Before All Else Read online

  Marcus continues talking, oblivious apparently to the two women standing behind him.

  “Sorry, Marcus. Just a minute.”

  Cecily rises and approaches her sisters. She gives Amelia a tender kiss on the top of her head. Despite yesterday’s bath, she still has about her all the smells of travel, of cheap food, of exhaustion, of other times. Marcus is forced to stop, look up at the new arrivals. Cecily is amused to see his eyes skip from face to face to face, as if scalded.

  Amelia rescues the strap of her cami top from its falling place off her shoulder. She is not wearing a bra and Marcus’s eyes zip to her prone nipples. Amelia lowers herself into a chair and folds her knees and long thin arms in front, like a cricket ready to flee. “Who’s this?”

  Marcus doesn’t reply. Cecily relates a little of Marcus’s investigations. Amelia listens while propelling smoke towards the ceiling. This seems to smudge Marcus’s earlier fascination as he gathers the pages towards him, preparing to leave. Cecily is amused to see him hold his breath, so as not to ingest any smoke, as he lifts his posterior off the chair to reach for the furthest sheaves. Tilly and Cecily share a look as Marcus, trapped by the sight of Amelia reaching revealingly for the sugar bowl, colours a culpable red.

  “I can see you’re busy,” he says in one quick exhalation of precious air.

  “I’ll see you to the door.”

  “Well, it’s a shame that we didn’t have time to…er…that… Anyway. There’s more I want to tell you.” Marcus puts his hand on the false door knob in the centre panel of the front door. “I’ve found out a bit about our omnipresent Mr Eveans too. Turns out he’s from a PR company that specialises in the rescue of dented reputations.”

  Cecily opens the door for him. Marcus turns at the top of the steps. “By the way, Velda called in yesterday. That was why I couldn’t come over before.”

  She isn’t too sure what response is required to this so just nods.

  “Well,” Marcus shrugs. “That’s that.”

  “Indeed.”

  She closes the door once he has scuffed his way down the steps to street level and turned right towards the pub. A smell of warm olive oil and the spitting of frying eggs fill the passageway. The house is warming up again.

  Summer

  Epigraph

  In the quiet centuries that follow, the Angul-Seaxan spread from their landing places. Danes, Norwegians, Saxons. Before them fall the Old English trees and the Old English men. Falling to the ground, lined like bundles of brushwood, the new-bared land scored by articulating talons into ridges and furrows. Water – streams, lakes, rivers – bring life to new crops. Villages, with an east field and a west field, a north field or a south field, two or three acres each.

  By the time of the Domesday book, nearly every non-industrial village has been hacked and drained and elevated by axe, mattock, billhook, hoe. Livestock working in tandem with the new drive for settlement, grinding away the bark and shoots of the competing scrubland. But still a man could shout into the waste and not be heard by another or only receive back a faint echoing shout.

  With a new millennium, a new order. One of castles, charters, villeins and taxes. The village becomes the feudal centre of a number of manors, ruled from the baron’s castle. There is a market, meadowland, swine roaming in the wood; vineyards and sheep support over 100 households. The French have come.

  It is the soft tissue of life that disappears first, the orchards, fishponds, water mill, vineyard, kennels, dovecot and swannery. Then go the forges, potteries, studios, brewhouses and bakeries. Again, four hundred years and all that flourished is gone.

  M. Blatt

  14

  The Village

  It is the day before the summer fair. For a brief moment, before the events of the day unfold, nature reforms itself after the stormy night. In the cottage gardens, the red poppies, wounded by the previous night’s downpour, hang out their battle-torn petals like drying flags. Waxy rose petals hold onto beads of moisture as if to slake a thirst, while lupins and hollyhocks rattle themselves dry in the gentle, lifting breeze. Bees drone above the open canopies of elderberry, flies strafe the thick, heat-laden air. Over the horizon step high-banked clouds like a line of white-frilled chorus girls in a slow-motion rehearsal. “Looks like we should be lucky with the weather tomorrow,” predict the few to venture out early.

