Advent (32 page)

 
‘You’re standing there like a sheep. Doesn’t he look just like a sheep?’

 
‘Sorry, Mum. Slice of cake?’

 
‘Really, no.’

 
‘Go on, Horace.’

 
Owen roused himself from the chair’s swampy upholstery as best he could. ‘Please. You’ve been very kind, but I’m fine. You’ll try Professor Lightfoot again later and ask her to call me as soon as possible if you find her in?’

 
‘Yes, yes, of course. She ought to be home. I know I saw the lights on opposite earlier. I can’t guess where she has gone. But I’m going tomorrow to help her. And I will try again tonight. Maybe Horace saw something?’

 
‘Saw what?’

 
‘Next door. As you came by just now.’

 
‘Mrs Pascoe?’

 
‘No. Didn’t you hear? The professor. Mrs Lightfoot.’

 
‘That’s not next door, it’s across.’

 
‘Horace!’

 
‘Sorry. What about her?’

 
‘Did you see if she was at home?’

 
‘Thought she’s never here. It’s her holiday place, isn’t it?’

 
‘I stopped by,’ Owen put in, explaining, ‘to ask if your mother happened to have bumped into Professor Lightfoot. I’m trying to get hold of her.’

 
‘Nah.’ Horace definitely didn’t want to say anything that might delay Owen’s departure. ‘Didn’t see anything.’

 
‘She arrived yesterday!’ Mum threw her hands in the air, as if Horace’s ignorance of the pointless comings and goings of mad old ladies was personally embarrassing to her. ‘I told you! I don’t think you listen. I think too much computer games. It rots your brain.’

 
‘We don’t have any computer games, Mum,’ Horace said darkly.

 
‘But you always go and play with your friends.’ She turned to Owen, catching him easing himself out into the hall. ‘All day long they play these games. It isn’t good, is it?’

 
‘I’m sure God doesn’t mind. And besides’ – he directed a peculiar smile at Horace – ‘I have a feeling Horace is good at finding more interesting things to do with his time.’

 
Horace went red. His secret throbbed at the back of his skull like a bruise, but Mum didn’t notice anything. She was too busy chasing the priest down the hall.

 
‘At least take a slice of cake with you.’

 
‘Well, all right, then.’

 
‘Oh good! Horace!’

 
‘I’ll get it,’ he called, and ducked into the kitchen.

 
‘Wash your hands again first!’

 
They felt like they were on fire. The bloke wanted Horace to know it was OK, he wasn’t going to tell her. That was obvious. But how come? Grown-ups ganged up on kids; that was the whole point of their existence. He heard them talking by the front door while he got out a napkin and folded it round a slice of the ginger cake. No matter how big he made the slice, he knew Mum would send him back for a bigger one. He knew the whole routine; he’d done it a million times. But just this one time he was spectacularly relieved that everything was the same as usual.

 
‘What is this? Don’t be so mean to a guest. That is half a slice. Go.’

 
‘It’s perfect.’ Owen took it from Horace, then shook hands. ‘Thank you. Nice to meet you again.’ He opened the door and squinted across the street towards Hester Lightfoot’s house. ‘Doesn’t seem like anyone’s home, but I might as well knock one more time just in case. Do please—’

 
‘Yes, of course. I will keep trying.’

 
‘Great. Thanks so much.’ Though Owen was already in the lane, Mum didn’t want to shut the door. When something was going on, she couldn’t bear the idea of not being involved.

 
‘Don’t stand there in the door. You let all the cold air in.’

 
She was actually the one holding it open, but Horace stopped himself pointing that out. He always had to bite back his retorts. He hoarded them for later, for his own room, where they’d all come out at last, his long bedtime monologue of fractured, whispered resentment.

 
‘So you didn’t see anything in her house just now?’ his mother asked, stepping back inside with evident reluctance.

 
Guess what, Mum. Some of us don’t spend our lives wondering what the neighbours are doing. Some of us really don’t give a shit. ‘No. I just came home.’

 
‘Her car still isn’t there.’ Mum lifted the net curtain over the square window beside the front door. He thought of it as her spyhole. ‘It’s a strange time to be driving. It’s so dark.’

 
‘That’s ’cos it’s night.’

 
‘What?’

 
‘Nothing.’

 
‘Don’t mumble like that.’

 
‘Sorry.’

 
She turned back to the view across the lane. ‘Did you know Professor Lightfoot was a friend of Miss Clifton?’

 
Fortunately Horace had turned back towards the stairs, so his mother couldn’t have seen the surprise on his face.

 
‘What?’

 
‘I think we have to go to the doctor to look at your ears. I said, did you know Professor Lightfoot knew Miss Clifton? Miss Clifton is that strange woman who comes to church sometimes. The one—’

 
‘Yeah, I know. What’s she got to do with— Why would I know anything about that?’ He tried to sound as bored as Mum’s conversation usually made him, as bored as he dared.

