Starlinda’s extraordinary eyes smiled into hers, for an expanding moment. She’s saying goodbye, Tessa thought. But Starlinda never used cut-off words like ‘goodbye’. She lived in the now. Her smile was bright and encouraging. ‘Good luck, darling. I’ll send you love and light.’
Tessa went home and packed. Jeans, tops, and one exotic outfit, her favourite, a full-length dress in a soft, sparkly fabric. She loved the way it glittered with greens of the forest, the flared sleeves flowing as she lifted her slim arms. She packed her crystal bracelets, silver stilettos, and a white mohair bolero. She added rose and sandalwood incense sticks, shampoo and conditioner, and her makeup bag. Then she took out the box of posters she’d had printed, and put them in before zipping up her light blue case.
She locked the flat, and drove out of London.
It was the time of the harvest moon. Late August, when sunset over the Somerset Levels was mirrored in the eastern sky by a huge, coral-coloured moon.
Tessa had deliberately chosen the night of the full moon to do her first big event in Somerset. She’d booked Glastonbury Town Hall, and advertised widely, in the newspapers and by distributing the posters herself. She was more nervous about working in her own home area than she’d ever been in London. Old demons from childhood stalked her, no matter how she tried to ignore them. Memories of being bullied at school, being labelled a troublemaker. Old attitudes and prejudices. In London she always had support from Starlinda, or Ross, or whoever had booked her. It felt scary to do a meeting totally on her own.
She passionately wanted her dad to go with her. ‘I really want you to experience what I do, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’ve worked so hard at it, and this meeting is important – it could make or break my chance of living and working down here in Somerset.’
She was disappointed when Freddie consistently refused to go, his excuses ranging from ‘I can’t leave me dog’ to ‘I never did like Glastonbury’. Even when she’d said, ‘Mum would have made you go,’ he stubbornly refused, and wouldn’t discuss it with her. Tessa wanted to scream at him. Instead, she quietly picked up Benita and carried her into the sunlit garden. She sat in the Anderson Hollow, talking to the little cat’s attentive golden eyes.
‘I feel like packing it in, Benita,’ she said. ‘Dad is impossible – just impossible. And I miss Mum so much.’ She paused and took some deep breaths. In the hours before her meeting she didn’t want to be crying, and arriving with swollen red eyes. She must look joyful and confident. Extra, extra confident as this was Somerset, not London. ‘London EXPECTS me to be brilliant and successful,’ she told Benita, ‘but Somerset expects me to fail. WHY?’ It was like being a child again, kicking the earth and sulking out in the garden. She felt that same endemic loneliness of being different. Benita stretched a velvet paw and patted her cheek, purring and rubbing her head against Tessa’s heart. ‘You’re a darling,’ Tessa said, and sighed. ‘Maybe I should quit and go back to London, forget trying to move back home.’ She looked at her watch. Three o’clock. Her Glastonbury meeting was at 7:30, and she’d planned to have a bath and change, then leave at 6:45.
At the moment when the Monterose church clock chimed three, she had a flash of inspiration. There was just time for her to go to the field, sit by the spring, and try to recharge.
She took Benita indoors; Freddie was still in his chair, and he was actually asleep, his head sagging sideways. Tessa looked at him sadly, and decided not to wake him. She left a note on the kitchen table, and set off, feeling inconspicuously at home in her jeans, denim shirt, and with her hair tied back in a loose ponytail.
Mellow sunlight coloured the apple orchards, the trees laden to the ground with fruit. Tessa walked slowly through the balmy afternoon, wondering why she felt so tired. The last six weeks had been hard, dashing to and fro between London and Somerset, trying to honour her commitments. Ironically she’d had hardly any time to visit the spring, which was her main reason for wanting to move back home.
