Familiar and Haunting Read online

  Old Jim had to get into the car before the others, because he had great difficulty in bending his back and legs. First of all, he sat backward onto the seat, and some of the Heslops went around to the other side and leaned into the car and pulled him, and the remainder of the Heslops stayed at his legs’ end and pushed him from there.

  Old Jim puffed and groaned. “That’s not worth it,” he said. “‘Tisn’t the way to travel, hemmed in”—he knocked his head against the roof of the car—“boxed down! That was different in the old days: carriages, and horses; room to move, fresh air! A wheelchair, now; that’s a kind of carriage.”

  “You may like a wheelchair for some things,” said Steve, “but it can’t go as fast as a car.”

  “I’ve heard you say to young Jim that you wish sometimes he could push your wheelchair faster,” said Mrs. Heslop.

  “You’ll never go anywhere farther than your old club, just in a wheelchair. In Steve’s car we shall get to the seaside and back in a day,” said Maisie.

  Young Jim said nothing, because he never did, and the other two Heslop children were too busy pulling and pushing.

  Old Jim said nothing because he had heard nothing.

  By now old Jim was completely in the back of the car, but cross-corneredly, with his right elbow against the window of the right-hand door, his left elbow against the back window, and his toes turned up against the bottom of the left-hand door. He was in—just.

  Having made sure that the door could be shut on him, the three younger Heslop children opened it again and climbed in on top of their grandfather. They sat where they could. Young Jim sat on old Jim’s stomach, because someone had to sit there, and he was the lightest. Also, he was his grandfather’s favorite.

  So they set off. When they reached the seaside, old Jim was pulled out of the car and put into a deck chair. He was so breathless from the journey and so exhausted from getting in and out of the car that he dropped into sleep at once. He woke up for the picnic and again to be put back into the car. When they got home and they were all thanking Steve and saying what a good driver he was and what a nice car and what a pleasant trip, old Jim said loudly: “Never again!”

  “Granddad!” said Mrs. Heslop reproachfully. “And after such a lovely day!”

  “And Steve’s having taken such trouble!” cried Maisie.

  “Don’t mind me,” said Steve, for he really did not mind.

  “They talk about modern improvements, I believe,” said old Jim. “Some things are improvements; some aren’t. Especially for people too old for them—or too big. I daresay I’m an old-fashioned size for traveling in a modern motorcar. What my grandfather would have done—he that was seven feet tall, broad, too …”

  “It’s not kind to Steve!” Maisie cried. “And I don’t believe your old grandfather was seven feet high, so there!” And she burst into tears.

  “What’s she crying for?” asked old Jim. They all looked at young Jim to explain. He was silent, and Maisie went on crying.

  “What did she say?” asked old Jim. “Nobody tells me anything nowadays; for some reason nobody speaks to me—except young Jim. Come on, Jim; you tell me what she said.”

  Young Jim looked uncertain, but he said: “She says it’s not kind to Steve.” Old Jim looked dumbfounded. “And she says she doesn’t believe your grandfather was seven feet high, so there.”

  Old Jim put his head back, closing his eyes, as though he were too tired to speak. At last he said: “So that’s what’s behind it. They’ve never believed me. Everything’s modern nowadays, and everybody’s young and small, and they all believe that’s the right thing, and the only thing, and that it was never any different. They don’t believe in those old days.”

  “Oh, Granddad!” said Maisie, and began crying in a different way. “I didn’t mean that. Young Jim, tell him I didn’t really mean that.”

  “Granddad!” said young Jim, and took the old man’s hand and shook it gently until he opened his eyes. “Granddad, she says she didn’t mean it.”

  “They don’t mean me to know what they think,” said old Jim, “but they think it all the same.”

  There was nothing more to be said. Maisie went on crying for some time, but on her mother’s advice, she did not speak of the subject again.

  The next time that Steve brought the car around to take the Heslops on a jaunt—to Whipsnade Zoo this time, to see the animals—old Mr. Heslop said he would stay at home. Maisie made him egg sandwiches for his tea and kissed him good-bye remorsefully. Silent Jim stayed with him, although he, too, loved to see strange animals.

