Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (33 page)

The clamp of ice, an abrupt transition into Cormac McCarthy bleakness, bit at my finger ends, splitting skin; rutted mud made field margins into a balancing act. The river was frozen in narrow channels around locks. I squeezed my shard of red brick for warmth. I passed two humans that morning, sliding through Marlow in the direction of the station: a languid Shelley-youth, trailing Isadora Duncan scarf, unbuttoned cuffs, smoking his breakfast, in company with a keen, bespectacled black girl talking very fast about electrostatic attraction. ‘You
want
to be a doctor?’ drawls the young man. ‘Why would you want to work with
sick
people?’ He shrugs into his velvet jacket. He turns up the volume on his ear bud.

After Henley the hit of the wooded slopes, witnessed from a footbridge over the lock, is sublime. It’s one of those moments when we see so much more than we know: the surging, ruffled water, skeletal black trees, ink strokes diminishing into the point where river meets sky.

My breakfast in the town, suitable café found after a lengthy search, was excellent: Italian. With fresh orange juice, real coffee, crispy bacon. And conversation with a friendly waitress. I noticed a Wyndham Lewis title on display in the window of an antiquarian bookseller:
The Ideal Giant
, his first separately published literary work. An item I didn’t possess, and couldn’t afford, even if the shop were open. Another life, move on. Let Lewis lie dormant among the glassine ranks of blind Huxleys and barking Woolfs. These bookish enterprises, embedded in commuter villages, are indistinguishable from superior funeral directors: preserved tombstone volumes, miniature marble headstones. Your name in places you don’t want to find it.

The man with the tent was drinking at a frost-slicked picnic table. He was waiting for me, a spare can punctured and hissing like a gas-canister time bomb.

‘What took you so long?’

Did he know me?
Was he aware of the interest I’d taken in his campsites? The dog snarled, but didn’t move. The man was dressed in hooded parka, multipocketed camouflage trousers and serious boots. I’m hopeless with faces, background artists from deleted films are more familiar than my immediate neighbours, but this person, so firmly positioned over his clutch of blue cans, rang all the bells. Like a backwoodsman from
Deliverance
cutting through the screen. He took off a leather glove to carve a hunk of meat for his hound. LOVE-HATE knuckles: one broken and white, a bolt about to pierce tight skin. A compass rose tattoo. Chobham Farm, Angel Lane. The long shed. Cribbage on a packing case. Mick.

‘Still living down Hackney?’

He picked up the conversation from a 1970s tea break, interrogating me, the newcomer, and giving nothing away in exchange. Where he slept. With whom. He noticed the way I fiddled nervously with the smoothed fragment of brick I’d carried from the Isle of Grain.

‘Swap.’

Mick offered a closed fist. Giving up my totemic stone was abdicating from the purity of the walk. I wanted to bury it at the spring from which the Thames flowed. But the exchange, eye to eye, no looking down, had to be made. Cold: an ice cube scalded my hand.

‘With all the work on the Olympic site, some bastard is going to find the platinum drum. You can only get there by water.’

I left him at the table, watching me, as I pushed on, saying that I had to be in Reading before it got dark, to find a bed for the night. Mick had the scornful expression he’d perfected in his crib. The certainty that I was playing at it, a faker, a person who wrote about walks he hadn’t achieved.

By Sonning Lock, evening closing in, I heard the yelps of a female cox driving a reluctant eight to one final push: that saw them trapped in the ice. Blades scratching uselessly. Like bird claws. No purchase. The thin shell with the steaming Reading University athletes was wedged, a symbol of elegant impotence. They scraped, faster and faster, on the thin ice sheet into which they had reversed. The young woman’s reflex barks of command tapered off into the silence of the coming night. A bitter cold fingered their burning lungs. The imprisoned craft, a membrane between the heat of the oarsmen and the black river, adjusted to its novel status: part of the picture. Bare trees. High wall. Lock. Voyeur with raised camera. All of it fading into the enveloping darkness.

I took Mick’s chilled object from my pocket, the metallic wafer. I had seen such a thing, once before, in Stratford. A silver nugget like the one young Freddie set rocking on the table of the brown-panelled pub. A mercury messenger for a new communion. Carry it to the abbey at Dorchester-on-Thames. Leave it there, a fee against my entry to the city of spooks and spires.

