RUNNING DOWN THE BEACON
by
Martin Woodhouse
Afternoon, and warm. Though with a rising wind. Jim Whalley, red in the face but as yet far from out of breath, making his way upwards, occasionally talking to nobody or to somebody.
“Hang on a bit, Wal. Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, we’re none of us as young as we were and that includes you and me.”
His black boots kicked puffs of dust from the rutted marl of the track that curls steeply up, between banks and hawthorn bushes and fox-holes, from the alley by the Post Office to the top of Hale’s Beacon. He was eighty-five. He didn’t know, at the moment, not really, why he was climbing.
Such things irritated but no longer dismayed him.
“I’m no Windy Lill,” he said. “That I can tell you. Lay your life on it, Wal, my old son.”
The business of Wal and Wally. Well, it was silly, especially if you came from outside. In a village like Halefoot, though, easily explained. All the Whalley men and boys were called Wally, Christian names regardless. But then Jim Whalley and Walter Simes became what you’d call inseparable from about six up. The joke, and the nuisance, of ‘Where’s Wally? Out with Wally,’ didn’t last long, and Walter Simes got renamed Wal out of convenience. In any case they’d grow out of it, everyone said.
Except of course they didn’t.
“Your old man wouldn’t care for things much if he were still around,” Jim Whalley said now. “Hardly a rabbit left. Eh? Not much point in setting a wire these days.”
Pollen and bumble bees drifted in shafts of sunlight. He fished for his watch in his waistcoat pocket and discovered that he’d left it at home.
Not that it mattered.
What mattered, what always bothered him, was that he couldn’t remember Jess. Not her face. Not when she was young, nor in her middle age. Her photograph was on the right-hand end of the mantelpiece in the living room. A quietly pretty young woman with dark hair and come-to-bed eyes. You couldn’t tell from the portrait how tall she was; small, he thought. But it distressed him, it enraged him beyond telling, that the picture he looked at might just as well have been of his aunt Clarissa (also pretty, also dark, with her name on the back of the frame) at the other end of the shelf, except for the style of the clothes. Walter Simes in the middle, well, anyone would recognise Wal any day of the week in his Tank Regiment rig or out of it.
But you cannot, he often said, lying on his back in bed, you can’t, not possibly, love a woman, be married to her, live with her until she died, and then not be able to remember her. They’d had some high old times. He knew that. He knew it because he said it to her, every day, looking at the picture he no longer recognised but could still put a name to. Saying it as though it were a charm. “We had some high old times, Jess.” In case it should suddenly be, not that he had forgotten her but forgotten about her too, as though she might never have existed, which was something he could hardly bear to think about.
But he couldn't remember the high old times either. Which, in their shared bed, made him smile, if wryly. Which was worse, he wondered? Not to be able to remember her, or not to be able to remember the high old times?
What he did remember, and quite clearly, was telling himself around the age of fifty that he'd never start looking back, never, because when you started doing that, talking about the old days all the time, you were as good as dead. That was a laugh or two, that was. He'd come right through that, hadn't he? And of course done it. And now gone beyond it.
It was, all of it, unreasonable, he thought as he climbed the last steep turn of the track before it opened into the chalk summit of the Beacon. It was unreasonable to be an old man with a daughter who was an old woman too. When even your children were old, what did that make you?
* * *
Down in Halefoot village, Myrtle Prescott stumping squarely along the High Street, perspiring in the idle, hot, late, downland valley afternoon. At sixty-three she was known to be ill-tempered, or possibly as feigning continual ill temper, nobody could be certain which. She had always been heavily plain and had married Dicko Prescott the butcher. Now dead without issue, as they say, and the butcher's shop long closed.
Inside the tiny front office of the police station it was cooler but not by much. Constable Perry was in shirt-sleeves. Of which, as of many other things these days, she disapproved. He had damp patches.
"What is it, then, Myrtle?" Constable John Perry asked her.
"It's my Dad. The old bugger's climbing the Beacon. I don't know what he's at. He's never been up Hale in thirty years. I can't imagine."
"Well, I can't arrest him for it, can I? Not for climbing a hill."
"He's wandering," Myrtle Prescott said, "they've got a long name for it now but it's just he's turned soft in the head. You know he talks to Wal? Wal Simes? Buried fifteen years and my dad talks to him as if he's sitting in the other chair. Daft as a brush, that's what."
"I dare say. What do you want me to do now, though, Myrtle? He won't come to any harm up on Hale, will he now? Not up on the Beacon in summer. It's not even as though he's got a bad heart, he must walk a two-mile every day. On the flat I grant you," added Constable Perry as an afterthought.
