Twelve

ANNA STOOD IN THE lane, and looked at the last house.

It was a double-fronted Victorian cottage at the end of a long terrace, bordered by a blackthorn hedge at the front. Beyond it, the lane rolled away in a long arc, disappearing into the dip where the stream ran under the road, and the woods rose up on the other side. Unsurfaced and narrow, the lane was a white line, and each leaf of the bordering hedgerows was outlined with the delicate perfection of a deep frost.

There had been snow recently: a scattering that turned the fields and the woods white, and lay in stripes on the plowed hillside. It was December. The fifteenth of December, the year that she was nineteen.

She saw herself walking down the lane. David and Sara were next to her. David’s sister was sixteen years old, and she wore a yellow PVC coat and Wellington boots, and a hand-knitted scarf wound again and again around her neck.

Sara had met them on the road, at the bus stop, and, as they had gotten off the bus, she had launched herself at David, and hugged him almost wildly. Her embrace of Anna had been no less fierce. Standing back from them, she had wrung her hands together; they had betrayed her below the smile.

“We had better go to Martock’s first,” she’d said.

“Is Dad here?” David asked.

“No,” Sara had replied. “He wouldn’t come.”

The bus had pulled away, toiling up the gradient of the Wells-Bristol road. They crossed the road, jumping the brown slush gutters. Martock’s was only a few yards down, its memorials lined up outside the single-story building whose corrugated iron roof dipped almost to the pavement.

They went in, and a woman met them. “David,” she said.

He shook her hand. “This is my friend Anna,” he murmured.

Miss Martock held out her bony fingers, and gripped her. “I’ve known him since he was a boy,” she told Anna. “And his poor mother. Poor Kathleen.”

They went into the workroom. “We’ve had a family business here for a hundred and thirty years,” Miss Martock said. “You go and look in the churchyard. You’ll see our names on the stones. A hundred and thirty years.”

The workroom, under the corrugated roof, was still. There were three large panes of glass in the roof, letting in a dusky, rain-smeared light. On the floor were puddles of water, where the snow and then the rain had come through.

“I’ve shown Sara the book,” the woman said. “She chose a marble. Like this one.”

And she showed them the texture of a half-finished headstone on the workbench. Anna looked at the lettering. It was not for David and Sara’s mother, but some other death. Lines were marked out in readiness on the surface. Beloved son, Anna noticed. Involuntarily, she shuddered.

“Sara thought, as you would be going back to Oxford, you had better choose now.”

Sara looked at her brother for approval, her face a mask of anxiety. “Is it right?” she asked.

“Yes,” David said.

That was all.

As they came out of the workroom again, and stood by the door of the house, Anna saw David look up. There was a holly tree in the garden.

She put her hand up now to the memory, to the image of the three of them standing by the headstones by the door. Beyond the ilex at Martock’s, she touched another, the tree that stood in the New College cloister, whose green crown could be seen above the roofs as you walked down New College Lane toward the bell tower. She pressed a little harder, and the ancient imprint folded. She grasped it in her fist, and pulled it away, and deeper still in her mind came others that David had shown her: the beeches at Addison’s Walk. The great plane tree by the President’s Lodgings. Deeper still, into her own childhood; the sugar maple by the summer cottage, with a gray-brown bark furrowed with age. The lovely acer in her grandfather’s garden, splashed with yellow, the one called Drummond. Fruit wings of sycamore dropping into her lap in the fall. Green flower clusters like small, spare lanterns of the spring.

There was holly in the church at the funeral.

Holly and ivy, like the Christmas carol.

She had felt like a trespasser. She had known David for only two months. The church was cold, and full of the villagers that had been David’s mother’s friends. Since they had gotten the news just a week ago in college, David had been unnaturally—or perhaps, in the circumstances, naturally—silent. She had treated him with studied care, not knowing what was needed from her, and feeling isolated in his company. Yet, when she had suggested that she should not come to the funeral, he had been wounded.

“Of course you’ll come,” he had insisted.

“Maybe I shouldn’t,” she’d said.

