Wilt in Nowhere

Chapter 7

Wilt’s day had begun badly and got steadily worse. All his hopes and expectations of the previous evening had proved terribly wrong. Instead of the homely pub with a log fire, and a good meal and several pints of beer or better still real ale inside him, and a warm bed waiting for him, he found himself trudging along a country lane with dark clouds closing in from the West. In many respects it had been a disastrous day. He had walked the mile and a half to the station with his knapsack on his back only to find that there were no trains to Birmingham because of work on the line. Wilt had had to take a bus. It was a comfortable enough bus–or would have been if it hadn’t been half filled with hyperactive schoolchildren under the charge of a teacher who did his level best to ignore them. The rest of the passengers were Senior, and in Wilt’s opinion Senile, Citizens, out on a day-trip to enjoy themselves, a process that seemed to consist of complaining loudly about the behaviour of the hyperactive kids and insisting on stopping at every service station on the motorway to relieve themselves. In between service stations they sang songs Wilt had seldom heard before and never wanted to hear again. And when finally they reached Birmingham and he bought a ticket for Hereford he had difficulty finding the bus. In the end he did. It was a very old double-decker bus with a faded ‘Hereford’ sign on the front. Wilt thanked God there were no other passengers in it. He’d had enough of small boys with sticky fingers climbing across his lap to look out the window and of old age pensioners singing, or at any rate caterwauling, ‘Ganging along the Scotswood Road to see the Blaydon Races’ and ‘We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’. Wilt climbed wearily into the back and lay down across the seat and fell asleep. When the bus left he woke up and was surprised to find he was still the only passenger. He went back to sleep again. He had only had two sandwiches and a bottle of beer all day and he was hungry. Still, when the bus got to Hereford he’d find a café and have a good meal and look for a bed and breakfast and in the morning set out on his walking tour. The bus didn’t get to Hereford. Instead it stopped outside a shabby bungalow on what was clearly a distinctly B road and the driver got out. Wilt waited ten minutes for him to return and then got out himself and was about to knock on the door when it opened and a large angry man looked out.

‘What do you want?’ he demanded. In the bungalow a Staffordshire bull terrier growled menacingly.

‘Well, as a matter of fact I want to go to Hereford,’ said Wilt, keeping a wary eye on the dog.

‘So what are you doing here? This isn’t bloody Hereford.’

Wilt produced his ticket.

‘I paid my fare for Hereford in Birmingham and that bus’

‘Isn’t going nowhere near Hereford. It’s going to the fucking knacker’s yard if I can’t flog the fucker first.’

‘But it says ‘Hereford’ on the front.’

‘My, oh, my,’ said the man sarcastically. ‘You could have fooled me. You sure it don’t say ‘New York’? Go and take a dekko and don’t come back and tell me. Just bugger off. You come back and I’ll set the dog on you.’

He went back into the bungalow and slammed the door. Wilt retreated and looked at the sign on the bus. It was blank. Wilt stared up and down the road and decided to go to the left. It was then he noticed the scrapyard behind the house. It was full of old rusting cars and lorries. Wilt walked on. There was bound to be a village somewhere down the road and where there was a village there was bound to be a pub. And beer. But after an hour in which he passed nothing more accommodating than another awful bungalow with a ‘For Sale’ sign outside it, he took his knapsack off and sat down on the grass verge opposite and considered his situation. The bungalow with its boarded windows and overgrown garden wasn’t a pleasing prospect. Lugging his knapsack Wilt moved a couple of hundred yards down the lane and sat down again and wished he’d bought some more sandwiches. But the evening sun shone down and the sky to the east was clear so things weren’t all that bad. In fact in many ways this was exactly what he had set out to experience. He had no idea where he was and no wish to know. Right from the start he had intended to erase the map of England he carried in his head. Not that he ever could; he had memorised it since his first geography lessons and over the years that internal map had been enlarged as much by his reading as by the places he’d visited. Hardy was Dorset or Wessex, and Bovington was Egdon Heath in _The Return of the Native_ as well as where Lawrence of Arabia had been killed on his motorcycle; _Bleak House_ was Lincolnshire; Arnold Bennett’s _Five Towns_ were the Potteries in Staffordshire; even Sir Walter Scott had contributed to Wilt’s literary cartography with _Woodstock_ and _Ivanhoe._ Graham Greene too. Wilt’s Brighton had been defined for ever by Pinkie and the woman waiting on the pier. But if he couldn’t erase that map he could at any rate do his best to ignore it by not having a clue where he was, by avoiding large towns and even by disregarding place names that might prevent him from finding the England he was looking for. It was a romantic, nostalgic England. He knew that but he was indulging his romantic streak. He wanted to look at old houses, at rivers and streams, at old trees and ancient woods. The houses could be small, mere cottages or large houses standing in parkland, once great mansions but now in all probability divided up into apartments or turned into nursing homes or schools. None of that mattered to Wilt. He just wanted to wash Oakhurst Avenue, the Tech and the meaninglessness of his own routine out of his system and see England with new eyes, eyes unsullied by the experience of so many years as a teacher.

