The Realities of Aldous U

by Michael Lawrence

  ‘But Dad…’

  ‘We have to wait, Al.’

  A young priest was going round trying to comfort anxious relatives. Reaching Alaric and his father he enquired if they had someone on the train.

  ‘Wife and mother,’ Alaric’s father snapped dismissively.

  ‘They might not be among the…’ the priest said gently, unaware of the other’s contempt for all churches, all faiths.

  An angry glare fixed on him. ‘They? One person. My wife, my son’s mother. And “might not be among the” what? The dead? Is that the word you can’t bring yourself to say?’

  The priest wilted. ‘I’ll pray for her.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Alaric’s father growled. ‘Who to? Look around you, mate. Haven’t you cottoned on yet? There’s no one at home up there.’

  She was brought out around two am. Her face wasn’t covered, but her eyes were closed. Snowflakes on her cheeks, like tiny dissolving tears. When they spoke to her she didn’t hear. Nor did she show any sign of feeling them holding her hands in the ambulance. At the hospital she was whisked away and they were left in a corridor, fretting helplessly, unable to look at one another. They weren’t the only relatives waiting for news. One middle-aged couple had received theirs, and clung together, sobbing quietly. After some time Alaric’s father went in search of information. When he returned his face was ashen.

  ‘It doesn’t look good, Al. They’re going to operate, but – I have to tell you this – they give her no more than a fifty-fifty chance.’

  A fifty-fifty chance. Fifty-fifty, fifty-fifty, the phrase had gone round and round in his head for the rest of the night. Afterwards, when it was all over, it returned to haunt him, with the inescapable question: if those were the odds why hadn’t she pulled through? She’d had an even chance. She might have lived.

  But she hadn’t.

  Pain, despair, month on month of empty, aching loneliness. Anger too, because she’d left him without warning, without even saying goodbye. He felt abandoned and betrayed – and ashamed for what he’d been up to at the time of the accident. A heady cocktail of bitterness, grief and guilt. Everyone said it would get better, and they were right, it did, but while all else slowly dissolved, the loss and the absence never quite went away, were always there, coloring, shading, distorting everything.

  There were tears in his eyes as he returned the photo of his mother to its place on the sideboard. The tears hindered his judgment and the back of his hand nudged something. When he saw what it was, another memory rushed at him. Three and a half years ago, coming in from school, crossing the garden from the side gate. Mum had seen him through the kitchen window and rushed out, tugged him inside, showed him the dusty object on the battered old refectory table.

  ‘Look what I found in the attic!’

  A bell-shaped glass dome, twelve inches tall, on a wooden base, it contained an elaborate arrangement of wax fruit, faded from prolonged exposure to direct sunlight in earlier decades.

  ‘Its called a shade,’ his mother said. ‘Victorian, Edwardian, not sure which, one or the other. Back then, no respectable parlor or drawing-room was complete without one on the sideboard or mantelpiece. Mostly you only find them in museums these days.’

  ‘All full of ancient fruit?’

  ‘Fruit, seashells, artificial flowers, stuffed animals and birds.’ He pulled a face. She laughed. ‘Yes, I’d have given the dead wildlife a miss myself, but some of the others were quite tasteful. This one must have looked rather good in its day. I’d love to know if it was bought off the shelf or created by the lady of the house.’

  ‘Which lady, which house?’

  His mother turned the shade over. On the round base there was a small yellow-brown label, and faint handwriting. He could just make out Elvira Underwood, 1905.

  ‘Wife of Withern’s original owner,’ she said. ‘He lived here till he died.’

  ‘It can’t have been in the attic all that time,’ Alaric said. ‘There were no Underwoods here for quite a few years.’

  ‘There weren’t, no. Maybe it was left in the attic by your great gran when she sold up in 1947 and the new owners didn’t get around to chucking it. Or it could have been put up there by Grandpa Rayner when he eventually bought the place back.’

  ‘You’re not thinking of putting it on show, are you?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘But it’s so…’ He screwed his face up again.

