by Lorna Gray
I resumed my course through the stream of busy shoppers before saying on a calmer note, ‘And yesterday, when I raced up the stairs to you, I believe I would have told you quite bleakly that happiness wasn’t likely to be my outcome from this.’
I felt Robert’s hand check me. He stopped me and made me turn. He told me, ‘We don’t have to go, you know. We can just leave it at this little positive discovery and move on.’
He was doing more than curbing this impulsive dash towards the bus stop. In answer to my questioning look, he admitted carefully, ‘I’m remembering the way you begged after that maddened race about graveyards never to be made to return there.’
He made my senses switch back to their normal levels.
People were hurrying along wet pavements and I was able to address his sudden undertone of caution. I studied him through the fading drizzle and saw him with unexpected clarity. I told him calmly, ‘I was desperate to trace Harriet when the story of that place only existed within the delusion of her neglect. It would be far more in keeping with my own memory of childhood to go these few steps further knowing the real Harriet was loved, don’t you think?’
‘Good,’ he said gently.
Some time later, after we had claimed our seats on a bus, I found myself asking, ‘Do you remember what you said to me over dinner at Bourton?’
I felt every word of his reply. A rattle of traffic slid past unnoticed beyond the fogged window while he told me steadily, ‘The old urge to keep moving has only really settled since meeting you. Well, here I am.’
I agreed with a flare somewhere deep inside, ‘Here you are.’
I think it was the drone of the engine as the bus pulled away that gave me the room to realise what was running in the background of my senses.
It struck me with a wrench. It was the contradiction of secretly straining to catch the first hushed note of that strange oppressiveness, whilst knowing that at some point the lull would run on so long that I would probably have to learn that there had never been any real external influence on my mind at all.
I heard myself say with sudden urgency, ‘Take care, Robert. And please don’t leave me.’
I said it without even quite knowing why; beyond knowing it was something to do with my sense that the Ashbrook house still stood, and Walter’s memorial had been installed by his loving adoptive daughter. Set in those terms, my discovery of their joint legacy ought to have been a symbol of freedom – for all of us.
But only yesterday, each new misspelling of her family name had seemed to bind me to a memory of loss.
Suddenly, I could vividly recall the quotation Robert had given me about a person leaving a trace behind in the things that they had touched and the air they had breathed.
It gave Walter’s philosophy that he could never die while his world, his monument survived the substance of a darkening threat.
Chapter 24
Robert was slipping on the mud of the bank by the river. I was too, although my slight heel was helping me to fare a little better.
We’d been set down by the bus near that little church and now I was picking my way across the river using the narrow and crumbling footbridge. I was expecting Robert to say something about the rain running down his neck in a way that was reminiscent of the responsibility I had felt when I had brought him through this churchyard once before.
Robert didn’t remark on the weather. He asked, ‘Lucy? Why did your parents give you up, really?’
He had noticed my quip about being able to prove at last that my only material connection to Harriet was not loss or abandonment, but happiness in childhood. He waited until we’d reached the far bank before he added, ‘I mean the full reason; not the edited version your aunt and uncle give. I presume you do know?’
I did know. And I didn’t mind the question. We were slithering along a particularly greasy path through trees and rotting bulrushes beside an overflowing river. Normally we would have left the river behind by turning left towards that high ridge with the lime avenue and the Ashbrook house. Instead, we’d taken a filthy old path to the right, and now a general decay of leaf mulch was leaving dark spatters on Robert’s skin and clothes. Probably, there were splatters on me too.
We ducked under a low bough from a willow that had toppled but not died, and stepped out onto a wider path and into better air.
I said, ‘I do know. I frightened my mum and dad by asking when I was about fifteen, and the truth is profoundly ordinary. They’d had a couple of fearsomely bad years – a lot of farms did in that time after the Great War. My parents were desperate to lighten their load. Quite simply, my older brothers might be useful on the farm, whereas out of all of us, it was probable that I would cope the most easily with the change.’
‘And besides, everyone agrees you didn’t like the animals.’
Robert supplied the line for me when I faltered after I’d led the way between straggling hawthorns. He added as he joined me, ‘You don’t want anyone to think they made the wrong choice, I know.’
Then he stopped beside me and uttered a faint sound under his breath.
The first thing that met us at Bramblemead was a flock of very aggressive geese. They raced white and grey out of the derelict farmyard where the moss grew.
This was the farmstead I had seen from our walk along the distant drive between Jacqueline’s gatehouse and the Ashbrook house.
It was impossible to make out that great house. Even the elegant roofs of its stable yard were screened by the stand of trees that ranged damply beside the river and spread thickly uphill. In fact, there was no sign of light or occupation up there at all. Not even a distant church tower pierced the skyline. I wondered who farmed this sorry farmstead. Or, rather, I wondered who I ought to complain to.
This was because there were a few bullocks and a dairy cow in the most robust of the rotting sheds that ranged beneath the ancient stone walls. The light was poor by now so it wasn’t exactly the best time to see this place but what house there had once been was without glass in the widows and its door had been widened so that the ground floor could provide summer shelter to livestock. Red paint was showing where the paper was peeling from the walls.
