Box Hill Read online

  I walked as far as the Thatched Bridge and then doubled back. My leg still isn’t right, and I was thinking of heading for the tea room and a sit down. I took what looked like a short cut in the direction I wanted, passing through what was almost a tunnel in the bushes. Branches came down almost to my head height. Then I stopped short.

  What I was looking at was row after row of little graves. A tiny churchyard. All of the graves had the full set: name, date of birth and death — 26 February 1908 – 30 Jan 1924 was one — and tender inscriptions. Ever lively companion… mourn his loss. The works.

  It was a bad moment for me, and even a few years ago I’d have found it shattering, to realise that the Grevilles had a cemetery for their dogs. Seventeen of them. For Caesar, for Tyke, for Prince Chang and the rest. For the dog with the most sweetly stabbing name of all, the West Highlander known as Little Fidelity. The Grevilles had seventeen graves to visit when they missed their dogs. And I have nowhere to visit when I want to remember Ray. With the scanty information I have, I might have seen his gravestone already and not have known it.

  If Ray had died in a plane crash, if he’d been shredded and scattered, I’d be in a better position than I am, because I’d know there was no help for it. I’d understand the reasons. And nobody would be any better off than me, there’d be nobody keeping a secret. But knowing I’m the only one to be kept in the dark makes it feel like it’s me that’s been singled out for shredding and scattering.

  That was when I decided. After I saw the dogs’ cemetery. I checked the tea room first, in case Mum had tired early and gone for some refreshment, and then I paid the extra three quid to go inside the house and retrieve her. I told her I’d like to have tea somewhere else, if she didn’t mind, at Box Hill. Box Hill where the bikers used to go on a Sunday. And still do I expect, only it’s no-one I know.

  The drive took only ten minutes, between one National Trust property and another. Two treasures of different types. There’s no antique silver and no rose garden at Box Hill, but there’s no doubt it’s the more important asset. It’s been a beauty spot for centuries, it’s in books, it’s in paintings, there were a million visitors last year. Box Hill came to the National Trust thirty years before the Grevilles let go of Polesden Lacey.

  I’d always thought that I would need to visit the place where Ray died, the bend and the tree on the B337, to finish things between us. At least I have a rough address for that moment in his life. I’d been thinking of asking Simon who shares the house to drive me one weekend, except I’ve not said a great deal to him about Ray, so it might seem strange.

  A few weeks ago he was up in the attic and he found the martial arts magazines that I’d taken from Cardinals Paddock as a way of getting a little shelf room there. He took it for granted I’d want them throwing out, but I couldn’t do it. Even though they were yellowed with age — it looked as if the years had peed on them, and still I couldn’t let them go, having nothing else. And Simon had the kindness not to ask me why not.

  He’s even helped in the past when he really didn’t know or care what it was all about. It’s a mistake to think that friends need to know everything about each other. Simon did the driving when I wanted to take some pictures for a class, of a unique little church that I’d mentioned in class often enough but never actually visited, God forgive me. Greensted Green in Essex, which pioneered the parish system before there were even parishes. What I mean is, the lord of the manor moved away and the church had to organise its survival on a new basis. So an interesting place in terms of church history, quite apart from architectural merit.

  Simon drove, and then lay on a convenient bench in the churchyard sleeping off the pub lunch that had been the reward for his trouble. Completely uninterested in what I was goggling at and taking pictures of, a nave built of Saxon oak, simply split tree-trunks set side by side, with long tongues of wood fitting in grooves between them to seal the gaps. The oldest wooden building standing in Europe. The oldest wooden church in the world. Not to mention a picturesque churchyard, bees going about their business, bushes in flower and berry, a crusader’s tomb with a low railing round it. He couldn’t care less, bless him.

  But it wasn’t going to be Simon helping me with my past, it was going to be Mum, even if she was too tactful to mention Ray’s name. Mum and I didn’t talk much on the drive to Box Hill, and perhaps it wasn’t quite like our usual companionable silences. I was thinking that I’d told Mum too early that widowhood was not going to be the worst part of her life, that she owed it to herself to have a good time. It sounded heartless, it sounded disloyal, but it was the truth. It wasn’t going to be the worst part of her life because the worst was over — the second half of her marriage.

