Castle Of Bone (12 page)

“Calm
down
, Hugh,” she said as he stiffened and peered through the windscreen ahead of them. “I don’t know what’s the matter, what’s biting you, I won’t ask, it’s none of my business. Just don’t take it so seriously, that’s all. It can’t be
that
bad.”

That’s what you think; just for once you’re wrong, thought Hugh. At that moment he saw precisely what he feared; turning into the road from the far end, Jean, Anna and the pushchair advanced, inexorably towards them.

They stopped abruptly at the sight of the car. Hugh saw them look at each other, in horror no doubt, though he was too far off to see their expressions. He saw Anna say something to Jean. She must have suggested that boldness was the only course, because they set off again and advanced towards them steadily, arriving at Hugh’s front gate just as the white Renault drew up at the kerb besides it.

Would Penn’s mother recognize him? Hugh wondered, detachedly. How could she not recognize him? On the other hand how could she, without making that giant mental step into the belief that such things were possible; that her teenage son could be returned to childhood in such a way. He realized how far he himself had come now to believing in such things; he’d had to. Penn’s mother didn’t have to though, he realized suddenly. Not unless he, Hugh, insisted that she did, and even then she might still not be convinced, might end up thinking him crazy. He wished he could convince her. That way she’d have to take charge of the whole matter, so relieving him.

“Get a move on, Hugh,” her voice was urging him. “Unless you want to stay the night in the car, that is. It’s all the same to me.”

Even so she leaned over and opened the door for him, and stayed leaning once he’d got out, staring at the baby.

“Where did you manage to steal him, Anna? Not from outside Sainsbury’s, I hope?”

“Of course not,” said Anna primly. “He’s the brother of someone at my school.” The answer must have been previously prepared, it came out so neatly, so directly. Jean more hurried, less convincing, added:

“We said we’d look after him – so she could go out shopping.”

“We’ve only got him for a
little
while,” said Anna.

“So I should hope.” But her mother spoke somewhat abstractedly, without her usual bite.

She still leaned uncomfortably across the front seat of the car, regarding intently the baby Penn who ignored her, absorbed in playing with the buckle of the pushchair belt. Even her earrings were motionless, save for the minutest flicker of light on one, which came and went without apparent cause. There was also a movement of light on the side of the car. Hugh after puzzling realized it was made by the movement of Penn’s hands and the glitter of the steel buckle reflected there.

“We did think he looked a bit like those pictures of Penn as a baby,” said Anna, her face completely blank. Both Hugh and Jean gasped, audibly, both stared at her. Her mother sat up abruptly. “Don’t be
silly
, Anna. His hair’s a bit like, that’s all. I’m not sure Penn’s wasn’t lighter too. You are obsessed with Penn, that’s your trouble. You think
everyone
looks like Penn.” She pushed the seat down and fished around in the back of the car for various packages and paper bags.

“Take some of those for me, please, Hugh. Incidentally,” she added, reappearing, “incidentally where
is
Penn?”

“Oh he just went off somewhere,” Hugh said hurriedly, “I’m not sure where.”

“You know Penn,” said Anna, coolly.

“I thought I did.” She was briskly gathering more parcels and handing them to Hugh, who in confusion bent to help and only succeeded in banging heads with her.

“Oh
leave
it,” she said in an irritated voice. “Just shut the door for me. Have you locked it? Lock it then.”

She dropped one of her paper bags while locking the door on her own side. It had Brooke Bond Tea written on it in blue letters. The two half-pound blocks of butter that fell out declared themselves to be especially imported in similar blue letters.

“Where are you taking him?” she shouted after Jean and Anna, retreating as fast as they could up Jean’s garden path. “Aren’t you going to take him
home
again?”

The baby peered round the edge of the pushchair and grinned at her. Again she stared at him and again looked away.

“All babies look alike,” she said to Hugh, angrily. “Pick up that butter for me, Hugh, please.” But she handed him her other packages and picked it up herself before he could make a move. The bag had split, the butter almost fell out again. Each block was neatly rectangular, right-angled at one end, at the other grubby, dented, out of shape. Her fingers tried to straighten these ends to shape – not looking, though, her eyes again were following her son, Penn.

“We’re going in a minute,” Anna called back.

“I just want to fetch something from indoors, that’s all,” said Jean.

“Be good tonight,” Penn’s mother said, and added as an afterthought, “Say goodnight to Penn for me, in case I don’t see him. Oh and take that baby home, will you, take him home
soon
.”

Hugh helped carry the things in from the car, then thankfully escaped. When he got back upstairs again, he went with reluctance into Jean’s room, to find Anna alternately sulking and shaking with hysterical laughter, Jean curbing her, rather red in the face and cross, on the edge of tears herself, Hugh realized.

“And where have you been,” she snapped at him, “leaving us to manage on our own. You didn’t even say you were going out.”

“I didn’t know I had to.”

“I suppose you haven’t thought what we’re going to do either?”

“No. Have you? It was all right this time anyway. She didn’t recognize him.”

“I almost wish she had,” said Jean.

Hugh did not tell her what he had wished. But Anna, stopped laughing or sulking, came out of her own world into theirs again.

“Oh no,” she said, “that would have spoiled it.” And hugged Penn to her, frantically. “Anyway she wouldn’t have dared,” she said.

Even if the infant Penn had given them much chance it would have been impossible to settle to anything that evening. Once he slept all three of them retired into separate worlds of anxiety. Hugh roamed a great deal, from the top of the house to the bottom, and back again.

All evening he was afraid that his mother would question Penn’s absence; was relieved that she did not, but annoyed on the other hand that she could be so vague, so careless as not to be more curious or worried as to his whereabouts. He wanted her to worry almost as much as he did not want her to.

