by Tim Pears
From the kitchen I watched him head towards his car, Grandma leaning on his arm as she had on mine in the churchyard. They shared a long embrace, and then Matt lowered himself into the red sports car, gunned the engine, reversed in the yard and pulled away. Grandma watched him disappear from view and then stood with her head bent to the ground, lost in thought or perhaps listening still to the sound of the car’s growl as it climbed the drive on the other side of the house, and faded along the lane. She turned, eventually, and started walking back towards the house. Halfway across the patio she stumbled, and steadied herself against the picnic table. My mother rushed out, and escorted her in.
Mum and Dad persuaded Grandma to take a rest and let the others get on with it. She agreed to ‘put her feet up’, not in bed but in front of the television. My parents had given her a DVD set of the BBC natural history series Planet Earth, and the three of them went through and watched the first episode. As I went past them, back to the drawing room, Dad was putting a blanket over her lap.
Holly and I put our instruments back in their cases, and shifted furniture back to its original configuration.
‘I had no idea you were such a good guitarist, Theo,’ Holly said. ‘You’ve been keeping that quiet.’
‘I write my own songs,’ I said, shrugging modestly.
‘With lyrics and everything?’ Holly was aghast. ‘What about?’
‘Oh, you know, war and stuff.’
‘Why didn’t you sing one?’ she demanded.
‘I don’t really perform in public,’ I blushed. ‘Working in a studio’s more nang than live performance.’
‘You’ve actually made recordings?’
‘Not exactly,’ I admitted. ‘Not yet. I might video something. Post it on YouTube.’
‘Get on MySpace,’ Holly said. ‘Hey. We should play together.’
‘Yeah,’ I drawled, as slowly as I could, then frowned. ‘I’m just not sure there are many pieces for sax and guitar.’
‘Really?’ said Holly. ‘That’s such a shame.’
I nodded. ‘It’s a bummer.’
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I know. Why don’t you write something?’
The twins were laying the table, arguing over whether to put a dessert spoon and fork beside or above the place mat; and if the former, then inside or outside the other cutlery.
Auntie Gwen poured a layer of fried vegetables into a large dish and Aunt Lorna laid rectangles of pasta across them.
‘It’s my favourite chair,’ Auntie Gwen said, watching Lorna’s elegant fingers lay down the brittle snaps of lasagne.
‘Yes,’ Lorna said. ‘It’s a good chair.’
‘But don’t you see? It’s mine,’ Gwen said. ‘It always was.’
‘One of the few pre-Victorian pieces in the entire house,’ Lorna said. ‘I’m pretty certain it’s a William the Fourth library chair. With those turned and fluted supports. The shaped back and arms.’
‘But I don’t care when it was made, or what it’s worth.’ Auntie Gwen poured in more vegetables. Courgette, carrot, aubergine. ‘I just don’t understand why Jonny put a first priority sticker on it.’
Lorna flattened the mixture in the dish with a fork. ‘He didn’t,’ she said. ‘I did.’ She turned towards the Aga, where Sid was stirring the contents of a large saucepan with a wooden spoon in one hand, holding a book she was reading with the other. ‘That bechamel sauce ready yet?’ Lorna asked. ‘All I’m doing,’ she said, turning back to Auntie Gwen, ‘is playing by the rules your parents set. That’s not a problem, is it?’
When she caught sight of me watching her, Aunt Lorna seemed not in the least surprised, but smiled at me, very slightly raised her eyebrows, and said, ‘Theo, darling, why don’t you see if your grandmother would like a cup of tea.’
It wasn’t easy to interrupt the television spectators: my grandmother ignored my whispered enquiry, until Dad found the remote and paused the DVD. Grandma dismissed my offer with so peremptory a shake of her hand that I might have been suggesting a gram of hard drugs. ‘Do take these dogs out, Theo,’ she said instead. ‘I don’t know where Leonard’s got to. If they’re not getting under horses’ feet, they’re getting under mine.’
