Ha, ha. Or LOL, as his daughter would have said.
In York he had spent many hours in the great cathedral train shed of the National Railway Museum where he paid tribute to the Mallard, Yorkshire-built and the fastest steam train in the world, a record that could never be taken away from her. Jackson’s heart had swelled with pride at the sight of the beautiful shining blue flanks of the engine. Not a day went by that he didn’t mourn the loss of engineering and industry. This was no country for old men.
As well as teashops Jackson had also discovered an unlooked-for delight in bagging the ruined abbeys of Yorkshire on his journey – Jervaulx, Rievaulx, Roche, Byland, Kirkstall. Jackson’s new pastime. Trains, coins, stamps, Cistercian abbeys, Betty’s – all part of the semi-autistic male impulse to collect – a need for order or a desire to possess, or both.
He still needed to collar Fountains, the mother of all abbeys. Years ago (decades ago now) Jackson had been on a school trip to Fountains Abbey, a rare thing, Jackson hadn’t gone to the kind of school that had outings. All he could remember was playing football amongst the ruins, until a teacher put a stop to it. Oh yes, and trying to kiss a girl called Daphne Wood on the back seat of the coach on the way home. And receiving a thumping for his pains. Daphne Wood had a tremendous right hook. It was Daphne Wood who had taught him the value of getting in there with one swift, mean blow rather than prancing around with a duellist’s finesse. Jackson wondered where she was now.
Rievaulx was sublime but his favourite abbey so far was Jervaulx. Privately owned, with an honesty box at the gate and no English Heritage branding, the ruins had touched his soul in some inarticulate and melancholy place, the nearest thing to holiness for an atheistic Jackson. He missed God. But then who didn’t? As far as Jackson was concerned, God slipped out of the building a long time ago and he wasn’t coming back, but, like any good architect, he had left his work behind as his legacy. North Yorkshire had been designed when God was in his pomp and each time that Jackson came here he was struck anew by the power that landscape and beauty had over him these days.
‘It’s your age,’ Julia said.
Of course, these were the very same rich and powerful abbeys that in the Middle Ages farmed the sheep, the golden fleeces which provided the foundation of the wool trade and England’s wealth and which led in turn to the Satanic mills of the West Riding, and thence to poverty, overcrowding, disease, child exploitation on levels beyond belief and the death and destruction of the dream of Arcadia. For want of a nail. Those mills were museums and galleries now, the abbeys in ruins. The world turns.
The day that Jackson visited Jervaulx it had been deserted apart from the everlasting sheep (nature’s lawnmowers) and their fat lambs and he had wandered amongst the peaceful stones where wild flowers sprang from between the cracks and wished that his sister was laid to rest in a place like this instead of the mundane municipal cemetery that had been her last stop on earth. He had unfinished business there, a promise never given to a dead sister to avenge her senseless death. He supposed Niamh would always be calling him home, the siren song of the dead, for the rest of his life.
‘All roads lead home,’ Julia said.
‘All roads lead away from home,’ Jackson said.
Josie, his first wife, had once said to him that if he ran far enough he would end up back where he started but Jackson didn’t think that the place he had started from existed any more. He had returned a few years ago, taken Marlee to meet her dead relatives, and he had found that it wasn’t the town he remembered. The slag heaps were levelled, the mine’s machinery long gone, only the pit-head wheel remained, cut in two and planted on a roundabout on the outskirts of town, more like an ornament than a memorial. There was not much evidence to show that it had ever been a place where his father had spent his life toiling in the velvet dark.
Niamh herself had been underground nearly forty years – too late to track down clues, sniff out DNA, interview witnesses. The coffin was closed, the case as cold as that clay she was buried in. When she was murdered his sister was just three years older than his daughter was now. Marlee was fourteen. A dangerous age, although, let’s face it, Jackson thought, every age was a dangerous age for a woman.
Seventeen, Niamh’s life hardly begun when it was halted. His sister couldn’t stop for death, so he had, very kindly, stopped for her. Emily Dickinson. Poetry? Jackson? Believe it or not.
Poetry had started to get under his skin a couple of years ago, round about the time he had almost died in a train crash. (In synopsis, Jackson’s life always sounded more dramatic than the mild ennui of living it every day.) He didn’t think the two things necessarily had anything to do with each other, but in his resurrected life he had decided to catch up, rather late in the day, with some of the things he had missed out on in his impoverished education. Like culture, for example. While living in London he had committed himself to a programme of self-improvement, feasting from the liberal banquet on offer in the capital – art galleries, exhibitions, museums, even the occasional classical concert. He developed a bit of a taste for Beethoven, the symphonies at any rate. Lush and tuneful, they seemed designed to address the soul. He caught the Fifth at the Proms. He’d never been to the Proms before, put off by all those jingoistic Last Night shenanigans, and, indeed, the self-important Promenaders proved to be over-privileged smug wankers but Beethoven hadn’t written the music for them. He had written it for Everyman, in the guise of a middle-aged trooper who was surprised to find himself moved to tears by the triumphant blossoming swell of brass and horsehair.
Not a lot of theatre, Julia and her actor friends had killed off any hope for him in that arena. He had made the mistake of taking Marlee to three hours of bum-numbing Brecht, by the end of which he wanted to shout out, ‘Yes! You’re right, the earth revolves around the sun, you said that when you first came on stage, you’ve been saying it ever since, you don’t need to keep saying it. I get it!’ Marlee slept through most of it. He loved her for that.
This attempt at betterment had extended beyond paintings and piano recitals and museum artefacts, he had also been grimly working his way through the world’s classics. Fiction had never been Jackson’s thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things – death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale. But poetry had wormed its way in, uninvited. A Toad, can die of Light! Crazy. So that here he was, thinking of his long-dead, long-lost sister, bolstered by a woman who felt a funeral in her brain.
As he left Jervaulx, Jackson had placed a twenty-pound note in the honesty box – more than any English Heritage fee but it was worth the money. And besides, he liked the fact that even in these days and times there was someone willing to trust to a man’s honesty.
When he was thirteen Jackson had spent one of the better summers of his life staying on a farm called Howdale on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. He was never sure how this rural idyll had come about, church or state, one of them was probably involved somewhere along the line – the parish priest or his social worker must have organized it, he supposed. The social worker had been a temporary acquisition, appearing out of the blue one day in the middle of the worst year of his life and disappearing just as mysteriously a few months later, even though it was still the worst year of his life. The social worker was there (apparently) to help guide him through that terrible year of bereavement which began with his mother dying of cancer and ended with his brother killing himself after their sister was murdered. (‘Top that if you can,’ he occasionally found himself thinking grouchily when he was a policeman and listening to some stranger’s less impressive lament.)