Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

There are two rows of pleached hornbeams on a lawn that leads to a forest. A woman in a hooded robe walks purposefully toward the woods, between the hornbeams. A greyhound trots ahead of her.

My head droops toward the painting. It bewilders me, after today. I can’t believe such things exist, both the painting and the things in it. The greyhound and the hooded robe. I want to know where the woman is going, and I want to be in her place with an urgency that surprises me, and that I would have thought I had outgrown.

My hands are still white with plaster dust. There are still black spots on the wall from the bottle of wine that exploded the night before her funeral.

RACHEL AND I VISITED the Tate last year. I like Tate Modern better. At its bar you can drink a white wine or a mineral water and look down at the cloudy river and St. Paul’s and the people on the bridges. I didn’t try to explain this to Rachel. She would fixate on the mineral water, which I rarely bought and always with a sense of disappointment in myself.

The mineral water fits, I wanted to tell her. It fits there.

We looked at medieval Flemish paintings. One of them was a triptych of a pilgrimage, and the path curved far back into the picture field. Looking at it is supposed to be like going on a pilgrimage yourself, said the placard, which I thought was overstating the matter. But it was mesmerizing, and I did find that I really wanted to be there, not here. Walking past, apparently, all manner of things. A hydra in the courtyard of an inn. Dogs chasing a leaping stag. A tavern on stilts in a pond.

Rachel came over and I leaned against her and said, “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Mm.”

I followed her into the next room, where there was an oil painting of Judith and Holofernes. Holofernes was the general of an invading army. Judith seduced him and maneuvered her way into his tent. She slaked him with wine and cut off his head.

“Then what happened?” I asked, but the placard didn’t say and Rachel was already in the next room.

THE NEXT DAY, there are cars parked in double rows along the common, and all the shops on the high street are closed. The Duck and Cover is closed, and the Miller’s Arms. The only open office belongs to the town solicitor, who tells me that today is Callum Hold’s funeral.

I don’t have anything else to do, so I find a bench on the common. From here, there is no sign of the two hundred people inside the church. Its wooden doors are closed. Every so often a twist of smoke rises from its chimney. The garden beside it, with thin stone tablets under the cedar elm, is quiet. The church looks cold and empty, the stained glass black and glossy as oil.

Above me the yews creak in the wind. The town didn’t shut down for Rachel. Or maybe the shops did close. I wouldn’t have noticed. The day is bleak, and I stuff my hands in my pockets and pull my scarf over my mouth.

I think about the Cross Keys and the red half-height doors in the toilets. I still can’t remember what happened there. Every time I think of it, my stomach drops, as it does when I remember something shameful.

With a sound like a gate being lowered, the church doors open. The family appears to be the first to come out. They’re down from Stoke, said the town solicitor. There isn’t a coffin.

Callum died in September. The solicitor told me the family waited to have the funeral until his best friend returned from a tour in Afghanistan. I can’t tell who he is. The best man, in a way. There are a lot of men around Callum’s age, and they all look gutted.

More and more people exit the church. They spill onto the common, near where I sit. I unwind my red scarf and stuff it in my pocket since it marks me out too much. I listen to the voices, which are low and somber. Some of the men and women are still crying freely. People form groups near the open doors of the church, on its lawn, in the middle of the road along the common. I don’t see Louise. I wouldn’t go either, if I were her.

The reception is in Brightwell. Someone has rented the manor lodge. I know the building, which is long and low, with three turrets. When they host weddings, they fly white pennants from the turrets. I wonder if there will be flags today, and what color they will be.

When I go out again later the shops and pubs are still closed, their owners out in Brightwell. I imagine the young men I saw outside the church standing on the lawn in front of the lodge and smoking.

KEITH HAS GAINED WEIGHT. He looks like a different man from the one who approached me on the aqueduct.

We are drawing closer. Today, he did leave a checkout line when I stood behind him. He put a full basket of food down and fled. People noticed, and after he had gone a number of them stared at me, as though they wanted to ask me what had just happened and what it meant.

• • •

Early in the evening, I run into Lewis on Meeting House Lane. “Want to go for a walk?” he says. “I could use a break.”

I nod, though it’s not really a break for him, anytime he talks to me he is working. I wonder what he thinks he might still discover. His legs are longer than mine, but he walks slowly, like we’re only out for a stroll.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“Brixton.”

“I like Brixton.”

“All of you like Brixton,” he says.

“Fuck off,” I say, but he’s smiling, and I remember that he knows about how we grew up. I can’t tell him about Paul Wheeler, not until I’ve decided what to do. I wish I could stop seeing his face.

“Where in Brixton?”

“Loughborough.”

“I can see Loughborough from my flat.”

“How did you know what it was?”

“I wanted to know what I was looking at.”

We walk past the rill, which is frozen now. You could walk on it instead of on the planks laid across it.

“Why did you become a policeman?”

“For a day job,” he says. “I was a musician. You have a lot of time on your own as a constable. A lot of time walking. I spent it composing songs.”

“Were you in Brixton?”

“No, Barnes, where nothing ever happened,” he says.

“What’s your first name?”

“Winston.”

“If I look you up, will I find any of your music?”

“No,” he says, “definitely not.”

I wonder what confidences he expects in exchange for this, but I don’t have any. I wish I did. We both know he shouldn’t have told me that, he should have said he wanted to help people.

“Do you miss London?” I ask.

“Yes. Do you?”

“I don’t know.” We start down the high street. “I was jealous of Rachel for living here. I hate London sometimes.”

“Centuries of people,” says Lewis, his low voice cresting up and down, “have hated London.”

The town is quiet. A few people are running errands. Coming calmly out of shops, unlocking their cars or walking down the pavements. Behind us is the rosy light in the church tower.

“Do you?” I ask.

“No,” he says. We walk past the bakery, and the queue inside it for bread and cakes. “I hate this.” We walk past the wine shop and the building society. “No grit. No culture. It’s boring.”

We reach the train station and return to the common on the north side of the road.

“It’s placid.”

“Exactly,” he says.

We walk past the chip shop. I stare in its window and then down the road, astonished. “It’s like Snaith,” I say. “It’s like the town where we grew up.”

“We always repeat our mistakes,” says Lewis.

“I never realized before. It’s like Snaith but farther south.”

“And with money,” says Lewis, and I nod. The only difference is that time has been kind to this town and not to Snaith.