The Small Hand (10 page)

The black-and-white photograph of the terrace showed a couple beside one of the benches and seated on the bench in a row were some children. Three boys. Neat, open-necked white shirts. Grey trousers. White socks. Sandals. One wore a sleeveless pullover knitted in what looked like Fair Isle. I looked at it more closely and, as I did so, I had a strange feeling of familiarity, as if I knew the pullover. And then I realised that it was not only the pullover which was familiar. I knew the boy. I knew him because he was myself, aged perhaps five years old. I remembered the pullover because it had been mine. I could see the colours: fawn, pale blue, brown.

I was the boy in the pullover and the one sitting next to me was my brother, Hugo.

But who the other boy was, the boy who sat at the end of our row and who was younger than either of us, I had no idea. I did not remember him.

‘Come outside,’ she was saying now. ‘Let me show you.’

Yes. I needed to be outside, to be anywhere in the fresh air and away from the house and that room with its smell, and the yellowing light. I followed her, thinking that, whatever happened, I had the key to the car in my pocket, I could get in and go within a few moments. But she was not leaving the room by the open door into the dark corridor, she had gone across to the French windows and turned the key. Yet surely these glass doors could not have been opened for years. The creeper was twined thick as rope around the joints and hinges.

They opened easily, as such a door would in a dream, and she brushed aside the heavy curtain of greenery as if it were so many overhanging cobwebs and I stepped out after her on to the wide veranda. It was twilight but the sky had cleared of the earlier, heavy cloud.

I remember that she turned her head and that she looked at me as I stood behind her. I remember her expression. I remember her eyes. I remember the way the old clothes she wore bunched up under the ancient mac when we had been inside the house.

I remember those things and I have clung on to the memory because it is — was — real, I saw those things, I was there. I could feel the evening air on my face. This was not a dream.

Yet everything that happened next had a quite different quality. It was real, it was happening, I was there. Yet it was not. I was not.

I despair. I am confused. I do not know how to describe what I felt, though in part the simple word ‘unwell’ would suffice. My legs were unsteady, my heart raced and I had seconds of dizziness followed by a sudden small jolt, like an electric shock, as if I had somehow come back into myself.

AS WE LEFT the shadow of the house and went down the stone steps, the evening seemed to retreat – the sun was still out after all and the air was less cold. I supposed heavy clouds had made it seem later and darker and now those were clearing, giving us a soft and slightly pearlescent end to the day.

Denisa Parsons stayed a few paces ahead of me and, as we walked, I saw that we must have come out on to a different side of the garden, one which I had not seen before and not even guessed about, a part that was still carefully tended – still a garden and not a jungle. The grass was mown, the paths were gravelled and without weeds and a wide border against a high stone wall still flowered with late roses among the green shrubs. I looked around, trying to get my bearings. I still felt unsteady. A squirrel sprang from branch to branch of a huge cedar tree to my right, making me start, but the old woman did not seem to notice, she simply walked on, and her walk was quite steady and purposeful, not faltering or cautious as I would have expected.

‘I had no idea you kept up some of the garden like this,’ I said. ‘I thought it had all gone back to nature. You must have plenty of help.’

She did not reply, only went on, a few steps ahead of me, neither turning her head again nor giving any sign that she had registered my words. We went down a gravel path which was in heavy shade, towards a yew hedge I thought looked familiar – but all high, dark green hedges look alike to me and there was nothing to distinguish it. The grass was mown short but there were no more flowerbeds and, as we continued on the same, rather monotonous way, I thought that maintenance must probably be done by some outside contractor who came in once a week to mow and trim hedges. A couple of times a year he might spray the gravel to get rid of weeds. What else was there to do?

The shade was reaching across the grass like fingers grasping at the last of the sunlight. And then she turned.

We had reached the arch in the yew hedge and were at the top of the flight of stone steps, looking down to where I had seen the sunken garden, overgrown and wild, its stone paths broken and weed-infested. Below me had been the strange circle, like a shading in the grass, which had been there and then not there, an optical illusion, perhaps caused by a cloud moving in front of the sun.

But what I saw ahead was not a wilderness. It certainly seemed to be the same sunken garden, reminding me of somewhere Italian I must once have visited, but it was immaculately ordered, with low hedges outlining squares and rectangles that contained beds of what I recognised as herbs, very regularly arranged. There were raked gravel paths and, on the far side, another flight of steps leading up to some sort of small stone temple.

