The Forest of Souls

by Carla Banks

  Her head was starting to ache by the time she’d read the first few pages. She checked her watch. It was after seven. She had been here for almost two hours. She hesitated, reluctant to pull herself away, but she wanted to check on Hannah who had been complaining of earache and a sore throat.

  She switched on her phone. The beep as it found the network was an intrusion from the 21st century. She keyed in Daniel’s number, but his answering machine took the call. She left a message, feeling relieved that she wouldn’t have to talk to him. ‘It’s Helen. I’m just checking that the kids are okay. I’ll see you on Thursday.’ His usual day for having the children.

  She was just getting back to the letters when her phone rang. It was Daniel. ‘I was working out front,’ he said. ‘Any reason why they wouldn’t be okay?’

  She didn’t want to row. ‘Hannah felt poorly. And it’s not their usual night…’

  ‘Right. It isn’t. And you dump Hannah when she’s ill.’

  She felt a stab of anxiety. ‘Ill? Has the earache…?’

  ‘She’s fine, since you’re so worried. They need their routine, Helen. Except when it suits you.’

  ‘I told you. I had to work. Like you do, you know? When you get a late call?’

  ‘Oh, sure, old letters and bits of paper. What does your wife do, Mr Kovacs? Oh, she’s got a BA in old shopping lists.’ There was a moment’s silence, then he added. ‘And a PhD in banging the boss.’

  Not that again. ‘I’m working,’ she said. ‘Are the kids okay? That’s all I wanted to know.’

  ‘I told you. They’re fine.’

  ‘Can I speak to Hannah?’

  ‘It’s a bad line. She won’t be able to hear you.’

  ‘I’ll be home by nine. I’ll phone when–’

  ‘She’ll be in bed.’ His voice was cold.

  ‘I know. I’d just like to say–’

  ‘I’ll tell her you called.’ He hung up.

  She felt depressed after the call. She and Daniel couldn’t even have a civil conversation about the children. At least it looked as though she wouldn’t have to take time off to go to the doctor’s with Hannah. She wouldn’t have to cancel her meeting with Faith.

  She looked at the letters spread out on the desk in front of her, and at the diary. She was about to make a decision. She couldn’t finish reading these here. She’d assumed there would be some kind of copying facilities–the word ‘library’ had conjured up a different image from the one that had confronted her. But no one knew the letters and diary were here, so no one would miss them. She could slip them into her bag and take them away to study at her leisure. It would be okay–she was a bona fide scholar, and she could quietly return them when she’d finished with them. No harm done.

  And that was when she heard the sound. It was–it had been–the soft click of the door. ‘Nick?’ she said. There was no response. She paused with the notebook closed over her finger. ‘Hello?’ she said.

  Silence whispered back. And in the silence…Was she imagining it?–the faintest sound of breathing, of something moving through the darkness like silk. She stood up, suddenly uneasy. ‘Who’s there?’ She picked up the lamp to lift it higher, to expand the area of light, but the cord pulled tight. She put it down on the desk and moved slowly back down the aisle, the high shelves looming shadows in the darkness.

  Now her imagination was playing tricks, making movements in the dark corners of the room, making soft sounds like footsteps behind her. She spun round, looking back along the aisle to the pool of light that marked the place where she had been working. ‘Hello?’ she said again.

  The aisle was empty, running back into the shadows. But she’d heard…

  Then there was someone behind her and before she could move something snaked round her neck and pulled tight. Her breath was cut off and her hands clawed futilely at the thing that bit deep into her flesh, feeling the slipperiness of blood under her fingers. Blood? My blood? And her legs were starting to tremble as she twisted and struggled for air and there was no one behind her as her flailing arms hit out and the darkness was darker and…

  And the circle of light from the desk lamp crept up the wall, illuminating the shelves, up and up until the balance mechanism caught, and the light froze, fixed upwards at the stained and ornate ceiling where a plaster cherub, half its face gone, dispensed grapes from fingerless hands and the stains darkened as the rain penetrated and dripped on to the papers spread out below.