  We’ve never talked about the reasons for Dad’s stubborn decline over twenty years. Perhaps it’ll be my turn this Christmas to open and close a huge subject in a single conversation. Perhaps while I’m sticking cards on the picture rail and the mantelpiece, and Mum lays out crackers on side plates, I’ll say, ‘You know what happened to Dad, don’t you?’

  Because it’s not complicated. When my little Dad stood up on his wedding day and said he took this woman till death did them part, he was only thinking of one way that could happen. He was eleven years older, he thought he was safe. Death would take him and leave her, to manage on her own. That would never happen to him.

  Then when Mum went to hospital in 1975, he suddenly realised it didn’t need to be like that. She might die, and he be left. He never really recovered from the knowledge of that moment. He was a changed man. He didn’t decide to die, exactly, but he was determined to get his dying in first, to stay safe and not face life without her. Never mind that from that day on he did something worse, before he widowed her.

  With any luck all I’ll need to say will be, ‘You know what happened to Dad, don’t you?’, and she’ll say, without even looking up, ‘Yes, he needed to be the one who died first,’ and then we’ll just get on with Christmas.

  So on the way to Box Hill in Mum’s car I was bound to be preoccupied with the past, but it may also be that she was thinking of her own problems. We both know this will be her last year driving, before her arthritis shuts down that part of her life. It’s only a short time since she started to have a little freedom again, but she’s cheerful about it. She even says she’s looking forward to selling the car and getting an electric buggy to take her to the shops. That’s silly, of course. All very valiant, but she knows I’d do her shopping for her. Having a son next door, let alone a son she calls her bestest and only, she won’t be short of help. And Simon who shares the house is always offering to help. In fact he’s over there so often, seeing if anything needs fixing, that I wonder if it’s not him that needs the company.

  It’s trips like these she’ll miss. It took me a long time to get her out of the house after Dad died. She’d got out of the habit. It was as if she’d been infected over the years by his fear of the world outside. I had to take drastic measures to break her isolation. Then when she told me there was this club she wanted to join, it would give her a bit of a social life, only she couldn’t face it unless I joined too, I felt I couldn’t say no, even though it’s pretty embarrassing.

  I can cope with being called Brainiac at work, with being asked the meanings of fancy words, and to help with application forms and difficult letters, but I’m not sure I could live with it if word got out. It’s bad enough being a self-taught late learner, that’s an opsimath and an autodidact, without your workmates knowing the shameful truth. That you have a membership of Mensa, not only that but you share it with your Mum. Well, they’ve a reduced rate for people who share an address, and she does only live next door, so it seemed silly not to go for that option. It’s in our names jointly, but the bumf comes to her address.

  By rights I should take the summer to get my driving licence, but Mum says I mustn’t unless I actually want the car for myself. I know she doesn’t
hide things from me, and I’ve learned to take what she says at face value. I haven’t quite made up my mind. But for myself, personally, what use do I have for a car?

  There were only a few bikes by Ryka’s the café at the bottom of the hill. Ryka’s for bikers. I directed Mum up the approach to the Zigzag. The curves are sharp even for four-wheeled transport, vehicles you don’t have to balance. They’ve put speed bumps down since 1981. Ray lived and died before traffic calming measures. He lived and died before car alarms that get skittish in windy weather and scream the place down. I wonder what he’d have made of those. I can imagine him riding close to parked cars — close but still safe — just to set them off.

  We stopped at the top of the hill, by the servery and the shop and the information centre. Mum didn’t have to pay to park, thanks to being a member of the National Trust, but I noticed there was no reduction for motorbikes. They have to pay the full £1.50 to Pay and Display, which seems steep, steep as the hill itself. I gave the parking attendant a bit of a grilling about that. What he said was, We don’t discriminate, which I thought was a bit dishonest. Is it discrimination to let kids under five ride my Tube for free? Discriminating is just what they’re doing by making out that two different things are the same. But I kept my mouth shut. The attendant pointed out a bit defensively that there’s a special grassy area for bikes, so they don’t have to take their chances on loose gravel.

