The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales - [SSC]

by Brian Stableford

  Her mother removed her spectacles and squinted at them. “I really should have booked an optician’s appointment over Easter,” she said. “It’ll probably have to wait till summer now.”

  “So much to do,” Angie observed, trying in vain to imitate her father’s voice. “So little time.”

  The village of Little Wychwood was about half a mile away on the map, but the map didn’t take account of the ups and downs. In spite of their name, and in spite of the fact that the appearance was plainly paradoxical, the South Downs seemed to Angie to have far more ups than downs. The ones between Orchard Cottage and Little Wychwood seemed much steeper on foot than they had in a car.

  On the return journey, of course, the ups became downs and the downs became ups, but the ups still seemed more numerous and more awkward, even though it didn’t make sense. The fact that Angie had to carry a bag full of shopping didn’t help.

  They had looked around the village for more than an hour, but there was so little to see that they hadn’t really needed that long. The heart of the village was a pub called The Elms, whose most notable feature seemed to Angie to be the incongruous reach of its car park. The shop was much tinier than their local supermarket in Kingston. There was a church too, and a graveyard, but the church was no longer in use and the graveyard was overgrown by long grass.

  “Is it called Little Wychwood because people used to hunt witches around here?” Angie asked, once they were safely out of earshot of any villagers who might take offence.

  “I don’t think so,” her mother replied. “I think it’s something to do with a kind of tree called a wych-elm. If the name of the pub signifies anything at all, there must have been a grove of them hereabouts, in the days before we were invaded by Dutch elm disease.”

  “Just like the cottage, then,” Angie remarked. “One’s called after apple trees that died, the other after elm trees that died.”

  “Don’t be so morbid,” her mother advised. “Look—here’s Mrs. Lamb on her way to the village.”

  Mrs. Lamb was their only close neighbor; they had met her for the first time back in October. She lived in a house set back from the road between the cottage and Little Wychwood, hidden behind a tall hedge. Its gate bore the name Well House, although Angie suspected that any well that might once have been in its grounds had run dry long before the 1930s.

  Mrs. Lamb was older than either of Angie’s grandmothers and she kept a black cat, but she didn’t look like the kind of witch after which Little Wychwood hadn’t been named. In fact, her blue-rimmed spectacles and her tied-back hair made her look like a retired primary school teacher, which was what she was. According to Angie’s mother, however, she and Mrs. Lamb had nothing in common, because Mrs. Lamb had done her teaching in a very different era, in a very different school.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Lamb,” Angie’s mother said, cheerfully.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Martindale,” Mrs. Lamb replied. “Hello, Angela.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Lamb,” Angie replied, dutifully.

  “We’re down for the whole school holiday,” Angie’s mother explained. “There’s just the decorating to do now—and the back garden, of course.”

  “Clearing that dead orchard will be back-breaking work,” Mrs. Lamb observed. “You’ll need more people in to do that, I suppose.”

  “Rob’s going to hire a chainsaw and a heavy strimmer, to see how difficult it is,” Angie’s mother said. “Not this time, though— it’ll have to wait until summer. With luck, we’ll get most of the painting done over Easter, and the rest on the odd weekend in May and June. It’ll be so nice to get it all finished—it was a big job. I don’t think Rob realized how much we were taking on.”

  “You’ll want to be careful with that old orchard,” Mrs. Lamb said, looking at Angie rather than her mother.

  “We will,” Angie’s mother assured her. “If Rob has to use heavy duty weed-killer he’ll wear a mask. We’ll be sure to warn you when we burn the rubbish—but it won’t be this trip.”

  “Lots of nasty things under that bindweed,” Mrs. Lamb continued, still looking down at Angie from behind her blue-rimmed spectacles. “Two weeks is a long time for little folk with nothing much to do, but you don’t want to go rooting around in there. Townsfolk are always allergic—not used to country plants, see.”

  “There can’t be much pollen about yet,” Angie’s mother said. “The bindweed’s beginning to flower, but the jungle seems to be mostly hawthorn, brambles and dead apple trees. Angie doesn’t suffer from allergies, though—Cathy’s the one who gets hay fever.”

  “I’ll be helping with the stripping,” Angie put in, because she didn’t want Mrs. Lamb to think that she’d be idling around for two whole weeks.

  “Must get on,” Mrs. Lamb said, continuing on her way towards the village.

  “Have a nice day,” Angie’s mother said, to the older woman’s retreating back.

  “Aren’t country people supposed to be friendly?” Angie asked, when Mrs. Lamb was safely out of range.

  “She is friendly,” her mother insisted. “Just not very talkative. Comes of living alone, I suppose. I couldn’t. Not without a car, at any rate.”

  “What nasty things might there be under the bindweed? Why was she looking at me when she said it?”

  “Thorns, I suppose,” her mother told her. “She’s right, though—you don’t want to go burrowing around in there.”

  “Poisonous thorns?” Angie asked.

