by Helen Grant
There was nothing to see from the track. I stepped off it, onto a spongy surface of moss and rotting leaves. The desiccated remains of brambles looped across the ground and caught at the hem of my coat as I picked my way through them.
There’s nothing here. No lodge. It was just a mistake.
But there was. I suppose someone had carted the masonry away years ago, because there really was nothing to see from the road – no walls, no chimney stack. There were still foundations though, hidden under the moss and brambles.
I felt rather than saw them first. I took a step forward and there was a solidity under my feet instead of the yielding earth. I probed with the toe of my boot and found a flat stone surface.
After that, it was easy to follow the line of the long-vanished walls. There was nothing to say what kind of building this had been any more, but it was exactly where the map had shown it. It had been here in the 1940s, and now it was gone. There was no way to tell exactly how many years had passed, but the forest told its own story. Tree trunks had thrust up through the spaces that had been rooms.
I stood there for a while, although the sun had gone and the shadows were crowding in. With the setting of the sun, the temperature dropped, and I could feel the bite of the cold even through my warm coat.
I thought about Grandmother, but it was like reaching out to touch her and finding only an empty space. I had known nothing true about her. What I remembered was all false.
She was right about one thing, anyway, I thought bitterly: I can’t trust anyone.
I turned away, and trudged back to the house. It was fully dark before I got there; if there had been no moonlight I should have struggled to find my way at all. I went inside and locked the door behind me. Then I went to the kitchen to warm myself. There seemed no reason not to spend another night there. Who would care, after all, if all those other rooms, so cold and dark, stayed empty?
I lit a lamp, and by its yellow glare I made myself a cup of tea with the last of the sugar and no milk. I wasn’t hungry at all. I sat at the pine table with the tea in front of me, listening to the tick of the kitchen clock. It was a while before I realised I was crying.
Tom McAllister came back the next day. He drove up to the house and sounded the car horn three times as he had said he would.
I had wondered whether he really would come. The whole of the previous day seemed strangely unreal, as though I had awoken from a fever dream. If Tom had never come back, I might have thought that that was what it was.
Grandmother is dead.
That was the least difficult thing to swallow. I knew something terrible must have happened for her to desert me.
Grandmother lied to me.
I was still trying to comprehend that. Even after seeing the ruins of the lodge under the mulch in the forest, I couldn’t completely believe it. A day was too short a time to unravel seventeen years.
I talked to Tom.
That was the strangest one of all. We had sat so close to each other that I could see the pulse in his neck, I could see the colour of his eyelashes. I liked the way he looked, when he had got over the shock of seeing me, the shades of expression that passed across his face.
That morning I was restless, waiting to see if he would come. He had said it might not be that day, it might be the one after, but I was impatient. So I braided up my long hair and occupied myself with the things that always needed doing at Langlands: I washed up my breakfast things and scrubbed the table and swept the kitchen floor. Then I put on an old greatcoat to keep out the cold and went outdoors to feed the chickens and fetch more wood for the stove. It was a clear, dry day and it was pleasant to be outdoors, but if I was honest with myself, I really wanted to listen for the sound of a car engine. And sure enough, late in the morning he came. I heard the car coming and watched from the stone porch until I could see it was Tom. Then I stepped out and went over to him.
“Ghost,” he said, and grinned. The name seemed to amuse him. He had his arms full of things, but he wouldn’t let me look at them right away. He said he wanted to put them down, so we went into the house and I took him down the passage to the kitchen.
“Do you want some tea?” I said, and then added, “I’m afraid there isn’t any milk or sugar left.”
“I could get you some more from the town if you like,” said Tom, and then looked a little surprised at his own suggestion. He’d said he’d come back a third time, without thinking about it. He didn’t want any tea, though. I couldn’t say I blamed him; it tasted pretty horrible like that, plain and unsweetened.
Tom put the things on the table. There were magazines, three of them. I knew what they were because there were copies of Country Life in the library, all of them very thin and brittle and with nothing but black and white pictures in them. These had very shiny colourful covers.
There was also a box of chocolates, and the moment I read the words on the side, my mouth began to water. I had not realised I missed having sweet things so much. Or even the feeling of being full after eating. I was hungry a lot of the time since Grandmother disappeared, because I forgot to cook or because all the best ingredients had been used up. I looked at the chocolates longingly, hardly able to believe they were for me.
“I went down to the gate last night,” I said. “You know, the one at the edge of the forest. There used to be a building down there, a lodge or something.”
“Yeah?” said Tom.
“I found a map from 1938. There was a building there then. But now it’s just a few stones in the ground.”
I stretched out a hand and touched one of the magazines, feeling the smooth glossiness under my fingers, looking at the bright images on the cover rather than at Tom.
“A lot of time has gone by, hasn’t it?” I said.
“Yeah.”
I still couldn’t look at him. There was something else I wanted to ask.
“Where will my Grandmother be?”
