Marlford (21 page)

Dan leaned his forehead against the top bar of a gate. ‘I can't believe it. Insidious, that's what it is. This whole thing, man – insidious. We should never have come.'

‘Well, we didn't come on purpose, did we? It was just luck.' Gadiel slid easily onto the ground and put a hand on Dan's back. ‘Don't worry, we'll look for it. We'll look all over.'

But it felt hopeless even as they began. For an hour or so they trailed around, peering into fields and following faint tracks. Even though it was obvious that no one could push a van through the dense woodland that circled the mere, they tramped through the undergrowth anyway.

Finally, Dan stood at the water's edge, watching the thin waves slap against a tree root. ‘What if it's down in there?' He leaned over as far as he could, as though to catch a glimpse of submerged bodywork shimmering below the surface, but he saw only his writhing reflection.

‘I think we have to accept it's gone, Dan.'

‘But it can't have. It can't have just vanished, man. I don't believe it.'

In the end, the men told them what had happened. They were seated on folding chairs in a line on the scrappy roadway in front of the hutments, waiting; as the squatters approached, they rose, steadying themselves.

Hindy stepped forwards. ‘We had wondered if you might return at some point,' he said.

Dan frowned at a coil of barbed wire that curled into the mud, trying to make sense of its viciousness. ‘My van's gone.'

‘And we heard about the fire,' Gadiel added, more kindly. ‘We're very sorry.'

‘There was no tragedy.' Luden was brisk. ‘Not in the end. There was no need to come.'

The men exchanged glances, condemning such extravagant behaviour.

‘No – we didn't come for that. We came to collect our things,' Dan explained.

‘Look,' said Gadiel. ‘We don't want to bother you. But do you know where they've gone, Mr Barton and Ellie? Did they tell you?'

‘And about my van?' Dan prompted. ‘We're looking for my van. It was in the yard, man, but it's disappeared.'

Hindy seemed troubled. He cleared his throat. ‘Mr Quersley took the vehicle, I understand.'

‘What? The librarian? How?' Dan stared.

The men all nodded solemnly, confirming Hindy's story.

‘We were unable to prevent him.' Ata was apologetic. ‘We didn't even know about it until it was too late, I'm afraid.'

‘And he was hell bent,' added Luden.

‘But how…? It was broken. He couldn't have taken it. Not without equipment.' Dan looked from one to the other of them. ‘I don't understand.'

‘He spent some time on repairs, I believe,' said Hindy.

‘But he had no right to do that. It's my van.'

‘Yes, indeed.'

Ata looked at Hindy, and then took up the explanation more fully. ‘It seems he acquired a manual of some sort and worked hard to make the vehicle ready. He simply drove off. He never mentioned a word to Mr Barton, nor even to us, after everything. It was the evening of the fire, around midnight – or possibly later. We couldn't be sure of the exact time. We were having rather a lengthy hand of cards and we heard the engine whilst we were playing.'

‘The thing was spluttering,' Luden pointed out. ‘It's not the finest example of motor engineering.'

‘We were going to investigate. But at that hour…' Ata allowed the idea to drift away.

‘Do you think he's coming back?' Gadiel asked. ‘There're animals still at the farm and it doesn't look… He won't have gone for good, will he?'

Ata looked at Hindy, who replied with great care.

‘My own opinion is that he will be gone for some time.'

Dan was sharp. ‘But this is theft, man. In anybody's book. It's a crime. I'm going to inform the police. I need to get on; we both need to get on. We need to find the van. We can't just let him drive off in my van.' He stormed off towards a clotted mound of broken stone and rusting wire and kicked at the debris.

Luden sat down heavily, as though things were concluded. ‘Well.' It was a dismissal of sorts.

‘Yes, we'll be going. I'm sorry,' Gadiel said. ‘But just… can you tell me where I might find Ellie? I'm – we're rather concerned about her. She didn't go with him, did she? With Mr Quersley and the van?'

