by Rachel Joyce
Pressed close to Eileen, he screwed his eyes shut, waiting for something terrible to happen. Without the duct tape the space felt vulnerable and terrifying – if anyone was unclothed it was the van – but nothing happened. She did not sleepwalk. She quickly snored. He felt he would cut off his arm rather than disturb her.
He eats a second custard cream. He is so hungry that one at a time does not seem enough.
When Eileen comes out to join him, the side of her face is red and squashed. She has put on her coat – the buttons are done up wrong – and the fabric is concertina’d round her waist. Her hair lifts out in two giant wings. She sits in the chair opposite his, saying nothing, looking out where he is looking. She takes the mug as if it is hers and pours tea. She helps herself to custard creams.
‘It’s nice,’ she says.
That’s all.
Already the dawn is growing. To the east, a crack of gold splits the night just above the horizon. The leaves of ivy rustle, rustle, and there is no need for words. Suddenly Eileen stands, hugging her torso. She stamps her feet on the ground.
‘Are you going?’ he says, trying to sound like someone who doesn’t mind.
‘I need a blanket if you want to sit out here.’
Stepping up to the van, she turns. Her hands rest on the doorframe as if she has been this way many times. As if she will continue to do so for hundreds more.
He says, ‘There’s something I would like to show you, Eileen.’
‘Give me two secs, love,’ she says. She disappears into the van.
Byron guides Eileen towards the Green. The moon is still up but the sky belongs to the dawn now, and the circle of white is losing its shine. Beneath their boots the frosted grass snaps. The blades twinkle, as if they are sugar-coated. He remembers that Eileen likes frost, better than snow, and he is happy she has a day like this. They are not holding hands but once or twice their shoulders or their hips find each other. They do not jump away.
Eileen and Byron come to a standstill beside the first of the houses on the cul-de-sac. ‘Look,’ he says. He tries not to laugh but his heart is vaulting with excitement.
He points at the home of the foreign students. No one is up, though a box of empty bottles and beer cans has been left on the doormat along with several trainers. Eileen looks confused. ‘I don’t get it,’ she says. ‘What am I looking at?’
‘Look there.’ He points.
‘I still can’t see anything.’
He guides her closer. They are standing right by the ground-floor window though there is no sound coming from inside. Gently he reaches into the plastic window box and parts a layer of leaves. Eileen peers to look closer. There are two unfolded purple crocuses.
‘Flowers?’
He nods. Putting his finger to his mouth, he whispers: ‘I did this.’
She looks confused. ‘Why?’ she says.
‘I don’t know. Maybe it was a bit for you.’
‘For me?’
‘Maybe.’
‘But you didn’t know me then.’
‘Well, I don’t know.’ He laughs.
Eileen reaches down and takes his hand in hers. She is warm as a glove. It does not frighten him. He does not flinch.
‘Would you have preferred pens?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I like this.’
He leads her to the next window box. This one is hidden by the washing line and the laundry that is never taken down. They stoop beneath the frozen tea towels and creep towards the window. Again, there is no sign of life inside the house. Beneath the layer of frozen leaves poke two slim green stalks. They are too slight yet to bear flowers but they smell clean, like pine. ‘These too?’ says Eileen. Again, he says yes. These too.
And finally Eileen gets the whole picture. She looks not simply at the two small houses in front of her, with their plastic window boxes. Hands over her eyes, as if she is creating a tunnel, she scans the whitened length of the cul-de-sac. Every house is the same. Beneath the surface of frosted leaves, there will be small signs of new life, poking through the earth.
‘When?’ she asks at last. ‘When did you do this?’
‘When people were sleeping.’
She stares at him. For a moment he wonders if he has something stuck in his teeth, like spinach, except that he hasn’t eaten any.
‘Good for you,’ she says.
Hand in hand, they cross the patch of mud that residents call the Green and head towards the enclosed ditch in the middle. This time he doesn’t need to point or speak. Instinctively, Eileen seems to know what she is going to find. The leaves he swept away earlier remain in glittering piles at the edge.
Inside the fencing, the pocket of land glows with many colours. There are tiny crocuses, aconites, snowdrops, Star of Bethlehem. Not all of them are in flower. Some are still tight buds.
