Starve Acre Read online

  His father had once taken as much pleasure in organising his library as in absorbing its contents, and he made it his aim to classify his collection to such an extent of specificity that a person could ask to see something on the most obscure of subjects and he would be able to find it instantly. In this little room, he had arranged the physical world, the whole of history, into something as watertight as a policy document. And yet what took him decades to build, he managed to dismantle in less than a week. Before they finally drove him off to Brackenburn he’d removed every single book from its carefully considered position and either burned it in the back garden or packed it away for safekeeping.

  His growing sense of despair had worsened to the point of paranoia, and he became fixated on the thought that someone was coming to take his library away; someone who would make nefarious use of the knowledge it contained. ‘Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,’ he’d say, assured that the order upon which he’d insisted would be the world’s undoing. With everything categorised so thoroughly, it would be easy for this determined someone to realise their plans. It was for the good of mankind, he said, that everything ought to be either destroyed or hidden. No one had been able to convince him otherwise and by the time the ambulance came, the shelves had been stripped and their contents mixed up in dozens of cardboard boxes.

  It would have been perfectly reasonable for someone who hadn’t known him to assume that Richard’s father had been an academic, but he had never set foot in a university in his life. For thirty years he’d worked in the legal department of an insurance company in Sheffield, ascending from clerk to manager, and it always surprised Richard how much affection folk had for this fussy, private man whose interest lay in things like waterwheels and Tudor shillings rather than people. Whenever he met any of his colleagues, the old guard and juniors alike left an impression of John Willoughby being somewhere between an affable football coach and a fondly remembered NCO. Wilby, they called him.

  Considering that he’d fared rather badly at school, he’d advanced beyond most people’s expectations and put it down to holding more stock in what he could teach himself than what someone else could tell him.

  If he’d had his way, then Richard might have been allowed to learn at home rather than at school. But Richard’s mother, recanting on her socialist faith in comprehensive education, sent him first to Bishop Harcourt’s and then, after his eleven plus, to Newlands, where he boarded until he was eighteen.

  Even in the holidays, Richard rarely ‘came home’ as such. Summers were spent with cousins in Galway. Christmases at his maternal grandparents’ house in Harrogate. Like those places, Starve Acre was somewhere that he visited rather than lived. It belonged exclusively to his parents; it was the stage for their life, not his. Until, that is, his mother died, and he inherited everything.

  Juliette had been to Starve Acre a number of times over the years but never once talked about what it might be like to call it home, even though she knew that one day it would be theirs. That she rarely discussed his parents’ house at all indicated to Richard that she didn’t much care for it. He wasn’t surprised. His mother and father had lived almost entirely separate lives within its walls and given the place an air of unhappiness that even the least sensitive visitor found hard to ignore.

  Yet, when the chance came to move there, Juliette was certain that they should. She had always hated living in Leeds. For her, the traffic and concrete made for an unpleasantness that found its way into some of the people too. There was always vandalism at the bus station, their neighbour a few doors down had been mugged for his pension money in the subway and every day the Post ran stories about violence and cruelty. She saw it herself at work often enough. After the pubs closed, Accident and Emergency was always full. She was convinced that sooner or later the city would touch them in some awful way too.

  ‘Aren’t we just trying to have the best life we can, Richard?’ she said, when he laughed at her unease. ‘Surely we’re more likely to find that in the Dales? It must be better to raise children there. Think of all that land we’d have for a start.’

  She assumed that through his own experience Richard would agree. But he told her, being away at school, he’d had little interest in the acre of muck or the tangled wood as a child. What lay on the other side of the lane from the house was simply background scenery to him. It was only his father who ever went there, walking the dog, digging for old coins.

  ‘There are plenty of houses,’ Richard argued. ‘Why does it have to be Starve Acre?’

  ‘Because it came to us,’ said Juliette. ‘Don’t you think we’re meant to be there?’

  When they drove across a few days after his mother’s cremation to try to gather the necessary bits of paperwork for the solicitor, Richard hoped that the foul weather that morning would show the house and its bleak setting in the most honest way and that the romantic fallacies Juliette still harboured about living there would be quickly dispelled.

  But once they were out of Leeds, the clouds gave way to wide sunlight that inked the shadows of trees on to the fields and turned the becks in the valleys a glassy blue. In Stythwaite, the main street was busy with people garlanding the lampposts and stringing up bunting for the spring fair. Juliette, he knew, was imagining what it would be like to be engaged in such a happy civic bustle, to be one of the committee members setting out the trestle tables or one of the ladies sweeping the pathway through the graveyard.

  Past Cannon’s grocery, they skirted the meadow at the edge of the village, the grass already thick and green. April fell through the windscreen and as they made their way up on to the top road Juliette wound down her window, letting the air rush in with the smell of earth and leaves and the flinty noise of the sparrows in the hedges. At the corner by the pines, they came across a gang of children, the Burnsall girls and two little Drewitts leading a pony down to the village, and Juliette turned to Richard as if to say: see? They could be Willoughbys.