  ‘Well, the fruit’s had it,’ she conceded. ‘But the glass and the base are still intact. I thought I might put something of my own inside it.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Dunno yet. Thinking of making something. Something that’ll last.’

  Construction of the new centerpiece for the old shade took much of her free time that autumn. She worked in secret, behind the closed door of her little studio (a wooden shed) next to the garage. All that Alaric knew was that she was cutting or carving something out of a lump of wood from the recently pollarded oak in the south garden: the Family Tree as it was known. Sometimes he saw her darting about outside taking pictures. She took a lot of pictures. When the work was finished she again ushered him into the kitchen and stood him before the table. She had draped a tea towel over the shade, and only when she was satisfied that he was ready did she whip the cover off, with a dramatic cry of: ‘Behold! Lexie’s Folly!’

  The jaded wax fruit had been replaced by a meticulously crafted replica of the house. Faithful to the original in every noticeable detail, there was nothing remotely ‘cute’ about the Withern Rise inside the glass dome. It was the building in miniature, without refinement or embellishment. Wherever there was a chipped brick or broken drainpipe on the actual house, there was a chipped brick and broken drainpipe on the model. Even the grey slates on the three roofs, from which four tall chimneys rose, were individually etched and painted to look like real slates. The main reference for the roof had been the aerial photo, taken five or six years earlier, that hung in the hall. Alaric noticed that one of the little chimneys was slightly skewed, as on the real roof, and there was even a crack in a small side window that corresponded with a crack in the south-facing box room window. As for the ivy, it too was carved, but it looked as alive as the ivy that clung to the walls of the house itself.

  ‘What did you call it?’ he asked.

  ‘Lexie’s Folly.’

  ‘Folly?’

  ‘A building or ruin of no practical use, built for fun, or on a whim, or to commemorate something. What’s the verdict?’

  ‘It’s not bad,’ he said, which, coming from him, was praise indeed.

  His mother smiled, broadly. ‘No, it’s not, is it? I’m rather pleased with it myself.’

  She put the Folly on the sideboard in the River Room, where he soon got as used to it as to any other ornament. Since her death he’d never looked at, his visits to that room being infrequent to say the least. He was only looking at it now because he’d knocked it accidentally, but at once he was marveling at the detail all over again, the skill of the hand that had carved and colored it. Dusty as it was, the glass dome managed to reflect the snow falling across the windows of the room, and he found that if he squatted down and gazed at the little house with half closed eyes it was like looking at the real house in a snowstorm. His imagination put lights in the minuscule windows, warmth in the rooms behind them, and there grew in him an intense longing for the Withern Rise after which his mother had so painstakingly fashioned this exquisite replica. Withern as it was when she was with them. When they were a family.

  At some point while his mind’s eye wandered through the perfect little house, he put his hands on the dome. When he felt a tingling in his palms he thought nothing of it, but he couldn’t ignore the pain that seared through him seconds later. His hands flew from the Folly, but if anything the pain intensified, doubling him over. The worst of it lasted less than half a minute, but was so acute that when it began to recede he remained hunched over, eyes shut, fearing its return. Then somet
hing touched his cheek. Something damp, very cold. He opened his eyes. He was standing on grass, beneath boughs and branches, through which tiny flakes of snow drifted.

  What am I doing here? I should be indoors, not –

  Walls, a ceiling, furniture formed about him. The tree, the grass, the garden vanished. He fell backwards – with shock, perhaps – onto the River Room floor. He sensed shapes, colors, odors that weren’t quite right, but before he could investigate or assimilate any of this he heard a voice outside, and then the door was opening and someone was coming in. A girl of his own age, who squawked when she saw him, and jumped back. Stared at him with an expression of horror identical to his own.

  Day Seven / 4

  Whatever Naia might have expected upon entering that room, it was not a stranger crouching on the floor. She fell back against the door, closing it without meaning to, stammering ‘Who… who?’, and heard the same garbled enquiry from him. Trying to compose herself, assume some sort of control, she demanded to know what he was doing in their house, and again heard him utter the same words, at the same instant. It was he who broke the copycat pattern, jumping to his feet.

