“Why should you imagine I should want to go there, Sheldrake?” In a moment he regained control of himself. “Forgive me, Mr Sheldrake. My mind was elsewhere,” he said. “We won’t be paying it a visit, no. As my father mentioned, it’s unidentified.”
I think most of the class took this on trust, but I’d seen more of the truth. As he lost control I’d remembered that the school trip had been his idea, even if he’d made it sound like mine. If he hadn’t been so thoughtless that he’d used my naked name I might have let the insight go, but now I was sure he had something to hide. He meant to find the place where his father had sensed some kind of life beneath the earth.
8 - The Fleeing Trees
France welcomed us with a smell of fish. We’d have called it a stink, and some of us did while others greeted it with groans, since several hours across the Channel had left many of us seasick. More than one port official seemed amused by our state, and the drivers of the coaches that picked us up didn’t help by slewing the vehicles around every bend of an hour’s worth of country roads and puffing on the foulest cigarettes we’d ever smelled. Jim and I were in the lead coach, together with the rest of our form and Mr Clement’s. At least the French master was able to address the driver in his own language, provoking imprecations every time the coach had to halt for someone else to jump off and throw up. Before we reached the hostel where we were to spend the night, several of the boys were praying for journey’s end. Jim and I kept each other in our seats by swapping the most repulsive jokes we could think of, though some of Jim’s made me have to swallow very hard indeed.
Most of us did without dinner. Even Jim did, despite the bulk he had to maintain. We went up to the dormitory as soon as we could. Once Mr Noble had led us in a token prayer I lay wondering if all the beds seemed to rock from side to side like mine, but I hadn’t time to be surprised by how fast I fell asleep. In the morning I felt ready for more than breakfast, especially when it proved to be the Continental kind, which struck me as not too different from rationing. Jim did his best to make up for missing dinner, and would have had yet another helping if Mr Clement hadn’t produced his pocket watch to confront everyone with the hour.
I was eager for adventure now—for my first real trip without my parents. Even having to wear the Holy Ghost uniform didn’t detract from the excitement too much. When Mr Noble handed out boiled sweets on the coach to help us travel, it felt like celebrating how confectionery was no longer rationed at home. “En route,” Mr Clement urged the driver, earning a scowl almost as black as the tobacco in the cigarette that lolled out of the driver’s mouth.
For days the convoy of three coaches travelled across France, stopping each night at a hostel. During the days we visited wartime sites. More than once we saw bombed buildings that had been left as memorials, which put me in mind of entire blitzed districts of Liverpool. Once the coaches slowed alongside a meadow where an old woman was bending effortfully down to lay a single poppy on the grass. Elsewhere we trudged through battleground museums while morose guides lectured us in approximate English. We were impressed most by a field where unmarked crosses stretched to the horizon, as if the throng of unidentified dead were erasing the landscape. I wondered if this might be the hungry place Mr Noble’s father had told us about, which I’d been looking out for ever since we left the seaport. It wasn’t, and when our tour brought us to it I didn’t know at first it was the site.
We’d lunched in the garden of a hotel, where the six teachers had shared a bottle of wine. Some of the older boys looked envious, though not of Mr Clement’s meal of snails and brains. Most of us had soup and a casserole that was filling enough even for Jim once he’d finished gnawing bits of rabbit off the bone. Sunlight like the sound of water rendered visible glittered on a nearby stream, and everybody was relaxed when we went back to the coaches. No doubt this was why Jim asked Mr Noble “Have you had your birthday yet, sir?”
“It isn’t every Easter, Mr Bailey, only the first one. I’ll be celebrating next week, and then I’ll have done better than Jesus.”
This caused quite a silence, and Mr Clement seemed not to know where to look. “Forgive me, gentlemen,” Mr Noble said. “I only meant to say I’ll have lived longer than your saviour.”
“He’s yours too, sir,” O’Shaughnessy protested.
“As much as he’s yours, true enough.” While the coach groaned up a slope Mr Noble said “I wasn’t really meaning to connect his years with mine. It’s a traditional enough number.”