She climbed over the gate and immediately sensed that something had changed. Half walking, half meditating, she followed the stream up to the source. She sat under the elder tree’s drooping fronds of purple berries, and closed her eyes. She listened. Subconsciously, she was listening for the singing, but it was silent up in the wood. In her meditation she asked for help with tonight’s meeting, clarity of insight and nerves of steel. Detachment from the bonds of her earth life. She’d tried so hard to explain her work to Freddie, and there had been an occasional glimmer of interest in his still grieving eyes. ‘It’s not about me showing off my clairvoyance, Dad,’ she’d said. ‘My passion is to use it to help people, and it does. I know it does. It helps them to climb out of their grief and their scepticism, brings them into the light and proves their loved ones are still alive, still close enough to care. They can’t get that kind of help anywhere else – and I love to do it, Dad.’
The way the water bubbled up from the earth was calming, like a song with the background music of grasshoppers and swallows. The robin appeared just when it was time to go.
Tessa got up and stretched. The robin chattered from a branch, looking at her with unfathomable knowing. She watched him fly towards the wood, and what she saw sent a chilling tingle around her bare neck and into her hair. Goosebumps prickled along her arms. And time stood still.
The gate in the new fence, which had always been locked, was swinging open, the emerald light of the woodland path calling to her – calling. And she couldn’t go – not NOW.
Freddie felt as if he’d been asleep for a hundred years and was suddenly shocked into life. He stared, open-mouthed, at the young woman drifting down the stairs. Her dress swished seductively as she walked into the room where he was sitting. Freddie had never seen, or imagined, such a dress. It glistened with all the greens of the forest, a soft, hazy jacket whiter than the morning mist over the Levels. A pair of graceful young arms with crystal bangles. A mane of chestnut hair, caught back with a slide of rhinestones and pearl. A bewitching smile, like Kate’s smile, and THOSE EYES, pale blue eyes with a core of gold, eyes so full of light. It took his breath away.
‘Wish me luck, Dad.’ Tessa bent over to kiss him, her car keys hooked around a slender finger. ‘I’ll be back about ten thirtyish.’
Freddie got to his feet. He touched the softness of the white jacket covering her shoulders. ‘You look – beautiful – stunning.’
‘Thanks, Dad. Are you sure you won’t come?’
Freddie felt the encrypted power of the word NO clamping his heart. He heard Tarka’s tail thumping against the chair. He knew from Tessa’s expression that she’d seen the light die in his eyes. He didn’t need to say it.
‘Okay,’ she said pleasantly. ‘I’ll see you later, Dad.’
She swanned out, briskly. Like Kate.
Freddie went to the window and watched her get into the car in the golden evening. Whatever happened to our little girl with plaits? he thought, shocked. I can’t let her go to GLASTONBURY to some meeting, all alone, looking like THAT.
He strode to the front door and out into the drive, only to see Tessa’s car disappearing down the lane. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he shouted, ‘I’ve changed me mind.’
Too late. Tessa had gone, in her dazzling dress, her aura shining with the radiance he needed.
Freddie looked down at Tarka. ‘I gotta go,’ he said and noticed his scruffy trousers and slippers. He bounded upstairs with money jingling in his pockets, tore a suit from the wardrobe, and a shirt and tie he hadn’t worn for years. It still fitted. He combed his hair and eased his feet into a creaking pair of shoes, glanced at his frightened eyes in the mirror, and ran downstairs.
Benita had got Tarka onto the sofa and was curled up, blissfully, under his chin. She gazed at Freddie with confident eyes, as if to say she’d keep an eye on the big dog and not let him howl or eat the hearth rug.
Freddie started the Morris Traveller and headed for Glastonbury with the sun setting out west over the Levels and the ha
rvest moon rising over the wooded hills.
‘We can just squeeze you in, sir,’ John Whitsby greeted Freddie at the door and found him a chair. ‘I’m John Whitsby, by the way – you’re Tessa’s father, aren’t you?’
Freddie nodded, breathing hard from running up the steps of Glastonbury Town Hall. Inside it was buzzing with excitement. He looked at the sea of heads in front of him, and couldn’t see Tessa anywhere. Had he come to the right place?
‘I offered to be the doorman for Tessa,’ John Whitsby whispered to him, ‘when I saw she was on her own.’
