It is getting dark. Mikey can make out the patterns on the other side of the river, but only because he knows what they look like already. This should be the best time, when the baby trout play over there by the fallen tree or behind him under the weeping willow, but this evening even the fish must be scared. No one can know everything. For a start, Edmund does not know what he’s thinking right now, and he’ll never know, not if he doesn’t tell him. A circle of ripples disturbs the pool beneath him; the trout is hungry after all, the flies never stop dancing.
Mikey surfaces. ‘I didn’t know she was unhappy.’
Edmund looks up towards him. Mikey can’t tell what he’s thinking either, his face is in the shadows, but his whisper is very loud and clear because everything else is so quiet and wrapped up in the evening.
‘Nor did I,’ says Edmund.
‘Or that she was sorry. She never told me.’
‘She didn’t tell me either, Mikey.’
Mikey’s bottom lip is distorted. ‘I wanted her to be dead.’ He holds his hands to his ears and closes his eyes, screws up his face so the truth can’t get in.
Sandpaper words these, for Edmund. ‘And so did I.’
As he reaches out, the boy struggles to escape his grasp, but then gives in, folds up on himself. ‘I almost killed her,’ he whispers.
‘And so did I,’ says Edmund, keeping hold of him as best he can. ‘Do you know, I wasn’t entirely truthful with you? Diana did speak to me when I visited her a few weeks ago.’
Sliding towards Edmund, Mikey crouches down close to him, finds a stick and pokes the ants which scurry away but always return to their chosen route. He will concentrate on the ants.
Edmund ploughs on. ‘Do you know what she didn’t say?’
Shake of the head.
‘She didn’t say anything about what happened when I was away. About any of what’s in the file, or what you did. That’s very brave of her, isn’t it? I think she wanted to put things right, she took all the blame herself.’
Nod.
‘Who do you think is to blame for everything that’s happened?’
‘Me,’ says Mikey. His stick cracks in two, and he breaks it into three pieces, four, five, six.
‘And?’
‘Diana.’
‘And?’
Mikey throws the splintered fragments into the water.
‘And?’
Hanging around close to the bank where the river goes nowhere, the twigs turn circles on themselves until something invisible calls them into the mainstream and off they sail, one after the other in a line, a little bit like the ants, all moving off together past the safe-as-houses islands and the snagged branches and then they’ll slow over the top of the three-fathom pool and then they’ll skim over the glistening weir and . . .
‘And you,’ says Mikey.
‘Yes, and me. Everyone except Monty, everyone except your mum.’ Edmund tries a smile and Mikey hugs the dog who lies chewing a stick beside them. ‘I’ve got it all wrong. All along I’ve been thinking that there is not enough love to go round. It has to be me and Diana, and not you. Or you and Diana here at Wynhope, while I go away. Or me and you, with no Diana, she has to stay at the home. But I’ve got it all wrong, Mikey.’
He is talking to himself, but he can see the child finds his words soothing, in the manner of their speaking if not their meaning. Mikey strokes the dog, over and over and over again.
‘The challenge is not in how to find ways to live without each other, but how to live with each other. I’ve done a lot of thinking this afternoon. Do you know what I think should happen next?’
‘She comes home.’
‘Diana comes home to Wynhope. It’s a terrible punishment to be banished, it’s like a sort of death, Shakespeare knew that,’ says Edmund. The quote is just out of reach, it is something to do with walls – no world for me outside these walls, that’s it. ‘And do you think that’s the right thing to do?’
Nod.
‘I can’t hear you, Mikey.’
‘Yes.’
‘And do you think you can manage that? Living here, Diana and me and you. And Monty. Do you think we can make a go of it?’
Mikey is doing the maths. Does it mean he will only have half of Edmund? Because from what he’s seen, half of things is never enough.
‘Mikey? I asked if you thought we could make a go of it.’
‘I don’t know.’
It is perhaps the most honest thing Edmund has ever heard Mikey say.
‘Now we have work to do.’ Awkwardly Edmund pushes himself to his feet. ‘Fetch me some stones, go on, two or three big ones.’
