Then she discovered the second drawing, which seemed to be a slight variation on the same theme. Again, instead of trying as hard as possible to make each loop of the spiral follow a near-circular path, the line began to wander as soon as it moved away from the central dot, and its wandering became more adventurous with each loop. Seen in isolation, this drawing too might have been mistaken for a mere doodle, but seeing the two of them together gave the impression that they were two attempts to produce a particular design: sketches aiming for a particular result.
Because the divergences from circularity became more exaggerated the further each line extended from the centre, each whole pattern ended up looking more like an amoeba than a coiled watch-spring. Both patterns reminded Angie quite forcefully of the puzzle-book mazes she liked so much—except, of course, that a spiral had no side-turnings. If the space enclosed by the looping line were regarded as a path, it was impossible to get lost, because all the pencil tracing the way out had to do was keep going, around and around and around, untroubled by all the kinks in the route.
Scraping away with increasing urgency, Angie soon uncovered parts of a third design, and then the edges of a fourth and a fifth. She immediately moved over to the other side of the window and began scraping there. It didn’t take long to determine that there were two more spirals there, making seven in all, but the artist seemed to have been less comfortable working on that side.
Angie knew that it would take time to uncover all seven sketches completely—especially if she did it carefully enough to minimize the damage to the plaster—but she was in no doubt that each of the seven was subtly different in shape from all the others.
Angie looked back at the first spiral she had found—the only one she had so far uncovered in its entirety. The line had been broken in numerous places where plaster had flaked away, but it was easy enough to complete the spiral in her mind if she looked at it intently enough. She found, however, that when she did stare hard enough to reconstruct the pattern in her mind it seemed to acquire a kind of flowing movement, as if it were continually attempting to change its own shape. It was an interesting optical illusion—and it helped her to guess what it was that she was looking at.
She ran downstairs then, shouting; “Mum! Come and see what I’ve found.”
Her mother put down her own scraper, without bothering to pretend that she was annoyed by the interruption, and followed Angie up to the bedroom.
“It’s just graffiti, treasure,” she said, having glanced at the near-complete sketch and the other six fragments. “People have always scrawled on walls. You see it all over the place in Rome, from the finest palaces to the ancient sewers and catacombs—you get it in all the cathedrals of Europe. The temptation to scrawl must be even stronger when people are about to hang wallpaper and cover the plaster over.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Angie told her. “Look out of the window.”
Her mother looked out of the window. “What am I looking for, treasure?” she asked, after a few seconds.
“The old orchard,” Angie said impatiently. “The apple trees weren’t planted in rows. They were planted in some kind of wonky spiral pattern—a spiral that gets less and less circular as it expands.”
“I can’t see anything,” her mother told her, after a few more seconds. “I can’t tell whether the bumps in the bindweed are apple trees or hawthorn, or something else entirely—there’s no pattern at all, so far as I can see. Anyway, there are seven drawings and there’s only one garden.”
“That’s just it,” Angie said. “Somebody was trying to draw the pattern, but they needed seven goes—maybe more, if there are others I haven’t uncovered yet.”
“I don’t think so, precious,” her mother said, sympathetically. “The bottom layer of paper here is the same type as the bottom layer downstairs. It’s Victorian, I think—the downstairs rooms were decorated again before the apple-blossom was pasted over it by the man who planted the orchard. The trees weren’t there when that wall was last bare.”
Angie hadn’t thought of that. She frowned.
“Keep up the good work,” her mother said, as she made her way back to the door. “I’ll do a little bit more, then we’ll leave it for today. We can go for a walk before dinner, if you like.”
It wasn’t until her mother was downstairs again, scraping away, that Angie wondered whether there might have been some kind of spiral formation in the garden before it was replanted as a orchard, and whether the layout of the trees, like the sketches, might have been an attempt to reproduce it.
They did go for a walk, heading away from the village along the road that ran past the front gate, but they didn’t go far. They were both too tired. Somewhat to Angie’s disappointment—although it was only to be expected, given that they were moving away from Well House—they didn’t meet Mrs. Lamb.
Later, as they ate dinner, Angie said: “How long has Mrs. Lamb lived in the cottage down the road?”
“I don’t know, treasure,” her mother replied. “Since she retired, I suppose—maybe since the 1980s. Why?”
“I just wondered whether she knew what the back garden was like before it was turned into an orchard.”
“Whether it had trees planted in a spiral pattern, you mean? It’s not likely—but I think she retired here because she knew the area. If she didn’t spend her childhood hereabouts, you might find someone in the village who did, but I doubt that you’ll find anyone alive now who can remember anything earlier than the 1930s.”
“What about the local library?” Angie asked.
“What passes for a local library in these parts is a van that comes around once a fortnight,” her mother observed. “There must be parish records somewhere, I suppose, but wherever they are, they’ll only be lists of births, marriages, and deaths—nothing about gardens. Does it matter?”