“How is it, sir?” I felt inspired to ask.
“Locally it’s the number of life, isn’t it, Mr Clement? The one the doctor has you say while he’s sounding your lungs. It’s the number of beads the Mohammedans have, and one of their preachers believes everyone will be that age in heaven. It’s how many times God’s name appears in Genesis, and the sum of the bones of your spine, Mr Sheldrake. It’s what the letters of the word Amen add up to, and you might try adding up the miracles they say Christ performed.”
I had a sense that he was gradually venturing towards some information, which was why I didn’t prompt him. “Come to that,” he said as if he didn’t care who heard, “if you want to go all the way back—”
I don’t know how many people thought Shea had interrupted him. Having laboured to the top of the slope, the coach was speeding alongside a large field. All the trees on the near edge leaned so precipitously away from the field that several looked close to toppling into the road. Branches kept scraping the roof of the coach, an assault that seemed to goad the driver into putting on more speed. “Why are the trees like that, sir?” Shea said. Mr Noble turned to look once he’d gazed at the hedge on the opposite side of the road. “It must show the direction of the prevailing wind, Mr Shea.”
“Not just these ones. The trees all round the field. That can’t be the wind, can it, sir?”
I peered between the contorted trunks and saw that the field was entirely bordered by trees, every one of which stooped away from it. “Was it a battlefield, sir?” Joyce said. “Did a bomb do that?”
“It doesn’t look much like a battlefield to me, Mr Joyce, and I can’t imagine what size of bomb you have in mind.”
I was reflecting that most of the sites we’d seen no longer looked like battlefields when Mr Clement said “Perhaps it’s something in the earth.”
“I can’t think what that could be either,” Mr Noble said, and at once I knew he could. He’d pretended not to notice the field until Shea drew his attention to it, and now he was trying to persuade us it wasn’t worth lingering over. “It must have been a hurricane, of course,” he said. “Maybe several. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re a feature of the region.”
I suspected that the question Mr Clement asked the driver was about this, but he didn’t elicit much of a response. A last branch made a feeble bid to snag the roof, and a few minutes later our coach led the procession of vehicles into a courtyard in front of a hostel. Mr Clement led his form off first, and I moved to sit opposite Mr Noble. “Sir, what else were you going to say about that number?”
He stared at me as if I’d tried to catch him out. “Let’s just say,” he said louder than I thought was necessary, “that it’s significant to people whose beliefs Mr O’Shaughnessy wouldn’t approve of.”
In fact I hadn’t especially wanted to know. I was making sure I was the first of our form off the coach. As I’d hoped, the hostel was set out like some of the others we’d stayed in, with each form in a separate dormitory overseen by the form master. Now that I was in the lead it was easy to bag the bed next to Mr Noble’s, which was by the only door, and hold the bed on the far side of mine for Jim. We all unpacked our bags yet again and stowed our belongings in tin lockers, and then I tried to find an opportunity to talk to Jim, which didn’t come until it was time for dinner. As we trooped into the dining hall, a long room that trestle tables laid with utensils and jugs of water didn’t render much less bare, I grabbed Jim’s elbow to let our classmate
s pass. “What’s up?” he protested. “Don’t make me miss my dinner.”
“I want to tell you something while they can’t hear,” I muttered. “Did you realise what that place with all the bent trees was?”
“Was it where Nobbly’s dad told us about?”
“You bet it was. And you know what else, I’ll bet it’s why he brought us here.”
Jim looked as if he felt each of the boys who were hurrying into the hall was denying him his dinner, but he couldn’t resist murmuring “Why?”
“You watch, he’ll go there when everyone’s asleep.” Lower still I said “We’ve got to follow him.”
Jim glanced towards the dining hall again. “What for?”
“I’ve found out stuff about him. I’ll tell you later. Don’t you want to see what’s there and what he does? Remember we’re the Tremendous Two.”
