Benedict glanced up to find that he was some way out along the Wellingborough Road from the last place he’d noticed, which had been the peeling shell of the Spread Eagle, on the corner past St. Edmund’s Hospital. Now he was getting on for Stimpson Avenue and that end, starting to think twice about his planned walk in the park, already feeling footsore. Clare, who’d hobbled eighty miles from Essex back home to Northamptonshire, would probably have laughed at him. They’d built their lyric nutters sturdier in his day. Ben thought he might wander round Abington Park some other time, contenting himself for the moment with a visit to the Crown & Cushion, a short distance further up the busy street. He’d only taken to the notion of a leafy stroll when there was nothing else to do, before he’d met with Alma, but now things were different. Now he had a business plan.
He’d not been in the Crown & Cushion for a while, although at one time, just after he’d broken up with Lily, it had been his regular dive. He supposed that his relationship with the pub’s clientele was at its best ambivalent, but then the place itself was somewhere he felt comfortable. Largely unchanged, the hostelry at least still traded under its historically appointed name, hadn’t become the Jolly Wanker or the Workhouse or the Vole & Astrolabe. Benedict could remember, with a twinge of mixed embarrassment and pride, how he’d once stormed into the bar demanding satisfaction when he’d felt his fellow drinkers weren’t taking his claim to be a published poet seriously. A poem of Ben’s had just been printed in the local Chronicle & Echo, and when he’d burst through the Crown & Cushion’s swing door like a piano-stopping gunfighter he’d thrown the thirty copies of the paper that he happened to be carrying into the air with a victorious cry of “There! Ah ha ha ha!” They’d naturally barred him on the spot, but that was years ago, and with a bit of luck that era’s staff and customers would all be dead or memory-impaired by now.
Even if not, traditionally the pub had always shown tremendous tolerance and even fondness for the various eccentrics passing through its portals. That was another reason why Ben liked the place, he thought as he pushed open its lounge door and stepped into the welcome gloom from the bright, squinting dazzle of the day outside. They’d had far worse than him in here. There was a story from back
in the very early 1980s which insisted that the great Sir Malcolm Arnold, trumpeter and orchestral arranger of such hits as “Colonel Bogey”, had been living in the room above the Crown & Cushion’s bar, mentally ill and alcoholic, guest in some accounts, virtual prisoner in others, dragged down almost nightly for the entertainment of a drunken and abusive crowd. This was the man who’d written Tam O’ Shanter, that delirious accompaniment to Burns’ inebriated night-sweat, the carousing highland hero chased by a Wild Hunt of fairies through the brass and woodwind dark. This was Sir Malcolm Arnold, who Ben thought had once been the Director of the Queen’s Music, a musical equivalent to Poet Laureate, banging out tunes on the joanna for a herd of braying and pugnacious goons. Old and tormented, ambisextrous, in his early sixties then, who knew what imps and demons, djinns and tonics, might have been stampeding through his fevered skull, glistening with perspiration and tipped forward over pounding yellow ivories?
Benedict stood there just inside the door until his pupils had sufficiently dilated to locate the bar. The staff and decor, he observed, were new since his last visit. This was just as well, especially about the bar staff, since as far as Ben knew he’d done nothing to offend the decor. Some, of course, might not agree. Ah ha ha ha. Benedict stepped up to the rail and bought a pint of bitter, slapping down his twenty on the freshly wiped and moisture-beaded bar-top with a certain swagger. This was undercut, though, by his deep regret at having said goodbye to Elgar. Some of this regret was purely on Ben’s own account, but mixed with this there was a genuine concern about Sir Edward, an uneasiness at leaving the composer in the Crown & Cushion. Look at what they’d done to Malcolm Arnold.
Taking his glass to an empty table, of which there were an unseasonable number, Ben fleetingly entertained a morbid fantasy in which, as punishment for the newspaper incident, he was incarcerated here in the same way that Arnold had reputedly been held. Each night intoxicated thugs would burst into his room and herd him down to the saloon, where he’d be plied with spirits and made to recite his earnest and wept-over sonnets to a room of jeering philistines. It didn’t sound that bad, if he was honest. He’d had Friday nights like that, without even the benefit of being plied with drink. Now that he came to think about it, he’d had entire years like that. The stretch just after Lily told him he should find another billet, when he’d lived in a house broken into flats along Victoria Road, had been like Tam O’ Shanter playing on a loop for months. Arriving home at 3.00am without a key, demanding as a published poet that he be let in, then playing Dylan Thomas reading Under Milkwood at top volume on his Dansette until all the other residents were threatening to kill him. What had that been all about? Creeping downstairs to the communal kitchen one night and devouring four whole chicken dinners that the surly and abusive tattooed couple in the flat above had made for the next day, then waking up another of the building’s tenants so that he could tell them. “Ah ha ha! I’ve ate the bastards’ dinner!” Looking back, Ben realised he was lucky to have come through those dire days unlynched, and never mind unscathed.