“OK. If you don’t want to…”

“I want to,” she’d reassured him, puzzled by the touch of impatience, and his inability to understand her reluctance.

The church stood at the top of the village, near the main road. It was eleventh-century, Sara had told her. Anna looked up now, through the memory, through the air that showed their breath, to the timbered vault of the roof.

They sang “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,” because it had been David’s mother’s favorite. And as they began the fourth verse, “Our words and works that drown/the tender whisper of thy call,” Anna looked along the row of the pew, and saw the family’s faces in profile: Sara’s grieving gaze; her father’s silent face. David, mouthing the words but not singing them. Anna had looked again from father to son. David’s father was fair; both his children were dark. She had been shown several photographs of Kathleen Mortimer, and saw how David and Sara took after her in coloring. Sara especially had her mother’s open, smiling expression.

That morning, Anna had found Sara crying downstairs, and the two of them had sat, in the silent hour before breakfast, by the range in the kitchen, looking through the photograph albums, and the kept cards and pressed flowers, and the keepsakes of childhood. The first drawings and paintings. The Mother’s Day messages. And Anna had felt drawn to this woman, who had died so suddenly at fifty-five, and whose imprint was all over this warm and homely house. Drawn, too, to Sara, who had wiped her eyes, and made the breakfast with a ghost of cheerfulness.

But the men. There was no way to get close to the men. As the hymn finished, they had closed their prayer books. The priest had come forward to them, as the coffin was lifted onto the shoulders of the pallbearers. Some question was asked about the order of service at the graveside. David’s father answered in a firm voice, almost bright. Anna looked from him to David again, and saw nothing. No interchange of looks. No hand on an arm for comfort. No contact at all, in fact. They kept themselves away from each other almost fastidiously, elbows pressed to their sides.

David had gazed out at the grave. He had looked away from the lowering of the coffin. His eyes had been fixed on the valley beyond the chalk walls of the graveyard. Anna had linked arms with him, and gently pushed her hand into his pocket to clasp his fingers.

She held out her hand now; this fragile and translucent hand that didn’t belong to her, attached to a body that had ceased to matter. She flexed her fingers this way and that, and thought of Sara’s warmth as she passed the photograph books, and unwrapped the tissue-guarded memories.

And David’s father, the following day. He had gone out early to work in the garden behind the house; an unfenced path of ground that had once been allotment gardens. They had walked up the path toward him to say good-bye. His attitude, she had thought, was almost jaunty. Good-humored.

“Will he cry?” Anna had asked David, as they waited for the bus to take them down to Bristol and the train. She was worried about him. Worried at the unnaturalness of it all.

“Cry?” David had said, and looked astonished. “I’ve never seen him cry.”

His expression had suddenly altered in that moment. As the cold wind blew around them, and the traffic roared past up the long winter hill, David’s eyes had filled with tears. She had put her arms around him, stroking his hair, gently kissing him, feeling him tremble.

“You can go back,” she’d whispered. “We don’t have to go to Oxford right now. Go back to the house, stay with them. Stay with your father.”

He’d pulled back from her abruptly. “Stay with him?” he’d asked. He rubbed his eyes, shook his head. “I can’t stand being around him,” he murmured. “He’s dead.”

She’d blinked in shock at his tone, at the words. Felt his sense of utter rejection from a father he longed to know.

David had met her gaze. “He’s dead and buried inside that face,” he told her. “That’s one thing you have to understand about my father. He’s not in this world. He’s not here. He never was.”

She came back now, down that winter lane, across the flattened grass of the fields, the uncut hay lying in frosty swathes, the stream running over stones in the darkness under the little bridge; to David’s father’s garden, and its neatly symmetrical rows and beds, the plants white in the frost, white from the snow. She looked hard at the field in front of the house, and saw something infinitely strange there: contour lines and lettering. Blocks of color. A map was unrolling over the field, molding itself to every rut and furrow and blade of grass. It swept away from the lane toward the trees of the hill, wrinkled under fences and hedges, smoothed over the rise where the oak trees grew. She saw it unraveling for miles, away from the valley, over the landscape, through Somerset and Dorset and down to the sea.