  2

  When Faith was a child, she thought that she lived in a forest. Her grandfather’s house, where she spent her childhood, was surrounded by trees, beech and sycamore and chestnut, their heavy leaves shielding it in summer and their branches standing like guardians when the winter stripped them bare. The garden was a playground of green tunnels and damp leaf mould where the sun would sometimes break through and dapple the ground with sudden colour–the vivid green of a leaf, the scarlet of a berry.

  The house itself was a place of dark corridors and closed-up rooms, cold and rather comfortless. But she could remember the evenings she spent with her grandfather when he read to her from his book of fairy tales with pictures of witches and goblins, dark paths and mysterious houses in forest glades. And he would tell her stories about his own childhood in a house built deep in a forest, somewhere far away.

  And she could remember the way his face would change sometimes as he talked. His voice would falter and then fall silent, and he would pat her hand absently and say, ‘That is enough, little one.’ He would go to his study and the door would close behind him with the finality of silence…

  Faith woke suddenly, sitting up in bed, the quilt that had tangled round her as she slept sliding on to the floor. For a moment she didn’t know where she was, then the confusion cleared. She was in her house in Glossop, where she had lived for just a month. It was still dark. She could see the square of the skylight above her, and the silhouettes of the bedroom furniture emerging from the gloom. She switched on the lamp, flooding the room with warmth and colour. Dreams of her childhood faded from her mind.

  Her bedroom was an attic, with slanting walls and odd nooks and corners. It was the first room she’d decorated once she’d bought the house, stripping off the dingy wallpaper and painting everything white, adding colour with throws and blinds so that even on this dark winter morning, the rain beating on the skylight above her head, the room looked warm and welcoming.

  She went down the winding staircase to the bathroom. Her head felt muzzy with sleep as she stood under the shower, so she turned the temperature down and woke herself up with a blast of cold water. She wrapped herself in a towel, shivering as she went quickly back up the stairs. A spatter of rain blew across the window.

  It was the start of her second week in her new job at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Manchester. She had recently been appointed as a senior research assistant to the director, the eminent historian and political philosopher Antoni Yevanov. It had been a hotly contested post that she had won after a gruelling three-day interview. She knew that a lot of people were surprised when she was appointed–they thought that at thirty-two, she was too young, that she didn’t yet have the experience–and the professional knives were out.

  She dried her hair. It had grown over the summer, and it hung heavy and dark to her shoulders, so she pulled it off her face and secured it with a clip. She hesitated as she tried to decide what to wear. The day was going to be bitty–she had a meeting first thing, she had an article to complete for an academic journal about the role of statistical analysis in historical research, and there was a departmental meeting at four, which would be the first she had attended at the Centre. She knew the importance of first impressions.

  After a moment’s thought, she chose a cream skirt and a tailored jacket. She’d be walking a lot today–the corridors of the Centre, the campus–so she opted for shoes with a low heel. She was tall enough to get away with it.

  It seemed strange to be back in Manc
hester. Faith had spent her childhood in the city, brought up by her grandfather who lived in the affluent suburb of Altrincham, but there had been no sentimentality in her decision to return–the opportunity of working with Antoni Yevanov had been incentive enough.

  Her attachments to the city were simply a bonus. It was good to be near her grandfather again, and she was working with her oldest friend, Helen Kovacs. The thought of Helen brought a frown to Faith’s face as she packed her work bag. Helen was still struggling in the early stages of her academic career–she had left academia after she had graduated, and had only recently returned and completed her PhD. It was hard in the current climate for a woman in her thirties with children to compete against the unencumbered twenty-three-year-olds who were applying for post-doctoral appointments now. Faith’s meeting this morning was with Helen, and it would be the first time she’d had to act in her position as Helen’s line manager.

