The door opened onto an old-fashioned enclosed staircase, steep polished wood steps that rose like a mine shaft toward light from a small window at the top. Through it I could see more gardens, humble ones this time, and extensive woodland at the end of the plots. Something stirred in my head, but urgency crushed it down again, and I hurried to the first door along the landing, flung it open, and tore the quilt and pillows from the bed inside.
Magnus had finished with the phone by the time I returned, and together we swaddled the old woman in the quilt and tucked the pillows under her head and shoulders. I was concerned about her hand.
“We need some clean cloth to wrap that in,” I said. Magnus looked at me helplessly. “A clean dishtowel, pillowcase, anything will do.”
Magnus nodded and disappeared into the kitchen, returning a few moments later with a crisp linen tea towel covered with British songbirds. I noticed it had been ironed while still damp, perfectly smooth with a faint sheen, perfectly square at the corners, and folded with geometric precision. Very gently I wrapped it loosely round the burned flesh, laying the linen parcel carefully on top of the quilt. Magnus relaxed a little when we could no longer see the blackened hand.
“I’ll have to go to the hospital with her,” he said.
“Would you like me to come with you?”
“I don’t think so, my dear. There’s little enough to be done, I reckon.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bring this on you.”
Magnus looked sharply at me. The adrenalin was still making me shake.
“Don’t you go shouldering this load,” he said sternly. “’Tweren’t your fault. You can’t fill yourself up with hate and bitterness all your life and not have it poison you inside and out. She’s my mother, but I can say it where I wouldn’t let others take the liberty. She’s a nasty soul, and she’s choked on her own venom at last, see if she hasn’t. There’s a justice there, somewhere.”
I was still digesting this when the ambulance swept up to the front door, lights flashing. The two ambulance attendants took over, loud and reassuring.
“Come on then, Ma, let’s make you comfy, then. Soon have you right.”
“What’s this then?” said the other, unwrapping the hand. “Bloody hell,” he exclaimed and covered it up again, hurriedly. “Put your skates on with this one, mate.”
Within minutes, my grandmother was loaded like an unwieldy roll of carpet onto a stretcher, the back doors of the ambulance slammed shut, and it sped away. Magnus and I looked at each other. “I’ll wait for my ride,” I said. “I’ll go for a walk out the back, perhaps. Is that all right? I’ll phone you later tonight, okay?”
Magnus nodded.
“Have your walk,” he said. “I’m off to the hospital.”
I watched him lumber past the pied tree and disappear through the archway in the brick wall. Then I turned back into the house.
TWENTY-FOUR
I snooped, of course. After all, it could have been my one chance to wander round the house where my mother grew up. I just wanted to learn its shapes and patterns, breathe its smells, hear its noises. Share this one thing with the mother I had never really known.
So I wandered about the still, bare rooms, listening to the crack of the floorboards and laying my cheek against the chill plaster to savour its damp, gritty smell. In my grandmother’s room there was a cumbersome mahogany bed with a fat feather mattress and a matching wardrobe and dressing table, but nothing stood on any of the surfaces, not a brush or an ornament of any kind, no photographs, no flowers, no pictures, no cushions, no rugs, no slippers waiting by the bed, nothing except for a Bible, bound in black calf and clamped shut with a brass clasp, waiting on the pillow.
Uncle Magnus’s room was also spartan, but it had the well-worn simplicity of a soldier’s quarters. The bed was narrow and trim, almost a cot; a small table beside it held an ancient alarm clock, the wind-up kind, and a small pile of books, the top one lying open. I picked it up to see what my uncle chose as bedtime reading; it was William Cobbett’s Rural Rides. The only luxuriant thing in this ascetic room was a massive maidenhair fern that stood in the window and gushed all over its brass pot.
I tried to imagine my mother as a little girl straining to reach the taps in the bathroom sink or splashing about in the big white bath with the lion’s feet. My hand learned what hers had known as I stroked the polished mahogany of the banister and unscrewed the knob on the brass bedstead. Did she, like me, lean dreamily out of the dormer windows in the tiny rooms at the back of the cottage, warmed by the slice of sunshine they offered as she watched the hens scratching below or the squirrels jerking head first down the tree trunks at the bottom of the garden?