At seven thirty, the audience fell silent, and there was only the swish of Tessa’s dress and the tap of her shoes as she walked down the gangway. Freddie reached out and touched her, a lump in his throat, wanting her to know he was there. She did more than smile in surprise. She paused and hugged him. ‘Thanks, Dad,’ she whispered, and it meant the world to Freddie. He sat, on the shoreline of tears, and watched her in awe.
She began with the heart meditation, something she had offered to do for him many times, and he’d said no. Now he closed his eyes with everyone else, amazed at how easy and right it felt to open his heart like a flower and feel his spirit coming in, coming home. He felt alive and awake for the first time since Kate had passed.
Two hours flew by as he watched and listened, entranced by the way Tessa seemed to mesmerise the audience as she picked out people who had visitors and messages from spirit. Her voice was firm and gentle, her eyes bewitching, her confidence unwavering. There were tears of joy, and hugs and spontaneous applause. And gratitude. It was huge. Freddie began to feel himself changing inside, as if a pathway to heaven opened in his heart. He never wanted it to end, and when Tessa closed the meeting by asking everyone to reach out and hold hands with the person next to them, Freddie was overwhelmed. For the first time, ever in his life, he felt that every single person in the hall was his friend.
‘We are one,’ Tessa said. ‘We are all on a journey, a journey home to our true spiritual selves. The loved ones who have visited you tonight are not just here, in this hall, on this day. They are with you always. Trust and go forward. You are not alone.’
She sat down to thunderous applause and a few wolf whistles. Someone at the back shouted ‘Awesome!’ and Freddie swung round to see a man with a black hat pulled over his eyes. An oddly familiar figure, who quickly got up and left the hall before anyone else.
Freddie stayed in his seat as people filed out, some of them lingering, crowding around Tessa to thank her and ask her questions. Freddie’s vision cleared and he saw Kate, radiant and bright-eyed, standing next to Tessa. I can still do it, he thought, wanting to laugh and cry at the same time, and maybe I can begin to live again.
Tessa slept late into the following morning, emerging at ten o’clock, to find Freddie standing in the hall, his hand on the telephone. All night her mind had been on the open gate to the wood, the way it called to her, the robin enticing her in. Would it be wise to go in there on her own? Should she ask her dad to go with her? Or borrow Tarka? Consistently her inner guidance said she must go alone. Today. At noon.
Freddie was looking at her strangely as she came downstairs, carrying Benita on one shoulder. ‘Now I’m gonna tell you something,’ he began, and led her to the kitchen table, his eyes like they used to be, twinkling with some untold secret.
‘You look different, Dad,’ she said, sitting down at the old kitchen table.
‘Ah – I am different.’ Freddie sat down, looking into her eyes. ‘You inspired me last night, love. You were wonderful. I were proud of you – and surprised. I never realised you’d done all that training and achieved so much – you were such a troubled little girl – and now people love you, I can see that. It woke me up, I can tell you – I’ve been in the fog ever since Kate died. I’d given up. I really had.’
‘You were grieving,’ Tessa said kindly.
‘Well – that’s not what I wanted to tell you,’ Freddie said, his eyes even brighter. ‘You inspired me so much, I thought I’d make a phone call.’
‘Go on.’
‘I rang Oliver Portwell, and asked him if his offer was still open, and he said yes – said they’d be glad to have me. So I told him I’d go. I start at Elrose College of Art in September.’
‘Oh Dad!’ Tessa squealed with joy. ‘That’s fantastic! Wow. I’m proud of you too. You’ve been the best dad on the planet, and you deserve a chance like this. Wow! If Mum was here she’d be dancing round the kitchen.’
Freddie beamed, and his face ached from smiling, the way it used to when Kate was there.
‘Where are you going now?’ he asked.
‘Up to the field,’ Tessa said, not wanting to worry him with talk about the gate being open. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Open up me workshop and think about carving another angel,’ he said, ‘and this time, she’ll look like you.’
CHAPTER 23
The Singer in the Wood
The robin was waiting on top of the spindle tree as Tessa arrived at the field. She saw him immediately, his red breast glowing amongst the pink and orange spindleberries.