  Madge

  “Well, never mind, dearie. I’m sure you’ll be alright. Anything I can get you? Got plasters at 67p – they’re not waterproof, but it doesn’t look like that should trouble you too much.” Sitting on an imperfectly balanced wooden chair inside the post office is what she can only describe as a ‘rather disreputable-looking young gentleman’. He’d staggered into her shop only a few minutes earlier with a cut above his left eye. Madge scrutinises him coolly from behind the counter, trying to assess whether the dirt ingrained into every micropore was caused by the injury or whether it might itself offer an explanation for the injury. She takes in the dreadlocks, the patchwork jacket and nose ring and decides that he is not likely to be a high spender. She toggles the under-counter switch that causes the closed circuit camera to whirr and shift ostentatiously, just to make sure he fully understands that he is being watched. Ever since the fairground has come to town, you cannot be too careful.

  “I couldn’t have a cup of tea, could I? It’s just that I’ve had a bit of a shock. The van’s gone off the road and into the hedge.”

  A quick mental calculation leads Madge shrewdly to the conclusion that it is going to be easier to make this indigent ne’er-do-well a cup of tea than to try and sort his camper van out, which is, on his account, balanced precariously, nose down, arse up, among the spiny branches of a hawthorn hedge somewhere.

  “You haven’t got any soya milk, have you, by any chance?”

  “No, I bleedin’ haven’t.” Madge stomps off into the back of the shop to put the kettle on, giving the toggle a purposeful wiggle as she goes.

  “Tony! Tony!” she whispers urgently into her mobile under cover of the whistling kettle. “There’s one of them druids in the shop.” The silly old duffer tells her to speak up. Best thing, she decides, is to give the lad a cup of tea and send him on his merry way.

  “Sugar, too, if you’ve got any,” comes the shout from the shop front.

  “I’ll sugar you, dearie,” mutters Madge, hoicking a squashed brown tea bag out of the recycled waste bin.

  The Village

  In the early dawn, the Town Field lies quiet and open. A family of swifts cling to the tight telegraph wire while, beneath, a few blackbirds mine for worms, heckled by a clutch of crows in the higher branches of the border oaks. New growth now smudges the rawness of the cut-about look of the field after the big clear-up. Young, green blackberries, sloes and hips hint forward to harvest time. Tilly’s flock of Blue-Faced Framlinghams contentedly tear up the lush grass. Moving with a collective mind they chomp their way selectively around the field, leaving the tall clumps of bitter buttercup, thistle and dock. Later that day, Tilly and sheepdog Pip will corral them between woven willow hurdles, polish their cloven hooves, clip out their woolly moss and display a board with rosettes from various agricultural shows. Three of the ewes have lambs – almost as full-grown and broad-backed as their mothers but with a whiter, tighter fleece and trusting eyes.

  In the damp shade of three alder trees loom two shipping containers craned in during the previous week. Inside are tables, chairs, bales of straw, decking, a stage, lighting, public address system, generators and gazebos. Bishy Barnabee’s (Eastern Counties) Est. 1932 had arrived on Wednesday and were setting up a Tipping Roulette, a Hungry Caterpillar, a Bouncy Castle and Montgolfier’s Centrifugalarium in preparation for tomorrow.

  Rather incongruously, the flat-fronted, stumpy nose of a 1970s Dodge Commer van looks in on the proceedings from two fields away, like an inquisitive old milker. No one is sure
if it belongs to the fair people or if it is one of Chris Eveans’s latest wheezes, a self-referencing art installation. As such, it is largely ignored.

  For now, all is going according to plan.

  At nine thirty, dads and lads from the local rugby team, the Bullenden Bulls, arrive to erect the beer tent, establish power lines and set up wooden trestles in preparation for the brewer’s dray arriving at two thirty to deliver and install twenty barrels of Summer Lightning, Badger’s Frenzy and Holy Cow. Two of their number, Daniel Holland and Martyn Harris, loose-head prop and fly half respectively for the Under 18s, have volunteered to camp out to ensure the beer’s safety over the coming night.