He sipped his bitter and, taking advantage of the sunlight falling through the window that he sat beneath, removed A Northamptonshire Garland from his satchel and began to read. The first piece his eyes fell on was “The Angler’s Song”, a work by William Basse, seventeenth-century pastoral poet with disputed although likely origins here in the town.
As inward love breeds outward talk,
The hound some praise, and some the hawk,
Some, better pleased with private sport,
Use tennis, some a mistress court:
But these delights I neither wish,
Nor envy, while I freely fish.
Ben liked the poem, though he’d never really done much fishing since his first youthful attempts, which had involved the accidental hooking of another child during the back-swing when he’d cast off. He recalled the blood, the screams, and worst of all his total inability to keep from giggling inappropriately with shame during the subsequent first aid. That had been it for Benedict and fishing, pretty much, though he approved of it as an idea. Along with fauns and shepherdesses it was part of his Arcadian mythology, the angler drowsing by the stream, the riverine crawl of the afternoon, but like the shepherdesses it was something he’d had little practical experience of.
On reflection, that was probably why Ben had let “Atlantis” go unfinished all those years ago, the sense that it was inauthentic, that he had been barking up the wrong tree. When he’d started it, he’d been a schoolboy from a dark house down in Freeschool Street, deploring all the grimy factory yards the way that he thought John Clare would have done; lamenting the bucolic idyll that, in his imagination, the contemporary mean streets of the Boroughs had displaced. Only when those slate rooftops and tree-punctured chimney breasts had been themselves removed had come belated recognition that the narrow lanes were the endangered habitat he should have been commemorating. Bottle-caps, not bluebells. He’d thrown out his central metaphor, the droning, drowning hedgerows of a continent that he’d reported lost but in all truth had never really owned, and written “Clearance Area” instead. After the neighbourhood as Benedict had known it was no more, at last he’d found a voice that had been genuine and of the Boroughs. Looking back, he thought that later poem had been more about the bulldozed flats of his own disillusion than the demolition site his district had become, although perhaps the two were ultimately the same thing.
He lit a cigarette, noting that this left six still rattling loose in the depleted pack, and flipped on through the alphabetically arranged compendium, skipping past Clare this time to light on the inarguably authentic Boroughs voice of Philip Doddridge. Though the piece was called “Christ’s Message” and based on a passage from the Book of Luke it was essentially the text of Doddridge’s most celebrated hymn: “Hark the glad sound! The Saviour comes!/ The Saviour promised long!” Benedict liked the exclamation marks, which seemed to couch the second coming as a gravel-throated trailer for a movie sequel. In his heart, Ben couldn’t say that he was confident concerning Christianity … the ton-up accident that took his sister back when he’d been ten put paid to that … but he could still hear and respect the strong Boroughs inflection in Doddridge’s verses, his concern for the impoverished and wretched no doubt sharpened by his time at Castle Hill. “He comes the broken heart to bind, The bleeding soul to cure,/ And with the treasures of his grace T’ enrich the humble poor.”
He’d drink to that. Lifting his glass he noticed that its ebbing tide-line foam was at half-mast. Just four sips left. Oh well. That was enough. He’d make it last. He wouldn’t have another one in here, despite the seventeen-odd pounds he still had left. He thumbed his way on through the book until he reached the Fanes of Apethorpe: Mildmay Fane, the second Earl of Westmorland, and his descendant Julian. He’d only really settled on the pair through being taken with the names ‘Mildmay’ and ‘Apethorpe’, but soon found himself immersed in Julian’s description of the family pile, as admired by Northampton fan John Betjeman. “The moss-grey mansion of my father stands/ Park’d in an English pasturage as fair/ As any that the grass-green isle can show./ Above it rise deep-wooded lawns; below/ A brook runs riot thro’ the pleasant lands …” The brook went babbling on as he sipped dry his pint and bought another without thinking.
Suddenly it was ten minutes after three and he was half a mile away, emerging out of Lutterworth Road onto Billing Road, just down from what had once been the Boy’s Grammar School. What was he doing here? He had the vaguest memory of standing in the toilets at the Crown & Cushion, of a ghostly moment staring at his own face in the mirror bolted up above the washbasin, but for the life of him could not remember leaving the pub premises, much less the fairish walk he’d evidently taken down here from the Wellingborough Road. Perhaps he’d wanted to head back to the town centre but had chosen this admittedly more scenic route? Chosen was probably too strong a word. Ben’s path through life was governed not so much by choice as by the powerful unde
rtow of his own whimsy, which would on occasion wash him up to unexpected beachheads like this present one.