It was high summer when Anna rejoined me, taking an early train to Reading. I had been drawn away, back north to Liverpool, then Ireland, Holland, Norway, Sweden, but we were reunited in time for my birthday. I planned an easy first session, a night in a river-facing pub in Streatley, before our Dorchester return and a stroll to Oxford. There was also, guided by Mick’s platinum tablet, a reconnection with the period of Chobham Farm walks, a group photograph on the bridge at Streatley, by the sign for the Swan Hotel. The Ridgeway, the Icknield Way, the Thames Path: they intersect at this point in the river. Chalk grassland to the south, butterflies, orchids. Highway to the megaliths.

Reading claims possession of an ORACLE, but it turns out to be a sprawling retail park. A woman, extricating herself from this zone, tells us that she is heading towards Paddington, then Bloomsbury; she has no map and not the slightest notion of what sits in her way. Floaty chiffon, turban, bangles: she’s as feathery and vague as a lost guest from Garsington Manor, snubbed by Lady Ottoline Morrell. Our conversation is interrupted by the din of a helicopter revving up on a riverside pad no bigger than a trampoline. The intrusive black bug is the first of many, the Thames along this reach is a runway for impatient commuters, airport hoppers who don’t have the patience to urge their chauffeurs through snarled motorway traffic.

The going is easy, but we are never more than tolerated intruders: private schools, fenced woods with notices in Polish warning off unlicensed fishermen. River cruisers (nautical caps, large gins) churn out a steady wash. Concrete pillboxes in tangled undergrowth. A fragrant lady from the Baltic in tailored uniform checks us into the Streatley hotel.

A pre-dinner amble tells us that the Bloomsbury Morrells, patrons of weekending artists, more Huxleys and Woolfs, were the big local brewers. They took care of the laundry for their labourers and organized seaside outings in due season. We return for a celebratory meal and a few drinks, while we sit watching the lights on the river. There is a corporate function, involving numerous mobile-phone instructions and revisions, on a floating restaurant.

Heading, none too steadily, for a welcome pillow, Anna kicks the sharp corner of the big bed and breaks a toe. Dosed with painkillers and brandy, the swollen digit strapped, she tramped on, making the best of it, for another two days: Dorchester, Oxford, and out to the station.

Those academics who weren’t in their pods on motorways were wandering friars on the footpaths of England. Nature-writers like Edward Thomas and Richard Jefferies were rediscovered and revalued, their downland walks invigilated by keen-eyed young men in khaki shorts. Robert Macfarlane, Cambridge lecturer, tree-climber, champion of wild places, led the way back to the era of ambulatory essays on dew ponds, standing stones, pilgrim tracks. He came off the Icknield Way and over the bridge to Streatley. Slipping awkwardly, he suffered Anna’s fate: broken ribs. ‘Bone for chalk,’ he told me. Forfeit paid for access to the Ridgeway, a geological shift experienced in the nerves and sinews. But Streatley also trades in the more indolent literary tradition of messing about on the river: Jerome K. Jerome’s trio of incompetent excursionists, un-aware that they were pioneering soft-commission TV fodder for moonlighting comedians, came ashore to stock up on provisions. Local pamphlets have it that the opening scene of Kenneth Grahame’s
Wind in the Willows
is set on the backwater beside the old Streatley Mill.

In 1893 Oscar Wilde was persuaded by Alfred Douglas, his Bosie, to take a house for the summer in Goring, across the bridge from Streatley. Walking with the poet Theodore Wratislaw into woods that slope down to the Thames, Wilde paused, stood for a moment, and said that he was satisfied. This view was as much as he wanted to experience. Let whatever lay around the bend remain a mystery. Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann interprets this as a gesture of unease, intimations of coming pain and distress. In Goring, Wilde entertained his guests by sculling in a blue shirt and pink tie. Like an unelected member of Henley’s famous Leander Club. He wrote the first act of
An Ideal Husband.

