The Convalescent Read online

  But now he had written her a letter.

  Dear Sandra,

  I am lighting out for pastures new. There comes a tide in the affairs of men when it is called for. Do not be angry! I leave you, if not my best, at least my best under the circumstances. Do not grieve; it is not worth it. It will come to seem an insignificant departure.

  Ever yours,

  William

  At twenty past six, wearing his anorak and carrying a small case, he laid the letter by the door of the lounge and went quietly downstairs. He had practised opening the front door silently and so his departure was as silent as a departure can be. His only pair of shoes were soft ones, which meant that by the time he reached the corner of the street he had made virtually no sound at all, but this very soundlessness of his flight had the effect of making him doubt its reality. Another joke for his own diversion? Another extended threat? There had been too many: his defiant quips to himself in the lavatory, his broken answering laughter. His move from one chair to another, one room to another (in no house had he slammed so many doors), each time with the illusion that he was putting Mrs Mclehose beyond him forever. He walked on, coughing slightly, until he came to the bus stop for the six thirty-five. There he reached out and grasped the pole, not for support, but to reassure himself of the reality of his venture. It worked; he felt suddenly jaunty.

  The bus, its doors open to the June morning, was empty. William sat near the driver, for he had to be sure to change at the right place. The bus for the farmlands to the south of Glasgow left at eight and arrived at nine-thirty. A Mr Weir was to meet him off it and drive him to the farm. He would recognise Mr Weir, he had been told in a letter, by his height. He hoped that he had been described in turn, for his fear was that he would get no further than the village, and that, after waiting there for some time, he would discover that his plan didn’t match reality at the critical point. He had heard of people who had been promised jobs that didn’t exist, or which had ceased to exist the moment they were promised. In an age of such carelessness could he really expect someone to take him to a deserted farm, where he would be paid to keep an eye on someone else’s property but where he would mainly be keeping an eye on himself?

  No longer jaunty after three hours of travel, William got off the second bus in the village square. The clock above the fountain said nine-thirty. The bus waited for a few moments, then drove off the way it had come. The square was empty then, and the streets leading into it, some from below, some from above, were empty too. The buildings were very white in the morning light, and very still. Beyond, there was a wooded hill, as green as the village was white, and appearing, as William looked at it, to move closer. He listened: from the profound silence sounds slowly emerged: a tractor, dogs, cows. His thoughts were simple: he was in the country and it was very different from the city. A pleasant difference, with the power of making Mr Weir’s absence less troubling than it might have been. For he was absent: in no shadowed doorway was he standing, watching the new caretaker.

  Then he heard a vehicle approaching the village rapidly from the direction of the hill. There was a lull before, recovering itself after a series of bends, the vehicle, a Land Rover, burst into the village. It came straight into the square and straight towards William, still at the same furious speed, the impression given being not so much of purpose as of purpose imitated, William recognised it as almost his own state: purpose imitated. He watched as the Land Rover turned in the square and reversed towards him, the engine high and impatient, the driver manoeuvring by memory apparently, for he was looking straight ahead, as at the next point in his day. He reversed until he was beside William, and then, smiling, reached across and opened the passenger door.

  “Come in if you’re William Templeton.”

  “That’s me.”

  “George Weir – at your service.”

  George Weir was indeed a large man. He stooped as he drove, a reckless smile (as in response to secret challenges) coming and going on his ruddy face. He was well dressed, however, almost a dandy, and the Land Rover was as neat as he was.

  “Last ditch?” he said, his voice loud and definite.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Last ditch job?”

  “Not at all.” William smiled, without turning his head. “A fresh start. As fresh as the day. One gets sick of cities.”

  “Glad to have you whatever your reasons. Your hours will be your own. Fill them as you like. There are vandals, so watch for them. And there are those, not vandals, whose line is old farm machinery. Watch those too. If it gets difficult, ring me, ring the police. Don’t try to be heroic; you’re not paid to be.”

  “You’re nearby?”

  “Five miles. Ashby House. I’m a farm manager. My time’s not my own. My wife is, though, and my children. But what will you do? I mean what will you do?” He was suddenly earnest, asking this.

  “I don’t know,” William said, thinking that it was enough that he was arriving. “I’ll have to find out.”

  “All the best anyway. I’ll drop in now and then. My wife too.”

  “Thanks very much,” William said.

  They were driving through farmland, but it wasn’t rich farmland. The dykes had crumbled in places, the fences looked unsteady and the cattle were poorly nourished. There was a greyness in the green of the fields, as if there had been too many droughts in the area, or as if the land had never recovered from a rain of ashes. As they drove – quite slowly now, quite calmly – George Weir appeared to be settled by their conversation and William’s impression was that the land had never been meant for farming. Ingenuity and doggedness alone had made it farmland, kept it so. To get it all going, he imagined, there must have been a time when labourers crawled on the face of every field. The exceptional flatness allowed him to imagine it: after the storm of ashes, the generations of labourers.