Feeling more cheerful he got to his feet and set off again; he passed a farm and came to a T-junction where he turned left towards a bridge over a river. Beyond it there was the village he had been looking for. A village with a pub. Wilt hurried on only to discover that the pub was shut for refurbishment and that there were no cafés or B&B guest-houses in the place. There was a shop but that too was shut. Wilt trudged on and finally found what he was looking for, an old woman who told him that, while she didn’t take lodgers in the normal way, he could stay the night in her spare bedroom and just hoped he didn’t snore. And so after a supper of eggs and bacon and the down payment of £15 he went to bed in an old brass bedstead with a lumpy mattress and slept like a log.

At 7 the old woman woke him with a cup of tea and told him where the bathroom was. Wilt drank the tea and studied the tintypes on the wall, one of General Buller in the Boer War with troops crossing the river. The bathroom looked as if it had been around during the Boer War too but he had a shave and a wash and then another apparently inevitable helping of bacon and eggs for breakfast, and thanked the old woman and set off down the road.

‘You’ll have to get to Raughton before you find a hostel,’ the old woman, Mrs Bishop, told him. ‘It’s five miles down thataway.’

Wilt thanked her and went down thataway until he came to a path that led uphill into some woods and turned off along it. He tried to forget the name Raughton, perhaps it was Rorton, and whatever it was he no longer cared. He was in the English countryside, old England, the England he had come to discover for himself. For half a mile he climbed up the hill and came out on to a stunning view. Below him a patchwork of meadows and beyond them a river. He went down and crossed the empty fields and presently was standing looking at a river that flowed, as it must have done for thousands of years, down the valley, in the process creating the flat empty fields he had just crossed. This was what he had come to find. He took off his knapsack and sat on the bank and watched the water drifting by with the occasional ripple that suggested a fish or an undercurrent, some hidden obstacle or pile of rubbish that was sliding past under the surface. Above him the sky was a cloudless blue. Life was marvellous. He was doing what he had come to do. Or so he thought. As ever in Wilt’s life he was moving towards his Nemesis.

