by Joe Treasure
‘We would have come sooner, but no one could find Rasputin.’
‘Simon was searching for him earlier. Aleksy told him he must have gone off in search of a girl monkey to mate with.’
‘Poor Rasputin. When I went up to talk to Maud, he was playing on your ladder. So I chased him off with a broom and shut the trap door. That’s the last I saw of him.’
The rain stops and we watch the sky clear across the valley, and the faint arc of refracted light.
Abigail says, ‘You did say you’d finished in the roof?’
‘The roof’s OK for now. The house will survive the winter, even if we don’t.’
‘We’ll be all right.’
‘What will happen to us, Abigail?’
‘We’ll grow wheat and bake bread. We’ll make cheese. There’ll be hay in the summer to feed the cows for another year. The orchard will give us fruit. The hens and geese will lay eggs. Maud’s bees will make honey and wax for our candles. And we’ll have children, first Deirdre and then me, and one day Maud. And we’ll take care of each other and our children will take care of us.’
‘And what will we tell them, these children?’
‘That now would be a good time to earth up the leeks.’
‘Have we got leeks?’
‘They were the first thing we planted, Maud and me. We brought what seeds we could find in Lloyd’s barn.’
‘You were thinking ahead.’
‘I’d been thinking for years, thinking myself out of Hebron.’ She reaches into the pocket of her apron. ‘I nearly forgot.’ She takes my left hand and slips my ring on. ‘I thought you’d like to have it with you.’
‘To bury Django you mean. You don’t mind that I wear it? You know it’s my wedding ring.’
‘We shouldn’t forget the people who were important to us. We hold them close, any way we can.’ She puts a hand to her heart, touching through her blouse the star on its silver chain.
Aleksy and Deirdre come, bringing Simon. He stands and watches while we move the stones away, lift Django’s body with the sheet still covering it and lower it into the ground.
Simon asks if he can read from his book.
‘Course you can, Si,’ I tell him. ‘Django would like that.’
‘This is n-Jangle’s… favourite bit,’ he says. He stumbles on the first goodnight. The second and third come more easily. Arbitrary words, they seem to me, though by some mystery they have captured his childish imagination. He draws out the last phrase, hushing his friend to an eternal sleep with his finger to his lips, and twitching in his effort to hold still.
That seems good enough for now. Together Aleksy and I shovel the earth back into the grave.
Later, when the leeks have been seen to and the cows have been milked, when Simon’s been put to bed and Aleksy is helping Deirdre clean the kitchen, I walk with Abigail in the long grass that used be a lawn. All day I’ve been aware of a glow, a vividness I hadn’t seen in her before. She touches me, and it’s as if her whole body is humming with energy, and mine too.
Above us the stars do what stars are supposed to do, what they’ve always done, though for a century or so it was hard to see them through the glare of cathode and neon and the glow of incandescent filaments.
I miss electricity – there’ll always be a hole in my heart where electricity used to be. God knows, I miss plumbing. I miss all the engineered gadgetry of the industrial age. I miss you too, Caroline, but just now you seem a long way off. If I could put everything back the way it was, if I could exchange this little rescued fragment of life for the world we had, in all its astounding, calamitous glory, I wouldn’t hesitate. Not for a second. But I have moments of forgetting. A mist crosses in front of it and I begin to lose the sharpness of its outline. I know it will come back to me, the desolation, the knowledge of all that’s gone. But for now there’s this glimmer of what it might feel like to be glad.
Agnes
So here we are in my cottage and the fire laid and Walt cleaned and fed, and Dell plucking some pigeons for the pan and a start made on the sweeping. And for now no one comes.
I sit at the kitchen table to write in my book. If someone should knock at my door and ask what it means, I will turn to them boldly and say: if Jane why not Agnes?
I have shown Walt my father’s things, his knife with its hidden blades, the little wren he carved from a scrap of maple. And the most precious of them – the silver chain he gave me when he could no longer speak, that he had from his mother, that will be Walt’s one day to pass on to his child. As delicate as anything ever made, like tiny grass seeds strung together. And the star with six points that hangs from it like a silver snowflake, and the ring, all gold except for a curling rim of paler colour, as though its first owner held it by one edge to dip it in the butter churn.
Little Walt laughed and reached a hand to all the shiny things. He cried when I wouldn’t let him play with them or put them to his mouth, but forgot them again soon after. When he’s older he’ll know how to value them.
