by F. G. Cottam
The first of the vanes pointed him back towards Gibbet Mourning. The second pointed coastward, towards some forgotten destination that had once been named Puller’s Reach. Who or what a puller was, Curtis had no idea. He was a bit mystified by Loxley’s Cross. It was enigmatic and so solitary and redundant it seemed almost surreal. It pointed to nowhere anyone might ever wish to go. But it was not sinister, which was something.
Looking at it, still and black and staunch, he wondered whether the function of the signpost at Loxley’s Cross might actually be the opposite of what would generally be assumed. It might exist to warn the wary traveller against places they should not visit. He smiled to himself at that contrapuntal bit of reasoning. Then he looked at his watch. He was due back at the house for lunch at one o’clock. He had ample time. He would head for Puller’s Reach and check personally on whatever it was the sign was warning people to avoid.
He was almost at the edge of the sea and had practically given up, was on the very brink of the land before he saw what he supposed must be the Reach. It was a construction. It was modest, but it was unarguably man-made.
Only a small cairn of stones marked the spot, at a place indistinguishable otherwise from anywhere else on the cliff top. It was very still, the sea was calm and it was almost noon when he got there. He dismounted and switched off the quad bike’s engine, listening to the somnolent rhythm of the waves lapping eighty feet below on the beach as he studied the conical pile.
The cairn had been assembled from large pebbles. This careful work had been completed a long time ago. The quantity and age of the moss and lichen suggested decades. The stones were stained a deep, enduring green with what had grown over them in their enduring stillness there through the years. The whole construction was about a yard across at its base and reached to a flat pinnacle only a little higher than his waist.
The wind had got up, unless it was just that bit fresher anyway in the exposure of the cliff top, so close to the expanse of the open sea. It whistled through the cairn. Curtis listened. The sound crooned and insinuated, like some sly and secretive melody half reluctant to let you hear it. It was as though some spirit inhabited the stones and he was hearing it at play, making music partly to entertain itself, partly to signal the fact of its presence, invisible there.
Curtis tried to enjoy the boundless view out over the sea as the waste of water glittered and toiled. He searched the horizon for ships, but there were none. Ordinarily a view such as this one would have lifted him, the way endless vistas were apt to do to anyone, freeing them from the bondage of their daily concerns with the sight of something naturally exhilarating, timeless and in the truest sense, free. He inhaled the pure air.
But his mood did not lift. The whistle through the cairn had grown harsh and insistent. There was something restless and febrile about the sound. It scratched and mauled at the senses. And the air did not seem pure. It smelled sourly tainted, as though something had spoiled on the spot. He thought that it might be the moss on the stones. Then it occurred to him that some small mammal might have sickened and sheltered at the cairn’s stone heart and perished there. He could smell its decomposition.
He decided he would attempt to descend the cliff to the beach. He would try to discover a route that could take him down without risk of falling and breaking his neck. The cliffs were not sheer. There were routes. They were goat-narrow but he was young and agile and he felt a compulsion to breathe clean air at the edge of the water. He wanted the smart of salt in his nostrils, suddenly, the prick of sea spray on the skin of his face.
Ten minutes later he was at the tide line. The smell of brine was strong and invigorating and the tumble of waves hissing into shingle an innocent sound that brought back, as it always did, a rush of tumbling childhood memories – each of them warm and innocent. He felt the strengthening sun on his face and was reminded that soon it would be April and the earth would surrender its spring life in tremulous buds reaching for light above the soil.
Then his eyes alighted on something else man-made. He saw a pattern imposed on the beach and not randomly, by nature. It was two parallel rows of pilings, the wood ancient and petrified, the planks of the landing stage they must once have secured at the spot long rotted away. He remembered the name on the sign he had seen pointing in this direction and thought that boats would be hauled ashore and that Puller’s Reach was a more logical name for a landing stage on a shore than it was for a pile of whispering stones on a cliff top.
He was studying the pilings, engrossed in his study of them, when he experienced the sudden and unmistakeable sensation of being watched. It wasn’t subtle this time, like it had been the previous evening at Gibbet Mourning with Sam Freemantle. It was almost overwhelming, so much so that he had no alternative but to turn around and look at the direction his senses strongly insisted this unwelcome scrutiny was coming from.
There was a figure above him at the cliff edge. It was a quite tall and slender man. He was attired in a belted tunic and leggings. He was not clad in armour as he was having slain his monster in the stained-glass depiction at Raven Dip. He was older and his hair was shorter and he wasn’t armed. He was looking directly at Curtis with an expression that was impossible to read and Curtis had the giddy thought that if he lived to see the age of forty, this was what he would look like. The clothes would be different. Physically, the likeness would be exact.
He was looking at a ghost. Reason told him that. Reason dictated that conclusion to him and so did the gooseflesh crawling over his skin and the tingle of terror invading his scalp. The warmth of the sun was forgotten. His childhood memories were suddenly at a bleak remove. He stood stranded in a stark winter of fear and incomprehension for a moment and then the courage and nerve returned to him and he thought, I’m being toyed with here. I’m the victim of an elaborate joke. There are no ghosts. It’s broad daylight and that’s a costumed actor up there.
