Wishing she could remove her water-filled boots, but aware that it would take far too much effort while standing in water, she began to climb – not easily; the excess weight made her legs feel like lead. The cat waited for her, not taking his eyes off her for an instant.
Monday: 8
The old tree didn’t look too fit up close, Alaric thought. The bark was discolored here and there, and leaves which should be fresh and bright at this time of year seemed smaller and duller than usual. A result of having its roots under water, perhaps.
He waded round the back of the broad trunk to conceal himself from the house, then took a breath and touched the bark. When nothing happened he settled his palm on it, and waited. Still nothing. He took his hand away. There was a thin sticky liquid on it. Reddish brown. He dipped his hand in the water and wiped it on his shorts. His palm was still sticky. He returned it to the water, waggled it furiously, then rubbed it on another part of the bark in an attempt to remove the last of the stickiness. While doing this he felt a slight quiver beneath his palm. He jumped back. Too late. The tree had changed. So had the water level. It was higher now by several inches, and a small rowing boat bumped against the trunk.
And there was someone above him, in the tree.
Monday: 9
Even up here, the cat was beyond her reach. Uneasy, so far above nothing but water, Naia swung a nervous leg over the bough. Astride it, feeling a little more secure, she proffered a hand. The cat stared at it suspiciously, as though wondering what it was for.
‘It’s all right. You’re quite safe. Come to mother.’
The cat raised a timid forepaw; a paw coated in something that looked like... snow.
‘Where have you been?’ she said.
She reached further, but before she could touch the cat she felt a small shudder, or dislocation, as if the tree had moved. Clutching the bough to steady herself, when she looked back the cat was no longer there. Her first thought was that it had fallen off, but then she realized that the bough was less substantial than it had been and that other eyes were now upon her, staring up from below.
Monday: 10
Needing a break from rowing, Aldous moored alongside his favorite tree. The boat rocked a little as he stood up, but he steadied it against the trunk. He glanced toward the house. His mother’s face was not in any of the windows, so he swung up and sat on the lowest bough surveying his watery domain. The tree was far older than him, but because of the name it was known by – Aldous’s Oak – he had always thought of it as his tree. He was proud to have a tree that bore his name. After a minute, he decided to climb higher, and felt his way upward through the dense foliage, hauling himself from bough to bough with confidence and ease. He might have gone further still if not for the sudden movement and voices below. He started back the way he’d come, dropping silently stage by stage, until he was just above them. He made a spy-hole in the leaves. There were two of them, a young woman who sat on the lower bough, and a youth, standing in the water below.
‘You’re not having it back, it’s mine now,’ he heard the youth say.
‘Oh, suits you then, does it?’ the girl replied.
‘Suits me? It’s the way things should’ve been.’
‘It’s the way things were. For me! You’ve stolen my life!’
‘I’ve stolen nothing. I didn’t plan it. It just happened.’
‘Oh yes, didn’t it just. Have you any idea what I’ve been going through? Sheer bloody hell, that’s what. I live in a world of strangers, and I don’t even have my mother any more. She wouldn’t know me if I walked in the room and sat down at the – ’
Naia broke off. A rustling above her head. She looked up. A young boy’s face was framed in the leaves.
‘Hello,’ she said, for want of a better greeting in her surprise.
‘Hello yourself,’ the boy answered. ‘What are you doing in my tree?’
‘Your tree?’
‘Yes. Mine.’
Then his legs were dangling, toes feeling their way, and he dropped to the bough, a yard or so along from her.
‘He could be right about that,’ Alaric said from below.
‘About what?’ Naia asked.
‘It being his tree. It’s not either of ours.’
In a better position to view their surroundings, he had spotted several differences. Naia bent down to peer below the broad spread of leaves and saw more trees than there should be in the south garden. Two of them, an apple tree and a pear, supported between them a rope hammock whose lowest part touched the water. From another bough of the apple tree there dangled a makeshift swing.
‘No, it’s not,’ she said, straightening up, puzzled.
‘What’s your name, kid?’ Alaric asked the boy.
He frowned. ‘I don’t like being called a kid.’
‘OK, so what’s you name?’
‘None of your business.’
