Sandlands (6 page)

Old Jack swallowed, his throat working, and the closed lids flickered.

‘We'll just ring the back five, I expect,' said Jack. That way, the fourth became the third. She leant to press his hand, where it lay square and heavy on the turned-down sheet. ‘I like it when I'm in the middle – the third of five, you know. It feels more... symmetrical, somehow.'

Mothers talked to infants in their buggies, didn't they? She'd seen them in the aisles at the Co-op in Wickham Market, regaling their babies with the price of frozen peas. One end of life and the other. Was this the same, or was it different? If old Jack could hear her, at least he understood.

 

One more set of changes, and they'd call it a night, said Willie. ‘I'll just hunt the treble down to the bottom and back again. Watch your striking spaces, everyone, and let's make those changes nice and clean. Straight past me on the next handstroke when I give you the word.'

It went like clockwork. Liam didn't ring fleet at all for once, and the team seemed to move in perfect partnership, as well-oiled as the wheels and bearings up aloft. Danny sat on the ladder and beat time in the air with his uninjured hand while the captain brought the second from its place at treble past each other bell in turn, and back up to the top to resume rounds. Walter sent the tenor swinging deep, so deep that the lighter bells were almost at the balance, and they rang like that for maybe a minute more, in stately, even rounds, handstroke and backstroke, their sallies chasing one another round the circle in metronomic order.

‘That's all,' said Willie, with a frown of quiet satisfaction. ‘And stand.'

Second and third came up to the balance, and gently over on to their stays. Jack applied the slightest of extra pressure to her rope: the smallest tweak was all it needed, and she'd follow them up to set. Olive and Walter behind her were already readying to finish. Suddenly something wasn't right. The fourth, though normally the most well-mannered of bells, seemed to give a jerk, the rope to twist between her fingers. As she gave the extra tug to bring her to the set, Jack's bell didn't stop but continued to swing, sixteen hundredweight of metal borne on by its own momentum. Up above her in the bell frame, stay hit slider with a buck and a leap, the ripping of bolts and the splintering of timber, and all at once the sally was wrenched from her grasp, sending the bellrope rearing and careering, lassoing out wildly amid the circle of ringers.

Hands raised to cover her face, Jack stepped backwards, the instinct saving her from the lethal whip of the rope. The other ringers, having set their own bells, had already stepped away, summoned from stupefaction by Willie Woolnough shouting, ‘Get back – back, all of you,' as he made a grab for the rope's lashing tail.

Jack felt sick, with a tightening of fear that was more than the delayed awareness of danger averted. Sweat sprang between her breasts and in the creases of her elbows, and tears rose from nowhere, making her blind. Her heart flailed wild and loose inside her chest. With a lurch she fled for the stairs, stumbling and tumbling down the narrow spiral, taking the worn stone steps two, three at a time, hardly knowing how she didn't fall, only that she had to escape from the savage clang of the bell above her in the loft. Then she was down in the church, feet grateful for the flat stone flags of the nave, and making for the south porch door, turning the great iron ring with a shaking hand, and letting the heavy felted oak swing closed with a clatter behind her. And out – out into the churchyard and the still hot night, and she was running now, running for home.

Up ahead, through the wash of tears, she saw her mother's torch come swaying towards her over Bellpit Field, while behind her in the tower the fourth bell, old Jack's bell, brought back to control now by the tower captain's expert hand, fell into a steady rhythm – the slow, implacable rhythm of the funeral knell.

The third cup of tea at breakfast was the mistake. The daily walk was a promise that Rebecca had made herself, along with more fresh fruit and learning to text the grandchildren, following the latest all-clear. Straight after breakfast was a perfect time for walking – unless you'd sat a little longer over the
Telegraph
crossword and squeezed a third cup out of the teapot.

It was bad enough having to spend a penny in the open, but surely nobody could manage it if they were being watched. Rebecca certainly couldn't, in any case. She was a good way from the road – ten minutes or so into the woods – and she'd found a quiet spot that was screened from the footpath by a belt of elder and hawthorn. It was too warm for tights, and her old cotton twill skirt was certainly easier than trousers. But she just couldn't rid herself of the sense of an onlooker. The feeling that someone was watching.

