Nature and Necessity Read online

  Nature and Necessity

  Praise for Nature and Necessity

  This is a wonderfully in-depth journey into the lives of a remarkable family led by Petula, the ultimate, ruthless matriarch. It is not just a journey in time, with family events leading to a compelling, affectionate and dramatic denouement, but a journey in prose, too. Because every sentence is a delight to read, crafted with an intricate yet intuitive design that makes the words themselves every bit as compelling as the plot. For this excellent reason, it is not an airport novel as every sentence deserves to be savored and many lingered over for their originality, inner meaning and insights into this wonderfully dysfunctional family. Its portrayal of country life has an enviable authenticity which means it is surely cut from real life. But it is sculpted to have a special significance and theme that raises it above ordinary reality. It is the story of a family, dark, deep, funny and, above all, likeable. I’m missing Petula and her children already.

  Pat Mills, Creator of 2000AD.

  A vast, immersive family saga, this book insists on the mud in blood, the wood in flesh – the astounding inextricability of the human animal from the earth in which it was formed. Goddard shows us that blood-relations are exactly that – bloody. This is nature writing at its most intensely observed, and ever mindful of our position within the colossal movements of the world. The ‘necessity’ of the title is inarguable.

  Niall Griffiths, Author of Grits.

  Tariq Goddard is good on houses and the people who inhabit them and the interplay between the inanimate and the humans who ascribe the inanimate with qualities that vary from the banal to the outré.

  In this instance the humans are snobbish, social climbing Yorkshire bohemians, gruesome people whose mores, pretences and hierarchical delusions are pungently portrayed. Their children are unspeakable. Their aquaintances include a marvellous caricature of Ted Hughes and some deftly drawn theatre folk. The book is a stern warning not to venture north of the Humber – though it is of course possible that such monsters of self-preoccupation may be found in, say, Cranborne Chase.

  Jonathan Meades, Author of An Encyclopaedia of Myself.

  Also by Tariq Goddard

  Homage To A Firing Squad (2002)

  Dynamo (2003)

  The Morning Rides Behind Us (2005)

  The Picture of Contented New Wealth (2009)

  The Message (2011)

  TARIQ GODDARD

  Nature and Necessity

  For my children, Lola, Spike and Titus, and in memory of their grandfather, David John Goddard, 1926–2013.

  In memory of Mark Fisher (1968–2017).

  In memory of Sara Hammond (1975–2017).

  The rat race is for rats.

  – Jimmy Reid

  Necessity is the kingdom of nature; freedom is the kingdom of grace.

  – Arthur Schopenhauer

  Prologue

  Even though they were mother and daughter they were known mostly as ‘the sisters’. It was a union that would lead them both into lives they wished they had not had. Petula, a divisive redhead and social titan, was their leader; Regan, the third of her children, and first in command, her mother’s life project and puckish enforcer. Whether people embraced them or not depended on their daring, and the sisters’ initiative, for they were tireless initiators. From the start, there were an elect few for whom they would perform, and countless extras who were expected to do the performing. Their criteria for deciding who fell where was unattainable by effort alone. What the performers thought of this depended on whether they were picked for the first team, or left on the bench to wonder and fade. For many it proved an elusive code to break; the sisters enjoyed mysteries and gave little away. Others remained tantalised to the end, waiting for the postcard, telephone call or text that would usher them up the hill for an audience at The Heights.

  For over thirty-five years, the sisters could be found in the village of Mockery Gap, a setting too beautiful for most natives to be allowed to live out their days in. Though northern, the village shared many features with its southern siblings; young professionals and their families, a smattering of overdevelopment and a nest of millionaire residences where labourers’cottages once stood. The house the sisters lived in, The Heights, was saved from literary comparisons by being one of three attractive buildings on the same farm, the second and third dwellings demonstrating their inferiority by their state of evolving dis repair and inhabitants’ vocations. Of these houses, the best that could be said was that their names, like cities swapping hands in a civil war, came to take meanings appropriate to the sisters’ changing attitudes towards their inhabitants. The bigger of the two houses, Tianta, Celtic for ‘Fighter’ or ‘Warrior’ – there was confusion over which – was occupied by Jasper, son and brother to the sisters, and found halfway up the hill. When the sisters were unhappy with Jasper they called this house ‘The Pimple’. Lower down the hill was Chudleigh, the home of the Hardfields, a family that came with the estate; theirs a smaller cottage that the sisters dubbed ‘The Wart’ whether they were happy with them or not.

