‘A rockery? Whatever for?’
‘You can’t beat a nice little rockery, moi booty! With little plants a-growin’ hare and there!’ Uncannily Mr. Gotobed’s old gravelly voice issued from her son’s soft childish lips.
‘But I don’t want a rockery. And Miss Yaxley hasn’t even been consulted . . .’
‘Too late,’ said Timothy. ‘He’s gone for a load of them stones.’
‘But where is he going to get stones round here? There aren’t any stones. And he hasn’t finished the hedge-laying yet.’
‘I know. That’s the funny thing. He was laying the hedge quite happily, till he found what the rabbits had done.’
‘Rabbits?’ Rose’s mind began to sway again.
‘Rabbits in the garden, digging burrows. We found them and showed him. They weren’t very good burrows, not very deep. Three of them, all in one group. Mr. Gotobed filled them in again, and stamped the earth down hard. Said you didn’t want rabbits in a garden, they ate all the lettuce and cabbages.’
‘But we haven’t got any lettuces and cabbages worth saving . . .’
‘I know. We said that. But then he told us about building the rockery, and went off in a hurry.’ There was a sound of grinding outside, as they finished up their rather horrible fruits of the forest low fat yogurts, from the mini-market. A grinding as of iron on stone, a rumbling, then an enormous thump. Then a second grinding and thump; then a third.
They rushed out, to see three figures departing down the path, wheeling wheelbarrows. The first two figures were of young men in washed-out jeans, but otherwise stripped to almost the level of the crack between their buttocks. They were bronzed and muscled like young Greek gods. The sort of men Rose always felt she shouldn’t be looking at, as they rested on their shovels at some roadworks, and Rose was stuck in the resulting traffic-jam.
The last of the trio was the well-wrapped-up form of Mr. Gotobed. He turned, when he was a good distance away, and waved reassuringly.
Rose thought she ought to hurry after him. Unfortunately, entirely blocking the gate was a large and unstable heap of sharp-edged stone, quite unnavigable to anyone wearing Clarks sandals, as Rose was. To anyone wearing less than very large hobnailed boots . . .
The stone was a curious mixture; some good brown sandstone blocks, that looked as if they’d been filched from a historic monument; a lot of round stones about six inches in diameter, that Timothy said must have come from the fields; and lastly a lot of ugly shattered reinforced concrete, with rusty bits of reinforcement still sticking out of it.
Timothy surveyed the treacherous and unsightly heap. ‘Now we know how the mouse felt,’ he said, to nobody in particular.
By the time they had returned with three more barrowloads of stone, the argument was unwinnable. Rose just hadn’t the heart to make them take it all away again. They looked so hot and sweaty! And they meant so well; their grins were so boyish and pleased with themselves. She opened her mouth to chide, but only the offer of a cold drink came out.
They all, instantly, said, ‘Coke please, missus.’ And then the two young gods were introduced as Harry and Dave, and enthusiastically shook hands with everyone having first wiped their hands on their worn-out jeans with such vigor that poor Rose expected strands of pubic hair to become visible above their faded belts at any moment.
Rose might, she supposed, have still kicked up a fuss had they intended to put the rockery somewhere quite unsuitable, like the middle of the front garden. But in the end they built it on a narrow patch by the path to the outhouse, close under the shadow of the hedge. She was so relieved at the site they had chosen that she felt almost grateful to them. They carried stone all the afternoon with great energy. Rose worried about how to pay them; but Timothy came back with the message that all they required was more Coke, and Jane went whizzing up to the shop for it. Then, quite suddenly, the gateway was clear of stone again, and they were gone, and she hadn’t got to worry about their jeans falling down any more, and Mr. Gotobed was back to his hedge-laying, whistling to himself like a man with a job well done. Rose went to inspect the new rockery, tactfully, since he had made no attempt to show it to her. She had to admit they had made the best of a bad job. The pieces of concrete were towards the back, turned cunningly so that soil covered the twisting, rusted reinforcement wires. The big blocks of sandstone had been set on edge, so their corners jutted up like minute mountains. The smaller round stones had been wedged tightly between, not leaving an inch of soil exposed. The whole effect was of a decaying bit of Hitler’s West Wall, in miniature. With tank-traps. Rose told herself it was the kind thought that mattered . . .
