The remainder of Saturday passed in snippets of memory, cut from whole cloth and rearranged by the blow my head had taken:
After we ate, I lay dozing on a surprisingly comfortable if much-repaired deck chair beneath the big oak tree. The late-afternoon sun had broken through; someone had put a warm wrap over me.
Estelle and Goodman were sitting on a pair of upended firewood rounds, a third round between them as a table. On it the child had arranged an impromptu tea-service. The participants were Estelle, Goodman, and a bedraggled once-purple stuffed rabbit lifted from his sitting room wall, with a fourth setting for the fawn he had told her might come by. The plates were mismatched saucers from Goodman’s kitchen, the cups were two acorns, a small tea-cup, and her treasured porcelain dollies’ cup. The tea-pot was a creamer lacking a handle, decorated with the Brighton Pier and a generous stripe of gilt. A silver salt bowl and spoon made for a scaled-down sugar bowl. A clean khaki-coloured handkerchief was the tablecloth.
Goodman solemnly stirred a spoonful of nonexistent sugar into the dollies’ cup, which was scarcely larger than the salt spoon. He raised it to his lips and sipped noisily, then held it out to admire.
“This is very pretty,” he remarked.
“I have the others, at home,” she informed him. “That’s in London.”
“You only brought the one?”
“Mary brought it. She found it where I’d left it, at a friend of my Mama’s.”
“That was thoughtful of Mary.”
“Papa bought it for me in Shanghai, before we left. He gave it to me so I would have a reason to remember how beautiful the city was. But I don’t, really.”
“Still, it was a nice thought.”
“Mr Robert, do you think the baby deer will come out? Or should we give his serving to the bunny?”
Later that afternoon: I was now on a settee before the fireplace, while Estelle helped prepare supper, scrubbing potatoes while our host kneaded bread on a board.
“There’s a lot of potatoes,” she said in mild complaint.
“You can stop if you’re tired.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“Sometimes when I’m doing a tedious job, I keep myself busy by singing.”
“I like to sing.”
“I thought you might. Do you want to sing something for me?”
She happily launched into a merry song with Chinese words. Despite the foreign tonality of the melody, her voice was pure and precise, skipping up the half tones without missing a one. At the end, Goodman clapped in an explosion of flour. I joined him, although the impact reverberated through my skull.
“Ha!” he laughed. “That was very fine. You must teach it to me one day.”
“You sing now,” she ordered.
Perhaps the task at hand or the demands of the kneading rhythm brought the song to mind: Goodman threw back his head and, in a rich and unexpected baritone, began to sing.
There were three men came from the west their fortunes for to try,
And these three made a solemn vow, John Barleycorn must die.
I stirred and tried to catch his eye, but he was well launched into the song and beat his bread dough with gusto. I subsided; surely the child was too young to understand the words?
It is a rousing tune, to be sure, and he did skip over the more adult verses—it is a very old song, and whether it is a paean to fertility sacrifice, an evocation of Christian Transubstantiation, or simply a drinking song, John Barleycorn is put through the wringer—hacked, beaten, ploughed, sowed, and buried—before he is reborn as beer, and finally sprouts up anew. Goodman sang and thumped his bread, raising a fine mist of flour in the room.
To my relief, when the song ended, Estelle did not enquire into the significance of the words. She merely demanded another. Goodman started “Frère Jacques.” Instantly, she joined him. In French to his English, the high child’s voice and the man’s baritone wound around each other, creating sweet harmony from an unlikely cottage in a Lake District clearing.
During the afternoon, he juggled for her, four round oak galls, then threw himself into a game of hide-and-seek that had us both grinning with Estelle’s infectious giggles. Later, they went out to fetch the day’s eggs from the hen-house, stopping on the way to examine a flower of some kind.
“Let Nature be your teacher,” Goodman said—or rather, pronounced.
“I don’t go to school yet,” Estelle told him.
“It is never too early to have a teacher. Or too late,” he said, with a note of surprise.
“How is Nature a teacher? Does she stand in front of a classroom with a stick?”
“I believe Mr Wordsworth merely meant that we can learn much from the world around us.”
“Is Mr Wordsworth a friend of yours?”
“We have many friends in common, Mr Wordsworth and I. Such as the hedgehog you shall see this evening.”
Their voices trailed off then, in the direction of the hen-house.
Dusk. The mouth-watering odour of baking wheat permeated the universe, and although I had been up and around, I was again on the settee in front of the fire. Estelle and Goodman were seated side by side in the open doorway, waiting for a hedgehog to emerge after a saucer of milk. Every so often he reared back his head to look at her; he seemed fascinated by the shape of her eyes.
“There it is!” Estelle squeaked.
“Shh, don’t frighten him. Not to worry, he’ll come back in a minute. See, there’s his nose, sniffing to make certain the world is safe.”
“We won’t hurt it.”
“Hedgehogs are shy.”
“What does shy mean?”
“Shy is when a person is frightened of many things.”
“I’m shy.”
“Ha! I don’t think that’s so.”
“I’m frightened of aeroplanes.”
“That only makes you sensible.”
“I’m afraid of our neighbour’s dog. It’s big.”
“That’s probably sensible, too.”
“Are you scared of anything, Mr Robert?”
“Look, he’s finished the milk and is looking around for more. Greedy thing.”
“Shall we give him more?”
“No, we don’t want him to forget how to find his own food. Milk is a treat, not dinner.”
“What do hedgehogs eat?”