The men fixed flat expressions on him.

‘I'm afraid we can't tell you,' Hindy replied.

‘Oh, come on – you must know something.'

‘We know rather less than you might think. We were not party to Mr Barton's plans. Nor Miss Barton's. Not in any way.'

‘Is Mr Barton coming back? Do you know that, at least?'

‘Mr Barton was lost here at Marlford.' Luden leaned back in his chair. He spoke gravely, as though delivering a legal judgement. ‘His attempts to be a fitting incumbent were – as you saw for yourselves – ridiculous. Why would he come back?'

Dan circled around, coming towards them again to hear the end of the discussion. ‘But you're still here,' he pointed out. ‘Why would you stay on here if no one's coming back?'

‘We keep an eye on things,' Hindy said.

‘We fill a gap,' Ata added. ‘A void, if you like.'

‘A gap in what?' Dan glanced involuntarily back towards the manor, as though it might be some kind of architectural service the men performed.

Hindy, too, looked away towards the house. ‘In people's minds, I suppose.'

Dan snorted. ‘But if they evict you, then you'll have to go. The man we met at the house was damn certain they would evict you. You see? You should have supported us, man. You should have joined the squat. Then you couldn't have been evicted.'

‘We'll ignore any attempt to evict us,' Hindy responded, evenly. ‘I imagine we're quite secure here. We'll continue as we've always done.'

Dan shook his head at them. ‘I'd like to see you – just the three of you – trying to hold out against bailiffs and enforcers, and what-have-you. I've seen this kind of thing before. It takes skill, you know – political nous. To play the game the right way. But if we'd only got going here, if people had come and joined us—'

‘That was never a possibility,' Luden said.

‘Yeah, but don't you see? You stand no chance. You're defeated, man.'

The men looked at him, puzzled, as though he were asking them to solve a complicated sum.

‘You can't stay here. You'll be chucked out – sent to an old folks' home or something.' Dan wondered if they had grown deaf in his absence: they showed no signs of understanding. ‘I mean, what have you been trying to do, man? What have you been holding out for?'

He gave them time to answer, but they just looked at him, uncomprehending. They were shaking, it was true, each of them trembling, but it may have been the cool breeze from the mere chilling them through, or their age catching up with them.

‘Marlford's finished. It's done for,' he said, slowly. ‘It's succumbing to the inevitable forces of change.'

Ata smiled, at Dan first and then in turn, carefully, at each of them. Hindy and Luden took up the smile and stretched it between them.

Gadiel sighed. ‘Look, we're sorry, about everything, but you really don't know about the Bartons? You can't tell us where they are?'

‘We know nothing.' Hindy's smile was still fixed.

‘Nothing? Not the slightest clue?'

‘Nothing.'

Gadiel frowned at them, baffled, knowing that they would not help him. He had the odd impression that he was talking to mannequins, outdated, dumped in a tangled strip of wasteland, lined up on chairs as a joke: they seemed suddenly to have shed their flesh, taking on the sickly, disturbing sheen of old plastic. He turned his back on them.

As he and Dan returned to the village, Gadiel took one last look – he could not resist – but what he saw was uncertain, the cluster of dilapidated hutments meaningless, the rotting debris a confusion, the men still unmoving; none of it really worth his attention.

Twenty-Eight

O
ne of the diggers dropped its load, adding to the clamour around the library, trussed now in wires and chains, boarded up and braced, veiled with plastic sheeting, unrecognizable. Victoria Street had been churned into a filthy track of black mud, most of the buildings wore complicated strata of grime; the Hepworth Barton Bank had acquired solid bespoke shutters. New walkways promised novel ways of negotiating the streets, suggesting different vistas, disrupting old routines. Most of the shops had found ways of serving customers from side doors or back windows, from borrowed premises and disused garages. At the newsagents, a stone's throw from the nymph, they were selling postcards of modern Marlford, views of buildings slumped by subsidence, of the gaping pit in the middle of the village, of Braithwaite Barton gazing serenely over his dismembered legacy. The disintegration had brought an element of fame.

