Pleased with this premature happy ending, Naia pushed herself from the tree – too vigorously, for her head went back and struck a raised section of bark. She turned to accuse the tree of assault, and met the swollen rim of the Message Hole, the sight of which brought a smile instead of an outburst. Around the beginning of every December when she was little, her father would hold her up to the hole to post her list of requests to Father Christmas – a practice introduced to him by his own father in his youth. Results for Naia, and for Ivan in his day, had proved quite effective most years, but even after Santa was unmasked she had continued to use the Message Hole to post notes – to herself. She didn’t know it, but until the age of twelve Alaric had frequently dropped non-Santa notes in the hole too, retrieving them a few days later with feigned surprise as if coming upon letters from a stranger. It was over four years since either of them had done such a thing, but as she was here and it had come to her notice, Naia reached in to the hole for old time’s sake. Expecting it to be empty, she pulled back sharply when her fingers touched something, but then dipped in once more and took out an envelope, hand-made from what appeared to be oilskin. Holding it up to the minimal light she could just make out three words printed on the front.
TO THE FINDER
Turning the envelope over, she found the flap sealed with a circle of red wax impressed with a capital ‘A’. She was wondering about this and the cryptic dedication on the front when her phone rang. She fumbled for it. ‘Hello?’ Her mother, unaware that she was only just outside, informing her that tea was ready. She headed across the lawn stuffing the envelope into her pocket, to look at later, when alone.
Day Four / 10
When Ivan phoned that evening, Liney greeted him with a winsome ‘Sweetheart,’ and, after a little light banter, asked how he would feel about having the house painted.
‘Painted?’ he said. ‘You mean like in watercolor?’
‘No, like in emulsion. Newsflash. I wield a fair brush and roller.’
There was a pause all the way from Newcastle, and finally: ‘You’ve started, haven’t you?’
‘Well you can’t expect me to just sit here twiddling my bits while you’re up there snowballing your ladylove,’ Liney answered.
‘How far have you got?’ He sounded worried.
‘We’ve finished the kitchen and the River Room.’
‘We? Who’s we?’
‘Alaric, who do you think?’
‘Alaric’s helping you?’
‘He is, yes. He has quite a flair for it as it turns out.’
‘Put him on, will you?’
Alaric was bent over the Escher in the Long Room, where Liney had lit the fire, the real fire, after locating a small supply of coal and logs. He joined her in the freezing hall – freezing, still, because in spite of his promise Mr. Dukas had failed to materialize with or without the precious valve. Liney handed over the receiver but remained at his elbow, ear tilted to catch both sides of the ensuing conversation.
‘That woman shouldn’t be allowed out,’ Ivan said without preamble. ‘Is she bollixing the place up, Al? Come on, the truth.’
‘It could be worse,’ he said. Liney beamed at him. Such praise!
‘You’re sure? You’re not just saying that?’
‘I’m not just saying it.’
‘Al, listen. Conditions are even worse here now and no sign of a let-up. Could you handle it if we dragged it out a bit longer, or would you be white-haired if stuck with her much longer?’
‘Cheek!’ Liney said.
Alaric changed ears. She came round the other side and listened there instead.
‘Don’t know if you’ve seen the news,’ Ivan went on, ‘but many of the roads are impassable up here, the countryside’s dotted with abandoned cars, people have even been found frozen to death in their vehicles.’ He paused. ‘But we’ll make the attempt if you feel lumbered.’
‘Lumbered?’ Liney said archly. ‘With me?’
‘Is she still there?’ Ivan asked.
‘In my pocket,’ Alaric said.
‘Shove her in the cellar and throw away the key, that’s my advice.’
‘We don’t have a cellar.’
‘But is it all right? You don’t mind?’
‘We’ll manage.’
‘Al...’
‘Yes?’
‘The compensation should be through soon. Be quite a bundle. We’ll buy some new gear. A family car from this century maybe, new sound system for you. I think we deserve a few luxuries, don’t you?’
He handed the receiver back to Liney and returned to the puzzle. He sat staring at it without seeing it. The compensation. Reparation for the accident that had taken his mother. After eighteen months of investigation and demands from lawyers the company responsible for the track at the time had finally accepted liability and announced that the victims’ next of kin would receive ‘generous cash payments’. The size of the checks would depend on the status of the injuries sustained. Status of the injuries. They’d actually said that. Six-figure sums had been promised to immediate relatives of the dead. Blood money. His mother had died so that he and his dad could buy some new gear. Alaric wanted none it. Not a penny.
‘We’re in business!’ Liney crowed, bouncing in. ‘We have the official grunt of approval to do our worst!’
He looked up from the puzzle. ‘Our worst?’
‘A free hand to decorate as we see fit!’
‘My father said that?’
‘Well not in those actual words. But as good as, reading between the lines. I’m a wiz at that. You’d be amazed how often a person says one thing and means the absolute opposite. Quite handy sometimes.’
