"This is the boys' day."
His father's glossy black Rover had refrained from invading the personal space of the Civic and the Volkswagen on the paving in front of the house. A swarm of contorted parchment-coloured leaves came scuttling along the road, and one shaped like a reptile's claw swooped towards Sam as he shut himself in the Rover. The car was gliding out of Woodland Close when his father said "So was I making as much of your aunt as everyone seemed to believe?"
"I didn't."
"That's because you aren't a woman. How's the girlfriend situation?"
"Nobody just now."
"Well, remember if there's anything you want to consult me about I'm as close as your phone." As Sam assured himself that wasn't meant to treat him like a client, his father said "And what are you making of Sylvia?"
"I'm trying to get used to having her around."
"Lucky you, or is it?"
"It's strange with someone else in the house."
"I wish it weren't," his father said, and cleared his throat of a hint of wistfulness.
"Anyway, we aren't talking about me."
"I wish we were."
"We did explain the situation to you at the time, me and your mother."
"You can use longer words now."
"It was simply when the firm moved out of Brichester it was either tag along with them or start again with people I didn't particularly like and at less of a salary into the bargain. I know you understood why your mother felt she had to stay. I thought you understood me too."
"I didn't say I didn't."
"It made sense for you to stay with her when Margo could help look after you, and we tried to make sure you saw enough of me. That doesn't stop me feeling guilty, all the same."
"Why would you want to feel that?"
"I don't want it at all," Sam's father retorted, only to admit "Perhaps I do if I'm honest.
Perhaps I don't need to. We'll have to see how you grow up."
That sounded like a threat to engineer the process. Apparently concluding he'd said enough for the moment, he inserted a compact disc of Beethoven symphonies into the player as the car left Goodmanswood behind. The music had barely announced itself with a flurry of notes when he turned it lower than the wind.
"Sorry I was late, by the way. I nearly did a silly on the bypass."
Sam wasn't merely watching but feeling the woods crowd towards him. He was less than fully aware of being expected to ask "What was that?"
"Tried to dodge something that wasn't there."
"What?" Sam demanded.
"It must have been the shadow of a tree or a lot of them. I thought it was someone running in front of the car at first, as if anyone could stretch across the whole road."
"How could just a shadow make you late?"
"Because I braked before I tried to take avoiding action. I nearly had a pair of trucks up my nether regions, and after that I needed a few minutes in a lay-by to recuperate."
"I still don't get it," Sam said uneasily. "It couldn't have been a shadow when the sun isn't behind the woods yet."
"There are trees on this side of the road as well, old fellow. As a matter of fact I think it was here," Sam's father said, nodding at the trees that staked out the grounds of the Arbour.
Sam tried and failed to see how any of those trees could have cast a shadow across the bypass, even when the sun was lower. He felt as though the depths of the forest or something they concealed were effortlessly pacing the car. He couldn't think for the Beethoven, which kept repeating itself louder like someone shouting at a deaf person or a foreigner while the treetops seemed to describe shapes more sinuous and patterns more complex than any music.
He couldn't grasp how long it took the car to pass the woods. He saw them shrink in the mirror as the motorway glittered with traffic ahead, but he felt as if they were dwindling only to reveal more of themselves, to increase themselves somehow. They remained a hovering restless many-limbed presence in his mind and at his back as the motorway reeled Brichester towards him. He was indifferent to the sight of the university towering over streets of repetitive houses until his father said "You'll need to tell me where we're meant to go, old chap."
That was Worlds Unlimited, which Sam realised now had been the first destination he could think of. "Past the, right," he said. "I don't mean right, I mean right, straight on. Right now, right here." He felt as if he was playing a video game on the monitor that was the windscreen, and clumsily too. "Along, right, no, just along. Here."
He could see without leaving his seat that the new shop window was intact, but he hobbled to check the door was locked. Beyond the window the display of books seemed to consist of little more than lumps of paper. "I can't say I'm surprised you don't want to hang round in a seedy district like this," his father remarked as Sam returned to the car.
Sam saw a page of last night's newspaper dodging from doorway to doorway like a messenger outdistanced by its message while two beer bottles clashed in the gutter. "Onward then, is it?" his father said.
"May as well."
"Where do you suggest?"
"The pub."
"I like a mystery as much as the next man, but I wouldn't mind knowing which."
"Go back. We have to go back."