The almshouses at the edge of the village remained untouched by the worst of the upheaval. Ellie paused on the path that cut across their prim garden frontage, watching
a bee burrow into a spike of delphinium. Its buzz grew shrill for a moment, and then it emerged dusted in pollen, taking flight clumsily. When it had disappeared into the summer light around the nymph, she turned away, seeing nothing else. She could imagine, if she wanted to, that the village was as it had always been.

She walked behind the row of cottages, crossing a narrow yard. There was a row of back doors, each painted an identical bottle green and fixed with a brass handle. Ellie went to the middle door, which was ajar. As she pushed it further open, she called, stepping inside and calling again, emptying the contents of her shopping basket onto the small kitchen table.

Finally, Ernest shouted back to her from the sitting room. ‘There's someone coming. Ellie – there's someone coming. Up the path. To the front. To the door.'

A moment later, she heard the rapid knock. She paused, wiping her hands on her skirt.

The knock sounded again, more resolutely.

‘Ellie!'

‘Yes, Papa. I hear it.'

‘It's a man. In overalls. A workman of some kind.'

‘Leave it, Papa. It's nothing, I'm sure.' She could not imagine who it might be. ‘Something about the library, perhaps. But I don't want to bother with it. Not now.'

‘Don't be a fool. We can't leave it. He's seen me. He can see me through the window.'

Ellie sighed. ‘Very well. But you know we agreed we wouldn't allow visitors here, Papa. We promised ourselves that.'

Her father did not reply.

Ellie went through to the front, leaving the back door standing wide open, a breeze blowing through, an escape of some kind.

Gadiel was too tall for the scowl of the thatched porch. He had to stoop. Despite this, he stood quite still on the step, smiling with uncomplicated delight.

‘I saw you. I've seen you once or twice before, just for a moment, coming and going in the village, but I never worked out where you were living. Then I saw you, just now, and I guessed you were living here, in one of these cottages. You are living here, aren't you?'

‘Yes. With Papa.'

‘Yes, I saw him, at the window. That's how I worked out which door to knock on. That's how I was sure.'

Behind and alongside her, the narrow hall was stuffed with library books, neatly stacked, crammed close and high, piled against the walls almost to the ceiling, leaving the slightest of passages, like the cut of a steep ravine.

She saw Gadiel's surprise. ‘They're everywhere.' She shook her head; it was still a wonder. ‘The house is full of them. They stored them here when they began work on the library. The cottage was empty then. But, after the fire – well, it was the only place we could find and we agreed that if they let us stay here, we'd make room for ourselves, and I'd do some work on the books at the same time, so they'd be ready to go back.'

‘Isn't it cramped, though?'

‘Yes, I suppose. A little.'

Gadiel stepped back, away from the porch. ‘Well.'
He straightened to his full height. ‘The library should be moved today.'

‘Yes, I know. I read about it in the newspaper.'

‘I'm working with one of the engineering firms.' He gestured at his overalls as explanation. ‘Just for a while. As experience.'

‘I imagine there's a great deal to learn.'

‘Yeah.' He stuffed his hands in his pockets.

‘A great many technical skills.'

He glanced at her. ‘You're not interested in that kind of thing, are you? You don't think it matters.'

‘Oh, yes, I do. Of course I do. I didn't mean to suggest… It's just not something I understand, that's all.' Ellie pushed at one of the piles of books, dropping her gaze.

‘No,' Gadiel said. ‘I suppose not.'

‘But it's valuable, of course, I'm sure it is.'

‘I like it.' He crossed his arms over his chest. The action seemed too deliberate, the ensuing silence too long.

Ellie rubbed her hands on her skirt again. ‘Can you spare a moment? Would you like to come in and see Papa?'