So what now? If they went on with Daniel’s punishment, Annie will be washing his wounds and the villagers returning mute and fearful to their work. If Sarah is punished for walking away from a flogging, she won’t come. If she wants only the study and the Book of Air and nothing more, she’ll stop at the Hall. Maybe the Reeds will come in the night and I shall be dragged away and my little boy taken from me. The Mistress will send them, surely, but will they come now at her sending? I saw the whisper scurry across the lawn, the books fluttering from hand to hand. Their certainty is shaken. The world is not as they thought. She may come for me herself and I will invite her into my kitchen, but not to cower at her every word. Knowing this, she surely won’t come.
Or they’ll all come, the village and the Hall together crowding at my door to know the meaning of these books, leaving Roland to sit alone in the turret, if he likes, and boil his own water.
Unless the books are already gathered into the fire, Sarah locked in the red room, the villagers afraid to raise their eyes from the ground.
Putting these thoughts down on a new page, I see something I hadn’t seen before. That when I write about things that haven’t yet happened and might never happen I can make them seem true just by writing them. Did Jane know this feeling too – of bringing things into being just by putting the words on paper? It makes me feel closer to her than ever to think she did.
Maybe I can say straight out then that this is how our day ended, with Sarah coming wrapped against the storm to find Dell like her younger self for all her strange manner of speaking. And cousin Annie arriving soon after with her little girl and Daniel unharmed. That it ended with candles lit and a fire to warm the cottage’s old stones, and good food from the pot, and tears for bad times past, and laughter that we are all here together to talk about them, and Walt and Eliza cuddled and passed from hand to hand, and wonder that all these things should come about never before guessed at.
And maybe writing this will make it so, even while the sky darkens and the wind howls at my door.
And maybe I can say that before another day passed Roland came himself with some primroses for the mantelpiece and a basket of strawberries to ask if we might forget our quarrel and talk in the old way. And that I told him I had my own cottage to clean now and a child to care for but, if I had time, we might walk out along the river and enjoy each other’s company as we once did.
Acknowledgements
First, my thanks to Hayley, Kate, Josh, Gareth and all at Clink Street for guiding this book safely into print.
It has taken me a good while to discover how to tell this story. Many people have helped along the way. For answering questions, offering suggestions, correcting errors and supporting in other ways, I would like to thank Adrian Barker, Michael Buck, Alan Buster, Jane Carroll, Mary Fee, Russell Kennedy, Neil Parker, Richard Porter, May Rigler, Zimmy Ryan, Liz Treasure and Tom Treasure.
Jane Kennedy, who was encouraging me to write before I had
begun to think of myself as a writer, has offered invaluable insights.
While preparing The Book of Air for publication, I have benefitted greatly from the encouragement and professional advice of Jenny Rogers and Phil Wilkinson.
I am grateful to my agent Victoria Hobbs for her care and attention in promoting this book and pushing me to make it better, and to my friend and colleague Tahmima Anam who nurtured it from its early days through many drafts.
Finally, my thanks to Leni Wildflower, whose love, companionship and fearless support has made this project possible.
About Joe Treasure
Raised sixth in a family of nine, Joe Treasure enjoyed a capriciously Bohemian childhood. Having received his educational grounding at the hands of Carmelite priests, he escaped to Cheltenham Grammar School where he excelled only in music and art. His architectural ambitions were thwarted by low grades in maths and physics. The local college of further education allowed him to pursue more congenial subjects, after which he surprised everyone, not least himself, by winning a place to read English at Keble College, Oxford.
Settling in Monmouth, Wales, Joe taught English and ran an innovative drama programme. He moved to Los Angeles at the turn of the millennium to join his wife, Leni Wildflower. Temporarily unemployed, he set about fixing up Leni’s house and turned to writing fiction.
In 2004, at the end of George W Bush’s first explosive term in office, they relocated to London where Joe studied creative writing at Royal Holloway. He wrote The Male Gaze, a novel that drew on his American experience, mingling social comedy with political drama. Offered a two-book publishing contract with Picador, he went on to explore the divided loyalties of an Anglo-Irish family in Besotted, a novel that celebrates the enduring bonds of brotherhood.
The Book of Air is Joe’s first venture into speculative fiction. He and Leni currently live in Balham, London.
Copyright
Published by Clink Street Publishing 2016
Copyright © 2016
First edition.
The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that with which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN:
978-1-911525-09-7 - paperback
978-1-911525-10-3 - ebook