Pondweed Page 7

  ~ The Great Necessity of Ponds

  by Selwyn Robby

  THERE IS NOTHING IN Loggerheads but the car wash that was a garage, a Chinese restaurant that was the post office, a fire station that was a hospital wing, and so it goes in this place where things were and now are not. I’m sitting in the pub with a coffee that’s making my head spin, waiting for Selwyn to come back from wherever Barnard has taken him to buy new tyres. They’ve been gone for so long now that I know Selwyn has somehow convinced Barnard to go and buy tyres via that municipal pond. I have not slept well, if I have slept at all, and despite a shower, a change of clothes, I still feel pestered by flies. I’m also waiting for Linda who’s coming to see me with her dead sea scrolls. I’ve promised Selwyn to humour her.

  She appears in violent purple running gear; she even sweats pure self-esteem. She’ll be one of those women who likes to leave lipstick marks on everything she touches. I hold out my hand to apologise for being so brusque last night, and blame a migraine.

  ‘It’s been a very turbulent trip,’ I say, but she waves me away, reties her ponytail, and places two leather-backed books on the table and some grainy looking photographs.

  Go a few miles down that road and a few miles down there and that’s where she thinks my mother was born, she tells me, showing me a photograph of a porcelain white cottage complete with smoking chimney.

  ‘One of the peasant cottages,’ Linda shouts at me. ‘Be no more than a two-up two-down with no bathroom. Squalor really. Not fit for insects. Tough times.’

  I remember our two-up two-down in Joiners Square, with two of this and two of that. Tough times too.

  Underneath that photograph is another one, and this one is a photograph of this pub when it was heaving with what she calls ‘logger folk’, as if they spent their lives hacking down trees. Linda points at the various washed-out faces in their best frocks, dust jackets and suits, telling me who that is and who that is and who descends from who, but I start to lose track and it all becomes a blur because I’m staring at one face whose eyes I’d know even if they were worn backwards.

  ‘The Richers,’ Linda says pointing at the faces again. ‘One, two, three boys.’ And no, she says, she can find no mention of a daughter in the books. ‘Sorry,’ she says, though not all births were registered. Poor circumstances and all that. ‘Some awful sad stories,’ she says. ‘Child pregnancies, landlord rights, rape.’ She makes it sound like a shopping list. ‘And I was right. Two of the brothers did die of TB.’

  She delivers all this information to me like she’s just on the phone to her hard-of-hearing mother asking if her cleaner’s been, when this is clearly my history and the sewer Meg talked about. It makes me feel like my insides are held together with elastic bands.

  ‘So, there you go,’ Linda says. ‘I knew I knew who they were. Though you don’t look anything like them. Your nose looks bigger.’

  I instantly cover my nose with my hand.

  ‘I’m trying to think if anyone else might know anything,’ she goes on, ‘because Mucklestone was always hogs, hundreds of hogs, and the family who had the place, well, they came down from Llangollen way with a filthy reputation. And you know, when I look at these photographs and see how dead behind the eyes they were, I mean, you’ve got to wonder, haven’t you? How they were treated.’ She looks down at the photograph shaking her head, then pushes it towards me. ‘Life was a shit slog.’

  I smile and say it’s fine. I don’t want the photograph. I move it away from me.

  ‘Heritage is important,’ she says, pushing the photograph towards me again. ‘Don’t you have grandchildren?’

  I tell her no, so no school history projects for me, and surely the photographs are better off staying together in wherever you keep them.

  The look she gives me is one of someone desperate for me to take the photograph. History really isn’t that frightening – but I really don’t want it: ‘You’re being very kind, but my mother wasn’t especially keen on her brothers anyway. And I never even met them,’ I tell her for good measure. ‘And she’s not even in the photograph either. All boys, see?’

  Linda squints down at the photograph then looks back at me. ‘I know they all had a crap life, but still, I’d like you to have it,’ she insists, thinning her lips.

