slept, but the total length of time he had lain awake wishing he were dead did not add up to the six hours which had elapsed. It struck him, as he gloomily stumbled along the road, the flies beginning to buzz around him, that what was clearly needed on one's wrist in the countryside was not a watch, but a distress flare.

He had been ambling uphill for about twenty minutes when he realised he was no longer on a road, but on a track which appeared to be narrowing. When the track became such that normal vehicles could clearly not pass along it, he considered turning back, but couldn't really see the point, even when the path just became gaps in the trees. He wasn't, after all, looking for anything in
particular. Just some sign of civilisation.

Then he saw a house. At first heavily obscured by trees, as he quickened his pace he could see that it was whitewashed save for the black door, and that the Virginia creeper growing up it was huge but neat. The bowing roof was slated long ago but there were none missing, and as he got closer he saw that the house had two sash windows downstairs, either side of the door, and three upstairs, all with four panes of old and wobbly glass. It was a child's drawing of a cottage. He tripped uncomfortably down a bank and onto a road by the side of the house, hoping to find an entrance. Some sort of path up to the door, or a fence to guide you there. But there seemed to be none. All there was was garden. And what a garden. Vast swathes of untidy but clearly very productive vegetable patch was how he might have described it at first. But as he got closer he could see that the vegetables were not all vegetables. There were herbs and weeds and bushes too, all jumbled in with what looked like a thousand varieties of fruit and vegetables. Raspberries climbed over peas which stood over potatoes. Honeysuckle was trying to throttle a pear tree, which was partly shading a small patch of damp, shiny lettuces, untidily distributed between carrots and garlic. Great fat beetles nestled on the patches of wild flowers, reeds and grasses that towered unmown between these small oases of food, and bees hummed all around as Claypole stood marvelling. A hen clucked from beneath a juniper hedge, and Claypole jumped as he realised that he was just ten feet away from a pair of heavily breathing and watchful pigs, the other side of a wicker fence. It was as if the BBC had come in and spent a fortune on setting it all up for its biggest and baddest Jane Austen yet.
It was perfectly pretty, gloriously ancient, and surely impossible.

‘If you want to talk about Jesus, you'd better come in!'

Claypole swivelled on his dusty heels. Heading towards him from the side of the house at a brisk pace was a woman of about seventy, with white hair in a tight bun and wearing a painter's smock and blue jeans. She smiled.

‘I'm not –' he began.

‘Oh, crikey,' said the woman.

She sniffed as she looked him up and down from a vantage point some three inches taller than Claypole. He was crumpled and filthy, his shirt bloody, his face dirty and his suit torn and stained. A mugged bank teller. He had no desire to have a conversation about Jesus, but if that's what it took to be able to make a phone call and get back to his life, then so be it.

‘I –' he began, ‘I'm… I'm not a… I'd be happy to have a chat about… If that's what you…' The woman looked aggressively healthy and her eyes were twinkling in a friendly and amused way. Claypole dropped his shoulders and said earnestly, ‘I'm really lost.'

‘Oh good,' the woman smiled, revealing some gold fillings among a fine white set. ‘It's only ever the postie or Jehovah's Witnesses who make it up here normally. It seems rude not to talk to them if they've come all this way. But really,' she tutted. ‘Poor fools. I expect you'd like some tea, at least.'

She pointed to the house and Claypole nodded grimly, clutching his back.

‘Come along, then. There's some kedgeree too if you fancy. I'm Dorcas.'

As he drank two glasses of water and wolfed a
ham sandwich, they established that she was Dorcas MacGilp, older sister of Peregrine, and that he was Claypole.

‘Ah. The wind farm chap.' Her tone was neutral.

‘Yeah.'

‘Is that your first name?'

‘No.'

The air remained still.

‘What
is
your first name? Or would you rather I called you
Mr
Claypole?'

Dorcas said this with a note of condescension. Even posh women, Claypole thought, might be expected to be a little wary of fat men in suits who come bumbling out of the woods. But she exuded the usual supreme self-confidence of her class.

