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The Grass Memorial
By Sarah Harrison St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2002 Sarah Harrison
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8204-1
CHAPTER 1
'Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass'
— G.K. Chesterton, 'Ballad of the White Horse'
1997
Spencer, getting dressed, could see the White Horse from his window. What a logo, he thought. Thousands of years old and good as new, unfurled like a banner up the face of the hill, proclaiming not just the Bronze Age fort but the brazen confidence of its occupants. You had to hand it to them.
This morning, Spencer's last in England, was the finest since he'd arrived two weeks ago. Not that he was complaining, he'd had a fondness for the English weather ever since the war. Soft, capricious, teasing – female weather, as against the blustering machismo of the elements back home. The sunshine, even when it came along, had a tremulous quality. And as for the winters, only a nation accustomed to that special brand of grey, icy wetness could have invented the sturdy delights of bread and dripping, bread sauce, crumpets, and that treacle-coloured beer (now less common, he found) the temperature of body fluids in which the hops seemed still to be growing ... God knows the Brits back then had had little enough to enjoy. It was no wonder he and his like had been greeted as saviours. You could forget the air war over Europe, it was get out the goodies when the Yanks came to call.
With a small grunt of effort he placed his right foot on the edge of a chair to tie his laces. Coming back as an old man on the eve of a new age, he appreciated for the first time just how bad things had been then. The small country hotel he was staying in wasn't materially different in period and design from the Seven Stars in Church Norton, or the Scratching Cat, or the Pipe and Bowl, or any of a score of other pubs he could remember, but it had wised up and got itself three stars in the guide by creating a beefed-up version of a fantasy English inn, the sort which had probably never existed outside Americans' imaginations. He changed feet laboriously, conceding that they'd done a good job. Now, the quaint freestanding tubs were spanking new, with jacuzzi ducts, and the brass mixer faucet delivered water soundlessly at the right temperature and roughly the right pressure not only into the tub itself but from the shower. The double bedstead was oak repro, the mattress posture-sprung, the king-size duvet a riot of tea roses. Breakfast was fine, dinner was better, but the great British afternoon tea (he sighed fondly as he buttoned his shirt) appeared to have gone by the board. There were phones with voice-mail in the rooms and you could receive faxes and e-mails at reception. Old world, hi-tec: a Britain at peace, and in clover.
He brushed his hair, bending his knees slightly to look in the mirror. Something had been lost, he reflected, but it was almost certainly he, and not the British people, who had lost it. You couldn't go back, you couldn't relive the past, nor retrieve the special cocktail of experiences which had made your pulse race at twenty-one ... He picked up his room key.
Just the same, there was a teenage waitress down in the dining room he found himself watching. He did so now, after he'd given her his order and was eating the fruit compôte which salved his conscience about bangers and eggs to come. She wasn't from the usual run of waitresses, a student probably. One of those aloof English girls, cool and clever and shy, her shiny mouse-brown hair pulled back into a pony tail, her long thin legs in unseasonal black tights. Not a beauty exactly, but oh, my!
Like Rosie, in fact.
And probably not much older than she had been – what, eighteen, nineteen? Hard to tell. Girls these days were more knowing, it seemed to him, but had an extended youth. They went on playing and choosing and scooting around for as long as they wanted, leaving home, going back, living with guys and living alone. There was no pattern.
He finished the fruit and glanced at his folded newspaper, his eye running up and down the same column of print until she came back. When she did return she hesitated, not wanting to disturb his reading by reaching across with the plate. He looked up and smiled, rescuing her.
'Is that my breakfast?'
'Yes.'
'Come on then –' he tapped his place mat '– I can hardly wait.'
Colouring up a little, she put the plate in front of him. She blushed easy, but her whole manner warned him, if he were thinking of such a thing, not to make anything of it. Which he would never have dreamed of doing.
'Thank you. I'm going to miss this.'
'Oh? You're leaving?'
'Later on today.'
'And don't you have nice breakfasts in America?' A tiny glint of irony.
'We have great breakfasts, but when it comes to sausages, you win.'
'Really? I'll take your word for it. I'm a vegetarian.'
'You don't know what you're missing.'
'Oh, I do, that's just the point.'
Definitely not a full-time waitress. He watched as she walked away again. She had that gait characteristic of a certain kind of English girl, a long, loping stride which attempted to deny any hint of sexiness, but which was in consequence as sexy as hell.
As he left the dining room, she said: 'Safe journey.'
In the hallway the receptionist hailed him. 'Mr McColl, e-mail for you.'
'Thanks.'
It was from Hannah.
Just to let you know I can hardly wait to see you day after tomorrow–has it really only been a week? I suddenly got this sick fancy you might not want to come home, all those old memories, all that quaint old charm ... remember I've got quaint old charms too. Hurry back, honey, love you. XXX Your old lady.
'Can I reply right away?'
'Of course. Office is round the corner.'
His message was brief.
