The Memory of Trees

by F. G. Cottam

  Some of the info the comms room provided was sort of freaky. Saul had taught him how to use the monitoring equipment and made it his task to take regular readings. He didn’t really understand the motive for this. Nor did he understand the anomalies thrown up. Why were some parts of the estate persistently cold? Pockets of ground fog could reduce the temperature of low-lying spots, particularly at night. But while that wouldn’t be exactly random, it would be more arbitrary than the puzzling consistency of the readings he got.

  The fog bank, though, was a new one on him altogether. It had been like nothing he’d seen before in the weeks that they’d been here. And he hadn’t seen the thorn bush move with quite the same barbed restlessness as it had when he had shown it to the tree guy. It had shifted in the past. It hadn’t seethed. In a funny way, it seemed to him as though the place was preparing for something. It was a ludicrous thought, held up to the light. But it was also kind of unnerving.

  The armoury was the smallest of the rooms in the basement of the house. It was little bigger than a walk-in cupboard. But it was well-stocked with rifles and shotguns and half-a-dozen automatic pistols of a very recent vintage.

  Some of this ordnance was what a seasoned countryman might expect. Most isolated farms had a shotgun and rifle to hand. They were necessary tools and with the increase over recent years in violent theft from remote properties, it was only really common sense.

  There was some heavy calibre stuff too though, that might have raised a rural eyebrow, lubed and gleaming on the armoury’s racks. Freemantle considered this equally necessary. Saul was one of the wealthiest men in the Britain. That made him a potential target for kidnap. Kidnap gangs arrived heavily armed and in numbers and were not easily deterred from plans painstakingly put together. Freemantle was confident he could deter them if it came to it. He was vigilant and willing and with the hardware and ammo in the armoury room, his boss had provided him with the means.

  People made assumptions based on appearance. He’d seen the assumptions the tree guy had made on meeting him and encouraged them with that bit of fiction about his ‘manoeuvres’ in Lincolnshire back in the day.

  Lincolnshire hadn’t been drill. It had been running. He had been a fugitive. He really had experienced that ghostly encounter taking refuge for the night in a Nissen hut on the abandoned airfield. He knew about weapons too. He had handled them often and used them to lethal effect. But his experience in their use had not been acquired in quite the way Tom Curtis would be likely now to assume.

  He showered after his workout and changed. He sauntered into the comms room, switched on a screen, tapped coordinates into a keyboard and saw that the fog bank had all but lifted. He looked at his watch. It was 10 a.m. With no pressing duties till lunchtime, he decided he would spend a couple of hours oiling and cleaning the guns.

  Francesca spent the early part of the morning in her studio. It was a much more productive period than her flustered visit of the previous evening. She cleaned oil paint off her fingers with turpentine at the end of it, thinking that two more sessions might see the picture she was working on completed. It was an inexact science. They were done only when they announced to you that they were done. But this one almost was now and she was pleased with it.

  She joined her father for coffee on the terrace just after 10 a.m. and he had only just poured for her when they heard the buzz of Curtis returning from wherever he’d been aboard the quad bike.

  ‘Went to check on his handiwork,’ her father said.

  ‘Into that fog bank?’

  ‘Yeah, if the grey stuff was still with us this morning.’

  ‘Oh, I think it probably was.’

  ‘An experience,’ he said.

  ‘What you’d call a bad trip, Dad?’

  He smiled at that. She knew that he liked it when she teased him but thought the joke a bit callous of her. She didn’t think there was anything really dangerous out there to threaten Tom Curtis. On the other hand, she would not have ventured into the fog herself. Not to the cliff top, by the cairn, where the yew tree was now planted. Certainly not alone.

  He was getting closer to them. She couldn’t make out his features clearly yet, but he looked pale. ‘What if he’s just experienced something that’s really freaked him out? He did yesterday. He seems to be quite sensitive to atmosphere, for a guy who deals in practicalities.’