‘It's just Claypole,' he said.

To this, she reacted most unusually. Most people, in Claypole's experience, silently judged him when he said this, whether as a fool or a poseur, he did not care. But Dorcas just looked him in the eye, deep in scrutiny.

‘Oh. Oh,' she said slowly. Claypole became uncomfortable with the length of time she was taking to examine him. ‘How very curious,' she added.

Perhaps she detected his discomfort, because she snapped out of her close examination of his face and almost squawked at him, ‘Tea first, or do you want to take your clothes off?'

Claypole's expression of alarm turned to confusion as he saw Dorcas's politely enquiring face. Then she giggled and punched the air near his arm.

‘You silly arse. I meant do you want to get out of that poor, knackered suit? I have some men's clothing somewhere.'

While the kettle was boiling, and she was upstairs fetching him a change of clothes, Claypole examined his host's kitchen and living room. The kitchen was small, dark and cluttered. Dried flowers, copper pots and garden produce fought for space with various dishes covered with ancient tea towels atop a scrubbed pine table. The smell of baking bread pervaded, and the overall impression was one of wholesome chaos. The living room was equally batty, but in a way that Claypole had never seen before. There were books everywhere. Not just everywhere in the way that a normally literate person has books everywhere – shelves bulging, and shelves on most of the walls. The books in this room covered every available surface, including large swathes of the floor. Indeed, books
were
every surface. In places they were piled two feet, four feet, high. He did not have time to examine them before Dorcas returned through what must have been a stairwell, but looked like a hole in the books.

‘Brr… Perhaps I could just make a phone call?'

‘By all means. But who are you going to telephone?'

‘Well,' said Claypole. ‘I thought a… taxi?'

‘Pff. Don't be daft. I'll take you wherever you need to go. Now sit.'

As he ate a large portion of blackberry and apple pie, he was presented with an ancient shirt for a man very much thinner than he, a woman's fleece (judging by the pastel pink colour and the faint floral aroma) and an old pair of jeans which had once belonged to Peregrine. The jeans would have to be rolled several times at the bottom, and the top button left undone. Dorcas presented him with an old Etonian tie as a belt with which to disguise this last necessity.

That made sense, he thought as he changed in
the downstairs loo. Of course Peregrine had been to Eton. All the old Etonians Claypole had met divided into two types. First, there was the wiry, ascetic, intellectual sort. They tended to run government departments, banks and embassies. They had clever but blunt wives called Clarissa. The second sort were generally good-looking as the result of the parental union of money and beauty, falsely demotic for the first twenty years of adulthood and snobbish thereafter. They also exhibited arrogance, apathy, and addiction in various proportions. Peregrine was Type 2.

When dressed and washed, Claypole took a moment to examine the photographs. There were many of Coky, and some of Dorcas herself, including her own retirement party from ‘Garvachhead and District Arts Council' in which she was the only one not smiling. There was a sepia photo of a grim-looking couple – he in wartime RAF uniform – on some church steps. But most seemed to be of various chirpy and solid-looking women in anoraks at the top of hills. There was one of Coky at about seventeen – shyly laughing. But there were none, he noticed, of Bonnie Straughan, or of Peregrine.

Before going back to his host, Claypole stopped in front of a small mirror. He leaned forward, pulling back his wispy forelock. There was ginger showing next to his scalp, making the thin black strands of hair look almost purple. He needed to get hold of some more dye. He must betray his roots.

‘I hope you don't mind, but I simply must have the Dubai Championships on,' said Dorcas as he entered the living room again, and she turned a knob on a television of deep antiquity nestled among the books. Before Claypole could wonder which sport was being
played in this strange desert paradise-cum-hell, the TV came to life. It was snooker. He remarked pleasantly that he didn't know that the Dubavians were fans of snooker.

