A very long chapter about the day after the referendum

On the morning of June 24th 2016, Virginia and her husband, Nick had seen the last few results come in on a live stream online. They hadn’t had a television since the birth of their third daughter in the late nineties.

Virginia could not quite believe her eyes, as the results came in, she did not have the prophetess’ skill, but it was true, so she flipped over to YouTube and found Nina Simone singing ‘Feeling Good’.

She danced round the bedroom, for the duration of the song, making un-sexy, sexy moves, still clad in her old fashioned, slightly tea stained, white cotton, full length night-gown, singing along and feeling more overwhelmed with joy than she had in decades.

She had decided to make kedgeree for breakfast with the very pricey kippers she’d bought from a very dodgy door to door salesman indeed. She’d bought them because he had told her he used to be a fisherman, and her sympathy had been aroused since the business with Bob Geldof. And besides he was huge and lacking his two front teeth and very determined.

Nobody really fancied the kedgeree, once it was prepared, though she served it from one of the 1920s ‘Bible Pattern’ Masons Ironstone tureens, onto the matching breakfast plates and made toast and marmalade and Yorkshire tea so that the whole service was put to use and looked right for the historic occasion. The sunshine poured in through the ten foot high, east facing sash windows, spilling over the top of the Regency sideboard and lighting up the joyous scene in the panelled dining room. The Today Programme was on, it had been banned for most of the campaign, but now Virginia and the children laughed at the mournful tones of the presenters and Cameron’s hissy fit resignation. Nick had left for work a little while ago. It was his penultimate day working for the firm in England. Next week he was going to start a new project on the Continent.

Later, after dozing and recovering a little of the sleep she had lost in watching the results, Virginia felt she wanted to go up to church. It was not straightforwardly a religious need to give thanks and praise. For one thing she believed God could hear her wherever she was (though somehow Virginia believed he turned a blind eye to her mischief making, provided she blamed it on the Devil and prayed for forgiveness afterwards, certainly she had not been made to pay for it yet, in any way). And also the dining room chimneypiece was constructed entirely from the 1686 altar (it was dated) of the village church. It had been ripped out of the church in the 1880s when the Lord of the Manor was the Church warden and wished to update the church and provide himself with some antique panelling, in the form of the old box pews. Virginia liked to imagine it was the previous occupant of her current property who had inspired Betjeman’s poem though she had no evidence for this. Virginia knew the power of that altar, it had made itself known to her on several occasions, including once when her youngest baby was only a few weeks old and her spirit had wandered far from her body, lying beneath it, and had found it difficult to return to her flesh unaided.

The church was at the top of the only little hill in the area and from the beautiful old graveyard one could see for miles across the whole of the Vale of York and to the Wolds in the East. Virginia just wanted to be there, smelling the elder scented balm, in the morning sunlight, breathing in The Peace, sensing the love wafting between the crooked, grey-green gravestones, listening to the rustling of the ancient yews, and watching the gentle nodding of the weeds as they danced in synchronicity with the ripening wheat which grew right up to the boundary hedge.

Virginia went out to her XK8 and lifted the lid of the boot. Virginia loved her car; she couldn’t afford an E Type but this was the next best thing. She knew it seemed funny to others, that such an old fuddy duddy as she was, in her dated clothes and with such old fashioned ideas should drive such a thing. A Morris Minor would probably have been more fitting, but Virginia liked good design and beautiful things and she couldn’t help it if she herself were neither well designed nor beautiful. She had made a playlist a week or two ago, on YouTube, which she’d called ‘Music for Brexit’. It had been made in hope, now she would listen to it in celebration. One of the children had downloaded it for her on to 6 CDs, which she now inserted into the stacking cd player. The music was wide ranging in taste and style, though all British. It started with Tomkins, “Above The Stars My Saviour Dwells” sung by the choir of Guildford Cathedral, under Barry Rose, and included many examples of early music sung by various choirs and artists including Alfred Deller. But there was also a good deal of Britten and Vaughan Williams and the first part of Finzi’s “Requiem Da Camera” a setting of John Masefield’s poem “August 1914”, which was rather too sad for the occasion. But Virginia had wanted to pay tribute as widely as possible, in her choice of music for this day, to all who had valued England.