  Though it gave the appearance of being a working farm, The Heights was a front for the good life, despite Petula’s insistence to the contrary. The facts were that the estate and its peacocks, guinea fowl, geese and free-range hens were largely decorative, the production of eggs and the making of money mostly incidental to their existence there. The same principle held for the prize-winning pigs that paraded yearly through the village every Bullrush Fair, never finding their way onto the breakfast table or butcher’s counter, and the farm donkey, Caligula, who photographed well for the children’s section of Yorkshire Life, garlands of orange peel and seashells hanging from his obliging mane. The oilseed rape and wheat fields snaking round The Heights were no different, merely the agricultural trimmings of a painting whose real subject matter lay elsewhere. Nearly all of the arable land was leased to local farmers. These quietly embittered men owned the grazing cattle and sheep that completed an atmosphere of rural industry. The real money for the lavish upkeep of The Heights came from factory-farms in the Philippines, owned by Petula’s estranged husband, and the rest of her bucolic high jinks supplemented by warehouse complexes outside Sheffield and Leeds. All this left Petula free to publicly pursue the official business of the farm, a highly convoluted and inimitable form of flower arranging.

  This highly visible, and largely unprofitable, occupation enjoyed a reputation and profile well in excess of its annual turnover, allowing Petula to compare it to opera, a similar loss-making but culturally necessary venture. Running her company seasonally, Petula specialised in pink and white tulips, purple iris and apple blossom in spring. With the arrival of summer, she turned to blue cornflowers, delicate cow parsley and bobbing cosmos, and in winter deep-red holly berries, trailing ivy and twisted twigs. Her clients were mostly local markets, a few ladies who made scents, and weddings, though Petula’s reputation for wanting to control every aspect of these kept bookings to a trickle. For the most part the flowers died where they grew, were thrown away or donated to schools, churches and charity. Petula took it all in her formidable stride. Her real passion, she said, was the house; once a modest Arts and Crafts cottage, now arguably the most attractive dwelling in the county. The Heights had evolved into her calling, its changing interiors, paintings, sculpture and furnishings the equal of a museum, if not an interactive installation in its own right. It was her creation, so she felt, the product of rare taste and persistent endeavour, its aesthetic glory her triumph and how she wished the world to see her. It did not matter if this display failed to reflect truth, as even in her own company, Petula did not see things as they were but as she wished others to, the public self the only one she would
acknowledge, even to Regan. And so the years passed as a reflection of what she thought they were, an unpreventable march towards what she preferred to call ‘modest local success’.

  As first witness to Petula, Regan saw it all. Fanaticism ran in the blood, and her early devotion to her mother bordered on the ideological. The imperative to remain loyal was inculcated into the children, though in Regan’s case there was little need to go to such lengths; she was a natural disciple. The first eyes she saw life through were Petula’s, and as her mother rooted for herself, it was natural for Regan to root for her too. For years it was impossible for her to separate her mother’s interests and battles from her own. Conflict was the pillow Petula slept on, fluffing it up when it threatened to become too comfortable a fit. Because she was loud, opinionated and forthright, her children assumed she told the world what it did not want to hear, the heresy that she might be audacious and possessed by her own fictions rarely crossing their minds. It shocked Regan especially that Petula’s construction of reality could be misconstrued as caprice, and those who thought so were isolated, demonised and set upon with relish. In the event, cruel whispers did little to dent the high regard Petula was held in, at least at the public events she policed, and disapproval was usually forced to take strange and subterranean forms.

