Before you ever love, you can dream of love. Jo was in the delight of such a dream, held by a vibrant boy who laughed and whispered poetry in her ear. She woke with two lines running through her head.
Our halves are nothing on their own but half and half make one,
And halves, divided, stand alone when the adding’s done.
Someone had shaken her and the poem had run away, leaving a warm residue which turned to waking disappointment as she saw dawn light filtering through the tent, ancient bugs crawling across the damp nylon just above her. She rolled over, thinking Lucy or Ali had woken her, but they were curled up asleep.
‘It wasn’t them, it was me,’ said Gally’s voice clearly in her head. ‘Come with me.’
Gally led her up the hill as if they were hand in hand. Jo stared ahead, wondering if the police were up there, if they had stayed all night, or whether they had trusted to their tape barriers in the darkness. They followed a narrow trail, shunning the path – a way made by deer or badgers or foxes that snaked up the steeper contours and brought them to the terrace. There, just ahead, were the brown stripes of the two trenches. Jo walked to the place where she had been working, knelt and reached tentatively down with her fingertips extended, holding back just short of the earth as if afraid. She thought this must be why she had been brought here. Driven by a craving for that feeling which had come to her the day before, she touched her fingers to the dry surface but there was just the crumbling earth, inanimate with the anticlimax of finding absolutely nothing there.
‘No,’ said Gally to her. ‘That was not why. Sit down. Breathe easily. Breathe deeply.’ Jo sat on a tree stump, did what she was told, slowed her breath, searching the landscape.
‘Do not try so hard,’ said the voice. ‘Look slowly. Clear away the trees.’ And she found to her surprise that she knew how to do it. She used her eyes like a brush, swinging her gaze slowly around, wiping the trees away to let in the dawn sky and the bright east off to the left. As the trees faded, something obstinate remained – plants in rows, lower. When she let them stay they grew a crop of golden green globes and she knew them for vines, and Gally nudged her to a brief vision of men stooping to tend them – men in monks’ robes.
‘Now leave it to me,’ Gally whispered inside her. ‘Watch.’
The vines had withered. Young trees grew again, little more than saplings, and the sun moved back on its course, sinking just below the eastern rim so that only dawn’s fingers were in the sky. Men were busy all around her, men she could not see to start with, but then she could smell their sharp sweat, see the dark blades of shovels arcing back and forth in the dim light, see the shrinking earth pile as they laboured to bury it out of sight, hurrying to leave this dangerous place. She turned to stare back down the slope, hair prickling, a lookout, watching for the enemy: And behind her, watching at the other side, she felt the vast comfort of his presence – the other half who made her whole.
‘You were here,’ Gally said quietly. ‘More than once. Long ago.’
Then she heard voices below, saw other men moving up through the trees, men in uniform, and opened her mouth to hiss a warning before reality intervened and she knew she was back among the modern trees, on the edge of the terrace where she should not be, where the old explosives oozed danger in the bunker below and these men were coming to deal with it. Love abandoned her again as sadly as in waking from her earlier dream, and she crept down the hillside, picking her way through the cover, anxious to avoid discovery.
Around the corner of the contour, safely away from them, she stopped to address with the swirl of sensation and memory in her head and found Gally with her. ‘You know what this is,’ said Gally.
‘No I don’t.’ She said it out loud.
‘Of course you do. Last night, round the fire, you told our story. How else did that happen?’
‘It was the darkness and the woodsmoke.’
‘Yes, but you opened your mind and remembered and you told them all around the fire. Why would you remember if not for love? Love is the fuel that fires memory. Now you must find him.’
‘I can’t remember him,’ she wailed.
‘You can. He was here,’ said her voice.
‘But that was long ago. You said so.’
‘That was yesterday,’ said the voice. ‘He touched the earth as you touched the earth and you felt each other.’ And Jo gasped as she understood the full meaning of that moment. ‘Go to him. You know where to go.’
Jo shook her head.
‘Yes you do,’ Gally insisted. ‘Do it by yourself. You will find me there too.’ And she seemed to walk away.
Left alone, Jo climbed down the hill on the far side to the camp and circled around through the fields. She sat in the empty marquee which slowly filled in ones and twos of quiet and disappointed diggers until Lucy and Ali joined her.
‘Where have you been?’ Lucy asked.