Aldous slipped down the trunk and dropped into the boat. It rocked, but he sat quickly, steadied it, gripped the oars.
‘Interesting,’ Naia said as he rowed away.
‘What is?’
‘A different Underwood at Withern Rise.’
‘You don’t know he’s an Underwood.’
‘Oh, he is. Didn’t you notice the shape of his head?’
‘His head?’
‘And his nose, his eyebrows?’
‘His eyebrows?’
She let it go. ‘The water’s higher here.’
‘I noticed. I’m standing in it.’
‘How did we get here?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Not the Follies. Not the one at my end anyway.’
‘Nor mine.’ He looked toward the house. ‘There might be another Alex and Ivan here.’
‘Eh?’
‘Well, if the kid is an Underwood...’
‘Different child,’ Naia said.
‘So maybe they had another.’
‘Another? Instead of you or me?’
‘As well as.’
‘I don’t think so, somehow.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because if they had, he would’ve thought one of us was him or her.’
She brought both legs over to the same side of the bough and estimated her chances of getting down without mishap.
‘Are they Grandpa Rayner’s waders?’ Alaric asked.
‘Yes. And they’re full of water.’ He opened his mouth. ‘Don’t ask,’ she said. She reached down. ‘Give me a hand.’
He stepped back. ‘No chance.’
‘This isn’t either of our gardens,’ she said. ‘We might be able to touch here.’
‘And we might not. Keep away.’
Before attempting an unassisted descent, Naia bent down again, this time to examine the house.
‘The brickwork’s brighter,’ she said. ‘Looks newer.’
‘Maybe they had it cleaned.’
‘And shutters at the windows. Neither of ours has shutters. That ivy isn’t so thick either, or as widely spread. And there are plants we don’t have as well as the additional trees, and look, over there, a sort of summerhouse.’
She moved closer to the trunk and eased herself down while seeking a toehold. She found one, but her foot slipped when she put her weight on it, which caused her hold to loosen. She squawked and fell backwards, away from the tree. Alaric jumped clear – too quickly, losing his own footing. The water covered him before he knew it. He rose, spluttering.
‘Oh, very impressive. You can drown in two inches of water, I tell him. Leave off, he says, I’m nearly seventeen. Well I hate to point it out, my lad, but this is even more than two inches.’
He sat up, in water that fell just below his chest – a little lower than the previous level. Naia’s former mother, in Grandpa Rayner’s old green waders, gazed at him with amusement. The additional trees were gone. So were the shutters. And Naia.
Monday: 11
Almost every day a new memory was there for him when he woke. A gift of the mornin
g. During the past months Aldous had recalled such a quantity of unsorted fragments that he wondered how many more there were to be recaptured. They were mostly undramatic memories, but few were unpleasant, and his uncomfortable sleeping arrangements were easier to bear for the thought of what the next waking might bring.
Last night, settling down, he thought again of his gran. She often came to him in the night, like a special guest offering comfort. She was the rock of his life. If some of the others were still a little hazy, she was not. He imagined that she’d cared for the other children as much as for him, but as yet he had no memory of her cuddling them, reading to them, bathing them. It pleased him to think that he was her favorite.
Occasionally a less welcome memory returned, such as an incident during a visit from the Montagniers – Uncle Mathieu and Aunt Eléne – who’d come from Limoges to spend Easter with them. Uncle Mathieu was one of those adults who adopt a superior air when talking to children, as if their own age, being greater, elevates them above the young. Aldous could only recall meeting him and his wife once before that visit. They had not been drawn to one another. Aldous’s coolness became active dislike during the afternoon of Easter Monday when the adults were gathered round the draw-leaf table in the Long Room. Maman – his uncle’s younger sister – had made a large pot of tea, and there were scones with home-made jam, and neat little egg-and-cress and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts trimmed off. ‘Oh, how very English!’ Tante Eléne had exclaimed dismissively. The incident that had embedded itself so deeply in Aldous’s mind occurred when he dropped his teaspoon on the floor and wanted a clean one to stir his tea with. He started toward the table, where the cutlery lay on a silver tray which caught the light and dazzled him.