  Victory over her adversaries did not bring love. The difficulty with Petula’s indefatigability was that little got close to it, and as people can only love what they enjoy true knowledge of, Petula had to make do with several approximations of the real thing. Love became shorthand for what her admirers really felt – intense esteem at the battling example she set, awe even, but never love. So far as that was concerned she remained an unknown object.

  Perhaps this was why a shrill current of hurt was often noticeable in her voice, a primary wound she had no intention of closing. Without completely meaning to, she cultivated it, filling it with generous helpings of fresh pain, until the morning came when she awoke to find hurt installed as the organising principle of her life.

  ‘Regan,’ said Petula, tearing open the blinds, ‘how long have you been up? I wish you wouldn’t put the lights on when there’s perfectly good sunshine outside, you know I hate artificial light, it makes me feel like I’m living in perennial winter. It’s cold enough in here as it is.’

  ‘It is November.’

  ‘November my teeth, November’s for sad old things to freeze to death in. We’re not sad old things, for us there’s no such thing as autumn.’

  Regan thumbed the switch leaving the room at the mercy of blinding, blazing sunlight. She was dressed in purple silk pyjamas, the kind worn by oriental courtesans or a pantomime Aladdin, and in spite of her slightly boyish attire, was a green-eyed thirty-two year-old woman in her prime. Her face was tight, pinched and angular; the skin stretched over a wrinkleless diamond consisting of a triangular chin, mountaintop cheekbones, and a skull worthy of donation to medicine, sitting on a neck of geometrical elegance. When Regan smiled, her expression grew so taut that her mother joked it could be steamed off with a whistling kettle, others finding it alluring, if not a little severe in construction.

  ‘But my birthday is in November…’

  ‘I wouldn’t go on about that if I were you, nothing with a zero behind it is good news.’

  ‘I’ll be thirty-three, no, two.’

  ‘Rubbish, you’re twenty-nine, aren’t you? We haven’t had your thirtieth yet.’

  ‘We put up a marquee for it Mum, there was lots of noise and people kept using your bathroom. It all definitely happened.’

  ‘Is there something the matter with you?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You seem to be talking through your teeth, are you nervous about something?’

  ‘No, no, I don’t think so… why, are you?’

  ‘How could I be in all this glorious sunshine?’

  The kitchen they stood in was the throne room of The Heights. It sat at the closing stages of a long and broad corridor that connected the two wings of the house, Petula’s half and Regan’s end, two mounted stacks either side of a tunnel, the shape of the building resembling a double-headed arrow with weighted tips. Large windows ensured good views and little privacy from prying eyes, which was how Petula liked it, the world looking in to see the sisters looking back. With its exposed position on top of a hill, living in The Heights was akin to joining passengers on a great cruise liner, the upper deck battered by the wind and rain, while down below a party presided, with the two tiers, the storm and the supper, never quite reconciled.

  ‘Has Brickwall moved those sheep yet? They can hardly walk, little wonder Vesey doesn’t want them in the village where everyone can see the poor shape they’re in.’ Petula did not like silence, even if she did not care much about sheep.

  ‘I can’t remember, has he?’

  ‘I wish you’d take more interest in the farm, I can’t keep everything going on my own forever.’

  ‘Oh you can.’

  ‘Don’t. If I didn’t chase, harry and harangue, those poor animals would be crawling round on their chins, eating stumps. Call themselves farmers? It’d make me laugh if it didn’t make me ill,’ Petula winced, her bad ankle tense and swollen. ‘They can’t look after their own clothes, let alone livestock. I’ve already written to your father about it, fat lot of use, but he may as well know what’s going on, it’s his “farm” after all.’

  It was a rare admission of reality and both women blanched at being reminded of the power relation that maintained them, for although they were separated and Petula exercised nominal control of The Heights on a vast allowance, she did not own the building – only a few of the newer objects in it. Most assumed she came from money, or was divorced and the house was hers, misconceptions she did nothing to discourage.

  ‘To hell with the man, he only remembers us when it suits him.’

