"Seldom known," she heard herself murmuring. She bore the fattest dictionary away from a table back to its weight conscious relatives, then on an impulse continued down the aisle of shelves to find her father's book.
Lennox Price's The Mechanics of Delusion was leaning against a stout Freudian tome on a shelf higher than her head. She climbed down from a stumpy ladder and turned to the date label. Quite a few people had borrowed the book in the sixties and early seventies, when her father's research in the woods had made headlines, but since then the book had seldom left the shelf. It began with a history of popular delusions, brought up to date by an account of myths then prevalent about drugs. The bulk of it related fringe beliefs to ones more widely held and demonstrated their interdependence, while the final pages compared skepticism with the beliefs it sought to overturn and showed they were products of the same psychological mechanism. The book reminded her how keen his mind used to be, and revived memories that distressed her—his bouts of walking up and down the house as though desperate to leave behind some intolerable contents of his brain, his sudden bursts of introverted mirth, his demands for absolute silence that might be expected to last for hours while he appeared to listen for some sound outside the house, his staring at toddler Sylvia as if he couldn't quite recognise her and must do so ... Heather shelved The Mechanics of Delusion and made for the art books.
Two volumes were called just Margo Price, a catalogue of her London retrospective in the eighties and a coffee-table book representing her work up to five years ago. Since then she'd concentrated on carving sculptures from deadwood she found on the edge of the forest outside Goodmanswood—the construction of the bypass had provided her with plenty of material—but Heather liked her paintings best, one in particular. She lifted the catalogue down and rested its spine on the edge of a shelf. The glossy pages fell open at Margo's
Arizona paintings, desert landscapes relieved only by solitary flowers under an almost shadowless sun. Heather turned pages until she reached The Light through the Thorns, the first canvas Margo had painted after committing Lennox to the Arbour.
It showed an arch of thorns so thickly entangled that only minute stars of light as spiky as the prickles managed to struggle through, but the longer one gazed at them, the more the thorns appeared to be partly an illusion. Did some of them rather consist of slivers of sky and a distant greenish horizon? When seven-year-old Heather had asked what was there her mother had told her it was whatever she could see. Perhaps the enigma helped explain why it was Margo's most reproduced painting, available as a poster, but sometimes it made Heather feel close to glimpsing a peace too profound to be expressed in words. Just now she seemed unable to grasp that impression. She returned the collection to the shelf and found herself heading for the folklore books.
Someone had replaced Sylvia's with the pages facing outward. Heather almost managed to suppress the thought that it was hiding like its author. Sylvia didn't need to stay home when Heather had chosen to, and it wasn't as if she didn't keep in touch, even if her letters had grown less frequent recently—none for months since a card from Mexico, where she was apparently researching a new book. Heather opened The Secret Woods: Sylvan Myths at random, to be confronted by a Chinese folk-tale about a boy who climbed trees in search of birds' eggs and found a nest of baby birds, headless yet alive. The image, or her reading it where she couldn't see most of the room, disturbed her more than made any sense.
Snorting with impatience at herself, she took the volume and her flock of echoes to her desk.
The book contained stories she liked, but she seemed to have forgotten where they were. The preface pointed out that woods had been regarded as secret places ever since stories were recorded. They were the locations of many fairy tales, though the chapter on Germany opened with a Bavarian tradition that if you walked through certain forests at night with a baby on your back, by the time you emerged from the woods the child would have been replaced by something whose ancient voice would croak in your ear. As for America, here was a Burkittsville legend of a misshapen cottage said to have been visible from a woodland road—a cottage that shrank as travellers approached it, then grew as they tried to flee.
Heather looked up Britain and was met by a Derbyshire tale about a woodwose, a satyr that emerged from a wood on Midsummer Eve in the guise of some local youth, whose betrothed it then seduced. In other versions it appeared as a brother who bedded his sister or a father who did so to his daughter. Heather had begun to wonder why she was continuing to read—perhaps in an attempt to demonstrate that not all Sylvia's interests were so dark—when someone came into the room.
