near enough to the water to have to accept it in the end. Christie had explained this to Stella. She was concerned for her daughter but the girl had just got caught up in Tom’s grieving.
Even alone in an old building he’d always known, Tom couldn’t sleep. He got up, unplugged everything, plugged it all in again, opened the back of the wireless and then, looking at its circuitry, felt tired and went to lie down. The thing had leaked memories of times when it had been his head that had buzzed and crackled, as if badly tuned, when it had picked up what appeared to be fragments of different stations: a woman singing a single verse of a song over and over; the Morse Code SOS of a sinking ship; a man repeating the same joke: ‘What did the mouse say when it saw a bat? Look, an angel!’; the thin, high endless laugh of someone who was exhausted and wanted to stop. His mother had held his head and stroked it in long lines till the noises were gone. She’d called it ‘ironing out’.
When Christie let himself into the Chapel the next morning, he found Tom lying on the mattress. He was shaking so badly, he couldn’t speak. Christie helped him down the stairs and walked him the few hundred yards along the High Street to where Dr Clough was just opening up for the Saturday morning emergency surgery. There were half a dozen people waiting already and they filed into the tiny waiting room where Betty Burgess, the old doctor’s wife who still acted as receptionist, took their names. The wooden chairs ranged around all four walls of the room were filled by those waiting. The room was so small that those opposite one another were almost knee to knee. When Dr Clough called Tom’s name first, nobody objected.
Half an hour later, the doctor appeared in the waiting room without Tom and asked Christie to step outside. ‘I don’t have his complete records yet, only a note of what he’s supposed to be taking. Why did the hostel let him go?’
‘It was up to him, wasn’t it?’
Dr Clough was an elegant figure with a cool manner and hollow good looks. He had arrived in Allnorthover a few months earlier and was already known as Dr Kill Off.
‘He just needs his pills, Doctor. He forgot to bring any back. They always did stop his shakes and help him sleep.’ Christie couldn’t have a brother of his going back into the bin, not again. ‘We can manage.’
Dr Clough’s face was expressionless. ‘He can have his pills, but you are to see that he takes them and I won’t give him enough of anything to hurt himself. He shouldn’t stay alone for the next week. I want to see him here on Monday morning to discuss further treatment. You must be glad that your brother’s home, Mr Hepple, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best place for him.’
Christie flushed, shocked at the doctor’s bluntness. Old Doctor Burgess had made every exchange seem like a chat over tea. He had asked after the family, even the dog, and had never said Tom was anything more than ‘over excited’ while suggesting pills might help as offhandedly as if they were vitamins. And he’d got Tom the best specialist help: an expert in Camptown. When Dr Burgess retired and the surgery moved from his front room to the old coach house, he had put forward Christie for the conversion. It seemed strange that such a man had recommended this new doctor but then again, once he’d retired, Dr Burgess had all but withdrawn from village life, resigning from the Parish Council, threatening not to run his bottle stall at the Fête and barely stopping to greet people in the street. Betty was working out her notice. There was talk of a new life: a boat or a caravan.
Christie followed Dr Clough back inside to wait with Tom while the doctor unlocked a cupboard in his dispensary and poured two different types of parti-coloured capsules, brown and blue, red and white, through his pill-counter. He scooped them into glass bottles and wrote detailed labels.
‘Two of these each morning and two of the others at night. It’s all written on the labels but it might help to, I don’t know, think “red and white: night” or something like that, to remember.’ Christie was taken aback. Red sky at night, thought Tom, shepherd’s delight.
The doctor continued. ‘They’ll take some days to really help and in the meantime you’ll feel pretty awful, but try to remember that what you’re feeling will pass. Go back and stay with your brother for a bit. Call me anytime.’ The doctor held out the bottles to Tom who took them and passed them to Christie, who tried to hand them back.
Camptown had always been a provisional sort of place. It benefited from leading elsewhere, accumulating, by chance, all the historical features expected of an English town. Its name had an ancient derivation from its role as a Roman staging post, half-way between the capital and the more useful and significant Camulodunum on the coast to the north. By the thirteenth century it had acquired a city wall, not as a place worth protecting in itself but as part of the frontline against the Danes. The small, orderly grid of Roman streets had been consolidated and extended. As the roads improved, more traffic passed through on its way between London and the coast. These journeyings back and forth rubbed against the town and created a kind of static through which people got stuck. The railway threw out an arm towards it. Manufacturers and merchants trading in wool, wheat, salt and corn settled on the outskirts, building substantial villas and funding civic works. Camptown broadened and put on weight without gaining character.
Remnants from each era could still be found, leaking through bland new surfaces. The hillock that lay just beyond the fence of the High School’s playing fields was a prehistoric burial mound, hemmed in by housing estates. A Roman villa had been excavated by the river and fragments of its concrete (mixed from stone and lime) and its tesserae had found their way to the British Museum, along with the skeleton of a baby thought to have been a foundation offering to household gods. Newling Hall, the mansion that now housed the art gallery and museum, had a fine Jacobean staircase, carved in the Spanish style. It was regularly hired by film crews who spent days repeating a single scene: the sweeping exit of a woman in a trailing gown or the clanking descent of a cavalier. For safety reasons, the staircase was never polished between hirings. All other floors in the public parts of the building were covered in linoleum.
Holidaymakers sometimes turned off the bypass in search of tea or a bed and were glad of a few sights to make the extra miles worthwhile. There was the small medieval cathedral that made Camptown technically a city, now dwarfed by the new civic hall, for which the derelict Corn Exchange had been demolished. Nobody came to see the cathedral’s architecture although they would make a thorough tour of the building before seeking out the Sheela-na-Gig, one of the few examples to be found in East Anglia. Carved on a pillar in a shadowy corner to one side of the pews, her wildness, her voracious eyes and spurting breasts, her fingers opening her vagina wide between splayed legs were intended to shock parishioners out of temptation. Somehow, she did just this.
Camptown had been damaged by bombs that had missed either London’s docks or the coastal defences, or had been jettisoned. The gaps this left in the High Street had now been filled with large commercial premises. The old shop fronts with their ornate masonry, ironwork and curved glass made way for the flat frames of display windows. The town made room for municipal resources: a multi-storey car park, a library, a theatre, a swimming pool, a bus station, a new hospital. These efficient buildings were oddly cramped and dim inside, with small windows and fussy arrangements of interior walls. They cut across streets which would have been too small to contain them, creating odd alleyways and dead ends. People who’d lived in Camptown all their lives found themselves getting lost and going to the swimming pool to pay a parking fine because these civic façades were all so alike.
Camptown had become awkward and diminished. Its constant, incidental and half-hearted replanning made it a difficult place to wander about in but Mary and Billy, who often found themselves with time on their hands, could pass several hours doing just that.
A fortnight after Tom Hepple’s return was the last day of term. They left school at four and made their way through the ‘top end’ of Camptown, the point at which the High Street frayed into new roads leading to housing and industrial estates, and the multi-storey car park. Beyond this were the expensive Edwardian villas with broad curved drives, ivy and wisteria, and long gardens edged with old trees: chestnuts, magnolias and limes.
There was no shade in the street so they walked slowly and kept stopping. First at a corner shop that would sell them