To her surprise, the album wasn’t in its usual place on the shelf next to the ancient set of Encyclopedia Britannicas. She asked Kate if she’d seen it.
‘I saw Ivan with it a few days ago,’ Kate told her. ‘But I don’t know where he put it. You could ring him at the shop…’
The shop still wasn’t open, but Ivan had gone to check that its fortifications were still holding against the floodwater. In her old reality Naia wouldn’t have had any hesitation in ringing him, but it was different here. While she could do the father-daughter charade to his face, she had not so far been able to phone him, on any pretext. She didn’t phone him now either.
Tuesday: 4
‘Boat-house’ was a rather grandiose term for the little hut tucked into the river bank some yards along from the landing stage. Many years ago, Eldon Underwood, Alaric’s great-great-grandfather, had cut a hollow in the bank to accommodate a wooden shelter for the little boat he took out when he wanted to be alone. According to Elizabeth Arnott Underwood, his biographer and unmet granddaughter-in-law, Eldon had written much of his post-1914 poetry in that boat.*
By the early years of the 21st century, however, the boat-house was forgotten, and virtually impossible to pick out even from across the river, especially in summer when the reaching foliage and shadow of a mature willow fell across it. The boat itself had been disposed of years ago.
Alaric had discovered the boat-house when he was ten. He’d been splashing about in the river and had swum into it before he realized what it was. Exploring the interior he found, just under the roof, the dry ledge Eldon had used for storing his works-in-progress. In the autumn of 1939, aware that death was close, Eldon had removed all his papers, so Alaric found nothing but a few dead insects, a ball of garden twine, and a knife. The latter was a large jack-knife, with a single blade which folded into a long, rather discolored bone handle. Not much of a thing in his eyes: he had a better knife of his own, a considerably newer one. So he left it with the dead insects and the twine. But he’d never forgotten that secret hidey-hole, and three months ago, needing a place of concealment for the family album, he sought and found an identical boat-house in this reality. Here, too, there was a recessed shelf containing a ball of twine and a jack-knife. Again he left the twine, but this time he pocketed the knife. A memento.
Having decided where to hide the album he’d needed something to wrap it in, keep it dry, and had found a heavy-duty polythene bag, rather like a small sack, in the cupboard under the stairs. Large enough to enclose the book with room to spare, the bag had a long, looped drawstring of industrial-strength cord which, pulled taut and wound round, secured and waterproofed the book. He had lodged the package in the boat-house, well back on the ledge, confident that it would never be found. But now, three months on, he wanted to retrieve it. He couldn’t have said why, but since waking he’d been longing to touch again the family album his mother had assembled over the years; leaf through his past, his previous life with his real family.
He waited until evening, when Alex and Ivan were watching TV. To get down to the boat-house he had to fight his way through the willow that overhung the bank, to four badly eroded concrete steps. Ordinarily the top three steps would be dry, but all of them were under water now, so he descended with care. At the bottom he had to crouch and step sideways into the hut, which was more than half full of water and smelt very dank. It was also dark in there, but groping under the roof he found what he’d come for.
Returning to the bank, he concealed himself behind the willow’s dense veil of leaves while he made as sure as he could that he was not likely to be observed returning to the house. Satisfied, about to break out, he sensed something nearby. He turned, saw nothing untoward, but recalled the first time Grandpa Rayner had brought him here. Grandpa had said that when you stepped well under the willow, near the trunk, the world seemed to withdraw a little. Alaric had tried it at his grandfather’s bidding, and it was true. Even natural sounds seemed to diminish near the trunk. The place was strange also in that it was the only bit of the garden where nothing grew, even wild grass and weeds. Rayner had told him that when he was a young lad, in summer, he used to hide in here, waiting for someone at the house to miss him. The willow was nothing like its present size then, but it had provided enough cover for his small squatting frame.
‘I would try and find worms and snails and bugs here,’ Rayner had said. ‘But there were none, ever. It was as if the ground would allow nothing to live in it or on it. And you know, sometimes…’
‘Sometimes?’
‘I heard voices.’
‘Voices?’
‘Sounds, too, from nowhere.’
‘What were they?’
‘I don’t know, and I never found out, but time and again I would hear them. Just under here. Only here.’
‘Weren’t you scared?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t scary. Just odd. It was my secret place. And now it’s your place too.’
Alaric hadn’t said as much, but the willow did not capture his imagination. It was just a patch of dead earth and shade to him, and he felt no need to hide. He went there once after Rayner died, to see if he could hear those not-quite-there voices and sounds, but there was nothing, and he’d never returned. Today, too, he heard nothing. That mildly disconcerting feeling of something elusive, intangible, that was all.
When he was ready he returned to the house as speedily as the floodwater would permit. Climbing in the window beside the front porch door, he kicked his sandals off, dashed the water off his legs, and crept upstairs with his package. He was in his room, about to unwrap the album, when he heard Alex calling him. He put the album in his wardrobe, right at the back, to look at later. When later came, he decided it could wait until morning. In the morning he overslept, and forgot about it.
