by Helen Grant
What is he? I asked myself as the daylight streaming through the library windows turned to gold and began to fade, and the shadows lengthened. Is he my friend? I touched my lips with cool fingertips, recalling the feeling of Tom’s lips on mine. The blood came into my face at the memory. I supposed that Grandmother would have said that what Tom had done had not made him my friend at all, but something much worse. But why should I care what Grandmother would have said? Why should I trust her? As I closed the door of the safe, I told myself that I did not care about that. I had only my own feelings to guide me now, and my own feelings told me that if Tom were to try to kiss me again, I wouldn’t stop him.
Tom didn’t come back for three days. He had to go to work with his father, and he had warned me too that it would take a while for him to get the things I wanted. I waited restlessly; I was impatient to see him, and impatient with myself. There was work to do – always work – but when the chores were done and I had time to spare, I sometimes found myself lingering in front of one of the great tarnish-spotted mirrors that hung in the house, trying to imagine how I would look in modern clothes. I made an unsuccessful foray up into the attic to look through the trunks for anything remotely like the things I had seen in the magazines, but it was hopeless. I saw now how limp and faded the fabrics were, how desperately old-fashioned the high necks and the rows of tiny buttons.
It was a relief on the third day when I heard the three blasts of the horn that meant it was Tom who had returned, and no one else. When I went out to him, he was already out of the car, and he had bags in his hands, flimsy shiny ones that showed interesting hints of the things inside.
We went into the house, to the kitchen, where Tom put all the bags on the table. I had given him some measurements but they were all in inches and Tom had said that there was another system altogether now. However, as soon as I started to lift the things out of the bags I could tell that most of them would fit. Whether I would feel comfortable wearing them was another question: they were quite unlike anything I had ever worn before, and most of them felt lighter too, because they were not armoured with thick linings and petticoats.
I hesitated, my arms full of clothes. “If I – if it looks all right, would you take me to the outside – I mean, outside Langlands estate – for a while?”
“Sure. Mum doesn’t need the car today.” Tom grinned. “She’s being very understanding about me borrowing it. She thinks I’ve got a secret girlfriend I’m not telling her about.”
You have, I thought, but Tom’s words gave me another of those sudden cold feelings of doubt. Perhaps he didn’t see what had happened between us the way I did; perhaps a kiss meant less to him than it did to me. Life outside Langlands was a mystery to me. Who knew how they did things out there?
I carried the new clothes upstairs to my bedroom, leaving Tom in the kitchen, warming his hands over the range. The room felt cold and neglected; I hardly spent any time here, hardly ever slept here anymore since the kitchen was so much warmer than the rest of the house, and there was no Grandmother to insist on any form of doing things.
It was hard to say which took longer: undressing myself or putting on the new clothes. My old things always took time to put on or take off: there were layers and layers of them, and nearly everything fastened with tiny hooks-and-eyes or buttons. The new things would probably take very little time to put on once I had got used to them, but they had fasteners of a kind I had not used before, with two rows of miniature teeth that interlocked when you ran a tiny tab up and down them. It took me a while to work out how to operate it, and to feel confident that it would stay closed once I had fastened it.
There were a couple of white cotton shirts, and those were very practical and comfortable; they had no fasteners at all but could just be pulled on over my head. And there were trousers. I looked at those for a full minute before I tried putting them on, and when I did, I thought Tom had made a mistake about the size. They were too tight-fitting. I could get them on all right, and once I had the trick of it, I could do the fastener up, but they felt very strange, and they looked – well, I knew what I had seen in the magazine, but still I found it hard to believe that anyone walked about dressed like this, in things so closely fitting that they showed the entire shape of the hips and legs. There was nothing for it though; if I couldn’t bear to wear modern clothes at all I couldn’t very well go out.
Lastly there was a jacket, and that made things a little better: it was still a closer fit than I was used to, but it was made of soft leather and had a robust feel to it.
I put my own boots back on and laced them up, and then I found my hairbrush and brushed out my hair. After that, it occurred to me that perhaps I should add something – a necklace or a scarf, and I spent some minutes fruitlessly looking for something that seemed right, until I realised that I was simply putting off the inevitable moment when I would have to go downstairs and show myself to Tom. What would I do if he looked dismayed at the sight of me, or worse still, laughed? But there was nothing for it. I had waited a very long time to leave Langlands, and here was no other way of doing it than this. I left my room, closing the door carefully behind me, and went downstairs.
It’s hard to say what Ghost thought of the stuff I’d bought but she went off to try it all on. She’s been gone longer than I thought she’d be, but now I hear her footsteps coming down the hall towards the kitchen. She pauses outside the kitchen door, as though she has to make up her mind whether to come in or not. I wait, and after a few moments she pushes the door open and comes in.
I don’t say anything, I just stare. She looks like a twenty-first century girl. Well, not exactly like the other ones I know, because there’s no fake tan and her eyebrows are all her own, but she looks modern. You wouldn’t know she’s just arrived here from living in 1945. It’s almost impossible to remember that she isn’t from now, that there are a thousand things she has no idea about.
