At the dark end of a winter’s afternoon early in 1991 a young woman climbed down from a lorry on the road through Thornyhill woods.
‘Are you sure?’ said the driver. ‘I can take you on to Eade.’
‘I’m sure.’ He had placed a hand on her knee. That was enough. She had insisted on being set down.
‘It’s a lonely stretch of road,’ he said, hefting her bags out of the cab, too slowly for her taste. She reached up, tugging her suitcase from his grasp and stumbling under the sudden weight. The baby suspended in a sling about her neck woke at the jolt but didn’t cry, only staring about him with wide-open eyes. They were very dark, the iris so large they seemed to have almost no whites, like the eyes of some small nocturnal animal. But the lorry-driver wasn’t watching the child. He thought the woman looked very young to be a mother, little more than a girl, her round face unmade-up and somehow vulnerable, framed in a soft blur of hair, her colouring far paler than her baby. He wanted her to stay in his cab for all sorts of reasons, some kindly, some less so. ‘I thought you were going on to Crawley.’
‘I know where I’m going.’ Her determination belied her softness. She didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. She slammed the door, hooking the strap of her holdall over her shoulder and dragging the suitcase behind on inadequate wheels. After a few minutes, the lorry drove off.
They were alone now. It was a relief the lorry had gone, but one fear was swiftly replaced by others. She had been going to Crawley – she had a contact there, a child-minder, the friend of a friend, and the possibility of a job – but instead here she was, miles from anywhere, with little hope of another lift even if she had the courage to accept one. The baby was quiet – he cried so rarely it worried her – but she knew he would soon be hungry, and it was growing darker, and the road was lonely indeed. The suitcase trundled awkwardly at her heels, swaying from side to side, regularly banging against her leg, and the woods seemed to draw closer on either hand, squeezing the road into a narrow slot between thickets of shadow. She was a country girl with no real fear of the night, but she thought she heard a whisper on the windless air, the crack of a twig somewhere nearby, strange stirrings and rustlings in the leaf-mould. Since the birth of her child she had been subject to nervous imaginings which she had not dared to confide in anyone, dreading to be called paranoiac. There were footsteps pattering on empty streets, doors that shifted without a draught, soft murmurings just beyond the reach of hearing. And now the woods seemed to wake at her presence, so she thought the branches groped, and shreds of darkness slithered from tree to tree. They were there, always following, getting closer, never quite catching up …
When she saw the lights, she thought they too must be an illusion, and she was becoming genuinely unbalanced. Twin gleams of yellow, twinkling through the trees, the yellow of firelight, candlelight, electric light. As she drew nearer she feared they would vanish, but they grew clearer, until she could make out the source. Windows, windows in a house, and the yellow glow between half-drawn curtains. The house appeared to be set in a clearing among the trees: she could see gables pointing against the sky, and the dim suggestion of half-timbering criss-crossing the façade. It looked a friendly house, even in the dark; but she wasn’t sure. ‘What do you think?’ she whispered to the baby. ‘Shall we ask for help? Maybe they’ll offer us tea …’ Maybe it was a witch’s cottage, made of gingerbread, and the door would be opened by a hook-nosed crone who would show them the shortest way to her oven.
Footsteps. Footsteps on the empty road. She looked round, but could see nothing. Yet for a moment they were quiet and clear, soft-shod feet, or padded paws. And in the gloom there was a deeper dark, like a ripple running through the woods, and the sound of breathing, very close by, as if the wind itself had a throat, and was panting on her neck … Her suitcase bounced and lurched as she tugged it up the path to the door. There was a knocker, and an old-fashioned bell-pull that dangled. She tried both.
The door opened, and there was no hook-nosed crone but a large, comfortable-looking man with a looming stomach, shoulders to match, and very graceful hands. His hair was pale, his complexion a faded pink. His face wore an expression of vague benevolence, or maybe the benevolence was in the arrangement of his features, since his manner was initially hesitant, almost guarded. His eyes were periwinkle-blue between fat eyelids.
‘We’re lost,’ the young woman began, uneasily, ‘and I wondered …’
He was looking beyond her, into the night, where the footsteps were, and the breathing of the wind. For a fleeting instant she fancied he too heard or saw, though what he saw she didn’t know; she didn’t look round. Then his gaze came back to her, and he smiled. ‘Perhaps you’d like to come in. It’s getting late, and I was just making tea. If you need to feed the little one …’
‘Thank you so much!’
She stepped into the hallway, and the closing of the door shut out the dark and its phantoms. Long afterwards, she knew she had trusted him without thinking, on instinct. Maybe it was because he was fat, and benevolent-looking, and she was desperate and alone, or because the blue twinkle of his eyes had worked a charm on her, but in the end she realized it was because he had looked behind her, and seen something, seen them. He showed her into a room with oak beams, shabby capacious chairs, firelight. A large dog was sprawled on the hearthrug, a dog with shaggy fur and waggy tail, plainly a mongrel. It got up as they came in, stretching its forelegs, rump in the air, tail waving. ‘Why don’t you leave the child by the fire?’ the man said. ‘Hoover will look after him. I call him Hoover for obvious reasons: he cleans up the crumbs. My name is Bartlemy Goodman.’