They had indeed already passed the Scholars' Rest, which might have been the only one Sam could bring to mind. Beneath a jauntily sagging slate roof the squat sandstone building faced the university campus, where isolated saplings were practising moves. Each window of the pub held a swelling like a great blind eye. Once across the thick doorstep worn convex by centuries of feet and through the small stout door, Sam was reminded that the dim low-timbered interior was lined with old books. He let his father buy him a pint of Witch's Brew, the strongest ale, and downed a quarter of it, then another. Having observed this with a mixture of admiration and amusement, his father said "Are we eating here as well?"
"There's
food."
"I did spot that. Let's see what's tempting," his father said, opening an unnecessarily giant menu that bore a cartoon of a mortarboard. "Lecturer's Lasagne. Student's Salad.
Graduate's Grill. Professor's Prawns. Coed's Chilli.
Bursar's Burger. Vice-Chancellor's Veggies. Sophomore's Steak..."
"Lasagne sounds all right."
"Does it?" his father said as though he'd failed to make the humour sufficiently obvious.
"Lasagne it is, then," he told the gowned barman, "and a Porter's Platter for me."
Sam had halved the remainder of his pint by the time the barman finished typing the order on a till that chirped like a bird. "Another before we sit down?" his father suggested.
"Do you want me to get it?"
"No, I want you to get around it." He gave Sam's immediately empty tankard only the briefest of frowns. "Everything's on me," he said.
Sam carried his second pint to a desk laid with sunlight that couldn't penetrate the empty inkwell. Whenever traffic or pedestrians passed outside, their distorted movements in the bloated windows made him feel as if he were viewing the street through someone else's eyes, too many of them. He tried peering at the contents of the shelves around him-children's novels older than himself, fifties self-help books, outdated histories, forgotten best-sellers-but the act of trying to distinguish ill-lit books seemed inexplicably ominous. "Looking for something special?" his father said.
"No."
"I'm sure you are even if it isn't here. You won't be angry if I admit I don't think it's that shop of yours."
"Maybe I don't either."
"Then shall we give your future a look?"
Sam's brain felt full of enough alcohol for any uninvited advice to float on.
"If
you
want."
"I was rather hoping you might."
The arrival of lunch-a less than full but steaming dish of lasagne, and a platter laden with the bread and cheese and pickles ploughmen, not porters, were alleged to favour-was by no m
eans the only reason why Sam failed to see ahead.
He fed himself a mouthful of lasagne to gain time, and was taking at least as long as seemed justifiable with it when his father said "Maths was always my best subject, which is why I'm an accountant. English is yours, so can't you make it work for you?"
All at once the setting inspired Sam. "I will soon."
"I feel happier already. Any preview available?"
"I'll still be in books. I'll be a publisher."
"Well, nobody could accuse you of not being ambitious."
"I don't mean right away. I'll get a job in the industry and work my way up."
"That's the attitude. You know you'll have to move down my way to get anywhere.
Have you told Heather?"
"Not till I've been for some interviews. I'm only telling you because you asked."
"I appreciate it, old chap. It's a secret, is it, till you say otherwise?"
"She's got enough changes in her life right now," Sam said, and tried to hold on to his vision. "So when I've been in publishing a few years I'll know when anyone is looking to put money into a new firm, and I'll have made enough of a name that they'll want me along. And I'll know who the writers are who are going to be hot, and we'll buy them in. Maybe I'll be one of them too. I feel like writing a book."
"If you can impress whoever interviews you as much as you've just impressed me I don't think you'll have many problems. Even if things don't work out exactly as you think, you'll be in a real job."
Sam bowed his head to meet a forkful of lasagne. "So is anything else hatching in there?" his father said.
"Where?"
"The old skull. The old brain."
Sam found the choice of words obscurely unnerving until his father said "I was just wondering if you had an idea for a book."
"A wood bigger than the world."
"A fantasy, you mean."
"Someone who lives in it, who's been born in it, tries to get to the end of it to see what else there is. He keeps climbing trees but he can never see anything else."
"What did some writer say, write what you know? You climbing that tree may come in useful after all." Sam's father took a sip of barely alcoholic lager and said "Does he have a name, your chap?"
The details of the book felt even more like dreaming aloud than Sam's thoughts about publishing had. "Bosky," he said.
"I'd say he'd stick in people's minds. Anything else you want to share about him?"
"He meets someone who leads him to the secret of the woods."
"A girl, would I be right?" When Sam found himself nodding his father said "And the secret is..."
"Stuff a wizard buried."
"Do you know what that is yet, or don't you want to say?"
Sam felt his brows tightening as if to hold in any response. "Keep it to yourself if you'd rather write it first," his father said. "Have you got a tide?"
Sam's mind had another surprise for him. "The Only Way Out is Down."
"You know, I think all this is worth celebrating. What do you say to champagne?"
"You're
driving."