“I suppose not,” Angie said. “If there aren’t any more sketches on the other side of the window, whoever drew them was probably left-handed.”
“That’s a clever deduction,” her mother said. “Your father will be proud of you. You’ll be able to show him the designs when he comes up on Friday—by then you’ll have the whole room scraped clean.”
“I’ll finish tomorrow,” Angie predicted, confidently.
“Maybe you can. The big room downstairs will take a little longer, though. Do you think you can bear to help me out with it when you’ve finished your room, or would you rather do Cathy’s room?”
“I’ll do Cathy’s,” Angie said.
“So you can be on your own?”
Angie hadn’t realized soon enough that the question was a kind of trap. “I’ll help you with the living room if you want me to,” she was quick to say—although she realized immediately afterwards was that what her mother really wanted was for her to want to. “That might be better,” she added—too late.
“No, you’re right,” her mother said. “We’ll probably drive one another crazy if we’re under one another’s feet the whole time. Best to work on two fronts anyway—we’ll see quite enough of one another when we’re not actually scraping, I dare say.”
On the following day they continued to work in separate rooms, but on the Tuesday Angie made a point of helping her mother in the lounge-dining room before starting work on Cathy’s bedroom. When they had finished downstairs, her mother made a start on the master bedroom, for the sake of “a change of scenery”.
Because Angie was able to finish Cathy’s room on Wednesday, she and her mother were able to spend Thursday morning working together to finish off the larger bedroom. By that time, however, Angie was only working in sporadic spells, most of which lasted little more than half an hour. She spent the rest of the time on other pursuits. She finished off the puzzle-book, although the other puzzles weren’t nearly as fascinating as the mazes. “That’s an engineer’s mind,” her father had told her, proudly. “The words and the numbers are just things you need—all the beauty is in the spatial constructs.”
“Did you ever get a chance to ask Mrs. Lamb about the back garden?” her mother asked, as they walked past the gate of Well House on Thursday afternoon. They were on the way to the village for the third time to stock up on groceries. They had to lay in supplies for the new arrivals expected on the following day, because it would be Good Friday.
“Yes, I bumped into her yesterday,” Angie said, innocently. Although she still wasn’t supposed to leave the garden, she had spent more than an hour hanging about in the lane outside Well House before Mrs. Lamb had put in an appearance outdoors, creating the opportunity for her to shout a greeting and strike up a conversation.
“What did she say?”
“She did grow up not far from here, but she never saw Orchard Cottage in the days before it was Orchard Cottage. She’s heard talk, though.”
“And what does the talk say?”
“Not very much. Before there was an orchard the people in the cottage used to grow vegetables there, and herbs.”
“Nothing planted in spirals, then? No fancy rockeries, or anything of that sort?”
“No,” Angie admitted. “Nothing of that sort.”
“No ghosts, either? No resident witches?”
“No witches,” Angie confirmed. “As for ghosts, she said that everywhere’s haunted, The dead can’t do us any harm if we pay them no attention, she said—her exact words. She didn’t laugh at me, though, the way some people might. When she warned me off last Saturday, she meant it. She does seem to have the idea that there’s something, nasty under the bindweed, even though she can’t say what it is.”
“Just thorns and dirt, precious,” her mother assured her. “Even if it doesn’t make you sneeze or bring you out in a rash, it’ll make you absolutely filthy. Better stay out of it, even if it’s not haunted. You’ve been copying those sketches, I see. Daddy will be pleased. He’s very fond of diagrams.”
Angie had left her drawing-pad shut, so her mother couldn’t have seen her sketches by accident, but she didn’t protest that her mother had been snooping because she knew that Mrs. Martindale would retaliate by asking her exactly where she’d “bumped into” Mrs. Lamb.
“They’ll be painted over soon,” Angie explained. “I wanted to keep a record. The copies aren’t very good, though. The spirals loop around anti-clockwise, and it’s easier to draw anti-clockwise spirals left-handed than right-handed, especially if you’re naturally left-handed. I’m right-handed. Maybe I was wrong about him being left-handed, and that’s why he never got the design exactly right.”
“How do you know he didn’t?” Her mother asked. “Come to that, how do you know he wasn’t a she?”
“I suppose I don’t,” Angie conceded, although she was certain in her own mind on the first point, at least.
“Maybe the sketches on the walls really are preliminary sketches,” her mother suggested. “Maybe he went on to do a painting, once he’d had enough practice. Maybe he got it right when he used charcoal on the canvas. That kind of painting would have seemed a bit weird back in the nineteenth century, though, when they hadn’t any idea what modern art would be like.”
“I don’t think he ever did a painting,” Angie said, “or even a drawing on paper.” She was quick to add, before the question was put to her: “Not that I can know that for sure, of course.”