  At last they turned off the main road onto a rutted track, driving between trees to the farmhouse, a yellow building of two stories. Outside it, but facing across the fields to the horizon, the Land Rover stopped. The silence was overwhelming.

  “I’ll show you round, then leave you to settle in,” George Weir said. “Don’t worry about the silence or the flatness. They seem to breed each other, I know, but you’ll get used to it. I did.”

  But it wasn’t this that was worrying William. It was his bowels. The lavatory was under the stairs, cramped, damp and windowless. But the water came generously from old fashioned taps and there was a small hard crescent of green soap.

  In the old days (the days of soft carpets and dubious favours, he had recently heard himself say), he couldn’t have stayed in a place like the farmhouse for a night. There was hardly anything in it. In the bedroom a chair and a bed; in the living room an old leather armchair; in the kitchen a cooker, a small table and two chairs. That was all. But now, with no possessions, no means of furnishing the place, nothing really, the farmhouse suited him. He saw why he had been given the job. What married couple, however down on their luck, would have taken it? The house suggested his state with a vividness that startled him. Walking about it, up and down the stairs, flushing the toilet to create a little sensation in the stillness, checking the cooker, he thought that for most conditions there is probably a job. If he didn’t quite understand his condition, he might do so after a month of this arresting bareness, this bullying flatness. He had the sensation, walking through the farmhouse, of preceding himself into himself, of coming on a piece of script in a deserted place and only by reading it beginning to grasp why he was there (how far do you have to go to discover why you set out?).

  It only took him a minute or two to unpack, but he did so carefully, laying his things out on the bed. He had one change of clothes, a toothbrush, a facecloth, a razor, a small cracked mirror and a small transistor radio. He lifted the radio to his ear, trying the area for reception. The flatness ensured that it was very clear. But what else could be said for the flatness? The bedroom was upstairs and as he tune
d in to a talk on vegetarian cookery he fancied that the expanse was mocking him. Many acres of it were now his responsibility, but how could he impose himself on so much second-rate farmland – he a third or even fourth-rate personality? He was being paid to make the attempt, though, and it was a long time since he had been paid to make any kind of attempt. This knowledge that money would be coming in regularly again pleased him, not so much because he would be able to pay his way as because it meant that he was recognised, marked, registered. He was on someone’s books; he would figure in someone’s accounts. William Templeton, Caretaker, Fulford Farm, £260 per month (gross).

  He took longer to arrange his things than he had done to unpack them. Should he keep them by him in the bedroom, or trust the other rooms? He held the mirror before him, moving it about rather as he had done the transistor, but it was harder, because of the crack in it, to get his face into focus than it had been the talk on vegetarian cookery. The crack had been there for a long time and it always dramatised his sense that he had lost himself. He had to be content with getting about two thirds of his face into the area of mirror to the right of the crack. This he did now. His hair, he saw, was dry and matted, his eyes a bloodshot dirty yellow, and his skin had a tight look, as if another month or two with Sandra Mclehose and it would have begun to crack open all over, to peel off, abandon the flesh within. He smiled at himself, but the effect was ghastly: what was recorded was his aversion to his own face, and his horror at that aversion. He seemed to see, he thought, a face that was ceasing to be a face. He put the mirror on the mantelpiece and, sitting down on the bed, switched off the talk on vegetarian cookery (“the versatility of the cauliflower cannot be …”). A great silence again.

  He thought that he might have to start talking to himself. To take yourself into your own confidence, however – how did you begin? The phone by the bed was an old one – upright, angular, black – and when he lifted the receiver the dialling tone suggested a mass of cancelled opportunities. Then it was cut off and there was a remote whine, which, after a few moments, was like another version of silence. William said, “How do you do, I’m glad to meet you, let’s grow some cauliflowers together” three times, replacing the receiver with exaggerated aplomb, hands poised shaking just above it. It exasperated him that he couldn’t hold anything without his hands shaking. That might be one of his first projects therefore: to stop them shaking, to be able to hold the mirror up to his face first thing in the morning without his hands in their wretchedness contributing to the ambiguity of what he saw.

  It was nearly lunchtime. When had he last made a point of having lunch? He would observe lunchtime again – breakfast-time and dinner-time too. There was a general store two miles away: he would walk there after he had made his first tour of inspection. George Weir had given him an advance of twenty-five pounds. He had suggested fifty – he had even had fifty in his hand – but William, associating the sudden appearance of money with recklessness, drinking, perversity, had refused. To start as he intended to continue was all he could think of saying to himself.

  He said it to himself again as he set out on his tour of inspection. It was June, and the air, warm and fresh on his face, made him raise his hands – a kind of apprehensive delight. Even in the winter though he would make these tours of inspection: three a day. He would work out various routes, each tour of inspection taking a different one. He would get to know the land as well as any farmer knew his – better perhaps – appreciating each feature, however broken or useless. Bold intentions, they made him walk more briskly than he had done for years, away from the yellow farmhouse – less yellow now, at noon, than it had been earlier – towards the first of the fields.