This time when he glanced away from me Jim looked anxious to make sure nobody had overheard, especially my last words. “Dunno,” he barely pronounced.
“Jim, he’s got to be going or he’d have let on that he knows what it is. I bet he goes tonight. I don’t want to go by myself, but I will.”
“How much do you bet?”
I couldn’t afford to be miserly. “Sixpence.”
“Go on then.” Perhaps it was the extravagance—a whole week’s pocket money—or the imminence of dinner that persuaded Jim. “Only if I go,” he said at once, “I haven’t got to pay.”
I thought his presence would be worth it, though I felt he’d played a sly trick. “It’s a deal,” I said, echoing a film if not a few of them, and followed him into the dining hall.
We wouldn’t have missed dinner. Brother Mayle was delaying grace while he waited for the two empty places on a bench to be occupied, and lent us a reproachful shake of the head. “Enter Banquo and Duncan,” Mr Noble remarked to Mr Askew, prompting a quick grin or at any rate a grimace. Some of the other teachers seemed to find the comment inappropriate, and Brother Mayle might have been trying to drive it away with the prayer.
A stout unsmiling moustached woman in a shapeless overall ladled out a dinner that might well have used more grace. A soup with an oily surface reminiscent of a stagnant pond stared back at us with the dead eyes of fish, some of which bared their teeth. “Dine with a will, gentlemen,” Mr Noble urged. “They would have been glad of it in the field.” Once the remains of fish were stranded at the bottom we had to return the bowls to our host while she inflicted a portion of a casserole from a vat on each of us. Even Jim poked at more of his helping than he ate, though he made up for it with half of mine. “If everyone’s replete,” Mr Noble said at last, “we’ve come a long way and we’ve a long way to travel tomorrow,” and I realised everyone except Jim and me would take him to be ensuring the boys caught up on their sleep.
Jim and I were soon out of the communal bathroom, where Brother Mayle kept up an avuncular look as he watched boys undress, and then we scrambled into our low cramped beds. When everyone was back in the dormitory at last, Mr Noble switched off the bare bulbs that hung above the uncarpeted aisles between the twin ranks of beds. “Good night, gentlemen,” he said. “Dream well.”
Before long I found his last words not just odd but ominous. I was lying on my side with my face towards Mr Noble’s bed. I heard the mattress creak as he lay down, and he murmured a few words that I didn’t think were a prayer. I narrowed my eyes, and once they adjusted to the dark I made out his dim silhouette. He was prone on his back with his fists gripping the blanket on either side of him. While I couldn’t distinguish his expression, I wasn’t far from fancying that he was anxious to keep himself there, or was he just waiting to be certain everybody was asleep? I don’t know how long I watched him before my eyelids gave up the battle for alertness, but as soon as they sank shut I felt I was about to dream. I was nervous of glimpsing what his father had seen in the trench, and my eyes wavered open at once. Mr Noble hadn’t moved, and I was able to see that he wasn’t trying to sleep. He was gazing up at the dark—at least that far—and his eyes looked darker still.
I tried to stay as awake as he was, but my body had other ideas. Whenever my eyes closed I strove to open them at once, not least because of the threat of the dream. More than once the dark inside my eyelids appeared to grow restless, writhing in search of a shape to take. I thought they never closed for more than a few seconds at a time, after which I had another sight of Mr Noble’s unchanged silhouette. Perhaps this lulled me into carelessness, because yet another sleepy glance showed me an empty bed.
As I lurched upright, crumpling the scrawny pillow and thumping my shoulders against the wall that served as a headboard, I saw the door creep shut a last inch. Mr Noble had made as little noise in sneaking out of bed, despite the creaky mattress. If I’d had any doubts about his intentions, I hadn’t now. I slid out of bed and grabbed Jim’s arm. “Jim,” I whispered, “quick.”
His eyes struggled open, and his voice sounded just as effortful. “Wad you one?”
“Quiet.” I nearly laid a finger on his lips, except that wasn’t how boys behaved. “He’s gone,” I hissed. “He’s going to that field.”