‘Annie Ward.’ She lifted the baby out of the sling and set him down on the hearthrug, which was as shaggy as the dog and so similar they might have been related. ‘This is Nathan.’
Baby and dog surveyed each other, wet black nose almost touching small brown one. Then suddenly Nathan laughed – something as rare as his tears – and she imagined they had formed a bond which transcended any differences of species or speech. ‘I’d like to heat his milk,’ she said. ‘Would – would you mind watching him for me?’
‘Hoover will take care of it. He’s like Nana in Peter Pan. The kitchen’s this way.’
Looking back, doubtfully, she saw the dog gently nudging the child away from the fire with his muzzle. ‘He must be awfully well-trained,’ she said.
‘He’s very intelligent,’ said her host. Afterwards, she thought it wasn’t really an affirmation.
The kitchen was heavily beamed and stone-flagged as she might have expected, with an old-fashioned cooking range on which something that resembled a small cauldron was simmering. A drift of steam came from under the lid, bringing with it a rich, meaty, gamey, spicy smell that made her mouth water. She had eaten nothing but a sandwich at lunchtime, and it occurred to her that she was very hungry; but the baby came first. Bartlemy provided a saucepan and she heated milk while he made tea and set out a tray with earthenware mugs, pot and jug, fruit cake. She longed to ask what was in the cauldron, but was afraid of sounding too greedy, or too desperate. The room was of irregular shape and there were many small shelves on every angle of wall, bearing hand-labelled bottles and jars containing pickled fruits, chutney, strange-looking vegetables in oil. Herbs grew in pots and dried in bunches. There was a bowl of onions, white and purple, and another of apples and Clementines. No washing up stocked the sink and the draining board was very clean.
Back in the living room, she gave Nathan his bottle and some bread-and-butter with no crusts that her host had prepared. ‘You’re being very kind,’ she said. ‘You must think …’
‘I think only that it’s dark outside, and cold, and you seem to be in difficulty. You can tell me more when you’re ready, if you wish to.’
She drank the tea, bergamot-scented, probably Earl Grey, and ate a large slice of the cake. Perhaps because she was famished, it seemed to her the nicest cake she had ever tasted.
‘Do you feel you can tell me now where you’re going?’ Bartlemy asked.
‘I was heading for Crawley,’ she said. ‘ There are jobs there – at least I hope so – and a friend of mine knows a good child-minder. Before, we … we were staying with one of my cousins, but things got awkward – I felt I was imposing – and she didn’t really want the baby. So … I thought it was time to move on. Be independent.’ She didn’t mention the pursuing shadows, or the whispers in the night. In this warm, safe haven they seemed almost unreal.
If it was safe. If it was a haven. She trusted him, but that very trust disturbed her, and she feared her own weakness, her cowardice – she feared to go back into the dark.
‘What about your parents?’
‘They’re in the West Country. I don’t see them much since my – my husband died.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He asked her nothing more, nor did she volunteer any further information. They watched the child on the hearthrug, romping with the dog, pulling his floppy ears. ‘Do you want to continue your journey tonight?’ Bartlemy said. ‘You can stay here if you wish: I have plenty of space. There’s a bolt on the bedroom door, if that would make you feel more comfortable.’
She opened her mouth to say that she couldn’t, she couldn’t possibly, but all that came out was: ‘Thank you.’ And: ‘I’m not worried.’ And she knew that, for a little while at least, she wasn’t.
For supper he filled a mug from the cauldron – it was some kind of broth, with so many mingled flavours she couldn’t identify them – and it flooded her whole body with warmth and ease. She slept side by side with her son, on a mattress that was both firm and soft, sliding the bolt because she knew it was a sensible precaution, though she didn’t really feel it was necessary. And somehow they stayed the next night, and the next, and she forgot to bolt the door, and Hoover woke them in the morning, plumping his forepaws on the quilt so he could lick Nathan’s face.
The Goodmans had lived at Thornyhill for as long as anyone could remember. In the village of Eade, about two and a half miles down the road, the most venerable residents claimed they could recall Bartlemy’s grandfather, or even his great-grandfather, but people were vague as to which generation was which: they were all called Bartlemy, or some similar name, and they all looked alike, fat and placid and kindly. None of them ever seemed to be very young, or to grow very old. It was assumed that womenfolk and childhood were details that happened somewhere else, and they gravitated to Thornyhill in middle age. They had money from some unspecified source, and they appeared to live retired, reclusive but not unfriendly, mixing little in local affairs. They were regarded as mildly and acceptably eccentric, part of the scenery, arousing no curiosity, subject to no prying questions. The dog, too, was said to be one of a succession, all mongrels, strays perhaps, rescued from dog homes. If they had been asked, the villagers might have said that one had been part retriever, another part wolfhound, a third had shown traits of Alsatian or Old English sheepdog; but no one would have been sure. Hoover had a retriever’s brown soulful eyes, the long legs of a hound, a coat shag-headed, maned, tufted like anything from an Afghan to a husky. He chased cats from time to time to prove his doghood and slobbered a good deal over friend and stranger alike. It was inferred that the present generation of both dog and master had been at Thornyhill for some twenty years, doing little, staid and respectable as hobbits in a hobbit-hole, aloof from the workaday world. If twenty years was a long time for a dog to live, nobody remarked on it.