  It wasn’t clear where the garden – if there had been one – ended and the field began; the grass was as thick in both. A cherry tree, its blossoms almost faded, suggested there had been a garden. Near to it, William came across an old sink, its taps, like forsaken mouths, pointing up at him from the grass, and a line of empty paint tins. Someone’s idea of a boundary? some lazy predecessor? Someone who, struck one day by the importance of boundaries, had then lost heart, become cynical? Gasping and stumbling, William carried the sink over to a hedge, and after it, two at a time, the paint tins. But then, his heart racing, he too felt the need of boundaries – felt it as one might the need for abrasive self-scrutiny – and drew a line with his heel where he thought the garden should end. He would make a lawn between the hedge and here – reclaim the lawn there had once been – first scything, then mowing.

  He took a few steps into the field and stopped. It was bright and hot and still. He listened – straining above the racing of his heart – for birdsong; but he couldn’t hear any. It seemed to him possible that it was there – indeed that it was all about him, remarkable sequences of it – but that he was as incapable of hearing it as he was of holding his mirror or transistor without trembling. He took the first path he saw, assuming that it would lead to the first group of outhouses. There were four groups of outhouses on the domain, he had been told, one of them, the most remote, with a small farmhouse. They were his main responsibility: he was to watch them closely. “Although,” George Weir had added soberly, “you’ve not exactly got troops to help you. Not exactly.”

  But after about two hundred yards the path ended. At his feet there was a scattering of marigolds. He squatted beside them, breathless. He would need to be fitter than this to make these tours of inspection. At this rate he would reach the first group of outhouses in a state of collapse. He rose, dark spots before his eyes, and pressed on, through grass which was often up to his knees.

  A walking stick would help – it could also be used as a weapon. When he was stronger, when his hands were steadier, when he did not have these spots before his eyes, he would fashion one.

  Quite recently he’d had a watch – he felt sure of that – but he didn’t have one any longer. He couldn’t tell how long it had taken him to reach the first of the outhouses. They formed a long rectangle round a steading which he entered through an archway of red brick. In the middle of the steading was a pump, its handle up, a pail on its side before it, bales of straw on either side. The materials of pantomime: that was what struck William as he squatted by the pump, exhausted (“The Treacherous Pump”, “The Secret Pump”). But the smells were of a real farm – hay, cows, milk, manure, loam and William had the fancy that he would only have to look up to find that life on the farm had resumed. He had simply strayed into a pause: in a moment or two a plump woman would be operating the pump, a child would be calling, a dog would be asleep in the sun. But he looked up and there was nothing. He tried the pump but its handle was broken and it made a clanking noise which, as in mockery of his images of continuity, gave the deadest of dead echoes in a corner of the yard.

  There was more farm machinery in the outhouses than he had thought there would be, much of it strange to him. Modern equipment for milking, ploughing, harvesting? The only thing he recognised with certainty was a small fork-lift truck, its cabin bright yellow, the fork-lift up, ready. Going from outhouse to outhouse – assuming that in the other groups of outhouses there would be more such machinery, elaborately waiting – William was shocked by the extent of his responsibilities. Did they know who they had hired when they had hired him? Was it so thankless a job that there was no other option but to pick someone like him? Who else had done the job? (He had been told that he was the first, but was he?) If they could afford all this machinery, why not several caretakers?

  Had there once been several? Had they quarrelled perhaps, so that the enemy were able to come and go virtually unnoticed? Drunk together too often and too much? Colluded with the enemy – finally gone over to them? Would he meet them one day therefore, face to face in a steading, and be offered a bribe? Might they know enough about him to try and bribe him with drink? How would he account for himself on that day?

  His theories about his predecessors getting darker and darker, weakening him, causing a ringing i
n his ears, he returned to the idea that he had none, that the line started with him. It was enough to get him going again, in the direction of the farmhouse.

  He imagined the great expanse of farmland then as a setting for the neglected machines. Soon, released from stasis, from the weeks or months of arrest, they would cross and recross the land, reclaiming it, redeeming it. And then, having done all that they had been built to do, having done it perfectly, they would stop, rusting until they disappeared. An idyll of redundant machines, the long silence of their rusting as perfect as their final performance.

  As though to check that these were merely visions, halfway back to the farmhouse William sat down and looked behind him. The outhouses wobbled in the heat. The distortions of June: he recalled them from childhood. Beyond the outhouses, however, he did think he saw something. Small black shapes, like eels dancing on their tails in clouds of dust. Towards or away from him? He walked back slowly, hoping that steady motion would help him to dominate his world. Then he looked behind him again. One minute the shapes appeared to be moving towards him, the next to be going away, the next to be gone entirely, the next to be returning. Endlessly flickering away from him, towards him, in the pure heat of June, they were like variations on the idea of periphery.