"Then we'll save it for the next time you're in London."
Sam was unable to envisage when that might be. "What's been happening there recently?" he said to compensate.
"They've opened a Thai round the corner from me I'll buy you dinner at next time you're down..." Sam's father described what sounded like at least a week's worth of attractions as a preamble to making no more of his successes at work than he apparently felt a man should.
Almost whenever it seemed appropriate, Sam uttered expressions of interest or enthusiasm or admiration while finding the subjects almost as unreal as the future he'd invented. He felt closer to his tale of Bosky, but even that struck him as a retelling of a story he couldn't remember having been told. Eventually he became aware that his tankard was the focus of attention.
"Another," his father said, "or shall we do something else with the rest of the day?"
A glance showed Sam that the street was competing with the interior of the pub for dimness. "Looks like there isn't any rest," he said.
"How about a stroll to walk off lunch? A fit man means a fit head. If you come to live near enough you can join my gym."
"Would you mind a lot if I went home? I didn't sleep all that much last night."
"I hope it was having so many ideas that kept you awake."
"Must have been," Sam said and stood up fast to abandon the topic.
Misshapen leaves pattered to meet him as he left the pub. They'd been blown from the saplings on the campus, but he could have imagined that the trees south of Goodmanswood had sent them to urge his return. Long before the forest swelled into view, amassing the dusk beyond the motorway, he felt it growing in his mind. As the car came abreast of the woods, it seemed to him that their depths were impenetrably lightless. Or could there be a room that was-a room where a figure was turning its head in the dark to follow the progress of the car?
"Sam," his father said, and then "Tell me to be quiet if you're getting ideas for your book."
"Quiet," Sam said, though at the sound of his father's voice the woods had closed into themselves in some indefinable way and were pretending to be no more than woods. He rubbed his knees to erase a memory of damp earth. When the Arbour came in sight he saw his grandfather at the upstairs window, a silhouette intent on the view. Sam clenched his teeth so as not to speak-clenched them until the forest swept away the lights of the hospital. While it was visible he had been tempted to ask to be driven there, to find out whether Lennox was aware of a room in the woods.
11
A Hidden Price
RANDALL confined himself to clearing his throat for the benefit of whoever might take notice until a student marched to the counter. "Excuse me?" she repeated, this time to him.
"Yes, of course. That's to say I'll just be..." When she drew a breath and expelled it with quite as much force he waived the delay and raised his bushy eyebrows to her. "How can I help?"
"Can you ask that lady to be a bit quieter?"
"I'm sure she isn't meaning to disturb you," he said loudly enough for Sylvia to hear but without any visible effect on her. "I'll speak to her," he added hastily, then glanced at Heather.
"That's if-"
Heather sighed and stood up. "I will."
She hadn't reached the table on which books surrounded Sylvia's notepad when Sylvia emitted yet another laugh not unlike a gasp. "Sylvie," Heather murmured.
"Yes, come take a look. The more I read the more I find there is."
"Well done, only could you see about keeping some of your enjoyment to yourself?
I don't mean don't tell me. It's just that most of these people are studying for essays if not exams."
"Like we did, and look how far we've come." Before Heather could decide if that and Sylvia's wide eyes hid any irony, Sylvia added "Of course I'll do what my big sister says. Sorry, anyone who's been having to listen to me."
"I expect they'll forgive you this once."
Most of the students nodded in at least some agreement, and Heather had taken a step away from the table when Sylvia said "See just this one thing while you're here."
Heather lowered her voice in the hope it would take Sylvia's down. "What is it, Sylvie?"
Sylvia pushed a bulky history of Roman Britain towards her and underlined a passage with a fingertip, and Heather remembered fingering stories as she read them aloud to her sister.
While the Roman advance left Stonehenge unscathed, there is evidence of the destruction of at least one Neolithic site of worship. This appears to have been a stone circle some fifteen miles north of the present boundary of Bristol.
Later quotations from a contemporary account, now lost, suggest that the razing of the area subsequent to the demolition of the circle uncovered evidence of still earlier rites. The account apparently noted that such was the thoroughness of the demolition that the stones of the circle were reduced
to dust, itself then cast into the River Severn. It remains unclear whether the Romans planted the area with trees, but it was forested by the seventh century, when a nearby settlement was named Goodman's or Goodman's Wood.
"Ah," said Heather. "You're saying now we know who Goodman was."
"Do
we?"
"An Anglo-Saxon by the sound of him."
"If that's how you read it. I thought the important part was this was the only stone circle the Romans didn't leave alone. Did you know the ice in the Ice Age stopped just a few miles north of Goodmanswood?"
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