Venn's Wall
Introducing Venn
In Venn's Wall I wanted to define for myself the corner of North Devon where I used to live, halfway between the sea and windswept, secretive, astonishingly beautiful Exmoor. At the time, the moor's hills, valleys, and villages were still locked in a pristine past. An old farmer who lived nearby told me he'd once been up to London to attend an all-night market, which he'd left to return home before dawn. London, he summed up, hadn't been much to his liking. The characters and places in my book are based on long and careful observation. In essence, Venn, Lisa, the Luxcombes, even the Gilbeys, are perennial. What I wanted to do in the novel was to portray a decent man whose only failing is that he is so rooted in the past he is unable to cope with the present.
Here are the opening chapters.
1
On the evening before starting work again, Matthew Venn, a Devon stonemason, went to bed early. He'd been unemployed for nearly a year, and the business of getting back to normal was causing as much upset as his first few jobless weeks.
His wife followed him into the bedroom, tight-lipped, and watched him lay out his clothes for the next day.
'For the last time, Matt, don't take this job. You can't. I need you here.'
Venn climbed into bed. 'I shall be here, Wednesday night, like I told you,' he said. Wedging the pillow under his cheek, he shut his eyes. But he could not shut off his brain.
Wednesday Lisa was booked to sing at the Stag's Head. That wasn't the problem. What she wanted was for him to stay at home full time, as he'd done over the past year, to take charge of the children.
The cupboard door banged, and Venn risked a look. Lisa's face was stony. She had plenty of her life left, Venn argued to himself. Twenty years more than him. At forty-eight, he might never be offered another job. And, so far, was Lisa's singing career taking the world by storm? One previous time she'd been given the chance of a proper audience she'd backed out at the last minute.
Lisa caught his eyes on her. 'Wearing something of yours, am I?' she snapped. She peered anxiously at her face in her dressing-table mirror.
Checking to see if since the last time she looked she'd developed facial hair? Venn fought off a wave of compassion, an urge to agree to whatever she wanted, and minced out with, 'Pardon me for breathing, I'm sure. If I'd have known you was on your high horse I'd have lied down and let you trample on me.'
Lisa stuck her chin in the air. Then, after a short pause but her voice still full of splinters, she told him if he played his cards right he might be in luck later. Coy, Venn thought, but who was he to complain?
He nearly fell asleep as she pottered on in a new nightshirt he could see through. It made her look slippery and fingerable, like soap in bathwater.
'In't you perishing in that garment?' he said. 'Room's colder than a corpse's handshake.'
'I'm warm enough, thank you.'
'Course, what with the heating left on.'
'Turn it off, then, but don't blame me if your thing shrivels up.'
At last, on the point of slumber, he felt her slide in beside him. He reached out. Lisa's body was on fire, and Venn burned himself recklessly.
Sometime in the middle of the night the baby woke in the next room. Venn kept silent. Lisa stirred.
'God, how I hate men,' she muttered, getting out of bed.
Listening to her wrangle with Bethany, Venn told himself he'd have talked the child back to sleep in no time. Calming babies only needed patience.
A few hours later, a period that didn't seem long enough for a night, Venn was at the window, inspecting the weather. Above the chimney pots, four or five herring gulls rode a dark dawn sky. Northerly squalls, he estimated, arranging his shirt tail inside his jeans so it covered his lower back evenly. Lately he'd felt a tendency to lumbago.
A shade remorseful now that Lisa wasn't awake to take advantage of him, he leaned down to touch her cheek and noted that her eyelashes were still beaded with mascara. Women battened down the hatches with their make-up, hardened themselves off against you, he thought. Lisa's skin was so soft his rough fingertips could barely feel it. She twitched, and Venn snatched his hand away. When she didn't stir again, he seized the chance to admire her face, with its pale skin and tiny freckles.
Shoes in hand, Venn padded down to the kitchen. The staircase let fly with a barrage of creaks. Years before those creaks had woken James, and coming down after Venn left for work the boy ladled cinders out of the living-room grate and flung them over the carpet. Lisa still refused to allow James downstairs on his own in the morning although the boy was nearly eight and the coal fire had been replaced by an electric log-effect.
Since then, Venn made a point of remarking every now and again, 'He'll have grown out of that silliness, shouldn't wonder.' James, the eldest of the three children, wasn't Venn's son. That made it seem only fair to the stonemason that he should take the boy's side. But implacable Lisa saw no reason to make allowances for anyone.