“Roots. Grubs.”
“Ew.”
“Carrots are roots. You ate those.”
“Because Mama says I have to be polite and eat what I’m given.”
“You don’t like carrots? Then I won’t serve them again.”
“But I don’t eat grubs.”
“True. But a hedgehog likes them. He would probably say ew if you offered him a chocolate biscuit.”
“Ah, the scientific approach. No, I don’t wish to introduce him to the taste of chocolate. What if I’m wrong and he likes it, and that one morsel condemns the poor creature to spend the rest of his life in unrequited longing for the taste of chocolate?”
“You talk funny, Mr Robert.”
“People before you have told me that.”
“So, are you frightened of anything?”
“Logic and persistence—I fear you will go far in this world, Estelle Adler.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
He sighed. “Fear,” he said, and turned to look down at the child by his side. “I am afraid of fear.”
Then he jumped to his feet. “If you can say the word pipistrelle, I will take you to watch the bats come out.”
Evening, and I might have curled up to sleep fully clothed except it had occurred to me that children required putting to bed. Estelle and Goodman were in front of the fire, he on the floor with Damian’s sketch-book on his knee, she stretched with her belly across the tree-round he used for a foot-stool, narrating the drawings for him. I had found the book in my rucksack, astonished that it had survived this far, and leafed through its pages before I gave it to her, making sure it contained none of his detailed nudes or violent battle scenes. Some of the drawings I had found mildly troubling, but doubted a small child would notice.
“That’s Papa,” she said. “His face doesn’t look like that, much.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Goodman replied, and I had to smile: Damian’s self-portrait might have been an interspecies breeding experiment, his face oddly canine down to the suggestion of fur.
“And that’s Mama,” she said.
“She’s very pretty.” I must tell him about Estelle’s mother, I thought. Tomorrow.
“Doesn’t she miss it?” he asked.
It took her a second to understand the joke. Then she giggled and called him silly, explaining that her Mama had her own hair, of course!
A vivid picture of that heavy black hair spilling over a cold slab flashed before my eyes; I shuddered.
The sound of a page turning, and then silence. I knew what sketch they were looking at, since I had lingered over it myself.
Estelle, yet not Estelle. In this portrait, Damian was looking forward through time to put an adult shape on his small daughter’s face. One might have thought it was Yolanda, from the clear Chinese cast to the features, but no one who knew Holmes could possibly mistake the imperious gaze from those grey eyes.
“I think that’s Mama,” the child said, sounding none too certain.
“No, it’s you,” Goodman said.
“I don’t look like that.”
“You will. Your Papa thinks you will.”
She leant forward, her nose near to touching the page.
“He loves you very much,” Goodman said.
“I love him, too. Mr Robert, is Papa all right?”
“Yes.” Goodman’s voice was absolutely certain, and my fingers twitched with the impulse to make a gesture against the evil eye.
Estelle did not respond, not immediately. Instead, a minute later I heard her feet cross the room, and opened my eyes to find her standing beside me, the sketch-book in her hand. “Can you take this out for me?” she asked.
I pushed myself upright, taking the book. She pointed to the drawing of her older self and ordered, “Take it out.”
I only hesitated for a moment before deciding, with the complete lack of logic that had permeated the last two days, that if Damian had wanted the drawing, he shouldn’t have let himself be duped by the charlatan who had murdered his wife. I reached down to my boot top for the knife I kept there, ran its razor-sharp point along the edge of the page, and handed it to her.
I thought Goodman was not going to accept it. He swallowed, shaken by the gift, before reaching out and taking it by the edges. After a moment, he stood and took it to the decorated wall. “Where should I put it?” he asked her.
She pointed at a handsbreadth of bare wood. Instead, he removed the bundle of feathers that marked the wall’s focal point, and mounted the drawing in its place.
She watched solemnly, then asked, “Is that the kind of feather that’s in your hat?”
“The very same,” he said, and began to work one of them free.
“Why do you wear a feather in your hat?”
“Ich habe einen Vogel,” he replied.
I choked, and he cast me a twinkle of his green eye.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means I have a bird. Or at least, one feather of a bird. And now so do you. This is for you,” he said to her. “It’s from the owl who lives in the big tree. She sometimes gives me one of her feathers, to thank me for sharing my mice with her.”
She fetched her hat and brought it to me, demanding that I work the feather into the hat’s crown.
I did so, trying not to laugh all the while: The colloquial English for the German Ich habe einen Vogel is I have bats in my belfry.
When the feather was installed, I suggested it was time for bed. Rather to my surprise, she accepted the command, although when she was tucked into the makeshift bed, the hat and its feather stood on the floor beside her head.
She wished us both good-night, and curled up with her face towards the wall, banishing my own thready memories of prolonged stories and prayers and glasses of water.
At long last, I was free to take to my own bed. I removed my shoes and sat on the window-seat I had been assigned, then realised that Goodman was still in the bedroom doorway, his eyes on the sleeping child. He felt my gaze, and turned to look at me. His eyes were liquid with tears. “‘A simple child,’” he said, “‘that lightly draws its breath/And feels its life in every limb …’”
Then turned and walked out of the house into the night.
Slowly, I arranged the wraps over my legs.
My paternal grandmother had been much taken by the poems of Wordsworth, the bard of the Lake District, and had read and recited them, over and over, when I was at her house in Boston. Thus, my mind could now supply the line about the child that Goodman had left off:
What should it know of death?