  Her father shrugged. She couldn’t see his eyes. They were hidden by his sunglasses. She suspected a bad night. He said, ‘Curtis won’t just quit and take off. Not the type. Anyway, Jo told me two hours ago that he wasn’t in his room, after she knocked on his door with a breakfast tray. Gave me time to arrange something.’

  ‘A little surprise for him?’

  ‘An incentive for him to stay.’

  He’d reached them. He got off the bike, took off his helmet and finger-combed his hair. Abercrombie gestured for him to join them. He unzipped his jacket, took it off and hung it across the back of his chair. Francesca poured him coffee. He smiled a thank you and raised the cup to his lips. She noticed a slight tremor in his hand. It could have been caused by the vibration of the bike, but she didn’t think it was.

  ‘How’s our yew?’

  ‘Lonely.’

  ‘But healthy? Flourishing?’

  Curtis paused before replying. He said, ‘It looks like it belongs there. It looks at home.’

  ‘No downside, Tree Man?’

  ‘Not with the yew. I think you might have a wildlife issue, though.’

  ‘No way,’ Abercrombie said.

  ‘Something large and feral.’

  ‘A beastie? We’re a long way from Bodmin Moor, brother.’

  ‘I’d take the Beast of Bodmin over whatever it was I heard in the fog this morning.’

  When her father next spoke it was in his real voice, the one underneath the hippie vernacular, the one Francesca remembered having heard maybe half-a-dozen times in her adult life. The last time, it had been to break to her the news of her mother’s death. And that had been five years ago.

  ‘I’m dying, Tom. This project is important to me. It will very likely be the last thing I ever do.’ He reached for his daughter’s hand. ‘Don’t run out on us.’

  ‘I’m going to London,’ Curtis said. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow evening. I’m not running out on anyone, but when I get back, I’d like answers to some of the questions this place is posing.’

  ‘You’ll have them,’ Abercrombie said, ‘if I know them. Word of honour, you will.’

  Curtis nodded and rose to go. To his retreating back, Abercrombie said, ‘There’s a little something in your room, Tree Man, in a bag on the bed. Let’s call it a down payment.’

  THREE

  She said, ‘I’m surprised you haven’t asked to see her yet. It’s almost twenty minutes since you arrived.’

  ‘She isn’t here.’

  ‘Your self-control is quite something. Don’t you want to see your daughter?’

  ‘She isn’t here, Sarah. You wouldn’t have agreed to see me if she was.’

  ‘I probably would have, just not here. I would have insisted on neutral ground.’

  ‘What do you think of my proposal?’

  She looked at the open bag on the table between them, at the money it contained. It was so quiet in the sitting room of the home they used to share that Curtis could hear rain beat on the window almost one heavy drop at a time.

  ‘Where do you think she is?’

  He stood and went over to the window. What used to be his family were housed in a gated development. The view outside was sterile, rows of parked cars in identical drives, white paintwork and trim lawns and sycamore saplings in a tame row, everything wet. He said, ‘It’s half-term. I expect she’s enjoying a sleepover somewhere with a friend. Not here, not a neighbour. You’ll have put her a safe distance away.’

  ‘How much is in the bag?’

  ‘Nineteen thousand pounds. Walking around money, he calls it. I kept a thousand for the actual
walking around. That’s the balance.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘You’ve heard of him?’

  ‘Everyone has. He went to prison after that student protest in Red Lion Square. He was fashionably militant, back in the day. They tried to link him in court to the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Group. But it was the seventies, the days when police routinely fitted people up. He’s certainly proven since he’s no anti-capitalist.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘What I just said. Conspicuous consumption is the phrase, isn’t it? Drugs, hostess bars in south-east Asia, casinos, mansions, all the paraphernalia of being rich when you’re not a family man.’

  ‘He has a daughter.’

  ‘So do lots of men. Paternity is different from parenting. It’s just biology.’