Part Two
COMPETING WITH MASKS
WEDNESDAY
Wednesday: 1
Ivan denied all knowledge of the album’s whereabouts. ‘But you must know where it is,’ Naia said. ‘Kate saw you with it.’
‘Did she? Well, if I had it I don’t know where I put it. What do you want it for anyway?’
‘To look at. I’m entitled, aren’t I?’
‘If I come across it you’ll be the first to know.’
‘Oh, much appreciated, I’m sure.’
That was last night. She spent the rest of the evening searching for it, to no avail. The one time she needed it and it was nowhere to be found.
This morning, still annoyed, she left the house ten minutes before she needed to, intending to vent some spleen by splashing around the garden. Climbing out of the window, again in Grandpa Rayner’s waders, she was startled to see a man wading toward the trees and bushes that lined the drive, and plunging through them. It was the old man from the cemetery; the one she’d met the first day of her exile here, when he told her that his name was Aldous Underwood. Since that encounter she’d seen him three times more, never to speak to, always in the distance, looking rather lost. But now he’d come into the garden, actually into the garden. Why? For what reason? Could it be…?
She had already persuaded herself that it was a variation of this man who had placed the mysterious letter in the message hole of her original Family Tree. The two realities were the same in most details, but some things occurred at different times. Mr. Knight had proved this by turning up in the present garden some time after his double had offered his services in her previous one. So, perhaps the man who called himself Aldous Underwood had just placed a letter in this Family Tree, four months after his doppelganger had placed the same letter in the other.
She headed for the tree, which had been her objective anyway, and reached into the message hole. When her fingers touched something, she pulled back; counted five before reaching in again. The envelope that she lifted out was crudely made of some sort of fabric that appeared to have been treated with oil or wax, probably to make it waterproof. It was similar, if not identical, to the one she’d
found in her old reality, which was there to this day. It even bore the same inscription, ‘To the Finder’, and, like the other, was sealed with red wax impressed with the letter ‘A’.
Keen as she was to see if the envelope contained the same document, she decided to leave it for later, and study it at her leisure. Rather than risk it falling out of her coat she returned it to the hole, went round the back of the tree so as to be hidden from the house, and leant against the trunk to await the designated hour, and what might or might not happen when it struck.
Wednesday: 2
For much of her extended sojourn at Withern Rise, Larissa May Underwood had not been in the best of tempers. Strait-jackets did that to her, she said. Her brother was openly amused by her determinedly sour expression, but he was one of the few people who could get away with laughing at her to her face. To three of the children – Aldous, Ursula and little Ray – Larissa was a formidable old bird. Only Mimi actually enjoyed her company. Mimi the dreamer, who loved to read her grandfather’s poetry aloud, and since the age of six had been infatuated with Rupert Brooke, or his photograph. She and her aunt were often seen together, not saying much, doing less, but at ease with one another in spite of the difference in their ages.
Amused, in her way, by Aldous’s recent boating expeditions around the garden, Larissa had proposed a trip with him away from the house. When she heard of this, Mimi begged to accompany them. Larissa had no objection, but now felt obliged to invite Ursula too. Ursula shook her head, preferring to continue her struggle with Virginia Woolf. Larissa laughed at this and dropped Orlando back in her niece’s lap. There was no suggestion that little Ray should join the outing. Marie was concerned enough when she heard that Aldous and Mimi wanted to go.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Suppose something should happen?’
‘Suppose nothing ever happened?’ Larissa countered grimly.
Marie backed down. She usually did with Larissa, of whom she had ever been wary. In all the time Larissa had been staying with them, Marie had never quite warmed to her – a feeling reciprocated by her sister-in-law.
Aldous and his father were the only ones who had ventured out since the rising of the river. Aldous didn’t mind getting his legs wet, but A.E., preferring not to, would carry his waders down to the lowest dry stair and put them on before stepping into the hall. Yesterday, however, he had fixed a long ladder to the window sill of the small bedroom overlooking the south garden, a means of exit approved of by Larissa, who considered it ‘a touch more adventurous than simply going downstairs’. She used the ladder now, followed by Mimi and Aldous, to descend to the boat her brother had brought round from its place by the back porch.
It was Larissa herself, ignoring the anxious Marie at the window, who rowed them away from the house. Aldous pretended not to see his mother either, but Mimi, all grins, waved heartily until they slid behind the young willow which overhung her late grandfather’s tiny boat-house.
They might have rowed just about anywhere they fancied, but Larissa had decided that they would head for the town bridge, and the best way to get there was to follow the now-concealed course of the river. Gigantic lily pads, chained to the river bed by lean, supple stalks, lurked just below the lucent surface, but a thrusting few pushed upward, ornamenting the way. Mimi delighted in dipping a hand in the water and tracing the outline of the submerged lilies, and once risked falling in by leaning out to pluck one of the yellow crowns which, for the rest of the journey, she wore in her hair.
