2
Black-eyed Dog
LOL PLANNED HIS suicide with all the precision missing from his life.
He drew curtains across the small, leaded windows facing the lane and the orchard. The curtains were cheap and thin but they took away the brightness of the morning. And also meant that Alison would not be able to look through the windows for his body.
On the turntable, Lol placed his third, already-worn copy of Nick Drake’s first album,
The album hissed and clicked into ‘Time Has Told Me’, veined through with Richard Thompson’s serene guitar. Lol went outside to check on the milk. With the bright mornings, the milkman had been arriving earlier of late. So the bottle was already on the step.
OK. He went back for another bottle from the fridge – yesterday’s, unopened – and set it down next to the new one. Then he shut the door and went to explain to Ethel, kneeling down on the carpet, looking into the unmoving green-gold eyes.
‘I’m going to have to shut you in. It won’t be for long. Don’t want you looking for me, OK?’
Ethel looked unconvinced, licked red mud from a paw. She was technically a stray, or maybe dumped. He’d heard this piteous mewling two nights running in the middle of January and finally found this thing in the hedge, about five inches long and not much thicker than a piece of black hosepipe. At first, Alison had not been pleased, displaying that hard edge he used to think would eventually wear away in the country. But on the morning she left, she said she was glad Lol had Ethel. Something for him to feel responsible for.
Lol went into the kitchen and didn’t put the toaster on; the smell of hot toast was one of the great scents of life. It would be hard to die with the smell of hot toast in the air. He didn’t switch on the radio either. He didn’t rake out the woodstove. He sat down at the table, facing the pot of Women’s Institute plum jam. He pulled off the rubber band and the parchment top, smelling the sweetness.
‘You should’ve told me,’ he said to the jam.
Meaning he should have realized. This was the last of the three pots Alison had brought back from the Women’s Institute. The day after she brought it, she’d told him herself and he’d just broken down into tears, here at this table, with the shock.
He’d always been naive. As a kid. As a songwriter. But naivety was something you were supposed to grow out of, like spots.
At the time, the idea of Alison joining all the farmers’ wives at the WI had seemed, OK, a little bizarre. But also kind of quaint and homely. It showed that coming here had really worked. It made him want to become part of the community too, a bellringer or something. Keep chickens, grow tomatoes for the chutney Alison would learn to make ... at the WI.
How had it begun? He didn’t know. Everyone else in the village seemed to know – the new woman in the life of the Squire of Upper Hall, that was bound to be a talking point. But there was nobody who’d have told Lol. He was a stranger, even to all the village newcomers. Lucy Devenish might have broken it to him, but he hadn’t known her then, in those long, hazy days of trying to get vegetables to grow and watching Alison’s easy smile slowly stiffen in her beautiful face.
Lol’s chin dropped into the crumbs on the kitchen table. All he wanted was to know why.
He closed his eyes and saw Alison riding, as she did almost every day, down the bridleway from Upper Hall, along the edge of the orchard and out into Blackberry Lane just before the cottage gate.
She was on her chestnut stallion. Alison knew a lot about horses and rode this one with something like contempt. It looked muscular and spectacularly masculine, a thoroughbred beast she could make a gesture out of being able to handle with no particular effort. Like Bull-Davies himself, who was the horse’s owner but would never, Lol was sure, be Alison’s.
He’d kept watching out for her, convinced she’d come back. For several weeks he’d really thought she would. Then he’d thought that one day she would at least dismount, lead the horse to the door, explain what had happened between them. But the morning ride always ended with an apparently casual glance towards the cottage, to see the smoke from the chimney, signs of life, signs of Lol’s survival ... before Alison and the stallion turned, both heads high, back into the bridleway.
Today there would be no smoke.
‘You all right, mate?’
Lol’s eyes had shuddered open when the knock came at the front door.
‘Oh.’ He didn’t know how long he must have been staring at the postman. ‘Sorry. Do I have to sign for it?’
‘No, I just couldn’t get it through the letter box, could I?’
‘Oh,’ Lol said. ‘Right. Sorry. Thanks very much.’
‘Your milk’s come.’
‘Oh ... I’ll come back for it. Thanks.’
‘Cheers,’ said the postman.
Lol carried the parcel into the kitchen, laid it down on the table. Ethel jumped on it, whiskers twitching.
The parcel was about fifteen inches square and an inch thick. It was postmarked Wiltshire. His name was on the front, typed on a label. Did he know anybody in Wiltshire? Lol lifted the cat to the floor and slit the brown paper with the butter knife.
Inside, under some stiff cardboard, was an LP record. Nick Drake.
Lol stared at it. He didn’t understand. He was afraid to touch it.
This was the posthumous album. The one with ‘Black-eyed Dog’, the bleak and eerie little song of depression and impending death. The one where Nick said he was feeling old and he wanted to go home. He was twenty-five years old. At barely twenty-six, he’d taken one anti-depressant too many and his mother had found him lying dead across his single bed.
Lol began to shake. Out of the speakers, from slightly happier days, Nick sang ‘Way to Blue’.
What kind of omen was this? He looked up at the curtained window facing the orchard. Suddenly had the overpowering feeling that posh, languid Nick was standing out there among the trees, waiting for him. A bass player he’d once met said he’d been to this party at someone’s flat and Nick Drake, six months before he died, had been there and had stood leaning in a corner next to a candle for two and a half hours, spoken to nobody and then slipped silently away, like a ghost.
There was a letter with the album. Neat and official and word-processed and signed ...
... Dennis Clarke.
Oh. Lol sat down. Oh, yeah. It was, in fact, his own album, the one he’d left with Dennis when he went into the hospital.