She didn’t want to say. ‘I got up early.’
‘I can’t bear this.’ Ali was looking around. ‘It’s like everyone is already halfway home in their heads.’
‘Real life is leaking in,’ Lucy said. ‘Our island is crumbling.’
Andy and Conrad came into the tent and heaped bowls full of cereal as if to emphasise that they, at least, still had work to do.
‘So what about you three?’ Conrad asked Ali, staring at her intently.
‘We’ll go back home, I suppose.’
Conrad frowned and that was when Jo sowed the seed of the plan that had come to her on the way down the hill. ‘I don’t see why,’ she said. ‘My mother’s away. Ali, your parents are in Ireland, aren’t they?’
‘Yes. Mum’s digging, Dad’s painting – if she lets him.’
‘Lucy, where have yours gone?’
‘Who knows?’ Lucy said theatrically. ‘I’ll tell you when the postcard comes,’ although she knew perfectly well that they were in Tuscany.
‘So there’s no point in going home, is there?’ asked Jo.
Ali looked uncomfortable. Jo knew she was worrying that her mother would be cross if she found out the dig had ended and they had stayed away. She also knew Ali didn’t want to admit that in front of Conrad.
‘It’s a pity there isn’t another dig we could go to,’ Jo said, and Conrad picked it up, just as she had hoped he would.
‘But there is,’ he said eagerly. ‘There’s this next one we’re going to when we’ve finished here – the place Rupert was talking about last night. What’s it called? I could ask him. I bet he wouldn’t mind if you came along. That would be really super.’
‘Would it?’ said Ali cautiously, but her face was shining.
‘Yes,’ said Jo quickly, ‘and you might say that the dig hasn’t ended. It’s just moving somewhere else. That sounds a really good idea.’
‘Why not?’ said Andy, putting his arm round Lucy’s shoulders. ‘We should be there quite soon. I can’t see this one taking more than another week. Come on, guys, let’s go and ask him.’
Jonno went with them and the girls saw them standing at the other end of the tent waiting for Rupert’s attention. He was talking to an army officer.
‘A week?’ said Lucy. ‘What are we going to do for a week? Hang around waiting for them?’
‘We could go there.’
‘Where? To the place with the three castles, whatever it’s called?’
‘Pen Selwood,’ Jo told her. ‘That’s what it’s called. Yes, we could go there. I’d like to see it.’
‘How would we get there? Is there a train?’
‘We could walk,’ said Jo.
‘Walk? How far is it?’
Jo looked off to the north-east. ‘A day or two going slowly, I expect,’ she replied. ‘We’ve got nothing else to do, have we? Why don’t we go by the fields and the paths and see the country the way it’s meant to be seen?’
Ali was frowning. ‘We’ll have to eat. I haven’t got much money.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Lucy, ‘I have,’ and they looked at her in surprise. Generosity was not usually her strongest quality. ‘I can lend you some,’ she added.
The students came back. Conrad was beaming. ‘He says yes. He can’t say how long we’ll be here but probably a week or so. If you don’t mind shifting dirt he says he’ll feed you. How about that?’
So they said all their goodbyes and studied Ali’s map. It was twenty-five miles from Montacute to Pen Selwood. ‘We could do that in a day or a day and a bit,’ said Ali.
‘Leaving us six days hanging about in a place that barely shows on the map. Why don’t we go somewhere fun first?’ Lucy pointed. ‘Look, Glastonbury. That’s all magic and King Arthur and stuff. Let’s go there.’
It was further north, in the wrong direction, at a tangent to the way her heart demanded, but Jo didn’t argue. It got them moving and committed and once they were on their way, she was sure they would make it to Pen Selwood. Right from the start, the journey did not go well. Lucy’s rucksack straps and her unsuitable shoes and her thin socks all combined to slow them to a frequently interrupted crawl. They were still miles from Glastonbury when evening came and they began casting around for somewhere to camp. The countryside, which had seemed so open, now took on an unexpected inaccessibility. The fields contained sheep or cows or crops. They came to a wood and saw signs saying PRIVATE SHOOTING. KEEP OUT. A track led around the wood but beyond it was a farm with windows that seemed to stare at them suspiciously. Back on the road, they walked on until they came to a field that had no animals and no crops, just grass, so they climbed the gate, walked to a corner where the hedge shielded them from the road and put up the tent. They ate the pasties they had bought on the way and fell asleep, exhausted.