He ran for the path he had descended. He climbed, agile and furious, his heart hammering with effort and indignation until he reached the top.
There was no one there. The stones of the cairn were silent. All he could hear was his own heavy breathing and his own thumping heart until he heard the sound of an engine and saw a quad bike at the horizon to his left coming towards him. The rider was tall and long-limbed and riding out of the saddle, like someone galloping astride a racehorse might. The rider was too young to be Abercrombie, far too slight to be Freemantle. The bike was still half a mile away when Curtis realized its rider was Francesca.
‘Did you follow me?’
She said, ‘Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve better things to do.’
‘I think this place might be haunted.’
She shrugged. She was still astride the bike. She’d taken off her helmet and shaken out her hair with a toss of her head. It moved in wisps at its edges with what little wind there was. There wasn’t enough now to summon any noise at all from the stones of the cairn. Looking at him, she said, ‘Why did Charlotte’s mother leave you?’
‘I might have left her.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘I was unfaithful.’
‘Habitually?’
‘No. A brief affair, last summer. I should have told her.’
‘Big mistake.’
‘My big mistake was in cheating in the first place.’
‘You’ve paid a high price.’
‘Present tense. I’m still paying it. How did you find me?’
She held something up. It looked like a walkie-talkie receiver but was only the size of a mobile phone. ‘The bikes all have tracking devices attached. It’s only practical. Dad invites senior management to his places sometimes.’
‘And they can bring their families and that means teenage sons and daughters. Teenagers have no sense.’
‘Are you not curious as to why I’ve come to find you?’
‘We’ll ride back together,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ll tell me on the way.’
‘What
did you mean just now? About this place being haunted?’ She was putting her helmet back on. She looked unconcerned.
‘I thought I saw my doppelgänger, right here, a minute before you arrived.’
‘Don’t they steal souls, in fairy stories?’
‘I’m not sure what they do. This one scared me. It looked like the stained-glass guy. Do you know who he was?’
‘Nobody does. Only that he was gentle.’
‘He doesn’t appear gentle in that window. He’s just used a sword to sever a monster’s head.’
She laughed, then said, ‘Gentle in the medieval sense, which means of noble birth. He was a knight.’
‘I knew that.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
Curtis grinned back at her. She had arrived at a good moment. He’d been rattled and relieved to see her. And he liked her. She was a reminder that women could be warm and funny as well as beautiful. It was something he’d forgotten.
Abercrombie had a set-piece planned for him. That was what she’d ridden out to warn him about. It was the planting of the first tree and it was to take place that same afternoon. There was something symbolic about it and there would be a little ceremony to follow, she said. They would celebrate with drinks afterwards. It would certainly require his staying on the site a second night.
‘It makes no difference to me,’ Curtis said. ‘I’ll be based here anyway for the work pretty much from now on. I’ll be travelling to source, obviously, but I’ll be on site the rest of the time until completion.’
‘You don’t have any other obligations?’
‘You mean do I have a life? Not really. It’s all on hold until I get access to Charlotte. There’s a rented flat in Lambeth. There’s a gym membership. There are a few acquaintances I meet up with now and then for a beer.’
‘You sound like quite a solitary man.’
‘Why did you think you needed to warn me about this afternoon? It’s what I’m here for.’
‘The ceremonial element,’ she said. ‘My dad can be a bit odd about trees. He had this mystical experience with them, this epiphany a few years ago. He was experiencing a big drugs come-down back in his partying days. He kind of came-to in a square in Soho. The sun was coming up. He was having a very bad moment, and credits the trees lining the square with saving his sanity.’
‘I see.’
‘I wanted to give you a heads up on how to behave if he gets all teary or starts quoting poetry when the tree is planted. Don’t laugh at him. He’ll be offended and you’ll lose the job.’
Curtis thought this warning unnecessary. He liked Saul Abercrombie, who had earned the right to his eccentricity. He would not have laughed at him, he did not think. But he was flattered that Francesca had taken the trouble to caution him.
‘Allen Ginsberg.’
‘What?’
‘The poetry, if your dad quoted it. I’d bet money.’
‘You don’t have any money, Tom.’
‘What about you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I didn’t think you’d be here. Whenever I’ve seen you in the papers you’ve been in some exotic part of the world.’
‘That’s because the photographers get sent to the exotic parts of the world to get their pictures,’ she said. ‘They want you on the beach at Rio or in a Monte Carlo cocktail bar, where you reinforce the celebrity myth. You’re no good to the paps reversing out of a Waitrose car park in Pembroke. Who’d want to goggle over that?’
‘You actually live here?’
She was silent before answering. When finally she did, her tone was sombre. ‘My father has been given seven months to live,’ she said. ‘I’m here for the duration. I want to share as much time with Dad as he’s got left.’
He thought it crass not to have realized that. Freemantle had told him the previous evening that Abercrombie’s cancer was incurable. Freemantle, who would probably see them now arriving back together and draw entirely the wrong conclusion if he did.
‘What type of tree does your dad have for me?’
‘An English yew, the type used for the bows that won the English victories at Agincourt and Crécy.’