Day Four / 11
Naia weighed the envelope in her hands; turned it over; considered the ‘A’ impressed into the wax seal. The only people she knew with that initial who were likely to wander round the garden were her mother and Alaric, but it didn’t seem the sort of thing that either of them would put there. Who was A then, if not one of them? And what should she do with the thing? Open it? Why shouldn’t she? ‘To the Finder’, it said. Well, she’d found it…
She snapped the brittle blob of wax and extracted three folded sheets of paper. The text they contained was not neatly word-processed like most documents these days, but typewritten with a rather faded black ribbon, as follows.
You are a go-ahead young marketing executive.
A bachelor.
It’s Saturday morning and you’re off to do your week’s shopping. About to get into your car you decide to go back and check that you locked the door. By going back you leave a minute later and miss the parking space you would have found at the supermarket and are forced to park in a nearby street instead. There are parking meters in this street, but drivers are only allowed to leave their cars here for thirty minutes at a time. While you are placing your ticket inside the windscreen someone calls your name. It is a friend you haven’t seen for a while. The friend introduces you to a neighbor of his, to whom he has given a lift into town. Call the neighbor Helen. You and Helen are mutually attracted, but as she’s married you part company. Or you don’t. Two possible scenarios present themselves.
Scenario 1.
Having left the friend and Helen you go to the supermarket, fill your trolley, and join a queue at the checkout – a longer queue than the one you would have joined if you’d parked in the car park rather than the street. By the time you get back to the car you find a sixty-two year old recovering alcoholic (a traffic warden) writing a ticket. You have a go at him, ruining his day. When he gets home after work the traffic warden takes it out on his wife. His wife has been feeling very put-upon of late and her husband’s cruel words are the final straw. She packs a bag and goes to stay with her sister two hundred miles away. In the weeks that follow, the lonely traffic warden starts drinking again. He takes booze to work and loses his job. One night at home, very drunk, he decides to do himself a fry-up. The frying pan catches fire, the fire spreads, th
e house is gutted. So is the ex-traffic warden. His widow collects on the insurance and passes the rest of her life in comfort, praising his memory.
And all because you went back to check the door.
Scenario 2.
Instead of saying goodbye to Helen in the street where you’ve parked your car, you go and have a coffee with her. You still get a parking ticket, but you don’t mind because you really got on with her. Over the next few weeks you and Helen meet regularly. You start an affair. Helen’s husband finds out and comes after you. He attacks you. Defending yourself, you lash out. He falls and cracks his head open. You are arrested, tried, and sentenced to four years in prison. By the time you get out you’ve lost all ambition and confidence and have no job. You very nearly go to pieces, but instead go to the island of Santorini in the Aegean, where you spend every day walking along the beach looking for coins dropped by tourists. One day you meet an attractive American student on vacation. She thinks you have a cute accent and runs her fingers through your nice fat beard and offers to share her sleeping bag with you. It’s not until she returns to Boston that she realizes she’s pregnant. She writes to inform you of this, but by the time the letter arrives you’ve moved to another island, so you never learn of the pregnancy. In due course she gives birth to a boy and doesn’t call him after you. Time passes. The boy becomes a man. He meets a girl. They choose not to marry, but they bring three children into the world, the eldest of whom becomes an accountant, the second a roofing contractor, and the third an Elvis Presley impersonator. The youngest is also a serial killer who over a two-year period butchers twelve teenage girls, who between them, in time, would have given birth to 29 children, who between them would have co-parented 68 children, who would have had 176 children, who altogether would have fathered or mothered 442 children, two of whom – female twins – would have been the first humans to be teleported to Alpha Centauri.
And all because you went back to check the door.
Aldous U.
Withern Rise
Day Four / 12
It was night and snowing hard as Alaric picked his way between towering monuments and leaning headstones. He reached the wall and bent to read the inscription on a particular stone. It wasn’t until he saw that the name and dates were blurred and unreadable that he understood that he was dreaming. Even so, when the ground began to shift beneath him he grew very afraid, but the grave did not burst open in the traditional horror story manner. No hand reached up and grabbed him by the ankle or throat. Yet he sensed that he wasn’t alone and looked over his shoulder, and there she was, gazing at him with big soft eyes. She whispered his name and he held his hands out to her, but she stepped back, out of reach, then turned away, walked off, limping badly. He tried to follow her but the snow under his feet was thick and wouldn’t let him. He couldn’t catch her, however hard he tried, and such was his frustration that he woke with a start. The room was awash with the surreal half-dark of the snow-filled night, but he was still more in the dream than out of it, and he swung his legs over the side, thinking, I mustn’t lose her again. He leant forward, put his hands on the Folly, begged it to take him to her.
Perhaps because he was barely awake, all barriers down, not thinking clearly, it was almost instantaneous this time. The pain stormed through him, jerking him to full wakefulness as he was flung into the garden. The agony died as his bare feet sank into the snow and the cold struck him. He looked down at himself. Pajamas, outside, middle of the night. He’d read the book of this.
