Thursday: 5
Naia spent much of the morning and a little of the afternoon searching for the man who called himself Aldous Underwood. The one place she deliberately avoided was his chosen place of residence on the bank across from the house. If he was there, it would feel like too much of an intrusion to walk in on him. It wasn’t like knocking on a door, after all.
Thursday:6
Larissa was jubilant. A rare mood in everyone’s experience but her brother’s. Only he had known her as an excitable girl and impulsive young woman. To him, the reason for her sudden lifting of spirits was obvious. She was going away. Larissa had grown up at Withern Rise, but it was years since she’d last wanted to stay there for any length of time. ‘It reeks of childhood,’ she once said. Quizzed about her need to be ever on the move, she would claim to be ‘stultified’ by the idea of passing night after night in the same tedious bed. What made her pulse race was the thought of not knowing where she would be resting on a given or ungiven night.
While A.E. had meant it when he said he would miss his sister, Marie did not shared the sentiment. She did her best not to let it show, but she was so relieved that her sister-in-law was going that she readily sanctioned Larissa’s proposed outing with all four children. Even Ursula was keen to join this expedition. Like her mother, Ursula did not feel much affection for her aunt (who’d never shown much for her) but she was leaving, and it seemed churlish not to go out with her this once.
A.E. donned his waders and carried his children one by one to the boat. He did not carry his sister. Larissa, bootless and stockingless, had tucked her skirts into her knickers to cross the short distance from the porch. ‘If there was room for me I might come too,’ A.E. said when all five were aboard.
‘You would not be admitted,’ his sister informed him. ‘This is an outing for the fancy free. You are a householder, dear boy. A husband, a father, and an employer. The weight of the world is on your shoulders.’
‘I try not to let it show,’ he said plaintively.
‘Try as you like, it’s a fact. Give us a shove.’
He untied the boat, provided the stipulated shove, and stood watching their departure.
This time Larissa allowed Aldous to row. After a few minutes Ray asked to take a turn. Aldous objected, but when Ray looked like going into a sulk Ursula ordered him to surrender the oars. Aldous handed them over, reluctantly, and for the next few minutes Ray struggled to control the boat.
‘We’re going in circles!’ Aldous shouted.
‘He hasn’t done this before,’ Ursula said. ‘You might tell him how instead of bawling at him.’
‘Stop arguing, you two,’ said Mimi.
‘Yes, stop arguing,’ said Larissa calmly, and she and Mimi nodded at one another as though sealing a covenant.
When Ray voluntarily handed the oars back after a short while, Aldous set about showing off his comparative skills by rowing around the Coneygeare smoothly and efficiently. There were fewer boats out than the last time he’d done this, with his father. The novelty of boating on water that was more usually open grassland was on the wane. Even for those whose premises had withstood the incursion, the flooding was now more of a nuisance than a source of amusement. Yet a few still enjoyed it.
‘Look – Mr. Knight,’ Ursula said.
About eighty yards off, their gardener was rowing his wife and small son this way and that. A family outing on the waters.
‘I’ve never seen Mr. Knight’s little boy,’ Mimi said. ‘Can we say good day?’
Aldous protested, but was overruled by the girls. Their aunt, herself no drooler over small offspring, withheld her objections.
Mrs. Knight was a fairly precise physical opposite to her husband. Where he was tall, she was short; where he was lean, she was plump; where he was cheerful, she was resolutely doleful of countenance and manner. While Mr. Knight greeted the boatload of Underwoods his wife gave the impression that she was rather put out by their approach.
The Knights’ cottage was just across the lane from Withern’s side gate, but in the three and a half years since their marriage, when she moved to Eynesford from Great Parr, Mrs. Knight had not gone out of her way to become friendly with her husband’s employers, or their children. The reason for this was a slightly unsavory family link discovered shortly before her son’s birth. A link she had no intention of admitting, to the Underwoods least of all, and which she had forbidden her husband to speak of to a living soul.
The two boats jostled one another and bobbed side by side as Mimi reached across and touched the boy’s chunky cheek. He beamed at her. The doting mother softened. The quickest way to Clarice Knight’s heart was to adore her son.
‘What’s his name?’ Mimi enquired.
‘He has two,’ Mr. Knight said with a sly glance at his wife.
She glared back at him. ‘We call him John.’
‘No sense of heritage,’ Mr. Knight muttered mischievously. While Clarice returned her attention to their child, who was involved in some sort of dialogue with Mimi, he addressed Larissa. ‘I hear you’re leaving us, Miss Underwood.’
‘News spreads quickly round here,’ Larissa said.
‘I didn’t catch where you’re going.’
‘France. Initially.’
‘France? Wouldn’t catch me going there. Lot of clearing up to be done there. Lot of bad feeling.’
‘I’ll take my chances.’
‘Be there long, will you?’
‘I can’t say. Depends who I find.’