‘This is where my mother died.’
‘Yes.’ She wipes her eyes.
‘Nothing would grow here. The water kept coming back. Not much. Just enough to make a ditch. Water doesn’t always do what people want it to.’
‘No.’ She nods, though.
‘Maybe that is the thing we have to accept about water. It comes and goes.’
Eileen wriggles a paper tissue out of her sleeve and blows her nose with a rattle.
He says, ‘So I brought soil. I carried manure. I planted bulbs. Every night I checked they were all right.’
‘Yes,’ she murmurs. ‘Yes.’
Eileen breaks free and moves towards the fence. She gazes down at the pool of winter flowers, where once there was a pond. Watching her, it is as if something wakens inside him. He sees Diana all over again, balancing on water. He feels the heat of that summer in 1972 when she slept under the stars and the air was drugged with the sweetness of night-scented stocks and white nicotiana. He finds his mother’s furniture: the frilled lamp, the occasional tables, the chintz armchair. All this is so clear, it is hard to keep remembering that over forty years have passed.
James Lowe was right. History is an inaccurate thing. Byron hardly dares blink in case he loses what his eyes are giving him.
But it is all around. To his left, he no longer finds the rows of affordable two-bedroom homes, wearing satellite dishes like hats. There is a Georgian house that stands square and alone against the moor. Where there are children’s swings, he sees his mother’s rose beds. He finds the patio terrace and hears her dance music. He sees the bench where they sat on a hot September night and watched for shooting stars.
Eileen turns. Suddenly, out of the frost-filled air, a cloud of summer flies converge and hover round her hair like tiny lights. She bats at them with her hand. He smiles – and in that moment his mother, the house, the summer flies are gone. They were all once here, these things, they were once his, and now they are over.
Slowly the sun rises over the horizon, like an old helium balloon, spilling colour over the sky. The clouds flame and so does the land. The moor, the trees, the frozen grass, the houses, they all blaze red, as if everything has decided it would like to be the shade of Eileen’s hair. Already cars are passing. Walkers and their dogs. There are calls of Happy New Year. People pause to look at the sunrise, the towers of saffron cloud, the ghost of a moon. Some notice the flowers. A mist rises over the land, and it is so soft it looks like breathing.
‘Shall we go back to yours?’ says Eileen.
Byron walks to the pond and meets her.
From inside the house, the old man studies his window box. He frowns, his face pressed to the glass. Then, disappearing for a few minutes, he reappears at the front door. He wears slippers and a tartan dressing gown, tied at the waist, and his new baseball cap. The old man sets one foot outside, testing the air, the ground. He picks his way towards the window box, slight as an old sparrow, and peers down.
The old man touches the two purple flowers, one and then the other, cupping them between his fingertips. He smiles as if this is what he has been waiting for all along.
And i
n other rooms, in other houses, there is Paula with Darren, there are Mr and Mrs Meade, there is Moira with the boy who plays cymbals. There is James Lowe with his wife, Margaret; Lucy with her banker. Somewhere, yes, there must even be Jeanie, married three times now, and running her mother’s lucrative import business. The foreign students; the man with or without his dangerous dog; all the residents of Crapham Village. Each of them believing on this New Year’s morning that life can change a little for the better. Their hope is slight, pale as a new shoot. It is midwinter and God knows, the frost will probably get it. But for a moment at least, there it is.
The sun climbs higher and higher, losing colour, until the moor is blue as dust.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Susanna Wadeson, Kendra Harpster, Clare Conville, Alison Barrow, Larry Finlay, Claire Ward, Andrew Davidson, Hope, Kezia, Jo and Nell, Amy and Em. But most of all, Paul Venables, because he knows this story as well as I do.
About the Author
Rachel Joyce is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and for which Rachel Joyce was awarded the Specsavers National Book Awards New Writer of the Year. She lives in Gloucestershire with her husband and four children.
www.rachel-joyce.co.uk
Also by Rachel Joyce
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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First published in Great Britain
in 2013 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Rachel Joyce 2013
Illustrations by Andrew Davidson
Quotation from William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, copyright © William Faulkner 1929, renewed 1956 by William Faulkner. Reprinted with permission of Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. and Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London
Rachel Joyce has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781446488652
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