  All very well, but it’s clear what’s really going on. The Trust doesn’t like the ruffians who gather lower down the Hill. The Trust will do all it can to keep riff-raff away from the Information Centre and Shop. In the pamphlets they sell at the Shop they’ll tell you about the several protected species of bat that have colonised the underground chambers of the fort near the Centre, but nothing about the bikers who have colonised the place above ground. They lower the tone. That’s what the pamphlet really means, when it says that ‘special care is needed to protect the natural beauty of the hill’. Bikers push off.

  Mum sat down at a picnic table while I queued for my tea and Mum’s coffee. I had a chat with the lady who was working in the Servery. I came clean about my biker past. She told me that these days the approach to the hill, the A24 from Givons Grove roundabout, is heavily policed on a Sunday, to prevent racing. There used to be a lot of racing on that stretch, a lot of boy racer and speed merchant activity. Not only do they patrol heavily, but Surrey County Council recently voted on a motion to ban bikes from the hill altogether. Box Hill without the bikers on Sunday, it’s impossible to imagine. The motion was voted down, but the anti-bike forces are sure to try again. I wonder how Ryka’s Caff will deal with the threat to its livelihood. I can’t see them taking it lying down.

  Mum left half her coffee. She’s particular about coffee. The Servery at Box Hill won the Trust’s 1997 award for most hygienic food preparation environment. Now, according to Mum, all they have to do is make their hygienically prepared coffee taste of something nice.

  I suggested we drive a bit further on, to see if there was another place that would do a better cup. We kept on going, past the panorama, where people have looked down from the Downs for hundreds of years. Mum asked if I wanted to get out for a look — she’d stay in the car — but I said no. That wasn’t the kind of perspective I was hoping to get from this day.

  I could have looked for the actual tree that Ray had been leaning against all those years ago, but that wasn’t something I needed either. Ray might have had his ashes scattered at the foot of that very tree, and I would never know it. I have to make my own peace. The leaves of the box are ovate, entire, smooth, thick, coriaceous and dark green, ovate meaning egg-shaped. Entire meaning undivided. Coriaceous meaning leather-like. I looked that one up. Leaves that look or feel like leather.

  I’m forced back on the only theory that makes sense, that explains why I had to lose Ray so completely when he died. He was the son of a great family. He lived his life in defiance of his station, but he couldn’t stop the suffocating world he’d rejected from taking him back when he died, to the grand tomb of his ancestors. Tomb or vault. Grave with a low railing, whatever.

  To the right of the road, past the panorama, we saw a pub that offered cream teas in an annexe. Mum knows I like a cream tea, and she pulled in. The pub was called Boxhills. There was a sign fixed to the fence by where we parked, announcing it as the highest tavern in Surrey.

  While we waited for our order to be brought, I tried to work out why I didn’t remember this pub from 1975, although I did seem to remember the sign on the fence. My memory is fairly reliable, and it bothered me that I couldn’t make the sum add up. Then I realised that this wasn’t a pub at all back then. Back then this was a Wimpy Bar. This was the Wimpy Bar where I ate my burger after leaving Ted to booze, all those years ago, just before I met Ray.

  And there was a reason for me to remember the Surrey’s Highest Tavern sign, hanging in a place I didn’t recognise. It didn’t used to be here. It used to be displayed outside the Hand in Hand down the road, where Ted did his boozing that day. Of course there’s not much point in keeping the sign when you’ve lost the title — though there can only be a few inches in it. I wonder if there was a bitter wrangle between the rival landlords in the middle of Box Hill Road, or maybe a tipsy little procession and a mock-earnest ceremony of handing over the sign and the title.

  You wouldn’t think people would care about the height above sea level of a pub, one way or the other. It’s hard to imagine someone saying, ‘Let’s have a jar in the Hand in Hand’, and his mate saying, ‘No, let’s go to Boxhills, it’s higher — it’s the highest tavern in Surrey.’ But people can care about anything.