She was a sum young woman in denim dungarees and a black polo neck, with a large dilapidated canvas bag dangling from one shoulder. Perhaps she wasn't quite so young, to judge by the traces of grey that were apparent in her carelessly cropped reddish hair as she turned to close the door. "We aren't really open until nine," Heather said, but wasn't about to make an issue of it. She was leafing through The Secret Woods when she heard footsteps approach the counter.
"May I help?" she said, not quite looking up.
"Hey."
The voice was American. If the word was an answer, Heather didn't understand it.
The Secret Woods had just turned up a spread of fairy tales. She splayed one hand on the pages and glanced vainly about for a bookmark. "I'll be with you in just a few moments," she said.
"You've always been with me, Heather."
Heather raised her slow astonished head to see large dark eyes opening wide to her, thin pink lips growing pale with the vigour of their smile, a small snub nose widening its nostrils as if scenting her. She stood up so fast her chair struck Randall's desk with a clatter whose echoes sounded like the fall of a branch through a tangle of boughs. "Sylvia," she cried.
5: The Return
When Heather raised the flap in the massive counter it seemed to have grown almost weightless. She might have imagined that the substance of the oak had been transformed if she hadn't realised her sister was lifting it too. As they embraced, it fell with a thud like the stroke of an axe, cueing a team of smaller blades among the shelves. Heather hugged her sister with a fierceness meant to counteract her not having recognised Sylvia at once—because of the accent, she told herself—only to feel the waist of Sylvia's dungarees collapse inwards. She wasn't much less thin than sticks. All Heather's years of big sisterhood surged over her, and she clutched Sylvia as if she might never again let her stray. At last she controlled herself enough to take Sylvia by the shoulders and gaze into her eyes, which appeared to be brimming with memories too. "What have you been doing to yourself?" Heather demanded.
Sylvia tilted her smiling head. "Do you mean with?"
"I mean to. What have you been eating, or haven't you?"
"There wasn't much choice for veggies in Mexico."
"You're still a herbivore, then."
"Still eating like a wild thing, right."
"I wish you were. We'll have to see you do."
"You're still my old sister sure enough." Sylvia stepped back, breaking her sister's hold, as echoes and Randall came into the library. "Listen, am I keeping you from work?"
"If you do I'll take the day off. I'll take however long we need to catch up.
Randall, this is my baby sister Sylvia."
"They must be delivering them fully grown these days," he remarked, then planted the back of his hand on his lips like a reproving slap while he cleared his throat. "Delightful to meet you."
"It's been years since she's been home," Heather told him. "I expect we won't stop talking while we've got any breath left."
He set his hoary bulging briefcase on his desk and scratched his eyebrows with a sandpapery sound. "I'll cover if you want to slip away. Our assistants should be here soon."
"Maybe we'll take a long lunch. You can sit with me now and we'll talk while I resurrect some old books, Sylvie."
"Sounds like magic."
"Which I'm
guessing you still like."
"Ever since you used to read to me."
"We're both too old for stories, do you think? What I'm doing now is just technology."
Sylvia followed her behind the counter as Randall held up the flap, and then she pointed with all her fingers. "What are you doing with my book?"
"I was just glancing through it."
"For what?"
"Nothing in particular," Heather said, surprised by the urgency of the question.
"I thought I'd read it since I hadn't for a while, that's all."
"You know what that means then, don't you?"
"I'm not sure I do."
"That you sensed I was coming, of course," Sylvia said, and trailed her fingertips across the tales of seduction in the woods before closing the book.
"Did you say you're going to resurrect it?"
"No, only because it isn't old enough. The books I'm putting on the computer are a lot older." Heather sat in front of the machine but didn't switch it on. "Do you mind if I ask .. ."
"Anything."