In the kitchen, Venn drank his tea and fried an egg, slapping it between slices of bread and eating it as he went about letting the cat in, feeding it, and shoving the dog out with his foot. He washed up the crockery that had beached on the draining board and took from the fridge the cheese and lettuce sandwiches he'd cut the night before. A fresh pot of tea went into his Thermos flask. Last of all, he put on his trainers.
Venn was glad he worked for himself. On a building site some busybody'd carp on about hard shoes. But such were no longer made in the shape of his feet, what with spreading corns and other bulges that recorded the tree rings of his life. It had been a long year and hard. Venn had been thrust late into the maelstrom of small children.
2
The streets were almost empty. Past the town's final housing estate, he turned into a single-track lane that led up to the open moor. Primroses mottled the high banks. At a spot with a view, Venn drew up and lit a cigarette. Then he wound down the window and prepared to enjoy the spring countryside. But almost at once a car appeared, coming his way. He sighed and dropped his half-smoked cigarette into the road. Reversing, he wedged himself against the bank.
When the other car drew level, the driver put his head out of the window and sized up the chink between the two vehicles. 'You'll have to back further, my friend,' he told the stonemason. 'I still can't get by.'
Venn frowned. 'You can't, can't you?' he said, slow and broad. Then he rammed down his foot.
His car shot forward, churning up a spray of mud and gravel that rained down with a clatter on the other vehicle. Venn braked and opened his door to climb out. With what in mind he didn't know, only the situation appeared to demand it. But the other car was already moving off, a hand emerging from the window with two fingers raised.
'Well!' Venn said softly. 'Well, then.'
He felt a little ashamed, for he prided himself on being known to all and sundry as a mild, easy-going man who never let himself get worked up. Gossip had it that he wasn't so much mild as timid, and it was all the fault of his mother. Venn had lived with her until he was forty. He knew what people said of him, but his fear was not that Agnes Venn had lopped off his strength but that it might break loose by itself.
One night it had. Returning home late, he'd found himself locked out. Venn had squared up, tucked in his chin, and charged the front door, ripping it clean off its hinges. Shouldering the thick oak slab, he carried it into the kitchen and laid it neatly on the table. Only then did he notice it wasn't his mother's table or his mother's kitchen or even his mother's house.
Now, as he drove out onto the open moor, a cold wind threw its weight against the car. Up here, the buds on the hedges were no more than pimples, and the tussocky grass was yellowish-brown. Everything was still stunned from winter - except for the sky, across which clouds hurtled. Before his marriage, the moors had been Venn's world, and today their wild light filled him with nostalgia.
Topping another rise, he paused, his car almost overhanging the sea. Then he dropped down a wooded cleft, where a few large houses lay among trees, giving a resort-like air to a scene that was otherwise bleak and unkempt. Dead bracken sprawled on both sides of the unmade track. After a stretch of woodland, the ground levelled out, and a slate-roofed farmhouse came into view.
He'd reached the job. Venn drew up and shook his head. Stone lay everywhere in disorder, as if it had rained down not from the surrounding understated landscape but from somewhere violent and volcanic.
As he unloaded tools from the boot of his car, Venn let his eye run over the scene. The work was to turn the chaos into a wall that would enclose the farm's derelict garden.
'Well, bugger me,' the mason remarked. 'And bugger me again, if it in't too much to ask.'
Wrapping his fist round the handle of a bucket full of tools, Venn advanced on the cataract of stone.
3
Leaning into the wind, Venn contemplated the footings of the wall. Four gulls landed beside him and strutted off to investigate a dead lamb that was being picked over by some crows. A buzzard circled overhead. Apart from a few distant cattle, carrion-eaters were the only living things in sight.
A construction firm had laid the foundation, Sam Gilbey, Venn's new employer, had told him. Gilbey never explained why he sacked them. Instead, he said his wife wanted a wall to provide a windbreak for the new garden she was planning. Venn took this to mean the kind of garden that would be full of foreign plants doing grievous bodily harm to each other. Maybe it was Gilbey who felt in need of the wall - to cut him off from the open countryside. Sam Gilbey was clearly a nervous type, one of the sort who always thought they knew best. Why else had he gone ahead and ordered all the stone at once without first consulting his mason? A load at a time was the way it should have been. Now, with half the stuff hidden under the other half, how could Venn see what he had?
Lifting a tarpaulin off the cement mixer, he ran his eye over the machine, then strolled off to inspect the stone at close quarters. It was a stack of what he called allsorts. Devon chunks, with their brown tinge, blue Cornish slices, big quoins from God knew where that might have been quarried in the fourteenth century, and a heap of the pieces he always thought of as horses' heads because they looked as if they had two ears, two eyes, and a muzzle. Soon, even asleep, Venn would be sorting stones.