  Another bend, a steeper rise, and then the lane flattened out and Starve Acre came into sight, its three storeys clad in heavy stone, the windows shuttered, the front door a utilitarian black. Happened upon like this, it was an ugly place, Richard always thought. A place to peer at from a moving car and let dwindle in the rear-view mirror thinking about the poor souls who lived there. On the edge of the moor, it was like a lighthouse, conspicuous and solitary. And now that Richard’s mother had gone, it felt as if the very last dregs of life there had dwindled away.

  But for Juliette, the sense of absence made the house seem new, and she stood in the hallway taking in the light and space as though she’d never noticed it before.

  As they walked from room to room trying to locate bank books and insurance policies, gas bills and mortgage statements, Richard could tell that Juliette was tempering her plans with discretion. His mother had only just been laid to rest and she didn’t want to seem mercenary. But it was clear that she was already filling the house with their furniture and their tastes and their children.

  She worked on him gently but persistently in the weeks that followed and such was her certainty about transferring their lives to Starve Acre that Richard couldn’t help visualising what their future might actually look like in that stack of high-ceilinged rooms. He found that if he thought of it in that way, as just a house and not his parents’ former home, then it didn’t seem quite so strange a proposition for them to go and live there.

  He pictured the front room. A winter’s night. A fire. Outside, silence: miles of it. He pictured the kitchen with its Belfast sink and its wooden racks and pulleys, and saw a dozen of their friends gathered around the table laughing and arguing as Juliette carved a joint of meat. Up on the first floor, he saw himself typing in what had been his father’s study, and the three bedrooms opposite waiting to be filled with little Willoughbys. At the top of the house, the room that his parents had used for storage became, in this vision, the place where he and Juliette slept together. Across the landing was the nursery, w
here he found a wooden crib and watched their first child, a son, sleeping under a blanket, his chest rising and falling, his hands clamped into pudgy little fists on either side of his head.

  They moved at the start of August, when Juliette had finally been allowed some leave from the infirmary, and settled in before the demands of the new term became too overwhelming for Richard. Ever the logistician, Juliette suggested that they concentrate on one room at a time, and days were spent systematically removing Richard’s parents’ things and shoving and swearing their own furniture into place. When they got hungry, they’d cook. When they didn’t have the strength to lift anything else or the inclination to unpack another box, they went to bed and enjoyed one another drowsily in the top of their tower before falling asleep. Then, the next morning, Juliette would be awake early stripping off the old wallpaper or fitting a new light bulb or sitting cross-legged in front of the range trying to understand the mysteries of its flues and valves.

  It was infectious to be with someone who was so sure about what they wanted. To Juliette, problems were welcome, because solving them was a means of dispensing with the old and replacing with the new. Any difficulties that arose were just waymarkers on the route to making Starve Acre their own. But she was never so swept up in it all that she became impatient. She was prepared for the fact that the place would only become theirs incrementally.

  Even so, their possessions took up so little space that the house felt larger and colder to Richard than it ever had. Their sofa was lost in the front room. Their plates and bowls all fitted into one cupboard. They hadn’t enough photographs to line the width of a window ledge and even with all their paintings hung, the rooms still sounded cavernous, especially the kitchen, where the clock seemed to mark the passing time twice. It was hard not to think of himself as an intruder here; a feeling that was strongest whenever he went into the study, and it became clear that if he was ever going to consider Starve Acre his home, then he would have to face the mounds of clutter that his father had left.

  He had no appetite to remake the library in its former image, but he felt that there should be some order to it, if only to see clearly what was there. And so, if he ever had a spare hour he would work on ‘Magna Congestus’ (as it became known) and pick up from where he’d left off, opening another box and sorting through the books. It was a tedious process, but it meant that he came across some things that he didn’t know his father had owned, like the woodblock prints of the Stythwaite Oak.

  It was purely by chance that he found them, pressed inside a heavy volume on the Mongol empire. They were small, early seventeenth century, he thought, by the composition. Probably pre-Civil War. Originals, too, from the look of the paper. The work was nothing to rival Holbein or Dürer, but far better than average. Any crudeness in the cutting was due to the poor quality of the material into which the designs had been carved rather than a lack of skill in the craftsman. Without the luxury of sanded boxwood in this part of the world, he’d undoubtably used sections from the dead oak tree itself, and it was possible to see where his burin had slipped and followed the warp of the grain.

  The edges of the prints were either torn or perforated with needle holes, meaning that they had probably come from a larger collection, and Richard suspected that the whole had been reduced to its parts during his father’s demented reshuffling and that there were more sheets loose in the study somewhere.

  The four scenes he had found so far corresponded to the four seasons and were a sort of overture of the tree’s changing shape and communal usage during the year.

  In Springe a young couple courted under the budding branches. In Merrie Maye children danced in a ring around the trunk and then in Autumn they were back, collecting acorns and firewood.

  In the last picture, where the tree was a maze of bare branches, a man climbed up a ladder to the bough labelled Olde Juſtice with a noose in his hand.

