Lol planned his suicide with all the precision missing from his life.
He drew curtains across the small, leaded windows facing the lane and the orchard. The curtains were cheap and thin but they took away the brightness of the morning. And also meant that Alison would not be able to look through the windows for his body.
On the turntable, Lol placed his third, already-worn copy of Nick Drake’s first album, Five Leaves Left. The lush arrangements, the soft and ghostly vocals of a man with only five years to live. All his adult life, he’d identified with Nick Drake, even though Nick had been taller and posher and dead – by his own hand – since 1974.
The album hissed and clicked into ‘Time Has Told Me’, veined through with Richard Thompson’s serene guitar. Lol went outside to check on the milk. With the bright mornings, the milkman had been arriving earlier of late. So the bottle was already on the step.
OK. He went back for another bottle from the fridge – yesterday’s, unopened – and set it down next to the new one. Then he shut the door and went to explain to Ethel, kneeling down on the carpet, looking into the unmoving green-gold eyes.
‘I’m going to have to shut you in. It won’t be for long. Don’t want you looking for me, OK?’
Ethel looked unconvinced, licked red mud from a paw. She was technically a stray, or maybe dumped. He’d heard this piteous mewling two nights running in the middle of January and finally found this thing in the hedge, about five inches long and not much thicker than a piece of black hosepipe. At first, Alison had not been pleased, displaying that hard edge he used to think would eventually wear away in the country. But on the morning she left, she said she was glad Lol had Ethel. Something for him to feel responsible for.
Lol went into the kitchen and didn’t put the toaster on; the smell of hot toast was one of the great scents of life. It would be hard to die with the smell of hot toast in the air. He didn’t switch on the radio either. He didn’t rake out the woodstove. He sat down at the table, facing the pot of Women’s Institute plum jam. He pulled off the rubber band and the parchment top, smelling the sweetness.
‘You should’ve told me,’ he said to the jam.
Meaning he should have realized. This was the last of the three pots Alison had brought back from the Women’s Institute. The day after she brought it, she’d told him herself and he’d just broken down into tears, here at this table, with the shock.
He’d always been naive. As a kid. As a songwriter. But naivety was something you were supposed to grow out of, like spots.
At the time, the idea of Alison joining all the farmers’ wives at the WI had seemed, OK, a little bizarre. But also kind of quaint and homely. It showed that coming here had really worked. It made him want to become part of the community too, a bellringer or something. Keep chickens, grow tomatoes for the chutney Alison would learn to make… at the WI.
Just off to the WI. It had been a while before he’d realized that all those times she’d said she was off to the WI and returned a few hours later with a pot of jam, she’d really been with James Bull-Davies in the big bed at the big farmhouse called Upper Hall.
How had it begun? He didn’t know. Everyone else in the village seemed to know – the new woman in the life of the Squire of Upper Hall, that was bound to be a talking point. But there was nobody who’d have told Lol. He was a stranger, even to all the village newcomers. Lucy Devenish might have broken it to him, but he hadn’t known her then, in those long, hazy days of trying to get vegetables to grow and watching Alison’s easy smile slowly stiffen in her beautiful face.
Lol’s chin dropped into the crumbs on the kitchen table. All he wanted was to know why.
He closed his eyes and saw Alison riding, as she did almost every day, down the bridleway from Upper Hall, along the edge of the orchard and out into Blackberry Lane just before the cottage gate.
She was on her chestnut stallion. Alison knew a lot about horses and rode this one with something like contempt. It looked muscular and spectacularly masculine, a thoroughbred beast she could make a gesture out of being able to handle with no particular effort. Like Bull-Davies himself, who was the horse’s owner but would never, Lol was sure, be Alison’s.
He’d kept watching out for her, convinced she’d come back. For several weeks he’d really thought she would. Then he’d thought that one day she would at least dismount, lead the horse to the door, explain what had happened between them. But the morning ride always ended with an apparently casual glance towards the cottage, to see the smoke from the chimney, signs of life, signs of Lol’s survival… before Alison and the stallion turned, both heads high, back into the bridleway.
Today there would be no smoke.
‘You all right, mate?’
Lol’s eyes had shuddered open when the knock came at the front door.
‘Oh.’ He didn’t know how long he must have been staring at the postman. ‘Sorry. Do I have to sign for it?’
‘No, I just couldn’t get it through the letter box, could I?’
‘Oh,’ Lol said. ‘Right. Sorry. Thanks very much.’
‘Your milk’s come.’
‘Oh… I’ll come back for it. Thanks.’
‘Cheers,’ said the postman.
Lol carried the parcel into the kitchen, laid it down on the table. Ethel jumped on it, whiskers twitching.
The parcel was about fifteen inches square and an inch thick. It was postmarked Wiltshire. His name was on the front, typed on a label. Did he know anybody in Wiltshire? Lol lifted the cat to the floor and slit the brown paper with the butter knife.
Inside, under some stiff cardboard, was an LP record. Nick Drake. Time of No Reply.
Lol stared at it. He didn’t understand. He was afraid to touch it.
This was the posthumous album. The one with ‘Black-eyed Dog’, the bleak and eerie little song of depression and impending death. The one where Nick said he was feeling old and he wanted to go home. He was twenty-five years old. At barely twenty-six, he’d taken one anti-depressant too many and his mother had found him lying dead across his single bed.