  ‘Seriously, Linda,’ I say, as kindly as I can. ‘We’re on the road. I’d hate to take it then lose it somewhere.’

  She interlocks her fingers together over the photographs. ‘You’re right,’ she suddenly snaps. ‘History is only a beautiful creature to those who will respect it.’

  And, just like that, we are properly glaring at each other. I feel this sort of antagonism in my thighs. I start laughing – ‘I really am grateful, but my mother isn’t even in the picture’ – and she starts banging everything about like it’s been a real chore and I’ve properly upset her, and, just as I start apologising again, here is Selwyn, thank God, and I get in such a fluster in trying to get out of the pub that I catch my shin on the table leg. I don’t realise I’m bleeding from a very deep gash until Selwyn looks down at my jeans in the car.

  ‘Ginny,’ he says, ‘what’s that stain on your trousers?’

  He gasps when I tell him, my blood.

  ‘Why did we come here?’ I shout at him. ‘Did you honestly think I wanted to come here? What did you think I needed to know?’

  He says, ‘What are you talking about? You’re bleeding.’ He wants me to show him my leg in case it needs a stitch. I tell him it doesn’t, I just banged it on the table leg and let’s just carry on.

  ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ he says. ‘Why would you behave like that?’

  ‘She was forcing a past on me that I don’t want to know,’ I snap.

  ‘She was being interested, Ginny. In you. Your people.’

  ‘They are not my people. They are people that I don’t know. Who Meg didn’t want me to know. So, if you’ve got any other tricks like that up your sleeve, you can turn around and take me home right now.’

  ‘You want to go back?’ he asks. ‘We can go back if you want? If that’s what you want?’

  Loggerheads is barely behind us and already we have stopped again.

  ‘I don’t think that question is for me, is it?’ I say.

  He asks me what I mean by that. I look above his head at the monotony of fields behind him and wonder for bodies buried in the soil that I can suddenly smell on my fingers. I tell him that I don’t mean anything other than what I said.

  ‘You’re answering all your own questions,’ I tell him. ‘Going where you want to go, doing what you want to do.’

  He studies his fingernails on his right hand as if he can smell the buried bodies too.

  ‘We had a flat tyre and the spare was flat,’ he says. ‘But now we have all good tyres, and a spare, I’d like to know what you want to do.’

  This is another sales tactic I have never warmed to: putting all the onus on the buyer. The seller can’t make that decision for you, he can only tell you the facts.

  ‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’ I ask. ‘Because you haven’t just taken the caravan for compensation, or for a holiday, or to work out what to do now you’re completely broke. This is about something else, isn’t it? Something about me.’

  He goes to say something, then looks out of the window and thinks better of it. ‘It’s hard,’ he mutters. ‘But no, no—’

  ‘Because there’s a lot of things you don’t know about me,’ I interrupt. ‘There’s a lot of things I don’t know about you.’

  He tells me that he can’t think straight; that he thought, if he just got on the road, things might slot into place.

  ‘But we keep on stopping!’ I yell.

  ‘Well, let’s keep on going.’ And he starts the car before saying once again, ‘If that’s what you want.’

  Men. That’s what I start thinking about as the fields streak past. All the men that were never in my life. Don’t give them a second thought, Meg used t
o say. And never a second chance. In some species, the father comes back to eat his own.

  I’d believe her because it was slim-pickings back then, saddling yourself with a husband from just around the corner and living your mother’s life, and when I start going down this road, I go cavorting across the playing fields to where the gipsies would come and set up camp once a year. I was always three rows back, my lips parted nonetheless, and I’d copy the older girls watching the boys groom their horses; the boys watching the girls watching them, and everyone hot under the collar, until, this one time, a horse cut loose and galloped straight for Edie Cartwright and took her legs right from under her. It confined her to a wheelchair so heavy only men could push her about. I learnt a lot from that. She’d been clever enough for university.

  ‘You’re deep in thought,’ Selwyn says, peering under the visor at a road sign up ahead.

  ‘I was thinking that you never talk about your father,’ I say. ‘You could tell me about him, pass the time.’