And then I glanced down. At my feet was not some shadowy outline, like a great fairy-ring, but a pool, a still, dark pool set flat into the grass and with a stone rim, and I saw that, as this was a very formal garden of careful symmetry, its exact counterpart was on the opposite side. In between them stood a stone circle on which was an elaborate sundial painted in enamelled gold and blue.

But it was the pool into which I stared now, the pool with its few thick, motionless, flowerless lily pads and its slow, silent fish moving about heavily under the surface of the water.

I turned to Denisa Parsons to ask for an explanation, but as I did so two things happened very quickly.

The small hand had crept into mine and begun to pull me forward with a tremendous, terrifying strength and, as it did so, a voice spoke my name. It was a real voice, and I seemed to know whose voice it was, yet it sounded different, distorted in some way.

It was whispering my name over and over again and the whisper grew louder and clearer and more urgent. On every previous occasion, whoever the owner of the small hand might be, that person had always been completely silent. I had never heard the faintest whisper on the air. But now I heard something quite clearly.

‘Adam!’ it said. ‘Adam. Adam. Adam.’ Then silence, and my name again, the cry growing a little louder and more urgent. ‘Adam. Adam.’ At the same time, the small hand was pulling me so hard I lost my balance and half fell down the steps, and went stumbling after it, or with it, as it dragged me towards the pool.

I closed my eyes, fearful of what was there, what I knew that I should see, as I had seen it in the pool at the monastery.

‘Here. Here. Here.’

I flung my right arm up into the air to shake off the grip of the small hand and, as I did so, looked towards the archway in some sort of desperate plea to the old woman to help me.

She was not there. The arch in the hedge was hollow, with only darkness, like a blank window, behind.

I DO NOT know if I cried out, I do not remember if the hand still clung to mine. I do not know anything, other than that the voice was still in my ears but wavering and becoming fainter and slightly distorted as the world tumbled in upon me and I felt myself fall, and not onto the hard ground but into a bottomless, swirling, dark vortex that had opened up at my feet.

Seventeen

am sure that for a few minutes I must have been unconscious, before I felt myself surfacing, as if I had been diving in deep water and was slowly coming to the light and air. But the air felt close and damp and there was very little light. How long had I been at the house? I had gone there in daylight, now it was almost dark.

I was lying on the ground. I reached out my hand and felt cold stone and something rough. Gravel. Gradually, my head cleared and I found that I could sit up. It took me several minutes to remember where I was. The garden was dark, but when my eyes adjusted to it I could see a little.

I seemed to be unhurt, although I was dazed. Had I fainted? Had I tripped and fallen and perhaps knocked myself out? No, because I would surely have felt pain somewhere and there was none.

I was alone. The garden was still. The bushes and trees around me did not rustle or stir. No bird called.

I waited until fragments of recollection floated nearer to me and began to form clearer shapes in my mind. The old woman in the strange bundled clothing. The room in which she lived in squalor, deep in the near-derelict house. Their smell. The wavering sound of her voice. The garden.

That part of the garden she had led me into which was not overgrown and neglected, but mown and tidy, with lawn and trees, shrubs and flowerbeds, arches in the high hedge leading down neat flights of steps to …

I got carefully to my feet.

I saw the dark gleaming surface of the pool, the flat stone ledge that ran round it.

Golden fish gliding beneath the surface.

A bench.

Had there been a bench?

Bench. Bench.

My legs gave way beneath me again and I felt a wave of nausea. Bile rose into my mouth and I retched onto the cold ground.

AND THEN I heard something, some ordinary and reassuringly familiar sound. The sound of a car. I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand.

I could not get up again and for a while everything was dark and silent, but after a moment I saw a light flash somewhere, dip away, flash again, and a few moments later heard something else, the sound of someone pushing through the undergrowth. And calling out.

‘Mr Snow? Mr Snow?’

I tried to reply but made only an odd, strangled sound in my throat.

The light sliced across the grass behind me.

‘Mr Snow?’

I did not recognise the voice.

‘Are you there? Mr Snow?’

And then someone almost tripped over me and the beam of a large torch was shining into my face and the man was bending down to me, murmuring with surprise and concern.

I closed my eyes in overwhelming relief.