‘Oh, wait – no. No thanks.' Gadiel grimaced exaggeratedly, in mock horror, and it drew her eyes back to his face. She recognized the sparkle about him, lodged under his skin. ‘Poor old Dan's still telling stories about his gunshot wound. I don't fancy another scuffle like that.'

‘It'll be fine, really – Papa's much better here.'

‘Even so. I don't suppose he'd be too pleased to see a squatter again.'

‘He won't mind, I'm sure. He doesn't even seem to think of Marlford any more. He's much quieter, without things to bother him, without the worry of the place
and the frogs at the mere…' She stopped and smiled, an invitation. ‘You'd be very welcome.'

‘Well. Thanks… that's kind.' Gadiel saw something new in the lines around her mouth; he tried to work out what it might be. It was hardly anything – the slightest flutter of expression – but it disconcerted him. He felt as though he had been away a long time. ‘I could step in briefly, if you like. I'm allowed a break from work – twenty minutes or so.'

‘Good. That would be nice.'

He followed her through the alley of books. The almshouse was compact: there were just two small rooms opening from the hallway, the kitchen, at the back, and the sitting room to one side. Ernest was in an armchair by the window of the sitting room, surrounded on all sides by piles of books, uneven in height, pushed into elaborate patterns, like the eroding columns of a limestone pavement.

He rose, offering a hand to Gadiel. ‘Ah – yes. I saw you coming.' His voice was too big for the tiny almshouse, too great a challenge to its respectability.

‘How do you do, Mr Barton. I'm Gadiel Hampton. I was – I was one of the squatters. At Marlford.'

‘Were you?' Ernest peered at him as though looking for a landmark lost in fog. ‘Not the blighter that Quersley shot?'

‘No, sir.'

‘No. I thought not.' But he did not sound sure. ‘You're the one who knocked me down, then?'

‘Yes – I'm sorry about that. It was just a panic… but I'm sorry about the whole squat thing, really. It wasn't really what we thought… we shouldn't have—'

‘Bloody mess. Best forgotten.' Ernest shook off the memory and glanced at Ellie. ‘Not that good things didn't come of it, in the end.' He reached for his daughter and gripped her hand as she stepped towards him. Regret seeped through the bags of his old skin. It was very calm for a moment, their reconciliation revisited.

Then Ernest started, as though he had been pricked, slung a nod at Gadiel and pushed past him. ‘I'm going to watch them shift that thing,' he said, smiling at Ellie. ‘I'll go the back way and fetch my hat and coat from the kitchen.'

‘If you wait, Papa, I'll come with you.'

But Ernest had sidled through the labyrinth. ‘Don't need an escort,' he called cheerfully, from the hallway.

They heard him dressing to go out and then the pull of the back door.

Ellie looked towards the noise. ‘You've no idea how cruel a trick was played on us,' she said, quietly.

Gadiel was not sure whether he was supposed to answer. ‘A trick?'

‘A kind of trick. Mr Quersley led me to believe – well, he turned me against my father. He poisoned my ideas.'

Gadiel could not measure her tone. ‘Really? You didn't seem very close, you and your father.'

She smiled at him, ruefully. ‘No. That's because of what Mr Quersley told me, because of things in the past. I regret it now. And now that it's just Papa and I —'

‘I wish you'd drop that whole “Papa” thing.' Gadiel was suddenly nettled. ‘It sounds stupid. Like you're some Victorian half-wit.'

Ellie frowned. ‘What should I call him then?'

‘I don't know.' He tugged at the pocket of his overalls. ‘I just think – it makes you seem old-fashioned.'

‘I am old-fashioned. Look at me.' She opened her arms to show him the extent of her dress, plain, beige cotton.

‘But, Ellie—'

‘Oh!' Her moan seemed involuntary; she looked surprised for a moment that such a wretched sound had been drawn from her, but then went on in a low, urgent tone. ‘I've been so unfair to him. All my life I've been so wrong.'