There was a hay store in an old barn but nowhere near the cattle. The dairy cow was ill from being left full of milk and the others were in hungry squalor. The place stank of muck and filth.
‘The path we’ve just come along.’ Robert was twisting to look behind us. ‘Does that look like an overgrown trackway to you?’
I followed his gaze. There was perhaps a sign of old cart-ruts between the wintered hedgerows.
We retraced our steps and met the whisper of the river again as we reached that fallen willow. It looked impenetrable. To the right was the poorly marked footpath back to that little church. But somewhere ahead, a dove was crooning to its mate. With a word to Robert, I forced a path through the mess.
There was a small garden gate and a dirty bit of ground that might have been designed as a vegetable patch. The river was close and the same fate was befalling this ground as was claiming the graveyard beside the small church. Everything was sinking, even my feet.
A ramshackle sprawl of sheds emerged from the net of a tangled bramble. The first had a wooden floor set on saddlestones in an effort to keep out the rats, but a partition wall had collapsed. It had left a great scar of damaged brickwork on one side.
This place was very different from the genteel dressed stone of the Ashbrook house or Jacqueline’s gatehouse. This was a hovel of crude bricks and timber set beneath the spreading fingers of a vast old oak and a darkening sky. I thought the shed was meant to be a dovecot.
The floor inside ran to a wooden panel with a door set in it. Doves were rustling about in the rafters when I tentatively set a foot upon the floor and found it firm enough to bear my weight. It stank of bird mess. I had to cover my face with a handkerchief to bear it and Robert had to guard his face with his sleeve. The door was locked. Or, rather, when I gingerly li
fted the corner of the disgusting net curtain that screened the glass, I found that the door led nowhere but was merely doing service as a roof support.
Robert had found a way past the back wall. I joined him, slithering, cursing and beginning to think we’d do better to turn tail and run straight up to Jacqueline’s gatehouse to ask who owned those bullocks. But there was another shed ahead, darker than the dovecote because its walls were intact.
Robert’s hand gripped my elbow when I slipped on the edge of a drainage gully. I nearly took him down into it with me but with a heave, he righted me. Then his hand pointed out the low opening. He didn’t speak. Neither of us did. We stepped into the sort of darkness that had its own hush as it filled the air with more of that acid smell of bird dung.
There was a sharp clap overhead. A white shape swooped. I felt the air move as it passed close to my head. The birds weren’t doves; they were pigeons and their mess hurt the lungs.
My fingers were knotting upon the fabric of Robert’s sleeve. I was suddenly shaking my head. I was turning to steer him back. This didn’t feel safe. This wasn’t right. This stank of decay and the end of things.
‘Robert? I—’
But speaking his name wasn’t permitted. I had known all along that the danger was in my mind and in my thoughts. It knew I meant to retreat, to tell Robert to abandon this useless scramble into the dark.
In the space of a heartbeat, that familiar sense of desolation crashed in. It swallowed everything – light, hope and everything. Because suddenly I understood why I had felt such dread.
All this time I had been hoping that the easing of the dreadful pressure meant that it was going to leave me alone. But this wasn’t like that at all. It had been with me all this time. It was simply that, from the moment yesterday of following me up the office stairs, it had abruptly fixed its gaze upon Robert.
It had watched me bring him here. It wasn’t going to let me take him away now.
I felt the shadow move in my mind like wings spreading. It stemmed my flight. It was like drowning in panic when I had no idea I was capable of feeling so much desperation on my own.
The feeling was in me, but more than me. And this time, for the first time, the darkness showed itself.
It lunged, blacker than night, out of a corner. I thought at first it was human; a man’s shape growing from floor level to chest height within a stride. But the mouth was too wide. It gaped as it leapt.
It wasn’t silent either. It came with a roar. I was braced but it swept past me and went straight for Robert. I was caught anyway by the pressure as it passed. It sent me backwards with an agonising twist into Robert. I collided with him at the same time that it did. I heard Robert’s breath get knocked out of him and felt his instinctive reach for me. Then his shoulder met the doorframe.
Wood splintered and took us down with it. The fall came with the hard shower of the wall collapsing, raining hard rubble like cement dust only fouler smelling and I crashed down onto my side. I had fallen half across Robert. I caught a brief glimpse of his face near to mine before he put his hand up to shield his head from the shower as batons and shingles from the roof came down. I began to scream.
A falling splinter had cut a hard line across his forehead. He was on his back beneath me. I thought he was dead, even though I knew he wasn’t. I felt his arm tighten around me. But it wanted him.
I had begun to notice his little slips and injuries. I should have guessed that each of them was a warning that what had befallen Archie must befall Robert too.
Because I was the common connection here and yesterday morning in the office, when I had run to him, it had finally seen him. I should have known that this had been its purpose all along. This was my fault.
Now violence tugged and snatched at my coat and tried to tear past me to get at Robert amidst a flurry of filth and rotten timber, but I wouldn’t let it.