  The summer advanced. Every Friday young Jim pushed his grandfather’s wheelchair through the village to the Over Sixties’ Club. Then the organizers decided to close the club for the month of August because most people went on their holidays then. The Heslops could not really afford a holiday, but Steve from the garage took Maisie and the two middle children off to a seaside camp for a fortnight. Mrs. Heslop did not go; she said it would be holiday enough to be left in the house with three less children than usual. Old Jim did not go, because he said he didn’t want to, and young Jim would not go, even at his mother’s urging. He would not say why, but his grandfather looked at him sadly. “You’d have enjoyed the sea.” Young Jim neither assented nor contradicted. “You shouldn’t have stayed for me,” said old Jim.

  Young Jim thought that old Jim might be lonely, and old Jim worried that young Jim might be bored. Every day of that hot season the neighbors saw them out in the front garden of the Heslops’ house in what shade there was: Silent Jim busy with some job of his own making and Still Jim talking to him. Since the time of his unhappy return from the day by the sea, the old man had not referred again to “those days.” Now, however, alone with young Jim, he felt free to go back into his memory for stories to interest and amaze. He would always end by saying: “And that was true, for all there’s nothing left to prove it and people disbelieve.”

  One late afternoon he had been talking in this strain for some time. They had finished their tea, and young Jim had got the wheelchair out and was cleaning the wickerwork with an old toothbrush. Mrs. Heslop came out to fetch their tea things and said: “It’s a pity there’s nowhere to take your granddad in the wheelchair, till the club opens again next month.” She went in again to do the bit of washing up.

  Old Jim had stopped talking, and he did not start again now. Young Jim looked up at him in surprise. His grandfather beckoned to him to come close. “If I speak like this,” he said, “can anyone hear but you?”

  Young Jim looked around carefully. There were no neighbors in the gardens, and his mother was in the kitchen with the taps running. He shook his head.

  His grandfather put his hand up and pulled young Jim’s head into such a position that the boy’s ear was only a few inches away from his mouth when he spoke. “What would you say to a jaunt—a real pleasure jaunt?”

  Silent Jim turned his face so that his grandfather could see his eyebrows going up.

  Old Jim nodded. “Mind you, it’s a long push with the wheelchair.”

  Silent Jim simply left his eyebrows up.

  “It came to me just now, in a flash,” said old Jim. “The whole plan. We’ll go over to Little Barley, where I was born, where I was christened at the font in the church there, with my father and grandfather standing by, my grandfather that’s buried in the same churchyard, he that was seven foot tall. I’ll show it to you—all of it.”

  Young Jim said: “When?”

  “The sooner the safer, before the weather thinks to break. Tomorrow, and very early in the morning, before the traffic’s on the main road, at least for our first crossing of it, and before others are about. Before your mother wakes.”

  Silent Jim nodded emphatically.

  “Sunrise is before five now,” said old Jim. “I’ve often seen it, for at my age I sleep lightly and never late.”

  It was easy for old Jim to wake early, but a different matter for young Jim, and it would be
impossible for his grandfather to call to him without waking Mrs. Heslop, too, or to get upstairs in order to wake him quietly.

  Young Jim’s bedroom upstairs, like old Jim’s room on the ground floor, was at the front of the house. This gave young Jim his idea. That evening he made a very long length of string out of several shorter pieces knotted together. The string stretched from his bedroom, out through the window, down and in again at the window of his grandfather’s room. The lower end was left within easy reach of old Jim’s hand; the upper end was tied around young Jim’s big toe. The device was put into working position after Mrs. Heslop had gone to bed, and the next morning—before morning seemed even to have come—it worked perfectly.