  ‘He’s dying.’

  ‘What are you doing for him, exactly?’

  ‘It’s a secret. I mean, I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement.’

  She nodded, smiled slightly and looked at her perfectly shaped fingernails, which were lacquered a deep shade of red. ‘It involves trees. If twenty grand is walking around money for his pet planter, it must involve some really esoteric and valuable trees, species that have to be stolen and smuggled. Or it involves a huge number of trees, planted on a vast scale somewhere. That second option would be my guess. This is Saul Abercrombie you’re working for. He’s spent his entire adult life empire building.’

  From his position by the window, Tom Curtis looked back towards the woman with whom he used to share his life and tried to view her objectively. She was blonde and slender and, even though she was seated, the length of her legs suggested she was quite tall. She was dressed in engineer boots, Earl jeans and a white fitted shirt, and had a high-boned hauteur which the cool appraisal of her green eyes emphasized.

  He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t see Sarah objectively at all. He could acknowledge that she was physically attractive and knew that she was successful at what she did. But she had the power to break his heart and she had used it in a way he thought both calculated and cruel, and in doing so had harmed their daughter. Charlotte was the most precious person to him in the world.

  ‘What about my proposal?’ he said again.

  She smiled. Her smile was complex, not good-humoured or accommodating, but a cold warning of what was to come. ‘You can’t buy access to your daughter.’

  ‘I’ll spend every penny he pays me on legal fees if I need to. Don’t make me take that route, Sarah. It’s so wasteful.’

  ‘I won’t be bribed, Tom.’

  ‘This way we both benefit.’

  ‘I won’t be bought.’

  He nodded. He would have to pass Charlotte’s things on the coat rack at the foot of the stairs on the way out. Her school coat and her satchel hung there on a peg. He would inhale for a breath the sweet aroma of his daughter’s hair and skin and, this close, not seeing her would be unbearable.

  Sarah stood. She spread the fingers of her elegant hands to dust imaginary debris from where it might have gathered in her lap had they eaten anything. They hadn’t. He was the debris. She was brushing him away. It had become a gesture she performed now every time they were obliged to meet. He thought that she was completely unaware of it.

  ‘Charlie has written you a letter.’

  He hated their daughter’s name abbreviated. ‘When did she do that?’

  ‘She’s been working on it for a week. She finished it yesterday. She’s been quite stressed about it, actually.’

  ‘Then let me see her. I’ll put her mind at rest.’

  ‘It’s addressed and stamped in the envelope. You might as well take it, since you won’t be in Lambeth to get it through the post.’

  Outside, he walked through the rain for a while. He couldn’t bring himself to read Charlotte’s letter just yet. He needed to recover from his encounter with Sarah. He walked along the chestnut-lined path at the rear of the development that led to the river. Over to the right, through the dripping tree trunks, was the park in which he had played with his daughter on the infant rides in the years before she was old enough for school. He could see their shapes in bright pastels through the prevailing gloom.

  He reached the river. The surface was stippled in places with the current and dimpled everywhere with rain. It was still quite early in the morning and the boat houses opposite were brick follies in lingering mist where the far bank reached down through grand sweeps of garden from great detached houses no more in this light than ghostly suggestions of stone. At the water’s edge, willows bowed and wept. Kingston was a lovely place in which to live. The richer you were, the lovelier it became for you.

  He would go back to his flat and pack what was necessary for a prolonged stay in Wales. He wouldn’t need much. He wanted a couple of pairs of boots and his climbing cleats, abseil gear and some foul weather clothing.

  He wanted too the bag of sea shells he had collected with Charlotte during their week in Swanage of the previous summer. She had presented them to him almost ceremonially at the end of their little holiday. He had come to regard them in the period since, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, as his hoard of lucky charms.