Virginia fired up the engine and pressed the button to fold down the roof. Once it was down she switched on the stereo and the shuffle button and Alfred began to sing “Fairest Isle”. And when Alfred had finished there was a beautiful piece in a minor key, by an obscure composer her father had known at Cambridge, Guy Roberts. Virginia’s mother had certainly never intended to kill Guy. She was never absolutely sure that she had, he’d died of natural causes, as had all her victims. Virginia’s mother had been a great fan of Guy’s music, which had been tonal, pastoral and beautiful in an era of Avant Garde noise and she would never have done him harm intentionally. Only Virginia’s father had had this terrible habit of inviting all sorts of marvellous people to dinner, when the family was at its most hard up. He would announce what he’d done at breakfast and Virginia’s mother would be expected to whip up something palatable out of practically nothing, for their guests arriving that evening.

Virginia’s mother had had a dreadful struggle to find anything at all, on that occasion. She had cursed her guests with all the venom in her, not knowing who they were to be, up at the old quarry above the house, where her antecedent had been used to meet with her fellow weird sisters, one hand in an orifice of the face in the diabolical old tree. She had been forced to serve a dinner more or less of herbs, though she’d managed to persuade the nearest of the farmers to let her have a chicken. Besides that there were a few home grown spuds from the kitchen garden, a sluggy lettuce, a great many nasturtium leaves, marigold petals and lovage. “Better a dinner of herbs where lovage, than a stallen ox and hate therein”, she had used to joke. For pudding there was to be the last of the rhubarb, woody and well past its best, if it had ever had a best, from a shady corner of the kitchen garden. And this was to be sweetened with the last of the lumpy sugar from the upstairs kitchen sugar bowl and a bit of treacle, as the post office was closed for a day or two and there was no more in the house. The upstairs kitchen was always the last resort when it was necessary to go hunting for food, since the Formica kitchen cabinet, despite its comparative modernity, was often invaded by mice when the rest of the rooms were mice free. This was most troubling when one was hunting for tea and all there was was Darjeeling, or Lapsang Souchong, because one could not properly distinguish between the large black leaves and the dried droppings of the mice. Anyway, the rhubarb would be served with custard made from dried Marvel, or tinned Carnation.

Virginia dredged up the details of this murky episode and pondered on her mother’s bad tempered outbursts, which had caused her to throw caution to the wind with regard to her diabolic ability. It was odd how much self control she had over smaller curses, by comparison. It was also odd how the bad things so often came to the fore in one’s memory, even when they were prompted by beauty. Virginia’s mother had been loving and kind and really a much better person than Virginia was herself.

The music had moved on now, it was Ian Partridge singing Warlock’s setting of W.B Yeats’s “The Curlew”. She didn’t know why she had included this, really, she liked it in theory, more than in practice. But she remembered that Peter Warlock’s bastard was the Art historian Brian Sewell, who had been another friend of her father’s. And she began to wonder if he had been granted his final wish, to be made into tins of Pedigree Chum. Then she remembered the story of Warlock riding his motorbike naked around some Cotswold village with Elizabeth Poston, composer of “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree” riding pillion, also in the altogether, so by the time she was out on the main road, streaming past the last mile of hogweed, her joyous feeling of the early morning had returned.

On entering the churchyard she had found it to be full of people from the regular congregation, who kept it functioning, they were mowing and shearing on the south side, keeping it tidy and generally enjoying being good and useful on this glorious, sunny day. Virginia had a policy of never discussing politics with anyone, in the flesh. She made sure she followed this rule even more stringently with the congregation at church, by barely ever speaking to them at all, though she loved them. In fact she loved them all the more for not engaging with them. She never really got on with anyone in real life, though she was quite good at pretending to.