"You know I don't mean this in any nasty way, but what's brought you back so suddenly?"
"I never felt good about leaving you to cope. Maybe you looked after me so much when we were kids I ended up thinking of you as the caring one."
"I try to be. I don't complain much, do I, Randall?"
He looked away from his computer screen, his face red as if he'd been caught eavesdropping. "Never that I've noticed."
"He's being kind, but anyway we're talking about you, Sylvie."
"I guess I felt I ought to use how I'd learned to research at university, and maybe I wanted to write a book like dad."
"You're still apologising. All I asked was why you've come back now."
"I felt I was needed. Aren't I?"
"Don't wonder," Heather said, hugging her until she was rewarded with a bony embrace.
"I was thinking more of dad. You and mom wrote some of how he's been, but how is he now?"
"His mind's been more active these past few months."
"Are you pleased?"
"I meant he's been mostly disturbed. He's asked after you more than once."
"Maybe he sensed like you did I was planning to come home, or maybe he made me."
"If either."
Sylvia looked disappointed for as long as it took her to blink. "How about mom?"
"She's doing well. She has an exhibition coming up in London. Haven't you been in touch?"
"Not since I got back to England yesterday. I wanted to see you first. We were always closest, weren't we?" Hardly waiting for Heather to smile at that, she said "Shall I call her now?"
"I think you should. Use my phone."
Sylvia leaned one elbow on her book and held the receiver away from her face so that Heather heard the shrill pulse. It repeated itself six and a half times before Margo said not altogether patiently "Hello?"
"Guess who this is."
"I'm afraid I couldn't say. If you're calling from America it's quite early here. I'm just at a crucial point in a piece I'm carving. If you'd like to leave me your name and number -"
"Heather didn't know at first either."
They heard a silence like the absence of a gasp, and then "Sylvia? Is that really you?"
"If it isn't someone must be using my body."
"You sound so far away."
"I'm not though, am I, Heather?"
For an instant Heather was tempted to join in the teasing, but didn't want to feel as young as her sister kept seeming. "Not any longer," she said.
"Are you there with her at work, Sylvia?"
"Stopping her doing it, right. Being all kinds of distraction."
"Why didn't you tell us you were coming home?"
"I didn't want you worrying where I was if I got delayed. It wasn't easy coming where I came from."
"All that matters is you're home. Stay there and I'll pick you up and we'll still be talking when it's dark."
"I thought you said you were in the middle of something important."
"Nothing's as important as you. It can wait a day. It's only a piece of wood with a mind of its own. I'll be there in half an hour or so. Don't you dare go far. Don't you let her, Heather."
"We won't," they said in chorus, at which they laughed so much that Randall ventured to join in. As they subsided and Sylvia replaced the phone, Heather admitted "I want to hear all about Mexico and wherever else you've been, but I really ought to get on with some work."
"I won't stop you." Sylvia brandished The Secret Woods as she hoisted the flap in the counter just enough to sidle thinly through. "I'll put myself away," she said.
"You can tell me all about your adventures later."
"Later, right." Sylvia glanced back as she moved into the shadow of bookshelves.
Her voice sounded both multiplied and muffled by wood as she said "I may have to save it till the book's done."
6: Behind The Houses
When Sam had hobbled slowly up one aisle of shelves and halfway down another as though in search of some book he couldn't name, Heather went to him. "I shouldn't be too long now," she murmured. "How's the shop?"
"We had to get the window boarded up till a friend of Andy's dad can put in some glass tomorrow, so now nobody can see what we sell."
"Didn't you have any customers today?"
"That many," he said, splaying the fingers of his left fist twice while he reached past her for a book that lay on top of several upright ones. "Doesn't mean they all bought anything."
"So long as some did," Heather said, thrown by the sight of The Secret Woods in his hand. "Strange you should pick that up."
"What's strange about it?"
"Not so loud, Sam. You'll soon see."
"Will I want to?"