"He's just an old bugger," Myrtle Prescott said. "A damned old bugger, I couldn't tell you."
"All of us'll be old buggers some day. It's not an offence, not of itself."
"And I'm due for my pension too, is what you mean to imply," Myrtle said, "not that I need any sauce from you, John Perry, I can remember you in short trousers and picking your nose."
Constable Perry gave a gentle policeman's sigh.
"Well I don't go climbing hills and causing worry," Myrtle went on. "I hope I've too much sense."
"That you have, Myrtle," Constable Perry said. "I'll get my glasses and keep an eye on him, if I can spot him from here. I'll go that far, and Mrs. Perry will give you a cup of tea."
He fetched a pair of binoculars. From across the street outside the front office window, Hale's Beacon rose like a green whale. At his shoulder, Myrtle Prescott pressed her huge square frontage against his shirt, peering.
"He's out of the lane now." Constable Perry focussed, swung, steadied. "Almost at the top, he is. Sitting down. I'll keep an eye. Or you could always go up and fetch him, come to that."
"At my age," Myrtle said.
"What about his age, then?"
"That's what I mean," Myrtle said. "Stupid old bugger."
* * *
Jim Whalley, sitting on turf as springy as a mattress, sunning himself like an ancient turtle, not quite at the top of Hale's Beacon where the old bench is. Looking out across half Wiltshire. Half the cloudless world. Drunk with height, and air, and summer haze, and past images, though not yet the ones he sought. How long since he'd begun to want tot die? He didn't know. Years. But his health was rude, they'd lived to a hundred in his family.
"No chance, then," he said. "The more's the pity."
Although, on an afternoon like this one, no such wish could be strong.
Ten years ago he'd broken his hip in a fall, just like any other silly old fool. In the hospital they'd talked down at him, nicely of course. Kindly, as though to an infant. He'd got so angry he told them to f--- off. He couldn't exactly recall who he'd said it to, it was all of them. It was also the first time he'd ever used the word. Of course in the war you heard it all the time, and nowadays everybody used it. And worse. His daughter. Everybody. His own parents would have called it 'effing and blinding', though, and he never said it. Until the hospital. Until when, as soon as he'd uttered it, he knew it was the last bit of fight he'd ever have left in him and that was why he'd said it, and that was when he started to want to die as well.
And she'd only said: Come on. Nicely, kindly. But. "Come on now, Mister Whalley," she'd said, "come on."
So it must have been the young lady he'd said the word to and he would have been ashamed of that then and was ashamed of it now. Just a sort of trigger was all it had been.
"I'm sorry," he said. As if. Where would she be now? And then, more formally because it appeared to be required though he didn't know why, "I apologise."
"Physio Therapist," he'd said to Wal, telling him later. He recalled now. Up here he seemed to be remembering more and more. "Bloody young madam," he'd added, though not meaning it. That must have been around the time he'd started talking to Wal, then, even though he knew perfectly well that Wal wasn't there. So that it was almost as if he'd meant, on purpose and mostly out of boredom, maybe, to turn himself into a daft old man, to look like a daft old man, act like a daft old man, but fooling everybody because he wasn't one, just pretending to be. Though maybe, all said and done, it amounted to the same thing whether you were pretending or not.
* * *
Tea drunk (and she'd needed to go to the loo as well) Myrtle Prescott urged Constable Perry to the window again.
"He's stood up," Perry said after a bit.
"Well. Thank goodness for that."
"Yes, only it doesn't look like he's coming down, Myrtle. He's going right up to the top now. Not the end by the bench. The far end. Maybe I shouldn't say, but you don't think he'd be better off at Salisbury? You know what I mean, the place they've got there?"
"No." said Myrtle. Not that she hadn't considered it.
"All right then. You know what you're at."
"Yes because silly old bugger or not he's my Da," Myrtle said at a run and surprising herself.
* * *
The thing about running down Hale's Beacon, Jim Whalley pulled out of his improving memory, was that you couldn't do it. You could slide down it in winter, in the snow, everybody did. But it was too steep to run down, all that happened was you got out of control and went faster and faster and fell over. Wal Simes had got closest, though. He got about two-thirds down and it was full of rabbit holes then, all the harder. Wal was a one. No doubt about it. That would have been in autumn. The point was, though, they'd agreed they'd both do it. Both together. But Wal had taken off like a plane, waving his arms, and he, Jim, pulled back at the last moment and Wal had called him Windy Lil. Mind you Wal, going like an express train when when he tripped up, thought he'd broken a collar bone, they both did, even though as it turned out he hadn't. He went on saying Windy Lil for a few days, but when Ralph Sturton said it too, Wal punched him out or nearly.