Across the street and some way off upon his left was the red brick front of the former grammar school, set back from the main road by flat lawns and a gravel forecourt where a naked flagpole stood, no ensign showing which side the establishment was on. Benedict understood the reticence. These days, targets were what schools aimed at, not what they aspired to be. Stretching away behind the calm façade and the aloof gaze of the tall white windows there were classrooms, art rooms, physics blocks and playing fields, a spinney and a swimming pool, all trying to ignore the gallows shadow that league tables cast across them. Not that there was any cause here for immediate concern. Though relegated from a snooty grammar to a red-eared comprehensive in the middle 1970s, the place had used its dwindling aura and residual reputation as brand markers in the competition-focussed marketplace that teaching had become. Invoking the school’s previous elitist status and the ghost of poshness past would seem to have succeeded, making it a big hit with the choice-dazed well-off parent of today. Apparently, from what Ben heard, they even made a selling point of the monastic single-sex approach to education. Anyone applying for their son to be accepted had to first compose a modest essay stating why, precisely, at the most profound ideological and moral level, they believed their child would benefit from being tutored in an atmosphere of strict gender apartheid. What did they expect people to say? That what they hoped for little Giles was that at best he’d grow into somebody awkward and uncomprehending in all his relationships with women, while at worst he’d end up a gay serial murderer? Ah ha ha ha.
Benedict crossed the road and turned right, heading into town, putting the school behind him. He’d once been a pupil there and hadn’t liked it much. For one thing, having squandered his first decade on the planet in what his mam called “acting the goat”, he’d not passed his eleven-plus exams that first go-round. When all the clever kids like Alma went off to their grammars, Benedict attended Spencer School, on the now-feared Spencer estate, with all the divs and bruisers. He’d been every bit as smart as Alma and the rest, just not inclined to take things like examinations seriously. Once he’d been at Spencer for a year or two, however, his intelligence began to shine from the surrounding dross and only then had he been transferred to the grammar school.
Here he’d felt stigmatised, even among the vanishingly small minority of other working-class boys, who’d at least been bright enough to put the ticks in the right boxes when they’d been eleven. With the middle-class majority, especially the teachers, Ben had never felt he stood a chance. The other boys had in the main been nice enough, acting and talking much the same as him, but they’d still snigger if somebody stuck their hand up during class to ask the master if they could go to the lav and not the toilet. On reflection, Benedict supposed, such prejudice as he’d experienced had been relatively minimal. At least he’d not been black like David Daniels in the year above, a serene and good natured lad that Ben had mainly known through Alma, who’d shared Daniels’s fondness for American science-fiction paperbacks and comics. Ben recalled one maths teacher who’d always send the only non-white at the school into the quadrangle outside the classroom window, so that in the full view of his classmates he could clean the board erasers, pounding them together until his black skin was pale with chalk dust. It was shameful.
He remembered how unfairly the whole learning process had been handled then, with kids’ lives and careers decided by an exam that they’d sat at age eleven. Mind you, wasn’t it just this last year that Tony Blair had set out his performance targets for the under-fives? There’d be established foetal standards soon, so that you could feel pressurized and backwards if your fingers hadn’t separated fully by the third trimester. Academic stress-related pre-birth suicides would become commonplace, the depressed embryos hanging themselves with their umbilical cords, farewell notes scratched onto the placenta.
Benedict became aware of railings passing in a strobe on his left side to vanish at his back, dark conifers beyond them, and remembered he was walking past St. Andrew’s Hospital. Could that have been the reason why he’d taken this route home, as an impulsive pilgrimage to where they’d kept John Clare for more than twenty years? Perhaps he’d muddily imagined that the thought of Clare, his hero, having been more of a hopeless circus-turn than Ben himself, would somehow be uplifting?
Instead, the reverse was true. As with his earlier envy of pub-prisoner Sir Malcolm Arnold – who had also been a former grammar school boy and a former inmate of St. Andrew’s, now he thought about it – Benedict found himself visualising the extensive institution grounds beyond the rail and envying John Clare. Admittedly, St. Andrew’s hadn’t been so lush back in the 1850s when it was Northampton General Asylum, but it had still been a gentler haven, in all likelihood, for lost and bruised poetic souls than somewhere like, say, Tower Street. What Ben wouldn’t give to trade his current circumstances for those of a nineteenth-century madhouse. If somebody asked why you weren’t seeking work, you could explain that you were already employed as an archaic mental. You could wander all day through Elysian meadows, or else take a stroll downtown to sit beneath the portico of All Saints’ Church. With your expenses paid for by a literary benefactor, you’d have time to write as much verse as you liked, much of it on how badly you felt you were being treated. And when even the exertion of poetics proved too much (for surely times like that afflicted everyone, Ben thought), you could abandon your exhausting personality and be somebody else, be Queen Victoria’s dad, or Byron. Frankly, if you’d lost your mind, there were worse places to go looking for it than beneath the bushes at St. Andrew’s.