The dogs attacked each other playfully as we crossed the patio, and the yard. There was a faint smell of woodsmoke: one of Jockie’s bonfires, still smouldering; he’d turned it over after he’d dropped Grandma back after the Boxing Day meet in the castle that morning. The beautiful cold blue day was dying, the sun a crimson globe setting beyond the Welsh mountains. I heard a sound like a solid drum: a woodpecker. I took the dogs down into the wood.
Apart from a scattered handful of Scots pines – planted, Grandpa had explained, for winter colour – all the trees were deciduous: a central core of English oak, and ash (‘the wood that’s used for all that trim on the outside of your car’, he’d told me, gesturing towards our Morris Traveller); surrounded with birch, rowan, crab apple and wild cherry. These trees were leafless now, dormant, their leaves rotting into the earth around them, a mulch to inhibit other plants stealing the soil’s nutrients, as well as providing some of their own. Walking among the trees I studied the ground, as Grandpa had shown me, identifying a badger’s habitual trail; the feathers of a crow flown up to its roost too late, caught and eaten by a fox; the droppings of deer, rabbit. It was strange that animals Grandpa was prepared to shoot came deep into his territory; he’d claimed that it was precisely because he culled and kept their numbers down that his land remained fruitful for them, but at that time I couldn’t quite understand how.
I did decide, however, that I wanted to live near, or preferably within, a wood. Perhaps even, it occurred to me then, this very one. I didn’t even need the house: the others – my cousins, our parents – could share that, while I built myself a treehouse down here.
It was some years ago now that I heard that the wood had been cut down, for firewood.
On my way back I noticed light from a window of Grandpa’s workshop. Figuring someone must have left it on, I entered the outbuildings by a door further along the wall. You can see out of doors perfectly well for long after you need illumination indoors, so that I was surprised by the darkness, and had to feel my way slowly through a dim room where potatoes were stored. The smell, of musky earth, was so strong I felt like I was underground, like a mole in its lair. Just as I reached the door into the workshop, a voice began speaking on the other side. Whoever it belonged to must have been pondering something in silence, or maybe listening on the phone, while I’d groped my way towards him.
‘I just need to pay off the interest on the loan or they’ve got me by the balls,’ a voice I now recognised as Uncle Jonny’s said. He must, it occurred to me, be speaking into his profanity phone. ‘I feel like a twat,’ he said. ‘So what do I do? Bend over and take it up the arse? No fucking way. I’ll come back at them and hit the bastards twice as hard as they hit me.’
‘How long do you have?’ a second voice asked, which surprised me.
‘Eight days,’ Uncle Jonny replied. ‘It’s just this month. Next month, I guarantee, I’ll be back into profit, this is just a weird fucking blip. Rod and Gwen don’t even need to know.’
‘I find it hard to believe how stupid you’ve been,’ the second person said. I realised now that it was Grandpa.
‘Your mistake,’ Uncle Jonny said, ‘is to think the landscape is in any way comparable to the way it was. In your day. Jesus Christ. These are not some country fucking squires we’re dealing with.’ There was silence, before Jonny added, ‘Anyhow, no one could have predicted this.’
‘Everyone did,’ Grandpa said.
There was another long pause then. Perhaps they’d been here ever since the music recital, conversing in this stark, staccato way: brief bouts of argument and insult, interspersed with long, belligerent silences.
‘When you retired –’
‘Retired?’ Grandpa interrupted. ‘I didn’t retire. I had practically no orchards left. Got out w
ith a little money because we scrubbed them up, and managed to sell the land for other use. You have no idea what it did to me, Jonny.’
Once again neither spoke for a while.
‘In ten years this amateurish industry of ours had been killed off by an invasion, container ships with their refrigerated holds full of bland, shiny, tasteless apples, each and every one the same identical size.’
‘Oh, spare us the self-pitying reminiscence. We all know what you did to accumulate those orchards in the first place. Bought out that old fart down the border. That’s what we do, men like you and I, we make things happen. We see opportunity and have the balls to chase it.’
A further silence, heavy with threat and tension.
‘They’re your fucking grandsons,’ Uncle Jonny said at last. ‘That is who we’re trying to protect. You can’t deny that, you mean old bastard.’