  That summer dawn surprised young Jim by its stillness and gray-ness; he had expected at least reds and yellows in the sky, like a festival. He was surprised, too, at the chill in the air, even indoors, at this time of heat wave. He dressed his grandfather in his warmest clothes and gave him an extra rug for the wheelchair. They had not planned to have any breakfast at all, but now young Jim, who was a sensible boy, saw they would need something later to warm them. The most that he dared do was to boil a kettle and make a thermos of tea. He also put a handful of biscuits into a paper bag. “And,” said old Jim, in his lowest voice, “we’ll take your mother’s tape measure.” He would not say why.

  With old Jim in the wheelchair, and the thermos and biscuits and the tape measure on his knees, they left the house. In all the houses they passed, the curtains were still drawn; none of the neighbors was up. Young Jim pushed the chair along with his heart in his mouth, for the squeak of the wheels sounded very loud in the morning silence. Perhaps, if anyone heard at all, the hearer thought it was only the early, monotonous call of some strange bird.

  They left the housing estate and came out onto the main road. There was no traffic at all to be seen, until an all-night truck rumbled by. Then nothing again.

  They crossed the main road unhurriedly and without the slightest danger and struck off down the road to Little Barley. Now that they were leaving the houses of Great Barley behind them, old Jim dared talk aloud, and young Jim, feeling that they were really on their way, relaxed his pace and looked around him as he went.

  This was a country road, going always deeper into the country. There were wide verges where the grasses grew tall, yellowing and drying with the heats of August. There were few flowers left in bloom, but the plants in the ditches were fresh and green where they could still suck up refreshment and life from ditch water or ditch mud.

  Dew lay on grasses and plants and hedges, a short-lived coolness before the sun should come again in its full strength. Already young Jim began to feel its warmth on his back, and wheelchair and wheelchair pusher together began to make a strange long shadow on the road ahead.

  They came to a bridge over a river and crossed it. They skirted a high wall; old Jim made young Jim stop to look at a fading black mark on it. When he was a young man, old Jim said, that mark had been repainted yearly; it was the boundary sign between the parishes of Great and Little Barley. When he was a boy, the champion fighter of the two villages stood with a foot on either side of the mark and shouted:

  Barley Little and Barley Great,

  Here I stand and won’t be beat.

  They went on and crossed a railway track, where you opened the gate for yourself and had to look both ways for safety.

  They reached the outskirts of Little Barley village—a cluster of cottages and a farmhouse, and the church beyond. They still saw no sign of anyone astir and heard no sound of life, except a clank of metal from a farm building—perhaps a bucket in a cowshed where the early milking was starting.

  They came to the little gray church. Young Jim pushed the wheelchair up the path between the tombstones to the church door. The door might so easily have been locked, but it was not. Young Jim could have wheeled the chair right inside, but old Jim thought that it might not be respectful. He got out of the chair instead, and leaning on young Jim’s shoulder, he hobbled inside.

  Little Barley was such a small village that no rector or vicar lived in it, and services were held in the church only occasionally. You could feel that on entering. There was a silence that was surprised to be disturbed. Church spiders had spun threads across and across the aisles, from pew head to pew head. Young Jim felt them breaking across his body as he and his grandfather paced along.

  Now they were facing the east end of the church and the altar. Behind and above it was a great window of pale greenish glass, through which streamed the light of the risen sun.

  Old Jim blinked into the light, and his eyes filled with tears, and he sat down rather suddenly in the pew beside him and prayed.

  When he had finished, he said to young Jim: “I was married to your grandmother at that altar. She died long before you were born.” Then he took young Jim to the west end of the church, to the gray stone font. “I was christened here; my mother and father stood here for my christening. They’re dead and gone, too.”

  “And your grandfather stood with them,” said young Jim. “He that was seven foot high.”

  “Aye, and he’s gone, too.” But this reminded old Jim of something. “I’ll show you outside,” he said. “Toward the east end of the church, it would be—his grave.”

  They went outside again, and as old Jim was tired, he got back into the chair, and young Jim wheeled him along the narrow path that went round the outside of the church. Toward the east end of the churchyard, old Jim said, “Stop!” He looked around him. “You’ll find it about here. James Heslop, his name was—like my name, like yours.”