‘I know some people find it boring,' she said. ‘I think it's the best game in the world. Tension, tactics, natural talent that can only come good with a strong mind, and…' Dorcas gave a slight pout, ‘young men in tight, shiny clothing. I think it's rather a shame that they don't wear black tie any more, but you can't have everything.'

As she made tea, Claypole picked up one of the many books that made up the coffee table. It was
The Essays of Michel de Montaigne
. He had heard of the man, but never read any of his work, and was having trouble placing him in any particular century. The spine was worn and the pages well thumbed. He picked up a volume of Dirk Bogarde's autobiography, with a postcard marking a page. The postcard was from someone called Terri, thanking Dorcas for a wonderful weekend and hoping that she enjoyed the ‘naughty chocs'. Another was a reasonably reputable-looking biography of Michael Jackson, with biro in the margins. ‘Thriller – showing violence + repressed homosexuality,' said one of the notes. ‘Earth Song not messiah complex, but father complex,' said another. And with an increasing sense of unease, he picked up another book. It was seventeenth-century Persian poetry, with a translation into French. Dorcas came back into the room.

‘I can't bear books on shelves. Too ordered. They just sit there, fossilised. One forgets about them. I like to have them around me all the time. Like friends who might surprise me. Is that pretentious?' She looked up and to the left, as if examining the ceiling for some lost
item. Claypole wondered whether he should fill the silence. But she continued. ‘Yes! Yes, it
is
pretentious. Of course it's a bugger to hoover. Perfectly good reason to invent the bookshelf.'

She put Claypole's mug of tea down. It teetered dangerously on a paperback of Thomas Hobbes'
Leviathan
.

‘Ignore me. I'm an old fool,' she snorted in disgust. ‘Do smoke.'

Claypole said that he only smoked at weddings. She nodded sadly.

‘I gave up fags when John Lennon was shot. Can't think why, really. Just seemed like a good idea to mark it in some way.'

They sipped their tea and chatted. Claypole explained that he had broken the Land Rover somewhere over the hill, and told her, to clucks of sympathy, about the night and his bed of bracken and feed bags. Dorcas assured him that she had spare fuel for the Land Rover, and that they would head over there at some point. Claypole relaxed and said he was grateful.

‘Oh, don't be. In fact, there is something you could do for me.'

Claypole was about to say that he would be happy to help in any way he could, but Dorcas was suddenly focused on something in the middle distance. Claypole felt uneasy.

‘Yes!' said Dorcas, whacking her thigh. ‘Jamie Daldry's just got through to the semis.' She sat up. ‘He's my favourite. Drinks a lot, I think. He's got that skin.'

Following Claypole's gaze toward the fruitcake she had put on top of a Gore Vidal novel, Dorcas cut a slice and put it on a commemorative Edward VIII Coronation saucer. She turned off the television.

‘Help yourself to more,' she said, and relaxed again into her faded purple easy chair. She flicked a switch and a footrest catapulted her feet upwards, and the back of the chair sloped backwards with a thunk. She was practically horizontal. She smiled at Claypole. ‘Now then, dear,' she said. ‘Who are you?'

The question was so direct that Claypole nearly choked on the sizeable portion of cake that he had just put in his mouth. She's lost her marbles, he thought. Living in the middle of nowhere, it was no wonder. He rallied as he dusted his fingers.

‘I'm Claypole. I'm helping Peregrine with the wind farm.'

She cocked her head on one side. ‘I know that. But who
are
you? Perhaps I should say…
why
are you doing that?'

‘Well, I…' Claypole was flummoxed. But there was something irresistible about Dorcas MacGilp's manner that forced him to search for a non-evasive answer. ‘I want to do a bit of good for the…' He almost choked on the word. ‘Brr… planet.' He shrugged.

‘Right.' She was impassive.

‘I was asked by Coky Viveksananda – brr, your niece, in fact – to come up and be a sort of spokesman. Just for a bit. While I'm not doing anything else.' A fly was thinking of diving into Claypole's tea. He wafted his hand above the mug.