She says, “Do I look all right?”
“Yes,” I say. “You look great.” Understatement, I think.
“Then can we go somewhere, Tom? Please?”
The way she says that, she sounds anxious, like she thinks she’s going to lose her nerve if we don’t leave right now, and maybe she’s right. Even if we don’t go any further than the main road, that’ll be further than she’s ever been from Langlands. She wants to get on and do it before she gets too nervous to do it at all.
I say, “Sure. Where do you want to go?”
I think she’s going to say she wants to go somewhere to choose some more clothes for herself, or maybe just drive around and look at the countryside if she can’t face going anywhere with a lot of people. I’d understand that. But she looks at me hopefully and says, “Can we go and see the sea?”
I open my mouth to say No, it’s miles away, it’d take ages and then I think, why not? We could get to Dundee in about an hour. Maybe not Dundee – too many people. Saint Andrews? Then I have a better idea. I’ll have to use up the rest of the cash she gave me buying petrol, but there’s no reason not to go.
So I say, “Yeah,” and then I add, “It’s going to be cold, though.”
“I don’t care,” she says, and I think she really doesn’t. What she cares about is getting moving before she chickens out.
We go back down the passage to the hallway with the stuffed stag’s head. Ghost takes the key out of the inside of the door and when we are outside in the stone porch she locks up very carefully. I don’t bother to point out that this is probably unnecessary because nobody ever comes up here.
When I open the car with the remote she looks startled, and I have to remind myself all over again that whatever she looks like on the outside, this isn’t a twenty-first century girl. She stands and looks at the car for a few moments and I wonder whether she is waiting for me to open the passenger door for her. Then I realise she probably has no idea where she is supposed to get in anyway, not i
f the old lady never took her out in that vintage car of hers. I open the door for her, and when she’s inside I close it.
When I get in, I have to show her how to put her seatbelt on, and that gives me a moment of doubt again about this whole thing. But I’ve said we’ll go now.
“Ready?” I ask her.
She nods, though she looks a bit uncertain.
“Okay,” I say. Then I start the engine, and we head off, over the gravel and onto the track which leads through the forest and to the world beyond Langlands.
When we got to the place where the track came out of the forest and into open land, the border of the Langlands estate, the car slowed down until it was going not very much faster than I could have gone on foot. I looked ahead, through the glass, and I could see the gate posts ahead. That was as far as I had ever gone before. Suddenly I began to feel a strange anxiety about what we were about to do. I had a terrible conviction that the car was going to stop altogether, before it ever crossed that limit – that it was a physical impossibility that I would ever leave Langlands. Some unseen force would prevent it ever happening, dragging me unwillingly back to the ageing house.
As the car slowed, the conviction became a smothering feeling. I could not move. I could not look at Tom, nor speak to him. The feeling of pressure on my chest grew until I could barely draw a breath and dark motes sparkled at the edge of my vision. I imagined the car stopping, refusing to move an inch further than the boundary of Langlands, or worse, the car gliding slowly over it and myself dissolving into the air like so much dust carried away on the wind. Panic boiled up inside me. The black sparkles on the air seemed to merge into one.
“Ghost? Ghost?”
There was an urgency in Tom’s voice that brought me back to myself. I opened my eyes and saw sky, bordered by window frame. I was slumped in the seat, the belt Tom had fastened across me cutting uncomfortably into the side of my neck.
Tom was asking me what had happened, whether I was all right, but I didn’t reply, not yet. I was pushing myself upright with my hands so that I could look out of the window properly.
It was bright out there, much brighter than it had been when we travelled through the forest. We were right out from under the canopy of trees. I twisted in my seat and peered out of the rear window. I could see the gate posts behind us, the opening into the forest a dark maw. They were far enough behind us that I could also see the metal grid that lay between them.
“We’re out,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Tom. “What happened? Did you faint? You went a really strange colour.”
“Why did we slow down?” I asked him.
“Because of the cattle grid.” Tom sounded as though he was pointing out something obvious. “Did it make you feel sick or something?”
“No. I mean, maybe. I don’t know.” I turned back to face the front again, staring at the road that ran downhill ahead of us, the fields that flanked it, the great expanse of sky.
We were out. Outside the Langlands estate. And nothing had happened to me. The sky hadn’t fallen on my head; I hadn’t died on the spot. Tom had simply carried me across the line without hesitation, as easily as if he had taken me up in his arms and stepped across the threshold. The suffocating feeling had drained away. Now I felt a kind of wild exhilaration. We were out, in the world. I wanted to see everything.
I looked at Tom and said, “Can we go?”
He stared at me for a moment. Then he grinned. “Yeah.”
Now that we were off the track with its deep ruts and mud, we were able to go more quickly. The car seemed to skim like a bird down the smooth road that led between the fields; the hedges on either side were a blur. At first it had a nauseating effect on me, but then I learnt the trick of it, to look a little ahead, rather than directly out of the side window. Even so, when we reached the end of the first road and turned left onto a wider one, the speed was alarming.