Once, Thornyhill had been the property of the Thorns, a family that was ancient rather than aristocratic, tracing their line back long before the Normans. Local historians said there had been a house on the hillside where now the Darkwood grew, a house that dated from Saxon times with a sunken chapel where Josevius Grimling Thorn, called Grimthorn, had traded with the Devil, though what he had traded, or why, remained a mystery. But the tales about him were confused and confusing, stating he had lived nearly two thousand years ago yet died around 650 AD, and the house had been razed, and the chapel was lost, and Josevius faded into legend, and the Darkwood had grown over all. In the Tudor age later Thorns had built the surviving house, where the woodland was lighter and greener, and bluebells carpeted the ground in spring, and there were woodpeckers and warblers, and deer in the thickets, and squirrels in the treetops. The house was criss-crossed with half-timbering, showing glimpses of plaster and brickwork in between, and cloaked in creepers which turned fire-red in autumn, and tall chimneys jutted higgledy-piggledy from the pointed roofs. There, the family had lived for centuries, keeping their secrets, until the eldest son died in the First World War, and his brother in the ’flu epidemic that followed, and presumably it was then the Goodmans came, though none could be found to remember clearly. There were still offshoots of the family in and around the village: the Carlows were known to be descended, on the wrong side of the blanket, from a black sheep of the Jacobean era, and the widowed Mrs Vanstone, now in her late fifties, was invariably called Rowena Thorn in acknowledgement of her antecedents. She would visit Bartlemy from time to time and talk about the past, and she was always impressed by how much he knew, in his unassuming way, about her more distant ancestors. It occurred to her, once or twice, that his residence there seemed to be a kind of guardianship, though what he was guarding, or for whom, she could not imagine, and she put it down to fancy.
Occasionally – very occasionally – Bartlemy had visitors who were not from the village or its environs, visitors who came late at night, and stayed indoors, away from the gaze of locals, and left after one day or many in the pre-dawn hour when no one would see them go. Sometimes an early riser or a reveller returning late from the pub at Chizzledown would catch sight of a hooded stranger striding along the road through the woods, or glimpse an unfamiliar figure on the twisty path to Bartlemy’s door, but gossip took no interest, since there was neither sex nor scandal afoot, and such sightings were too rare to be thought significant. There were beginning to be Londoners in the area now, high-earning, high-spending West End ex-pats, generally with media connections, who bought into the country lifestyle as pictured in the glossy magazines, and installed Agas in their kitchens, and filled their fridges with Chardonnay, and invited their city friends down for summer parties in their carefully sculpted gardens. Some of them made inquiries about the Goodmans, and Thornyhill, but their questions went unanswered, and the house was not for sale. Nothing seemed to happen there for a long, long time, until Annie Ward and her baby came to the door on a dark afternoon in 1991, and found sanctuary.
Bartlemy had a car of sorts, a blunt-nosed Jowett Javelin from the Fifties. It was dirty and tired-looking but it always managed to go, and in it he drove Annie to Crawley, and waited while she visited the child-minder and the job centre, and came away disheartened. ‘What do you do?’ he had asked her.
‘I’m a computer programmer,’ she told him; but it appeared there were plenty of computer programmers, and she was just one in a queue.
‘I’m planning to open a second-hand bookshop in the village,’ he said later that evening. ‘I want someone to manage it for me. I’ve got my eye on a suitable property: there’s a little flat upstairs. I’ll need a manager who’s good with computers to catalogue stocks and keep the accounts; I’m afraid technology’s a little beyond me.’
What about them? she thought. They’re always out there … But when she looked through the window the woods were still, and door and curtain did not stir, and no mutterings came to trouble her sleep.
‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘You’ve done so much already.’
‘Exactly. So this is something you can do for me.’
She knew it wasn’t true, but he seemed so matter-of-fact, his generosity unobtrusive, almost invisible, and the property materialized somehow, a tiny slot of a building between an antique shop and a delicatessen for the Londoners, with rooms that went back and back, and queer little stairs going nowhere, and bedrooms the size of cupboards and cupboards the size of bedrooms, all in the best tradition of second-hand bookshops. She moved in, and there was no rent, and her slender salary stretched to cover everything. The villagers assumed she was a relative of Bartlemy’s, a niece or distant cousin, and eventually she almost came to believe it herself, half forgetting, under the spell of his protection, that she had ever been a homeless wanderer, who knocked on his door purely by chance, if chance it was. Nathan would grow up to call him uncle, and Annie walked through the woods on summer nights, and they were gone, vanished like an evil dream in the moment of awakening, until she barely remembered that they had ever been.
