“It’s still there. It’s just gone deeper for a time. Few people realise how much is lying low in the world.” Less dismissively he said “Did you rescue your books?”
“The ones your grandfather made my son steal from me, you mean? Yes, I took them back.”
“I take it you still have them.”
“Why, are you going to try and steal them again?”
“As far as I’m concerned you’re welcome to them. I knew them by heart the first time we met.” As I hoped he was exaggerating if not simply lying he said “I doubt the rest of us will care about them either. You keep them if they give you any insight, but we’ve progressed a lot further since then.”
“Progressed how?”
“I believe your son introduced you to it. He’ll be guiding you onwards, and soon we’ll be giving a sermon. I do hope you’ll attend.”
“You’re suggesting I should come to one of your services.”
“That wouldn’t be our word for it, but a communal occasion of the chapel, yes. The more of us there are the better.”
“You don’t think I could be inconvenient”
“Your family will all be there.” Before I could decide if he meant this should inhibit my behaviour he said “Now you’ll be wanting to do what you came for.”
I found this ominously ambiguous, and didn’t answer. I watched him lift the phone and press a key with a movement so fluid it looked close to boneless. “Toby,” he said, “your father’s here with me.”
Rising to my feet revived a selection of aches, and Toph reached the door well ahead of me. He held it open and delivered the old reptilian bow as I hobbled into the lobby, to find my son emerging from his room. “Everything all right?” he said, a question I thought he was keeping carefully neutral.
“Certainly as far as I’m concerned, and I trust Dominic will say as much.”
“I’ll say it,” I said.
“We didn’t realise you were here, dad.”
“I had security advise me when your father arrived.”
Once Toby shut his office door behind us he said “What happened in there, dad?”
“Just a conversation with your leader.”
“You weren’t arguing with him.”
“Why do you think I should have done that?”
“I know you had some doubts about our church. If you’ve none now, I’m glad.”
“I’ve no doubts about him.” I gazed at Toby, and when his eyes grew not just blank but darker I said “I think you know what he used to call himself.”
If the look Toby gave me was a plea, it was beyond interpretation. “I wasn’t sure, dad.”
“You told me Toph wasn’t involved.” As if this made it worse I said “You told me just before your mother’s funeral.”
“We didn’t want to upset you, especially then.”
“That’s right, you and Claudine said there was nobody here called Noble or Bloan.”
“There isn’t, dad.”
For a moment I was too furious to speak, and then my rage collapsed. “You’ve inherited this from me, haven’t you? I used to fool my parents like that, and it was all about the Nobles then too.”
“I wasn’t lying when I said we tried not to upset you any more.”
“I don’t suppose you were about that.” Having conceded this much, I had to make an effort to bring us back together. “Let’s agree not to lie, I said. “Let’s tell each other nothing but the truth in future.”
“That’ll be the future,” Toby said and gripped my hand. “The truth.”
I remembered past vows—the one I’d made with Bobby and Jim, and assuring my father I would care for my son, and promising Lesley that our family would look after one another. As I closed my other hand around his, Toby said “Did Christopher know who you were?”
“I suspect he may have known for quite a while, and he says he wants me to be here.”
“We all do,” Toby said, renewing his grip, and the office door swung wide to confirm his assurance as Macy ran in ahead of her mother. “Is grandad going to be born again?” Macy cried.
The prospect felt more intimidating than I’d anticipated. “Do I have to go through that every time?”
“It’s just a gateway, Dominic,” Claudine said. “We’ll teach you another way to make your journey.”
“Fix on a memory that’s yours and see where it leads to,” Toby said. “Make sure it’s a strong one so you can use it to find your way back here.”
“My one is going on the big wheel with mum and dad and you and grandma,” Macy said. “It’s like looking out of here.”
I glanced towards the window to see shards of bone fly up from the bay—a flock of seagulls. Macy was dancing with impatience in the doorway, and as soon as I stood up she ran to switch on the lights in the meditation room. I was belatedly afraid Toph Noble might propose to guide me, but only Toby and Claudine followed me in. “Have you settled on a memory, dad?” Toby said as I sat close to the door he’d just shut. “Tell us which one if you like.”
“Then we can use it to call you back if you need us to,” Claudine said.
Macy was singing to herself as she waited by the light switch. “Fly away Peter, fly away Paul…” The names referred to the apostles, though the rhyme hadn’t originally included them. The change put me in mind of Christian Noble’s interpretation of the Bible, not a welcome memory, and then the sound of a child’s song led me elsewhere. “Carol singers coming to the house,” I said. “Long before your time, but I miss them.”
“Start from that,” Toby said. “We won’t hold your hands today, but remember we’re here.”
He and Claudine flanked me as I sat resolutely upright. I hadn’t shut my eyes when the chant began, so softly that I could have fancied I was hearing it just inside my head. Despite its insubstantiality, I imagined it gathering on my eyelids, which began to sink. Almost instantly I saw the hall of my childhood home, where multicoloured streamers linked the walls, and heard several children of about my age singing Away In A Manger more or less in key and unison. They delivered several verses before someone rapped the knocker.
