by Rachel Joyce
‘Do you like them?’ he said.
She nodded.
‘Do you want any more?’
She stared back at him and the look she gave was a strange one, a questioning one. She pointed to her legs.
‘This one?’ he said.
She shook her head and pointed to the caliper. He glanced back at the house and then down to the pond. Beverley was playing a new piece. She kept stopping and going back to the beginning to get it right. There was no sign of his mother.
His hands shook as he undid the buckles. He unfolded the leather and the skin of her leg was soft and white, and it smelt a little of salt, but it wasn’t unpleasant. He didn’t want to upset her. There was no plaster. There was no scar on either knee.
‘Poor, poor knee,’ he said.
She nodded.
‘Poor Jeanie.’
He drew one spot on her knee. It was so faint, so slight, it was like the smallest blemish. She didn’t flinch. She watched very carefully.
‘Do you want another?’
She pointed to her ankle, then her shin, then her thigh. He drew six more. All the time he drew, she craned her head forward, studying his work intently. Their heads were almost touching. He saw she was not lying about her legs. She was just waiting for them to be ready to move again.
‘We’re the same now,’ he said.
A yellow leaf flittered through the sunlight. It landed on the blanket and he saw it was the butterfly with her yellow wings. He didn’t know if it could be a sign, the butterfly, but its reappearance was certainly like the joining of two moments that would otherwise be split apart. Beverley’s music was building to a finish. She hit the chorus with a crescendo of chords. He even thought he heard his mother calling from the pond. He had a sense that something was coming, another landmark, and that if he didn’t capture it quickly it would be gone again.
‘The butterfly is looking for a flower,’ he whispered. He held out his fingers like petals and so did Jeanie. ‘It thinks our spots are flowers.’
He scooped the butterfly gently inside his hands. He could feel its wings, pale as paper, beating against his skin. He lowered it into her hands and told her to be still. It sat in her palm, and somehow the butterfly knew too about keeping still, it didn’t flap its wings or get frightened. Jeanie was so still she was not breathing.
‘Jeanie!’ called Beverley from the terrace.
‘Byron!’ called his mother, crossing the garden.
The butterfly edged towards Jeanie’s fingertips. ‘Oh no,’ he murmured, ‘it might fall. What should we do, Jeanie?’
In the silence and very slowly she began to lift her knees to make a flowery bridge. As the butterfly crept over her nails and down towards her legs, she brought them higher. The women were shouting, they were running towards them, but he kept saying to Jeanie, ‘Higher, higher, sweetheart.’ The butterfly tiptoed up and down her small white lifting knees and at last she laughed.
PART THREE
Besley Hill
1
Rain Dance
A NEW MOON in early September brought a change in the weather. The heat subsided. The days were warm but no longer fierce. There was a slight chill in the morning air, and a white cloud of condensation at the windows. Already the leaves of the clematis were drying brown twists on the stems, and the ox-eye daisies were almost over. The morning sun peeped at Byron over the hedgerows as if it couldn’t quite reach the zenith of the sky.
The new moon brought a change in his mother too. She was happier again. She continued to post small gifts to Beverley and to telephone about Jeanie but she no longer drove to Digby Road and Beverley no longer came to visit. James had greeted the news of Jeanie’s recovery with silence. He had informed Byron he was spending the last weekend of the holidays at the seaside. Maybe he would get to see a concert? Byron had suggested. James had said awkwardly it would not be that sort of trip.
Beverley’s response was the opposite. It was a miracle, she concluded. That a child should recover when all the doctors had given up. She had thanked Byron profusely. She had apologized over and over for the anxiety she had caused. Things had got out of hand, she kept saying. She just wanted to be Diana’s friend, she never meant her to suffer. Everybody made misakes, she cried. She had never guessed Jeanie’s lame leg was imagined. She had promised to return the soft toys, the pushchair, the kaftan dress, the borrowed clothes. There were many tears. But Diana had reassured her. It had been a strange summer, she said. Maybe the heat had got to them all? She seemed so relieved to have reached a conclusion she had no space for blame or even understanding. The last time Beverley had telephoned, she confided that Walt had asked her to marry him. They were thinking of moving north; they would be like a proper family. She had an idea too for a small import business. She talked about grabbing opportunities and thinking big but with the threat of strikes, her business idea seemed unlikely to work out. She promised to fetch her organ and somehow or other she never did.