He started the mixer, bent to pick up his shovel, and grunted. The wind strummed on his sciatic nerve. He began to wonder if the job was not too much for one man and was then struck by the thought that, after a lifetime in the trade, there was no one he could have asked for help. Searching his memory for the cause of this phenomenon, he came face to face with Lisa. He saw her narrowed nostrils and heard her edgy voice. She had alienated his friends, and, in loyalty to her, he'd come to look on them in a less accepting light - Lisa's light.
Exactly as his mother had foretold.
'More trouble than three of her's worth, that maid,' the elder Mrs Venn had remarked. 'You know what you're like.'
What her son was like with women, she meant, for she had convinced herself that Venn was in thrall to sex. Not that she ever said the word 'sex' or even 'women'.
Shovelling sand into his mixer, Venn could not bring himself to blame his mother for her disgust with everything natural. Agnes Venn had lost a husband and two infants and, all Venn's childhood, she had 'managed' on the insurance money and on family remittances that came with strings. For Matt it was as if his father had fallen down one of the moor's old mineshafts, since no one in the village ever spoke of Arthur Venn. If by chance his name came up, people went silent or talked about something else.
As for Agnes, every time her son came close to marrying someone, she would sigh, 'Her'll be the death of we.'
Did she mean she'd not outlast his marriage? Or that for them both his marriage would be the final straw laid on an already over-burdened providence? Venn never knew. In any event, he didn't dare put his mother's prophecy to the test - until he met Lisa.
4
He'd been pointing up the brickwork on some council flats when he recognized a girl who lived there.
'I know you,' he told her. 'You're Leslie Luxcombe's maid. I used to go up the Stag's Head when your father had it.'
'Really!' With a sniff.
'You were going to be a singer, I remember.'
'You were going to do some work, I remember.'
And the door slammed in his face. He sensed her banked-up tears.
Lisa's mother, he recalled, had dropped names round the Stag's Head as if she were strewing alms to the parish poor. According to her, every recording company in the country wanted to get its hands on Lisa. Luxcombe too had raved about someone coming down from London. Not that the publican could recall why. Luxcombe had barely been able to remember what happened the previous afternoon. That night at the Stag's, Lisa had sung, but Venn forgot that part. All he remembered was the way she'd stared at him through eyelashes as black and stiff as the iron grills of prisons. Soon after, the Luxcombes' hopes for Lisa foundered. Some youth had left their daughter with a child.
After Venn finished working on the flats, he found excuses to drop in on Lisa. He and she were two of a kind, he convinced himself, people who felt they had a lesser right to the world than others. He waited for Lisa's prickly front to slip and reveal the wistful girl he knew lurked behind it. Then desire, sexual, spiritual, magical, soared out of his control, and he forgot his mother's prophecy. He married Lisa because her pale skin and languid body aroused him to the point of torture.
Soon afterwards, Agnes Venn died, and Lisa took on the allure of plunder. For her, Venn left his village and bought and restored a house in town, taking jobs nearby because she could not bear him to be far away. Then, last year, he - who'd never in his life missed a working day - was made redundant.
He was stunned when Lisa said, 'I don't care that you've been laid off. You shouldn't be doing that kind of work anyway.'
'That kind of work's my trade,' he said.
But she'd shrugged as if to say bricklaying was out of date, like last year's clothes, which she gave to the charity shops. Coolly she went on to tell him her father had hired her a singing teacher. Now Venn must look after the children, because she would soon be going professional.
Bemused, Venn drifted into his new role while Lisa and her parents argued about agents, bookings, and the imminent invitation from the Albert Hall. Venn, who knew Lisa couldn't even attend a parents' evening at the toddlers' group unless he was there to hold her hand, took little notice - until Leslie Luxcombe announced his intention to get Lisa a booking to sing at the Stag's Head, now in the hands of a friend of his. This was when Venn forced himself out of inertia and into a desperate search for work.
A carpenter he knew told him about Gilbey. A stonemason was needed. Venn took the job at once, but he put off starting for almost a fortnight because he couldn't get his mouth round telling Lisa.
Now, on this early spring morning, he measured off a ten-yard stretch along the trench, set up his line, and spread several trowelfuls of mortar. Soon the heft of the tools and the dead weight of the sand and cement made Venn feel himself again. For a whole year, his body had been a bag of dung he'd been aware of all the time instead of only when it hurt or climaxed. Now he knew that the one clean act in the world was work.
