The Grass Memorial Read online

  Sarah Harrison

  THE GRASS

  MEMORIAL

  CONTENTS

  SLEEPING

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  WAKING

  For Patrick, and the many hearts of a various world

  All flesh is as grass, and the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: Surely the people is grass’

  —The Book of Isaiah

  SLEEPING

  Harry 1854

  Long before he opened his eyes he believed that it was morning – early morning in England, fragile and fair.

  The sun on his bare head, the pungent scent of the grass, and the cross-hatching of its stems under his cheek painted a picture of his surroundings as clear as any that hung on the walls of Bells. He could see, like dawn coming up in the dark of his mind’s eye, the soft, booming curves of the hills with their coarse pelt of pale grass, and stamped on their flank the sharper white of the primitive horse, millennia old. He saw the watercolour wastes of sky which in summer seemed to quiver with the song of invisible larks, and the tumbled roofs of the village houses that clustered tenderly around their patronal church. And now he could hear the bells of that and other churches, tumbling and tolling, catching randomly on harmony and dissonance, sometimes together, sometimes in counterpoint like the hooves of trotting horses. The very smell of those horses flooded into his head, warm and branny, with an edge of leather and sweat, a smell that rose poignantly off the past and caused tears to ooze from beneath his lids.

  The picture intensified, became close and particular, encompassing himself as he was now, lying prone in the four-acre field as the sun climbed, the idle cropping of the horses just reaching him as a rustling and uneven heartbeat through the grass . . .

  Past and present fused. With great difficulty, and without lifting his head, he opened his eyes.

  * * * * *

  What he saw was strange: the same but subtly and disturbingly altered as if the reality had been in his head, and this was some kind of mocking dream. His vision was blurred not by tears so much as a stinging veil of sweat. All other sensations were brutally enhanced. The light, not mellow gold but pallid and glaring, hammered at the side of his head. The stench of the ground and of his own body was rancid. He seemed to be in a pocket of silence, far beyond which a distant, animal clamour was just audible. The sound made his stomach churn. He was damp beneath his heavy clothes, and not just with sweat. He knew his shell of calm was vulnerable, that the calm itself was an illusion, that he should move. His body felt heavy and inert, a dragging burden that would not – perhaps could not – respond. With a huge effort he pulled his left arm beneath him and used it to raise his torso from the ground.

  A sickening gush of hot fluid rushed from him. Shocked, he clutched at himself and fell forward once more, thinking to staunch the flow against the ground. The past was returning to him – the recent past, shrieking and buffeting like an angry wind. Inescapably terrible, and real.

  With a moan of fear he tilted his head back, grazing his cheek on some small prickly plant as he did so. This was the only pain he felt, though he knew now that there were gaping holes in him through which his life was trickling away, seeping into the foreign ground. At the farthest edge of his vision he could see what he was looking for – the mare’s angular, rough-coated brown bulk. She seemed to be lying on her side and turned away from him, it was the top of her rear quarters he could see, and the hintel of the saddle, still miraculously in place and glossy with elbow grease.

  ‘Clemmie . . .’ He made hardly a sound. He tried to swallow but his throat was parched. ‘Clemmie—’

  She was quite motionless. He remembered going down to the four-acre paddock as a boy and finding the horses still asleep, lying on their sides in the long summer grass, and his childish fear that they might be not sleeping, but dead. He saw that she was breathing, but his relief was shortlived. With each exhalation she was wracked by a long shudder.

  ‘Clemmie—’ He forced the word out, but still it was scarcely more than a rasping whisper. His agitation caused another squirt of blood and with it the small, threatening stab of returning pain.

  The mare did not respond to his voice, but as he strained to look a great blowfly settled on her rump and her hide twitched violently, shaking it off. The fly was gone for only seconds before returning. It became suddenly of overriding importance to him, upon whose face and neck the flies were also settling, to rid Clemmie of their greedy attentions.

  He began to inch, on his side, towards her, his left arm clamped to his midriff. He tried to keep each minute movement as smooth as possible, to avoid any further pain or loss of blood, but with his agonisingly slow, slithering progress he could feel the long tear opening him from breastbone to stomach. He told himself that if he could only reach the mare, rest against her and protect her from the flies, he would achieve some sort of peace, and the achievement of it would protect them both from the horror carried on the breath of that far-off shouting.