Meanwhile Diana retrieved her pencil skirts from where they had been hiding, screwed up beside her shoes, and pressed them. They were a little loose about the waist but they returned her to that tight way of walking with her clippy steps. She stopped spending hours at the pond, or sleeping under the stars. She retrieved her notebook and small butterfly cakes with sponge wings. Byron helped her carry her mother’s old furniture back to the garage and they covered it with the dustsheet. Diana reset the clocks. She began to tidy the house and clean. When his father came for his first visit, she did not contradict him. She washed his smalls and over dinner they talked about his shooting holiday and the weather. Lucy played chopsticks over and over again on her electric organ. And even though Seymour insisted it was an extravagant birthday present for a little girl, Diana assured him none of the other children had Wurlitzers and he gave his upside-down smile.
The children returned to school. Now that Jeanie was no longer lame, James rarely discussed what had happened and how the boys had planned to save Diana. Once or twice he referred to that business in the summer, but only in a disparaging way, as if they had been childish. He gave Byron the Operation Perfect folder. He did not talk about magic tricks or ask about Brooke Bond tea cards. Maybe he was disappointed in Byron; it was hard to tell.
Besides, it was not simply James who seemed reserved or altered. Being in their scholarship year made young men of the boys. Some of them had gained inches. Their voices alternately squeaked and growled. Their faces bore spots like marbles. Their bodies smelt and moved and bulged in new ways that were both confusing and exciting. It was like the heating going on in parts of themselves they were not aware they owned. Samuel Watkins even had a moustache.
One night in mid-September they sat outside, Byron and his mother, beneath a clear sky that was upholstered with stars. He showed her the Plough and the Seven Sisters and she gazed up, with her glass on her lap, her neck tipped back. He pointed out the winged eagle shape of Aquila, Cygnus the swan, and Capricornus. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. She was obviously listening. She kept nodding at the sky and then turning to gaze at him.
‘They’re playing with us, aren’t they?’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘The gods. We think we understand, we’ve invented science, but we haven’t a clue. Maybe the clever people are not the ones who think they’re clever. Maybe the clever people are the ones who accept they know nothing.’
He had no idea what to say. As if reading his thoughts, she reached for his hand and wove his arm through hers. ‘You’re clever, though. You’re really clever. And you’ll be a good person. That’s what counts.’
She pointed to a veil of opaque light above their heads. ‘Now tell me about that.’
He told her it was the Milky Way. Then, from nowhere, a star shot through the dark as if it had been hurled, and snapped out of sight. ‘Did you see that?’ He grabbed her arm so hard she almost spilt her drink.
‘What? What?’ She had clearly missed it but once he had explained
she sat very still, watching the sky and waiting. ‘I know I’m going to see one,’ she said. ‘I just feel it in my bones.’ He went to laugh but she held up her hand as if to silence him. ‘Don’t say anything else or I will want to look at you. And I mustn’t because I have to concentrate.’ She sat so neat and expectant she looked like Lucy.
When at last she found one, she leapt up, her eyes wide, her finger making a tapping movement at the night. ‘Look! Look!’ she told him. ‘Do you see?’
‘That’s a beauty,’ he said.
It was an aeroplane. He could even see its vapour trail, lit up by the moon and shining through the sky like a stitchwork of silver thread. He kept waiting for her to realize and when she didn’t, when she laughed and squeezed his hand and said, ‘I made a wish for you, Byron. Everything will be all right now I’ve seen that lucky star,’ he had to nod his head and look away. How could she be so innocent? So stupid? He followed her to the house but she slipped in her shoe and he had to hold out a hand to steady her.