  The local GP, Dr Carmichael, and other members of the Vintage and Veteran Car Club are to spend the day prepping and polishing in readiness for the procession down the High Street, escorting the May Queen, Phillipa Grayson. There had been some uproar concerning the majorettes twirling their batons within a fifty-yard radius of such rare and precious bodywork but Ariadne Montague, high-pitched and irrepressible, had given her ‘personal guarantee’ that none of her girls had ever, ever dropped a baton while on public display. The old boys had been persuaded to take her at her word.

  Marcus

  Marcus is planning his address to the villagers that evening, on his investigations into the sunken chapel, hoping to lend each and every one of them a lens through which to see their own multi-layered, complex world, a world that had, in the last few days, tilted and reassembled slightly. It is rumoured that Major Welding has put some money behind the bar for afters. He would call his piece ‘Smacking the Rump of England’.

  He stares at the pile of books and handwritten pages scattered about his desk. Trouble is, the more he needs to place his finger on the pulse of this handmade world, the more the pulse jumps and shifts.

  Would anyone in the audience really be that bothered? For most, surely, the things that stand prone upon the surface of the earth are what matter. Should they care that the church has a tower or a spire? For most, church is a place of hard wooden pews, views of the nativity encumbered by stone pillars, a brief flash of coloured light upon a grey slab. An arena for funerals.

  Talking to Cecily, he knew how some villagers, including her husband, had been lowered into the rich earth of the county, to slowly lose their grip on their human form and seep into matter. Yet in the next village, the church abuts right onto the road, denied burial rights by the avaricious rector of this church. Fascinating stuff but only if you could, like Marcus, smell the ink on the petition, see the powder fall softly to the ground, the blow of the petitioner within his cheek, the roll and dispatch of the parchment.

  Nothing exemplifies more the abrupt, random, haphazard nature of history than the view from his window. In contrast to the uniformity and built-for-purpose architecture of London’s suburbs, each blink of an eye in his passage along Bullenden’s streets seems to offer up a magic lantern view. The colours are at their best this time in the morning, he observes, with the sun gathering herself up from the horizon. The lemons and pinks of the painted render. The black and tan of the stovepipe chimneys. Glassy-eyed flint and friable brick. The black-as-tar wooden boards. The duck-egg blue of the bookshop. The fuchsia pink of the hardware store. Long spires of rosebay, tumbling tendrils of wild rose.

  The streets please him for their lack of uniformity. Taken as a complete view, it is as if someone had slid a door here, a window there, raked a roof, lowered a dormer, stretched and elided features to deliberately confound, to snatch and snag the viewer’s attention, let it not slide carelessly away on a smooth vista. Buildings turn their shoulders to the road. Small lead-lined lookout windows, lukums, set in a roof line, pop like eyes. An old mother’s hovel abuts a white brick gentleman’s residence.

  He stands in front of the mirror hanging on a chain above the bulbous, glazed fireplace. He can just about see the top of his head but not his shaking hands.

  “Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming out this evening. I know we all have a busy day tomorrow, so I shall be brief.” [Pause for murmurs of appreciation.]

  “As you know, our ‘chapel’ [grip papers to execute the floating quotation marks sign] has been something of a discovery for us – for Major Welding on whose field it is located, and for the entire village, prompting as it has some interest from local TV and the press, due in no small part to the auspices of Mr Eveans.” [Pause again for perhaps more muted appreciation this time as the media glare has not been to everyone’s liking.]

  “Those of you who have watched the piece on Look East and have read the piece in Eastern Life, will know that there has been some uncertainty regarding the origins and, thereby, purpose of this space.

  “Damn.” Marcus leans to pause the recording on his phone and answer the incoming call. Caller ID unknown. No-one there. Third time in as many days.

  “Ahem.” He coughs to bring his voice down an octave. Bit alarming these unexplained phone calls. Has he been rumbled? Any chance that his discreet enquiries concerning the origins and purpose of the Major and his oleaginous sidekick have been found out? But how is that possible? And…and…and…well, the information is out there, in the public domain, isn’t it? Would they put a gagging order on him? Get out an injunction? His throat tightens at the thought of gagging. Water. Need a glass of water. Pressing Stop on the recording app on his phone, Marcus places his pages – by now a little damp and crumpled – on the coffee table and goes into the kitchen for something to soothe and moisten his throat.