The gardener nodded as if he understood, though he was merely being polite. Ursula and Ray were also chatting to the little boy by this time. Only Aldous remained aloof, staring across the Coneygeare’s watery plain hoping the others would notice before much longer that he was keen to be on his way. When all conversation and child-gazing was done, he turned the boat toward the village. It was four-twenty-five. He had fifty-five minutes to live.
Thursday: 7
After his return from the library, Alaric had gone out of his way to distract himself from what he felt he must do. It wasn’t until around five that he at last screwed up the nerve to go ahead. All right, he said to himself, so I’ll be shattered afterwards, but how often do you get a chance to step into your family’s past, for God’s sake? Not that that was his real reason for wanting to revisit the 1945 reality. No, the honest reason was that he hoped to find Naia there. He wanted to show her his family album. Surely, he thought, the sight of the sad empty pages toward its end would persuade her to part with the picture-filled leaves removed from her own version of the album. If she gave him those pages he would add them to his and produce it at last for Alex’s inspection. Naturally, he’d have to lose any photos that Naia was in, and somehow explain the gaps, but one thing at a time.
All this depended, of course, on their reaching the earlier reality more or less at the same point. Hoping Naia was thinking along the same lines, he loosened the cord around the polythene-covered album, looped it over his shoulder in order to have his hands free, and started to climb the Family Tree. He might have just leaned against it, but he climbed it. He climbed it.
Thursday: 8
Aldous rowed along the village street, so much wider with the pavements under water. A swan sailed along the middle of this new river, beak turning grandly this way and that on its proud white neck. There were a couple of other boats, whose occupants hailed the Underwood party, as did a group of dedicated strollers in waders. ‘Look, a fish!’ Ray, said, pointing over the side. Strangers waved from upper windows.
Everything was interesting from the boat, especially for the younger children. For them all sorts of things ordinarily taken for granted or not particularly interesting had striking new qualities. But it was the display in the newsagent’s window that caught Larissa’s eye: an elaborate promotion for the entertainment that should have been with them this week. By now Willy Bright’s Circus should have transformed the Coneygeare. A circus would have been a welcome diversion
after the austerity of the past few years. A street party had been planned to accompany it. Almost every household had volunteered chairs and tables, to be placed end to end along Main Street. But then the Great Ouse got all uppity and that was that. Even though the circus and the party had been cancelled the newsagent’s display remained, and the shop was open. The owner, Mr. Bettany, had insisted on keeping normal business hours since the water burst in some days ago, standing behind the counter in his fishing togs ready to serve any customers who waded in.
A notice in the window declared that a free mask would be offered with every ticket for the circus bought from the shop. When Mimi expressed interest in the masks, her aunt leant in the door and asked if they were for sale. Mr. Bettany told her that if she bought enough sweets he would give them a mask apiece.
‘How many must I buy?’ Larissa enquired.
‘How many coupons you got?’
‘My quota. I also have actual money…’
A deal was struck, and Mr. Bettany scooped the selected sweets out of the enormous glass jars and screwed them into four separate twists of paper. The clown masks he provided for the children were all different, highly colored, absurdly manic. ‘What about me?’ Larissa said. ‘Or do I have to buy sweets for myself too?’
Mr. Bettany told her to take her pick. Larissa pointed at a particularly grotesque object in the window. He fetched it out for her and she put it on at once. Ursula, Mimi and Ray already had theirs on, squeezing sweets through the insane cardboard mouths. Aldous accepted the bull’s-eyes he was given but refused to don his mask, embarrassed to wear such a thing in public. ‘I won’t be able to see to row,’ was his excuse.
From the newsagent’s, he rowed the boat round the corner, into the lane that would take them to Withern’s side gate.
‘It won’t go through the gate,’ Ursula’s muffled voice reminded him.
‘I know that. I’ll go down to the river and up to the garden from there.’
While Larissa and the younger children played the fool in their masks, rocking the boat for extra effect, Aldous rowed past the allotments and the cemetery and Withern’s northern wall. From there he passed over the sunken river bank to the wide water, where he swung around and rowed parallel with the garden and the landing stage until he was almost at the great willow that cornered the south garden.
In twenty minutes, while the others wore masks, he would be dead.
Thursday:9
Alaric’s hope for some sort of psychic synchronicity between himself and Naia was not to be realized. At five, as he was climbing the tree, she was lying on the chaise in the River Room, theoretically reading a novel, in practice harassed by salvos of questions, the most insistent of which was why the pair of them were able, all of a sudden, to drop into the past without trying. Whatever the reason, and there had to be one, suppose the same thing had happened to others. How many, before them, might have found themselves unexpectedly in a time-reality to which they did not belong? Such a thing might have happened to any number of people, in any age or society. There they are, minding their own business in the fourteenth century, and a minute later they’re staring around them in the twelfth – or the sixteenth if such realities can exist in a person’s future. On their return they tell their tale to neighbors, perhaps to their cost. Such adventures would be dismisses as the fantasies of lunatics by most people, in most centuries and cultures. They might even be flung into dungeons as subversives or executed as heretics by some authorities or regimes. Just as well I live here and now, Naia thought. Not that she intended to mention her experiences to the nearest casual listener. Anyone at all, come to that. There was no one, absolutely no one, who would believe that she’d met her grandfather as a young boy in the mid-1940s.