There was a pause as Tom thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said eventually. “They’d have taken her to hospital in an ambulance in case...well, in case there was anything they could do.” He hesitated. “And I suppose then they’d put the body in the hospital morgue until they’d managed to contact her family to sort out the funeral.”
“She didn’t have any family,” I said. “Except me.”
“Well, someone should have come up here to check, I guess,” said Tom.
“There were those two men,” I pointed out. “The soldiers.”
“It wouldn’t be soldiers. The War is over, remember?”
“They did come,” I said. I knew what I had seen.
Tom considered. “What did they look like, these soldiers?”
“They had black uniforms on.”
“Were they kind of bulky, around here?”
I nodded.
“That was the police, not soldiers. They probably came to see if Mrs. McAndrew had any family living here.”
“And I hid from them,” I said, softly. It was disorienting, the feeling that Tom knew what I had seen better than I did. Suddenly, I wanted to sit down. I slid onto one of the kitchen chairs, put my elbows on the table and my head in my hands. I was used to having no experience of the outside world, but now my ignorance seemed to extend terrifyingly in all directions, a vast swamp full of traps and hazards. Was it true that the men I had seen were policemen, and not soldiers at all? Should I have opened the door to them? But if there was nothing to fear from them, why had Grandmother insisted that I keep myself hidden? Nothing made any sense at all.
Tom pulled out a chair and sat down across the table from me. “Look,” he said, “Don’t worry about that. You can sort that out later. It’s not against the law to be out when the police come round.”
“But what will they do?” I asked.
“With your grandmother? I don’t know. I suppose they
hang on to people with no family for a while, and then they bury them, or cremate them. I could try to find out, if you want.”
“No,” I said suddenly. “I don’t want to know.” I knew I sounded petulant, and probably later I would want to know, but right at that instant I really didn’t. I didn’t want to make decisions about burial; I wanted Grandmother here in front of me, alive and well. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and demand that she tell me why she had done this to me – why? She had left me alone in a world I didn’t understand, and I had no idea what she had done it for.
I was angry with myself, too. The more I thought about it, the more naive and unquestioning my own behaviour seemed to have been. The night the chimney had come down through the roof I had instantly thought that Langlands had been bombed; I had imagined aeroplanes droning over the roofs and turrets. I had thought of War, and yet Grandmother had not seemed afraid of that at all. She had been dead calm.
I very much doubt it, she had said when I blurted out that we had been bombed. Why had I not seen then that she was not afraid because she knew we had not been bombed, that it was altogether impossible?
Stupid, stupid, I berated myself. It made me wonder whether I was right to trust Tom, but then, what choice did I have? I knew nobody else in the whole world. And he had said he would bring proof that what he had told me was true.
I drew the magazines towards me. It wasn’t difficult to pick out the dates printed on the covers. March 2017, said two of them, the third, February 2017. I could not imagine how anyone could create such things just to support a lie. These had to be real.
The first I opened was called National Geographic, and it was full of the most beautiful photographs I had ever seen, all of them in colour. They were so vivid that they seemed more like the loveliest of the paintings in Langlands House than photographs.
I looked at a series of pictures of a great city, and then some of a kind of sleek and gleaming machine whose purpose I could only guess at. It seemed to me that life in this world was as different from life at Langlands as the coloured photographs were from the sepia ones in the house. Nearly everything in Langlands had the soft shades of age. The woodwork was worn, the carpets and curtains were faded, the rooms we rarely frequented were covered with a fine layer of grey dust. Even the pages of the books in the library were yellowing.
Outside, though, the people who thronged the streets wore a dazzling rainbow of different colours, some of them so bright that they seemed to glow. Everything was lit very brightly. Streets, cars, buildings – from all of them light streamed out in such prodigious amounts that I wondered how the people were not blinded by it. And how did any of them ever sleep? It seemed as though night had been banished completely out there. It was also plainly impossible that a war should be going on in such places. How could anyone hide from bombs dropped from the air, when every building revealed its existence with such brilliant lights?
I finished looking at the National Geographic with a strange hard feeling like a knot in the centre of my chest.
Lies. All lies.
Somehow the lie about the War seemed the worst of all. I had dreamed of men wading through mud, tangled in barbed wire, mown down by gunfire; I had imagined gas and blood and screaming. But those things were history; they had long since ceased to be. I felt as though Grandmother had tried to make me behave myself by pretending to have some terrible disease. It was not right to say such things unless they were true.
I opened the second magazine, which was full of pictures of houses with people in them. These were the insides of those fantastical light-filled buildings I had seen in the National Geographic photographs. The rooms were decorated in bold, jewel-like colours. Some were puzzlingly stark and plain, but one house was clearly an old one, made beautiful with all the materials and techniques that the modern world could offer. On the mantelpiece at the back of the sitting room were two silver pheasants like the ones that faced each other on top of the cupboard in Langlands’ hallway. I stared at that photograph for a while. It was strange seeing something so familiar in such a setting, but it proved the link between my life here and the life outside. The things in the magazine were not imaginary, they were real.
