‘Oh yes?’
‘Is your name really Underwood?’
‘Did I say it was?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s your answer then.’
‘But it’s my name too.’
‘Well, well,’ he said dismissively.
‘Which suggests that we’re related in some way.’
‘Does it now.’
‘But if we are… how?’
He looked at her for the first time since she sat down.
‘You mean who am I? Where do I fit in?’
‘Well. Yes.’
He turned away. ‘Long story.’
‘I’m in no hurry.’
‘Why should I talk to you?’ he said, still not looking.
‘Because you’ve seen me before.’
‘So you said.’
‘I mean before that. Long time ago. When you were a boy.’
He glanced at her in surprise. ‘When I was a boy?’
‘Do you remember that far back?’
He laughed, without humor. ‘Like it was yesterday.’
‘And me?’
‘You?’
‘That’s when you saw me. Me and someone else.’
‘Don’t know what you’re on about.’
‘Oh, please,’ she said, plaintively.
He hesitated, mulling, but then looked her full in the face. There was something very childlike about him, she thought.
‘What’s this about?’ he asked.
‘I want to know about you.’
‘Why? So you can have a laugh with your pals?’
She leant forward. ‘I’d never do that. Believe me.’
And he did. Impossible not to, the way she was looking at him. He hesitated a little longer, but then gave in. Began to talk.
Saturday: 3
A bench on the Coneygeare. Alaric stabbed at the swampy ground with his heels, nervous about what he’d vowed to attempt if the chance came. The nervousness was partly of the deed itself, but also of the devastating energy loss that would follow it. He tried not to think about this, returned instead to his bubbles-of-time-idea, his small eternities. It was pure speculation, of course, but it pleased him and he developed it. Small eternities might contain days or weeks of ordinary time, complete, enclosed, impenetrable except to an outsider drawn from another small eternity that shares a common factor. Common factor. Naia would love that. But what factor – what event, feature, quality – could possibly bind his own day to June nineteen forty-fi…
He had it.
It was him. He was the one who took the polythene bag into the 1945 reality; the bag that had caused a death that should not have occurred. And then he’d been dispatched to a duplicate reality to put the matter right, there at least. Except that he’d failed to save Aldous there too. But there was a problem with that. If the focal point of that sixty year old small eternity was Aldous’s death, why had he been drawn there the first two times? He didn’t take the bag until his third visit, and if he hadn’t gone there hoping to see Naia he wouldn’t have taken it at all. Come to that, if he was the one who’d caused such an upset that long-ago June, why was Naia there at all...
Voices.
Small, indistinct, but close.
He looked about him.
No one.
He listened harder.
The voices died, and it was as if they’d never been. But he didn’t simply shrug, say, ‘Oh, I’m hearing things now’, as most of us would. Reality was not an impenetrable fortress, he knew that now. With little if any physical space between the realities, it was a wonder more people didn’t hear voices than the few who were dismissed as cranks or lunatics. To the voices he’d just heard, he said, ‘Hello?’, feeling, because he was quite alone, more than a little foolish. Expecting no reply, he was not disappointed.
Saturday: 4
‘Did you hear something?’ Naia said to Aldous on the bench in the Coneygeare.
‘What sort of something?’
‘Thought I heard a voice say “Hello”.’
‘I hear voices all the time,’ he said. ‘Visit them too.’
‘Visit voices?’
He tugged at his pocket. ‘Aniseed ball?’
She declined. The tale he’d told her was the saddest she’d ever heard, first-hand. What a tragic life. What a short life.
‘You said there was someone else. In the other bed.’
He crunched an aniseed ball. ‘More than one.’
‘More than one bed?’
‘In the other bed. At different times.’
‘But one in particular. You said there was one most of all. A boy. What was his name?’
‘Not sure.’
She sensed that he knew the name well enough, and she was right, but it had only come to him while he was telling her about the particular occupant of the other bed. She waited, to see if he would go on.
‘I think it was Tommy,’ he said eventually. There. It was out.
‘Tommy,’ Naia repeated. ‘How long was he there?’
‘Can’t say. S’all mixed up.’
‘Did Tommy sleep a lot too?’
‘Oh no. He was the opposite of me. Tommy’s problem was he couldn’t sleep. That’s why he was there, for them to find out why.’
‘And did they?’
‘If they did, they didn’t wake me to tell me.’
‘Did you talk, you and Tommy, when you were awake?’
‘Well I couldn’t have talked to him in my sleep, could I?’ Aldous said. Naia smiled dutifully. ‘If we did I can’t remember what ab…out…’
He’d trailed off. His eyes had become hooded.
‘What is it?’
‘I just remembered Tommy’s visitor.’
‘His visitor?’
He clenched his fists, withdrew into himself.
‘What?’ she asked.
He stood up abruptly. Stepped away.
‘I’m going now.’
‘Oh, don’t. Please.’
‘Got to.’
He trudged away, through the vast puddle that covered the Coneygeare.
