Middlewood

I know this road, thought Lena, walking down the quaint cobbled street of the town where she had never previously been in her life. I know that there is a church with a squat stone tower that is slightly awry at the end of the street, and know that down that side street there is an inn. Or if there is not, there ought to be. 

     I do not think or feel, or at least I don’t just think and feel. I know. 

     Some may have been scared by such a notion, by such knowledge, or been furious that it offended their logical vision of the universe. Others may have felt as if all their birthdays and Christmases had come at once as their beliefs were confirmed.

     Lena did not experience such strong feelings either way. She believed on keeping an open mind on such matters. Keeping an open mind on matters (with obvious exceptions) mattered very much to Lena. 

     Oh, she’d had that strange niggling little sensation that something entirely trivial and ridiculous had happened before; either a split second or years ago, or perhaps in a dream or in that space between sleep and wakefulness. Something like a clue in a crossword (but they did repeat clues, after all) or a passing exchange between strangers at the next table in a café, or a brief break in transmission on a TV show.

     But this was entirely different. 

     You don’t just completely forget visiting a town, not even a small one, and Lena knew for a fact that she had never been to Middlewood. She had never intended to go there now, either, but her car had developed a strange rattling noise, and though it still functioned, strange rattling noises were probably best attended to. She had pulled in at a garage on the little industrial estate just outside Middlewood, and a friendly and honest seeming mechanic told her it was nothing that serious, but might take a few hours, and though she was more than welcome to sit in the little waiting room and enjoy a complimentary coffee, it was only a few minutes walk into town and, he said, proudly, Middlewood was an undiscovered treasure.

     Lena tended to be somewhat cynical concerning undiscovered treasures, whether literary or urban, but stretching her legs would do no harm, and it seemed like the kind of town that might have a decent bookshop. Recognising the kind of town that might have a decent bookshop wasn’t rocket science, though you could be mistaken both ways. As she tramped up the cobbled street, Lena wondered about quite how a little town in the endless flatness of the fens could have such a steep street. There was something almost perverse about it. But it had always been so, just as it had always been called Middlewood (though in Anglo-Saxon times it had probably been something like Mittelweld or the like) although now the only trees to be seen far and wide were those that grew in cultivated spaces. Forests had been cleared and rivers drained and redirected into farmland centuries since. Many people, particularly those who were just passing through, probably did not even know that the typical landscape of the fen country was not one that nature had originally created.

      Lena hadn’t even meant to be passing through Middlewood. Or only by noticing signs for it or seeing a clump of buildings across the flat landscape in that strange light that comes with open skies and shimmering crops in the midsummer light, but with that sensation that somewhere a storm was brewing. She would have to phone her friend Sybil and let her know she would arrive late. She and Sybil went back a long way, as they said, and were always there for each other in a crisis, but their friendship probably survived best with periods of separation.

     I know what Sybil would say about this feeing, she thought. When she had first met Sybil, in her room two down the corridor from hers in the university hall of residence – oh, goodness, it was over twenty years ago! – she hadn’t been surprised to see that she’d unpacked her books first – that seemed an entirely sensible thing to do. But whilst Lena’s books were a mixture of staples of student feminism (she actually had read The Female Eunuch and genuinely meant to get round to reading The Second Sex) and chunky paperback family sagas and a few true crime books, Sybil’s entire collection seemed to consist of books with titles like Hidden in Plain Sight and What they don’t want to Tell You and Mystic Places of East Anglia. 

     When it came to such matters, well, it would be hard to say whether Sybil had an open mind or not. It was probably open to anything except cynicism on such matters. Generally an admirably even-tempered person, phrases such as Conspiracy Theory and Confirmation Bias were like vivid crimson table-cloths to a gargantuan bull having a very bad day.

     Yet she was the kind of person who saw to everything straight away, and could do all her own household repairs.

     Normally, Lena would have been delighted to discover the book shop, snuggling between an old-fashioned hardware store and a vaping salon. She would have felt that sensation of coming home as she saw the eclectic displays of books as she looked through the bulbous amber glass windows. But her first thought was this shop shouldn’t be here! Not in that place on the street, it didn’t make any sense. Still, she pushed open the door, which creaked a little and set a bell tinkling, and was inside a shop selling cakes and sweetmeats, some dainty, some hearty, and with the honest, earthy smell of baking bread mingling with the sweetness and the spiciness. 

     A very small lady dressed all in black apart from a big lace collar on her dress bustled to the front of the shop. “Why, good afternoon to you, Miss Helena! Does my heart good to see a pretty young face in here, as pretty as her Young Majesty, I’ll warrant. I’ve heard said that she’s more than partial to a cake and some bonbons, but I’ll bet those fancy London bakers can’t make any to rival mine.”