“Howdah no?”
“Because he just crept out.” At the far end of the dormitory a boy moaned as though he didn’t like a dream, and I was afraid of waking people up. “We bet, remember,” I murmured urgently.
“All rye, uncommon,” Jim mumbled, which he clarified by sprawling out of bed.
At least our clothes were within reach, since we’d all been told to lay them under the mattresses. As we dressed, another boy made an uneasy sound in his sleep, and I had the irrational notion that he was dreaming what I’d striven not to dream. I was heading for the door when Jim nudged me and demonstrated how to make a supine shape under the blankets with a pillow and a bundle of pyjamas. No doubt this was how the Tremendous Two ought to cover their tracks, and so I copied him, although the result looked a good deal less convincing than stories made it sound. I could only hope that nobody would give the contents of the beds a second look. Once I’d finished easing the door open Jim took even longer to close it behind us, which gave me time to try and think of an excuse in case a teacher came out of any of the dormitories along the hall. I hadn’t thought of anything I could have said with any confidence when Jim muttered “Go” in my ear.
The wooden stairs were warped. I’d noticed earlier how loudly some of them squeaked, but if Mr Noble had made so little noise on his way downstairs, surely we could. I did my best by walking on the edge against the bare brick wall, but more than one tread made a muted protest, and complained louder about Jim. All the same, I thought we reached the downstairs corridor without disturbing anyone, and we were halfway to the outer door when a woman in the room we’d just passed called out a question in French.
I was so thrown that I opened my mouth. I might even have given her some desperate answer if the rest of my brain hadn’t overtaken my response. In a moment a man shouted to her from the room we had yet to pass. Even if she hadn’t asked who was in the corridor—her words had been too fast for me to translate—I was afraid the man would go to her and see us. I was glancing about wildly for somewhere we could hide when the woman grunted, apparently expressing some form of satisfaction, since that was the end of the dialogue. Before I felt safe to move, Jim leaned over my shoulder. “Go,” he said with such vigour he spat in my ear.
The outer door had a massive latch. As I eased the bar up it scraped against the socket, and I froze until I had to take a breath, having heard no reaction along the corridor. The door was so heavy that I was afraid it would catch against the stone threshold, but when it lumbered towards me it stayed just clear of the step. I held the latch up until Jim followed me outside, and then I inched it into place, having wrestled the door shut. As we paced across the courtyard I glanced back to see that all the dormitories at the front of the building were dark, while the only window that was lit downstairs was curtained tight. Nevertheless I didn’t
feel safe from being seen until we were out of sight beyond the courtyard wall.
High above us the moon was just past full. It blackened all the trees along the silent road and iced the upper surfaces of branches white. The nearest leaves looked crystallised by luminous pallor. The surface of the road glistened so much like fresh tar that I almost expected my shoes to stick to it. A wakeful magpie chittered in a tree, a brittle icy sound, but the fluttering of wings among the leaves couldn’t distract me. Hundreds of yards ahead, a man was vanishing around a bend towards the field we’d seen.
As soon as he was past the bend we hurried after him. Despite trying not to make a noise we startled the magpie, which flapped across the road like an abstract of the monochrome midnight and sailed down to rest in a meadow. The moonlight turned even our green blazers black, so that I could have fancied we were characters in a black and white film, a heroic duo pursuing a respected citizen who nobody else realised wasn’t what he seemed to be. I was about to share the fantasy with Jim when he murmured “So what were you going to say about Nobbly?”
“He brings the dead to people. I think he wants to find out who’s in that field.”
“Are you having me on?” Jim peered at me as if he wished there were more light on my face. “How do you mean, brings the dead?”
“He did for Mrs Norris who lives past the bridge. He brought her husband back.”
Jim made a sound on the way to a skeptical laugh. “Who says?”
“She does, and I’ve heard her talking to him.”
Jim added the rest of the laugh. “Big deal. Have you heard him, though?”
The Searching Dead Page 8