Robert had fallen through the crumbling wall. The shed was made of brittle wood and mortar anyway. And I had twisted across him with my hands on his chest and I was screaming like I might defend him. I was sobbing out to the darkness both within me and moving on the edge of my sight, ‘Leave him alone. Please. You can’t take him.’
Only I wasn’t even sure that the source of the violence wasn’t me.
Robert was beneath me in a tangle of debris and struggling because I think he was fighting me too. He was trying to get up and get me behind him, but he couldn’t do it with the weight of wood across his chest and me and the pressure of this other presence darting in.
I had my head turned towards it. My memory was full of the sheer recklessness last night of asking Robert to stay. I was crying out to anything that would listen and begging it to leave him because I couldn’t bear to have the things he had said robbed from me. I gripped him and sobbed out, ‘I won’t do it. I wasn’t rushing last night because I thought I would lose him too. It’s simply that we were happy. I won’t let him go. Just leave him alone. Please.’
This was like the madness of sometimes believing it was me who had died in the war. Perhaps we both had – Robert and I, I mean. And this was the moment when I realised it. His spirit would be torn from me, and I would finally be truly on my own in the eternity of the gathering night.
At the same time though, the snarl was beginning to clarify into the form of a dog. It was lean, lithe and moving about on the periphery of my vision like a black and white spectre of vengeance. Or like a living arrow; one of the farmyard sort who might live half wild on a diet of shepherding and scraps.
And Robert was taking advantage of the slackening of my fight to stir at last, hands pushing the wood away and getting a better grip on me even while I was distracted by the blur of the moving dog. I was conscious, suddenly, of the fierce heat of Robert’s living body against mine in the midst of that wretched pattern of loss.
And the dog didn’t bite and then Robert was saying something.
‘What?’ I asked faintly. My stumble out of blind panic into this single stupid word of a question met amusement. Of all things, there was a hint of a smile in his voice.
He told me, ‘It matters that you would try to save me, but would you please stop for a second, and just listen?’
He had eased himself into a sitting position very close to me. I was sitting beside him but facing the other way – facing towards him with my legs curled uncomfortably to one side and my arm across his body where I presume I had imagined I was shielding him.
Now my eyes were fixed on his, while his own concentrated on the gentle task of lifting a shard of wood from my hair. He knew I had descended into the depths of my darkest nightmare, and barely come up gasping.
I fought my way out of the sickening giddiness into the effort of seeing the world steady. He was still here. There was a single dark bead of blood on his forehead but the rest of him was whole and streaked white with the foul dust of pigeon mess. We both were.
Then something dragged his mind to a place somewhere beyond me. I twisted with a fresh lurch of fear to follow his gaze. I saw nothing but the remains of the partition through which we had fallen and an awful lot of pieces of the shed door. I turned back.
He was gathering himself to gingerly pick himself up from the floor, only he needed me to untangle myself first.
‘Did you hear that?’ he asked. ‘Someone called the dog off.’
It was as I settled back on my heels and he reached to lift one last encumbering length of wood aside from his leg that I heard it. A timorous voice – a woman’s – calling out a fearful, ‘Who’s there?’
The dog had been recalled by her command.
When Robert climbed to his feet, he wasn’t wearing any other expression than shaken curiosity. I wasn’t sure for him this tumble through rotten wood had ever been more than a grim accident. That line I had seen drawn across his head hadn’t run to a lot of blood.
Now I was standing beside him while he blankly touched the heel of his hand to his forehead. He seemed vaguely surprised
when it came away darkened.
I searched for my handkerchief and gave it to him but he barely seemed to spare a thought for it, really, with his other hand steadying me while he focussed intently upon tracing the source of that sound.
He took a step past me, with a glance at me to ensure that I was ready to follow. He moved towards the back of the shed. He called through the panel, ‘How do we get to you?’
His voice was serious and concentrated. There was a door with a hole at the bottom where presumably the dog had got through. The door stuck, but opened when he set his shoulder to it and we both gave a determined thrust. Beyond was a storeroom of furniture and rubbish. And beyond that was Bramblemead Cottage.
Chapter 25
‘Mrs Murray?’ I asked.
The passage into the house was narrow and without the luxury of electric lighting or even gas. At this dusky hour, there was a single oil lamp at the end. It was bitterly cold and full of dark corners like a cellar.
Robert had his hand to his head again, dabbing at the fresh trickle of blood that had been gently building. Suddenly, the pain had struck him, I think. It bewildered him. He was staring at the stained handkerchief in his hand like it was a question he didn’t know how to answer. Then I saw the moment his gaze lifted to focus once more upon the passage before us. His manner changed.
‘Dear God,’ he said on a hardened note I had never heard before.
There was a woman here in this house that smelled of damp. Mrs Murray was standing in a faded housecoat, with skin that was so translucent though age that she was almost as pale as silver.
She had hands where the fingers were all curled in, and she was, in fact, so tiny and hunched over two walking sticks that it was hard to perceive how she could walk. The dog was slinking at her heels like a wraith. He was the only thing that moved. Mrs Murray was staring at us from the heart of the passage. I could see the glitter of her eyes.