But for all her trust, it was many months before she confided fully in Bartlemy. Winter came round again, and on fire-lit evenings at Thornyhill she watched Nathan grow.
‘Is he like his father?’ Bartlemy asked once.
‘No,’ she said. A silence fell, laden with waiting. ‘He’s like himself. Daniel …’
‘Your husband?’
‘He wasn’t my husband. We just – lived together. I took his name when he died for Nathan’s sake, I suppose. I wanted my son to have something of his father to hold on to, something to remember him by. Or maybe it was because my family didn’t … they weren’t happy that Daniel and I didn’t marry, and when Nathan came, they … didn’t want him.’
‘Why not?’ Bartlemy inquired. ‘He’s a beautiful, intelligent child. Exceptionally so, I would say.’
‘Isn’t he?’ For a minute her face lit; then recollection clouded it over again. ‘The trouble was …’ Suddenly, she looked directly at him, and there was a kind of pleading in her eyes. ‘Daniel was white. Nathan’s far too dark – he looks half Indian or something. But I’d never had an Indian lover. There’d been no one but Daniel since we met. We were together eight years, and I was faithful to him. I wouldn’t want to play around. After Daniel died, when I found I was pregnant, I was very happy. And then the baby came, and he was beautiful, so beautiful, but – since then, I never seemed to stop running. Till I came here.’ After a few moments, she went on: ‘Please believe me. I can’t explain why Nathan looks the way he does. I can’t explain any of it.’
‘How very interesting,’ Bartlemy said at last. ‘Don’t fret: I know you wouldn’t make it up. You’re not that type at all. Anyway, why should you? There would be no real point. Can you tell me how Daniel died?’
‘It was a car crash. He’d been working late – he often did – and they said, the police said, he may have fallen asleep at the wheel, but he wouldn’t. I know that. They said at the inquest another vehicle hit him, a van or a truck, and must have just driven away. He only had a little Renault: he was knocked off the road into a tree …’
Her mind was carried back to the pale hospital room, pale as a sepulchre, and the still figure in the bed, with his battered face almost unrecognizable between the bandages, except she would have recognized him however he looked, however bruised and broken. She held his hand, tight, tight, and the tears ran down her cheeks unwiped, and she begged him to live in a running whisper which she knew or dreaded he would not hear. Looking back, she thought she had sat there forever, that a part of her was still sitting there, trapped in a moment of time, with his hand in hers, imploring him in vain: Don’t go, don’t give up, live. Live. And then he had opened his eyes.
They had given him morphine for the pain; the nurses thought he would not wake again. But somehow his body rejected the drug, and he came round, looking at her with love, so much love that she thought her heart would burst, and then the pain came, the price of that instant, that love, because he had shaken off the influence of the morphine. His face was wrung with it, scrunched up in the final agony, and she reached out with all that she had, all that she was, with mind and heart and soul, reached into his pain, into his death, and in that second she would have given life and happiness to save him, to spare him even an atom of suffering. But the pain was smoothed away, and his life with it, and when at last she drew back it was another age, another world.
‘Nathan was born exactly nine months later,’ she told Bartlemy. ‘I always thought …’
‘You thought you became pregnant in the moment of Daniel’s death,’ he said. ‘I understand.’
‘Something happened then, something I can’t remember. I don’t mean there are blanks: it wasn’t like that. It’s as if there’s a scar, a scar in time, or a fold, and inside it there’s the memory, the forgotten thing. Afterwards, I was different. I was … more. I knew I was pregnant, I knew it immediately, though I hadn’t known it before. I couldn’t even grieve properly. I missed Daniel – I’ll always miss him – but the differentness, the moreness, filled me up.’
‘Life out of death,’ said Bartlemy. ‘It makes sense. Yes. There is a Gate we pass when we die –’ she could hear the capital G ‘– a Gate out of this world. What lies beyond it no one knows. Religion invents, philosophers speculate, and the rest of us merely hope. If there are other universes, other states of being, then that is the only way to reach them – the only way we know of. But none may pass the Gate alive, or ever return. So they say. But even the Ultimate Laws may be broken, by the very wicked, or the very rash, or those whose love takes them beyond fear – or by the Powers themselves.’
‘Is this your philosophy?’ she asked him. ‘A Gateway between worlds, and unearthly powers making laws for us to live by?’
‘I’m not so original,’ he responded. ‘Others have done my thinking for me, long ago. I simply follow a well-worn path.’
‘I like the sound of it,’ she said. ‘People say they see a tunnel, but I prefer a gate. A gate opens both ways. Maybe I did pass through, and return … But then, why doesn’t Nathan look like Daniel? Have you a philosophy to answer that?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at the moment. There could be many explanations. I will give it some thought.’
