by Joe Treasure
‘The blessing,’ I said, holding your hand at the window when the news first began to break. ‘They’re calling it the blessing.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why this singing, though, this drawing, this construction of strange objects?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe because it’s our deepest instinct – to make meaning.’
‘Even when there is no meaning?’
‘Especially then.’ And I felt the terror in your grip.
And who was I in all this? An onlooker from a high window, a nurse, a reader of Jane Eyre. A scavenger when it became necessary. A looter and barterer. A dodger of military bullets and a street fighter when I couldn’t avoid it. A shit-dumper and a grunting water carrier.
Can it really have been like this, or is it just the way I’ve reconfigured it, stretched out as I am, mushroomed and Django’d, with my brain’s wiring still scrambled from the sickness? Could I have lived through this and still be sane?
At some early point when we couldn’t begin to imagine how much worse it was going to get, you lay down with a fever, and I read to you, and Simon who seemed to have lost the power of speech was so quiet I sometimes forgot he was there. And we argued and you painted our wall and your second fever burned you into oblivion. And the last thing I could do for you was to carry your body to the designated collection point for a hastily improvised municipal burial, where you and others became landfill while the mourners covered their mouths – me among them – and looked away.
Agnes
I have shown Dell my book, this book that has been my most precious secret. It made me breathless to do it. She wasn’t shocked, but only puzzled at this new strangeness. When I read her something I’d written she smiled. ‘I see it now,’ she said. ‘You throw a pebble for someone to catch. Before, when you found meaning in the marks in all those books, I saw only the catching.’
I wonder at myself that Dell could see this at once, when all this time I couldn’t. But how could I when no one in the village does?
Then Dell frowned again. ‘You put your own words in your book,’ she said. ‘So why didn’t my mother write her own words to me?’
I saw then how impossible it would be for Dell to understand all the ways of the Hall, and it came to me with a sharp pang that I have travelled further than I ever meant to and left behind everything that was once precious to me.
I don’t know when I shall see the village again. The cottage where Walt and Janet raised me comes to me sometimes in dreams. More often I dream of the Hall, its dark places, and I must walk endlessly to find what’s lost, the passageways tilting so I crawl and cling to keep from tumbling backwards. And my neighbours turn away from me, cold and indifferent. I think often of cousin Annie who would have been my friend if I’d let her, and of Roland and Megan who will be an old married couple by now, but I haven’t yet dreamt of them. I dream the stern face of the Mistress. I dream of Brendan falling from the banisters into trees that sprout to meet him from the tiled floor. And one time I dreamt of Sarah, shedding light from one end of the top corridor to where I stood desolate at the other, and I woke weightless with joy, until I remembered where I was and what my life had come to.
I love Dell and Trevor, but I fear for myself out here among the scroungers. And I fear for my child. Meanwhile I gather wood for the fire and help Dell with the cooking. And I teach her the letters and the sounds they make, which she is quick to learn, being eager to understand this oddness of wild words found in patterns of ink, and longing to read for herself her mother’s only message.
Later I will teach her writing, which she has her own reason to learn. That torn page she said was her mother’s way of passing her the word. And I see now that for the scroungers a word isn’t a shape made of letters but something left at the O to be passed on to someone else – that this one has gone east, that one south, that another might be found hunting cattle in such a place or won’t be back before the first stirrings of spring – all these words to be stowed in Trevor’s head. With writing she can help him. Is this wrong? I am so far from the schoolroom and the study, and so accustomed to this strange book of mine, that my qualms slide away.
But not my fears. I fear that Brendan is dead. I fear that he is still alive and Sarah takes my place in the red room. I fear I shall be found and punished for his killing, that Sarah regrets putting herself in danger for my sake, that she hasn’t forgiven me, that she will never forgive me, trapped at the Hall to be maddened by the muttered longings and resentments of the village. I fear that Roland, when he remembers me, thinks only how glad he is that I am gone and he has Megan to love and comfort him.
I write too much about fear, and think about it uselessly. I mean anyway to write less, so that there might be ink when I have urgent need of it.
I’ve helped Sarah make ink and could do it myself if I were at the Hall. Here in the forest, I’ve taken Dell to search for the purple galls that swell sometimes on oak twigs and we’ve left our findings in a lidded pot to seep and grow mouldy. Among the ruins we’ve found shards of iron small enough to stir into the mix when it’s time. I’ve put aside a piece of cloth that may be fine enough for straining. There’s no lack of water. Sarah adds sloe juice, but says water alone will do. But what of the indigo that grows in the windowed shed beside the Hall and deepens the ink’s colour? And where will I find an acacia bush like the one that spreads its purple leaves against the south wall beside the study window and spills thick sap under the knife. I’m afraid my ink will come faint and watery from the nib, and fade to nothing, and my writing wasted, and my thoughts forgotten.
And besides, now that I have Dell as a friend, now that Dell knows about the book, now that the book is not my only friend, perhaps I can put it by and maybe not think about it so often and so fiercely. I will try at least.