I recalled how carollers had subsequently offered less and less, until they’d knocked or rung the bell before starting to perform and then sung the minimum that might gain them some cash, and that had been the end of carolling. Rather than advance towards the present, I was tempted to adventure further back. My parents sent me to plant coins in the chilly hand of the foremost singer on our doorstep, but I’d never gone carolling myself, yet now I remembered standing in a slow gentle fall of fat snow, singing in a high voice about royal David’s city. My companions and I carried lanterns on poles, lending snowflakes an intermittent yellowish glow, and a muffler wrapped around my head clung moistly to my cheeks. The memory had to belong not to my father but, I suspected, to somebody I’d never known. I couldn’t identify them, nor whoever would have recollected skating on a frozen river, though I felt the blades cut into the dazzling sunlit ice and heard their chill metallic screech. The sensations led to a memory that I recognised was yet another person’s, of digging a hole in frozen earth. My hands ached and shivered as I slammed the spade down yet again, but the black soil veined with ice barely yielded. My foggy breaths obscured the sight of the tiny makeshift coffin that lay tilted on a mound sprouting a few shrivelled weeds, unless my eyes were blurred by tears that felt like ice. Perhaps I recoiled from sharing more of this experience, which gave way to an even colder one, of struggling through a blizzard on a mountain in the hope of reaching land more fertile than the territory the tribe had left. The windborne ice that slashed my face felt close to piercing my eyeballs, and when, I turned my head I could scarcely distinguish the figures trudging with bent heads behind me—my mate and our young son. I had no words for them, just raw feelings, and the paucity of language threatened to draw me back to an earlier state. That condition felt capable of dissolving my mind, of exploding it to merge with shapeless darkness or to shape it into
some form alien beyond description and yet seductively familiar. I shrank back into my own mind, or would have done if I’d been able to recapture my personality. The tribe in the blizzard, the blows of the spade that sent pain throbbing through my frozen hands, a mistake with the skates that left me sprawling on the harsh ice, a gust of wind that flattened the flames in the lanterns and pasted snowflakes to my cheeks, the carol singers staring at me as if I were playing the householder when I should be patrolling the night with them… “Are you back with us, dad?” Toby said in my ear.
I didn’t think I was. The remotest memory seemed capable of keeping hold of me to drag me back into the primal dark. The childhood reminiscence of the carol singers was too distant to fix me in the present—and then I remembered what my encounter with Toph Noble and his new identity should prompt me to do. “I am,” I said.
5 - A Souvenir of France
“Lesley, I’m keeping my promise.”
There was no response, but I expected none. I’d spoken only because I was so close to her abandoned desk, where her computer was as silent and inactive as a stone—a memorial. I could have imagined the computer felt secretive, since I didn’t know the password. I needn’t suspect Lesley of having hidden secrets simply because I’d kept so many of my own, but she had never told me that she knew our granddaughter was attending the Church of the Eternal Three. Might she have known more that she hadn’t shared with me? I was unlikely ever to learn, and surely my suspicions were no more than an attempt to exonerate myself from having failed to wonder if the Nobles were involved—from avoiding any thoughts of them for fear of a reprisal. I’d lost too much that I valued to be afraid now, and I switched on my computer.
I shouldn’t have looked at my emails. Among the invitations to make links with people who were presented as professional but whom I’d never heard of, I was faced with condolences from an old colleague of Lesley’s who had moved to the far side of the world, and a belated offer of a discounted ceremony from an undertaker’s, and an exhortation from an insurance firm to start monthly payments that would cover my own funeral. I deleted them in a rage, including the condolences by mistake. At least I’d progressed beyond grief, though I had no doubt that it was lying in wait for me. I brought up the world on the screen and entered Somme in the search box.
The viewpoint sailed down like a meteor towards the globular map, and French names rose out of the expanding simplified landscape. Several were places Jim and our schoolmates had passed through or stayed in during the trip that Christian Noble had organised. I magnified the area until it yielded up the name I recalled as closest to the field that Noble had visited after dark. In which direction was the field itself? I’d begun to range about the cartoon territory in the hope that some aspect of it would grow more familiar when I saw what I ought to have done. I typed Le Bon in the search box, and a reference appeared in a sidebar. It was the name of a hotel.
When I clicked on the reference the map sprouted a marker. Once I’d enlarged the image sufficiently to see that the hotel was by the road the bus had followed to the hostel more than sixty years ago, I brought the viewpoint down to ground level by dragging an icon like a chess piece in rudimentary human form across the map. The front of the hotel—an extensive concrete building that made a stark bid for elegance—lurched erect to occupy the screen, and the computer mouse jerked sideways as my hand twitched. The photograph showed sections of the grounds on each side of the hotel, and every tree visible along the edge was leaning if not straining away from the field.