She dragged her thoughts back to the rather more pertinent question of why she and Alaric were suddenly able to cross into another time period. Always the same period too. If the Family Tree was a sort of conduit to other points in time, why was it active now, when it had shown no such ability on the numerous occasions that she – and Alaric, no doubt – had climbed it when younger? But wait. Suppose the tree wasn’t an unofficial customs post between present and past, but quite the reverse: an obstruction, a barrier that wasn’t working too well just now. It wasn’t looking so healthy at present. So maybe the floodwater had weakened its effectiveness as…
Being of a skittish turn of mind, her thoughts leaped unbidden to last August, when she and her parents were holidaying in Greece, on the island of Rhodes. They’d been staying in Lindos, a sunken little oven of a town. One morning, desperate for a breeze, they drove to Prasonissi, the island’s southernmost point, beyond which a sandbank a thousand meters long divided the Mediterranean from the Aegean, which rolled toward one another in long shallow crested waves. The Aegean was a bit choppy some way out, to the delight of windsurfers, while the Med was fairly unruffled. Glad of the cooler air, which made the intense blue heat so much more bearable, Naia left her parents at their rented car and set off along the sandbank, enjoying the fine warm sand between her bare toes. Some way along, the sand narrowed into an elongated spear shape before disappearing altogether, allowing the two great oceans to meet. She stopped just before the vanishing point, feet straddling the sandbank, comparing the temperatures of the waters. The Mediterranean, she decided, was about two degrees colder than the Aegean.
As an analogy it lacked finesse, but ten months on, in the River Room of a Withern Rise she’d never imagined back then, she wondered if the barrier that kept the realities apart was all that different from the sandbank between the two oceans. Might there not be a point – June 2005, say – by which the barrier had became so ineffective that an individual could step from one reality into another – several others, including realities set apart in time? It was the kind of thought which could easily have set her mind racing to all manner of possibilities and scenarios – overlapping realities, merging realities, realities hitherto separated by history but now forced to co-exist – but to forestall this she closed her unread book with a snap, jumped up, and went to the kitchen. She put the kettle on. Mug of fruit tea required. Cranberry, Raspberry and Elderflower. Perfect calmer of the wired mind. She hoped.
Thursday: 10
At first when Alaric climbed the tree nothing happened. He imagined this was because Naia wasn’t in direct contact with her version of it – his former version – but then he felt a tiny lurch, and at once he was in the 1945 version. He looked around, and down. She wasn’t there. But maybe she would be, soon. If they didn’t have to be in their versions of the tree at precisely the same time, she might even now be approaching hers, touch it in a minute, be with him shortly.
So he waited.
A minute passed. Several minutes. By the end of five he’d given her up. But what to do now? Stay there doing nothing, or get down and slush around the flooded garden? The second option was even less tempting than the first. If he got down he might be seen. Asked awkward questions. Unlike Naia he didn’t have ready answers for everything.
So he stayed put, astride the bough. Having no idea how long he would have to remain there, or what he had to do to get back, he loosened the cord at the neck of the polythene bag and took the album out. He might as well not have brought it, but glancing through it would pass some time if nothing else. He cast about for somewhere to lodge the bag temporarily and saw a stump some little way along where a branch had broken off at some stage. He looped the cord around the stump, leaned back against the trunk, and began to flip slowly through his life.
Thursday: 11
Determinedly sullen, sick of the giggles, the shouts, the high-spirited wobbling of the boat, Aldous navigated the trees, the bushes, the half-drowned shrubs of the south garden, intending to turn back to the house after this and leave them to their own devices if they wished to stay out. But when he came within easy reach of his tree, rising above the water, so regal and full, he felt an urge to climb into it, his own domain. While the kids continued
to lark about and his aunt did nothing to calm them, he rowed toward Aldous’s Oak.
Thursday: 12
Alaric looked up from the photographs. Voices: young, excited, but there was a woman’s in there too. He closed the album, tucked it under his arm, and climbed higher, into more substantial cover. There he sat quite still, listening. He couldn’t see them, but whoever they were, they were directly below him now.
Thursday: 13
Beneath the tree, Aldous offered the oars. ‘Who wants them?’
‘Had enough, have you?’ Larissa said.
‘Yes.’
She accepted them. Aldous stood up.
‘What are you doing?’ Mimi demanded through her clown mask.
‘Climbing.’
‘Ooh, can I climb too?’ asked Ray, excited.
‘No.’
Gripping the lowest bough, a full stretch above the water, Aldous shoved the boat away with his heels and pulled himself upward.
The Realities of Aldous U Page 24