The pause this time was shorter. ‘What about Lorna’s family? Won’t –’
‘Can you not understand?’ Jonny interrupted, his voice much louder, almost shouting at his father. ‘There’s nothing else. It’s all crumbling. Lorna? Her family have nothing. They never did. What, you still think she’s from the Argentine aristocracy? She was a dancer in a fucking club, Pa. That’s where I found her. She reinvented herself. There’s nothing there.’
‘I didn’t realise.’
Rather more quietly, Uncle Jonny said, ‘She’s had a good look at a bungalow down the hill, by the way. Rather lovely, she reckoned.’
‘I know,’ Grandpa said.
I retreated carefully through the darkness, found the door latch, quietly raised it and let myself out. The dogs had disappeared; gone to the back of the house, probably, waiting there for someone to let them in. I walked along the side wall of the outbuilding. Just before I reached the corner, I heard the door of the workshop open, then close. Footsteps rapped on the concrete. Grandpa came into view, just a few metres away from me, his tightly hunched figure stumping angrily away towards the house. And he was muttering to himself in a way that shook me to my core.
About a year before the events herein described took place, my father took me with him to a spiritualist church in Oxford. In Summertown, not far from where we lived. ‘For research,’ he explained to me as we walked along Squitchey Lane, although I’m not sure that what we witnessed that day ever made it into one of his classes. Perhaps the visit was meant for my education, as well as his own amusement.
The visiting medium, a middle-aged man from Swindon, told us that in order to make contact with our deceased forbears he would let his spirit guide come and take over his body. He closed his eyes and as we watched him an amazing transformation took place in front of our eyes: his features sagged and drooped, ageing him by ten or twenty years; his face became that of someone else; I could have sworn that there was even some alteration in the colour of his skin. It was utterly incredible, like something Hollywood special effects people spent millions of dollars on, but there it was, happening for real, in front of me.
The medium slowly opened his eyes, and spoke to us in the deep voice of an old Indian man – ‘with a Peter Sellers accent’, according to Dad – and proceeded to pass on invaluable pieces of information, and useful advice, to people in the congregation from their loved ones now residing in the spiritual realm.
The extraordinary thing was that the man’s incredible metamorphosis was authentic, sincere. As my father said afterwards, if he was fooling us he was also fooling himself: he clearly believed in what he was doing, or having done to him.
And the reason I’m relating this anecdote is to give an idea of how shocked I was when I heard my grandfather walking away from the workshop that Boxing Day afternoon, cursing loudly. ‘You gives it away and it’s gone, ain’t it? There be no bloody fool like an old fool.’ Because he did so speaking in a way I’d never heard him, with a broad Salopian accent; the accent, I realised, of his early, long ago childhood.
I waited until Grandpa had gone inside the house, and then I waited a little longer, for Uncle Jonny to go in, too. There was a line of burnished orange along the black horizon. When I finally walked across the yard, there was an orange glow ahead of me, on the patio. I smelled the cigarette smoke, and realised who it was – muttering to himself, typically – before I reached him. When I spoke, my father jumped; the shock made him cough. He asked me what I was doing.
‘I was walking the dogs,’ I said. Then I realised someone else was there too, beside Dad. Wrapped up in a coat she hugged tight to herself, it took me a moment to make out it was Aunt Lorna. I was going to say I didn’t know she was a smoker, too, but then my father told me the dogs were already inside when he came out.
‘The temptation is to linger though, Theo, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Especially when it’s so still. It’s easy to imagine the nocturnal world coming to life all around us. Even if it is bloody cold.’ He threw the butt of his rollie into a bush. ‘Shall we go in?’ he asked, addressing Aunt Lorna and me both.
It was my father’s idea to play games after our early supper, and with the promise of cards with the adults later on, Oh Hell and Racing Demon, we children began with Sardines. The simple rules were that one person would hide, the others would look for him or her; if you found him you would join him in his hiding place; the game continued until all but one of the searchers had found the hiding place, and squeezed in like sardines. The game finished when the last person found all the others, whereupon he or she was pronounced the loser, and had then to be the hider in the next game.
