Disputed Land Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Pears

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part III

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part IV

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part V

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Leonard and Rosemary Cannon summon their middle-aged offspring, along with partners and children, to the family home in the Welsh Marches for the Christmas holiday. As the gathered family settle in to their first Christmas together for some years, the grown siblings – Rodney, Johnny and Gwen – are surprised when they are invited to each put stickers on the furniture and items they wish to inherit from their parents.

  Disputed Land is narrated by Leonard and Rosemary’s thirteen-year-old grandson, Theo, who observes how from these innocent beginnings age-old fissures open up in the relationships of those around him. Looking back at this Christmas gathering from his own middle-age – a narrator at once nostalgic and naïve – Theo Cannon remembers his imperious grandmother Rosemary, alpha-male uncle Johnny, abominable twin cousins Xan and Baz; he recalls his love for his grandfather Leonard and the burgeoning feelings for his cousin Holly. And he asks himself the question: if a single family cannot solve the problem of what it bequeaths to future generations, then what chance does a whole society have of leaving the world intact?

  About the Author

  Born in 1956, Tim Pears grew up in Devon, left school at sixteen and had countless menial jobs before studying at the National Film and Television School. He is the author of six previous novels, including In the Place of Fallen Leaves, which won the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award, In a Land of Plenty, which was made into a ten part drama series for the BBC, and, most recently, Landed. He has been Writer in Residence at Cheltenham Festival of Literature, and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and has taught creative writing at Ruskin College and elsewhere. He lives in Oxford with his wife and children.

  Also by Tim Pears

  In the Place of Fallen Leaves

  In a Land of Plenty

  A Revolution of the Sun

  Wake Up

  Blenheim Orchard

  Landed

  Tim Pears

  DISPUTED

  LAND

  For Hania

  On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble

  His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;

  The gale, it plies the saplings double,

  And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

  * * * * *

  The gale, it plies the saplings double,

  It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:

  Today the Roman and his trouble

  Are ashes under Uricon.

  from A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman

  PROLOGUE

  My son wondered why I had wanted to write down the following story. ‘For posterity?’ he asked. ‘For the future? There is no future. There’s only now.’

  He knows the story, an episode from my childhood. He’s heard the basic facts before.

  ‘Is it for us?’

  ‘Perhaps. Yes. For you, and for your children.’

  This was a pat answer, and avoided the issues implied by my son’s question. The futility of art, when action was needed. The absurdity of producing more, now. Writers have, I imagine, always asked themselves whether or not they would continue if they knew that no one would ever read what they were writing.

  ‘I think it’s for the people of whom I write,’ I told him, the idea coming to me as I said it; having already written the first draft. It wasn’t a conscious motive, or motivation, in the process of composition, but, having summoned the memories recalled in these pages, having resurrected time spent with these people, it seemed to me that I had done so for them.

  ‘But most of them are gone,’ my son said.

  Perhaps, I thought, it is possible to produce something, now, not only for the future but also for the past. Perhaps in some way the story as I have written it, or my communion with the spirit of those members of my family, is not only a consolation for the passage of time but a call across it.

  My son laughed. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that those people, as they were, fifty years ago, would receive some, I don’t know, consoling, enlightening emanation from the future?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted, ‘what I mean.’

  My son – and his brother and his sister – think it’s vanity, or evasion, no kind of legacy compared to the real one that they and their own children have to deal with.

  He thinks that I and my generation should have done more to slay the false gods of growth and greed. Where have they brought us? The cornucopia of food from my childhood is a decadent dream; fuel is ruinously expensive; yet, in comparison with most places on this earth, our island is a haven others make for. They scramble ashore and head inland.

  And then it occurred to me that yes, I have indeed written it for you, my son. That this is the best way I can explain to you why it was we failed. Judge us as you will.

  I

  1

  We trundled along. I sat alone in the back, listening on my Samsung MP3 player to Julian Bream playing Danzas españolas by Enrique Granados, which my mother had downloaded for me especially for the journey. The recording was old, and there was a little background hiss, but I didn’t mind. To tell the truth, I rather liked that poor sound quality. It rendered the performance less Olympian, made it easier to imagine that I might one day play as well as that maestro, would coax such tonal range from my own acoustic guitar.

  My father drove, my mother sat beside him in the front. The music, spare and delicate, with its dancing melody, building into a gorgeous powerful theme, played in my headphones while the dismal English countryside, with its dreary towns, sidled past.

  I never answered the telephone in those days. There was no reason why I should. It was never for me. My own mobile only ever bleeped: my mother, usually, texting to save money, wondering where r u? As for the landline, they could answer it themselves. I wasn’t my parents’ servant. Their unpaid skivvy. Oh, sure, there’d been a time when I was happy to answer. I enjoyed doing so, I admit. ‘This is the Cannon Duran residence. How can I help you?’ I’d pass the receiver to whichever parent had been asked for, they’d listen for a moment and then Mum would say, ‘Yes, he is a wonderful secretary, we couldn’t ask for better.’ Dad on the other hand would provide some wry aside like, ‘We’re grooming him for a job in a call centre.’