By the time he went home, Mr. Gotobed had nearly finished the hedge-laying. The only bit of hedge untouched was the bit that overshadowed the tank-traps. But in his erratic way, he had left it, in the last half-hour of work, and turned his attention again to weeding the front garden. Rose told herself to be charitable. It would be awkward to lay that bit of hedge now, swinging the billhook standing on tiny pinnacles of sandstone. Of course, he should have thought of that before he made the damned rockery! But then, she didn’t think he could be all that bright . . .
The children were oddly troubled over supper. She kept on looking up from the Cornish pasties heated in the oven of the range, and peas and potatoes boiled on the open fire, to see them exchanging looks, nods and shrugs. Which they stopped, as soon as they saw her watching.
She looked down at her plate, carefully slicing off a triangular corner of pasty as neatly as a surgeon, and said suddenly, ‘All right, what’s going on?’
‘You tell her.’
‘No, you!’
After quite a lot of this, Timothy said, ‘Mr. Gotobed’s set snares for rabbits in the garden. They’re very cunning – you can hardly see them cos he’s wrapped grass round them – but I wondered what he was fiddling with so much, and after he’d gone, I looked.’
‘Snares?’ Rose’s blood was up in a second. ‘Do you know how snares work? Do you know how cruel they are? The rabbit’s neck goes through the loop, when it’s running along a path, and the rabbit struggles to get out and the noose tightens and tightens, until the rabbit slowly chokes to death. If it doesn’t choke on its own blood. Where are these snares?’
Timothy had gone a bit white. ‘I’ll show you, Mum. There’s three . . .’ He led the small and shocked procession out of doors.
The first was not far from the front gate. It was right against the hedge, opposite a small hole in the bottom of the hawthorns, where some small creature seemed to have worn a path in the long grass.
‘The rabbit comes running through there,’ said Rose. ‘And,’ she thrust her hand and wrist along the tiny faint path, and a noose of plaited grass closed tightly round her wrist; tightly enough to crease her pale flesh. And inside the plait of grass was the glint of plaited copper wire. And on the end of the loop of wire, a length of strong dull-brown cord. And then she heaved, and a big soily peg like a tent-peg came out of the ground with a flurry of earth. ‘That’s how a snare works!’ She added, ‘I’m going to throw it in the trash can.’
‘There isn’t one, Mum,’ said Jane thoughtfully.
‘Mr. Gotobed takes all the rubbish away,’ said Timothy.
‘They are his snares,’ said Jane. ‘They look like they cost quite a lot of money . . .’ Her voice was slightly shocked.
‘Whose side are you on?’ demanded Rose. Then she said, ‘I shall speak to him, in the morning. Go and fetch the other two snares, Tim. And make sure you don’t hurt yourself . . .’
But Tim seemed to have seen something in the surrounding grass.
‘Here’s one of the rabbit’s hairs,’ he said. ‘It’s very dark, for a rabbit.’
‘You get black rabbits,’ said Jane. ‘Witches used to keep black rabbits as familiars . . .’
‘What – in East-Enders?’ asked Timothy, with mock-serious interest.
‘No – in a book called Matthew
Hopkins, Witchfinder-general – clever!’
‘Oh, Matthew Hopkins – he’s in Dallas. I forgot.’
‘Why do you always try to make out I’m stupid when you go on and on making stupid remarks yourself that you think are funny and nobody else does only they’re too polite to say so . . .’
‘It’s getting cold,’ said Rose. ‘Let’s get back indoors.’
She was just saying it to be tactful.
So why did she shiver?
They were bedded down for the night, in the low dim bedrooms with their sloping ceilings. The exchange of insults from bedroom to bedroom had finally ceased. Jane at least had put out her oil-lamp, for her bedroom showed dark through the half-opened doors. She wondered if Tim had fallen asleep over his book with the light still on; then she heard him turn a page, the night was so silent.
She turned her own page. She wished she had a more suitable book, like Lark Rise to Candleford or Kilvert’s diary, but all she had was one of Philip’s violent thrillers, brought home from a transatlantic flight. Though it was as much about suspender-belts as guns . . . she thought sadly that after all, he was a Cambridge graduate, even if it was in science. What did men see in such books, where the women were as cold and hard as the tiny blue-barrelled automatics they produced from their stocking-tops?
