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NATIVE RITES
© David Hewson 1999Page 2 of 400
Michaelmas
It was the third week of September and the harvest was late. The air was alivewith the sharp, sweet smell of cut wheat and barley. Specks of straw hung in thefeeble breeze, glittering in the mellow late afternoon sun. Alison Fenway satnaked on the edge of the big double bed, trying to order her thoughts.Miles lay on the sheets, curled into the shape of a lazy apostrophe, a cat-like smile on his handsome face. His hair was turning a touch grey over the earsnow. Too soon, she thought, at just thirty five. There was no fat on his lean,muscular body.“Is it really only two months?” she asked and wondered how well herAmerican accent fitted into the Georgian splendour of the place, whether thewalls heard her intonation and tut-tutted inwardly to themselves.He rolled his eyes at the ceiling, thinking. “Good God, yes. It just flew,didn’t it?”Dimly, she could recall the day she left the hospital in the Catskills, mindstill a bitter, reeling whirl. There was a car ride, a flight, tortured sleep, thenEngland, home for Miles, always somewhere foreign to her. The weather hadbeen unseasonably kind. The motorway began as a familiar, choking serpent of urban congestion, until they veered south, into Kent where the countrysideappeared out of nowhere: flat open farmland and, in the distance, the high ridgeof the Downs. Then a final wriggle through narrow, winding lanes, scarcelywide enough to take two cars, and they were nearly there.Her first sight of Beulah was from the valley near Wye. The village laypast a spectacular chalk horse cut high into the Downs above, at the top of thetortuous climb of Vipers Hill. She sat in the passenger seat in silence, her mindtrying to embrace the idea that the city was behind them. It had seemed to makesense when Miles had first raised the notion. But that was
after.
Anything wouldhave made sense, any escape plan from the city and its vivid, searing memories.He had inherited the house just after she “fell ill”. He had shown her pictures inthe hospital, and she had nodded. It meant she was moving again. Her dead
NATIVE RITES
© David Hewson 1999Page 3 of 400
father’s voice haunted her, the Boston brogue cold and hard:
We all need a goal, Alison. Time you remembered that.
The car had rolled over the top of the hill, dived into a sudden zig-zag of sharp bends, then sauntered along a dead straight avenue of poplars wavingsoftly in the morning breeze.Something was happening on the village green: colour and people,games and rituals. They had stopped outside a three-storey Georgian mansionso vast she thought it was a hotel. And, like the shining knight he was, MilesFenway had carried her, grinning, over the threshold, into Priory House, shownher around its myriad corners, the vast farmhouse kitchen and the airy, high-ceilinged rooms. Later, they walked through the sprawling rear garden of lawn,herbaceous border and errant vegetable beds, hand in hand, like childrenentering some secret paradise.In each life, she knew, there was a pivotal point where a single, smalldecision determined the direction of everything that happened thereafter.Entering Beulah and discovering Priory House was one of these. It would havebeen so easy to have rejected it. To have realised that this was no way to find anew home, begin a new beginning, simply on the basis of some distant bloodties, a property deed passed on from one generation to the next. There was aninstant when she could have shook her head and said:
No
.
I make my own life. Ichoose my own places.
The words ran though her head… and fell silently away. In front of theancient, heat-blackened Aga in the vast farmhouse kitchen she had kissed Miles,grateful that he knew when to lead and when to sit back. Her acceptance, andthe feeling of relief that came with it, were still etched on her memory. This
would
work out. They deserved a break, at last.Alison took one last, long suck of the cigarette then stubbed it out, half finished, on the ashtray that sat on the windowsill. There was no reason tosmoke after sex. This was habit, a clichéd habit at that. She didn’t even enjoy itthese days. They needed to make love, at the right time, for all the right reasons.Tobacco had no place in the game. It tasted foul. She could smell herself sometimes. And when she lit the damned thing, when there was that brief spurt
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