Chapter Fifteen
‘S
O THIS IS
where you are. I wondered where you’d gone.’ Juliet’s voice surprised me. I turned round. She was standing in the late afternoon sun, dappled in green, a denizen of the forest clothed in a glimmer of holly. She threw her arm up to her face, because something was dazzling her. ‘And I can’t find Lawrence. I thought maybe you’d gone out together. Do you know where he is? What are you doing?’
I’d been down to the hearse for some of my father’s tools and then around to the back of the house. As surreptitiously as possible, I’d taken the mouldy tarpaulin off her car. First of all, I’d managed to open the driver’s door and ping the bonnet-release catch. I’d heaved up the bonnet and with some difficulty I’d removed the battery.
My mind had been a muddle of thoughts. About the woman and me... I marvelled at myself and the kind of person I must be, because in all my several relationships with girls and women since my teens, I’d never once been the pursuer, they’d always come to me, to my room, to my bed and slipped into it. About my ribs, which I’d thought were getting better, and the discomfort was easing... until I wrestled the battery out the car, and the weight of it sent such a stabbing pain through my body that I yelped and nearly dropped the wretched lump onto the ground. The dense cover of holly, bristling darkly behind the house, had given me a sense of privacy, a retreat from the woman and the boy and whatever he was up to. I thought I knew what Lawrence was doing: he was looking for the place where the swifts might roost at night. Why, I wasn’t sure, but it seemed a harmless enough project to occupy him, and even his loony rambles in the garden were hardly worrisome, compared with the damage he’d done in the real world.
That was the way my mind was muddling, when I’d hidden myself in the holly wood and pulled the tarpaulin off the car. But then the real world had jumped out. Eye – an eye for an eye – daubed in blood.
I winced at the ugliness of it, and all the hatred that had gone into it. When I touched the red paint and felt the thickness of it, the way it had pooled and set, I could feel the anger. The mother of a blinded boy had lifted a full, heavy bucket and tipped it, pouring out her pain and bitterness. That was reality. Lawrence Lundy mooching in the garden was... well, nothing, he was just a mooching teenager, indulging a mood.
The bonnet was still wide open, a glaring slab of red. Juliet threw up her arm to shield her eyes from it.
I was holding the battery. The deadly weight of it was stretching my arms and tugging my ribs. I said feebly, ‘I want to start up the Daimler. It doesn’t mean I’m running away or anything. It’s my Dad’s car and the battery’s flat and so I owe it to him to try and fix it.’
‘I hear you,’ she said. ‘But I can’t see...’ She strode past me, reached to the bonnet and pulled it shut. There was a tremendous clang, probably the loudest noise the valley had heard since the glacier was grinding it out. It echoed through the trees. A volley of wood-pigeons erupted into the sky.
In the silence that followed, Juliet appraised the damage to her car as though it had just happened, as though she’d never seen it before. I mean, I watched her and I could imagine how she’d first discovered it, returning to the car with her shopping, on a bright autumn day in a busy high street or a town centre car-park. She stared, she stared longer, she looked closely and she cocked her head at the horridness of it. And then? What did she do? She did what anyone, even the burliest, bravest man would have done... sensing a murderous anger in the air, she glanced around with fear in her eyes, in case the person who had done it was still there.
I felt a surge of compassion for her. She was only a little green elf. The prickliness of the holly gleamed on her. She was so small, so alone, so wounded, so afraid. Looking at her and the way she flinched from the shadows, I was suddenly so moved that I dropped the battery with a thud and took her into my arms.
‘There’s no one here, there’s no one here...’ I was whispering into her hair, ‘ and no one’s going to hurt you... it’s all over and it’s horrible but it’s all over now... I’m going to stay and there’s just you and me and Lawrence and we’re all safe and no one’s going to hurt us and...’
She was shuddering against me. I held her very tightly, her face buried in my chest.
A curious and very wonderful thing happened. The wood pigeons clattered into the holly trees around us. We could hear them settling into the dense foliage, adjusting themselves into the armoury of spikes... and when she sniffed and wiped her nose on my shoulder and we both looked up to watch them, they were as plump and smug as choirboys preening in a vestry. As though the huge metallic clang had never happened and their life was as orderly as ever before, they started to coo.