‘Borrow mine, young man,’ said Uncle Mathieu.
‘No thank you. I want my own.’
He reached for one of the unused teaspoons on the tray, but before his fingers could close on it Uncle Mathieu inserted his arm in the space between boy and spoon. He spoke through his teeth, which, Aldous noticed, resembled a double row of mossy tombstones.
‘I said use mine.’
His uncle’s eyes were very cold beneath eyebrows like gray wire. There was a crumb lodged in his moustache.
‘I’d like a clean one,’ Aldous said.
Uncle Mathieu held his spoon upright like a small trophy. Tea dribbled down the handle, onto his fingers.
‘Take mine or do without.’
For Aldous it was a moment of uncertainty. It would have been easier to accept the spoon, but he didn’t want his uncle’s spoon, or anyone else’s, he wanted his own. He bit his lip and spun about; marched the length of the room, which had fallen silent. He went out to the hall and up to his room, hoping no one had realized how close he’d been to tears. Gran would have known. Gran wouldn’t have let his uncle bully him. He needed her that day. He really needed her.
But she wasn’t there.
Monday: 12
Naia did not remain long after her fall from the tree. The water she rose from was that of the reality in which she’d climbed it – and the cat was swimming for its life nearby. Scooping it up and carrying it to the house cradled against her chest, it wasn’t until she reached the window and dropped the cat over the sill that she realized how exhausted she was; so exhausted that it took a supreme effort to climb in herself. Inside she sank to the floor and rested her back against the wall, a position she maintained for some minutes before summoning the reserves to remove the waders. From there she trailed along the hall, and up stairs which had never seemed so steep, or so many.
Similarly drained, it took every ounce of Alaric’s strength to get upstairs and change into dry clothes, but within an hour of their return, both he and Naia sat in armchairs in their respective Long Rooms, thinking very similar thoughts. Wanting to be alone, neither of them welcomed the intrusion when Alex entered one Long Room, Kate the other.
‘Are you all right?’ Alex asked.
‘Look a bit peaky,’ said Kate.
Two replies, identical: ‘Overdid it out there,’ and without further discussion they were left alone. Kate Faraday and Alex Underwood were more alike than anyone knew.
Monday: 13
The discovery of two strangers in the tree hadn’t bothered Aldous all that much. A minor distraction, with so much else to think about. Such as betraying his mother’s trust by rowing out of the main gate and into the Coneygeare before, overcome by guilt, he turned about and rowed back to the south garden. He paused under his tree to see if the strangers were still there. They weren’t, so he rowed round the house and tied the boat up. He hadn’t thought how he would get indoors, but his father, returning from checking the tomatoes in the flooded greenhouse at just the right moment, carried him in.
Maman was sitting on the lower stairs, awaiting her wandering son’s return, though she did not say as much. A.E. passed him up and Marie sat him beside her to tug his boots off, wet from a few inches of water in the boat. She was lodging them between banister rails to dry out when pandemonium broke out above: Ursula chasing her young sister and brother along the landing accompanied by Mimi’s high-pitched screams and little Ray’s croaky roar of terror. Their mother stormed upstairs to impose order, but at the top changed her mind because the two youngest had charged into the box room and Ursula, after shoving against the door with her shoulder, had managed to get in too and slam the door behind her. The mayhem continued – cries, squeals, laughter, thuds – but sufficiently subdued by the closed door for Marie to decide to leave them to it.
Aldous, still sitting on the lower stairs, noticed that his mother’s face was gray with strain when she came back down. She’d been stuck indoors for days, unable to shop, potter in the garden, talk to neighbors, even get to her kitchen and prepare decent meals. Marie refused to accept that the children were happy with scraps – or, indeed, that her husband was relieved not to be eating as well as usual. For the youngsters it was a novelty, but for A.E. it was his waistline, and the extra chin that was beginning to swell below the original: a lethal combination of early middle-age and his wife’s cooking. But here was a man as pleased with life as he felt anyone had a right to be. With a flourishing business, a fine house, an attractive (if rather too thin) French wife, and children he doted on, he could not imagine being more contented with his lot. If told by a clairvoyant that in a matter of days tragedy would tear his family apart, he would have dismissed the prediction as wicked and absurd, if not impossible.