This time she’d brought the car, and backed it into the gateway, in case she needed to escape. She wore her favourite jeans, flared and frayed around the ankles, her Friends of the Earth t-shirt and stone-washed denim jacket. She fished in the innermost pocket of her bag and found her velvet pouch of crystals. Closing her eyes, she touched each one, and chose the amber bead Art had given her long ago. She threaded it into a strand of her hair, and got out of the car. With her eyes fixed nervously on the open gate in the far corner, she followed the robin along the hedge.
She tried to remember if she’d ever been in that part of the wood in her childhood, before it was divided up and sold. It had been part of the six miles of ancient woodland on the southern slopes of the Polden Hills. There was a memory of an enchanted glade where she and Lucy had played, and a mossy bank overhung with giant beeches, and the wood of coppiced hazel where the nightingales sang.
At the gate she stood touching the padlock which had been left, unlocked, hooked into the wire. She listened, tense and alert. Deep in the leaf-layers of time she could hear the true song of the wood, the fairy harps, the Pan Pipes. She felt free now to hear their music, free to learn the secrets of this special grove.
Tingling from head to toe, Tessa followed the robin from tree to tree, her shoes soundless on the path. The noon-time light cascaded over the canopy of beech and oak, sharpening the outlines of the dark spaces. The deeper she ventured into the wood, the more the light burned silver, the greens more vivid, the branches more indigo like veins and arteries carrying pulses of life to the far edges of sky.
Each time she paused to listen, the robin scolded her and led her on. The sounds of the outside world had gone. Tessa felt she floated in a bubble of translucence. Yet she was increasingly afraid. To go back was no longer an option. There was something she had to find. Something waiting. She sensed the leaves closing behind her, like a conspiracy, the trees growing older, more gnarled with faces, with lips, and eyes, and breath.
She stopped to admire a raindrop caught in the palm of a sycamore leaf. The robin had vanished. She heard him deep inside a thicket of arching bramble and the trumpet flowers of bindweed, shockingly white, like flowers piled on top of a hearse.
A chill crawled over Tessa, an unexpected doom-laden shudder of fear. With cold, unsteady hands she parted the foliage in front of her. She reached through a tangle of stems and touched something rubbery. A tyre, an old tyre someone had dumped in the wood. Why did it spook her? She tugged the tendrils of creeper apart, and saw colours. Colours she knew well. Colours she had once painted. Her mind flashed back to a scorching day in St Ives, a happy day when she’d been free and in love, painting marigolds on Art’s bus, with the ocean surf foaming and sparkling. Now she was seeing those painted marigolds, rusting, covered in moss.
The bus. She’d found the bus.
&nbs
p; Abandoned.
She screamed. ‘NO. NO. Oh God!’ and her scream pierced the canopy of leaves and fractured the sky into flakes of blue glass. Birds flew up, out of the wood, screaming with her, their wings beating like the panic in her heart.
He’s dead, she thought, and stumbled across the path, and collapsed against the trunk of a beech tree, her hands clutched against her temples. I can’t face this. Surely he didn’t die, all alone in the bus?
It might have gone on, and on, hauling her into the deepest grief she could possibly imagine. But as the echo of her scream reverberated into the hills, she heard the singing. The earthy twang of an acoustic guitar, the husky voice, the same old Beatles song, now close, the words distinctly reaching her.
When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
And in my hour of darkness
She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
Tessa hesitated, her nerves on thin ice as her eyes searched the spaces between the trees. She noticed the path was wider, the light more luminous, the air seasoned with a tang of wood smoke. She tiptoed over the beech leaves, while the song gathered a magnetic power that rang through the wood.
And when the broken-hearted people
Living in the world agree
There will be an answer, let it be.
For though they may be parted
There is still a chance that they will see
There will be an answer, let it be.
And then she saw him. The singer in the wood. Standing against an oak tree, singing his heart out, a black hat pulled down over his brow. The man in the hat who had been there at her meeting! She’d heard his voice shout ‘AWESOME’ at the end. She’d seen him slip away, out of the door before anyone could see the face below the hat.
She stood there looking at him.
And suddenly he couldn’t sing any more. The guitar slid down to the earth. The hat came off. The dear, beloved smile lit his face, reached his intense grey eyes.
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