The wood-pigeon coo – the softest, sleepiest sound the world had ever heard. I felt her body relax against mine. She was boneless. The shuddering didn’t stop, but I realised she wasn’t crying anymore or frightened. She was giggling. The cotton-wool cooing was as marvellous as morphine. Everything was alright. How could it not be, with the fat, silly pigeons cooing so cosily over our heads?
‘All I want,’ she said eventually, spluttering with laughter, ‘all I want... all I want is to blubber onto your shirt, listen to these birds in the trees, and know that Lawrence is safe. That’s all I want, to know he’s safe.’ She looked up at me, and her face was streaky with tears, like a child awakening from a nightmare. ‘Stay with us and we’ll all feel safer.’
S
O.
I
T WAS
a bit ironic, after that injunction, to be stumbling through the woodland with the battery bumping against my ribs, to try and start the car which might facilitate my leaving. But that was what we did. We covered her car with the tarpaulin, we dragged the mouldy green stuff across it, and it was no longer the ‘ultimate driving machine’ but a mouldering heap – disfigured, disembowelled, an animal which had died in the forest and would soon be fetid with fungi. I carried the battery. Juliet walked beside me.
Before we got to the hearse, we found the boy. There was a crash of breaking glass. A whoop, like a head-hunter or a baboon. Another smash of glass.
And the boy emerged from a dense green shadow into a shaft of sunlight, like an end-of-the-pier comedian bursting on-stage. ‘I found them! I think I found them! Come and look!’
Blood. He shook his head and spattered us with blood. He was a grinning goof, in the same old t-shirt and shorts, with a fresh, big gash somewhere in his hair. I felt it splash onto my face and saw it on his mother’s. I dropped the battery. Before we could smear at the blood, he took hold of Juliet’s wrist in one hand and my wrist in the other and tugged us with him... and he was so strong, so hot and young and sinewy, that we could do no more than simply stumble behind him.
He dragged us through a barricade of nettles and bramble, through a forest of elder and cow-parsley. He’d flattened them already on his way through, and in doing so he’d crushed the stalks into a sappy fume – heady, the green essence of summer. Some broken bricks underfoot, where a surprised toad sprang away from our clumsy tread... and we were into the derelict greenhouse I’d first spotted when I’d arrived at Chalke House.
‘I looked in the books!’ he was saying with great excitement. He still had us by the wrists, and his grip was harsh. ‘One of Dad’s books, I got it out last night, from under Mum’s bed when she was fast asleep... nowadays they never nest in natural places, I mean they always use barns or houses or old factories or churches or whatever, you know, man-made buildings to nest in... and here they are, in the greenhouse!’
‘But what’ve you done, Lawrence? Your head... let me see...’
He let go of our wrists and bent towards her. Blood was welling from his scalp. Again, unnecessarily, he shook his head, with a kind of gruesome friskiness... and as a haze of it blurred into my eyes, I had a vision of a puppy I’d rescued from a monitor lizard in my garden, and its nose and mouth had been lashed by the lizard’s tail and it was licking at my face with a mixture of panic and joy and gratitude. ‘I was climbing the vine, I grabbed one of the old beams and the glass broke and... don’t worry Mum I’m alright I’m alright...’
His mother was trying to inspect the wound, but he grappled her off him. The blood ran off his brow and down his nose and into his mouth. He grinned, and his teeth were red. ‘Come and see, let me show you...’
The old greenhouse was a marvellous place. As big as a squash court, it was a grand structure of sagging beams and mossy glass, leaning wearily against an overgrown cliff. Difficult to tell, at first glance, if the ancient, serpentine vine which had torn up the brickwork of the floor and was feeling into every corner and space of the building with long, muscular tendrils... hard to say if the vine was pulling the greenhouse down or holding it up. Whatever else had been cultivated there, flowers or fruits or vegetables for the residents of Chalke House, had been overwhelmed by the flora of an English woodland. Yes, it was a fragrant wilderness, and nothing wrong with that.