Engine noise and a voice, shouting, woke them in the morning. They unzipped the flap. A tractor was parked just inside the field and a young man was standing outside the tent shouting, ‘Out, out! You must get out!’
Lucy crawled out and stood upright, facing him. She was wearing a long T-shirt and not much else and he seemed disconcerted. ‘Go,’ he said, ‘Now. I must pray.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I must pray. Here.’ He was pale-skinned, pale haired, thin.
‘You’re not making sense,’ she said. ‘We’re not doing any harm. Go and pray somewhere else. We’re going to pack up in a minute.’
He held out his wrist to her, tapping his watch. ‘Must pray. Right now. You. Go away.’
‘You’re very rude,’ said Lucy. Ali and Jo were out of the tent, collapsing it and packing away the parts in their backpacks.
He held up his hands as if in invocation and said something incomprehensible.
‘You’re not from this country, are you?’ asked Lucy.
‘Estonia,’ he said.
‘I don’t know where that is, but we don’t pray in our fields. We grow things in them and, if we want to, we sleep in them, so go and boil your head.’
‘Come on,’ said Ali. ‘Leave it, Lucy. Give us a hand.’
‘I don’t see why I should leave it. He’s got a nerve, talking to us like that.’
The young man had retreated to his tractor and was fiddling around with the equipment mounted on the back. He pulled down two long arms which stuck out at the side and climbed up to check the contents of the plastic tank mounted behind.
They walked out of the field, Lucy looking pointedly in the other direction while Ali and Jo waved apologies at the man, who gave them an uncertain smile and waved back.
‘Halfwit,’ said Lucy. ‘He should go back to Esty . . . wherever it was and do his praying.’
‘You saw that thing on his tractor?’ Ali asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I think that was a sprayer.’
‘So?’
‘He was saying “I must spray.” He didn’t want to spray us.’
There was a long silence after that.
‘Well, he should speak English better,’ said Lucy in the end.
‘That’s how fights start.’
‘What?’ Lucy swung round to look at Jo, who had spoken as if her attention was elsewhere.
‘Two people up against each other, and one doesn’t know the language well. Normally we have all these tricks to make our point. Word tricks. We can wheedle and we can half-joke and when it gets too serious we know just how much to back off, but not if we don’t know the ins and the outs of the language. That’s how fights start. That’s how wars start. Not because people hate each other but because the wrong words drag them to a crisis.’
‘Where did that come from?’ asked Lucy in surprise.
‘Oh,’ said Jo. ‘Someone told me that once.’
Glastonbury was not quite what they expected. They soon tired of the shops selling crystals and plastic swords and resin models of Merlin. They shared two sandwiches between them for lunch and went into the Abbey ruins.
‘Look. This is where they buried Arthur and Guinevere,’ Lucy declared, staring at the sign in front of her. ‘I read about it in that shop. They found a huge oak coffin with two skeletons and a lead cross with lettering saying it was them. That was 1191, it says here. Then they buried them right here in a black marble tomb in 1278. Isn’t that amazing?’
‘They didn’t exist,’ said Ali. ‘They were just a folk tale.’
‘You don’t know that.’
Ali went to buy a guidebook. Jo stood by the gate, imagining the gaunt remains as they had once been with a roof and glass in the windows and bright colours everywhere inside. She thought she preferred the ruin.
‘Let’s go to the Tor,’ she suggested, so they walked out to the steep hill a mile to the east, climbing the path to the remains of the chapel on the summit. All the way up she was remembering that first drive down to Exeter four years earlier, when she had seen this cone in the far distance and thought it was where she most wanted to be. Now she knew it had only been a signpost, a finger pointing beyond the horizon. For all that, it felt immensely exciting because, as she reached the summit and the tower which was all that was left of the chapel, she knew this was the frontier of her territory, a border post – and she knew she had looked out from her true home to see this same tower at the edge of her vision.
They sat down together with the evening sun behind them, staring out across the wide land.
‘I know two interesting things about this place,’ said Ali.
‘Do tell us, O fountain of wisdom,’ Lucy replied.
‘The first church up here fell down in an earthquake. Then Henry the Eighth hanged the abbot here.’
Lucy shivered. ‘There are some things you should keep to yourself,’ she complained.