Virginia strolled around the edge of the graveyard, taking in the views of what would soon become Brexit Yorkshire, humming “Fairest Isle '' to herself. She wanted to dance among the trees and tombstones, but couldn’t while so many were there. In the distance, coming through the Lychgate she saw one of the regular ‘locum’ vicars. Were stand-in vicars’ locums? She couldn’t remember. She assumed, what with all the extra activity there must be going to be a wedding that day. What a marvellous date for an anniversary. She knew this vicar had a funny name, which she considered unsuitable for his profession, but it eluded her at first. She tested several in her mind, was it Denis, Lennie, Ronnie? Oh no, it was Trevor. What sort of a name was Trevor for a vicar? Or even a baby boy? Virginia began to imagine the elderly vicar’s young mother, with a crush on Trevor Howard. She must have seen him in “Brief Encounter” and fallen for his strong, silent manner and failure to make the most of his opportunity with Celia Johnson, when they were first alone. Perhaps she had wished Trevor’s father had failed to take his opportunity with her, the first time they were alone, then she would never have been up the duff, and never had to get married or go through labour. Perhaps that was why she had persuaded her son to take up religion? Perhaps she thought a vicar would be too well behaved to get anyone pregnant, or perhaps she’d hoped he would convert to Catholicism and take up the celibate life! Virginia remembered reading somewhere that Trevor Howard was actually a psychopath and so thick he didn’t understand the plot of “Brief Encounter”. It would have been terribly upsetting for Trevor’s mother and all those other women who’d fancied him so much they’d named their sons for him to discover this. Good job the information had only surfaced recently.

Breaking from her reverie and internal conversation Virginia walked back towards the bench by the church door. She sat down and bowed her head, for despite telling herself she was not coming up here to give thanks and praise, she had found that that was exactly what she felt compelled to do. She thanked God with all her heart for the referendum result, though she knew it didn’t really have anything to do with Him. And despite her own habits of mind and mischief making, she prayed for Jo Cox and her children. She prayed that a new, sensible Prime Minister would emerge, to guide the country through the time of upheaval ahead. Then she summoned Freddy and sent him dashing about the Graveyard like a mad thing, faster than any real dog could run, between the old graves and the new granite ones weaving in and out of the regimented rows and leaping over the garish pea gravel in the modern part of the cemetery. She saw several members of the congregation watch him dash past, uncertain if they had seen him or not, and shudder involuntarily. She didn’t wish to frighten anyone, least of all these good people. But just today she wanted to flex her supernatural muscles a bit, as a way of celebrating and releasing some of the tension she had built up over the last few weeks of campaigning, as she considered her endless online trolling to be.

When Freddy had finished his mad dash, Virginia returned to the car. She hadn’t bothered to put the roof back up when she parked, and Freddy leapt in over the top of the door, flopping down on the back seat. Virginia was glad she didn’t need to bother with a dog’s seat belt and all the fuss of settling Freddy. Phoebe hated trips out in the Jag, and her claws invariably marked the leather. But any minute now Freddy would vanish into it.

Virginia had experimented with Freddy, when he first began to appear, rather meanly. One night she had thought it funny to send him to her father’s wardrobe, where he set up a constant, cross barking, beneath the musty morning suits, dinner suits and old coats, so that her father was driven out of bed to find the stray dog that he was convinced he could hear. Her mother had found him in the grey light of early morning rummaging among his old clothes for the creature he was convinced was real. Virginia’s mother should have really guessed what was going on, but seemed to think Virginia’s father was sleepwalking and suffering an auditory hallucination. He had an important exhibition in the offing and had been working hard and late. The result of that episode was that Virginia’s father rested a little more, so with hindsight Virginia’s prank had done some good.