Jason
Is it October yet? There’s no way of knowing. The day’s colour faded long ago from the sky, but it’s warm still, almost sultry. I’m tired, but too restless for bed. I sit on the front steps of the house and rest against a pillar. I push my hands against the stone and its texture speaks like Braille. I was here before you were born, the house says, and I’ll be here after you’re dead. And when I’m old I’ll shelter your offspring. Your descendants too will be nurtured here, will sit where you sit and see the cottages standing among trees across the empty road, the church tower breaking the skyline to the east where the woodland thickens, a drift of haze softening the edges of the moon.
I’m distracted by human voices. Below in the orchard Aleksy has said something to make Deirdre laugh. So that’s where they disappeared to after our spin in the Merc. I see them now. Their outlines shift and mingle in the shadows and their soft laughter joins the other noises – the bird cries and fox barks, the scurrying of badgers, the wingbeats of roosting pheasants.
How close you seem to me right now, Caro, Caroline, though forever out of reach.
The Merc is where we left it, down there tilting into the ditch among the weeds. That’s the last of our old life. Somewhere up in the house the monkey is bickering with Django’s clarinet, bubbles of noise floating from the high windows. There are footsteps behind me in the hallway and a rushing sound like wind blowing through the grass, but there is no wind.
Abigail speaks to me. ‘I brought you a jumper, look.’
‘I’m not cold.’
‘But you might be later.’
I turn and look up at her and see there’s a duvet over her shoulder, dragging on the flagstones.
‘Maud’s gone to bed. I don’t want to sleep in the house. Not tonight.’
She puts her hand out and helps me up. Then without letting go she draws me down the steps and towards the High Wood.
‘It’s Django’s stew,’ I say.
‘Yes, it’s Django’s stew, so we don’t have to think of another reason.’
‘Did you know he’d spiked the food?’
‘Spiked – is that what you call it? Because of those sharp
-capped mushrooms? I should have known not to eat them. I was so eager for everything to be all right.’
‘What are we going to do about Django?’
‘He can’t hurt us if we don’t let him.’
‘He could have poisoned us.’
‘I’ll keep him out of the kitchen.’
‘He burnt my books.’
‘So that’s one thing he can never do to you again.’
‘I’m not sure that makes sense.’
‘Maybe it doesn’t. Ask me in the morning.’ She looks at me closely, her eyes fixed on mine, and starts to smile and looks away, because looking and smiling aren’t allowed at the same time.
I let her lead me in silence across the lawn and in among the trees until the house is obscured. Her headscarf snags on a twig and for a moment she’s tangled. I help her pull her hair free. Then she unhooks the scarf from the branch and pockets it. Where the trees are most ancient and the ground opens up, she throws the duvet down on a bank of leaves and we sit watching bright slivers of sky between trunks of beech and elder.
‘I want to tell you about Caroline.’
‘Tell me then.’
‘We were married for five years and we were going to have a child, a little girl. She was great, Caroline was, really great. She was always full of ideas. She lived in her head. It drove me up the wall sometimes. She’d lose something and not notice for days. It never bothered her. She was much cleverer than me, except about practical things. She didn’t tell me much about her childhood, only that she was lonely and read for company. I should have asked her more. But asking questions was more her thing than mine. She was an anthropologist. Do you know what that is?’
‘No.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t either, really. She wrote things – books and articles. She wrote all the time, when she wasn’t teaching and going to meetings or doing what she called fieldwork. But there was a book she was writing for herself. Nothing to do with her job, just an idea she had. It started with Jane Eyre because she loved Jane Eyre. She had various copies of it, but her favourite came from her godmother and was about eighty years old. Do you know Jane Eyre?’
‘No.’
‘She wanted to write a kind of history of the way Jane Eyre’s been imitated and re-written and generally ripped off. I teased her about it, how far up itself it was – a book about a book and all the other books it’s spawned. She didn’t mind. She enjoyed being teased. You don’t know what I’m talking about do you? Don’t listen to me. I don’t know why I’m talking so much.’
‘Don’t stop. It’s interesting. I like it when you talk.’
‘There were books she liked a lot. One that told the story of Rochester’s mad wife, all the things Charlotte Bronte doesn’t tell us and Jane Eyre doesn’t know – about her being a Jamaican and how she’s done in by men. I forget the name of it. And there were books that annoyed her, and books that made her laugh. She loved spotting Charlotte’s children, as she called them. Stories about Victorian husbands driving their wives mad and locking them in lunatic asylums. Stories about houses haunted by secrets, and you’d know it wouldn’t be over until someone had set fire to the house. I said once it was the houses I felt bad for and she pretended to be shocked. Of course I never actually read them, but she’d be in bed with a book and start giggling or get excited and then she’d tell me. I asked her once why she didn’t write a book of her own – a novel, I mean. And she said she didn’t have the talent for making things up. She was better at seeing patterns in other people’s stories. But she did once have this idea for a children’s story.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I’m not sure I can remember it all.’
‘Tell me what you remember.’