‘This was St Michael’s church,’ said Jo. ‘So was the chapel that used to stand at the top of the hill at Montacute, where the tower is now. There are churches to St Michael on a lot of hilltops. They believed St Michael fought Lucifer up in the air.’
‘That’s the sort of thing I expect Ali to know, not you,’ Lucy said. ‘So where do we go next?’
Jo, without hesitation, pointed out across the fields towards high ground in the far distance. Behind them, the sinking sun dipped below a band of cloud and lit up the horizon. In that sharp, clear light, she saw another tower sticking up from the ridge.
‘There,’ she said, and Ali, peering at her map and twisting it one way then the other, nodded. ‘Yes, that’s about right,’ she said.
They camped at the edge of a wood near the village of East Pennard, tucking the tent out of sight, then they inspected the food they had bought in Glastonbury.
‘One tin of frankfurters. One baguette. Butter. One bag of mixed leaf salad,’ said Ali. ‘A feast.’ She tore the salad open. ‘Correction: one bag of compost claiming to be a mixed leaf salad.’ She tipped it and brown liquid dripped out. ‘Just frankfurters and bread then.’
‘That’s boring,’ said Lucy.
Jo got up and gazed at the trees nearby. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Look what we have here.’
Pale yellow crescents of fungi were growing from low down on one trunk. She broke them off, brought them back and began to clean them, rubbing them gently with her fingers. Lucy prodded one fastidiously.
‘You can’t be serious,’ she said. ‘That’s not a mushroom. It’s more like some sort of tree disease. I’m not eating that.’
Jo smiled. ‘It’s the one we call the wood fairy’s saddle,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve eaten them lots of times. They’re good.’
‘When have you eaten them? Where? In Exeter? I’ve never seen you eating them. People die of eating the wrong mushrooms.’
Jo shrugged, lit the camping stove, melted butter in the small aluminium pan, broke the crescents into pieces and began frying them.
‘I’ll try them first if you don’t believe me.’
‘That won’t help. You might die writhing in agony in twelve hours’ time.’
So the other two watched, shaking their heads, as Jo tore open a length of baguette, spooned in the mushrooms, added a frankfurter and ate them with enjoyment.
When they had all eaten, Ali got out the guidebook she had bought in Glastonbury. ‘Lucy,’ she said. ‘Just so you know, that story about Arthur and Guinevere is crap.’
‘No, it’s not. It was on the sign.’
‘Oh, right. The Abbot had some sort of vision so they dug a hole and, guess what? They found the skeletons and the little cross.’
‘There you are.’
‘No, it was all rubbish. The whole thing was a scam. The Abbey was in trouble. They bigged it up just to get lots of pilgrims to go there. That’s how they made their money.’
Jo was far away, seeing the lead cross, feeling the weight of it in her hand, studying the crude letters incised into it, ‘Hic jacet sepultus . . .’ Dimly, she heard Lucy ask, ‘What do you mean, the Abbey was in trouble?’
‘It had burnt down,’ Jo said, ‘just a few years before. They had to rebuild. They had to start again. It was a huge fire . . .’ She remembered the call in the darkness, remembered the whole village pouring out of their houses in the dark, chattering in horrified excitement as they ran through the village to the edge of the ridge, staring out westward to the bright red glow on the far horizon, which grew until, even at that great distance, they could see flames leaping. They knew what lay out there. They knew what was burning.
The other two girls were staring at her and she realised she had been talking all the time.
‘Oh my God,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s the mushrooms. It must be. Are you feeling weird?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, but she could see she had shaken them, even when they woke early the following morning. After that, she was careful to say little and leave the navigation to Ali, although she could have found the way with her eyes shut. That was why they went too far north and Ali got them lost in lanes with no signs and fields with no landmarks. Jo didn’t feel lost at all. From time to time she caught glimpses of the ridge to the east and as they came nearer, they all saw the tower sticking up from the trees.
‘We’re nearly there,’ Ali said. ‘If we go up the hill to that tower, we should be able to head south from there.’
They climbed the ridge, winding through the trees that stopped them seeing the tower again until they were almost on it. Three cars parked on the verge showed they were coming to something worth stopping for and then the tower seemed to burst upward beside the road as they came out of the woodland and Jo’s heart lifted with it.