Contemplating the garden like that reminded me of my intention to have a walk. Despite all my longing to find some lingering traces, there was really nothing of my mother in the house. Too much time had crept by, too much had been wilfully erased, and not even the faintest echo survived. Only the most indomitable spirit could ever have prevailed against my grandmother’s implacable will.
Downstairs again, I gagged at the smell lingering on the air. Was that how Auschwitz smelled? If so, how could anyone pretend they didn’t know what was being burned? I hurried into the small kitchen, flung open the back door, and stumbled outside. The air was cool and sweet, reviving, and the finest of rain gently misted my face and hair.
I followed a grassy path toward the trees. There were garden plots on either side. The left side seemed to be devoted mainly to flowers. I recognized the remains of sunflowers and hollyhocks by the fence, and little islands of hollow stalks, with new shoots already showing where delphiniums had stood the previous summer. I passed a line of stakes and netting that had supported vines of some kind, for the dried tendrils still corkscrewed through the string in places: sweet peas, at a guess. And there were wigwams of bamboo canes that must have been covered with scarlet runners or beans of some kind.
The right side was more regimented. Here the lines were straight. There were two rows of dry-looking strawberry plants, wisps of their straw mulch still in place. Next came rows of kale and cabbage like green cannonballs and the large red-veined leaves of old beets. The rest of the plot was bare, dug over; there were mounds of earth, furred with tiny weeds, and a long hump like a Stone Age barrow. The garden had no defined end; the tame simply gave way to the wild. There was a stretch given over to the behind-the-scenes stuff any garden involves: a patch of ash where bonfires had burned; compost bins; a heap of broken pots and a coiled length of hose; a rusted oil barrel. Beyond this, I was pushing through long grass and the tough flowerless stems of last year’s buttercups, with the sly claws of brambles clutching at my legs.
And then, as if I had crossed a boundary into another country, I was in the wood. Even on that sunless day, there was a marked drop in temperature under the trees. The light was dim, although the leaves were still young and had not linked up in a canopy; there were still some bare black branches and holes for the sky.
It was very quiet. There was none of the secret scurrying, the furtive rustling of dead leaves that would suggest small bodies darting through the undergrowth, none of the subdued chatter of finches, none of the flicks and dashes and vibrating twigs that betray small birds on the move. Not even my own progress among the trees disturbed the peace; my footfalls smothered in the short turf and there was little debris on the path, almost as if it had been swept. No dead branches, no twigs to snap under my tread.
Weightless, I drifted between the green-grey columns of beech trees. The path tilted uphill but so gently there was no effort involved, just a rise that had more to do with levitation than climbing, although I had to keep my eyes on the ground now, where the roots of the trees snaked along just under the skin of the earth, breaking through in some places to lay snares.
I had never trodden the path before, but it was utterly familiar, as if I had rehearsed this walk many times in some other life. So the cry, when it pierc
ed the stillness, though heartstoppingly loud and close, was no surprise. I looked up, and there, where I knew it would be, a white peacock sat on the branch, its filigree tail cascading like a bride’s train. It cocked its tiny crowned head to inspect me obliquely with one dark eye, then turned and called again.
Help! Help! Help!
I could see the breath curling out of its open beak. We both listened, and sure enough, a faint reply drifted to us, and the peacock shuffled his feathers and dropped without warning from his perch, gliding away to disappear in green shadows.
There was no doubt in my mind what I would find ahead. The way was steeper now, and the trees were thinning. There at the top of the hill it stood against the sky. A miniature Greek temple, white, a handful of columns supporting a roof with unadorned pediments, open to the winds and rain blowing through it. My mother’s favourite summerhouse, I knew.