Someone – or, as it turned out, some
thing
. She wasn't sure how she became aware of it because she was certain it hadn't moved, and in spite of its paleness it blended well enough into the background hatching of twigs and leaves and sunlight. Maybe the same way she knew it was there watching her in the first place: there was something about its stillness that drew the eye, once you were still yourself.

It was a barn owl. Rebecca was no great ornithologist, but everybody could recognise a barn owl. It was so distinctive, with the flat, white plane of its heart-shaped face above shoulders speckled grey and fawn, and those wide, unblinking black eyes. Glistening, mineral eyes, as round and glassy wet as the pebbles they used to find on the beach at Aldeburgh that Janet always hoped were real jet. But if the eyes were hard, the hooked beak nestled protectively inwards among the pillowing down and the bird bore an overall countenance of calm – an air if not of benevolence, precisely, then at least of quiet, unthreatening vigilance. What nonsense, though, Rebecca chided herself, to be attributing to the creature these human feelings, these human characteristics. It was only a bird, after all.

But she still couldn't spend a penny with it watching.

 

After that, Rebecca found her feet often tending to that particular path on her daily constitutional. Pretty soon she admitted to herself it was a deliberate choice, in the hope of seeing the owl. On one or two mornings when she got herself up and out early for her walk, while the sun was still struggling to break above the under-canopy of brush and bracken and send its rays to slant in stripes between the trees, she was halted in her tracks by the sight of the owl at its hunt. Its chosen killing ground was a little distance from the tree where they'd had their first encounter, clear of the band of trees in an open area of scrubby gorse bushes interspersed with heather. At this in-between time of year, as March slid towards April, the new green growth fought for light and space in a landscape still dominated by last year's contours of woody black and brown. It was hard to believe that in three short months this would all be a carpet of brilliant purple, the hard-packed soil of the pathways crumbling back to a scuff of sand. For now, whatever small scamperers and scurriers were the focus of the owl's attention from its vantage point on a branch of gorse sought out for their protection the resinous clumps of overwintered heather, springing tough and resilient above the slowly warming earth.

The barn owl hunched motionless: watching, watching. Then it threw out both its wings and flung forwards, not in the smooth dive of the hawk but a clumsy flurry of feather and claw – yet almost eerily noiseless in the still of the morning. And down, its bleached belly a gleam of white against the dark vegetation, its wings two intersecting arcs of gold. It must have struck its target, because it did not rise again but disappeared from sight beneath the mounded heather. Rebecca turned away and hurried on, finding she had no stomach to confront even in imagination the transaction's natural end.

On days when she rose late and lingered over breakfast, she'd find the owl already roosting, always on the same tree as before, on a stubby oak branch some eight or ten feet above the ground. It jutted horizontally from the tree – the lone oak among a group of rowan, ash and hazel – before ending abruptly in a splintered wound, broken off, presumably, in some long-past storm. The trunk of the tree was fractured too, riven with a deep, angry V-shaped gash, perhaps another ravage of the same storm, though to Rebecca's mind it looked to have caught a glancing blow from the axe of some woodland giant, splitting kindling. Was the bird's nest in there, she wondered, inside the hollow? You thought of barn owls as nesting in... well, barns: in roof spaces, and empty farm buildings. She must look it up.

 

Rebecca had always been a library person, but the nearest one was Leiston, and you could hardly expect the mobile library van that stopped in the village once a week to have a reference book on owls. However, Janet had recently persuaded her mother online. She'd set her up with a computer – it was just an old one she'd finished with but it was a decent size, with a proper screen and keyboard, not like those fiddly things Josh and Ellie had that they called their ‘notebooks', was it? – and showed her how to look things up. Silver surfing was the current phrase for it, apparently. ‘Sounds a bit energetic for me, Jan,' she'd told her, ‘and I'm more of a mousy grey.' But once you got started it was rather addictive – a terrible swallower of time. People thought you had a lot of time when you were older but in fact it was quite the opposite, Rebecca found. It raced away from her in a way she found ever harder to keep pace with, even without the lurking stopwatch of cancer. But if it devoured the hours at a disorientating rate, the web was a goldmine of information. There were pages and pages about the barn owl.