Lol began to shake. Out of the speakers, from slightly happier days, Nick sang ‘Way to Blue’.
What kind of omen was this? He looked up at the curtained window facing the orchard. Suddenly had the overpowering feeling that posh, languid Nick was standing out there among the trees, waiting for him. A bass player he’d once met said he’d been to this party at someone’s flat and Nick Drake, six months before he died, had been there and had stood leaning in a corner next to a candle for two and a half hours, spoken to nobody and then slipped silently away, like a ghost.
There was a letter with the album. Neat and official and word-processed and signed…
… Dennis Clarke.
Oh. Lol sat down. Oh, yeah. It was, in fact, his own album, the one he’d left with Dennis when he went into the hospital.
Dear Lol,
I found this record when Gill and I were sorting everything out for the move. Sorry, I’ve been meaning to send it for months. To be honest, Gill kept putting me off, saying it might make you depressed again. But now we know you’re over it and settled with a nice lady, well, here it is.
As you can see, we’re in Chippenham now, where I am a partner in a new accountancy firm. A couple of us decided to break away from the old outfit and set up on our own, and I think it’s paying off.
Gill and I have got three kids now, and we live in a four-bedroomed, neo-Georgian villa, extremely suburban. I do think about the old days quite a lot, how things might have been. Disastrous, probably. On reflection I’m always glad it ended when it did. We still get our royalties, don’t we?
Anyway, the real reason I’m writing is that I had a visit yesterday evening. From Karl.
Lol let the letter fall to the table. He didn’t want to read any more, and he didn’t need to, did he? Karl was over. Karl was gone. Karl was in…
If you remember, he was in Seattle, managing a band and doing very well. However, it seems they split quite suddenly (musical differences, of course!!) and Karl was left with quite a few pieces to pick up. Anyway, he’s back in this country now because this is now Where the Future Is. He says.
I was a bit thrown when he went on to say he was convinced WE were part of that future. I never read the music papers these days, don’t have the time or, to be quite honest, the interest. However, according to Karl, the first two albums are now considered Seminal. That is, they have been discovered by a couple of the major bands – one of them might have been The Verve, no less – who list them among their influences, and sales are picking up again (expect to see this reflected in the next royalties, or I’ll want to know why!!).
Needless to say, I’d be happy to see those albums get the recognition they never really had in their day (with whatever resulting remuneration might be forthcoming!!) but I’ve been out of the business for a considerable time now and that’s what I told Karl when he said we should be thinking seriously about re-forming the band. Look, I said, I shall be forty-five next year, I have lost most of my hair, I have got three kids to support and I am very happy to be a chartered accountant in a nice part of the country. Also I have had a periodic problem with my elbow and have not lifted a drumstick in about three years.
Well, he didn’t push too hard, because, let’s face it, he can manage without me. I never wrote a song. I wasn’t even a very good drummer. It’s you he needs – not only the major talent in the band but nearly ten years younger than the rest of us and so less likely to seem like an old fart.
I don’t know how you feel about this. I did wonder, with you being in a stable relationship now and perhaps better able to hold your own with Karl, whether you might not be ready for something like this. However, when he asked me where you were living now, I decided on caution. I said, Look, Lol’s had his problems, you had better go easy. I think he got the message. Naturally, I said I didn’t know where you were living now, and I rang that guy Chris in A and R at TMM and warned them not to give your address to him either, but somebody’s bound to leak it, and that’s why I’m writing. I would have phoned, but I find you are ex-directory.
Anyway, I thought I had better let you know. Karl has changed… well, a little. All the same, Gill didn’t take to him and was not at all happy when he took out what I would swear is the SAME TIN and rolled himself a joint, which, as you can imagine, is not exactly the drug of choice in our part of Chippenham.
Let me know if you hear anything. Give my best wishes to – Alison, is it? We were both so delighted to hear things are working out for you at last on a personal level and once again, sorry for keeping the album so long.
With very best wishes,
Dennis Clark.
Dear old Dennis Clarke.
Methodical, play-it-safe Dennis. If you work it out for yourselves, lads, you’ll see that if we do these two gigs in Banbury, we’ll be twenty-seven pounds better off than if we go up to Sheffield, taking into consideration at least three Little Chef meals, eleven gallons of petrol and tyre-wear…
Dear old stupid, bloody Dennis. Put it behind you, Lol, it’s not the end of the world. Make a new start. In a couple of years you’ll be laughing about it.
Lol slumped into the old blue armchair.
Nick Drake sang ‘Cello Song’. Calm, upper-class English accent. And yet the black-eyed dog had been at Nick Drake’s door, as sure as the Hellhound had pursued Robert Johnson, the poor bluesman, over half a century ago. Both of them dead before the age of twenty-seven.
The thought of the hellhound who was Karl Windling back on his trail made Lol’s mouth go dry.
He thought, Where will I go?
The days were growing longer. Living in the country, you could really feel the earth turning, and it made you dizzy.
He would do it. He’d go. Now. In the springtime, when the sun was beginning to linger over the village with its ancient black and white cottages and inns, its old and mellowed church, its narrow, brown river.
In a similar village, not two hours’ drive from here, sometime in the night, Nick Drake had opened his door to the black-eyed dog.
Now, out there in the orchard, Nick was waiting for Lol.