“What’s that?” I asked Tom McAllister when I came to a series of photographs of kitchens filled with unfamiliar things.
He came around to my side of the table and I was conscious of his nearness as he leaned over my shoulder to look. I could hear him draw breath.
“It’s a dishwasher,” he said. “You stack the dishes and all the rest in it, and it washes them.”
“And that?”
“That’s a washing machine. For clothes.”
“There’s two of them.”
“The other one’s probably a dryer – for drying them.”
“And that?”
“That’s a microwave.” He must have realised that meant nothing to me because he added, “You cook food in it.”
“How? There’s nowhere to light a fire.”
“With electromagnetic waves.” He glanced at me. “That doesn’t mean anything, does it?”
Irrationally, I found myself becoming angry. Tom was just trying to be helpful, I could see that, but–
“You think I’m stupid,” I said.
“No,” he said, far too quickly. “Of course not. If you’ve never seen one before, how can you know?”
“Is it unusual?” I asked, pointing at the object. “Is it new, I mean? Or does everyone know about it?”
“It’s not really that new,” he said. “Pretty much everyone has one of those.”
I stared at the pictures and it occurred to me that not only should Grandmother have told me about these things, she should have got some of them. A machine for washing dishes! I need not have hand pumped water and heated it on the range every time we had to wash up. We could have had a machine to wash all our clothes and dry them too, instead of doing it all by hand.
I was becoming too angry; I was afraid I would lose control. I closed the magazine with its alluring pictures and pushed it away from me.
I shouldn’t have picked up the third magazine. I could have told Tom I was tired, I’d read it later. But there was a certain sort of bitter recklessness welling up inside me now. I wanted to know the full extent of it, how very far out of step with the world I was, how deeply Grandmother had betrayed me.
This magazine wasn’t cities or houses. It was all people. Women and girls. They were wearing coats, dresses, even trousers. I saw a photograph of a girl about my own age wearing tight-fitting trousers, made of the same blue cotton twill as the ones Tom McAllister was wearing, and a shirt that seemed to be made of tiny overlapping silver scales. There were shirts that seemed to show an alarming amount of shoulder, and dresses that skimmed the thighs. One set of photographs showed nothing but older women, dressed in clothes that were more colourful and more revealing than anything I had ever put on. All of them had beautiful, flawless faces and every single one of them, without exception, had short hair – short, that is, in comparison to mine. Some – shockingly – had hair cut as short as Tom’s, but none of them had hair that came lower than their shoulder blades. None of them had hair like mine, that cascaded over my shoulders and down past my waist and hips so that I seemed to be forever swimming upstream in a great gush of it. I saw myself suddenly, in Tom McAllister’s eyes; I saw that where I wished to be interesting or at least normal I was ludicrous, and at last I lost control.
When it happens, it catches me unawares. She’s sitting there, leafing through the last of the magazines, when suddenly she just goes berserk. Her hands tighten on the pages until she is holding handfuls of scrunched-up paper in her fists, and then she’s ripping at the magazine, trying to tear it in half. That doesn’t work, so she starts pulling out the pages. All the time she’s making these terrible sounds, sobs that are almost screams.
I’m st
ill standing right by her, but I don’t think she even remembers I’m there. She rips the magazine to shreds and then she sweeps it off the table, taking her tea cup and saucer with it. The teapot is the next to go, and that smashes on the flagstones. There’s a wooden box full of cutlery on the table and when that hits the floor there’s a massive crash as all the knives and forks and spoons go everywhere.
It’s when she reaches out for the tea canister that I come to my senses. She’s already run out of sugar. If she throws that around she’ll be drinking nothing but hot water. I reach over and pick it up myself.
Then she puts her head on her arms and cries.
I put a hand on her shoulder, very carefully. At first, I don’t think she’s even noticed, but then she sits up a little and leans against me and cries until she’s worn herself out.
At least, I think she’s worn herself out. She stops crying and wipes her eyes, and then she gets up from her chair, moving away from me, down to the other end of the kitchen, where there’s a kind of wooden dresser with plates stacked on it. I think for one moment that she’s going to start throwing the crockery around too, but she opens one of the drawers instead. When I see what she takes out of it, I’m so shocked my jaw drops.
“Don’t,” I say, and take a couple of steps forward, but then I stop because she’s holding the scissors up. They look huge in her hand. These aren’t wee scissors for cutting paper, they’re great big shears with sharp points to the blades.
“Put those down, Ghost,” I say, feeling a bit sick thinking what she might do. “Don’t hurt yourself. It’s not worth it.”
She looks at me, calm as anything. Then she grabs the thick plait of hair hanging over one shoulder, opens the blades of the scissors and hacks into it.
“Don’t do that,” I say, horrified.
“Why not?” she says. “Nobody has hair like this anymore.”
“I know, but...”