He looked toward the house. It wasn’t his, and he didn’t want to visit it dressed like this, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to return home until he’d reached Naia’s Folly. Hardly had he thought this than a mobile-hung ceiling formed above him, walls clicked silently together about him, and he felt a welcome increase in temperature. The curtains were open. Bright shadows clung to the walls. In the bed lay a huddled form, turned away from him, mop of dark hair trailing across the pillow. He imagined the exquisite extra warmth under that duvet, warm girl, legs bent at the knee, arms folded into her breasts. How tempting to slip under the cover, snuggle in to her, feel the length of her against him. Naia stirred, as though aware even in her sleep of his presence, bringing him to his senses. Guilty senses. This wasn’t just some girl to be lusted after, it was Naia, closer to his own flesh than any relative. He was relieved that she didn’t wake, turn over, discover him standing there in pajamas; but she alarmed him when she spoke – ‘No, Robert, get off!’ – before lapsing back into sleep.
He might have wondered who Robert was, if anything more than a dream-visitor, but the need to get out of there was suddenly all-consuming. He turned to the bookcase, seeking the instrument that would send him home. It wasn’t there.
He cast about him for it. What had she done with it? Oh, there, the window ledge. He leant over the sleeper, put his hands on the dome, pictured his version of the house, and with no further thought or effort once again stood barefoot in the snow. Now he visualized his bedroom, and with barely a pause it built itself around him. He shuffled the snow off his feet and was about to dive into bed and shiver the cold away when he saw something that shook him to the core.
The bed was occupied.
He stared about him. It was his room. His chair, his posters, books, clothes slung any-old-where, the Folly on the bookcase. Everything exactly as it should be. So who…?
He leaned over. Saw the face of the sleeper.
It was his own.
He jumped back. It wasn’t his room. Not quite. He spun around, flung himself at the Folly, concentrated, and… he was outside, in the snow. He clenched his fists, focused – My room, my own room! – and… he was there. Or was he? How could he be sure? But the bed was empty. He felt the undersheet. Cold. Hardly conclusive proof, but good enough. He got in, pulled the duvet up, closed his eyes. Nothing bad could happen now. Not if he couldn’t see it.
Part Three
FAMILY TREES
DAY THREE
Day Three / 1
‘I’ve phoned Mr. Dukas,’ Liney said when Alaric joined her in the kitchen next morning. ‘He swears on his mother’s life that he’ll be here at twelve to fit the valve.’
‘Perhaps he doesn’t get on with his mother,’ Alaric said.
‘Yes, that occurred to me too.’
‘Say why he didn’t come yesterday?’
‘Something came up, he said. Doesn’t it always? The domestics are starting at two, by the way.’
‘I’d forgotten the domestics.’
‘I thought we might go into Stone while we have a chance and look at wallpapers.’
‘What?’
‘Go into Stone?’ she repeated. ‘Look at wallpapers?’
‘Why would we do that?’
‘Why? To tie in with my cunning plan to find something to stick on the walls of this depressing hovel, that’s why, my cocky young bucko.’
‘You want to wallpaper it now?’ he said, aghast.
‘Some of it. It’s about time I learnt how to wallpaper.’
‘You’ve never done it before?’
‘Once or twice, not very well.’
‘No surprise there then.’
What did surprise him was that, upon leaving the house, he found the porch clear of rubbish for once. ‘I lugged it up to the gate for the bin men to collect when next they happen by,’ Liney said when he asked what had happened to it. ‘I hope you’re not going to tell me that your dad was hanging on to it because it was a gift, like that paint rag.’
‘No. It had to go. He wasn’t in a hurry, is all.’
They crossed the north garden and went out into the lane, where Liney turned right toward Eynesford village
.
‘No wallpaper shops up there,’ Alaric said, not following.
‘I realize that,’ Liney said over her shoulder. ‘We’re going to Stone.’
‘No need to go through the village. It’s quicker this way.’
She stopped; looked pa
st him toward the iced-over river. ‘You’re thinking of skiing there?’
‘The lane turns at the end,’ he said, heading off in that direction.
He was well ahead of her when he reached the turn, where he paused to wait for her. In purple fur-topped boots, tight green leggings, knitted hat of many colors, she looked like a very tall, malnourished, eccentric elf. ‘Dad’s right,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You shouldn’t be allowed out.’
‘Snow can be lethal,’ Liney said, thinking he meant the way she was walking, arms out, flailing wildly, picking her way through the snow as though expecting to go over at every step.
‘It was lethal in that snowball fight, but you didn’t seem to mind that.’
‘That was different. That was animal warfare. Today I’m a lady going to town.’
They walked past the bowling green and the municipal tennis courts, both now completely white, through a small copse to the narrow iron bridge over the tributary that ran past the marina.
The boats moored along the banks of the tributary were coated with snow, but this time, this bridge, Liney did not pause and lean admiringly.
‘Very pretty, I’m sure,’ she said, merely glancing to her left as she trudged over the bridge, ‘if viewed from behind double glazing with your back against a working radiator. I’m not built for temperatures like these.’ She pulled one of her gloves off with her teeth. ‘Dead,’ she said, displaying bloodless fingers.
From the bridge it was a short walk to the market square, which served as a car park five days a week, a market place on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
The Realities of Aldous U Page 11