  He reached her and rested, exhausted, his cheek against her withers. His sudden touch startled her and she convulsed, snorting with fear, her legs flailing the air helplessly. Slipping his arm over her neck he said her name again and she quietened, though she still trembled with every breath. Gently, no longer aware of his own pain, he stroked her neck, running his hand along the strong swell of muscle beneath her mane. Her ears moved slightly forward in recognition. He thought that was how he would remember her, neck arched, ears pricked – ready, in her animal innocence, for anything.

  Now he could see the marks of what she had been through. The scummy lather of sweat around the girth and pommel and where the reins lay on her neck; the bulging scarlet seam of a sabre slash on her haunch, on which the flies feasted, out of his reach; and the smaller and even more dismaying scars of his own spurs, employed in a feverish excess of panic and bravado, to goad on a mare who had not a mean or timid bone in her body and who had only ever served him with her whole strength and trust.

  Worse still was to imagine the damage he could not see. For Clemmie was clearly unable to stand. She was as helpless and vulnerable as a starfish left by the tide, and he could do nothing to protect her. He had not even the strength nor the means to despatch her cleanly himself. She had done all that was asked of her and now could only lie here in this dry valley far from home, waiting, like him, for the end. Life was leaking out of both of them as the sun climbed high in the sky. His eyes closed again in despair.

  Feverish now, he saw other pictures. Pictures of Hugo on Piper, furiously alive, riding bareback like a savage through the edge of the trees at Bells, whooping and waving, ducking to avoid branches, the scarcely broken yearling all fiery and sweated-up with excitement, nostrils blooming like two crimson roses, a tell-tale paring of white in the corner of each eye . . . Images of youth in all its reckless glory.

  These he saw in vivid colour and movement, as if they were happening before him. But the next picture was still, and in black and white, sombrely framed: Hugo and Rachel on their wedding day, he uncharacteristically so
lemn, scarcely able to believe his luck, glaring out at the world and defying all comers to find him wanting as a husband; the bride slender, composed in mind and heart, gazing calmly into her future. And then there was Rachel alone and all in black, clothed in the desolate dignity of young widowhood, her terrible thinness guarding Hugo’s precious legacy.

  He heard once more the sound of the cart in which he and the men had taken Hugo to church – no working horses that day, they’d lined up along the shafts and pulled the cart themselves. Rachel had walked with them, her gloved hand resting on the side, and Colin Bartlemas leading Piper, unsaddled and with only a head collar, behind them. The colt, unaware of the solemnity of the occasion and spooked by the blundering rattle of the wheels, had skittered and danced, tossing his head wildly up and down, his mane like black flames. To him, and he was sure to Rachel, Piper had been the keeper of Hugo’s spirit, the reminder of the life now gone.

  Now he was certain he could really hear those wheels, the creak of the weathered wood, lumbering close. Pain and a terrible lassitude weighed him down; he could no longer distinguish between what was here and now, and the pictures in his head. But Clemmie also sensed something, and jerked feebly. He didn’t want to see what it was that loomed over them. Friend or foe it could only mean some sort of release. He wanted to pray but could think of no words.

  The wheels had halted and he heard footsteps crunching on the dry grass. There was a sharp, alien, chemical smell that cut across his dulled senses. The coolness of a shadow fell on him for a second, he could have sworn he caught the sound of breathing, soft and concentrated. He held his own breath, the mare’s trembling had ceased, as if they both knew it was the end.

  There were more sounds, a little distance away and unidentifiable, but which he took to be those of preparation. His flesh, along with the slow coursing of his blood, seemed to be sinking into the earth, losing with every second its personal and particular detail, and becoming only matter. The pain was no longer sharp but a muffled drumbeat, in time with his failing heart.

  A hiatus. Not even the rustle of grass. The far-off shouting faded, with his consciousness.

  The last sound that he heard was the distant pealing of bells, ended by a dull, truncated explosion. Clemmie did not move, for she had already gone.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘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’

  Spencer 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 kingsize 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.