"I'm sure you will. Wait till you see why we're waiting," she murmured, and returned to her desk.
She saw him lower himself into a seat, apparently not noticing that he was opposite a more than pretty girl about his age, and frown over the book. She couldn't help wondering how he would greet Sylvia.
On catching sight of her, Margo had released a cry of mingled delight and dismay that had made all the students raise their heads like club members scenting an intruder. She'd stood on tiptoe to give Sylvia a hug across the counter as a foretaste of the one she'd delivered as soon as the flap was out of their way.
"Don't you ever stay away so long again," she'd whispered, and not much less fiercely, "Look what happens to you when you do." At once she'd been abashed, not only by her words. "Sorry. This isn't like me usually. Just years catching up with me. We're on our way now," she'd told everyone in the library. "Are you coming, Heather? Too much work, poor girl. Then we'll pick you up for lunch."
They'd eaten in Peace & Beans, the vegetarian restaurant on the far side of the campus, but Sylvia had consumed nowhere near enough to satisfy her mother.
"We're going to have to feed you up," Margo had declared, poking around in her vegetable moussaka as though hoping some meat might have sneaked into it. While she'd done most of the talking, to Heather she'd said only "Isn't he?" and "Isn't she?" and "Didn't I?" and more of the same kind of punctuation. She'd proposed that Sylvia should stay at Heather's, where there was more room—Heather would have made the offer herself if she'd had the chance. Holding Sylvia's thin cold hands, she'd assured her she could stay for as long as they were sisters, and had made that her cue to return belatedly to work while Margo took Sylvia into town to buy her clothes. Heather wasn't about to resent that—she'd had presents from Margo herself, really quite a few of them. All she wanted now was for as many of her family as possible to be together.
She thought more than two young students were chattering and giggling in the corridor until the American voices outdistanced their echoes. Margo held the door open for Sylvia, who was loaded with three large shopping bags. "Sam,"
Margo called and put a quick though jokey finger to her lips. "Do you know who this is?" she ask
ed in a whisper that would have reached the limits of a bigger room.
Sam leaned his hands on two pages of The Secret Woods and raised himself into a crouch. "Where did I see her before?" he wondered aloud.
"Let's get reacquainted outside, shall we?" Heather said and left Nick and Sarita to staff the desk for the evening.
Sam started when she touched his arm to move him. Once they were all in the corridor and the door was shut, Margo said not quite impatiently enough to leave affection behind "It's your aunt Sylvia."
"I know," Sam said, and turned to Sylvia. "I was just looking at you."
"Well, don't be shy of each other," Margo cried.
Aunt and nephew performed a hug that struck Heather as, at least on Sam's part, awkward. As they separated Sylvia asked him "When were you looking?"
"You're on your book I was reading."
"Heather was as well. Seems like it has a new lease of life."
"I feel as if we all have," said Margo. "She must have brought it with her, mustn't she, Heather?"
"I don't know who else could have."
Sylvia took Sam's arm. "I'm going to be rooming with you if that's all right with you," she said.
"Can't see how it couldn't be."
Perhaps it was his apparent confusion that inspired her to say "You've raised yourself a real knight, Heather. Remember when you told me one lived behind the house?"
"I can't say I do."
"When I was little and I asked who Goodman was and why it was his wood."
"I still don't remember."
"Now, girls," Margo protested, "you aren't going to start arguing as soon as you're back together."
"I think I rather grew out of knights. I'll be happy if Sam's just a good person," Heather said, and hurried Margo and Sylvia past his embarrassment, out of the door he was holding open.
A dusk that she could taste was settling over the campus, rousing floodlights in their burrows at the foot of the sandstone facade. "You'll have had enough of me for one day," Margo said to whoever might have. "Somebody call me tomorrow and we'll fix a date for dinner very soon."
"Can I visit dad tomorrow?" Sylvia said.
The Darkest Part Of The Woods Page 4