‘No – Ellie, stop, I'm sure that's not true. Whatever this Mr Quersley did, whatever he said to you—'

‘But I believed it. Exactly as it was told to me. I failed my father; I failed to imagine how it might have been different. I did a terrible thing – arrogant and stupid. If I'd only talked to him. But I was so frightened that I'd be weak, that he'd make me love him, when I didn't want to, when he didn't deserve it…'

Gadiel wanted to comfort her but he felt awkward there, with the books closing in on all sides and her distress so tangible.

‘I'm sure it'll be all right,' he reassured her feebly.

She did not seem to hear. ‘It'll take us so long now to know each other. And we don't have all that much time, do we? A few years, perhaps, that's all – everything else is lost. Everything that could have been is lost, and we can't even begin to know what it might have been like.'

Gadiel realized for the first time that he was intruding: another man had come before him, captivating her.

‘I'm sorry,' he said.

‘I'm learning to be his daughter, you see, so that we're not on our own again, with everything uncertain and no
one knowing what to believe. Nothing else matters, does it, other than that – nobody cares about the Bartons or the past or anything. I know that now.' She blinked, still puzzled by the revelation, vapid and unsatisfactory, unwanted.

‘Ellie, I wouldn't have come after you if you hadn't wanted to be found.'

She looked up at him, perplexed, as though she had just discovered him there among the mounds of old books and rotting papers. ‘Oh, no – I'm pleased you came.' But she sounded rueful, distracted. ‘I didn't know the squatters had stayed in the village. I presumed you'd gone, straight away.'

‘Look, I should probably go back to work.'

‘Are you both here? Is Dan here?'

She gave nothing away with the question. He could not tell what answer she wanted.

‘No. He's out of hospital – he's fine. But it's only me here now. He's gone off.'

She heard the fragility of his regret. ‘I'm sorry – if you've fallen out. I'm sorry that you're on your own.'

‘Oh, no, it's fine. It was me who… I met one of the engineers in the pub and got talking. They suggested that I helped with the library and it seemed too good an opportunity to miss, so I decided to hang around. When that's done, well, I'll go on to another project, if they'll have me.'

Ellie took a sharp intake of breath, as though she had been stung. ‘But what about your studies?'

‘I think I'll let them go.' He smiled sheepishly. ‘I've told you – it's not really my thing. The summer's made me clear on that, at least.'

‘No… really? You've decided that… since coming here?' The flutter in her voice suggested a greater tragedy. ‘But that's terrible, that your visit to Marlford has made you abandon your learning.'

The mantelpiece clock – a cheap round face in an arched plastic case – chimed the half-hour neatly.

Gadiel examined the hands sadly, avoiding her disappointment. ‘Look, I'd better go. I'm glad you're all right, though. We heard about the fire. We went to the house.'

‘I'm fine.'

‘They wouldn't tell me where you'd gone.'

‘I'm not sure it was a great secret. It was just confused, at first, trying to find somewhere.'

‘There was a man there, at the house; an official bloke.'

‘Yes. Marlford's being demolished.'

The words came impassively, but in Ellie's glance something trembled, a tiny movement, like the ripple of a gnat against a blue sky.

He stepped towards her. ‘Oh, Ellie – no. I'm sorry.'

‘Oh, it's fine. Really.' She pulled away. ‘The land can be used for other things. They want to – build. Again.' She could not concentrate; could not think about Marlford. She felt she was breathing too quickly. ‘But it doesn't matter. We couldn't have gone on there, anyway. This way we'll have money to live on; when it comes through, we'll perhaps find somewhere else to go – somewhere less cramped.'

He filled the room, the breadth of his shoulders seeming to stretch from wall to wall. She leaned against the books. ‘Will you tell me, about the library?' Her question was too
abrupt. ‘I'd be interested to hear how the arrangements have been made.'

‘Another time.' He was suddenly annoyed. They were back where they had started. ‘I'd better get back now before they start winching.'