I sneaked a look at Tom, but he didn’t seem concerned. Looking at him was a guilty kind of pleasure, and I would have carried on with it for longer, except that the background of trees and fields speeding past his window was too distracting; it made me feel dizzy again.
For a while, we passed through countryside with very few buildings in it. I saw one house at a distance, set back against the hill; it was not as large as Langlands, but it was still a good size. Then we passed two others that were so small that they seemed like dolls’ houses to me, after having Langlands all to myself.
A little later we came into a village and here we saw a few people walking about the street. Several of them were old, like Grandmother, but I saw one woman who was much younger, perhaps not very many years older than I was, with a tiny child toddling along beside her. I turned my head to look back, but already they had dwindled to specks in the distance.
My mind went from that short glimpse of a mother and child to my own mother, and then to Grandmother and what she had done, and perhaps Tom’s did too, because a few moments later he said, “I asked my Dad about Langlands.” He glanced at me. “How long your grandmother had lived there, stuff like that. He grew up in the town so I thought he might know something.”
“What did he say?”
Tom grinned. “He said not to go up there, if that was what I was thinking of, in case I ripped the exhaust off Mum’s car on the ruts.”
“You didn’t tell him you’d been, did you?” I said, alarmed.
“Of course not. I said I was just curious because the old place was as creepy as – well, very creepy.” He shrugged. “Dad said there were stories about it when he was a kid, and probably before that, too. He said he went up there once, when he was about my age. He’d just got his first car, and he took a girl up there. Not Mum – it was before he met her.” Tom made a face. “He said it was empty. All the windows were boarded up. He wanted to break in, have a look around, but the girl he was with didn’t want to.”
“Did he do it?” I asked.
“No. They drove into the town instead and went to the chippy.”
“Oh,” I said, disappointed. “He couldn’t really tell you anything, then.”
“It’s told us the house used to be empty back then,” Tom pointed out. He thought for a moment. “I guess that would have been around 1980, 1985 maybe. But somebody was living there during the War, because there’s that picture of your grandmother in front of the house, when she was a kid.”
“I suppose she went away,” I said, “And then she came back, later on.”
“But why?” said Tom. He risked another glance at me. “What about you? Have you always lived there? Or can you remember living anywhere else – you know, before?”
I shook my head. “I’ve always lived at Langlands. Always.”
“Well, where were you born? Did your Gran ever say?”
“At Langlands,” I said.
“Really? Nobody gets born at home anymore.”
Out of step with Tom’s world again. Every time it happened it was a goad, like the sting of a tiny insect. Before I had thought it through I said, “Lots of people are born at home–” and then I stopped. In 1945, I thought. But it was not 1945.
Tom didn’t contradict me. Instead he said, “What about your mum and dad? Can you remember them at all?”
I shook my head. I had asked myself that question so many times before. I had looked back into the past and strained to remember something, anything. But there was nothing – not even that strange feeling of not-quite-remembering. My parents existed in my memory only as a blank space.
“What did your gran say about them?”
I looked down, at my own hands entwined in my lap. “She said my mother was dead – in the War. If there’s no War any more, I don’t know what happened to her. But Grandmother said she was dead.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” said Tom. “Even if it was 1945 right now, she couldn’t have died
in the War. I mean, it only went on for five or six years. If your mum died when you were a baby, well, that would be way more than six years ago.”
I said nothing. This was worse than being out of step with Tom’s time. Now I felt as though I had been ridiculously naive. Grandmother had talked of the War as something that had been going on all my life; she made it sound as though it had been going on forever. And I had not questioned that, not half enough. I felt angry at myself, and angrier than ever at Grandmother.
After a moment, Tom said, “What about your dad?”
I put my head up. “She would hardly talk about him,” I said. “It was like he’d done something so terrible she couldn’t even think about it.”
“She never said what?”
I shook my head. “No.” For a moment we travelled on in silence, past trees and fields and hedges. Then I said, “I’ve been wondering – about my mother. If she didn’t die in the War like Grandmother said – I mean, if she couldn’t have – then maybe –” I hesitated. “Maybe she isn’t dead at all.”
Tom said nothing for a while, and I began to wonder whether he had heard what I said. But then he said, “I guess it’s possible. But then, where is she?”
Now it was my turn to be silent. I had had an idea about that question, but it seemed so tenuous that I was almost afraid to put it into words. But at last I said, “I thought maybe that was why Grandmother didn’t like talking about my father. Maybe he was the one who took my mother away. I mean, she went with him.”
My face was warm; it felt too intimate, sharing this idea I was nurturing, that perhaps my mother had left for love. The idea itself was no better than a sketch in my imagination. I did not know why my father would have had to go away, what urgent call of duty or obligation or emotion could have drawn him to itself. But to think of my mother following him for a love so great that it overwhelmed everything else was more comforting than imagining her dead. It was like the fairy tales in the books in the library, dramatic and beautiful.