  But Selwyn is concentrating on something I’ve not seen.

  ‘I knew it wasn’t far,’ he replies jubilantly, as he flicks up the indicator to go right. ‘And here we are.’

  Though it was once home to a twelfth century Norman castle, only the sixteenth century Tudor mansion house remains, which is now a restaurant, currently catering for a daytrip from the Black Country with enough walking sticks to erect a garden fence. In the late nineteenth century, a neo-Elizabethan house was built on the warmer and less damp side of the valley, and it’s been the home of the Heber-Percy family since the 1960s. The gardens were the dream-child of Brigadier A. G. W. Heber-Percy, who set out to create a union between the older grounds surrounding the earlier mansion and the newer gardens of the house that remains today. He’d constructed dykes, dammed the stream and created a chain of pools, which now animate the gardens.

  I read all this from the little glossy booklet we’ve been given as we paid our full entrance fee, since both of us left any form of pensioner identification in the car and couldn’t be bothered to trudge the mile back. Selwyn nods his head furiously and agrees with everything I’ve just said.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I can see exactly what he did with the channelling right there, because of the downstream confluence.’

  We’ve been in Hodnet Hall Gardens for the best part of two hours. Selwyn has been in his element and found a new lease of life, while I’ve been walking on the side of my sole because of the gash on my shin which is chafing under my jeans. Selwyn takes my hand and says it’s a shame that it’s not June because the geraniums around the ponds must be stunning. He spends a long time analysing the lily pads, as if he’s contemplating crossing to the other side, and wonders for otters, because what he’s just spotted is definitely not manmade.

  I look at the ruck of sticks and stones he’s pointing at and try and see the organisation that he does. I think about how he likes his knife and fork to be an inch away from his table mat and set for the left hand, with a butter knife for bread rolls. How we have conflabs over what’s a breakfast cereal bowl and what’s a pudding dish, and how it needles me when he takes a knife to decapitate his boiled egg as if it were a spirit level.

  ‘Shall we have a spot of lunch?’ he asks, checking his watch. ‘Then I’d like to walk around the gardens again with fresh eyes. I feel like I’m missing things.’

  It seems that we have stopped again.

  The woman who takes our order at the café till recognises Selwyn from the garden centre. She says, ‘I know it was long ago, but I know you,’ and Selwyn looks proud as punch and says, ‘It was a long time ago, but I know you,’ and they grasp at one another’s hands.

  She’s a string bean in black, with casserole-brown eyes, and does he remember what he sold her? There’s not a day goes by that she isn’t thankful for meeting him, and he tells her that he’s glad that she’s still ponding. She tells him that she’s more than just ponding. She’s now part of some project that’s looking to exceed a million ponds, and that they’re always looking for guest speakers and donations. Selwyn looks interested and asks where would he speak, and suddenly the details seem less interesting because that would mean going backwards. So, he apologises, and tells her, ‘We’re off up to Wales,’ and she gives him a sour look and I give him a little smile, because I’m glad that he’s remembered that we’re still meant to be going somewhere. To further his apology, he pays for our lunch, gives her a five-pound tip and adds a twenty-pound donation to the million-pond project.

  ‘Tell me something,’ I begin, as we sit waiting for our sandwiches and quiche to arrive. ‘Are you really flat broke?’

  He adjusts his knife and fork against the table mat and asks me what I’m getting at.

  I find a pen in my handbag and start a long addition on my napkin:

  £47.57 for Swan with Two Necks meal

  £50 for B&B at Swan with Two Necks

  £40 unnecessary express car valet + whatever tip he gave

  £2.75 air freshener

  £45 room rate at the Loggerheads

  £30 meal at the Loggerheads (+ drinks with Barnard)

  £168 for two new tyres

  £16 admission fee to Hodnet Hall and Gardens

  £23.15 for lunch at Hodnet Hall Gardens café

  £25 tip + million-pond project donation

  ‘You’ve spent almost five hundred quid,’ I gasp.

