‘Is this what you expected?’ Naia asked as they reached it.
‘I’m sorry,’ AU said. ‘Another huge adjustment for you. For both of you. But if I hadn’t done this…’ Doubt flickered across his face. ‘It’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know.’ She turned to Alaric. ‘Is it?’
‘Ask me in a week,’ he said tautly.
‘If just one of us had been accepted here,’ Naia said, ‘what would have happened to the other?’
‘In all honesty, I’m not sure.’ AU took a number 36 pouch from his satchel. ‘I might have found myself with a lodger in my new home.’
‘Your new home,’ Alaric said. ‘Is it definite?’
He beamed. ‘Yep. My offer’s been accepted. I have my proper Withern Rise.’
Naia said, tentatively: ‘Is it… mine?’
‘Yours? No, no,’ AU said, a little too hastily. ‘Another one entirely.’
She contented herself with this. ‘When will we see you again?’
He looked at her, a little sadly. ‘I think it’s best if I keep away from now on, don’t you?’
‘But all the stuff you wanted to tell me. There’s so much I – ’
‘I’ve told him most of what I would have told you,’ he interjected, flicking a glance at Alaric. ‘I’m sure he’ll fill you in.’
To which she gave a scornful snort. ‘Him? He’s a teenage boy. The only kind of communication he knows is the grunt.’
‘Oh, this’ll be fun,’ Alaric muttered.
‘What will you do now?’ she asked.
AU gave a vague shrug. ‘Potter in the garden. Get myself a fishing rod. Write my memoirs.’
‘Your memoirs!’
‘Why not? I’ve kept records of the realities I’ve visited over the decades, with reams of observations and asides. Make quite a read, all that, presented well.’
‘I bet,’ Naia said. ‘You couldn’t publish it, though.’
‘I could make a novel of it. Bring it out under an assumed name.’
‘Another name?’
He laughed, and took her hand. Bent over it. Kissed it lightly. ‘Dear girl,’ he said tenderly. ‘Do take care.’
He nodded at Alaric, passed into the willow, and was gone.
They did not move for some time. Thoughts of any substance eluded them. How should they feel? Behave toward one another? Alaric was less prepared for any of this than Naia. She understood what he did not, quite. That their lives had been rewritten in the past few minutes to account for and allow their dual existence here. That among their friends there might be one or two they’d never met. That they would be expected to recall things they hadn’t said, done, participated in. There would need to be a great deal of bluffing and quick thinking to avoid stares, snide remarks, nudges behind their backs. The difficulties would be many, and every one of them would have to be faced up to and dealt with as they presented themselves.
‘We can’t stay here forever,’ Naia said at last.
‘This reality?’
‘This spot.’
As they started toward the house, Alaric said: ‘The old boy with the rubbish. I’ve seen him somewhere. Your friend called him Aldous. Another Aldous?’
‘This one lives in the south garden. Well, he did last time I saw him.’
‘He does what?’
‘Under the willow there. It’s a long story.’
‘Aren’t they all.’
‘I’m glad he’s here,’ she said. ‘I’d hate it if he’d disappeared. He’s my great-uncle, you know, give or take a reality. Our great uncle.’
‘Ours? I don’t even know him.’
‘Not yet maybe, but I’m betting he knows you, or thinks he does. From now on we share relatives.’
‘This is going to take some getting used to.’
‘It is,’ Naia said as they crossed the lawn. ‘I don’t want to even think about some of it. I mean, what about – ’ She halted suddenly. ‘Oh, my giddy aunt.’ He stopped too. ‘There is one thing about us being under the same roof. The corner bedroom.’
‘What about it?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Well, it’s mine. Always has been.’
‘Always been mine too.’
‘We can’t both have it.’
‘No, we can’t. One of us must be in a different room here. Question is, who?’
‘Only one way to find out.’
‘Yes.’
They went on, toward the house, but with every step they walked a little faster, until it became a competition. Then they were running like children, fighting to be first through the front door, first along the hall, first up the stairs with a great clatter of feet and much shoving and shouting. Then they were making a racket all the way along the landing.
They stopped at the closed door of the room in which they’d both woken almost every morning of their lives. Paused there for a count of ten before Alaric gripped the old brass door-knob. Naia closed her hand on his. They turned the handle, slowly.
Entered.
Flash 5
Muted light behind the blinds of the corner bedroom. A lean figure moving across. Aldous. She liked the thought of him up there, in the room he’d had as a boy and had now as a young man in that old body. She turned round on the landing stage, to which no boat had been tethered since she was a girl. Dark as it was – Aldous’s window the sole source of artificial light – the river glowed faintly between the two great willows, spilling over into the water, draping it, while the bushes and leaning trees of the far bank were as densely tangled as ever. Unchanged, all of it, the way she hoped it always would be. Standing beside this treasured stretch of the Great Ouse, amid the musty odors of this clear October night, it might have been 1988, the year she was born, or 1947, the year the place was signed over to strangers. Any year in Withern’s lengthening history. A history she was so glad to be part of, whatever the reality; that her child was going to be part of. This thought brought a warm and very tender melancholy worlds away from sorrow; one to be savored rather than overcome. Savoring it now, beneath a sky brisk with stars, she was unprepared for the sharp kick inside her, or for the feeling that followed it of no longer being alone on the landing stage. Turning her head, she saw herself, with longer hair, not pregnant, gazing back at her as if to say ‘I feel it too,’ referring not to the kick, of course, but to the Withern-induced melancholy. Such sightings were rare these years, but she was no more alarmed or frightened by it than was the other Naia, as they withdrew, in seconds, from one another’s worlds.