I climbed into it and gazed down at the far side of the hill. The column I touched struck cold under my hand, as I knew it would, and there were no surprises in the view either. The slope, covered in coarse grass and bracken, ran down to a sheet of dark water. The lake was fringed with reeds; small black water birds, coots or moorhens, darted in and out of its cover. The surface of the water was dimpled like pewter and restless, and light flickered over it, until it seemed as if the very shadows of the gunmetal clouds flying intermittently overhead were pushing the ceaseless flow of ripples from right to left.
I’ve no doubt it was a reservoir of some sort, with a humble purpose: supplying water for irrigation or livestock, for example. It was a romantic stretch of water, though. Its darkness and isolation summoned words like tarn and mere, conjured up Grendel and his mother, or the Lady of the Lake and the tumbling, glinting flight of Excalibur through the air.
For the first time, as I sat on the step and submerged myself in that tiny piece of English landscape, I felt connected to my mother. If anywhere, her spirit lived in this wild place. I knew she had shared my thoughts, for didn’t she love poetry and romance? Didn’t she search, in her own way, for a better world? And more than that, I knew she had shared this place with me when I was very small, carrying me in the twilight through the garden and the wood, sitting in the little temple that represented her only liberty, plotting her deliverance as she watched the water and the dying light.
By the time I looked at my watch and raced back to the cottage, shutting the door firmly and hurrying back to the road to meet the three ladies, I had determined that whatever happened with my grandmother, whatever objections she might mount, whatever difficulties I might cause, I would return to that place where my mother lingered still.
There was no word from Magnus that night. I rang twice, once after reaching Wimbledon, once at ten o’clock in the evening. The phone rang and rang in the empty room. I imagined it vibrating on its little table in the dark cottage, stirring the molecules in the air, reviving the ghostly smell of charred flesh. No answer. Magnus had to be at the hospital still, or he would have phoned me. That was ominous.
At five minutes past midnight I was bundled in my housecoat on the bottom step of the stairs listening to the phone ringing thousands of miles away in my kitchen. I was rehearsing what I was going to say, how I’d tell the story of my encounter with my grandmother, what I’d found, how I wanted to stay longer and soak up the place where my mother had been a child, where I had been born. Caught up in this, I had just realized the phone had been ringing a long time when it suddenly ceased and Neil spoke in my ear.
“Liv? Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours!”
“What’s—” I began, but he cut me off.
“No, Liv, listen. You’ve got to come home.”
“Home?” I echoed stupidly. “What’s wr—?”
Again he cut me off. His urgency was palpable and I could feel the choking sensation that fear brings.
“Liv, are you sitting down?”
“My God, Neil, what’s wrong? Tell me. It’s Stephen, isn’t it?”
“What? Oh, Liv, no, no, it’s nothing wrong. Stephen’s . . . no, nothing like that, nothing wrong, actually, it couldn’t be righter . . .”
“Neil. Stop babbling and tell me.”
“Yes,” he said, “yes, sorry. It’s hard. Well, it’s not hard . . .”
“Neil!”
I heard him take a breath. Let it out. Carefully. When he spoke again, his voice trembled with control.
“Livvy, Daniel has come back.”
TWENTY-FIVE
It’s so peaceful in here. I know things are moving outside this room; gurneys and trolleys keep rolling past, and I can hear the chatter at the nurses’ station down the hall, but it’s all far away and hushed. I can sit here with my head against the wall, watching the green light tracing the peaks and valleys of your heartbeat on the monitor, listening to the slow whisper of your breathing as the lights in the parking lot flicker on one by one, and think. For the first time since Neil’s phone call, I can scan the whole picture instead of poring over each detail.
That moment of hearing Daniel had reappeared was the most visceral jolt of my life, Stephen. I know what the victims of blast feel when the shock waves hit them, the great express train punch, everything silently exploding inside from the pressure, sucked empty in an instant by vacuum, compressed, flattened, before the smile can even start to fade from the unsuspecting face. You’d think it would be paralyzing, and it was, but only for a moment. In the next heartbeat, everything was clear, all hesitation and uncertainty swept away, my path absolutely plain.