  Swanage had all the charm a coastal resort on the Dorset coast should properly possess. That’s why he’d picked it. There was a tiny fairground and a crazy golf course on its pretty, banked promenade. There was a seafront museum. Fishermen caught crabs from its short wooden pier. Out over the shimmering July sea, the Needles announced the presence of the Isle of Wight in pillars rising as pale and distant as a mirage. Charlotte had built her sandcastles and collected her shells against their distant backdrop.

  And there had been nothing at all sinister about it, he thought, staring now at the Thames in the rain, remembering his encounter of the previous day with whatever had lurked in the Welsh mist at the edge of Saul Abercrombie’s ancient domain.

  Wales wasn’t England. It had a bloodier history in which oppression figured fairly large. But the seaside was a British tradition and there were Welsh Coastal towns sharing the wholesome charms that Swanage possessed in such happy abundance. They had whitewashed cottages, welcoming quayside pubs, lettered rock and shrimp fleets crewed by men with smiling, ruddy faces.

  The Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas had written his verse masterpiece about just such a Welsh port. Curtis remembered studying Under Milkwood at school. Maybe it was people. You needed the presence of people to humanize a place, to give it compassion and humour and a soul.

  It wasn’t just that Abercrombie’s Pembrokeshire tract was wilderness though, was it? There was more to it than its barrenness and the absence of a resident population. He had to admit to himself that it was genuinely sinister. He had the strong feeling it was, in some shiftless way, unsafe. And he had no choice but to go back there, if he was to gain the means to alter the awful domestic situation it was presently in his power to do nothing at all about.

  Tom Curtis craved a friendly face and a bit of human warmth after his glacial encounter with the mother of his child. He decided he’d walk along the bank under Kingston Bridge and on the half mile or so to the Riverside Café. Customers would be few this early on such a rainy morning. He liked the café’s proprietor and as he walked he hoped that he’d be the one doing the serving behind the counter, whistling as he always did when he worked.

  After a cup of coffee, he’d walk on to Surbiton and take the fast train to Waterloo. It was a good idea to avoid Kingston Station, where he’d often stood with Charlotte on their way to her ballet class or Forest Club meetings, trips going back to the days when she still thought trains had the names he’d had to make up for her as they waited for theirs on the platform. He hadn’t known until after the split the previous autumn that memories could bring pleasure and pain simultaneously.

  John was there behind his counter with a greeting quite out of keeping with the grey, lightless morning. Curtis had often brought Charlotte to the café in the past, but John would
be too tactful to mention his daughter unless he did. He was a man who fished and did a bit of bird watching during his downtime, and had a deep love and respect for nature. He wasn’t pompous or precious about it; it was there in his smile when he saw a heron or kingfisher out over the water. He was fascinated by the mechanics and science of Curtis’s craft and by the impact it could have on the character of the land.

  Curtis was his only customer. The café’s glass door and walls were steamed with condensation, adding to the sense of seclusion in the building. Outside, the promenade was empty of pedestrians. Beyond the opaque glass the river swam brown and swollen with the rain that had been falling without pause since early the previous evening.

  Bespoke cakes iced by hand were on display under Perspex domes. Most of the juices in their refrigerated cabinet racks were organic. The coffee was fairtrade. John knew his clientele.

  ‘Working on anything much, Tom?’

  And so Curtis told him about Pembrokeshire. He didn’t name his employer, was vague about the location and only hinted at the scale of the project, but described something of the wilderness bordered by the sea which he had briefly explored and would work on there.

  ‘I think I‘ve only been to Wales once, to Anglesey as a kid,’ John said. ‘I was about seven. Don’t remember it at all.’

  ‘It’s not much like England. It’s remote, all a bit strange. It has its own character.’

  John laughed. ‘I don’t know. One Butlins camp’s much the same as another. Same climate, anyway. I remember it rained.’

  ‘This place is completely wild. I think there might be some folklore attached to the region, or to particular spots there. I haven’t gone into it. Not yet, anyway. I’ve only been on the job four days. But it’s intriguing.’