‘I’ve forgotten how to wear heels,’ she laughed.
Seeing the wishing star seemed to lift his mother’s spirits further. The following day she worked in the garden while the children were at school. She dug over the rose beds and, as the sun began to slide from the sky, Byron helped her pile the first of the fallen leaves into a wheelbarrow to make a bonfire. They collected windfall apples and watered the flower beds near the house; they needed rain. Then she talked about Hallowe’en, how she had read in a magazine they carved faces out of pumpkins in America. She would like to do that, she said. They stopped to watch the bank of cloud, flaming like pink candyfloss towers over the moor. His mother said it had been a truly beautiful day. People didn’t look enough at the sky.
Maybe it was as simple as believing things were what you wanted them to be? Maybe that was all it took? If there was anything Byron had learned that summer, it was that a thing was capable of being not one but many different things, and some of them contradictory. Not everything had a label. Or if it did, you had to be prepared to re-examine that label from time to time and paste another alongside it. The truth could be true, but not in a definite way. It could be more or less true; and maybe that was the best a human being could hope for. They returned to the house.
It was almost teatime when his mother remembered she had left a cardigan outside. She called that she was going to fetch it and would only be a few minutes.
Byron began a game with Lucy. Rising to switch on the lamps, it occurred to him it was getting dark. He made sandwiches because Lucy was hungry and sliced them into triangles. When he glanced again at the window, the light was green.
He told Lucy he had to fetch something from the garden, and set out a new game of Snakes and Ladders. ‘You have your go first,’ he told her. ‘Count very carefully. I’ll be back for my turn.’ When he opened the front door, he was shocked.
Outside, the cloud over the moor was dark as a stain. There was a storm coming, no question. He called out to his mother from the threshold but she made no answer. He checked the rose beds and the perennial borders and there was no sign of her. A sudden gust of wind tore at the trees and, as the clouds raced forward, corners of the hills were briefly illuminated in silver shafts of light and then eclipsed. The leaves in the branches began to tremble and rattle. He made a dash through the garden and towards the picket gate just as the first drops of rain came.
They were bigger than he expected. The rain was driving down from the upper peaks in thick curtains. There was no way she could be at the pond. He turned back towards the house and tried to hide from the rain, tucking his hands into his armpits, ducking his head, but very quickly water was sliding from his hair and down his collar. It surprised him how quickly he went from dry to wet. Byron dashed back through the garden towards the garage.
The rain hit like peppercorns at the roof but his mother’s furniture was still under its sheet and Diana was not there. Briefly he wondered if she was sitting in the Jaguar, if she was asleep on the seat, but the doors were locked and the car was empty. She must have gone back to the house. Maybe she was drying her hair and talking to Lucy even as he shut the garage doors.
Lucy was waiting for him at the threshold. ‘Where did you go, Byron? I waited and waited. Why did you be so long?’ She looked frightened and seeing her like that he realized he was frightened too. The rain had leaked all over the hall floor. It was only when he turned and saw the pools of water behind that he realized they had come from him.
‘Where’s Mummy?’ he said.
‘I thought she was with you.’
Byron began to go over all that had happened, trying to calculate the time his mother had been gone. Stooping to remove his school shoes, he found they were soft like pulp. His fingers couldn’t manage the laces and in the end he had to yank them off without undoing them. He began searching the house. Gently at first and then faster, until he was hurrying from bedroom to bedroom, flinging open doors. At the opened windows, the curtains ballooned like sails, and beyond them, the branches of the trees shook helplessly up and down. He secured the windows and the rain shot at the glass in rods and splattered on the roof. All over the house, he heard the wind throwing doors open and punching them shut.
‘Where is Mummy? What are you doing?’ said Lucy. She was trailing him like a shadow.
He checked his mother’s bed, the bathroom, his father’s study, the kitchen, but there was no sign, no hint, of her.
‘Why are we rushing everywhere?’ wailed Lucy.