The years of Nathan’s childhood passed in something close to an idyll. Of course, the trouble with a happy childhood is that you are much too young to appreciate it. Nathan, with the unthinking acceptance of youth, assumed happiness was the lot of most human beings: the unhappy were few and far between, and after a period of suffering they too would be helped to find contentment. He had never known a father so he couldn’t miss him, but his mother’s talk of Daniel gave him a feeling of security, of being watched over by a friendly ghost, though strangely she had no photographs to show him. Otherwise, his Uncle Barty filled whatever space there might have been – filled and overfilled it, his solidity a protective wall, a quiet strength behind his placid manner. And Annie, trying her best always to be firm and fair, determined not to lose her temper under the stresses and irritants of parenthood, found it, much of the time, unexpectedly easy. Money was not plentiful but there was always enough, and the little feuds and fracas of village life could not disturb her comfort. Nathan went to the local school, excelled at his studies, played football in winter and cricket in summer. The other children admired him but were also wary of him, slightly daunted by his effortless intelligence and something about him that set him a little apart, a sort of calmness, an inner certainty. The few who became his particular friends felt themselves somehow special, singled out, though Nathan was friendly to all and never seemed to do any visible singling. His most frequent companions were George Fawn and Hazel Bagot – something which surprised his classmates, since he could have hung out with the most popular boys in the school. George was chubby and shy, regularly picked on by pupils and even some of the teachers, given to stammering when he was nervous, which was often. He was cornered in the playground one day by the school bully, Jason Wicks, when Nathan came to his defence. ‘Leave him alone. He’s never harmed you. Why should you want to hurt him?’
There was a chorus of laughter from Jason’s backing group. ‘’Cos he’s fat, and he s-s-stammers, and his mother’s a –’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Nathan, not angrily, but with a kind of set look on his face. ‘I told you, leave him alone.’
‘You’re going to protect him, are you?’ Jason bunched a big fist.
‘I’ll try.’
The fist shot out, knocking him against the wall. George moved to help him and then shrank away, too frightened to aid his champion. When Nathan straightened up, there was blood on his lip.
‘Now fuck off,’ Jason ordered. He had learnt both his manners and his vocabulary from his seniors at home.
‘No.’
This time, Nathan dodged the blow, grabbed the lunging arm, and drove it past him, with both his weight and Jason’s behind it. Knuckles rammed into the wall – Jason screamed as flint cut his flesh to the bone. ‘I’m sorry,’ Nathan said, ‘but in future, let George alone.’ The backing group could have jumped him, but they didn’t. Maybe they had read enough of the right books, or at any rate seen enough of the right movies, to know that this was how a hero behaved. George would have become his willing slave from that moment, if he had wanted one.
As for Hazel, she and Nathan were near neighbours, nursery playmates, squabbling companions, sharers in adventures both imaginary and real. Mrs Bagot worked in the deli, and Hazel was frequently left at the bookshop, in theory under Annie’s eye, the two children chasing each other up steps and stairways in rowdy games, or mysteriously quiet as Nathan showed her wonderful books with yellowing pages and illustrations shielded in tissue paper. Without his encouragement she would have read little: she came from a household where reading was something that happened to other people, her mother preferred the television, her father the pub. She was an only child, given to strange introverted moods when she wouldn’t speak for hours, or would climb a tree and refuse to come down, ‘watching’ she would explain later when asked what she’d been doing, or ‘thinking’. But she would always talk to Nathan. She had occasional outbursts of temper which alarmed other children, but these were rare. To look at she was a little below the average height for her age, sturdily built, with a lot of untidy brown hair which her mother was always trying to restrain in plait or ponytail or twist, but the shorter ends invariably worked loose, and Hazel would pull them over her face to hide behind. Nathan’s male classmates scorned her as a best friend because she was a girl, but it made no difference to him. Both his companions and his mother were learning that nothing anyone said or did made any difference to Nathan, once he had made up his mind.
But before George, even before Hazel, there was Woody. ‘Your imaginary friend,’ Annie called him, and Nathan accepted this, although with a note of doubt, since he thought ‘imaginary’ meant ‘not real’, and Woody was quite real. They would meet in the garden at Thornyhill – a garden that seemed much bigger than its actual size, with trellises overgrown with beanflowers, and herb beds, and rambling shrubs, and curious furtive statues hiding in leaves, and wild corners where wood and garden ran together and an infant Nathan found no boundaries to his playground. Annie learned not to worry about him: Hoover was always around, if he strayed too far. But even Hoover never saw Woody. Woody was very, very shy, an odd little creature with an elongated face, all nose, and slanting eyes that looked sideways from his head, like the eyes of an animal. His body was thin as a twig, his skin brownish and slightly mottled, varying in tone according to his background. Hair bristled on his scalp and straggled down his back. If he wore clothes, they were so close to his skin colour that Nathan never noticed. He explained that he was a woodwose, but if he had a name he couldn’t remember it, so Nathan called him Woody.
‘Have you lived here a long time?’ the child asked him once.