It lay in the vengeful mind of a justifiably embittered old woman in Meldrum Slocum. All her working life, ever since she had entered the service of General and Mrs Battleby forty-five years before, Martha Meadows had been the cleaner, the cook, the housekeeper, the every help the General and his wife depended on at Meldrum Manor. She had been devoted to the old couple and the Manor had been the centre of her life but the General and his wife had been killed five years before in an accident with a drunken lorry driver; the estate had been taken over by their nephew Bob Battleby and everything had changed. From being what the old General had called ‘our faithful retainer, Martha’, a title of which she had been exceedingly proud, she had found herself being called that ‘bloody woman’. In spite of it she had stayed on. Bob Battleby was a drunk, and a nasty drunk at that, but she had her husband to think of. He’d been the gardener at the Manor but a bout of pneumonia followed by arthritis had forced him to leave his job. Martha had to work and there was nowhere else in Meldrum she could find employment. Besides, she had hopes that Battleby would drink himself to death before too long. Instead he began an affair with Ruth Rottecombe, the wife of the local MP and Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement. It was largely thanks to her that Martha had been replaced by a Filipino maid who was less disapproving of what they called their little games. Martha Meadows had kept her thoughts to herself but one morning Battleby, after a particularly drunken night, had lost his temper and had thrown her things–the clothes she came in before changing into her working ones–into the muddy yard outside the kitchen; he had called her a fucking old bitch and better off dead at that. Mrs Meadows had walked home seething with rage, and determined on getting her own back. Day after day she had sat at home beside her sick husband–who’d recently had a stroke and couldn’t talk–grimly determined to get her revenge. She had to be very, very careful. The Battlebys were a rich and influential family in the county and she had often thought of appealing to them, but for the most part they were of a different generation to the General’s nephew and seldom came to the Manor. No, she would have to act on her own. Two empty years passed before she thought of her own husband’s nephew, Bert Addle. Bert had always been a bit of a tearaway but she’d always had a soft spot for him, had lent him money when he was in trouble and had never asked for it back. Been like a mother to him, she had. Yes, Bert would help, especially now he’d just lost his job at the shipyard at Barrow-in-Furness. What she had in mind would certainly give him something to do.

‘He called you that?’ Bert said when she told him. ‘Why, I’ll kill the bastard. Calling my auntie a thing like that when you’ve been with the family all those years. By God, I will.’

But Martha shook her head.

‘You’ll do no such thing. I’m not having you go to prison. I’ve got a better idea.’

Bert looked at her questioningly.

‘Like what?’

‘Disgrace him in public, so he can’t show his face round here no more, him and that hussy of his. That’s what I want.’

‘How you going to do that?’ Bert asked. He’d never seen Martha so furious.

‘Him and that Rottecombe bitch get up to some strange things, I can tell you,’ she said darkly.

‘What sort of things?’

‘Sex,’ said Mrs Meadows. ‘Unnatural sex. Like him being tied up and…Well, Bert, I don’t like to say. But what I do say is I’ve seen the things they use. Whips and hoods and handcuffs. He keeps them locked away along of the magazines. Pornography and pictures of little boys and worse. Horrible.’

‘Little boys? He could go to prison for that.’

‘Best place for him.’

‘But how come you’ve seen them if they’re locked away?’

‘Cos he was so drunk one morning he was dead to the world in the old General’s dressing room and the cupboard was open and the key still in the lock. And I know where he keeps his keys, like the spare ones. He don’t know I do but I found them. On a beam over the old tractor in the barn he don’t ever use and can’t cos it’s broken. Shoves them up there where no one would think of looking. I seen him from the kitchen window. Keys of the back and front doors, key of his study and his Range Rover and the key of that cupboard with all that filth in it. Right, now here’s what I want you to do. That is if you’re prepared to, like.’

‘I’d do anything for you, Aunt Martha. You knows that.’

By the time he left Bert knew exactly what he had to do.

‘And don’t you come in your car,’ Martha told him. ‘I don’t want you getting into trouble. You hire one or something. I’ll give you the money.’

Bert shook his head.

‘Don’t need to. I’ve got enough and I know where I can get something to use, never you worry,’ he said and drove off happily, filled with admiration for his auntie. She was a sly one, Auntie Martha was. Thursday, she’d said.

‘Unless I phones you otherwise. And I’ll use a public phone. I’ve heard they can trace calls from homes and suchlike, the police can. Can’t be too careful. I’ll say…’ She looked at the calendar with the kitten on the wall. ‘I’ll say Thursday 7th or 14th or whatever Thursday you’re to do it. And that’s all.’

‘Why Thursday?’ Bert asked.

‘Cos that’s when they play bridge at the Country Club till after midnight and he gets so drunk she can do what she likes with him and she don’t go home till 4 or 5 in the morning. You’ll have time enough to do what I told you.’

Bert drove past the Manor House, checked the lane behind it and then drove north with the map Martha Meadows had given him. He paused for a moment outside the Rottecombes’ house, Leyline Lodge, and decided to come down again and make sure he knew exactly where to go. He’d borrow a friend’s car for that trip too. He’d learnt a lot from Martha and he didn’t want to get her into trouble.