  “No, of course not—but scratches can start allergic reactions, even in people who don’t get hay fever. When your father’s cleared it we can make a nice big lawn, with flower beds. Until then, best let it alone.”

  The natural result of this advice was that Angie immediately began to take a greater interest in the dead orchard than she had before. While her mother put the shopping away, Angie ran around to the back of the cottage, along the paved path that ran beside it to the left.

  From ground level the tangle of vegetation didn’t look like a carpet or a sea, although it wasn’t tall enough to be a forest. It was more like a huge square hedge, like a country house maze without any internal pathways. Because of her fondness for puzzle-book mazes, her lather had sought out some real ones for her to get lost in—and she had got lost at first, because being inside a maze was quite different from looking down at a drawing. Her father had explained the trick of finding one’s way out, though. “Like any other problem, it’s just a matter of method,” he’d told her. “Remember the motto.”

  It looked as if Mrs. Lamb’s advice to stay out of the thicket would be very easy to follow, because there seemed to be no way in. There was no gap at all between the vegetation and the garden wall, whose uppermost stones were so irregular that trying to walk along the top of it would be highly dangerous. A path of sorts had been cleared between the brambles and the wall of the house, so that the builders could fix their scaffolding and go in and out of the back door, but all they’d done was to stamp everything down with heavy boots, and now they’d gone the brambles had begun to rear up again much more forcefully than the feebler plants in the front garden. The greenery facing Angie, extending between the garden wall and the house, was like a solid wall itself.

  Angie went around the other side of the house. The wall of the house was much closer to the wall of the property on that side and the unpaved path was much narrower; the mass of green blocking its far end seemed even denser, in spite of the builders’ attempts to clear a way for themselves. It was so difficult to see anything within the thicket that Angie settled for leaning over and putting her ear close to the green surface, hoping that she might hear something interesting within. She didn’t know what sort of animals might be using it as a refuge, but she felt sure that there must be some—mice, at least. If there were, they were being just as quiet as she was trying to be.

  “Daddy had better hire a bulldozer instead of a strimmer,” she said, with a sigh. She straightened up, intending to turn away—but as she did
, a movement caught her eye. It was in the higher branches, where the nearest apple tree must have been planted, but it wasn’t a bird moving inside the thicket. The movement seemed to be on the surface created by the bindweed, as if something invisible were moving over it, leaving brief footprints behind.

  “Trick of the wind,” she said.

  “What’s that, treasure?” her mother asked, from the corner at the front of the house. “What are you doing down there?”

  “Nothing,” Angie replied, to both questions.

  “I wondered where you’d got to,” her mother said, as Angie joined her and they went inside. “Your case is still on your bed— you haven’t unpacked yet. We’re here for a fortnight, remember. This isn’t just an overnight slay, like the other times. It’ll be the first taste we’ve had of living here. I do hope you like it.” Angie guessed that her mother must be thinking anxiously about Cathy’s reaction to the possibility of spending an entire fortnight in the cottage.

  They went into the kitchen, where her mother immediately set about making preparations for dinner. “Cathy will like it too, when it’s all done,” Angie said, supportively. “When we’ve got a lawn and flower-beds. She’ll be able to bring her friends down to visit.”

  “Not if we’re not here, she won’t,” her mother was quick to say. “Special friends, maybe—one at a time. This place is for your father, really—so he can get away at weekends and have a rest. I do wish Cathy wouldn’t be so difficult.”

  “She’s a teenager,” Angie said, echoing her father’s all-purpose explanation for Cathy’s difficulties. Angie would be a teenager herself in not much more than a year’s time, and she couldn’t help wondering whether she, too, might turn out to be difficult.

  Angie’s mother was busy chopping carrots and made no response to the ritual remark. Mrs. Martindale didn’t cook much during the week but she always made an extra effort at weekends. She believed in making sure that her children ate lots of healthy food, even if she had to cram it into them in two days rather than spreading it out over seven.

  “I’ll go unpack, then,” Angie said.

  She went back up to her room, but instead of making a start on moving her clothes from the small suitcase to the chest of drawers she went to the window and looked out over the bindweed-tiled roof of the dead orchard. The green surface was still moving, and it was easy to imagine that the movements were slow waves and ripples on the surface of a heavy sea—or that invisible creatures really were moving over it, pushing it down where their big feet landed for a moment before moving on.

  Angie tried to make a mental map of the positions of the wave-crests, expecting to find that they would be arranged in a series of neat rows, because that seemed the obvious pattern in which to plant apple trees in an orchard. She couldn’t make out any neat rows, though, whether running from the house to the back wall of the garden or across the garden from side wall to side wall. Indeed, when she tried to find some sense in the arrangement of the dead tree-tops, it was more reminiscent of a spiral than a grid.

  “Perhaps that’s how they planted orchards back in the 1930s,” Angie murmured. “Perhaps they always have. Or maybe the hawthorn trees have grown so big by now that they’re taller than the dead apple-trees. The spiral’s just an illusion—like the idea that something invisible might be moving over the bindweed.”