  Faith and Helen had met at the prestigious grammar school they both attended. It prided itself on its academic excellence and appealed to parents who wanted their children to have a traditional education. The uniform they wore was supposed to iron out any differences of background that the children brought to the school, but the adolescent jungle of status and conformity operated there just the same.

  Faith, who lived with her immigrant grandfather and had no visible parents, was an object of suspicion. Helen, whose parents were working class and who lived on a modern housing estate in Salford, was a complete outsider. Her father was a builder who was earning just enough to buy his daughter what he believed would be the best education for her. Helen’s accent was wrong, her clothes were wrong, she lived in the wrong place and had the wrong parents. The pack turned on her.

  The two girls, with the well-honed survival instincts that six years in the school system had given them, had drawn together. They were both bright, they were both athletic, and Faith soon discovered that Helen had a dry wit and a talent for sharp mockery that matched her own. They had seen off their tormentors and established a friendship that had endured into adulthood. They had gone to Oxford together, shared a flat through their student years, seen each other through the ecstasy of first relationships and the subsequent heartbreak. And even though their lives had gone down different paths since then, they had stayed close.

  Faith went into the kitchen and put some bread in the toaster. There was coffee left from the night before. She poured some into a mug and put it in the microwave. As she watched the light of the LED, her phone rang. She checked the number. It was her mother. Katya Lange rarely phoned her daughter. Their contacts tended to be Christmas and birthdays and the occasional good-will call that Katya was hardly likely to make at 7.45 in the morning.

  Puzzled, she answered it. ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’m glad I caught you.’ Katya’s voice was brisk. ‘Listen, Faith, there’s a bit of a problem with Marek.’

  ‘What is it? Is he ill?’ Her grandfather, Marek Lange, was in his eighties. He was stubbornly independent and would accept almost no help, though Faith had tried often enough to persuade him.

  ‘Nothing like that. You’d be the first to hear. It’s this journalist…’

  Faith sighed. She really didn’t want to have this conversation again. A journalist, a man called Jake Denbigh, wanted to interview Grandpapa for a series of articles he was writing about changing attitudes to refugees. Marek Lange, a Polish refugee who had fought on the side of the Allies in the last war, had attracted his interest.

  The interview seemed a valid enough enterprise to Faith. She’d read some of Denbigh’s articles and she’d heard him once or twice on late-night discussion programmes on Radio 4. As far as Faith could see, the interview would be something her grandfather would enjoy. He was an opinionated man, and would relish the chance to express his views. She thought it would add a bit of variety to a life that was becoming more and more circumscribed by old age, but Katya had been against it from the start.

  ‘I told you what I think,’ Faith said now. ‘It’s up to him. It’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘It’s more urgent than that,’ Katya said. ‘Marek’s agreed to do the interview. It’s happening this morning.’

  ‘Well–good for him.’ Her toast was done. She hunted round for the spread.

  ‘I’m not so sure. I’ve had a bad feeling about this from the start. I don’t trust this Denbigh man, so I looked some stuff up. A few months ago, he got involved in a witch-hunt in Blackburn about a man they said was an ex-Nazi. It got nasty.’

  ‘Oh.’ That gave Faith pause for thought. Her grandfather had escaped from Nazi-occupied Poland to join the Polish Free Forces in England in 1943. He had arrived alone, his family and his past lost in the chaos behind him. All that was left were the stories he used to tell her when she was a child, stories about his own childhood, a childhood that had been obliterated as surely as the cities of Europe had been razed in the final destruction of that conflict. His war years in occupied Europe were something he never spoke of, ever.

  If Jake Denbigh’s focus was Nazis, especially if he was looking for lurid headlines, then Faith shared her mother’s misgivings. ‘He isn’t going to talk to any journalist about it,’ she said slowly. ‘He wouldn’t discuss it with his own family, never mind a stranger.’ She sometimes thought it would have been a good thing if he had done, but now it was probably best left where it was, sealed away in his mind.

  ‘I wish I shared your confidence,’ Katya said. ‘This man is a professional. It’s his job to get people talking.’