  By now, at thirteen, I’d long grown out of that juvenile phase. The day before our journey, however, the phone rang while I was hanging around in the hallway.

  ‘Get that, would you?’ Mum called from the kitchen.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ I countered.

  ‘Checking the car.’

  ‘Checking what?’ I yelled back. ‘I could have told him it’s still there.’ The ringing tone grew louder.

  ‘Tyres,’ Mum shouted. ‘Oil. I don’t know. Will you just answer it?’

  By now the machine ha
d come on. My mother’s calm voice stated, Hello. This is the answerphone of Rodney Cannon, Amy Duran and Theo Cannon. Please leave a message after the tone.

  ‘Why don’t you get it?’ I wondered out loud.

  ‘I’m up to my elbows in this gunk,’ Mum wailed. ‘Please, Theo.’

  After the tone had sounded there was a long, uncertain pause, before an imperious voice announced, ‘It’s me.’ After a further delay, ‘What time do you plan to arrive? I need to know whether or not I’m feeding you.’

  What, I wondered, like penguins in a zoo? I picked up the receiver and said, ‘Hello, Grandma.’

  ‘Is that you, Rodney?’

  ‘No, it’s Theo, Grandma.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, surprised, if not disappointed. ‘How are you, darling?’

  ‘Me?’ I pondered. ‘Well, I guess I’m sort of –’

  ‘Never mind,’ she interrupted. ‘We’ll catch up tomorrow. When are you going to get here?’

  ‘After lunch, I suppose,’ I said. ‘We’ll eat in the car as usual.’ This was one of our family rituals: any drive over an hour long was timed, if possible, to include a packed lunch, a proven method, begun when I was small, of making a long journey bearable.

  ‘You’re coming by car?’ Grandma exclaimed, apparently shocked by the prospect.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ I murmured. ‘I mean, we always do.’

  ‘Have you people not got the foggiest idea what’s happening?’ Grandma demanded. ‘We’ve simply got to stop using these horrible combustion engines. All of us. Come by train. I’ll have Jockie meet you at the station.’

  The nearest railway station was miles away from my grandparents’ house, I felt sure; in Ludlow or Craven Arms or one of those places. ‘How would Jockie get between the village and the station?’ I asked. ‘He’d have to drive, wouldn’t he?’

  There was another pause. I feared Grandma was going to reprimand me for being impertinent. Instead, she said, ‘We’ve not got rid of all the horses, Theo.’

  We drove through the Cotswolds (thus avoiding the motorways, for ‘aesthetic reasons’, according to my father) at a steady fifty-five miles per hour on the open road, in order to conserve fuel, but also because this was the least stressful speed for a driver, as scientifically proven by the AA and the RAC, so Dad said. His own pulse rate, he claimed, rose exponentially with every increase in velocity from that point. He paid no attention to the suffering caused to the passenger in the rear seat, namely myself, by travelling at such a tedious speed. If I tried to read a magazine, however, I was likely to throw up in a plastic bag, a supply of which my mother kept in the glove compartment. I found it curious – and not a little annoying – that my stomach could cope with sandwiches, crisps and apples chomped into it, but was turned by my eyes perusing a printed page; such, I concluded, were the mysterious frailties of the human organism.

  Outside, a soft drizzle of rain fell from a grey, blotchy sky. The landscape was drained of colour. The wipers tick-tocked mournfully across the windscreen as we made our way to my grandparents’ house for Christmas on Tuesday the twenty-third of December, two thousand and eight, in common no doubt with the occupants of all the other cars, vans, coaches and lorries that passed by or overtook us, criss-crossing the country, scuttling to and fro across the spider web of our intimate diasporas, our familial dispersals.

  It was just as well my father drove so slowly. He did it not only for his own sake but also that of our car, a Morris Traveller built in 1970. It was twenty-five years older than I was. His profound attachment to that croaking old vehicle might have been seen as curious for a man who claimed not to understand how any mechanical device more recent or more complex than the Archimedean Screw functioned. ‘And I don’t really know how that works, to tell the truth,’ he admitted. Actually, I knew more about Archimedes than my father did, from when we’d studied the Romans: Archimedes invented engines of war for the defence of Syracuse.

  My father was clueless when it came to DIY, but he would happily spend hours of a summer evening sanding down, by hand, the Morris Traveller’s distinctive exterior woodwork, and revarnishing it with loving strokes of a sable-haired paintbrush. I’d been with him a month earlier, when, after its annual MOT and service, he went to pick it up from the garage in Farndon Road, whose owner and sole mechanic had been tending my father’s car for the past thirty years. The two men stood in front of her, addressing each other formally: Mr Weaver explained that he’d put in an alternator conversion and new brake drums, and that he might need to take a look at the sills next year, but for now she still ran like a beauty, to all of which Dad nodded sagely; and I noticed that, possibly unbeknownst to either themselves or one another, each man had placed a hand on one of the rounded wings of the almond green chassis, and caressed the old girl with a tender appreciation.