  She moved sideways to look through pieces of the old glass instead of the clearer ones. The impression of a spiral seemed to become even stronger, as did the suggestion that something was moving over—or perhaps under—the surface of the wind-stirred bindweed.

  After she had put her clothes away Angie went back downstairs. “Has anyone in the village said anything about the cottage being haunted?” She asked her mother.

  “No, precious,” her mother replied. “Why? Were you talking to a ghost just now? You talk to yourself so often at home that I didn’t think anything of it.”

  “No,” Angie said. “I was just watching the invisible monsters scuttling and slithering about on the bushes in the back garden.”

  “You’ll need to be careful, watching invisible monsters,” her mother said, without a trace of anxiety in her voice. “Sometimes, if you look hard enough, you begin to see them. That’s when you need to start worrying.”

  Angie was glad that her mother trusted her enough to know that any talk of ghosts and invisible monsters was just a joke. Like her father, her mother often told her that she was an engineer’s daughter through and through.

  “It’s okay,” Angie assured her mother. “If they put on enough weight to be seen, they’ll fall right through into the heart of the maze—and then the poisonous thorns will tear them to pieces, or make them sneeze themselves to death.”

  “That’s why there are so few invisible monsters about nowadays, treasure,” her mother said. “It’s the allergies that get them, every time.”

  * * * *

  3.

  Although the next day was Sunday, Angie and her mother were up early, eager to make a start on stripping the walls. They were each armed with a scraper and a bucket of soapy water.

  By the time they’d been working for an hour in the lounge-dining room—where there were already big gaps in the paper left by the builders when they’d knocked down the partition wall—Angie had begun to wonder how she’d ever got the idea that stripping wallpaper might be fun. It was much harder work than she had expected, because the wallpaper was much more resistant to being stripped than she’d imagined. Whenever she seemed to have a nice fat strip that got broader as she pulled it would suddenly decide to narrow itself down. Whenever a piece seemed to be coming away cleanly it would suddenly stick hard and leave a stubborn patch behind.

  Angie was interested to discover that there were three layers of paper, which had been laid one atop another. The apple-blossom paper had been put on top of an elaborately-textured paper whose colors ranged from beige to chestnut brown. Beneath that was something thicker and more fibrous, whose colors included royal blue and silver.

  There was a certain pleasure in taking an edge turned up by the scraper between her fingernails and pulling steadily, hoping that a huge strip might come away. More often than not she’d be left with a piece in her fingertips that was only a little larger than the edge she’d turned up, but on the rare occasions when things worked out the strip would curl up in her hand, as if it were finally able to revert to the shape it wanted to be after a hundred years of being forced to lie flat.

  Wherever the plaster underneath the paper was uneven, little islands of paper were left behind, clinging hard—and when the plaster wasn’t uneven to start with, it often became uneven as it cracked and crumbled under the pressure of the scrapers.

  “Don’t worry about the plaster coming away, precious,” her mother told her, as a whole section melted into dust and miniature rubble. “Daddy will skim the whole surface before he paints it.”

  “Do we have to do one room at a time?” Angie asked. “1 think I’d rather make a start in my bedroom.”

  “It’s all got to come off eventually, I suppose. You can make a start upstairs if you like. It won’t be any easier, though, even if there aren’t so many layers.”

  As predicted, the wallpaper in Angie’s bedroom proved just as hard to remove from the wall as the paper downstairs—although there were, indeed, fewer layers and the outer layer of paper wasn’t as dirty. Here, a relatively plain paper patterned in pink and blue had been laid over something very similar to the bottom layer in the downstairs room. On the other hand, because the bedroom was so much smaller than the lounge-dining room, the job seemed far less daunting. The ceiling was lower too, although Angie still had to stand on a chair to reach the higher parts of the wall.

  Once she’d figured out that the paper became much easier to strip away after it had been soaked for some time, Angie doused the entire wall around the window while she was still working on the narrow strip between that wall and the doorway. By the time she’d cleared the st
rip, the paper around the window was ready to come off a little more easily.

  The plaster underneath the wallpaper was more grey than white, and sometimes stained with yellow and brown. It had occasional pencil marks on it, which the first of the two paper-hangers— presumably working long before the 1930s—must have used in calculating how much paper he would use and how it would need to be cut.

  In mid-afternoon, when she returned to work after spending a leisurely break reading on her bed, Angie peeled back an unusually satisfying strip to find more markings on the plaster, in black ink rather than pencil. They seemed to have been made by a fine brush rather than a pen.

  At first, Angie thought that the first drawing she uncovered must be a doodle of some kind—the kind of thing her father drew absent-mindedly on the message-pad beside the phone, consisting of a series of interlocking shapes or an expanding spiral. It looked like something that the wallpaper-hanger might have done in an idle moment, while taking a short break and staring out of the window.