Clearly, Ben was not alone in this opinion. In the years since Clare’s day, the asylum’s tittering and weeping dayroom had become a hall of damaged fame. Misogynist and poet J.K. Stephen. Malcolm Arnold. Dusty Springfield. Lucia Joyce, a child of the more famous James, whose delicate psychology had first become apparent when she worked as chief assistant on her father’s unreadable masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, then titled Work in Progress. Joyce’s daughter had arrived here at the pricey but quite justly celebrated Billing Road retreat in the late 1940s, and had evidently liked the place so much she’d stayed for over thirty years until her death in 1982. Even mortality had not soured Lucia on Northampton. She’d requested she be buried here, at Kingsthorpe Cemetery, where she was currently at rest a few feet from the gravestone of a Mr. Finnegan. It was still strange to think that Lucia Joyce had been here all the time Ben was a pupil at the grammar school next door. He wondered idly if she’d ever met with Dusty or Sir Malcolm, picturing abruptly all three on stage as a trio, possibly for therapeutic reasons, looking melancholic, belting out “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself”. Ah ha ha ha.
Benedict had heard that Samuel Beckett was one of Lucia Joyce’s visitors, here at St. Andrew’s and then, later, at the cemetery in Kingsthorpe. Part of Lucia’s madness had been the belief that Beckett, who’d replaced her as assistant on the Work in Progress, was in love with her. Disastrous as this misunderstanding must have been for all concerned, the two had evidently remained friends, at least to judge from all the visits. Ben’s good chum Dave Turvey, cricketing enthusiast companion to the late Tom Hall, had informed Benedict of Beckett’s sole entry in Wisden’s Almanac, playing against Northampton at the County Ground. Amongst the visiting team, Beckett had distinguished himself not so much upon the pitch as in his choice of entertainment afterwards. He’d spent that evening in a solitary trawl around Northampton’s churches while his colleagues had contented themselves with the other things the town was famous for, these being pubs and whores. Benedict found this conduct admirable, at least in theory, though he’d never cared for Beckett as an author much. All those long silences and haunted monologues. It was too much like life.
He was by now beyond St. Andrew’s, crossing over at the top of Cliftonville as he continued his fastidiously measured stumble, onward down the Billing Road to town. This was the route he’d take each weeknight as a schoolboy, home to Freeschool Street astride his bike, riding into the sunset as if every day had been a feature film, which, very often in Ben’s case, it had been. Duck Soup, usually, with Benedict as both Zeppo and Harpo, playing them, innovatively, as two sides of the same troubled personality. A drift of generally pleasant and only occasionally horrifying recollection, like a fairground ride through Toyland but with horse intestines draped at intervals, conveyed him on into the centre. Where the Billing Road concluded at the crossroads with Cheyne Walk and York Road, near the General Hospital, Ben waltzed over the zebra crossing and along Spencer Parade.
Boughs from St. Giles churchyard overhung the pavement, off-cut scraps of light and shadow rustling across the cracked slabs in a mobile stipple. Past the low wall on Ben’s right was soft grass and hard marble markers, peeling benches scored with the initials of a hundred brief relationships and then the caramel stones of the church itself, probably one of those inspected on Sam Beckett’s lone nocturnal tour. St. Giles was old, not ancient like St. Peter’s or the Holy Sepulchre, but old enough, and here as long as anybody could remember. It was clearly well-established by the time that John Speed drafted the town map for 1610, which Benedict owned a facsimile edition of, rolled up somewhere behind his bookshelves back in Tower Street. Though state-of-the-art technical drawing in its day, to modern eyes its slightly wonky isomorphic house-rows looked like the endeavour of a talented though possibly autistic child. The image of Northampton poised there at the start of the seventeenth century, a crudely drawn cross-section of a heart with extra ventricles, was nonetheless delightful. When the modern urban landscape was too much for Benedict to bear, say one day out of every five, then he’d imagine he was walking through the simple and depopulated flatland of Speed’s diagram, the vanished landmarks dark with quill pen hatch-work scribbling themselves into existence all around him. White streets bounded by ink curbs, devoid of human complication.
Benedict continued down into St. Giles Street, passing the still-open lower end of the half-destitute, half-empty Co-op Arcade, its redundant upper reaches gazing bleakly onto Abington Street which ran parallel, a short way up the gentle slope of the town’s southern flank. Some distance further on, past Fish Street’s gaping cod’s mouth, was the Wig & Pen, the disinfec