‘All right. This girl lives in an orphanage. One day she finds a book hidden in the fireplace where they’re too mean to light a fire. It’s a beautiful book and she loves it like a friend, like a toy bear or something, hugging it at night. She starts having these strange dreams. Every morning she finds the story of her dream has printed itself in the book in place of what was there before. Meanwhile, in some other country, a wealthy man finds parts of his life disappearing – objects missing from his house, then pieces of his own history. Friends become unreachable and unknown as though they’d never existed. When his son doesn’t come down to breakfast, he sends his daughter to wake him. Go and fetch your brother from his room, he says, and she reacts as if he’s gone mad. What brother? What room? His piano disappears. He visits a friend, a violinist. He sits to play the friend’s piano and he can’t play a note. It’s as though he’s never touched a piano in his life. I can’t remember how it ends. Maybe that was going to be the end. It doesn’t sound like much of story does it.’
‘It’s sad.’
‘Yes, but Caroline wasn’t sad when she told me about it. She was excited. That’s the way she was.’
‘There’s something I must tell you, Jason.’
‘You can tell me anything.’
‘But this is a secret. I mean I’ve kept it a secret and I shouldn’t have, and now I’m afraid you’ll be angry that I didn’t tell you before.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Because I was afraid.’
‘You’re not afraid of anything.’
‘I’m more afraid than you know. If you weren’t here I don’t know what I’d do.’
I wait for her to tell me her secret, thinking she could hardly guess how hard it would be to shock me.
‘Do you think sometimes,’ she says, ‘that we’ve known each other all our lives?’
‘My life stopped, and began again when I woke up in this house.’
‘But we knew each other before.’
‘Is this about reincarnation?’
‘I don’t know what that is. But we did know each other. I was in Hebron. I was on the Jesus bus.’
And I am shocked after all. ‘What do you know about the Jesus bus?’
‘Everything. I was there. With my grandma. Grandma Cheryl. We left my mother in London because she didn’t want to come. I mean… because she was a streetwalker – that’s what Grandma Cheryl said. I think it must have been a hard life. I barely remember her and I never saw her again after we left.’
‘Abigail? I don’t remember any Abigail.’
‘I wasn’t Abigail then. Caleb gave us all new names, remember, when we reached Hebron. I was Tiffany before.’
‘Tiffany!’ I search her face for that child, that pudgy kid bundled up in clothes too big for her and clinging to Penny’s skirt. It is her. Now I see it, I wonder that I didn’t see it before. ‘But how come you’re here? It’s unbelievable.’ It makes me laugh with astonishment.
‘No, not unbelievable. I saw the house when you did. When we were getting apples in the orchard. And you said, one day you’d buy it and live in it and I asked if I could come too. I knew if I was ever going to find you it would be here – back along the road from Lloyd’s farm. Not that far away. Three days walk, as it turned out. When most of the others were dead and there was no one left to nurse.’
‘You grew up on Lloyd’s farm.’
‘Yes, Hebron.’
‘So you knew Penny.’
‘Yes.’
‘And my mother.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Derek and Walter and all of them.’
‘Walter I remember vaguely. He died when I was quite young. Just after you left. They said it killed him when you ran away.’
‘That’s a lie. He was dead already. I watched him go.’
‘And Caleb – Derek – that’s the part I was afraid to tell you.’
‘Why? What about him?’
‘I was his wife. One of his wives. After your mother died, and your sister ran away, he chose me. Then later a girl called Sarah, and then Maud.’
‘Three of you?’
‘It was better when it wasn’t just me. We took care of each other. I loved Sarah. We were everything to each other.’
&nbs
p; ‘You were all his wives?’
‘Yes, like in the time of the patriarchs, Caleb said.’
‘I bet he did. Were there any children?’
‘No, none of us had children.’
‘He was infertile, then, I suppose.’
‘Maybe, I don’t know if that’s the word for it. It’s hard to explain.’
‘Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.’
There’s a pale movement overhead and I see the owl swooping among the trees to settle on a branch.
‘I knew what it was supposed to be like,’ Abigail says. ‘My grandma told me not to be scared, that it was nice when you got used to it. All good fun really, she said, as long as you don’t fight it. She saw me, one day, looking at the stallion in the field across the river with his pizzle hanging under his belly like something that didn’t belong to him, and she laughed and said it wouldn’t be that size. I knew that anyway. I’d seen one of the boys… you know… doing himself behind the barn. But it turned out different than I expected. Caleb never got hard like that. He’d get on top of me, but only to kiss me and rub against me.’ She stopped. ‘I didn’t think I’d tell you this. No reason to tell anyone now. I told Sarah, so she’d know what to expect. And Maud, later on. But I’ve no reason to tell you.’
‘Yes you have. So that you don’t have to carry it around all by yourself.’ I’m thinking of Penny, of what she told me when I found her squatting in my property with Jack or Zac – that sex with Derek was worse than she’d expected.
‘Well, I was supposed to use my hands and sometimes my mouth. It took a long time, longer than the boy behind the barn, a lot longer than the horse, and quite often nothing happened and he’d give up or fall asleep.’