Stones for throwing, stones for skimming, stones for damming the stream, he dare not ask what these stones are for. Mikey has a terrible feeling he gave the wrong answer to the question. He should have said yes, he can manage Diana coming home, then he’d definitely be staying at Wynhope as well. In class, the teacher stares around the room with that expression on her face which says has anyone else got a better answer? Wading into the shallows, he reaches into the water, soaking his sleeves; the cold numbs his hands as he grasps a stone and heaves it to the bank. Back in again, stumbling, he almost loses his footing. What if he falls? Would Edmund come in after him and save him? He’s never been frightened here before now, but the current is pushing at his legs and the river is creeping up over the top of his boots as he tugs on a second, heavier rock, his fingers scratching into the gravel until he prises it from its bed and the water turns cloudy with all the thousands of bits of stuff which have been stuck underneath it for years and years, all free and floating now like they are in space. He will go back in one more time, if he’s brave enough. For the last stone, he searches for something special and he finds it, the perfect stone. Smaller, smoothed and rounded and polished, it fits in the palm of his hands like a miniature globe.
The stones are not for keeping. They are to go in the bottom of the sack. This is how people drown kittens, Mikey saw it in a cartoon once, and his mum said he shouldn’t watch things like that on the telly, not with the cat in the room. In the low light, Edmund’s shadow is huge, his enormous hands are holding the mouth of the sack open wide; behind Mikey the river rushes away into the dusk. Paul put his mum’s head under the taps in the bath one night, he saw through the door, hair held, face down, shouting, the smell of soap and the splatter of water. Edmund has got rid of people before. He had two wives before Diana and where did they go? At times like this, there has only ever been one person who could make everything all right again and even though she is gone and cannot hear, it is her name he calls inside his head as though he could summon her out of the tower. Gripping onto Monty’s collar for dear life, his heart beat-beat-beating, he has never felt so small and so completely powerless. He has never wanted his mother as much as he wants her now.
A man’s arm across your shoulders is a heavy arm, a man’s breath this close to your neck is hot. Edmund is crouched beside him, pulling him close, pointing at the file.
It is the file he is going to drown.
The file.
Picking it up, sideways, Mikey checks Edmund’s face for confirmation, receives a nod. It is the file that’s going to die.
This is the child’s process, Edmund is not going to interfere. He forces himself to wait in silence and to wait with patience as behind him he hears the click of the metal clips being snapped open and shut; he wonders what Mikey is going to leave and what he is choosing to keep.
‘Ready now.’
All the pieces of paper are dropped into the bag; only the empty file itself is left out, the label peeled away from the front.
‘Why?’ asks Edmund.
‘It isn’t biodegradable,’ says Mikey. ‘We did that in science.’ Sometimes Edmund is quite stupid.
‘True,’ replies Edmund, twisting the top of the sack.
With Mikey holding the twine with his finger and thumb and Edmund tying the knot, tight as you can, they close the bag. It is too heavy for a child, so Edmund carries it for him and together they scrabble back up to the drive to the edge of the old bridge. Beneath them, the water is over thirty feet deep, even in the hottest of summers. All sorts of things have probably met their end in that pool, thinks Edmund; we will not be the first or the last to ask the river to take things away for us.
‘One, two, three.’
Together they heave the bag onto the ledge.
‘Are you ready? Are you sure?’ asks Edmund.
A nod.
‘I can’t hear you, Mikey.’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ says Mikey. ‘Are you?’
‘Yes, I’m sure too.’
It’s quite hard to push it, it’s an ungainly, ugly thing, this sack, and the hessian snags on the stonework before it topples and tumbles in slow motion like a man from a roof, but there is no body, no questions, no siren, even the ripples last only a minute or two of waiting. Edmund realises that time is not linear; these are the patterns not just of what has happened, but of what is going to happen, of what might have happened, different dimensions contained in a series of perfect, concentric circles.
‘All gone,’ says Edmund. ‘Shall we stay down here a while?’
Everything else is preparing for night. It is a violet dusk, too pale to allow the thin moon to shine, too hesitant to convince the rooks to roost in the pines. They settle, rise and swoop and scatter and re-form in unison to some unknown music. Lying on the bank, Edmund feels the roots of the overhanging sycamores digging into his back. He shifts his weight. The sunset has faded, colouring in the sky through the jigsaw pattern of the bare branches over his head, the only stars the fragile white wood anemones under their feet. The difficult, ordinary here and now, this is where they have to live. Grand gestures of the past, like that of his father, are not what is called for. It is how to live honourably with the people and the places God has given to you – that is the challenge. How to live with them, not how to live without them. How to sleep easily, spooned with your history, your family, your story. How to live easily with your self, your God.