"You call him it," Ralph said resentfully, handkerchief to nose.
"That's for me and Wally. You got that?" Wal told him. "It's a private joke. You got that too?"
And he stopped calling me Windy Lil as well, Jim Whalley thought, and anyway the next thing we did, both together this time and no nonsense, was he Rushmore Quarry Jump, thirty foot straight down from the top edge and nobody knew how deep the water was. All you heard was stories about who'd done it until they actually did do it. Together. So.
Just the same it was funny. When the war came, Wal joined the Tank Regiment while he'd spent the whole time in Stores. In Alexandria as it happened. They'd gone up rank for rank but Wal was driving tanks all over Italy and France, and all he had done in Alex was sign in, sign out, sign in, sign out, and file the chitties. They wrote to each other a couple of times and once they'd been on home leave together.
"Somebody's got to be Stores," he'd said to Wal. "Otherwise you Death Or Glory boys would be stuck there in your tin cans, full of holes and no spares, no petrol, no RT, no char and nothing to shoot with."
"Too right," agreed Wal. "Leave out the rest, but no char, that'd be a bleeding tragedy."
All the same.
* * *
"He's just walking about," Constable John Perry told Myrtle Prescott.
* * *
Before the war, of course, both of them had been farm lads. Wal had turned an eye in Jess's direction, naturally (and along with every other man in Helfoot) though being a good friend not for long. He'd stood down, as he put it. Her parents, just as naturally, had been pleased she'd married Jim, since anybody with half an eye could see that Walter Simes would, to say the least, be unreliable. After they'd married and Myrtle arrived, things might have changed between him and Wal, but they didn't.
He could see he was putting it together, now. Like a jigsaw only with the pieces face down, and you were allowed to turn some of them over here and there and then you could look at them and fit them to make the picture you were looking for. None of the pieces looked like Jess, not yet. He was exasperated by this but, underneath, untroubled. He'd find them, all the pieces, he was getting surer and surer. Sometimes he could remember things she'd said. But not her voice saying them. Wal came in for supper pretty often, for instance, and once she'd said (he knew but couldn't hear her saying it): All these women of his, and none of them feed him. What else they do for him we don't know, do we? That was exactly the kind of thing she used to say. If he could just hear her in his mind, properly, he thought, he would be able to see her, too.
Another time.
What you are, he told himself, is a randy old bastard. Did that sound like her? No, she wouldn't have said that. It wasn't the kind of thing she'd say, she wasn't a one for language, though on the other hand. But no, that was him, here, now, what he thought up here on the Beacon on the turn of afternoon and evening, randy old bastard or not, walking on the warm grass in the rising wind, looking at the mares' tails in the summer downland sky.
Anyway, another time. She had said. No. He had said. She'd said something, it didn't matter what, and he'd said, Jess, that's you all over. And it wasn't after dark either. It was in the daytime, and she pulled her her dress off all at once over her head and with hardly anything underneath it and said, No, this is me all over, but he still couldn't hear her saying it, couldn't see her doing it, and he couldn't remember what happened next though, of course, he would put a shilling on what it must have been.
After the war he'd worked his way up, in the end, to farm manager at Cobbs. Wal, though. How had Wal come through the whole war, in bloody tanks for goodness' sake, without a scratch? Plenty of campaign medals, but not a scratch on him. Wal's luck. The only harm he'd taken was, as he put it and no surprise, a dose of the clap. In France. You could bet Wal wouldn't come back to the farm, and, sure enough, he went into the scrap trade over by Ringwood. But always came back to Helfoot every Saturday. Usually in a different car each time it seemed. Wal called them motors, but he wasn't flash, no camel-hair coats or anything, everybody knew him in the Quarter Moon and it was almost as though he'd never left. He had a wife but he never brought her. She belonged to his life over by Ringwood, along with the big house and garden nobody had seen either.
"What do they call you in Ringwood, then?" Jim asked him once.
"Mr Simes, mostly.."
"Mister Simes? Well there you are, then."
"I know," Wal had said, "I know, but there's the odd few ton of metal lying round Ringwood and sod-all lying round here."
* * *
"He always keeps that place of his clean, I'll give him that," Myrtle Prescott said, finding it necessary to defend herself against any unspoken charge that she might have gone soft. "Not tidy, you can't expect that, but clean. I only have to give him his supper and leave the kettle where he can find it when he gets up."
"You're a good old girl, Myrtle," said John Perry.
"Except of course he puts cocoa in the teapot. He did once, anyway. I put a label on the caddy after that. I sometimes wonder if I'll find him polishing the furniture with margarine one day."
"It'll come to all of us, I dare say."