“It seems a bit disappointing to me,” her mother said. “It would have been so much more interesting to uncover a long-lost mural of the battle of Trafalgar, or an inscription saying Queen Victoria slept here.”
“That would have been in Cathy’s room,” Angie said. “From there you can see the road. Queen Victoria wouldn’t have wanted a room overlooking a vegetable garden, would she?”
“Queens are funny like that,” her mother agreed. “Are you looking forward to seeing Daddy and Cathy, after being cooped up in the cottage for a whole week with your mum?”
“It’ll be nice to see them,” Angie admitted, carefully. “But it’s been an interesting week—and I expect you’ll be looking forward to seeing Daddy too, even if he does have a teenager in tow.”
“It won’t be as quiet, that’s for sure.” her mother said, glancing disapprovingly into the almost-empty car park of The Elms as they passed by. “Cathy ought to be grateful that you’ve done her room, but she won’t let on—and I dare say she’ll find plenty of things to complain about. If she becomes unbearable, I suppose I can always give her a pair of scissors and tell her to make a start on the orchard.”
“She’ll claim that she can’t do it because of her hay fever,” Angie pointed out. “You might be able to change her mind by offering her the use of the chainsaw—except that the only thing worse than a bad-tempered teenager is a bad-tempered teenager with a chainsaw.”
“Tell that one to your father,” her mother said. “But wait until Cathy’s well out of earshot before you do.”
* * * *
4.
Angie’s father and sister didn’t arrive at Orchard Cottage until mid-afternoon on Good Friday, but the fact that they were due to arrive combined with the fact that it was an official holiday to provide a good excuse for not working too hard in the morning. Although the wallpaper was almost all stripped, there was still a lot of cleaning to do, but Angie’s mother decided that it could wait a little longer.
After five days, Angie felt that she had done enough soaking and scraping to last her a lifetime, although she was looking forward to helping out with the painting, which would be more creative.
She wasn’t entirely happy about the prospect of her unexpected discovery being plastered and painted over, but she knew that it had to be done. There was no way that the walls of her bedroom could be left bare and crumbling. It was partly for that reason that she had what effort she could to preserve the mysterious finding by trying to copy the designs on to sheets of paper in her drawing pad. She decided to use the Friday morning to make one last attempt to get the drawings exactly right.
Because her mother was idling too, she came up to Angie’s room to see what her precious daughter was doing. Knowing that her mother had already seen the drawings, Angie didn’t try to hide them.
“We used to have tracing paper when I was a girl,” her mother said, when she saw what Angie had done. “I don’t suppose there’s much demand for it, now that we’ve got photocopiers and scanners.”
Angie had already tried to trace the drawings using ordinary printer paper, but had proved too difficult. She didn’t bother to mention it.
Her mother joined her at the window and imitated her, first looking out through the diamond-shaped miniature panes, then looking carefully at all seven of the fully-exposed sketches on the wall.
“I still can’t see anything out there that looks remotely like these drawings, treasure,” she said. “The lumps under the bindweed seem quite random to me.”
“Perhaps it’s just my imagination,” Angie said, anticipating the suggestion.
“Perhaps it is, treasure. But that’s good. Imagination is a precious gift, especially when you’re eleven. When you’re younger, you haven’t really got enough ideas and images in store to make the most of it, and when you’re older....”
“You turn into a teenager,” Angie said.
“That as well,” her mother agreed. “What I was going to say is that when you’re older—and it lasts much longer than being a teenager—your horizons get narrower. You concentrate on the ordinary things. You start not being able to see the forest for the trees—or the pattern of the orchard for the bindweed that’s overgrown it. It’s too easy to see appearances, and to hard to see things as they really are.”
Angie reached the end of a spiral and stopped drawing. “Are you all right, mum?” she asked.
“Fine,” her mother assured her. “Engineers don’t have a monopoly on little flights of philosophical fancy, you know— schoolteachers can do it too.” She turned round then and left the room.
Angie carried on drawing, moving her pencil as carefully as she
would have done if she’d been solving a maze. She eventually managed to produce copies of all seven diagrams that seemed almost correct—except, of course, that none of the seven was really correct, as a representation of whatever lay beneath the thicket that now occupied the area behind the house. Given that the original artist seemed to have had so much trouble getting the effect that he—or she—wanted, Angie thought that her efforts were just as good as his.
It was easier to compare the view from her window to her own drawings than it was the compare it to the sketches on the wall because she could place the sheets of paper flat on the older diamonds, one by one, while peering through the newer ones directly alongside. It was very difficult to figure out exactly where the discrepancy was between the drawings and the actual spiral, though. The weather was still breezy, and the bindweed overlaying the bushes and brambles was moving about restlessly. The illusory movement in the spiral drawings might have helped, if it had only matched the stirrings of the wind, but it didn’t; indeed, it seemed perversely contrary, always working in opposition.
The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales Page 18