Free Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson Page A

with pride at the sight of the beautiful shining blue flanks of the engine. Not a day went by that he didn’t mourn the loss of engineering and industry. This was no country for old men.
    As well as teashops Jackson had also discovered an unlooked-for delight in bagging the ruined abbeys of Yorkshire on his journey – Jervaulx, Rievaulx, Roche, Byland, Kirkstall. Jackson’s new pastime. Trains, coins, stamps, Cistercian abbeys, Betty’s – all part of the semi-autistic male impulse to collect – a need for order or a desire to possess, or both.
    He still needed to collar Fountains, the mother of all abbeys. Years ago (decades ago now) Jackson had been on a school trip to Fountains Abbey, a rare thing, Jackson hadn’t gone to the kind of school that had outings. All he could remember was playing football amongst the ruins, until a teacher put a stop to it. Oh yes, and trying to kiss a girl called Daphne Wood on the back seat of the coach on the way home. And receiving a thumping for his pains. Daphne Wood had a tremendous right hook. It was Daphne Wood who had taught him the value of getting in there with one swift, mean blow rather than prancing around with a duellist’s finesse. Jackson wondered where she was now.
    Rievaulx was sublime but his favourite abbey so far was Jervaulx. Privately owned, with an honesty box at the gate and no English Heritage branding, the ruins had touched his soul in some inarticulate and melancholy place, the nearest thing to holiness for an atheistic Jackson. He missed God. But then who didn’t? As far as Jackson was concerned, God slipped out of the building a long time ago and he wasn’t coming back, but, like any good architect, he had left his work behind as his legacy. North Yorkshire had been designed when God was in his pomp and each time that Jackson came here he was struck anew by the power that landscape and beauty had over him these days.
    ‘It’s your age,’ Julia said.
    Of course, these were the very same rich and powerful abbeys that in the Middle Ages farmed the sheep, the golden fleeces which provided the foundation of the wool trade and England’s wealth and which led in turn to the Satanic mills of the West Riding, and thence to poverty, overcrowding, disease, child exploitation on levels beyond belief and the death and destruction of the dream of Arcadia. For want of a nail. Those mills were museums and galleries now, the abbeys in ruins. The world turns.
    The day that Jackson visited Jervaulx it had been deserted apart from the everlasting sheep (nature’s lawnmowers) and their fat lambs and he had wandered amongst the peaceful stones where wild flowers sprang from between the cracks and wished that his sister was laid to rest in a place like this instead of the mundane municipal cemetery that had been her last stop on earth. He had unfinished business there, a promise never given to a dead sister to avenge her senseless death. He supposed Niamh would always be calling him home, the siren song of the dead, for the rest of his life.
    ‘All roads lead home,’ Julia said.
    ‘All roads lead away from home,’ Jackson said.
    Josie, his first wife, had once said to him that if he ran far enough he would end up back where he started but Jackson didn’t think that the place he had started from existed any more. He had returned a few years ago, taken Marlee to meet her dead relatives, and he had found that it wasn’t the town he remembered. The slag heaps were levelled, the mine’s machinery long gone, only the pit-head wheel remained, cut in two and planted on a roundabout on the outskirts of town, more like an ornament than a memorial. There was not much evidence to show that it had ever been a place where his father had spent his life toiling in the velvet dark.
    Niamh herself had been underground nearly forty years – too late to track down clues, sniff out DNA, interview witnesses. The coffin was closed, the case as cold as that clay she was buried in. When