Saturday: 5
It was a very ordinary rowing boat, but solid and heavy, far from easy to overturn on his own. When he managed to get it over, after much struggling, he fetched a bucket and began to scoop water out. He didn’t get it all out, but having walked in water for days he could put up with a drop more sloshing round his ankles. Besides, another day and it might not be possible to row around the garden.
He was about to lift a leg over the side when the light changed, and instead of climbing into the boat he was falling along the bough of a tree. His sudden appearance caused a blackbird, which had been thinking of stopping for a while, to change its mind. Alaric threw his arms round the bough to save himself, then lay still until he recovered his equilibrium and senses. Slowly, too slowly, in spite of his vow to be ready, he remembered how precious time was. Only then did he act. He tugged batches of leaves apart; peered down. Aldous was there, hanging by the neck, feet kicking just above the water.
‘Hold on!’
He jumped to the lower bough, reached down –
– and was standing in the water beside the rowing boat. He leant on the side to steady himself and absorb what had happened. He hadn’t even been near the tree this time, and it had all been over so soon. So much too soon. As he stood lamenting his third failure to save the boy, every ounce of energy drained from him. In seconds, he was barely able to hold himself upright.
It was hard enough finding the strength to return to the house and climb in the window, but when he tried to get upstairs the half-way platform was the most he could manage. Alex and Ivan were at the shop today, trying to repair the minor damage created by water that had seeped in when the flooding started. Their absence was just as well, for the after-effects of the return from 1945 were the worst yet. He lay curled up between the upper and lower floors for some time before he felt able to complete the climb. When he eventually made it to his
room and felt sufficiently recovered, he read some of the translation of Marie Underwood’s diary. She hadn’t written much for weeks after her son died. A pang of remorse shot through him. Remorse and shame. If he was right about a new reality being created each time he was offered the chance to save Aldous’s life, there were now – or had been – two further Maries struggling to write diaries through tears. Two more small eternities in which a young boy had been found hanging from a tree with a mysterious bag over his head.
Saturday: 6
Naia was baffled. It had stopped her in her tracks when Aldous said it, but the conversation had moved on so quickly that she hadn’t had time to digest it. It was evening now, though, and she was in her room, the cat dozing on her lap, able to think. She had wanted to know about the letters she’d found in two versions of the message hole, though she’d only asked him about one, believing that an alternative Aldous had placed the other. He had frowned at the query.
‘Message hole?’
‘Or maybe you didn’t...’ she started to say, intending to add, ‘call it that when you were a boy,’ when she realized that she hadn’t noticed a hole in the tree that he knew back then. The hole must have appeared some time later, when a bough broke off or was removed.
But, as she soon learned, Aldous wasn’t merely ignorant of message holes. He claimed not to have left letters in any part of the tree in the present-day garden.
‘Why would I leave letters about?’ he said.
‘Well… to tell me things?’
‘Tell you things? What things?’
She stared at him. ‘Are you saying that you haven’t left typewritten letters for anyone, anywhere?’
A vague shake of the head. ‘I’ve seen a typewriter, but I’ve never used one. Wouldn’t know how.’
The puzzle this left her with was: if he didn’t write the letters, who did? Already aware that something had caused the death of the Aldous of 1945, she became as certain as she could be that when he died another version of him came into being and survived into his seventies. The remains in the grave and the elderly Aldous belonged to different realities, and yet a letter that could only have come from him – or a version of him – had been deposited in the Family Tree of her old reality.
The reality in which he died aged eleven.
But if he was long dead there, how could he leave letters? Obviously, he couldn’t. But someone had. Someone who called himself Aldous U. Someone cleverer than the aniseed-crunching hobo. Were there two more Aldous Underwoods then? One who had left a letter in her old reality, and one who had left one here? If so, why did they hide themselves?
And what, anyway, was the point of the messages?
Saturday: 7
It was evening but still light when Alaric slipped out via a window in the River Room and waded round to the south garden. He carried in his pocket the folding jack-knife from the old boat-house. From now on, until he no longer needed it, he planned to have it with him at all times. If the transition could occur wherever he was, he wanted to be ready for it. Next time he would reach down at once, cut the cord round Aldous’s neck, then drop after him and rip the polythene from his face. He would be so quick, so efficient, that the power that seemed keen to draw him back ever sooner would be outmaneuvered, the boy would live, and he himself would not be dispatched to any version of that small eternity again.
He went to the old oak. He might not need to be near it, but he wanted to provoke the transfer so the deed could be done and the whole business put behind him for good and all. He placed a palm on the trunk, inviting the tree to transport him to that fateful minute in 1945.
He waited. Nothing happened. He began to climb.
As he gripped the lowest bough, on which he planned to sit until he was returned to the earlier reality, he felt a surge of some kind beneath the bark, like blood pumping through an artery. Alarmed, he completed his climb at speed and threw his legs astride the bough. There he put his hand on his pocket, felt the outline of the knife.
He was ready. But again, nothing happened.