And all along the overhead rafters, the nests of the swifts. Dozens or scores of them. Not at all spectacular to look at – little cups of stuff stuck here and there, clumsy little cups that primary school kids might botch up with papier-mâché for an enthusiastic teacher – except that the boy was brimming with the joy of their discovery. He was spouting at his mother through his horrid red bubbly lips, all sorts of garbled facts he’d got from his father’s book from under her bed... about the swifts gathering their nest material in mid-air, catching straws and feathers and dust in flight and sticking it all to the rafters with their own saliva... all true and extraordinarily wonderful, except that I was watching him with a kind of morbid fascination, the fascination I’d felt when I’d been nude and afraid in the shadows and his mother had been naked and fearful in her bed and he’d been licking her.
I looked at his teeth. The blood on them. His lips and the mucous blood on his tongue. His eyes were wild as he enthused like an eccentric professor, about the swifts and their mad, relentless flight. Now and then, as he waved his arms at the rafters, where after all there were no birds but only their gobbets of saliva and grass and other regurgitated fluids, a new gush of blood would burst out of his hair and dribble into his eyebrows. And I wanted to get out.
‘I’m going to come down here this evening, I’m going to stay down here and wait and watch them coming to roost! Look up there, that’s where I climbed up, there’s lots of holes in the glass, where the glass is broken... that’s where they come in!’
I edged away from him. I passed my hands across my brows and nose and chin and felt the smear of his blood. He was enthusing to his mother, looming over her and quite unaware of my leaving. She shrank beneath him, quivering like a shrew he’d discovered in a damp corner of the greenhouse, amazed by his sheer size and power. So full of himself and his own strange purpose, he’d blanked out everything but this burgeoning project. He didn’t notice as I moved out of his range, but Juliet was overwhelmed.
It was a relief to be alone in the woodland. The boy’s hectoring voice faded as I picked up the car battery and walked through the trees. It was about six o’clock, or later, one of the longest days of the year. It would be light until ten, cool and light: blissfully refreshing for me, after the unchanging years in the tropics, where the months were no different except for the roaring rains of monsoon. No seasons, and every evening at half past six, when the mosque was calling the faithful to the
maghrib
prayers, there was dusk and nightfall, from daylight to darkness, in a matter of fifteen minutes.
A long, English summer’s evening, holier than a perfunctory prayer-time.
I came to the hearse at the foot of the Scots pine. I looked into the dark foliage and I could see the trail of my fall, the branches bent and broken by my clumsy impact. Higher still, the spars of the tree-house, the pieces of a wooden pallet which Lawrence’s father had manhandled up there and lashed together, so that his son could have access to his world, his infinite sky-world, where he hurtled god-like in his mighty machine. Where the swifts were hurtling and screaming, splinters of god in their own infinity.
Lawrence had been there, but only as far as the crude platform his father had made for him. He would never go higher. He might stretch his hands to the blue, he might barely touch it. He might imagine the further, higher world of his father’s flight, and the flight of the swifts. It would be a dream of flying, and no more.
I felt sorry for the boy, and for the boy he’d damaged, and I’d been moved by the depth of his mother’s hurt. But I’d never forgotten the reason for my returning to England, more important than my entanglement in the Lundy family at Chalke House. My father. And here was his car, which had rolled into the shadow of the pine and been scarred even as its wheels had stopped turning. Now the grasses were growing higher and higher around it. Neglected, it would be swallowed by the woodland, absorbed into this hidden valley, it would disappear without trace unless it got moving again. Me too.
‘Hey, you and me, we gotta look out for ourselves,’ I said to the car. ‘No one in the world knows where we are or where we’ve gone. If we get too comfy here, we ain’t goin’ nowhere...’
The Daimler didn’t reply. It just eyed me with its huge round headlamps, as doleful and rheumy as a bloodhound. I opened the driver’s door, slid inside and pinged the bonnet-release catch. Again, the warm, earthy smell in the car was an instant hit on my memories – the feel of the leather and the carpets and the touch of my father’s hands on the wheel. With a renewed energy I got out and heaved open the bonnet, and the pain in my ribs was good, I was alive and it hurt and I had my own purpose in life, beyond the cobwebby entrapment of the Lundys. A minute later, wielding the tools which my father’s fingers had worn smooth over decades of use and meticulous maintenance, I’d disconnected the battery from the monstrous engine, lifted it out and connected the battery from Juliet’s BMW.