He laid the first stone. Sam Gilbey, he'd been told, was a photographer. Venn had been surprised to meet a wiry Yorkshireman with a broken nose and a friendly manner. Gilbey had not questioned the fact that Venn proposed to take on the job by himself. His bruiser's face had spread in a grin while, complaining about his sinuses, he'd snorted loudly, as if his nose were a chimney whose bridges had rotted and needed a good draught to get it going. From time to time he spat. Venn was lucky, he said. All problems came from having to rely on other people. In Gilbey's job, he had no choice.
As if icing a cake, Venn skimmed a strip of mortar from where it oozed out beneath two or three stones. Gilbey had rubbed his hand over his face, pulling down the skin below his eyes. The whites were streaked with red. His wife had found the stones, Gilbey said. Some had come from old barns, some from a demolition site she'd passed on her way to a job in Cornwall. Two loads had arrived from a quarry in Wales. Joy, his wife, had a flair for collecting.
'Then us'll have to do'em justice, mister, shan't us?' Venn had said.
For a second Gilbey lost his air of being perpetually at war with himself. He beamed, and Venn was touched.
But today Gilbey was nowhere to be seen. Lunchtime, although the wind had dropped, Venn ate his sandwiches in his car. He was lighting a cigarette, when two boys trooped out of the wood. Gilbey's sons, Venn knew. Carl, the elder one, was seventeen or eighteen. He was trailed by his small brother, who carried an air rifle. Passing Venn's pile of stones, the child kicked out at a piece, lost his balance, and let out a howl. Without even glancing round, Carl halted and waited. When the younger boy caught up, the two of them proceeded in tandem to the fence behind Venn's footings. Carl vaulted over it, then held up the lower strand of wire so his brother could squeeze underneath.
Minutes later, Venn heard the distant crack of the air rifle, a sound taking him back to when he had his first gun and used to let fly at anything that moved. Anything - whether or not it could be eaten. But that was before the Environment was invented and people started to interfere. How were the Gilbeys in relation to the Environment? he wondered. You never knew with London people.
He was still wondering, when he heard the younger boy scream. He and Carl were back at the fence, the gun between them, and both of them tugging at it.
Venn strolled over. 'Give it here,' he ordered, holding out a hand.
Carl shrugged and let go, but his brother clung on. He glared at Venn.
The stonemason shook his head. 'You're making a proper fuss, boy, in't you?' he said. 'Give us the gun. When you're through the fence, you can have it back.'
Red-faced, the boy clutched the rifle even more tightly.
'What's his name?' Venn said to Carl.
'George.'
'Come on, then, George,' Venn said. Leaning over the fence, he swung the boy into the air. 'And don't you make that noise no more, look, because Carl and me can't stand it.'
George, who had opened his mouth, quickly shut it again.
'That's better,' Venn said, setting him down. 'How old are you?'
'Nine.'
'My lord, I thought you was a baby.'
'I don't want Carl to show me how to shoot. I want you to.' George thrust the gun at Venn.
'I got my work to do. Why can't Carl show you?'
'Because he hates me.'
'Could that be because you're a bit of a pain in the neck?'
'The worst,' Carl said.
Venn noted that Carl still wore a tooth brace and that his face was a copy of his father's, the same eyes - pale as the glass in old bottles, dug up and gone greenish. But Carl's expression was different. He looked somehow as if he'd already given up.
After he finished for the day, Venn drove home on a road that ran through the Exmoor village where he'd lived as a boy. The place was set on a hill and commanded breathtaking views. But the old cottages, seeming determined not to expose themselves, all faced inwards, huddling onto the lane, which had to prise them apart in order to make its way through the middle. Only a small group of new houses risked looking out at the wild skies and plunging valleys.
Matt Venn could never enter the village without a certain picture coming to mind. He was ten. It was the night his father fell, hitting his head on the corner of the dresser. Agnes Venn's shriek had filled the boy's head, so that for a long time afterwards household objects shrieked at him without warning. The kitchen dresser, the stove, certain pans.
Matt had seen his father's eyes thicken like spoiled milk - first one, and much later the other, so that Arthur Venn had seemed to die in stages. Could he have known he was dead even before he actually died? The idea vibrated in the boy's head but there'd been no one to ask. No one else had seemed to notice. The next day Aunt Vera arrived to take charge and all she told the boy was that men did things which would never pass her lips. 'Better off dead time they get like that,' she'd added, as if dying were a choice.
She was just as short about the two babies. 'Croup,' she'd say, moulding her lips tightly round the word as if to nip off any further information that might emerge unbidden. To Matt, croup came to mean the end of his being a child. But some part of him knew the word was only a name for one of the things nobody in the village could bring themselves to talk about.
The straggle of houses behind him now, Venn's face restored itself to its normal mild expression. He drove on, turning his mind to its preferred subject - the contemplation of his wife.