‘The forest here was cleared hundreds of years before those battles were fought. And this is Wales.’
‘Well,’ she said, distracted, because they were almost there, ‘I’m sure Welsh yew was used to carve Welsh bows to use in Welsh battles.’
‘I’m sure it was.’
‘In the time of your doppelgänger,’ she said. In a time before recorded history, the era they called the Dark Ages, when myths were created that became legends. And Curtis had his first inkling that Francesca might know more about the noble subject of the portrait she had painted than she was letting on.
There was no sign of Freemantle. They joined Abercrombie for an open-air lunch. Curtis became aware for the first time of the telltale signs as Jo, the industrious cook, served them a tuna pasta salad: of how drawn and hollow-eyed his host looked in the glare of the spring sunshine, of how little he ate and the deliberate way each morsel of food he did manage was chewed and swallowed.
‘Got a tree for you to plant, brother.’
‘So this is the audition.’
‘No. You got the gig. I told you that.’
‘Then I’ll be planting a hundred thousand trees.’
‘Only one of those comes first. This is special, the breaking of the ground.’
‘Have a particular spot in mind?’
‘Should I?’
‘No. Everywhere’s good, Saul. The ground is so nutrient-rich you could probably grow giant red-woods here.’
‘It’s a mature yew tree. It’s forty years old and comes from a copse in the Black Mountains. That’s where this baby was born and raised. I thought the first planting should be Welsh.’
‘I’d suggest beside the cairn at Puller’s Reach,’ Curtis said. ‘We’re going to have to work inland from the cliffs anyway, once the heavy diggers arrive. That seems like as good a spot as any.’
Abercrombie frowned. ‘You’re not thinking of destroying the cairn?’
‘I’m not, but if it came to practicalities, why wouldn’t I? You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’
‘You’re not engaged in cookery,’ Francesca said. ‘You’d be no competition for Jo. You’re here to create a forest. I’m sure a forest can accommodate a pile of old pebbles.’
‘Is there some significance to the stones?’ He saw father and daughter exchange a swift glance at the question.
Francesca said, ‘Nothing’s written from the time that little monument was built. The stories pass down the generations. There’s a saying about it to the effect that if you safeguard it, it will safeguard you.’
‘Bad, bad karma, Tree Man,’ Abercrombie said. ‘You’re bringing it on if you total the cairn, inviting heavy karmic retribution. And fate-wise, with this project, I’d say we need the breaks.’
‘I’d no intention of destroying it,’ Curtis said. ‘I’ve as much respect for an ancient monument as anyone.’ This was true, so far as it went. But what he was thinking was that they were wary of the cairn, maybe even scared of it. Perhaps they knew something they weren’t sharing about the capering spirit that caused it to whistle and croon. It was his second such intuition in less than an hour.
Freemantle emerged from the house and marched over to them. He’s been for the tree, Curtis thought. It was obvious from his determined stride and the clothing and industrial gloves he wore and the smirk of triumphalism spread across his face.
The yew was lashed to a low-loading trailer behind a Land Rover at the front of the house. Its foliage was an intense green rising from its gnarled trunk but its roots looked pale and somehow loathsome exposed to the light, more than anything like the trailing innards of a mortal creature.
‘We need to get it into the ground as quickly as possible,’ Curtis said.
Freemantle said, ‘Where do you want it?’
‘Pull
er’s Reach.’
‘There’s another vehicle with a small digger on its trailer in one of the garages at the back of the house,’ Abercrombie said. He rubbed the dry palms of his hands together. ‘This is an auspicious moment,’ he said.
It took just over two hours to get that first tree successfully into the ground, once they had reached the site. It was a small tree and rose to a modest height, no more than eight feet at its tip when it was firmly anchored in the willing earth. It looked much bigger, of course, because it stood so solitary in the surrounding flatness of the grass. Curtis planted it about thirty feet from the cairn, which it dwarfed in its size and vibrancy.
The cairn was a monument. The tree was a living thing, its leaves responding to the caress of the wind with a shiver there in the exposure of its new-found home. It wouldn’t be alone for long, Curtis thought. But Abercrombie was right, wasn’t he? It was the first and would always have that distinction.
The yew was positioned a dozen feet from the cliff edge. A person could walk around it without risking a fall. And Saul Abercrombie did this, six or seven times, pausing at the start or the conclusion of each circuit – for it was both – before striding around it again. There was a ceremonial or ritual character to this progress that made it seem much more dignified than ridiculous. It occurred to Curtis that the last thing he felt like doing was laughing at the man.
Freemantle opened a bottle of champagne and produced four flutes. Abercrombie raised a toast. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Curtis took only a token sip of his drink. His mind was on the magnitude of his task. He was thinking about personnel he could recruit and plant equipment he could hire and trees he could source at short notice. He was wondering how much stuff he could delegate to Freemantle, a smart man with a substantial ego with whom he felt already he could very easily clash.
He’d had no alternative but to accept the job. The pay was going to enable and secure his future, legitimate access to his daughter. The ten-week time frame, though, was ridiculous. He knew it and suspected that his new employer did too. But when you’d been given seven months to live it was probably only human nature to try to accelerate the achievement of a life’s ambition.