The noise was a tearing of the night, a murder of the silence. It rose and cracked, as if the throat that made it could no longer sustain it. Inhuman, unearthly. Rose’s legs gave a convulsive twitch under the bedclothes. Then the noise rose again . . .
Outside. In the dark. In the garden.
A third time it rose. And then Jane came flying into the room and hurled herself on to the bed and into Rose’s arms.
‘Mummy, what is it? I thought I was having a nightmare but . . .’
The noise rose a fourth time. Savage. Yet mournful, as if there were no hope, no life left in the world. Cold and dreary as death itself, Rose thought.
A movement in the doorway made Rose’s skin leap all over. But it was only Timothy. He looked quite calm; almost as if he was enjoying himself. There was something long and black in his hands. His hands tensed, as he bent it in half . . .
‘Tim, what have you got?’
He gave a small grin. ‘Only my air-pistol. The one Dad gave me last Christmas. I thought it might come in useful in outlandish parts . . .’
‘Tim, for heaven’s sake, what good is an air-pistol?’
‘It’s a .22. It can go through a plank of wood at fifty yards. Dad and I tried it, down Bunty’s pit. It’s Yugoslav – ’
‘Tim, you wouldn’t shoot . . .’
‘Bloody would,’ he said, taking a small shiny pellet from the box that was bulging his pyjama pocket and putting it carefully into the barrel. He closed the air-pistol with a reassuring click.
The awful cry rose again, as Tim parted the curtains and opened the small window. ‘Black as the hobs of hell out here,’ said his suddenly muffled voice.
Rose leapt out of bed. If her offspring was going to shoot something on her behalf, she really ought to be there as a witness. She pushed in alongside him, in the narrow dormer window. Peered out. There was a dim blue light to the south; the one solitary neon streetlamp in the centre of Wallney, by the sub-post office. And the moon was somewhere up there, behind clouds . . . As her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, she began to see the line of the laid hedge.
‘There it is,’ said Tim. ‘On the rockery.’
There was a small black shape, on the faint paleness of the concrete lumps.
Her breath went out of her in a great whoosh. ‘It’s only cats . . . tomcats fighting.’
‘I can only see one of them.’
‘The other one must be in the hedge.’
‘But there’s only one making a noise. And it’s not hunched up like it’s going to fight. It’s just sitting.’
Another wail went up. In spite of knowing it was a cat, Rose couldn’t help shuddering. ‘I hope it goes away soon.’
‘Shall I have a pot at it?’ Tim raised the pistol.
‘Tim, how could you?’ This was a crueller Tim than she’d known before; she felt distress, that she didn’t know her own children better.
‘I don’t mean to hit it. Or only on the end of the tail, to scare it away. I’m a dead shot, you know.’
‘Certainly not. If we ignore it, it will soon go away. It’s time you were tucked up with your light out.’
‘Oh, all right. I’ll have to fire the gun though. You can’t unload it.’ The gun gave a vicious spat, and there was a sharp thud from down the garden.
‘Outhouse door,’ said Tim. ‘Have a look at the hole it’s made, in the morning.’
‘Tim, really!’
But with a rather sinister little giggle, he had slipped away to bed.
She went back to bed in a fluster. Really, damaging people’s property . . . he needed a father’s hand.
Which reminded her that she hadn’t tried to phone Philip this evening. She’d just forgotten. What was she coming to? It was all that upset about the rockery. Everyone was being so very odd.
And that damned cat went on yowling and yowling, fit to wake the dead.
She finally managed to get to sleep by jamming a pillow over her ear. She’d only ever read about people doing that before.
She wakened feeling leaden and weary. Breakfast was a chore to make, because the fire in the range had gone out, in spite of careful banking-up. The kids were weary too. It was a morose meal, during which Rose several times asked herself what the heck she was doing here, instead of sitting down to fresh coffee and croissants in some four-star hotel. This was supposed to be a vacation, for God’s sake!