 
But she was still watching the house opposite hopefully, and for once didn’t reprove him. ‘Reverend Jeffrey was looking for Miss Clifton. He went to the train station in Truro. She was going to pick someone up there, he said. Something like that. But he said there was a message for her there from Professor Lightfoot.’

 
‘Why’s he looking for Miss Clifton?’

 
‘I don’t know. It’s not my business. You don’t ask why someone does something. What would you think if I was always asking you why you do this, why you do that?’

 
Under normal circumstances Horace would have been thinking a lot of things, all of which would only have been whispered aloud upstairs in the solitude of his room, after lights out, but this time he was busy answering his own question in his head. Because something weird happened to her. Because I saw her acting really strange down by the river and everyone else thinks she’s disappeared completely. And Marina wouldn’t believe me. Told me I didn’t know what I was talking about.

 
‘She’s a very strange woman. I don’t like to know about her. All that Old Age business.’

 
‘It’s called New Age, Mum.’

 
‘Reverend Jeffrey ought to talk to her about it. God will not like it. Whatever you call it.’

 
Uh-oh, Horace thought, here comes God. Mostly he liked it that Mum was so into church and everything – it gave her lots of other people to fuss over and boss around and force to eat her food – but sometimes the subject started her off on one of her lectures. Miss Clifton might be a total psycho, and look like a grown-up pretending to be a mosher, but at least she never lectured you.

 
I know her a lot better than you do, he thought, and the slow burn of his secret lit up and spread through him, sunshine on a stone. Loads better than you think I do. You have absolutely no idea how much I know about Miss Clifton.

 
So where had she gone? What was the priest doing looking for her all the way over here on the wrong side of the river?

 
He closed his eyes involuntarily and saw again the strangely dishevelled figure bending over the water, trailing hooked fingers through its surface as if hunting raw fish. All wrong somehow.

 
He shook the memory out of his head. Who cares? he thought. His secret was still safe. He still had the key to the boat. Everything’ll be all right tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow’ll be a better day.

‘Well. All right.’

 
Hester was a shadow in the driver’s seat, her face ghostly in the glow of the dashboard. Gavin slumped in the seat next to her and stared out at the road’s contortions. Engine-warmed air washed over them.

 
‘So,’ Hester began again. She snuck a glance across at him, perhaps checking that he was awake.

 
After a while she sighed. ‘The thing is, I know just what it’s like. When you’re being pestered to talk and all you want to do is be quiet. Truly I do.’ She glanced across again. ‘Can I at least ask if you’re OK?’

 
‘I’ll survive,’ Gav said.

 
He wondered whether even that much was true.

 
Now that he was watching the world go by, sealed behind glass, smelling car smells and listening to car noises, passing isolated houses and villages – bright windows through which he glimpsed scenes from an ordinary night, a man feeding a baby in a high chair, the spectral blue radiance of a television on a white wall – he couldn’t get hold of the day he’d just lived through. It was as phantasmal as the TV images, and as quickly lost from view behind him. There couldn’t be any such ancient houses. There were no such girls who’d never heard swear words and didn’t know where China was, no such clawed feet scraping stone. He’d imagined it all. He was imagining things.
You’re imagining things, Gav.
Except this time, at last, at long last, he knew he wasn’t.

 
‘Where are we going?’

 
‘You know,’ she said, in the same mild conversational tone he remembered from the train, as though as far as she was concerned ferrying a haunted teenager back and forth along twisting country lanes at night was as ordinary as driving to work, ‘I hadn’t thought about it yet. Wherever you like. Should I take you back to the station?’

 
‘The station?’

 
‘I can put you on a train. If you want to go straight home.’

 
‘God no. Not that.’

 
She gave him a long curious look before turning back to the road. ‘My house, then. To start with. If that’s all right with you?’

 
He couldn’t answer. He couldn’t think of anywhere else. He couldn’t think of anywhere at all, the bright windows, the rooms with TVs and fathers and children. She manoeuvred the car round a twisting descent and over a brief bridge barely wider than it was. The road was a black stream, down which their little white bubble floated.

 
‘So,’ she said eventually, much as Mr Bushy used to do when no one in the class could answer the question he’d put before them and he gave up and tried a new one. ‘Did your aunt turn up in the end?’

 
Gav winced. Of all the things he didn’t want to think about, that was the worst.

 
‘I don’t think so.’

 
Her eyebrows lifted slightly. ‘You don’t think so?’

 
‘Sorry. I don’t want to talk about it.’

 
‘As I say,’ she said quietly, ‘I entirely understand.’

 
He leaned back and closed his eyes. Usually whenever anyone said
I understand
to him, it meant the exact opposite. It was what Mum said when she actually wanted to say
I don’t believe you
. But this time it didn’t matter who believed him or not. The things he’d seen and heard loomed in the darkness behind, impossible, unforgettable.

 
He shivered violently. Hester made a solicitous noise and twisted a dial on the dashboard. The petrol-flavoured air turned warmer.