The next trick Virginia tried with Freddy was worse than the first. She sent him to sit on her mother’s chest in the middle of the night. She did it twice, on both occasions after they had had a row over something and nothing. Again, Virginia’s mother should have recognised the black dog, but she assumed, due to her age and weight and high blood pressure that it was angina and booked herself in to see her doctor. She was duly diagnosed and put on Beta Blockers, so Virginia thought, in the long run, her little acts of nastiness with her familiar had been turned into something positive.

As she fired the engine up the wonderful voices of Lynne Dawson and Ian Bostridge came out of the stereo, singing “As Steals The Morn Upon The Night”, Handel’s setting of two poems by John Milton. How happy would Milton have been today? “Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live” thought Virginia. Virginia had recruited Milton for the Brexit side. But he had also been in favour of England becoming a Republic; would he have wanted to see a return to the indivisible sovereignty of the nation state, instead of the ‘pooled’ sovereignty in which the ‘Remainers’ believed? It was tricky dragging historic figures in to support one’s modern causes. Virginia wasn’t sure if the poet, Alison Carter’s accuser, had known Milton. She had walked with the poet in her dreams, down beside the rock strewn stream through the valley. Sometimes he had appeared at her side as she came down from the Packhorse Bridge, as she was walking back home, appearing out of nowhere, like Freddy did. Sometimes he appeared where the way broadened out, where the moss covered rocks sat among the red-gold sand and gorse, just about where Turner had stopped and painted. “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” thought Virginia. At this spot was another hall, of the late 17th or early 18th century, which looked like a town-house, in the middle of a field, it had been inhabited by Carters, during Virginia’s childhood, but Virginia’s mother had never let her distant relatives know they were related. Virginia and the poet had sometimes spoken, in these dreams, but it was always him quizzing her about Alison, whom he seemed to think was her mother. She could not imagine asking him about Milton, or whether his views on Monarchy and the Constitution were the same as his better known half brother’s, which might have given Virginia a clue to his modern, political ideas. His half brother had lived so much later into the seventeenth century and his political thought had developed and altered during a much more turbulent period, when he had held high office. Both brothers had certainly been of interest to Milton, poetically, and politically, but this did not mean that they had met. Oh dear it didn’t do to go into these historical and political rabbit warrens, not when one didn’t have the internet to hand.

Instead, Virginia thought of her print of Milton as a child, which hung in her drawing room.. She liked to fancy that she bore a resemblance to him, her hair had been more golden, her eyes were green, but there was something of the same intelligent, straightforward, analytical gaze, she flattered herself. So far there were no signs that Virginia had inherited her father’s glaucoma. She wondered about going blind in the 17th century, as poor Milton had. She had once seen a 17th century prosthetic eyeball.

Of course everyone knew of the power of the evil eye; the maker of this prosthesis seemed to have set out to show it was possible to make its antithesis. The very act of wishing to provide a face, which had lost its beautiful, blue-green eye, was an act of love in itself. And all the love and care with which this object had been constructed had warded off the evil which, Virginia did not doubt, would have otherwise surrounded, then resided in it. The object was constructed from bone. It resembled nothing so much as a miniature yo-yo, being two hemispheres, joined together, or more likely carved from the solid, so that the groove which would have been the place where the yo-yo’s string was wound provided a definite place at which the back part of the eyeball fitted into the eye socket, leaving the front part visible. Virginia imagined pushing the object into her empty eye socket and rearranging the floppy eyelid and surrounding flesh around it for the first time. Would it need to be ducked under the brow ridge a bit, to get past it? Would a sort of screwing motion have been necessary to line up the iris properly with the real thing. Would it be possible to walk about all day with it positioned lopsided, and go about one’s marketing, and that nobody would tell you, out of tact, until your children got home?