‘Always.’
‘How long is always?’
‘I’m not sure. Not very long I think, but I can’t remember being anywhere else.’
‘Do you have parents?’
‘Parents …?’
‘A mummy and daddy. I have a mummy, but my daddy is dead. And I have Uncle Barty, and Hoover. Who do you have?’
But Woody didn’t seem to have anybody.
‘Then you can have me,’ said Nathan.
They would crawl through gaps in the undergrowth into the woods, where his imaginary friend showed him the secret worlds in the hollows of trees, and under last year’s leaves, and they would watch new shoots growing, and the tiny lives of insects, and the green beginnings of things. Sometimes birds would come, and perch on Woody’s fingers – long, brown, knobbly fingers – or his shoulder, as if he were no more than a sapling sprouting among the roots. When Annie first heard of these explorations she was horrified. ‘He mustn’t go wandering off on his own like this. Anything could happen to him!’
‘He appears to be looked after,’ Bartlemy said. ‘You don’t have to worry. No harm can come to him here.’
And somehow, she believed him.
When Nathan’s friendship with Hazel grew he told her about Woody, but she never met him. And gradually, as he became more preoccupied with school and other activities, he saw less and less of his strange companion, and Woody faded with early childhood, until, without really thinking about it, Nathan came to accept his mother’s definition, that the woodwose had come from his imagination, and had no substance of its own.
When he was eleven Nathan won a scholarship to Ffylde Abbey, a private school run by monks about an hour’s drive from Eade. Annie had dredged up the long-forgotten Catholicism of her youth to enable him to apply: it was one of the best schools in the area, patronized largely by the sons of the rich and privileged, but with high academic standards for those who wanted to attain them and superb sports facilities for everyone else. Nathan went as a weekly boarder: the distance was too great for him to come home every evening. Jason Wicks and his gang jeered at him for being a swot and a snob, but they soon grew tired of it, since Nathan appeared genuinely indifferent to their mockery and never responded to provocation. At the new school he made new friends, and inevitably saw less of some of the village children, but his closeness to Hazel and George was unaffected. They would foregather at weekends in their special meeting place in the bookshop, known as the Den. There was a kind of storage space, like a very tall, thin cupboard, between two stacks of shelving, and they had discovered that if you climbed up inside with the help of a stepladder you would find yourself in a tiny loft area tucked under the slope of the roof, with a skylight through which you could scramble right outside. This was their secret headquarters where they would go to plan games and adventures, or just sit and talk out of the range of grown-up ears. They kept a biscuit tin there with emergency supplies, three mugs for coke or lemonade, and a lantern with coloured glass in the sides for dark winter evenings. Nathan had even made a cardboard screen to put over the skylight at such times, so no passerby would see it illuminated. Annie sneaked up there occasionally and dusted, when she was sure they weren’t around, to prevent them getting too obviously grubby. She didn’t think either Hazel’s or George’s parents would be pleased if an afternoon in Nathan’s company invariably resulted in grey clothing.
Sometimes on clear nights they would extinguish the lantern, and open the skylight to look up at the stars. ‘I wish we had a telescope,’ Nathan said. ‘Then we could see them much bigger and closer.’ He’d been doing some astronomy at Ffylde. ‘Look, there’s the Great Bear.’
‘It never looks like a bear to me,’ Hazel said. ‘More like a saucepan with a bent handle.’
‘Maybe we could see a comet,’ George said hopefully. ‘David –’ his elder brother ‘– showed me one once, through binoculars, but I couldn’t really see anything. I thought it would be very bright, with a tail, like a firework, but there was just a bit of a blur.’
‘Where’s Orion?’ asked Hazel, naming the only other constellation she had heard of.
‘I’ll show you.’ Standing on a box with her, leaning against the edge of the skylight, Nathan pointed upwards. ‘There. That string of stars is his belt.’
‘What about the rest of him?’
‘I’m not sure …’ His pointing finger wavered; in the dark they couldn’t see him frown. ‘That’s funny.’
‘What’s funny?’ said George. There wasn’t room for him on the box, and he was trying to gaze up past the other two, and failing.
‘There’s another star, just below Orion. It wasn’t there before: I’m sure it wasn’t. I was up here last night.’
‘Show me,’ said Hazel. Nathan pointed again. ‘Perhaps you remembered wrong. Or there was some cloud or something.’
‘It wasn’t cloudy.’
‘Perhaps it’s a comet!’ George said excitedly.
‘If there was a comet it would’ve been on the news,’ Nathan said. ‘Besides, it looks like a star.’
‘It’s not very twinkly,’ Hazel explained.
Nathan climbed down, switched on the lantern, and consulted his star map. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘There shouldn’t be a star there at all.’
‘It must be a UFO,’ George declared. ‘They can look like stars. Let me see.’ Now the others had come down, he scrambled onto the box. ‘It’ll whoosh across the sky in a minute and disappear.’
But it didn’t.