  ‘I’m not confident. I just don’t know what to do. It’s still up to Grandpapa in the end.’

  ‘I thought…’ Katya said, the tentative note in her voice triggering Faith’s alarm system, ‘…that maybe you could go over. Sit in on the interview. Then if this Denbigh person tries anything…’

  Perhaps she should. ‘I’ve got meetings today. It depends what time they’ve arranged the interview.’

  ‘Eleven,’ Katya said.

  She was meeting Helen at nine–that would take less than an hour, with luck. She’d pencilled in the rest of the morning for writing the article…she could work on that tonight, cancel her plans for the evening. She’d still need some time to prepare for the meeting, but it was doable. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there.’

  She checked the clock as she put the phone down. It was almost eight–she’d better get going. Her meeting with Helen today was a professional thing, part of her new role. If the two women hadn’t known each other so well, it could have been tricky.

  Helen had left Oxford with a First, but instead of pursuing the academic career she had planned, she had come back to Manchester to marry Daniel Kovacs. This decision had been beyond Faith’s comprehension. Helen was pregnant, but that didn’t seem to be a good reason to give up her academic carer. Faith didn’t like Daniel–he was attractive, but there was a watchful hostility about him, a coldness that made him a strange choice for the warm, vivacious Helen. Despite Faith’s misgivings, Helen had been unstoppable. She had asked Faith to be godmother to their son, Finn, who had been born six months later, and this had gone a long way towards healing the slight breach in their friendship.

  Their lives had taken different routes after that. Helen had stayed near Manchester, moving with Daniel to Shawbridge, one of the small cotton towns on the outskirts of the city, to live on a road that was not much different from the one where she had grown up. Daniel’s work as an electrician was thriving, and Helen became a full-time housewife and mother.

  Faith had stayed at Oxford to work on her PhD. She took her duties as godmother seriously, visiting as often as she could, writing letters, sending cards and presents, surprised at how much she enjoyed Helen’s baby, who grew up into a bright, serious little boy. Five years later, Helen’s second child, Hannah, was born. Faith decided she had been wrong. Helen seemed happy with her life, with her children and with her enigmatic husband.

  But then Helen had got restless.
She decided that she wanted to take up her career again, and despite Daniel’s opposition had embarked on a PhD. Once she had completed that, she had landed a three-year research post at the Centre for European Studies. She had been lucky to get it. Her search for work was confined to Manchester. Even this level of commuting was difficult as Daniel insisted that his work hours made it impossible for him to deliver or collect the children to and from school.

  And then, just a few months ago, after twelve years of marriage, she had left Daniel.

  Faith pulled her coat around her as she left the house. It was one of those bleak January days. The wind was whipping the clouds across the sky and blew gusts of rain against her face. She threw her bag on to the back seat and edged out into the rush hour. The grey winter streets made her think longingly of Mediterranean landscapes, of blue skies and warm breezes. One day she was going to work somewhere where the sun shone for more than six weeks a year, somewhere that had warmth, light and space.

  Stuck in the stop-go queue into the city, she tried to focus on the meeting she had with Helen in half an hour. Helen was currently working on a paper for a major conference in Bonn, in May. The paper was supposed to be complete by the end of the month–the organizers wanted camera-ready copy in advance–and Helen had fallen behind.

  It was understandable. Her life was in chaos. Daniel, outraged by her departure, was fighting her for custody of the children and for the house. He was being as difficult as he could be about child support, and Helen’s salary barely covered her expenses. On top of this, the crucial deadline for the Bonn paper had been too much for her, and she had appealed to Faith for help.

  Faith ran possible solutions through her mind as she negotiated the roundabout on to the M67. She wanted to manage it so that it didn’t become a big issue to Antoni Yevanov. Helen’s position at the Centre was vulnerable in the face of ongoing cuts. Her appointment was due for review at the end of her first year, and its continuation depended very much on her successful completion of the paper and the reception it got at Bonn.