  ‘Whatever you’re after, you broke into the wrong house. We’ve nothing worth taking.’

  Naia glanced at the French doors. They were closed. Didn’t look as if they’d been forced.

  ‘How did you get in?’

  He didn’t take his eyes off her. Didn’t dare. She’d looked toward the French doors. Why? In the hope that he too would look so she could hit him with something? There was something in the hand at her side. He daren’t look at it directly, but it could be a weapon of some sort.

  ‘Ten seconds,’ he said, trying to sound bolder than he felt. ‘If you’re still here after that I’m picking up the phone.’

  There was no phone in the River Room, but a threat of some sort seemed in order. Unfortunately, the girl didn’t seem intimidated.

  ‘Pick up the phone?’ she said. ‘If there was one, who would you call?’

  ‘The fairies at the bottom of the garden, who do you think?’ he snapped, and even as he said it he wanted to kick himself. The fairies at the bottom of the garden?

  Naia laughed. ‘Tell you what. You call the fairies, I’ll call my mum, then we can all have a nice chat till the police get here.’

  He wilted at that, visibly wilted, which was gratifying. Keen to capitalize on her advantage, she tossed aside the lethal vacuum cleaner part she’d brought in with her and folded her arms, hoping he would take her for a force to be reckoned with. Straight talk now, straight talk.

  ‘You don’t deserve it,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to be generous. Slip out through those doors and I won’t tell anyone you’ve been here. But stay, keep arguing with me, and I fetch my mother. That’s the deal.’

  Oh, it was straight all right. Straight out of a TV cop show. But it seemed to do the job. The boy looked bemused, very bemused – or worried, hard to tell which. His silence gave her a chance to look him over, and it was then she noticed that he wore slippers, not shoes, and that he wore nothing over his sweater.

  ‘Where’s your coat?’ she asked. ‘You can’t have come out without a coat, day like this.’ She looked around. No sign. ‘Did you take it off in another room? Which room? Have you already turned that one over?’

  He might or might not have attempted some sort of explanation had a floorboard not creaked overhead. He jumped as though slapped.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘My mum. Didn’t believe me, did you? Thought I was alone.’

  ‘What’s your mum doing upstairs?’

  ‘Oh, you know, the usual. Clearing up after my dad, making the beds…’

  ‘Making the beds? She’s got no right to make the beds.’

  ‘No right? She’ll love that. Hang on, I’ll give her a shout, you can tell her in person.’

  She opened the door and was about to lean out when he leapt forward and spun her away. He slammed the door; jammed himself between it and her, wild-eyed, agitated almost to the point of twitching.

  ‘Not too keen on meeting my mum, are you?’ Naia said.

  ‘All I want is for you to go,’ he said. ‘We might have a big house, but look around you, we’re not rich or anything.’

  She bit back a sarcastic retort, sensing an impasse. Asked his name instead. His eyes narrowed.

  ‘My name? What’s my name to you?’

  ‘Your name’s nothing to me,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to give you a break, that’s all.’

  ‘The only break I want from you is the door shut behind you. My old man’ll be back any minute, then you’ll be right in it.’

  She folded her arms, determinedly unfazed. ‘Yes, of course. And the name?’

  ‘Jesus,’ he growled.

  ‘Jesus? I think I’ve heard of you. But shouldn’t you have a beard?’

  ‘It’s Alaric.’

  ‘Alaric? What’s that?’

  ‘My name. Alaric Underwood. Now get the hell out of here.’

  Naia’s eyebrows rose. ‘Underwood?’

  ‘Oh, heard it before, have we?’

  The raised eyebrows knitted together into a frown. ‘Look, if you’ve been put up to this by one of my so-called friends...’

  ‘Friends? I don’t know any of your lousy fr…’

  Like her he trailed off, but for a very different reason. He’d caught something in the mirror on the wall behind her and was staring at it, and from it back at her, then at the mirror again.