     “I’m sure they can’t, Mrs Brewer,” she said, politely. She bought some of the sweet almond slices that were called Maids of Honour. Though they’d been called that for a while, nobody quite new how long, and weren’t named for her Young Majesty and her ladies, a lot of people liked to think they were. 

     “I’ve heard it said she’s a tiny little thing, just like a little doll,” Mrs Brewer said, “Smaller than I am even. Well, as my Father used to say, may God rest his soul, good things come in small packages!” Almost as if proving a point she put the maids of honour into a dainty little box she fastened with a narrow pink ribbon. 

     Lena knew she was very fond of Mrs Brewer, and that she was a good-hearted woman, but also knew that, as their family cook said, she could “Talk the hind leg off a donkey”.  It would only be a matter of time before she started remarking on how some thought it was so funny she was called Brewer when she was a Baker, and she had to admit it was herself! Lena had thought it funny the first nine or ten times she’d heard it. So she politely took her leave, and, holding her skirts up a little, because it had been raining and the cobbles were glistening with rain and some traces of mud, and though she didn’t mind in the slightest, but Mama would have something to say on the matter, she preceded to the bookshop, four doors down. For a long while she had lived in hope that someone would discover a new book by Jane Austen, who had been dead for twenty years or more now, but had finally resigned herself to the fact that it was highly unlikely. She bought a couple of the little pamphlets that Mr Ryland sold (he even wrote some of them himself) about the history of the area. And some of them were, indeed, dry as dust history but others were the kind of history that Lena loved, and meandered into tales of hauntings and strange creatures, and imprisoned princesses and half-savage men fighting for their freedom. Mama didn’t approve, of course, and though she wasn’t religious in the way that Aunt Marigold was (Aunt Marigold thought nothing but the Bible should be read on a Sunday and though she was by no means an unkind woman, was rather too fond of exhortations such as Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child for her liking) she rather wished that if Helena, as she always insisted on calling her, must read unsuitable literature, she would at least develop a taste for romance like her older sister Evadne. Anyway, Evadne was to be married soon, and that would put any ideas of romance out of her head. On that Lena was inclined to agree with her. Evadne’s fiancé Charles was a decent man, but no Mr Darcy. 

     Lena knew better than to mention it to Mama, let alone Aunt Marigold, but sometimes she dreamt of being one of these heroic princesses, and of seeing these strange creatures. She both dreamt of it by night and dreamt of it by day. Her governess, Miss Appleton, who had sometimes told her things that she knew instinctively that she must not mention to Mama, had once told her that in many of the world’s religions people believed that when you died you didn’t go to heaven or to – well, to the other place, as the Reverend Eliot called it. His predecessor, the Reverend Mason, had not hesitated to dwell in great detail on what awaited unrepentant souls. Sometimes his sermons were a bit too fiery even for Aunt Marigold and that proved something, though her main accusation was that he was “ill-bred and showy”. Anyway, Miss Appleton said that these people thought that you had lived many times before, and would live many times again, and that how you behaved in this life affected what you would be in the next. “Do you believe such things, Miss Appleton?” she had once asked. Miss Appleton had dutifully replied that she tried to be a good Christian woman, but added, “Still, I can’t help thinking that most of us aren’t good enough for Heaven or bad enough for the other place.” 

     She still missed Miss Appleton. Especially towards the end of her tenure, the two of them had been more like friends. But Mama was right, she was too old for a governess now. She sighed. I am so bored, she thought, and no matter what Aunt Marigold might say about the Devil making work for idle hands, no amount of sewing is going to make me any less bored. 

     She read the pamphlets for a while, but this time they were a disappointment. She sighed. She’d hoped some new stories might at least give her some interesting new dreams. You are too old to be dreaming about being a Saxon princess, she told herself, hearing her mother’s voice in her head.

     And when she dreamt that night, she did not dream of being a Saxon princess. She dreamt of being a much older woman, a woman as old as her mother or as old as Aunt Marigold. Though some things are vague in dreams, that was not. She dreamt she was in Middlewood, and there were the familiar curves and shiny coarseness of the cobbles under her feet, but she did not need to hitch up her skirts to avoid them trailing on the cobbles. 

     She was restless, in her dream, and she wandered out of town. After all, she was a grown woman, and she did not need to ask anyone’s permission, and it was not wandering aimlessly, she had good reason and something to do.

     She awoke with a jar and a jolt, and the kind of sensation that comes when a storm suddenly brews and roars in a midsummer sky.

     In that dream, she had moved more swiftly than any Saxon princess in a chariot, and others were around her, all in those strange, noisy, metal boxes. It had been a curious place, and yet a familiar one, and she suddenly was desperate to go back there – and did not know if she could.