  ‘What’s your point, Ginny?’

  ‘You’ve paid for everything in cash. You’re walking around like it grows on trees.’

  He puts up a thumb. ‘One, I sold a pond filter back at Trentham. Two,’ he says, adding his forefinger, ‘I can’t begin to tell you what I’ve been through to get here. Three—’ middle finger goes up, ‘I’m working this out as I go along and when the opportunities arise. Four—’ wedding-ring finger, still bare, ‘you have no idea for that man’s life and what he’s endured to do what he’s having to do, which is wash cars. He could be a doctor, for all we know. Five—’ he waves his left little finger, ‘I have always wanted to come here and today I didn’t need to just drive past thinking one day I will come.’ He puts both hands in his lap. ‘And I took the petty cash tin.’

  My head is in my hands.

  When I look up, he’s looking around the café as if he’s been asked to quote for a re-plaster. I rap my knuckles on the table to grab his attention. He looks at me stonily, and says, ‘What?’

  ‘I thought we were going somewhere,’ I say. ‘Like a specific destination.’

  ‘We are,’ he agrees. ‘But we can get there when we want.’

  ‘And what about Louis?’ I ask. His name lodges in my throat like a stuck lozenge.

  ‘What about him?’ Then he follows it up quickly with, ‘What do you want me to say, Ginny? He did what he did, and we’ve hardly left the country.’

  ‘Perhaps, if we had, I’d be clearer about what it is we’re doing and not feel such an accomplice.’

  He looks at me like I’ve just pushed him nettles.

  ‘You’re being a coward,’ I say. ‘And Louis is cleverer than you think—’

  But here’s pond woman with our order and she starts up another conversation with Selwyn about the maturing of her pond water, which she is hoping to stock with koi. I take in her shoes, which are little black school pumps and she really does have around size two feet. I look up at her and then back down at her feet and cannot work out the maths.

  ‘Have you dropped something?’ she asks, and she is looking down at the floor too.

  ‘Just my napkin,’ I say, which is still on the table underneath my knife and fork. And then because I’ve been caught out, ‘Do you do wine?’ because that suddenly seems like a really good idea. ‘Anything white? I’m not fussy. Sauvignon? Chardonnay?’

  ‘Only on special occasions,’ she says. ‘It’s a license thing, I’m afraid.’

  I clap my hands. ‘Well, this is a special occasion,’ I smile, and even bare my teeth. ‘Right, Selwyn? Long-
lost customers and us on holiday. Does that count?’

  Selwyn looks at me as if I’ve barked out every word.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman says to Selwyn, and she starts to laugh all shrill and it bugs me. Neither of us know what’s so funny. She says, ‘It’s funny. I was just thinking to myself, I could tell you all about the acidity in a dew pond, but not the difference between a sauvignon or chardonnay for your wife.’

  And the bastard goes, ‘Oh, she’s not my wife.’

  I kick him in the ankle under the table. He winces and glares. I glare back. She sashays her way back to the counter, beaming like a butcher’s stripe.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he snaps at me.

  ‘I fancy a glass of wine,’ I snap back.

  ‘You’re looking her up and down,’ he says.

  ‘Because she has the feet of a child yet the crush of a widow.’

  ‘She was being friendly.’

  ‘She was flirting.’

  He starts on his plate of food with such gusto that he barely chews. I don’t know what’s worse – Selwyn being right there in front of me, or Selwyn not being there at all.

  ‘What?’ he goes. ‘Why are you watching me eat?’ He looks like a fish with a rock stuck in its mouth.

  ‘I used to think you’d clipped my wings,’ I say, out of nowhere. ‘But actually, you’ve clipped one wing, which is worse.’

  He rubs at his mouth with his napkin and does that thing he does where he pinches his nostrils together and sniffs. He says, ‘You want us to tie our shoelaces together so you know where I am all the time?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ I say. ‘To be honest, I don’t know what I’m saying.’ I shake my head in case it puts all my thoughts in order.