Relax, old lady. Get the pipe and slippers out, I'm on my way. XXX Spence.
Back in his room as he put the last couple of items in his bag and prepared to leave he secretly conceded that Hannah's fancy had not been as sick as all that. There might have been no particular moment when he considered staying, but neither had he especially looked forward to returning as he should have done.
Downstairs, he settled up, ordered a cab for later, left his bags at reception and set out on foot for the White Horse.
For the last few days, the past had become his magnetic north.
It had been easy to fall asleep: it was hell waking up.
This disproved at a stroke Stella's mother's oft-repeated maxim that things would look better in the morning. As a child it had certainly been true. Stella had lost count of the number of agonising anxieties, fears and looming horrors which had resumed their correct proportions over porridge and brown sugar, against the burble of the news on her father's wireless and the chugging of the early-morning water pipes. Night was black and eternal, a featureless abyss in which separate problems had merged to become the single great insuperable problem of Being Oneself (another of her mother's maxims). But back then, good old day made light work of the dark stuff.
Not this time. Jesus wept ... The back seat of the car, so cosy five hours ago, felt like some kind of mediaeval torture device, a way of chilling, twisting and compressing the human frame till it cried uncle.
She'd left the northern town at eleven last night, still on a roll from the show, her system fizzing with adrenalin. Even the heartache – who was she kidding? The heart-rip, heart-haemorrhage – which had been her constant companion for months was subsumed in the sheer simplicity of the decision: she was going home.
All she had to do was climb into her car, switch on the engine and point south. To get from A to B that was all it took.
They – the management, the producer, even Derek – thought she was off her trolley, that she wouldn't come back. She saw it in their pale, startled faces as they wished her a safe journey. There was always this faint sense that they didn't trust her – not that they thought she'd deliberately deceive them, but that she was a loose cannon, not quite in control. This in spite of twenty years in the business with never a cancelled performance (not counting the great schism) or, she flattered herself, a duff one. But of course they were right without knowing how right they were. Only Stella knew how many small victories went into the delivery of one great song. Her onstage persona was not an escape, but her means of survival.
Anyway, to hell with them. It had been Saturday night, she had thirty-six hours, she needed to be home. She'd driven on auto-pilot with first Missa Luba, then Billie Holliday, finally Brahms, to keep her company. She hadn't had a drink since leaving the stage, her head was clear and the white line stayed single, but just the same she knew her reactions weren't a hundred per cent. Once, on the M6 near Wolverhampton, she came that close to ploughing into a juggernaut as it moved into the middle lane in front of her. The driver had signalled with time to spare, she could comfortably have pulled out to accommodate him, but her brain had failed to register the winking light until she heard the hysterical whine of the lorry's horn, and was flooded by the livid glare of its full-on lights in her rear windscreen.
Then the shock-sweat had broken out all over her. For half an hour after that she'd pushed a hundred, putting time and space between her and the incident, scared that the vengeful (and she was sure misogynistic) juggernaut might pursue her like the one in the Spielberg film.
At around two-thirty a.m. with only a few miles left, she was suddenly poleaxed by exhaustion. She was off the motorway and on the A-road, deserted in the small hours, when her head nodded and for a nanosecond she slept. The car swerved crazily, she was disorientated, it careered back and forth across the road three times before she regained control of it. Had there been anyone else coming, in either direction, she and they would have been killed. No great loss for herself, she was tempted to think, but that was wicked – what about the other people?
Shaken and shamed she'd turned into a lane which crept from the snug fold of the valley round the flank of a hill until suddenly the White Horse had appeared in front of her, huge and strange, a creature of earth and air, leaping towards the heavens like the magic rocking horse of children's fiction. She'd stopped exactly where she was, knowing this place and confident she was alone on this narrow thread of road. It had once been a track up to the fort; people had trudged, and run, and ridden and toiled up this same road for two thousand years. All that lay between their way and hers was a thin skin of tarmac.
She'd switched off the lights and the engine, and got out of the car. She walked a little way up the grassy slope, trusting to instinct until her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Then she stood quite still, breathing in the secret deeps of the hillside, the wild, arrested flight of the White Horse, and the glitter of the endless stars.
For the first time in weeks – months – she felt the jagged corners of her spirit soften and extend like the fronds of a sea anemone in the incoming tide. Minute muscles in her neck and face yielded just a little, releasing some of the tears that she'd so far been unable to shed.
After a few minutes she returned to the car, shuffling and stumbling like a drunk, scarcely able to walk for tiredness. She took her tissues out of the glove compartment and blew her nose, shattering the spell with a loud, prosaic honk. Then she climbed into the back seat, unlaced her boots and curled up, her arms wrapped around her face. She had nothing to cover herself with, because it was summer, and she had brought nothing with her. She was relaxed. She sank into sleep like a child.