  ‘What?’ Naia said.

  He didn’t answer. Didn’t seem capable of answering. She glanced over her shoulder, leant sideways to try and see what he was gaping at, and saw half of her face next to his in the glass. She pulled back for a better perspective, and caught her breath. Turned back to him.

  ‘You said your name’s Underwood.’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘You were kidding, right?’

  He tore his gaze from the mirror. ‘Why would I kid about my name?’

  ‘Because it’s mine too. But you knew that. You must have. You’ve got some scam going here.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Well, one of us is.’

  She leaned forward. Gripped his chin. He jerked his head back. She reached again. This time he let her. She tilted his jaw to view his face from various angles.

  ‘Same eyes,’ she said. ‘Same nose, hair color, everything.’

  He was about to respond when a drawer closed sharply in the room above. His eyes flew to the ceiling like startled birds. Something else now. A piece of furniture being dragged. Alarmed all over again, he groped behind him for the support he knew to be there – and found nothing. He turned to look.

  ‘Where’s the table? The chairs?’

  ‘We got rid of them,’ Naia said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘New dining suite coming. You mean you didn’t know? But I thought you lived here.’

  He stared about him. The faded blue covering of the chaise had been replaced by lush red velvet. The curtains were also red, also velvet, very unlike the old beige ones that should be hanging there. And there was a new carpet and lampshade, a vase of flowers on the windowsill. The rosewood sideboard was still in place, but it was a long time since he’d seen it gleaming like that, and among the framed photos on it there were some that he didn’t recognize. And the room. It was warm. Warm! If he’d failed to notice anything else, how could he not have noticed that?

  His eyes darted about, trying to take in everything at once. There were pictures on the walls that he knew and pictures that he did not. Among the latter was a group of black-and-white prints of the New York skyline at night, desert sandscapes, gnarled and twisted trees. On another wall there was a large print that he knew very well. It showed a young woman, naked, bent over a free-standing wash basin next to a window with a splintered shutter, a water jug and a pestle and mortar on the uneven flagstones near her feet. He knew every detail of this image: the way the light
from the window splashed the girl’s shoulders; the contours of her calves and buttocks; the hint of profiled breast. The date on the photo, 1949, had struck him almost as much as the model herself when he first saw it, because he couldn’t take his eyes off her even when he realized that she must have been born some years before either of his grandmothers, and would now be getting on for eighty, or dead. His mother had bought the print a couple of months before the accident that had taken her life. She’d been looking for just the right frame for it. Hadn’t managed it. But here it was, on the wall, handsomely framed in dark old oak.

  Alaric whirled round. ‘This isn’t my house!’

  Naia clapped her hands lightly. ‘At last!’

  He turned his back on her. She didn’t exist. He wouldn’t let her. None of this existed. He sought something familiar; found it on the sideboard; rushed at the Folly; placed his hands around the dome; closed his eyes to shut out this bright false room. Somewhere behind him the girl was lobbing questions at him, but he found her easy to ignore, and then she fell silent, the air turned cold, very cold, and there was nothing between his hands. He opened his eyes. He was in the south garden, under the old oak.

  ‘Not here!’ he shouted.

  A small pause, as if of consideration, then four walls, a floor, a ceiling formed about him, bringing with them familiar furniture in its proper, uncared-for condition. The Folly on the dusty sideboard was the first thing he saw as the chill loneliness of the real River Room enveloped him, and he sank to his knees in abject relief.

  Day Seven / 5

  He was in the kitchen when the doorbell rang. Liney. Last person he needed right now. Apart from the fact that he had a lot to think about all of a sudden, once he let her in she would take over the house and his life until Dad came home with Kate, whereupon she would impose herself instead. It was tempting to delay phase one of this dismal future by pretending he wasn’t in and hoping she would turn around and drive back the way she’d come, but he knew that Liney, being Liney, would either camp out on the step until someone turned up, or break in.