‘It could be a whole new star,’ Hazel suggested. ‘I’ve heard how they can have huge explosions out in space, and that makes new stars.’
‘A supernova,’ Nathan said knowledgeably. ‘If it is, it’ll be on Patrick Moore.’
But there was nothing about a new star on any programme, and when Nathan looked the following evening it had gone. He didn’t say much to the other two, but on his own he wondered, and would steal up the stepladder late at night to look, just in case. But it was not until the next spring, when he had almost forgotten about it, that he saw the star again.
That winter a new couple moved down from London, causing a minor flutter of interest among less glamorous residents. They were in their thirties: he was a lecturer in history at East Sussex University and a writer of up-market period novels, popular enough to be stocked in most bookshops instead of having to be specially ordered, and she was an actress of the intellectual type who had appeared regularly on stage and television. His name was Michael Addison, hers Rianna Sardou (Rianna reputedly shortened from Marianne), but they were assumed to be married, though she seemed to be away a great deal, on tour with a play or on location shoots for a TV drama or bit-part film role. However, Michael was around most of the time, and the villagers pronounced him pleasant and friendly, and began to call him Mike. He would have a pint in the pub of an evening, and chat to Lily Bagot in the deli, and to Annie in the bookshop. He was rather good-looking, in a tousled, don’t-give-a-damn sort of way, with a one-sided smile which might have been irresistible if he had been inclined so to employ it. He wore country clothes – Barbour jackets, wellies, trainers – and glasses for reading and driving. His wife on the other hand, when actually seen, was something of a disappointment. The rumpled, unmade-up look which suited Michael so well was not what the village expected of an actress, particularly not one with a name like Rianna, and local opinion found her aloof and unapproachable. She had the appropriate cheekbones, but they displayed more angularity than beauty, and her hair, though long and dark, was usually scraped back into a tight coil, with loose ends spraying over the crown of her head. Gossip said she neglected Michael, and local attitudes became tinged with an unexpressed sympathy when he was around.
They had bought an oast house on the edge of the village, with two round towers under pixy-hat roofs, and a long building in between, wood-panelled, antique-furnished, expensively renovated. The River Glyde flowed past it on its meandering way through the water-meadows, and their garden ran down to the bank, with mooring for a couple of boats, though they only appeared to have a dinghy, left behind by a previous owner. The house had been empty for a while before they moved in, and Nathan, George and Hazel had once ‘borrowed’ the dinghy, almost coming to grief in the grip of a current too strong for their oarsmanship. They had had to ram the boat into the bank in order to avoid being swept away – or sinking, since the planking proved far from watertight. Nathan, seeing Michael in the shop one day, felt obliged to mention these hazards, though he would have preferred it if his mother hadn’t been within earshot. ‘You – took – that – boat – out – without – permission?’ Annie had paled from a mixture of anger and terror.
‘It wasn’t stealing!’ Nathan protested. ‘We put it back afterwards – and anyway, it didn’t seem to belong to anybody then.’
‘Boats are dangerous,’ Annie said, dismissing the issue of theft unconsidered. ‘You could’ve drowned. What were you thinking of?’
‘We can all swim. We wouldn’t drown, honestly.’
‘There are weeds under the water which can drag you down …’
‘Never mind,’ Michael intervened. ‘Thanks for warning me, Nathan. That was very thoughtful of you. Actually, I was thinking of getting a boat of my own, just a small one, an inflatable maybe, with an outboard motor. You could come for a ride with me, if your mother doesn’t object.’
‘Of course I don’t, if he’s supervised,’ Annie said hastily. ‘It’s very kind of you, but – I mean, you don’t have to –’
‘I’d like to,’ Michael assured her, turning up the twist of his smile.
‘Could I bring my friends?’ Nathan asked.
‘Nathan –!’
‘It’s okay,’ Michael said. ‘Friends are fine – if the boat’s big enough, and there aren’t too many of them.’
‘Just Hazel and George. When will you get the boat?’
‘Oh – in the spring, I expect. Too chilly on the river now. Don’t worry, Nat: I won’t forget about taking you out, I promise. I’m not a forgetting kind of person.’
‘I wasn’t worried,’ Nathan said. ‘No one calls me Nat, it sounds a bit American.’
‘I won’t if you dislike it.’
Nathan thought about it. ‘I don’t mind,’ he decided, ‘if it’s just you. And if Mum doesn’t mind?’
‘It’s your name,’ Annie smiled.
He told the others about this, in the Den the following weekend. George was both excited and rather scared at the prospect of going out in a boat again, but Hazel looked thoughtful. ‘What’s the matter?’ Nathan asked her.
‘D’you think he likes your mum?’ Hazel said, pulling her hair over her eyes as if to hide from his response.
‘Why shouldn’t he?’
‘You know what I mean.’ She still wouldn’t meet his gaze.
‘He’s married …’
‘Don’t be silly. Married people often like other people; they get divorced; they marry someone else.’ She added, rather gruffly: ‘I sometimes wish Mum would divorce Dad. He doesn’t love her very much. Great-grandma Effie says he’s no good and never was.’