  Madge

  He’d thanked her, very politely, for the cup of tea and placed the mug on the counter. She’d given brief consideration to his request for work – “Any sort, window cleaning, painting…” – but decided she couldn’t keep an eye on him and the stock at the same time so sent him on his way. Not a bad sort of lad all in all. She’d asked him where he was headed to. He told her he was on his way to a festival in the next county. Didn’t matter, had a day or two to get there. Apparently he’d been in touch with his mates and they were on their way to sort out the van. Maybe she should have got him to rod the drains while he was waiting. Too late now. He’d promised to fix the hedge, so no harm done, eh?

  Marcus

  “Right. Where was I? I am delighted to be able to present to you my initial findings.” Here he would signal to whoever was operating the PowerPoint to move to the first slide: a shot he’d taken by jumping into the gully and pressing his back firmly into the hedge. “Cut into the exposed flank of the grassy knoll, you can clearly see an arched opening. By scraping away some of the sub soil, there are the flat roof tiles, probably baked clay. And if we look further down, there you can see the stone walls and buttresses.”

  Gwyddno

  The cup of tea had been disgusting. An insult really. It left a metallic taste in his mouth, like someone had applied electrodes to his fillings. It will be a few hours before the others get to this backwater of a place. The sun is warm so he might walk down the High Street. Doubtless Tanya would think it was all a bit bourgeois, but he likes the place. OK, maybe they weren’t so into sullying their own back yard – he’d seen quite a few signs up: No to the Wind Farm. No to Pylons. No to the Prison. No to the Incinerator. No to Fracking. Yes to the Bypass.

  It had the feel of the children’s adventure books his mum used to read. Wide, dusty roads. Cheery postmen. Somebody always ready with a sixpence for an ice cream. Sticklebacks in a jar. He wouldn’t be surprised if they went round saying things like “Gosh” and “Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire.”

  But he should have got the number plate of that geezer in a white van that came careering round the corner on the wrong side of the road and knocked him flying over the ditch and straight into the hedge. Christ knows what Wylff will say when he sees his precious green and cream van perpendicular to the hawthorn hedge. Mind you, if the brakes hadn’t have been so dodgy, he would have stopped in time. As it is, he
never liked the van anyway. He has a very vague memory of going to see Mum’s nan in a place where you had to walk down echoing corridors that smelled of bleach and piss. The colours of the tiles on the walls had been the same colours as the van.

  He’ll find a quiet spot and have one of those flapjacks he’d helped himself to from the post office.

  Cecily

  Amelia worked alongside, quiet and efficient. By midday they had zested and juiced ten dozen lemons. The tiny spritzes of lemon released by the grater had settled on the backs of their hands, on the table top, drying to a sticky white film. Tiny, translucent juice sacs stuck to the inside of the glass measuring jugs. The sight of them set her front teeth on edge. Lemon husks were piled up on the black granite worktop as they gently simmered small batches with sugar to make a syrup. Five bluebottles buzzed and bumped round the kitchen ceiling.

  Has Amelia said much to Tilly? She certainly hadn’t said much in their times together. Throwing her arms wide and saying, in a long drawn-out way, “So…” had produced zilch by way of explanation. “The more you push her, the more she’ll clam up,” Tilly had said. And it is true. It is almost as if Amelia is as insubstantial as she was hundreds of miles away, a kind of phantasmagorical being that shades in and out of existence at whim. She’ll just have to wait, Cecily tells herself.

  Once the syrup had cooled, they would bottle it and serve it tomorrow over ice and white mint leaves with a good splash of chilled mineral water. One pound fifty a shot.

  “Weather looks like it might hold for tomorrow.” Amelia nods but offers no reply.

  Marcus

  He would then show a series of photographs from inside the space. The long, thin, rectangular stones, rough cut and held fast by age and compression. The gently barrelled ceiling that seems to taper off behind the vertical walls, suggesting more than just soil and rubble behind. Maybe at one point the elegantly arching roof had reached right down to the floor and these were load-bearing walls added later, maybe after some collapse or destruction. A close-up of the microscopic lichen softening the hard edges of the infill. Plucky Hart’s Tongue clinging halfway up the walls.