  Richard looked out of the window at the white rolling of the dale. He would have given anything to have seen the Stythwaite Oak on a wintry evening like this; the shadow of its great cranium of branches splayed across the snow, a centuries-old behemoth that had – so they said – seen sixteen kings and queens from Plantagenets to Stuarts come and go. If all that were true and if it had lived longer, then it might have become as well known as the Selborne Yew or the Tolpuddle Sycamore, but no record of it survived apart from the woodblock prints and a handful of stories that naturally contradicted one another. The only point of agreement was that the tree had died unexpectedly. In which case it seemed obvious to Richard that it had suffered from some kind of fungal infestation, or had even been struck by lightning. That at least would have given weight to Gordon’s yarn about the tree’s ruin being a punishment for putting one of God’s creations to such brutal purpose.

  ‘You do know they used the tree for hangings, don’t you, Richard?’

  ‘Yes, Gordon.’

  ‘That’s the reason nothing grows there in your field.’

  ‘Yes, Gordon.’

  ‘There’s not an inch of soil that’s still alive.’

  Local lore had it that the divine reprisal had not ended with the tree but had spread out across the common in a poisonous ripple, turning the grass black, seeping down into the earth like oil, suffocating the life out of the place.

  Time had inevitably fattened the myths about Starve Acre, and yet it was undeniably sterile – most noticeably in the summertime, when all along the dale the fields belonging to the Burnsalls and Drewitts and Westburys were verdant and the Willoughbys’ plot was nothing but dry mud.

  In all the digging he’d done, Richard had never once turned up a single worm or spider. Only bones.

  His coat was still on the desk where he’d left it, the arms folded and the hood and hem tucked in. When he opened it up, the hare’s carcass was a jumble, but the book of anatomical diagrams he’d been looking for would help him reassemble the pieces. He found it eventually between a biography of Nicolas Flamel and Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris. It was a battered volume, the stitching loose and the cover nubbed at the corners. But the drawings of the various skeletons had been kept pristine by sheets of tissue paper and between gull, black-headed and harrier, hen he came to hare, common.

  Under the desk lamp, he cleaned the bones with cotton buds and warm water, finding that beneath the dirt they were not the stained, mouldering brown he’d expected of things pulled from the soil but looked bleached, as if by a desert sun.

  He picked out the skull and held it in his palm. Its weight was barely noticeable, like an egg shell or a ball of paper. It was a beautiful object. The brain cavity was intricately terraced and sutured, the mesh of the nasal passages woven out of hair-thin filaments of bone. Both sets of incisors were still intact, white and sharp as splinters of chalk, and the molars were solidly fixed in the jaw. What dominated his attention, though, was the eye sockets. They seemed too wide and too deep, as though this were the skull of a large bird.

  With a pair of tweezers, he began to sort through the individual vertebrae, arranging them inside a cardboard box in order of shape and size. Piece by piece he rebuilt the hare just as it appeared in the book, just as he had found it in the field. Though laid out here in the study it looked so much bigger.

  From the base of the skull, the bones arched and thickened through the lumbar region before narrowing towards the tail which curved like the crack-end of a whip. The shoulder blades were sharp and translucent. The ribs made a strong coop. But it was the hind legs that fascinated him most – the way that speed and spring still seemed ready to burst from the joints. In life, it would have been a magnificent animal. Ewan would have been captivated by it.

  He would often come into the study while Richard was working. He’d steal in, actually, and ten minutes might pass before the boy made his presence known. Then, dressed as a wizard or a fireman or a prince he’d sit quietly on Richard’s knee and leaf through picture books; or he’d ask to feed a sheet of paper into the typewrite
r and jab the keys, fascinated by the noise and magic of the mechanisms. This was Ewan, not what other people said of him. He wasn’t vicious or cruel. There were reasons for what had happened at school with Susan Drewitt. Richard hoped that everyone might see that now and think of Ewan with sympathy given that he had passed away, but judgements about people tended to become fixed in the village for considerable lengths of time.

  Richard had learned from his father long ago that Stythwaite opinion was worthless. Certainly not something that one should expend any energy in opposing. Left alone and unnourished by concern, it would have to feed on itself like an ouroboros and eventually die. Well, it had been easy for his father to say that; he hadn’t sent his son to the village school and could be as indifferent as he liked about what folk thought of him. Besides, he’d retired to the dale to get away from people, to put several miles between himself and his nearest neighbours. It was Richard’s mother who’d done her best to ingratiate herself with those in the village.

  When they lived in Sheffield she’d been chairwoman of a poor relief committee that sought to alleviate the suffering of those bombed out of their homes by the Luftwaffe. It was a role that kept her busy for some time and it was almost ten years after the war ended that she and Richard’s father finally moved to Croftendale. She found no less hardship there either. Though the scale of want was naturally smaller here in the countryside, her proletarian brothers and sisters still felt the bite of deprivation, especially the elderly. Every other day she’d cycle down from Starve Acre to visit lonely widows or gouty, wheezing gentlemen invalided out of some back-breaking rural industry. She’d cook, she’d clean, she’d write their shopping lists and at the weekends she’d drive the Ford Anglia to Cannon’s and collect the groceries she thought they needed most.