A map. A map…

He had bought a map, those last weeks. Those last days in March.

“What is this?” she’d asked.

“The route,” he’d told her.

“What route?”

“To China,” he’d said.

They had been in his room. She’d turned around in sudden fury—rolling, unrolling contours, rolling road and trees—and flailed her hands against things: the table, the desk, the chair. The bed.

“What are you doing?” he’d asked, mystified. “What’s the matter with you?”

“With me?” she’d cried. She’d pushed him in the chest. “It’s you!” she’d shouted.

“What have I said?” he’d asked.

“It isn’t what you’ve said,” she’d replied. Her throat was hot. Her whole body was hot.

“But I don’t understand,” he’d told her.

“No,” she’d said. “You don’t understand.” She’d lost control of herself completely, suddenly possessed by the panic at her situation. She’d hit him, a clenched fist, in the center of his chest.

Darkness stepped between them. She’d purposely ignored the confused, hurt look on his face. She was so wound up that all she could think of was to find something to hurt him with.

“You never cried about your mother,” she said. “Your father never cried. You told me that yourself. It’s not right! It’s not human! What’s the matter with you both?”

“I think about my mother,” he’d said. “I do cry about her.”

“Do you? You never say so. I’ve never seen you.”

“I do. Of course I do.”

“And your father?”

His face had darkened. “I’m not like him,” he said.

“There’s something missing with you,” she’d whispered.

He had flinched. She was glad of it at the time, in that desperation she felt.

“He never spoke to me,” David said. There was confusion and pain in his tone. “That’s how it was. He never spoke to any of us.”

“Not to your mother?”

“He worked very hard, and he read the newspaper, and he had his little projects—”

He suddenly realized what he’d said.

“And you’re just like him,” she whispered. “You remember how he was talking about his garden, that morning after the funeral? You’re just like him, talking about Wilson all the time; about some person who’s dead…”

“I’m not like him,” he’d said. “I want to talk to you. Anna! I want to talk to you.” And he’d snatched for her arm, while she simultaneously pulled away from him.

“And some dead place that doesn’t exist anymore,” she’d gasped. “That’s what you want. You want to be far away, don’t you? Up on some mountain. That’s what you talk about all the time, isn’t it?” she’d demanded. “How Wilson went where no one had ever been before. Up to the places where even the Chinese were afraid to go. Into places where the dead don’t want to be, for Chrissake!”

“It’s not true,” he’d said. “I’m not my father!”

“If you tell me one more thing about trees or plants or flowers—”

“I’m not like him,” he repeated. “That’s not fair. It’s not fair…”

She had floundered for the words. The right words. The right blade to sink in his flesh, to make him suffer. She had been so afraid that night: afraid the world was slipping away. All her plans, her vision for the future. All disintegrating. If she told him the truth, he would leave her. Just like her father had left her mother, for the same reason. That was what terrified her. David would vanish into Wilson’s world.

“You’re living in some place,” she told him, “some far-off place and you don’t care if that connects with anyone else.” She’d sobbed, “You are him. You and your father are the same.”

She saw she’d succeeded. Confusion was replaced with hurt in his expression. She had touched his innermost fear, that one day he would find himself in some remote, unreachable place.

She’d turned, and run out of the room, down the stairs. Hatred for herself welled up, for using that weapon against him. And the blind terror at her own predicament. She remembered stone steps, those little narrow stairwells. The black boards with gold lettering by the cloister. She’d run. Away from the noise of The High. Down Longwall and St. Cross. She had an insane thought in her head, that she would throw herself in the Cherwell. She’d stopped and run halfway back to the edge of the Deer Park, and halted there, gasping for breath.

It was getting dark. And she thought of the river, and suddenly, of her mother, and the ocean.

The physical, physical ache to go home. To see Grace. To hide.

And the map of China still rolled away now, out of David’s hands, out of the streets, out of the quick brown water flowing under the bridges.

On the surface of the water were leaves, torn by the spring gales, beating their endless circles to the sea.