But this morning her body at least was grown-up. A bloody Methuselah, thirty-nine years old, with aching joints, cold hands and feet, an empty stomach and eyes itchy with last night's stage make-up. A mouth like a fell-runner's crotch and breath – she tested it warily in her cupped palm – like a car crash. She unwrapped a wrinkled stick of chewing gum, put it in her mouth, and kneeled up to inspect herself in the driving mirror. Her reflection made her flinch. The only time she looked in a mirror was before and after a show when her face, uncompromisingly lit, was just a commodity – a blank canvas on to which she painted Stella Carlyle, entertainer. Be yourself? And what, in God's name, was that? Her raspberry-red hair stood up in wild stooks above her poor, pasty complexion, legacy of two decades of slap. Last night's healing tears had left snail-tracks of dried mascara down her cheeks. She found a fresh tissue, spat on it and scrubbed at her face and eye sockets. Who the fuck that mattered, or cared, was going to see her anyway?
There was a half-full bottle of tepid Evian water rolling around on the floor by the front passenger seat, along with the usual drift of old newspapers, burger cartons, road maps and dead flowers. She got out, retrieved it, took the gum out of her mouth and gulped down the water as she took in her surroundings.
It was ten o'clock, and now that daylight had restored detail and scale to her surroundings the White Horse seemed farther away. Even at this time on a Sunday morning there was a walker up there, moving at a snail's pace uphill, along the horse's back. Looking away, about three miles down the valley to her right, she could see the line of trees of the Mayden watercourse and make out the conical church tower of Fort Mayden. Above and beyond it the hill with its cape of ancient woodland, that protected the old manor house. To her left, the west, the smooth moon-coloured contours of the downs rolled towards Salisbury, forty miles away.
Between where she was now and the main road was a broad, shallow sweep of coarse hill grass, thinly fenced with posts and wire. There were three horses inside the fence, two big alert-looking chaps and a third lying on its side asleep. When she began to walk towards them the two lively ones began to trot and then canter about, arching their necks, kicking, strutting their stuff – horsing around, she supposed. Stella had a lifelong fear of horses, but this artless braggadocio was bewitching. At one point they seemed to charge the fence and be about to leap over it, and she took a couple of steps backwards in alarm, but at the last minute they turned and galloped westward along the inside of the fragile wire, tails streaming, necks snaked forward, ears flat, in mock competition.
As they stormed away Stella's eye was drawn back to the third horse which still lay motionless in the grass. Its head was towards her, and it had not moved by so much as a muscle. Knowing nothing about horses she was nonetheless struck by something fixed and unnatural in its position – something about the way the legs were held. She squinted shortsightedly – could the poor thing be dead?
She returned to the Ka and took her glasses off the dashboard. When she looked again, the two show-off horses had come to a halt and were cropping the grass, tails still switching skittishly, some hundreds of yards away at the northwestern corner of the field in the lee of the smooth barrow known as Knights Hill. The third horse still lay in that odd, rigid attitude. Stella's heart sank. She'd barely slept, she was knackered and famished, her eyes felt as though they'd been sandblasted and she was scared of horses. But her wretched conscience pricked her. To drive away now, in the cosy expectation of tender hugs and home comforts, not knowing whether the animal was dead or alive ... was that the action of a decent human being?
Praying with an atheist's bad grace that the fence was not electrified, she bent and very gingerly slipped between the top strands of wire. She took a few steps and paused. The two frisky horses had picked her up on their radar and raised their heads to look at her. One movement in my direction, she told herself, just one, and I'm out of here. But having made their long-distance assessment they began once more peaceably grazing.
Moving very slowly, not wanting to attract their attention again, she advanced. The notion entered her head, unbidden, that Vitelio would have been proud of her.
Last night Robert had embarked on a precipitate white-water ride of furious, focused energy for which he knew he'd pay heavily. He would allow nothing to blur his brutal clarity of purpose. This was a small country, nothing was far away in terms of distance or time, and he had at his command a performance car the full rampaging glory of which he rarely indulged. For once he was going to put his foot to the floor and let her go. He hadn't had a drink, and if he was caught for speeding it hardly mattered. For once, success would be surrender, and it would be cheap at any price.
The arterial roads out of London were virtually empty, dark and hollow as drains. On littered wastes of pavement occasional war parties of teenagers moved from club to club chi-iking, spilling off the pavement, grimacing, gesturing, seething with sex and substances. In the unsmart northern suburbs quiet ranks of semi-timbered respectable homes stood patiently, stoically awaiting the teenagers' return. Further out in provincial laybys, lorries and their drivers slumbered, with coyly curtained cabs. Others thundered on, winking indicator lights confidingly to let him by – no competition at this hour, they were all knights of the road.
It took him only three hours to reach Manchester, twenty minutes to locate the hotel. The night porter was initially the very soul of discreet intransigence, but mellowed under the influence of a fifty-pound note.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Grass Memorial by Sarah Harrison. Copyright © 2002 Sarah Harrison. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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