  Young Jim began to look. The graves in this part of the churchyard were very old, overgrown, and weatherworn. The inscriptions were hard to read.

  Old Jim saw his grandson’s difficulty. “Look for a big tombstone—the biggest. Seven foot tall he was, and his tombstone was to match.”

  “This is the longest tombstone,” said young Jim at last. He scraped away the ivy tendrils from the head of it. “There’s an O here—no, it’s a cherub’s face. But there’s writing below. I can’t read the first letters, but here’s an S, and an L, and this really is an O. …”

  “‘Tis Heslop,” said old Jim. “It’s his. Wheel me close, boy.”

  Young Jim brought the chair alongside the tombstone. Old Jim leaned forward with the tape measure he had brought. He placed one end at the head of the tombstone and, with difficulty, stretched the length of it out. It was only a five-foot tape measure, and it did not reach. Young Jim had to measure the remainder separately.

  “Five feet,” he said, “and another two feet nine inches.”

  “Nearly eight foot,” said old Jim, and lay back in his chair and closed his eyes. “You must tell your sister that; you must tell them all that. Nearly eight feet his tombstone had to be, because in his life he was seven foot tall. There’s his tombstone to prove it. Seven foot tall—they were giants in those days.”

  Then he opened his eyes again and said briskly: “What about the tea?”

  Young Jim set the thermos and the biscuits out on the tombstone, as his grandfather told him. “He would never have minded,” said old Jim, “any more than I should mind if you did it to me, when I’m gone. No, I should take it kindly.”

  They took turns at drinking out of the cup top of the thermos and ate biscuits. The time was still not yet half past six, but there was no doubt that the day was going to be another scorcher. The sun warmed them as they breakfasted, and old Jim spread his handkerchief over the top of his head for protection. Bees came out and began work among the tall weeds of the churchyard. A robin suddenly appeared at the far end of the tombstone, and young Jim threw him some crumbs.

  Unexpectedly a car passed; they just saw its roof over the top of the churchyard wall and then—for a second—the whole of it as it passed the gap that was the churchyard gate. Then they heard brakes go on; the car seemed to stop abruptly, and then it backed until it was by the gate again, and the
n it stopped again. After a moment two policemen got out and stared at them.

  “Who’s got a better right than we have?” said old Jim indignantly. “It’s my grandfather’s tombstone.”

  The policemen opened the churchyard gate and began walking up the path.

  Old Jim and young Jim watched them.

  The policemen left the main path and, in single file, came along the narrow path by the church directly toward the Heslops.

  When he was still some way away, the policeman in front called out, in an arresting voice: “James Heslop!” That he knew their name seemed ominous.

  He did not go on at once; it was as if words failed him, but the second policeman burst out: “Whatever are you doing here, James Heslop, with your daughter-in-law and your mother off her head looking for you?”

  The policemen now began to talk both at once.

  “Running around the village looking for you,” said the first policeman.

  “In her dressing gown,” said the second policeman.

  “Came to us in despair,” said the first policeman.

  “In her bedroom slippers,” said the second policeman.

  “And here we’ve been looking for you ever since,” said the first policeman. “Now what were you two up to?”

  Both policemen waited for an answer to this. Neither old Jim nor young Jim said anything, so the second policeman said, “Eh?”

  Old Jim smiled and shook his head, and young Jim cast his eyes down, putting himself out of the conversation altogether.

  The second policeman said suddenly: “The old un’s deaf—you remember she said so—and she said the child couldn’t be got to talk much.”

  “Deaf?” said the first policeman. He drew a deep breath into his great chest, so that the blue bulk of it advanced until the silver buttons, moving from sunlight to sunlight, twinkled. With his breath very slowly going out, in a voice that might have wakened seven-foot James Heslop under his tombstone, the policeman shouted: “We’ve come to take you home in the car, Mr. Heslop.” He added, with less voice because he had less voice left: “The child can push the wheelchair back, empty.” The policeman, when he had finished, looked tired and hollow-chested; old Jim smiled and shook his head.