The eyes, it was said, perhaps rather cornily, were the windows of the soul. Although the 17th century prosthetic eyeball was manufactured, inanimate, a thing without a soul, one might have thought, in fact it was the window of the soul of the kind man who’d made it. It gazed upon the world, serenely and benevolently but did not see. It was blind, itself, yet conveyed to others the inner thoughts of another person, which was what people wanted when they looked into another’s eyes. It was an I as well as an eye, as Roger Scruton had explained eyes were, but this was also a singular object, an 'it' and yet still a first person singular.

Virginia remembered that Gordon Brown had a prosthetic eyeball. She wondered if the person who had made it had managed to endow it with any of the dourness, bad temper and general Scots misery which infected his soul? These days were such items mass produced so that they would appear to be soulless?

Handel was easier to find a place for on the leave/remain spectrum, Virginia decided. He would have been pro EU, and yet the music of that fat, German homosexual was possibly Virginia’s favourite music of all. It was not Europe or European culture she disliked, contrary to what had been asserted by the other side.

Virginia’s father, in one of his buying phases, had acquired the Snetzler chamber organ of 1740, which had been used in the first performance of The Messiah. There was documentation showing it had been shipped from Dublin, which corresponded with the dates. The case dated from later in the 18th century. The organ belonged to a former auctioneer and collector, a tall, thin Scot, with high cheekbones and beautiful, pale blue, watery eyes. He had been well into his eighties when he brought the instrument down and stayed a little while with them, while he assembled it. At this time the family had become vegetarian. Virginia’s mother had decided that as they spent so much time having to make do with vegetables they may as well pretend it was intentional. So when the old chap came to stay he was subject to the same lentil soup with shredded savoy cabbage and pearl barley that the rest of the family ate. Every night, as he was sleeping in the room next to Virginia, and sharing the same bathroom, she heard his interminable noises, on, or over the loo. She could never tell whether he was retching or shitting. But it was dreadful to think what her mother’s cooking was doing to the poor old chap’s inside.

The bathroom next to Virginia’s bedroom had come about as the result of one of Virginia’s mother’s outbursts. The first of them, in fact. Virginia’s mother had known of the ‘goings on’ of her distant relative from the first week or two of moving to Kineburn. The story of the ‘Kineburn Witches’ was well known in the valley. Her father had found a copy of the poet’s written accusation in a second hand bookshop in the market town a few miles away, and her mother had begun her experiments up at the quarry fairly shortly after that. The house had no indoor sanitation, and Virginia’s mother was expecting Virginia. It was bad enough having to cope with the lack of mains electricity, the fact that the water came directly from a stream in the woods. But having to use the Elsan chemical loo, and to empty it, felt like too much. So her parents had applied for permission to install a couple of bathrooms and two loos upstairs and down. The permission was not forthcoming, the house being a grade ii* listed building.

How strange it all was, how Virginia wished for officials of the sort her mother had murdered now. Men who would stand firm and not allow the desecration of old properties for the sake of modern convenience. These days anything went, even plastic windows. But back then, not so, hence Virginia’s mother’s outburst.

Of course murder was too strong a word. There was no physical contact, no poisoning, no assassination. Only witchcraft, which of course was not real. Only calling on darkness, only calling on her sisters’ ancient power, up at the quarry, in the dead of night, beside the old tree with the gnarled face and obscene Bosch like orifices, only these pretend things. And yet news of the poor sod’s death came within a day or two of that first session. A heart attack. News of the approval of their application came a week or two after that, when a new chap, who believed historic buildings should not be museums took over.

The other chaps Virginia’s mother had done in were more deserving of their end. Though again the cause of death was always natural. Mostly they were gallery owners or art dealers who had let Virginia’s father down in some way. There had been the pancreatic cancer which had finished off an absolute bitch of a man in the art department at the local polytechnic where her father had had to humble himself to take a job when times were hard and most of the good furniture had been sold. And an art historian friend of a friend whom Virginia’s mother was convinced was a double agent. But his end may have come about by a different means. Then there was the rather funny time when Virginia’s mother had become convinced one of the neighbours, who’d moved into a nearby barn conversion was the Yorkshire Ripper. The police had not taken Virginia’s mother’s allegation seriously and so she had used her own means to bring his murderous spree to an end. Only of course it didn’t, because it wasn’t him.