I felt as though I was attempting to retain some hold on the mundane when I clicked on a link to TripAdvisor. The consensus awarded the hotel three stars out of five, and in general the reviews were tepid: “decent but pricey”, “okay for one night”, “average accommodation, basic food”, “service without a smile”, “run of the moulin”. Photographs showed clinically pallid rooms with beds as flat as sheeted slabs, bathrooms where bidets squatted next to snaky showers, a dining-room dominated by chandeliers with many crystal limbs. Exterior shots displayed just the building, not the grounds. One reviewer mentioned that the staff gave the impression of wanting to be elsewhere, but I couldn’t tell if this simply meant they were unhelpful. Another commentator found the food too earthy for her taste, but was she saying it was overly coarse for her palate? I’d begun to feel that the reviews were deliberately ambiguous—that some hindrance was preventing me from grasping them, at any rate—when I recognised the man who’d made the joke about the mill.
In the miniature photograph he was years older than last time I’d seen him, as a colleague of Lesley’s and mine. He’d worked in Modern Languages, which helped explain why his screen name was Phil O’Logical instead of Philip Trask. His profile placed him on Merseyside, and his phone number was easily located. As soon as I’d thought how to word my approach I rang him, but it was a woman who said “Trask?”
“Is that—” To my chagrin I found her name was out of reach, and I could hardly just call her his wife. “Might I speak to Philip?” I said. “I expect he may remember me. Dominic Sheldrake.”
“Dominic, of course we do. How are you and Lesley now? We haven’t seen you since we all retired.”
“I’m afraid Lesley died last month.”
“Dominic, I’m sorry,” Mrs Trask said but wasn’t quite able to contain a reproof. “You should have let us know. Have you had the funeral?”
“Yes, last month.”
“We would certainly have been there if we’d known.” With an attempt at gentleness she said “I hope that’s not why you’re phoning.”
The reason I’d concocted seemed rather less persuasive now. “I wanted to ask about a hotel Philip reviewed online.”
“Perhaps going away for a few days will help you.” This sounded like indulgence if not closer to permission. “Do ignore that awful name he’s adopted,” she said. “He will have his little jokes.”
“It made me smile, don’t worry. Did you stay at the hotel too? It’s the Hotel Le Bon. If you did, let me ask—”
“I’ll put him on,” she said as if she hadn’t heard, though I suspected she had. “Philip, it’s Dominic Sheldrake.”
She was plainly calling to somewhere else in the house, so that I didn’t expect him to respond at once. “Dominic, what’s the occasion? Now that we’re back in touch we should all get together.”
“I’m afraid it would just be me.”
“Excuse my thoughtlessness. We heard you and Lesley had your differences, but we understood they’d been resolved.”
“Philip, no,” his wife said just as close to me, “he’s saying she’s passed on.”
“Did he tell you that? Kathryn, you should have said.”
“Kathryn, of course.” In case this sounded like agreeing with his reprimand, I added at some speed “We didn’t give her time, did we? I just wanted to consult you about a hotel you wrote up.”
“So my thoughts are worth the labour after all.” I suspected the comment was aimed at his wife. “Which of my critiques inspired you, Dominic?”
“The place near Bonchamp. Hotel Le Bon.”
“Ah.” This sounded ominously like reluctance to say more. “Do excuse my deplorable attempt at wit,” he said.
“Sorry, which part of the piece was that?”
“If you’ve expunged it from your memory, so much the better. Run of the mill, but ending up in French.”
“It amused me,” I said despite feeling as if I’d needed an explanation of a joke.
“Hear that, Kathryn? Whatever you say, I’ve an audience. So what has it prompted, Dominic?”
“I was wondering if there was anything special about the hotel.”
“I shouldn’t say so. That was rather the point of my pun.”
“How about the staff?”
“On the whole morose, but that can be the French.”
“Or the food?”
“Edible enough, would you say, Kathryn?” Having roused a non-committal murmur
, he said “But unmemorable.”
My frustration was edging towards nervousness. “Did anything at all unusual happen while you were there?”
“I don’t think I can pretend it did. Why do you ask?”
I was trying to devise a reason I could give when Kathryn said “Unless you count my dream.”
“Good heavens, I’d have thought you would have forgotten that by now. In any case I hardly think it can be relevant to Dominic’s enquiry.”
I heard a restless sound suggesting Kathryn was about to leave the conversation. “I’d like to hear about it all the same,” I urged.
“It was just a dream I had the first night we stayed. I don’t remember all the details now.” Kathryn fell silent for so long that I was about to speak when she said “Parts of someone were scattered all over the grounds, and they were still alive. It was so vivid I got up to look.”
“And you were rather less than quite awake,” Philip said, “because at first you insisted you saw them.”
“I did, didn’t I? No,” Kathryn said with belated vigour, “I said I saw fragments of statues. But of course those weren’t there either when you woke me up.”
“Evidence of how we can think we’re being rational when we’re the other thing,” Philip said.
I was afraid he might have antagonised his wife enough to end her reminiscences until she said “There was one other odd development.”
“Then I’m unaware of it,” Philip objected.
“That’s because I didn’t think it was worth mentioning. It was just that I had the same dream the second night, and I felt as if it wanted me to get up.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by that, Kathryn.”
“I don’t really understand myself. I didn’t want to disturb you again, so I stayed in bed and made it go away.”
“How did you manage that?” I said.
“With ease, I imagine,” Philip said. “We’re talking about a dream.”
The Way Of The Worm Page 6
