The Mistletoe Bride(48)

A version of this story first appeared in two instalments in The Big Issue, December 2009.



ON HARTING HILL



South Harting Village, West Sussex

October 1961





On Harting Hill





On such a night, when Air has loosed

Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,

Old terrors then of god or ghost

Creep from their caves to life again;





from ‘Low Barometer’

ROBERT BRIDGES

Friday, 27th October, 1961. That afternoon, I was late getting away. A burst water main in Tolworth, and down to one lane in Kingston, meant the going was slow and the traffic was heavy. It had been mild, but in the last few days the weather had turned unsettled. There was a light drizzle and the road was slippery and wet. Leaves, fallen, on the pavements.

All the same, I was comfortable enough in my Morris Minor, the heating rattling on full, rime on the inside of the windscreen as I crept forward in a stream of cars leaving London by the old Portsmouth Road. I half listened to the news on the wireless: unrest in the Paris suburbs, the last British troops leaving Kuwait, another stand-off between Soviet and American tanks at Checkpoint Charlie. The traffic inched forward.

A friend from my school days had invited me to stay for the weekend. A few like-minded chaps, Bill said, all of them single or, like me, recently divorced. All very informal, he’d said. Country walks and a pub lunch, a few hands of cards. A round of golf on Sunday morning. I hadn’t seen Bill for years, but the thought of a change of scene was welcome and I’d accepted. Now, what with the traffic, I was in two minds about whether I’d done the right thing.

‘Traffic’s always bad Fridays,’ Bill said. ‘All the weekenders choking up the road.’

‘Adding to their number,’ I’d said, and we’d both laughed in that slightly awkward way of friends who had once known each other well.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Friday it is. I’ll send directions. We’re hard to find the first time.’

‘Can I bring anything?’

‘Just yourself,’ he’d replied. ‘Just yourself.’

I tell you this, and in such detail, so you understand there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was an unexceptional Friday afternoon, nothing to mark it out. I was regretting accepting Bill’s invitation, in the way of those things, but I wasn’t anxious beyond what you’d expect from a man intending to spend the weekend with strangers. I was in good spirits, good health and I’d been sleeping better over the past few weeks.

Once I was out of London, I had a clear run of it and the first hour or so passed uneventfully. Traffic started to thin out. One by one, the commuter husbands hurrying home to their wives. The grey afternoon sky turned pink at dusk, then an inky blue. On road signs, the names of unfamiliar villages, places I’d never heard of and would never visit. As I drove on and on, I thought of all the people I’d never meet, settling down for their supper. A closed up garage on the corner and rows of shops, street after anonymous street of modern new houses on the outskirts of towns.

I made good time. Even so, it already was past nine o’clock by the time I turned off the main road and started to make my way cross country. Bill had promised a scratch meal, since we were all arriving at different times, but I was worried about pitching up after everyone else. I decided I’d stop, if I could, to let him know I was running late.

I didn’t have long to wait. In a village called South Harting, I found a telephone box. The red paint was chipped and, inside, an acrid smell of damp and ash, but the phone itself was working. I dialled the number, waited for the pips and Bill’s voice, pushed the coin into the slot.

‘My wife won’t mind,’ Bill said when I explained I was still a good half hour away. ‘She’ll put something by for you.’

‘If you’re sure.’

‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he called out.

I imagined him cupping the receiver with his hand and his wife smiling and shaking her head. In the background, I could hear the raised voices of men who’ve had one over the eight.

‘She doesn’t mind,’ Bill said again. ‘We’ll see you when we see you.’

I came out of the phone box and lit a cigarette. I lingered a while to shrug the stale smell off my clothes, tempted by the convivial lights in the White Hart, but I knew I should press on. I allowed myself to finish the cigarette though and stretched my legs. Turning my collar to the cold and damp, I wrapped my scarf a little tighter around my neck, then walked up the High Street towards the church of St Mary and St Gabriel, then back on the opposite side of the road. The air was filled with the scent of coal fires and wood, wet earth and ploughed fields. Squares of light from kitchen windows, an untenanted schoolhouse, it seemed a quintessentially English village.