After the fourth night of the old organ builder and auctioneer’s retching/diarrhoea Virginia told her mother about what had occurred on the previous three and for the first time she started to wonder about her mother’s ability. Why could she only cause harm? Why did her skills not encompass ‘wise woman’ type ways with soothing herbs? Virginia knew she was no better herself. She had taken Feverfew for her migraines, in a sandwich made from her mother’s dense, wholemeal bread. It had given some relief, but she had found she had no instinct for which other herbs to try. Her mother believed in modern medicine, not herbal humbug.

The only really successful experiment Virginia had carried out in this line was on her allergies to rabbits. The cats often brought baby ones in from the fields and they were so cute Virginia who had been a surprisingly soppy child, found she could not allow them to be mauled to death. Yet her eyes swelled up like red balloons, even if she only touched the rabbits for a moment. She was in the habit of taking antihistamine, therefore, but had noticed they worked almost instantaneously. She surmised that their effect was psychosomatic or placebo. And determined next time she would take a raisin to cure the inflammation, instead. This she did and it worked just as well as the antihistamine. Was it still a placebo effect, if one knew the ‘medicine’ was pretend? Virginia wasn’t sure. Neither was she sure that her power over her own body wasn’t just the same power she had inherited from her mother and antecedents, yet why then could she not cure her migraines? She could not persuade anyone else to try her remedy for allergies, so convinced were her friends and family that their own conditions were much more real and severe than Virginia’s. After a while Virginia was able to take back control of her allergy by passing herself an invisible raisin, and pretending it was an antihistamine. Perhaps this was why the idea of taking back control was such a powerful one, for Virginia; she understood the power of the idea of taking back control over the body politic, because she understood the power of the idea of taking back control over the body, even if that idea was swallowing an invisible cure. This was all getting too silly.

Virginia switched the cd off, for a bit and found herself comparing the voices of the two tenor Ians, Bost and Part - ridge. She knew that technically the former was the better singer, but she found him a bit cold and sometimes thought he sounded like a vegan. Part. on the other hand wasn’t really a tenor, more of a baritone who was pretending. But he sounded warm and fat and kind and civilised, in the way she just about remembered men used to be, when she was a child. Her father had known him, too, back in the day, perhaps he was the actual nice man she thought she remembered all nice men being. Oh God! Her mother hadn’t done him in too, had she? No, she was fairly sure he was still alive. But how difficult it was to keep track of who was alive and who was dead, these days. So many people one had thought long dead turned out to be still alive, and vice versa. Virginia remembered how she had felt on discovering Deanna Durbin had only just died, a few years ago, and remembered how she had pondered producing an “I Can’t Believe You Weren’t Dead Already” card. Should it have been ‘You’, or They or ‘He’ or ‘She’, with ‘Wasn’t’? ‘You’ implied the spirit of the ancient corpse would be reading the words. Once you were over a century old, your offspring might actually be dead already and addressing the joke on the card to grandchildren or great grandchildren would be callous: ‘In Sympathy, Can’t Believe She Wasn’t Dead Already’. Enough Already!

Virginia reached home, tired and happy, and was greeted enthusiastically by Phoebe, who seemed to have decided to overlook Virginia’s having gone out without her, if Virginia would play with her ball, which she duly did, on the lawn, beside the borders of sweet rocket, the Fruhlingsgold and Rosarie de l’Hay and the huge clumps of Sarah Bernhardt peonies. And since she hadn’t been able to dance among the graves and ancient trees, she did a crazy dance about the lawn, while simultaneously impersonating Hinge or was it Bracket singing ‘We’ll gather Lilacs’, in which performance Nick discovered her, on his return from work., music and happy activity was how Virginia recollected that historic day