‘Hi, Sis.’
The moment he spoke it was as though she’d known he was coming.
‘Hi, Bruv.’
Standard forms of address after some time apart; frivolous, offhand, their own little joke. To everyone else, even his partner Chris, even Kate, they’d always been brother and sister. It hadn’t been easy at first, thanks largely to the aggressive insecurities of his late teens; but in the years since, following their independent departures from Withern to take up jobs and liaisons elsewhere, they’d become very close. The old boards creaked as he stepped down onto them.
‘Didn’t hear you arrive,’ she said.
‘We gave the car-horn fanfare a miss for once. How’s junior?’
Her hands fluttered to the bump. ‘Kicking like a bastard.’
‘Showing who’s boss.’
‘Probably. How’s Chris?’
‘He’s good.’
‘Forthcoming as ever, I see.’
‘What do you want, a blow by blow account?’
‘Heaven forbid.’
The fact was that the day Alaric met Chris – coming up to five years ago now – everything had clicked into place for him, and at thirty-one he was as contented as he’d ever hoped to be. There were some things he couldn’t talk to Chris about, of course, but whenever he felt a need to rake over that old stuff, or speculate on what-might-have-been, Naia was just a call away, and Withern, which they owned jointly, was a
lways there.
‘What the hell have you done to your hair?’ he said.
‘The wind took it.’
After this they fell into a companionable silence, side by side above the quiet water. It wasn’t, as Kate surmised, the talking time they needed when together, but to be with the one person who knew their mind, and how they’d become who they were. Only when they were together at Withern Rise did they feel truly complete. As one.
‘I’d say there’s nowhere like it,’ Alaric said after a while, echoing her own thought, ‘but it wouldn’t be true.’
‘Wouldn’t be remotely true,’ she whispered. ‘But this one’ll do me.’
‘For good?’
‘For good, now.’
Some minutes later, they ascended the steps and the grassy slope to the house. At the back porch, left unlit by each of them in turn, one of them said: ‘Back to reality.’ When they went in, Kate and Chris asked what was so funny. They never did find out.
Epilogue
During the ten years following Naia’s return to Withern Rise, a great deal of construction work took place in the immediate area. An extensive house-building program so reshaped the landscape around Eynesford and Stone that by the end of that time the countryside was no longer a mere stroll away. Most of the buildings along one side of the village street were bought up and demolished in order for the road to be widened and, in part, transformed into a cobbled piazza dotted with young trees, benches, restaurants and shops. The nine-hundred-year old church was sold and its interior rearranged to accommodate several small businesses, including a home-letting agency, a multisex ‘hair & body salon’, and an ersatz gothic café tragically called The Priest’s Hole.
The Coneygeare, already reduced in size by a succession of district councils who saw no point to it, finally lost its common-land status to fifty-five two-bedroom starter homes. The name was retained for the new estate, but few of the children or their starter parents knew or cared that the land on which they lived, played and watched hundreds of TV channels had been a meadow for free public use since the fourteenth century, when an equally disremembered king decreed it so.
Nor did Withern Rise escape the cavalier scamper of time. A compulsory purchase order forced the sale of most of the north garden and the loss of access from the side gate. The primary school was closed, the lane turned into a road, and pallid blocks with green roofs soon covered all the land between the former woodyard tributary and the garage in which Naia and Kate parked their small Honda. A brick wall was erected to separate the diminished Underwood See from The Eynesford Project, but as the statutory height limit was two meters, much of the remaining garden became the view from some two dozen back bedroom windows.
Aldous Underwood passed away in his sleep after almost thirty-seven years of active life. The death certificate recorded his age as ninety-six. His great-great nephew took over the corner bedroom, and was happy to do so, for the two had been close in a quiet sort of way. That was four years ago. Alexander Aldous Underwood (who likes to be called Lex) is now fifteen, Kate is sixty-seven, and Naia three-and-a-half years shy of fifty.
On a certain night in April, Lex wakes from some forgettable dream and can’t get back to sleep. After half-an-hour’s tossing and turning, he gets up and goes to the window that overlooks the river. If there’s a moon it’s in hiding, but the exterior lamps of the ‘luxury riverside condos’ on the opposite bank provide all the light the casual watcher could need. Lex can just remember what it was like to look out and see nothing but a confusion of trees and bushes over there. It’s not a view he misses. He likes the balconied dwellings with their shared courtyards and docking points, the line of small craft bobbing at the water’s edge – and the windows, many of which are lit up at night – supply considerable titillation through the old binoculars bequeathed to him by the room’s previous occupant.