She went back to cleaning the sitting-room, telling the kids to ask Mr. Gotobed to come and see her as soon as he got here. She was still angry about the snares, and even more angry about the half-inch hole in the outhouse door. That gun was a terrifying thing; the pellet had gone through the outhouse seat too. Mr. Gotobed would certainly notice, and might go and tell Miss Yaxley. Philip had been totally irresponsible buying Timothy a lethal weapon like that. She was cross with nearly everybody.
And she was cross with the dimness of the sitting-room, even on a sunny morning. In a fit of reluctance to start, she idly picked up the book that she’d found under the armchair. Such funny writing. The way you thought you could just about read it, then found when you focused your eyes that you couldn’t. It didn’t seem to be in any foreign language; she knew French and German, and could recognise most European languages. It seemed more like abbreviated English. ‘Wth’ might be ‘with,’ for instance . . .
‘You wanted me, missus?’ The small open window darkened, and she looked up to see Mr. Gotobed standing outside. He had a truculent look on his face; she somehow knew that he knew about the snares. Oh, God, more bother! She walked to the window, studying Mr. Gotobed’s face. His eyes were slitty, and his mouth turned down.
And then his eyes dropped to the level of her navel. His mouth fell open, displaying a decaying graveyard of leaning teeth. His eyes, from being slitty, went very wide; she could quite distinctly see the whites all round them. She thought, as he looked her in the face again, that he was about to scream. He had certainly gone very pale; his unshaven whiskers stood out like dark paint. Perhaps he was going to have a stroke or a heart attack . . .
Instinctively, she reached out her free hand.
‘Mr. Gotobed . . .’
He backed away from her hand as if it held a viper.
His mouth made a couple of movements and a moan came out. And then suddenly he wasn’t there any more. He was running down the garden path, as fast as his old legs would carry him. He flung open the front gate so savagely that it fell off its remaining hinge. And then he was just a head bobbing away down the lane.
Two more heads appeared at the window, as she stood paralysed.
‘What did you say to Mr. Gotobed?’ asked Tim in an awed voice.
&nb
sp; ‘I only said, “Mr. Gotobed,” ’ said Rose, helplessly. ‘Then he ran off. He looked terrified. Why should he suddenly be terrified of me?’
Her children looked at her, with disconcerting seriousness.
‘Your hair needs combing,’ said Jane. ‘And you’re not wearing any makeup. But you never do, in the mornings.’
‘Bare feet in sandals,’ said Tim severely. ‘It must be your hippy image, Mum.’ She realised with relief that their seriousness was only mockery.
‘But why? He sort of looked at my tummy, and then he moaned and ran.’
‘Your shirt’s out and hanging down under your sweater,’ said Tim. ‘But he’s a grown man! Perhaps he fancies you, Mum. Perhaps you aroused his lust to breaking point . . .’
‘Be serious.’ Rose was on the verge of tears. It was the first time she had ever terrified anybody in her life.
‘Were you holding that book?’ said Jane sharply. ‘How were you holding it?’
She showed them.
‘In front of your tummy,’ said Jane. ‘He must have been looking at that book.’
‘But why . . . a book?’
Jane took the book from her. ‘It’s a very odd-looking book. You can’t read the writing. Perhaps it’s a book of spells . . .’
‘Bollocks,’ said Timothy. ‘It’s handwriting. ’Spect it’s old Yaxley’s secret diary. Maybe he was keeping records on everybody in the village, and blackmailing them. Maybe Mr. Gotobed thought you were going to blackmail him.’
‘But what . . .’ The idea of Mr. Gotobed being blackmailed was ridiculous.
‘Poaching rabbits?’ suggested Tim. ‘Growing marijuana on his allotment? Getting the milkmaids preggers?’
‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous.’
‘He’s left his wheelbarrow and his tools and everything. What shall we do if he doesn’t come back? Who’s going to see to us?’
‘I’d better go and talk to him, I suppose,’ said Rose wearily.
‘But he’s terrified of you,’ said Tim. The kids looked at each other. ‘He’s not terrified of us. We’ll go and talk to him. Take him his wheelbarrow. That’ll be a good excuse.’ They nodded to each other, with secretive grins. They were really raring to go.
Spectral Shadows Page 25