It was all right, he kept saying, everything was all right, as he ran back to the front door. His chest was beginning to hurt. He fetched the umbrella and his mother’s waterproof coat from her peg.
‘It’s all right, Luce,’ he said. ‘I will have Mummy back in a minute.’
‘But I am cold, Byron. I want my blanket.’ Lucy clung to him so hard he had to wriggle free.
It was as he was guiding her to the drawing room and fetching her blanket that it struck him. What was he doing? He shouldn’t be fussing over the blanket. He should be outside. He couldn’t understand why he had even come back to the house. ‘Just sit and wait,’ he said, and he led Lucy by the hand to an armchair. After that he tried to run away but came back to kiss her because she was crying again. ‘Just sit still, Luce,’ he said. Then he suddenly dropped everything, the coat, the umbrella, the blanket, on the drawing-room carpet. He fled.
He thought all this had taken minutes but outside the hood of sky was darker. The rain shot straight down, as hard as spikes. It smashed against the leaves. It flattened the grass. It pelted at the house as if it meant harm, and poured from the gutters on to the terrace. The noise was deafening.
As he ran, he shouted his mother’s name but the crashing of rain was so loud he seemed to make no noise. He was still in the garden. He couldn’t even see as far as the pond. Shoulders hunched, he threw open the picket gate, without stopping to close it. He moved towards the pond and it was no longer a run. He was sliding and slipping, arms out to steady himself; he could barely lift his head. The land was saturated. The water swelled through the grass. With each footfall, it splashed as high as his face.
The pond came into view, and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He had to flail at the rain with his arms in order to clear it away.
‘Mummy! Mummy!’ he tried to shout but she didn’t hear.
There she was, on the pond. Her hair, her clothes, her skin, were so wet she shone. Only here was the thing. She was not on the turfy hummock in the middle, but balancing on the watery space between the island and the bank. How could this be? He had to rub his eyes to check. Glass in hand, she was at a midway point that was no longer earthbound, that was only water. She moved slowly, arms outstretched, as if she were dancing. Occasionally her body seemed to buckle and sway but she kept her balance and went forward, back straight, chin high, arms wide, through the hard silver lines of rain.
‘Over here!’ he shouted. ‘Over here!’ He was
still at the top of the meadow.
She must have heard because she suddenly stopped and waved. He gasped because he was afraid she would fall but she didn’t. She remained upright and balanced on the surface.
Diana shouted something back at him but he couldn’t hear what it was, and then she held up her hand, not the one with the glass but the other, and he saw she had something white and heavy. It was a goose egg. She was laughing. She was happy she’d got it.
The relief at finding his mother filled Byron like hurt. He didn’t know any more what was crying and what was rain. He tugged his handkerchief from his pocket to blow his nose. It was soaked but he bowed his face into the cotton, not wanting her to know he had been crying. Just as he folded it and returned it to his pocket, he looked up and something seemed to strike at the back of his mother’s knees. He thought she was doing it to make him laugh. Then her body gave a sudden downwards jolt, her hands flew upwards, and both the glass and the egg went spinning out of her grasp. A movement caught her upper body, rippling along one arm, through her torso, and out to the other shoulder. It was like witnessing the gathering of a wave.
She shouted something else to him and then she seemed to fold and go down.
Byron stood a moment, waiting for her to re-emerge. He couldn’t move. It was as if time had slipped or fallen away. And then when she did not reappear, when there was only rain hammering at the pond, he began to shift, slowly at first and then faster and faster, knowing he didn’t want to get to the water’s edge, but sliding through the mud all the same, his shoes gaining no purchase. Knowing, even as he fell forward, that when he arrived he would not want to see.
The following morning soft plumes of mist rose from the hills, as if all over the moor small fires were being lit. The air creaked and pattered, although there was no rain now, there was only the memory of it. A frayed moon lingered like a ghost of the sun and all through the sky swarmed tiny summer flies, or were they seeds. Whatever they were, it was a beautiful beginning.