"Oh yes? And how old are you, then? Eh? Constable Perry?"
"Old enough to be responsible for what goes on in this community, as you'll find in the church register," John Perry said, "which is why I'm taking a squint with these glasses at your old dad every now and again."
"It's a good thing we haven't had any crime waves, I dare say," said Myrtle. "Not even any poaching to speak of, not since Wal Simes' dad passed on, which you aren't old enough to remember by a good few years. I don't know what you find to keep you occupied, I honestly don't."
Constable Perry picked up the glasses from the office counter again and went outside onto the concrete apron in front of the station in silence. The sun was going down.
"What's he doing now?" Myrtle demanded, following him.
"Still walking about," John Perry said. "He's over by the bench now, nothing to bother about. He'll be down in a bit, he can't stay up there for ever, can he?"
* * *
Seeing her there on the old bench, with its rusty wrought iron arms and polished slats from which the paint had long gone, Jim Whalley felt no surprise. Just seeing her there, young as she was, tiny as she was, pretty as peacocks as she was, wide-mouthed, wide-eyed, sitting on the bench with a folded blanket beside her, in a white dress with orange and yellow daisies. And buttons all the way down the front, he noticed, which was Jess all right. But none of them undone, as he also noticed, which was Jess too. Available (her word for it) but not so as to tire a man out, unlike some girls, so he'd heard, most likely from Wal. But only heard. He didn't know, he'd never done anything like that, not even in Alex where there must have been a fair bit of it going on.
Seeing her now, he knew why. Why he never had, except with her. There would have been no point to it. As for the blanket, all that was coming back too. They'd gone up the Beacon to be together in summer like this, on an evening like this and a month before they were due to be married. Being together, well, they both knew what they meant by that, promises-to-wait or not. Jess had said, I'm not lying on any old grass though, I'll catch my death. Excited, nervous, eager to oblige, he had fetched the blanket out of the attic. Whereupon Jess told him he wasn't going to carry that either, not up the Beacon, everyone would know what was intended, she said, making him laugh and then laughing herself, so he'd had to wrap it round his chest under his shirt, under his jacket, you look like an elephant, she'd told him.
Now she said: Come and sit down, Jim my dear.
"No," he said. "I know what's intended."
And she broke into that laughter of hers. Oh, do you? she asked.
"But not yet awhile, Jess," he said to her. "I'm not quite ready yet."
She went on laughing. That'll be the first time then, surely, she said to him, we've never known that happen, Jim, have we?
"Jess, you always had a naughty mind along with you." he told her, not knowing whether he felt like laughing too. Or, seeing her now in daisies and buttons, like doing something else entirely. Before he'd suggested the blanket, all that time ago an no time at all (as he was beginning to realise more and more clearly) her first idea, joking perhaps, had been for him to lie on the grass and she on top of him, and he'd said he didn't think you could manage anything that way.
Though later, mind you, they had found out differently. One way and another, as she'd said.
He couldn't stop looking at her.
"Wait for me a little," he asked her. "Jess?"
And she answered, as he was certain she would without having to hear her say it: Yes.
He turned away from her for the moment, away from the bench and into the warm hard wind blowing up the slope of the hill, making his mind up, just as if he hadn't made it up days ago, and when he looked quickly back, it seeming inevitable that he should do so, the blanket was gone and so was she. But waiting close by, he had no doubt, as she'd said she was going to.
* * *
"Standing close by that old bench, he is," John Perry told Myrtle. "And talking at it. I don't know."
"Talking to Wal, I expect he thinks," Myrtle said, "and I've his supper to get. Suppose he doesn't come down by dark?"
"Then I'll go up there myself and fetch him, Myrtle. Never you worry. You go along, and we'll give him another half-hour."
* * *
When he was ready, he had a sudden thought. It was just curiosity, so he didn't need to turn round to ask her. "Is Wal there, Jess? With you?"
He couldn't tell how far away she was from her voice, teasing now as she often did. That's for me to know and you to find out, she said.
"Oh, is it, then?" he shouted, laughing out loud now and throwing out his arms to the wind, like an aeroplane, like a young fool again instead of an old one. "All right! Just you watch me, Wal! I'm no Windy Lil! Just you watch!"
- and one step, another, down, down, and he began to run,
- "Oh bloody hell, " said Constable Perry,
- and Jim Whalley running, and then stumbling, and sliding, and then tripping and tumbling, falling head over heels and sideways, all ways, bones cracking like chalk, like the old brittle chalk of Wiltshire, rolling, bouncing, and in the end of course flying (what else?) down Hale's Beacon and away to wherever Jess (and Wal too, he knew) would be expecting him to arrive.
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(c) Martin Woodhouse