There was a short silence. Mention of Effie Carlow, Hazel’s great-grandmother, always commanded respect, since few people had great-grandmothers, and age had given her opinions the aura of wisdom, whether they deserved it or not. What that age was no one was certain: her piled-up grey hair was still abundant, her walk vigorous, her face wrinkled but not withered. She had a sharp nose and a sharper tongue, and her eyes, under heavy lids, were as keen as a hawk’s.
‘Even so,’ Nathan said at last, ‘I don’t think you should put your dad down.’
‘Only to you.’ She wouldn’t have chosen to confide in George, but Nathan had made him part of their group, and she treated him a little like a favoured pet. George being there counted no more than Hoover. Probably less.
‘Anyway,’ Nathan reverted to the original subject, ‘Mum wouldn’t … she wouldn’t want someone else’s husband.’
‘My mum says Michael’s very attractive,’ Hazel stated. ‘And Annie’s pretty. She ought to have boyfriends.’
Nathan didn’t answer. This was a point which had troubled him occasionally. He had friends with single mums, both at the village school and at Ffylde – even some with single dads – and boyfriends and girlfriends were always a problem. Children had to sort them out, encourage the good ones, fend off undesirables. They tended to buy lavish Christmas presents, woo the children with hamburgers and then shoo them from the room so they could indulge in kissing and fondling while their audience giggled outside. Some new partners brought unwanted brothers and sisters in their train. It was a hazard of modern life. Nathan knew he was lucky not to have these problems, but … but … ‘Do you want a father?’ Annie asked him once.
‘I have a father,’ Nathan responded. ‘He’s dead, but he’s still my father. I don’t need another one. Only … well … if you have a boyfriend that’s all right. As long as he’s a nice person, and he loves you. Is there – is there someone?’
‘When there is,’ Annie had said, ‘you’ll be the first to know.’
And now there was Michael Addison. Who was nice. And Lily Bagot said he was attractive. He had a wife, but she was an actress, and everyone knew actresses had affairs and got divorced a lot: it went with the territory. Still … maybe he loved his wife, and missed her when she was away, turning to Annie only for comfort. Nathan decided he didn’t like the situation whichever way you looked at it. If he starts to give me presents and take me for hamburgers, he thought, then I’ll know.
The years in Eade had turned Annie from a girl into a woman. Time had firmed her softness and tapered the planes of her face; her fluffy hair was cut short and fell over her forehead in light brown feather-curls. She still wore little makeup, but the country air gave her pale skin the glow of health. Once in a while some man would be extra friendly, but she would smile politely and distance herself, in manner if not words, asserting in thought that it was for her son and knowing – in her more self-analytical moods – that Nathan was an excuse. Perhaps Daniel still had all her heart; perhaps there was something else, lost in that fold of time, which kept her alone and separate, unresponsive to all men. When Michael Addison took to dropping in, to browse among the books and chat, she liked him without reserve, confident that liking was all it would ever be. She was not cold, merely absent, like a nun who, wedded to the idea of God, seeks no mortal husband. But Annie had always been doubtful about God – the Catholic God of her childhood, demanding, faintly patronizing, immersed in ritual. She preferred Bartlemy’s theory of the Ultimate Powers, maintaining some kind of equilibrium throughout all the worlds, but exacting neither blind worship nor interminable repentance. Since the moment of Daniel’s death she had known with the certainty of experience that there were things out there beyond the range of ordinary human knowledge, other dimensions – universes – beings, and maybe some of them had a foothold on her memory, and a handhold on her heart.
That Christmas Michael and Rianna went to stay with friends in Gloucestershire, and afterwards went skiing, Hazel’s father got drunk and hit Lily, causing her, for the first time, to consult a lawyer, and George was given a pair of binoculars, which were almost as good as a telescope. Annie and Nathan spent the day as they always did, with Bartlemy and Hoover, eating what was, had they but known it, the best Christmas dinner in the country. Bartlemy could do mysterious and wonderful things with food: children would fight to eat their greens when he had cooked them, his roast turkey was moist inside and crisp outside, oozing golden-brown juices, his potatoes crunched and melted, his plum pudding magically combined both airy lightness and dark fruitiness. Afterwards, Nathan always remembered that Christmas as especially perfect. It didn’t snow, in fact it rained, but they were indoors and the rain was out, and the fire filled the room with warmth and radiance, and his huge dinner disappeared into an elastic stomach and slender body, leaving no visible trace. Bartlemy had a television, which picked up channels no one else ever received, so they watched a fairytale in a foreign language, about an arrogant king who was forced to wander among his people in the guise of a beggar, and learned wisdom and humility, then they played chess, and Nathan almost won, and Annie watched them affectionately and thought: ‘How lucky I am. How lucky.’ And suddenly she was afraid, though she had never been afraid before, in case her luck would change.
And in the New Year Nathan found the sunken chapel, and saw the whispering cup, and then everything was different.