She dropped a tray of dishes on the floor at one point. He was rent by shock; he thought at first the worst had happened, the thing he waited for and feared, before he remembered that what he feared was the discovery of Penn, which would not be heralded in such a way. From the expressions on their faces both Jean and Anna must have suffered, briefly, the same fearful illusion.

All three of them helped pick the dishes up again, more or less willing; Anna also looked amused. By a miracle nothing was broken except for an already cracked plate, which had split in half neatly, along its crack.

“I wish you’d be more like other mothers sometimes,” Jean said, her voice sharper than usual.

“Other people do occasionally drop things. Even you, Jean, I’ve known.”

“But not all the time. You break something practically every day. Last week you broke my favourite bowl.”

“Things taste the same out of other bowls.”

“I think you enjoy it,” said Jean bitterly, “breaking things.”

“It’s not what you do,
I
mind,” said Hugh as bitterly, “it’s what you don’t do. What’s funny then?” he snapped at Anna, seeing her little, separate smile.

“Nothing.
Nothing
,” Anna said.

“Now leave that poor girl alone, Hugh.”

“It’s nothing to do with you.” Hugh challenged his mother for a moment, before both of them looked away. Her “Don’t speak to me like that,” also came out somewhat lamely; this time neither of them seemed to want a fight. Hugh attacked his omelette instead. His mother ate hers absently, as if she couldn’t taste what she was eating.

“Will Penn want something when he comes in? What time
will
he be in?” she asked not with much interest, but as if she thought she ought to inquire at least. Hugh’s mumble satisfied her. “I gave him my key,” he added, so that she would not be surprised that the doorbell did not ring; that is, if she wondered anything.

The kitten which had slept for most of the day came to life now. It went mad, leaping huge, stiff-legged leaps from side to side, dashing from one end of the room to the other, spinning furiously in pursuit of its shadow or its tail. It seemed to turn on its own axis, it seemed weightless like a shadow, or a feather – afterwards it tore round and round the room again, then paused, pounced, paused and pounced, time after time after time.

“All kittens behave like that,” said Jean pro-prietorially. It helped distract them for a little while; till Hugh’s father arrived and monopolized attention as always. He was much more interested in Anna, plying her with plums, a surprising number of which she ate. After a while she began to make patterns with the stones upon her plate, taking no notice of anyone, as if she was quite alone. Hugh tried to attract her attention once but she ignored him.

When Hugh went to bed he tossed and turned for hours; the landscape sucked him in eventually; he had resisted it, clinging to his bedhead even. But the bedhead was made of oak, which he did not know, because it was painted and he had never bothered to look any further. And the trees of course were oak trees too, in an avenue leading towards the castle. He had not yet reached the avenue. He was walking along a road towards it through a grey and familiar landscape, so familiar that though he only remembered being there four or five times, he must have visited it many other times that he did not remember.

The sun gave no brightness. It was as if its brilliant edges dwindled to a black centre. He stared at it fixedly for a minute, blinding himself, and so briefly afterwards saw nothing about him, except a kind of white, then grey, haze, from which emerged gradually the grey configurations of the landscape defuzzing slowly, growing darker, the outlines clear. The broken edges of the castle were like teeth.

Vision narrowed. It felt as if the landscape was an enormous eye, and he was at the centre of the eye. The immediate surroundings were grey, this centre black, and it was doing something to him that he fought against, against a force he could not define, until he realized it was trying to suck him in; that the blackness was both the pupil of the eye and a tunnel which was sucking, pulling him. Yet he was also still walking along a track; towards a castle. The actions co-existed, were carried on simultaneously. At the same time he was both screaming with fear and not screaming, feeling the harshness of the stones beneath his feet and not feeling them.

He struggled on. The castle grew nearer. The tunnel sucked as hard but did not manage to pull him farther in. The weight of the sky seemed to press on him too, pushing him into the tunnel, into the pupil of the eye. It felt like being drowned – only it would have to be a lake to drown him, he thought confusedly, and not simply a tunnel. At the same time these two opposing forces, raised in him also a still greater obstinacy, a still greater will to resist. He was actually walking faster and then he was running, stumbling, and the forces were having to pursue him. He had not burst out of them exactly, as he had burst out of the circle of alder trees in the first dream, they were still there all round him, yet they did not stop him going on. They were sensations as much as forces. As he ran between the lines of oak trees – and they were all dead he saw now – it was like a car passing through an avenue of trees, with a little whoosh at each tree, little stripes of sound all the way along, except that these were stripes of feeling not of sound; between each pair of trees he felt the pressures grow stronger.

He passed through a vast, an enormous pressure; all the other pressures came with him and stopped dead as he did, and then vaporized, faded from him.

He had passed under the gate of the castle and was inside it. He was in the courtyard, but the castle was more or less a ruin.

He had escaped the eye, yet he was also at the centre of it still, the eye being all around him. His footsteps were loud on cracked cobblestones as he walked towards a studded, oaken door. The studs were multitudinous, and like eyes watching him, they glinted with an iron glint, that seemed out of place in this lightless, shineless world.

There was a handle on the door, shaped like a bird; a crow. As he put his hand to it the world too faded. He found himself lying in darkness, in his own bed.

Hugh woke next morning from restless sleep to the sound of infant cheerfulness next door, and water running in the bathroom. Jean was down there rinsing nappies in the basin.

“Do you know what time he woke us, Hugh? Five o’clock, five
o’clock
. And we had to keep him quiet till now. We jolly well nearly came to wake you up to help.”