In Wallingford, Anna searches for a chemist. We have a pint in the courtyard of a coaching inn. The bristling Russian waitress, slamming the glasses down, says: ‘This is
not
what I do. I am scientist.’ A frail old lady in Shillingford tells us that we are occupying her bench, she comes out every afternoon at this time to smoke a cigar. In Dorchester, we admire the Jesse window, genealogy taking the form of a loaded tree. An orchard of saints perched like partridges. In Abingdon we sit beside a troop of care-in-the-community folk on an outing to the pub. They are calm, taking food in measured fashion, slow and steady, where their minders leap for phones, trot backwards and forwards to the bar, kick doors, screw up newspapers, rush outside to smoke. Never failing to remind the disadvantaged ones of what a fabulous time they are having.

Through our long and uninspired Oxford approach, prohibitions mount. Anna becomes quieter and quieter, as she manages the waves of pain from her broken toe.
PLEASE DO NOT LET YOUR DOG FOUL
THIS AREA
. COWS WITH BABY CALVES, KEEP WELL AWAY FROM THEM. PRIVATE FISHING NO DAY TICKETS NO LITTER CAMPING OR FIRES. BEWARE ROAD CROSSING AHEAD.
PLEASE TAKE YOUR LITTER HOME
. CLEAN UP OR PAY UP. NO NIGHT FISHING BY ORDER. PRIVATE RAFTS: PLEASE KEEP OFF. POLICE DO NOT LEAVE YOUR VALUABLES IN YOUR CAR
.

We pass under bridges, through pylon plantations, into the heritage zone of boathouses, parks and distant towers; Anna dropping further and further back. When I wait, at stile or lock, she says: ‘I don’t want to talk.’ All her concentration is required to put one foot in front of another.

Staying on the river path, we go through Folly Bridge. I made so much of Oxford in my earlier fiction – terrorist incidents, episodes in pubs – that I find the city redundant now. You can play fast and loose with descriptive prose. Poetry, I have discovered, is the orgasm that can’t be faked. It happens or it doesn’t. No cure. If there is poetry in this place, I’m not ready for it. We carry straight on to the station, where Anna takes the train back to London. I can’t do it. I head off in search of a sleeping bag. As Don DeLillo says, ‘We need time to lose interest in things.’

The glory of Hull, as contemplated from the Lower Lea Valley, is the certainty that there is somewhere worse than Hackney, the crappest of crap towns in a list made by idiots. I wasn’t charging off to a defunct whaling port that offered a refuge to John Prescott, New Labour’s token bully, and Philip Larkin, the Eeyore of English verse. Now I know better. We’ve been misled by stereotypes customized for export: the crooked-mouthed, wife-beating old cricketers, those would-you-credit-it pipe-suckers. And wearied by Prescott’s mangled arias of self-justification and class war. (Conducted from state-owned, rent-free apartments and striped croquet lawns in the Home Counties.) Big John has spent too long south of the M62. A ripe colour photograph complementing the inevitable sideways shuffle into reality television presents a Dorian Gray portrait finished by Francis Bacon. Inside the flaccid sporran of superfluous, hard-dining flesh is the imprint of a rugged Heathcliff workingman, a union organizer who looks like a fit and glowering Fred Truman. A good metaphor for the way the north’s ruined industrial heritage has been prostituted by grand projects of regeneration (new forms of colonial patronage). Beyond Kingston-upon-Hull is the most blasted of heaths, the Holderness Plain: flat, melancholy, bone-heaped, crumbling into the sea. Will Self, in a meltdown final panel in
Walking to Hollywood
, nominated the stretch between Flamborough Head and Spurn Point as the physical manifestation of Alzheimer’s disease, the slow death of English memory. Men climbing prematurely from trains to piss against vanishing barbed-wire fences.

An ASBO family, deemed too recidivist for one of Hackney’s more infamous estates, faced expulsion to a place they could not begin to fix on the map: Hull. Which these unfortunates, picking up their travel passes, heard as Hell. And took their leave, with downcast eyes and Dante-tread, as if condemned to walk barefoot up the Great North Road on a causeway of burning coals. Only to discover a thrusting new enterprise zone, lavished with architectural interventions like The Deep, a flashy Terry Farrell dockside fish-tank with as much cultural relevance as the MI6 building, that Aztec jukebox on the south bank of the Thames.