The view from his other window is less thrilling. Nothing to see from there but the cornucopia of trees and shrubs planted by Kate and his mother in a determined effort to make something of the south garden after decades of bland lawn, the sole reminder of whose day is the stump of ancient oak that he and friends from The Coneygeare Estate and the Project used to jump from, yelling, when they were younger.
Wide awake now, Lex pulls on his dressing gown and goes downstairs. He descends in darkness, knowing the stairs too well to need the way illuminated. With no thought as to where he might go on reaching the lower hall, he opts for the River Room, it being just a couple of strides away. He turns the lights on, but once the door closes behind him he is stuck for distraction. Some magazines and papers that don’t interest him, pictures on the walls that he knows too well, nothing else. He envies his friends in their modern homes, entertainment points and facilities in every room. Here, just walls, books, ornaments, history. He decided recently that when he’s older, when Mum and Kate and his uncle are gone and the place is his, he’ll sell up. There are a lot of sentimentalists with more euros than sense who’ll pay fortunes for rambling old dumps like Withern Rise. Or maybe he’ll flog it to developers, who’ll probably demolish it and erect housing of this age in its place.
He stands for a while at the French doors, but with the lights on all he can see is his own reflection. When interest in the way he looks in dark glass wanes, he turns away, thinking that he might as well go back to bed. But as he turns his eye falls on his mother’s latest wall-hanging, finished just a couple of days ago. Used to these things, he wouldn’t ordinarily waste a glance on them, but this one’s new, and one of her best. He goes to it, runs a hand slowly through it.
Naia’s wall-hangings are not pretty by any standards, or very colorful – she dislikes overtly attractive artifacts, and has a fondness for earth colors and what she calls ‘seasonal tones’. In spite of this, or because of it, demand for them is growing, though she never advertises. They’re not orderly, these things; they’re uncouth, they intrude, they’re hard to ignore. The largest of them, like the present one, measures about a meter and a half from top to bottom, and stands out from the wall by ten centimeters here, thirty or so there. No two hangings are alike, but all are made with similar materials – coarse string and rope, tangled wool, fragments of rag and lace – which she dyes or distresses before tying or knotting selections together in a fairly balanced assemblage, to which she fixes feathers, frayed ribbons, old beads, and small pieces of wood carved into elementary forms that please her. The wooden appendages to this latest offering come from an old spruce, to which she recently macheted her way through the strip of jungle along the periphery wall of the south garden.
Lex pretends disdain for his mother’s work, but secretly admires her for creating such idiosyncratic articles. His hand is fondling one of the small pieces of spruce when a sharp pain slithers up his arm and bursts in his chest. He yelps and stumbles backwards, but instead of crashing into furniture continues to fall – dimly aware that the ceiling and walls have given way to dark trunks and branches – onto something brittle that splinters and springs up around him. Raising a hand to protect his face, he feels, fleetingly, empty space beneath him; but then he’s back in the River Room, sprawling on the carpet. The pain has already abated, but even if it hadn’t it might not be his point of focus now, for the door is opening. He looks toward it, expecting Kate or his mother, but someone else comes in, a girl he’s never seen before – in a dressing gown, as though she lives here.
Alexandra Ivana Underwood (who insists on being called Ali) stiffens at the sight of this unknown boy, this total stranger, on the floor.
‘Who are you?’ she demands. ‘What are you doing in our house?’
THE END
WHO BELONGS TO WHICH REALITY
R36. Naia’s original reality, which became Alaric’s at the end of A Crack in the Line. There’s no Aldous here, but Mr. Knight is Alex’s confidant.
R39. The Naia who lost her mother to the Alaric of Reality 36 now lives here with his father and Kate Faraday. Old Aldous has taken up
residence under the willow tree by the south garden. Mr. Knight is prominent here.
R43. The gloomy, dying reality where Aldous U has lived for seven years.
R47. Alaric lives here with his father and Kate. There’s no Aldous, no Mr. Knight. This Alaric hasn’t seen Naia, or visited another reality, since February.
R78. The reality with the Alsatian and fallen fences, where Underwoods have not lived since 1924.
R82. The reality in which Aldous U, searching for news of missing boys, takes a break at the Baker’s Oven opposite Stone market square before going on to the last reality of the day.
R114. A reality from which, in July, an Alaric was transferred to Reality 43, where he became known as Ric.
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There is an additional volume to this book: Juby’s Rook, whose main character is Midge Miller, great granddaughter of Larissa Underwood. In that book we hear of Larissa’s unfortunate fate, and about old Juby Bench and the village he lived in until his teens, when it was seized by the British government for troop training exercises. The setting – the ruined village of Rouklye – is based on a real Dorset village, which can be visited at certain times of the year, when the military allows the public in.
Copyright © Michael Lawrence 2011
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* Collections by E.C. Underwood: The Rags of War (1898), Hunting Mallarmé (1916), A Grief Rekindled (1925), Withies (1941, posthumous)
*
He’d been injured in R503, that most unstable of realities, and had to lay up for a while.
The Realities of Aldous U Page 48