If he sits up, Edmund can just see the roof of the chapel and he hears that cry, that prayer, a second time: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? They are not forsaken, they have all been given a second chance, and for that Edmund is grateful. He will restore the chapel, chase out the crow, request that it be reconsecrated. The house is also visible in the distance, two lights on upstairs; he imagines a third lamp shining in the months to come, maybe even this summer. He has pushed Diana up the long drive after a picnic at the river, walking and talking about this and that, she has finished the glass of wine he brought her as she rested under the catalpa tree, her rug is slipping so he pulls it up over her cold legs, and the shade is as soft as silk falling on her shoulders. The piano music is Mikey, the front door to Wynhope is open, she is ready for bed and he carries her upstairs and the smell of meadow hay sweetens their bedroom. His mind wanders on into a future: he will employ a couple to live in the coach house, Grace won’t want to look after Diana, even if she ever agrees to come back at all, everything might be explicable, but that is not to say everything will be forgiven. It turns out Grace is a complicated lady after all. The drawing room has been converted and it has become Diana’s dayroom, opening out on the front lawn where they have built raised beds and he helps her tend them. He does the hard work, he digs in the compost in the winter and plants new roses in the spring, she picks the tulips and yellow daffodils with her left hand. Wynhope has been restructured to accommodate the sick before, in a different time, for the casualties of a different type of war. It is all very idealised, he acknowledges, but if it is to work at all, there has to be hope.
Monday he will go to Stourhead with Dominic as planned. His friend will never know what the original purpose of the day out was, nor will Diana. He’ll unlock the walnut box with the silver key and destroy its contents, put the little key with the yellow-and-red twisted cotton tag back in its rightful place, and it will be as if none of it ever happened. Monday, there will be a sort of second proposal to Diana, to come and live with him at Wynhope, and she will say yes, yes, please, and he will do something of value with his life at last, pay his long overdue debt to the dead – he will rescue her. He will change the tenses: Diana loves him and he loves her. What if she turns him down? The evening has become cold, Edmund is stiff from this blind groping with the future unreal conditional, and he sits up, pulling his coat around him. Does she still love him? How could she still love him? He cannot force her to do anything; he fears he has been something of a bully over the past year.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ says Mikey.
Edmund shares his dream.
‘She might say no,’ says Mikey, the world expert in no. ‘She probably doesn’t like me or Wynhope any longer. Or she might not want people fussing.’
An element of wishful thinking, to put it mildly, thinks Edmund. ‘Well, we will have to listen to what she wants.’
‘And I’ve been thinking too,’ interrupts Mikey, taken up in a hurry of thoughts. ‘We still need to go to the seaside in the summer holidays like you promised and her wheelchair won’t work in the sand so she’ll have to stay here and someone will have to look after her.’ He pauses. ‘Sally is her best friend. She can come. I think Grace might not want to. She’ll be too busy.’
‘We’ll work something out.’
‘Diana could come in September instead when I’m in Year Six and Solomon will be here as well. He can come and stay, not just for tea. He’s good at helping. He helped Mummy and Mummy helped him. And there’s John, he’s strong enough to carry people.’
‘Come here, you. Snuggle up to me.’
Edmund hugs Mikey to warm him up and hold him still and keep him close and in one piece. He does not fool himself that this is going to be easy, but despite everything that he has read about the future prognosis for boys like this, Mikey does not frighten him. He never has, he has only ever stirred up feelings of great love; if Diana has finally met her childhood self, then perhaps, in a roundabout way, the same is true for him. He feels Mikey’s hands rummaging in his pocket.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Gloves. I’m cold. What’s this? Your hanky?’
How extraordinary, thinks Edmund, in my pocket tonight of all nights. ‘I’ll show you.’
Having turned on the torch on his phone, Edmund hands it to Mikey. It is a very white light, Edmund’s face is all lit up and luminous. Mikey flashes the beam down the river, listens to everything running away into the night with a rush and a rustle, then he shines it on the ground between them where the Wynhope Psalm is laid out on the damp moss, weighed down with pebbles from the river.
‘You look surprised,’ says Edmund. ‘Do you know it?’
‘Yes and no.’ Edmund helps him with the difficult words like Zion, captive and mirth, and Mikey reads it out loud.
‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive, required of us a song;
And they that visited us required of us mirth, saying.’
Edmund joins in the last line.
‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’
So they don’t rush off, they don’t fish, they just sit. They don’t talk, they listen to the songs the river sings. The trout rise to the fly, flashes of silver twisting high over the black water before swimming away free, deep beneath the weeded ledges, until a kind darkness comes with the coolness of a cloth held soft against the forehead and the still earth reminds them both that this feverish day is done and that Wynhope is waiting.