Tyto
alba
was its Latin name – the white owl, confusingly, in spite of its largely golden-brown plumage, and in spite of the existence, too, of the snowy owl, or
Bubo
scandiacus
. In flight at dawn or dusk, though, she supposed her owl was so pallid as almost to appear white. ‘Ethereal' was the word that came to Rebecca's mind. In some Inuit dialects, she discovered, the word for barn owl was the same as the word for ghost.

The hollow oak could certainly be its nesting place. They seemed to adopt not only man-made sites but holes and crevices in rocks and trees – anywhere with a flattish ledge, concealed from view, on which to raise their young. But wasn't the websites outlining the habitat and breeding patterns of the owl which drew Rebecca to read on, but those which told of its mythology. The Lenape peoples of the Delaware and Hudson rivers believed that if they dreamed of a barn owl it would become their guardian and protector of their soul, while to the south-western Pima tribe the pale bird in flight at dusk was the newly released spirit of the departed. Death was known as ‘crossing the owl river'; the feather of a barn owl would help the soul of the dying to pass across. Its crepuscular hunting habits and reputedly keen night vision imbued the owl for many with the power of intuition, the power of inner sight. It became the totem of prophets and clairvoyants, a messenger between the hidden world of death and shadow and the world of light. The one who hears what is not spoken and sees what is unseen. The keeper of secrets, the watcher of souls.

 

Rebecca stared into the owl's unreadable black eyes and the owl stared back. Softly, she moved closer, keeping hold of the bird's gaze, careful not to put it to fright but at the same time visited by a strange sense of seeking permission. Another step and she was near enough to look into the hollow bolus of the tree, and there it was, the nest site: a protruding ledge above the level of her eyeline, its rim encrusted with droppings and snowflaked with down. Lower down, in the base of the V where it narrowed to a point some two or three feet above the forest floor, she was surprised to see that grass and ground elder had taken root and were growing there in the partial sunlight, taking their sustenance from the accumulation of debris, of dead leaves and earth and every state between. And no doubt, too, from the fabric of the oak itself, as it rotted from within, the outside returning to fresh spring leaf while the inside sickened and fell to dust.
Like cancer, like
cancer, like cancer
. Except that it wasn't the same at all; the tree's putrefaction was fecund, a source of new life. A part of the natural cycle of things.

Still mindful of the silent watcher above, she edged closer once again, until she could stretch out her hands and feel the cool moisture of the vegetation in the base of the hollow. She ran her fingers in among it, parting the grass, disturbing more down and droppings as well as here and there a larger feather. Peering down between the separated stems, she felt a sudden chill as she caught a gleam of white more bleached than the feathers, and colder and sharper, too: the brittle white of tiny bones. They lay scattered in a deep layer among the roots of the grass, the remnants of a hundred owl suppers, picked clean or undigested – the mass grave of a hundred small animals and birds.

Rebecca shuddered but did not step back. Some macabre fascination made her want to sink her hands in the tumble of broken skeletons, as if to measure the tally of lost lives. And then her fingertips struck something smoother, flatter, larger: an unyielding something that was neither rock nor bone. Its glint, when she swept aside the bones and leaf mould, was unmistakably metallic.

Working with firmer purpose now – almost hurrying – she dug and scraped and brushed until a clear surface began to emerge. It was darkened by its years of entombment in the damp soil, but as she rubbed it took on colour, a geometric pattern of red and black with, in its centre, two intersecting limbs of rusty cream which formed the letter X.
X marks the spot
, she thought, with the childish thrill of unearthing buried treasure. On either side of the X were soon revealed two matching letter Os. It was an Oxo tin.
Oxo cubes dissolve at once
, announced the legend below the name, and above it the instruction, so palpably unheeded:
Store in a cool dry place
.