‘The Zambezi with willows and sparrows!’ Larissa cried, rowing with a verve the children had never seen in her before. Generally stern, sharp-tongued Aunt Larissa, entranced and enlivened by her surroundings: who would have thought it possible? She became almost garrulous, telling them things about herself that they hadn’t previously been privy to. Larissa had never pretended interest in men, but eighteen years ago, nine months after a ‘rather distasteful overnighter’ with a Dutch sailor passing through Honduras, she’d given birth. If she had been told the sailor’s name, she said, she’d forgotten it the moment she realized what she must do in the cause of science. The nameless Dutchman had gone on his way unaware that he had left something of himself with the tanned woman in the broad-brimmed hat first spotted on the quayside haggling with fishermen. Larissa told the enthralled Aldous and Mimi how she had found a name for her baby son in the history of the English church she carried in her knapsack at the time. She had just got to the seventh century and the first Christian king of Northumbria, whose name was Edwin.
‘Well, I had to call the kid something,’ she said, ‘and I thought there were worse names, so Edwin it was. I managed to resist the “king” part.’
She and Edwin had lived in the south Dorset village of Rouklye, until, achieving the great age of fourteen, Edwin suddenly announced that he had apprenticed himself to a ship’s chandler in Weymouth, who would provide digs for him. Just over two years after her son’s departure, Larissa herself was made homeless when the government requisitioned the village, along with the valley that contained it, for ‘war use’. It was her brother’s invitation that had brought her to Withern Rise. Edwin had visited her just once since she’d been here, a lack of contact which seemed to perturbed her not at all.
‘His father was a sailor, his mother can’t bear to be in one place for more than an afternoon,’ she told Aldous and Mimi as she rowed toward the town bridge, ‘and between us we produced a clerk. He’s oddly squat, too, young Edwin, while I’m on the tall side, and the sailor wasn’t exactly a dwarf. I sometimes wonder if he wasn’t swapped at birth. Still talking about your cousin, in case you wonder.’
Wednesday: 3
After a while, fed up of waiting for something that might not happen, Naia climbed the tree. It wasn’t until she straddled the same bough as before that she noticed that the leaves were less green than might be expected at this time of year; smaller too, and not as abundant. And they smelt odd. Sort of mushroomy. She was thinking that it must be because the roots were unaccustomed to being under water, when the tree shivered, branches rearranged themselves, leaves grew in quantity, volume, vivacity, and the bough became less sturdy.
‘I didn’t think it was going to work this time,’ Alaric said from below.
She looked down. ‘I was starting to doubt it myself. Is the boy around?’
‘Can’t see him.’
‘I’m coming down.’
‘What for?’
‘I want to go to the house. I have some questions.’
‘His parents might be in.’
‘So I’ll ask them.’
He kept his distance while she eased herself down. The water was deeper than ever today.
‘Ask them what?’ he said. ‘What right they have to be living there?’
‘I’ll play it by ear. Stay here if you haven’t got the nerve.’
Before leaving the cover of the tree, she bent low to survey their surroundings. As well as the maroon shutters flanking many of the upper windows of the house, they saw an extra window between the box room and the nearest corner. In both of their realities, the window had been bricked in about a quarter of a century ago and the newer brickwork concealed, over the years, by ivy. Here a large rain barrel stood by the kitchen door where they did not have a barrel, or need of one. There was no garage. They’d previously noticed that there were more trees in this south garden. There were about the same amount in other parts, but substantially more bushes and shrubs struggled to emerge from the higher floodwater. There were a couple of wooden sheds, too, and a greenhouse, and the ramshackle summerhouse Naia had picked out on their first visit.
‘The old photos,’ she said.
‘Old photos?’
‘In the other family album. The earlier one.’
In both realities, the photos in that album were black-and-white or sepia. They showed forgotten aunts and uncles and great-thisses and great-thats whom they’d only known as elderly near-strangers, or whose lives they’d missed entirel
y. Several of the earliest pictures were of a proud young man in army uniform, gangling, bright eyed, a hint of moustache: Roderick Lyman Underwood. Both Alexes had discovered during their researches for the Underwood family tree that Roderick was killed in Flanders in November 1917, at Passchendaele. He was eighteen. His early death was a major turning point in Underwood family history. If Roderick hadn’t died a year before the end of the Great War, Withern Rise would have eventually gone to him instead of to A.E., his younger brother, and an alternative branch of the family would have dwelt there over the years. Because different meetings, liaisons and connections would have occurred in the line that subsequently occupied Withern Rise, Alexandra Bell would not have met Ivan Charles Underwood in 1987 and a year later had a child by him – and neither Alaric or Naia would have been born.
The old album also contained pictures of the exterior of the house, or bits of it, in the background of family portraits and casual snaps. But Naia was right. What little the album showed of the house was more like this one than either of theirs.
‘I don’t get it,’ Alaric said.
‘If it’s what I’m thinking,’ Naia said, ‘neither do I.’
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I need to check the family tree.’
‘This tree?’
‘The one in the album. Except that I can’t. Your dad lost it.’
‘I didn’t think he even knew where the family album was.’
‘Well, apparently he did, and now he doesn’t.’
‘You said you wanted to go to the house,’ Alaric said. ‘We could be hauled out of here in a heartbeat.’
‘Yes.’ Naia started forward. ‘Let’s hope there’s someone at home.’
‘What’s the plan anyway?’ he asked, following.
The Realities of Aldous U Page 21