It wasn’t as simple as that, of course. There was endless talk, arrangements to be made in a fearful hurry, all sorts of loose ends to be tied up in some fashion before I bolted back across the world. And the story itself came in dribs and drabs: a first gush of stark facts from Neil, then more, some of it adding to what we knew already, some forcing us to revise what we believed was true, question what we thought was unquestionable, and all of it involving more and more people and lives, until the starting line of Daniel’s disappearance receded almost to vanishing point.
Neil relayed the first facts in a strained breathy voice as if he were chasing after them and daren’t let them out of his sight.
“Detective Mallory phoned,” he said, “so I knew at once something was up. I was waiting for him to say they’d found some bones, then he said, ‘Good news!’ I swear he was crying, Liv. I bet they don’t get to say that much, specially after so long.”
I didn’t want to hear about Mallory.
“Well, apparently a sixteen-year-old boy turned up out of the blue at a police station in Santa Barbara with a four-year-old in tow. He told the desk sergeant he’d found the kid crying on the beach alone and had brought him in because he didn’t know what else to do. If the desk sergeant hadn’t been on the ball, he might have let the teenager go at that point, but he recognized the child as the victim in an abduction that had taken place in Washington State five months earlier. Just the same sort of thing as Daniel: huge manhunt, no results.”
I listened, mesmerized, to Neil’s voice in my ear, stronger now, relishing the narrative. You can imagine detectives were skeptical, he went on, about how the teenager and the child came to be together. They questioned the older boy, who said his name was Jimmy, until they had wrung him dry. He was reluctant, but eventually he told another version altogether.
He lived with his uncle, he said. Mainly on a boat. But they moved about a lot.
While they had been moored at Astoria, several months before, his uncle had left him for a day and come back after dark with a large athletic bag. It contained the little boy, drowsy from the effect of some drug.
His uncle said this was Sam, and he would be living with them now. The next day, they moved south, keeping well out to sea.
Sam, said Jimmy, cried a lot and would not be comforted. His uncle took to locking the child in the tiny forward cabin and warned Jimmy to leave him alone. But the child stopped eating and tal
king and, like an animal, took refuge in the darkest corners, sleeping curled up in fetal position. Jimmy couldn’t bear the child’s grief, waited until his uncle was forced to come into harbour for supplies, hurrying the process up by furtively tipping food overboard and sabotaging a bilge pump, then broke the lock with a screwdriver and ran with the child.
Asked why he had come to the police, he said, “Well, it wasn’t right, was it? Stealing a kid?”
Asked the name of his uncle, he replied, “John Moore. But his real name’s Jerry Murtry.”
And Jimmy? He insisted that was his name and he had no other, so that’s how the American detectives referred to him. But Jerry’s name on a police bulletin had alerted one cop who dimly remembered following up some Canadian by that name, and he checked, eventually blowing the dust off the file concerning the disappearance of Daniel James Alvarsson.
That was what I got from that first phone call. The other things had to wait until later, after the initial shock had subsided and Neil had found out more. The reactions of the three ladies echoed all the questions that had gone so long unanswered.
“How did this Jerry person manage to get Daniel to accompany him?” asked Miss Hoar, and I asked Neil the same question.
“Apparently Jerry said he’d come to take him to Disneyland,” Neil replied, and I could hear the conversation at Daniel’s birthday party over again.
“Told Daniel we’d come for him after Disneyland, and then when we didn’t, said that we’d decided he should stay with Jerry. What could the kid do? He accepted it, of course. Wasn’t happy, but it just became the way things were.”
“What about school? Did he go to school?”
“Not on any routine basis, apparently. They were always on the move, slipping up and down the coast, and Jerry’d spend time ashore when the money got low, odd jobs, picking fruit, that kind of thing, and Daniel would get shunted off to some temporary school if there were social workers around to keep an eye on the migrant workers. He’d stay there until Jerry decided they had enough money for a while, or the school started agitating for birth certificates or transcripts, then he’d be whipped out and away. He can’t remember how many schools he’s been in, but the police have traced at least fourteen. They say he’s not much of a reader, but he can tell you everything you want to know about boats and small engines.”
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