  Now, Julian Bream having brought his virtuoso performance to a close, I removed the headphones. My parents were gabbling away to each other in the front. Compared to the acoustically sealed environment of a modern automobile, our antique rattletrap made a racket, both its own noisy engine and the roar of the road. Since there was nothing my parents valued more than peace and quiet in which to babble at each other it was odd we had a car that forced them to raise their voices. They discussed the imminent closure of another post office in north Oxford, and the historically proven impossibility of an occupying army imposing peace in Afghanistan. Rolling through Stow-on-the-Wold and Upper Swell, my parents gossipped about their friends and criticised work colleagues. My father proclaimed that the only answer to the present credit crunch recession in Britain, ‘the British solution’, was for patriotic consumer-citizens to buy their way out, a proposal which annoyed my anti-materialist mother, who did not enjoy irony, but amused him enormously. I tried to ignore them, zoning in and out of their conversations as they pondered improvements to our house, following their recent coup of having our loft insulated for just one hundred and ninety eight pounds, ‘materials and labour’, my father reiterated, courtesy of a Tesco special offer; and my mother, despite our never having owned a family pet, ruminated upon whether our long, thin garden would be a more suitable environment for chickens or for bees.

  The fact of the matter was that, wittering on at each other, my parents forgot I was there. I leaned against the side behind my father’s head, out of his eyeline in the rear-view mirror. The car smelled old in a way I despised at the time, though now, as the smell of venerable leather returns in my memory as strongly as if in my very nostrils, I remember it only with an affection as fond as my father’s. ‘You may not appreciate her now, Theo,’ he’d say, chuckling in the face of my teenage contempt. ‘She’ll likely be the major part of your inheritance.’ If I have moved through life at the same speed as my father – if I tell stories at as leisurely a pace as he drove – then I can only apologise; though it could hardly be helped. Our legacies are limited.

  We stopped in a lay-by with a roadside snack bar, outlets which, in Mum’s opinion, tended to sell dreadful coffee but drinkable tea. My father turned to climb out of the car, and when he saw me he gave a little start, before saying with a smile, ‘Theo. I forgot you were there.’ He didn’t mean it had slipped his mind that I was in the back of the car accompanying him and his wife, my mother, on this particular journey. What he really meant was that he’d forgotten that I, his son, his only child, existed. That Mum and he were not still going out together, as they had for many years before my birth. Their relationship was an endless, intermittent conversation which my unplanned arrival had interrupted. I could only imagine their relief when they discovered how easy it was to resume their conversation, and leave me to my own devices as I sat behind them. I’d not been joined by any brother or sister – for reasons as mysterious to my parents, probably, as my appearance had been. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d only ever once had sex, considering what that worrisome prospect entailed.

  Two men ran the snack bar. They had identical bull necks, thick square head
s, close-cropped hair and pale blue eyes; they could have been father and son, or possibly brothers.

  ‘What can I get you, chap?’ the younger one asked Dad, who I could tell was a little disconcerted by this form of address. But he ordered three teas, and paid for them. We waited while the drinks were poured, the three of us, silenced by the periodical noise of the traffic thudding past.

  ‘There you go, mate,’ the older one said, placing our drinks on the counter.

  We carried the hot styrofoam cups back to the car, got in, closed the doors. Mum turned and said, ‘I’m sorry, Rod, all I’m saying is, don’t blame me if I go into my shell. I just don’t know how to deal with your family.’

  2

  Although both my parents were university teachers they were unable to enjoy the long vacation, as one could ‘in the old days’, according to my father, but were obliged to attend meetings, conduct interviews and carry out onerous administrative duties. So for a month every summer I was sent on my own to the country, holidays with my grandparents at the beginning and end of which Dad would deliver or collect me, staying a few days each time.

  It was odd to arrive now in winter. We generally spent Christmas at home in Oxford, and made day trips to Mum’s sister or her parents, Nana Sue and Táta Jiri, in Rickmansworth. The fact was that as a family unit we rarely saw my father’s relations. This year, however, Grandpa had summoned his three children, asking them to make every effort to come, and to bring their families with them, for Christmas.

  Now the bracken-covered lower slopes of the hill above the house were not a vibrant green but dull brown, as was the beech hedge on top of the brown stone wall that followed the curve of the drive. Plants overhanging the wall, cascading profusions of bright purple in summer, now had only dull green leaves. The trees that lined the drive or were dotted around the sloping fields were leafless, stark against the grey sky; Grandpa’s wood beyond the lower fields looked glum, exhausted.