Monday: 14
The several paths of the landscaped park known as Withy Meadows were no more visible than its various ponds and gullies, so that sensible progress was slow and cautious. Aldous, young of mind if not body, was less circumspect in his progress than most of his apparent age, but he managed to reach the car-park at the far end without incident. As usual his trouser legs were soaked through, but it didn’t concern him overmuch. He was just glad to be here, awake, alive, breathing pure air, out in the world.
After paying a visit to the miraculously unlocked toilet block in the car-park, he climbed the steps to the town bridge and walked along it and down it, to Stone market square, currently a lake dotted with spindly black lamps. He was about to start across the square when a name came to him which he doubted had entered his mind for six full decades, awake or asleep: Eric Hobb. He stopped. Eric Hobb. Where had that come from? He cast about him for a clue, and saw:
HOBB, MORTON AND BECK
Family Solicitors & Notaries
Serving the Community
Then it unfolded in his mind. Eric’s story. The whole sad business.
Eric was fifteen when Aldous was nine, which meant they’d had little to do with one another. Different generations, then. Eric lived with his mother and twelve year old sister Joyce at 42 Main Street, Eynesford, two doors down from the butcher’s. Everyone knew Eric Hobb. Eric and his bike. Eric loved his bike. It could whisk him in and out of slow traffic, get him from here to there in no time. Whether he bent low ov
er his drop handlebars or sat bolt upright with his hands behind his head, Eric was in such command of his vehicle that it was a surprise as well as a shock when the accident occurred.
It was the weekend, a Saturday, and Eric had set out for the bicycle shop in Stone. The bike shop was his favorite place on earth, he always said. He didn’t buy much there, but he liked to look and touch, and the owner, Terry Eagle, a fellow enthusiast, was always happy to talk about bikes. The town’s official boundary lay just the other side of the little humpback bridge into the village, above the woodyard estuary. The boundary was marked by a seventeenth century coaching inn known as The Sorry Fiddler. A small car-park lay beyond a brick archway attached to the pub, but cars were fewer in those days, and in any case The Fiddler was just a short walk from both village and town. The only car there the day of the accident was the 1938 Ford Sedan belonging to Bill Ockham, representative of a firm of razor manufacturers. Mr. Ockham had popped in for a pint in the middle of the day. While there, he also consumed a portion of Woolton Pie and smoked a Craven A while eyeing the 36 year old barmaid’s imposing bosom.
While Eric Hobb was pausing on the bridge to peer over the wall at the pine logs jostling one another below, Mr. Ockham was climbing into his car with the intention of driving the three or four miles to Eaton Fane and continuing his rounds. As the razor salesman put his car into gear and his foot on the accelerator, Eric stood up on his pedals and launched himself down the slope of the bridge. The road ahead was clear, but as he was about to sweep past the pub the Ford shot through the archway and Eric and his bike went under the car. The bike was buckled, but not beyond repair, while Eric’s skull was shattered, his life extinguished in the wink of an eye.
Aldous did not speculate as to how the accident might have been avoided, but it was a simple matter. If Eric had not paused on the bridge there would have been no fatality. Because he started down when he did, several other lives were also changed, not least that of Helen Stoker, the girl he would have married seven years on, and the two children they would have produced. Mr. Ockham and Eric’s mother were the most obvious casualties. The razor salesman suffered such torment for the life he’d taken that, eighteen months later, he posted farewell gifts to his three young grandchildren before slitting his wrists in another pub car-park, with one of his own sample products. The effect of the accident on Eric’s mother was more long-term, but no less tragic. Her husband, Bruce, had left her eight years earlier for one of the younger staff at Stone Library, since when he had contributed little to their children’s upkeep and provided nothing at all for her. She worked as a counter assistant at the Co-op – small wages to cover the rent and support two kids. Life was already far from good for Geraldine Hobb when her eldest died. His death was the final blow. It did not drive her to drink (which she couldn’t have afforded anyway) or to suicide, but into a long decline laden with negativity and regret that lasted until her eighty-sixth year.
The Realities of Aldous U Page 19