  Petula was tall, full-breasted and heavier than she looked, without being in the slightest bit fat. Her shoulder-length hair was burnt-red, and her wide shoulders and long forearms exuded Amazonian fortitude, last tested pulling down the jodhpurs of the master of the local hunt a week earlier. Despite her immense strength of character, her body was failing her, the act of sitting painful for her lower back and knees; and avoiding the temptation to flop on a chair, having only been awake for ten minutes, she practically shouted:

  ‘And I suppose nothing’s been done about the hot water either?’

  ‘He said Skinner will come next week.’

  ‘Skinner! Next week, first as tragedy then as farce! I’d sooner knock the pipes down myself. It was his fault we’re in this mess, I told your father not to hire him, they never listen. It’s like the Hampton Court Maze up in that attic. You’d think they’d take some pride in their work. Heaven knows, I do in mine. As I get older I become more open about my faults and infinitely more forgiving about those of others,’ she lied, ‘but that man really does take the full St Michael.’

  The habit of blaming others ran deep in Petula, starting with her father, moving on to her husbands, settling on her son, and always primed to affix itself to various tradesmen, farmers and lovers. There was no disguising that it was usually men who fulfilled this role, or that hers was a life (and family) a lot of men had run away from. Men were like children to Petula: it was not good to let them make decisions for themselves too early on, yet by the time they came of age they took them to spite her earlier care.

  Petula squinted and pursed her flinty lips. ‘Is that Jazzy out there by the bird table?’ The sky had tipped to one side, as if God was having trouble seeing straight, and in the bifurcating light Petula could make out a figure, its silhouette giving off an aura of agitation in defeat.

  ‘It could be, he likes to feed the birds.’

  ‘He’s been saying that all year and I still end up doing it, I’ve learnt not to set my watch by hope with that boy.’

  ‘He’s having a hard time, I think.’

  ‘He is a hard time.’
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  ‘He’s unlucky.’ Until quite recently, Regan had clung to the belief that her mother was a fair person given to an unfeasibly large number of unfair remarks. ‘And he hasn’t learnt to budget properly.’

  ‘Life isn’t fair on those of us whose backbones are made of self-pity. You can’t confuse karma with morality. What you deserve isn’t always fair. Morality is the stuff of judgement, but life is an energy. Jazzy is all one and none of the other.’

  Regan nodded, ‘In a way.’ With all the goodwill she could scrape together, a condition and activity she was more troubled by than proficient in, she knew her brother’s life stratagem was roughly predicated on her mother, her father or herself ‘carking’ it, preferably at one and the same time, and found that she could best love him on occasions, such as those that had existed for the past few years, when her mother did not.

  Petula moved her long fingers over the Aga, their tips dancing nervously upon the heat. ‘What time did you ask him to come over?’

  ‘Two, the same time as everyone else, it was on the invites I thought. Did you want to get him on his own first?’

  ‘Never mind him, are you sure they’re all coming?’

  ‘I think so, I rang around and asked like you said I should, and told them it was important, like you asked me to. They all said they would be here; at least, everyone I talked to did.’

  ‘Do you think your insisting made the difference?’

  ‘To their coming?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Perhaps, no, they would have come anyway. They love it here, you know that, it’s their spiritual home, what was it Hall calls it, a “magical kingdom”?’

  ‘That man is an obsequious creep, but happily not wrong about everything.’

  Petula regulated her circle through large and frequent meals, the superlatives used to describe them as grandiloquent and sticky as the marmalade-glazed hams consumed by the privileged attendees. For her family, rather than friends, these occasions were somewhat less looked-forward-to. A few even approached them with trepidation; a call from The Heights taking on the role of a high-court summons. In the past few months assorted relatives had done the hitherto unthinkable and failed to show on demand. This fed into a perverse aspect of Petula’s statecraft. There was nothing more likely to rouse her than someone she considered beneath her appearing to not want her. The recalcitrant absentees had to be reined in before their quiet escape attempts became a full-blown stampede. Petula had struggled to think of an occasion to get them all back, and still had not made her mind up when she gave Regan the order to wheel them in again. ‘Masterly inactivity’ was not her style, action was paramount, even if a plan or point had yet to be put in place.