I volunteered to go first, after I had a sudden inspiration: when I’d stayed during the summer in Grandpa’s dressing room, I’d noticed that his built-in wardrobe was almost a walk-in one, a veritable closet. It was not only ten or twelve feet wide but also just as deep, much deeper than you could possibly have guessed from the other dimensions of the room. Like some magic trick, it was as if a cavity in the centre of the building had been conjured out of nothing.
While Sidney, Holly, Xan and Baz pretended to close their eyes, sat around the dining table, and count to fifty, I trod silently in my socks upstairs, made my way to the room and pushed through the hanging coats, jackets, trousers and shirts. Although the floor of the wardrobe was covered in neatly paired shoes, it wasn’t difficult for me to make room for myself by turning one pair of brown leather brogues around – so that they were pointing out towards the door rather than back towards the wall – and stepping into them. They were just about the right size for me. Clothes were stacked loosely along the rails. I pushed them forward, closed the wardrobe doors, which clicked satisfyingly shut, stood against the back wall, and waited in the darkness.
The comforting smell of my grandfather’s old clothes was mixed with that of naphthalene, or camphor, found in mothballs, a faint aroma of which permeated everything. I didn’t know what caused this smell – didn’t think I’d ever come across it before – but whenever I have encountered it on odd occasions since I have been plummetted back into the wardrobe, and what happened next, that Christmas of my childhood.
My wristwatch had a little button on the side, which if pressed switched on a light that illuminated the watch face, enabling one to tell the time in the dark. After eleven and a quarter minutes I heard someone open the doors of the wardrobe, rustle around a little and then, to my disappointment, step inside. Perhaps they’d spotted my ankles, in a gap between the shoes and the bottom of the coats. He or she then closed the door behind them. The wardrobe was once more plunged into total darkness, but now there was someone else in there with me, shifting position, shuffling their feet amongst the shoes on the floor, and breathing. I stood as still as I possibly could for as long as I could stand it, breathing through my wide open mouth. But as the other person grew quieter, it became more difficult for me to breathe silently. I seemed to need to take ever deeper breaths, partly out of annoyance with this fool who gave no indication of being aware of my presence. I wondered whether he or she did, in fact, know that I was in there
: perhaps they thought that everyone was supposed to hide, and it was a total coincidence that we were both in this same enclosed space.
I became convinced that this other person could hear me breathing, even as he or she became ever more silent. Then I began to doubt whether they were there or not, whether anyone else had actually climbed into the wardrobe at all. Maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. I knew that, robbed of sight, the human imagination could do strange things to its possessor, and that under stress the mind was prone to hallucinate. Eventually I could take it no more, and demanded, in a fierce whisper, ‘Who’s there?’
There was no reply. Silence. I could feel my pulse racing in the darkness now, my heart pulsating. ‘I know you’re there,’ I rasped once more. ‘Who are you?’
A hushed voice I recognised immediately as Holly’s replied, ‘I knew you’d be in here, Theo.’
What nonsense! Anger flared through me. ‘How?’
‘Oh, you’ve been banging on about how much you like staying in Grandpa’s dressing room, and no one else ever does, what a privilege.’ It was strange: it was impossible to tell where Holly’s voice came from: whether to the left, or the right, or directly in front. ‘I knew you’d come straight up here, and as soon as I came into the room I knew you’d be in this wardrobe.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘It was obvious. Had to be.’
With creaks of coat hangers and then scrapes of shoes, Holly started to move in the darkness. I couldn’t tell where she was coming from, or shifting position to. I raised my watch, pressed the button and swept my wrist in an arc ahead of me, from left to right. Turning, I found myself face to face with the grinning visage of my cousin, bathed in a dim, green light. I regret to say that I’m prepared to admit I may have let slip a slight sound of surprise. The light went off.
Once my heart had stopped banging against my chest, and Holly had finished sniggering, I said, ‘If you came straight here, how come it took you almost twelve minutes?’