He sat there for what felt like an age before impatience set in, whereupon, with the light fading, he clambered down and started toward the house. He’d gone less than a third of the way when it struck him that the water was higher than when he climbed the tree. He paused. Looked about him. Surely it wasn’t rising again. Seeking assurance that all was as it should be, he glanced up, to his room, his sanctuary from all things, and saw a male figure in the window, looking out, down, at him. Someone in his room? In his absence? He didn’t like that. It had to be Ivan. But Ivan never went into his room as far as he knew. He scowled to register displeasure, and as he did so, saw that it wasn’t Ivan. And staggered. Looked around again. But it was all the same. Everything except... the water level.
Then, suddenly, with the very slightest of changes in atmosphere and light, the level dropped. He looked again at his window. No one was watching him. No one stood there.
Saturday: 8
It was pitch dark when it came to him. Lying in his hammock amid the trees, a bolt of lightning could not have shaken him more than the truth he’d been unwilling to allow. The cheery little woman who had sat him on the table to wash him when he was small, bathe him in the tin bath in front of the fire, brush his hair and read to him at bedtime: she was not his grandmother. Grandma Underwood died long before he was born, and he’d only met Grand-mère Montagnier a few times, when she’d visited from France, and the one time they went to her in Limoges just before the war. It was his mother who had washed him when he was little, probably brushed his hair too, though he couldn’t actually recall her doing so. Maman was affectionate but generally restrained, rarely jolly, and she’d read to him far less frequently than his father had.
No, the lovable woman he’d been thinking of so fondly these past months had been visiting Tommy, at the clinic. She was Tommy’s gran, not his, and the visits might have taken place fifty or more years ago, while he himself was still physically a boy. Aldous remembered, now, finally, how each time he woke Tommy seemed a little older, and that his grandmother was almost always sitting on a chair reading to him in that warm, melodic voice of hers, hoping to lull him to sleep. When she noticed that Aldous had stirred, Tommy’s gran had always uttered his name, very tenderly, and moved her chair to include him in the reading. He had generally responded by promptly going back to sleep, with her face in his mind, her voice in his ears. At some point, one year, while Aldous was sleeping, Tommy was moved – perhaps they’d cured him – and his gran had never been there again. Eventually, struggling to make sense of his life, mostly in his sleep, he had adopted her; fitted her into his brief, elusive past.
From somewhere nearby an owl taunted him. It was a long time before Aldous found sleep that night.
SUNDAY
Sunday: 1
The cat had gone walkabout again. Or swimabout. She’d looked everywhere for him, calling his name all round the garden. The last place she tried was the willow on the bank above the old boat-house.
Years ago, Grandpa Rayner had brought her here. She remembered him telling her that it was his secret place when he was a lad. Before his father died and his mother sold Withern to strangers, Rayner used to tuck himself away inside the willow, chuckling gleefully when they called from the house. He once hid there for an hour, he told her, and they were frantic by the time he emerged, big grin on his face. His mother had slapped his legs good and hard, but it had been worth it. Grandpa had told Naia something else about that bit of ground too: that if you stood close to the trunk, and quite still, you could sometimes hear voices. The one time he took her there in hope of demonstrating this, and the only other time she’d gone there, shortly after his death, she hadn’t heard a thing. But today she was on a different mission. To find that wretched cat.
The leaves brushed her softly as she entered, caught her hair, clung briefly to her cheek. A green veil fell about her, instantly reducing the light level, while the world, already qu
iet, fell utterly silent, as if a door had been covertly closed. She called softly, as though it would be rude to shout here.
‘Alaric? Alaric, where the hell are you?’
She couldn’t see much. Certainly no cowering or floating bundle of white fur. She stepped closer to the willow’s leaning trunk, still calling, and was standing there, calf-deep in water, when she heard a plaintive mewing.
‘Alaric,’ she said. ‘Show yourself. At once!’
The cat did not show itself, but its pitiful cries ceased abruptly. Naia went cold. She shivered, stepped back, and, without knowing why, fled the willow.
Sunday: 2
That morning, in the garden, Alaric heard his name called, repeatedly, and there’d been no one there. It was Naia’s voice, small, distant, but undoubtedly hers. He’d tried to track the source, but the voice kept moving this way and that until it stopped altogether. He could have done without hearing things after lying awake half the night. Unable to shake what had happened the previous evening, the conclusion he’d come to was that he had dropped into an earlier segment of a small eternity that he himself inhabited. He recalled his first experience of that scene. He’d been in his room, gazing out at the newly flooded south garden, when a figure climbed down from the Family Tree and started toward the house. A figure which closer scrutiny had revealed to be an alternative Alaric.
Or so he’d thought at the time.
He knew better now. What he’d seen wasn’t another version of himself, but the same self from almost a week on, who had somehow dropped – literally dropped – into the wrong day. So what was going on? First, glimpses of himself six days apart; now Naia’s voice, presumably calling from the reality that was now hers. Were the barriers between the realities breaking down? He didn’t know. Couldn’t say. But he was getting nervous.
The Realities of Aldous U Page 28