The Auberge Fertility Clinic was some forty minutes to the far north of the ever-expanding city.
She had grown exhausted by the thought of eggs and ovaries and had lately discontinued her visits there. But the odd travelling salesman with his ludicrously transparent predictions somehow renewed her interest. She was between jobs then, with too much time on her hands. So she called once more to make one more appointment and was told they could fit her in on 22 June. And on the way there she had grown once more exhausted by the thought of eggs and ovaries and in vitro and all of those Latinate terms and had fallen asleep on the train. She woke in a panic then, seeing clear bright sea outside where there should have been the manicured gardens of the new industrial estate. She saw the old fencing of an approaching station against the blue-green sea, neglected and bleached of all of its paint, sagging in places. Then she saw the small wooden house above the platform coming towards her, with its quaint, storybook simplicity, and her feelings of panic subsided. Because she recognised it, from her childhood. The blue and white eaves of the station roof, each with its tiny droplet of water. It must have rained, she realised, while she slept. There were pools of water along the old-fashioned platform. They would holiday here, each summer, in a time that seemed part of another century now. In fact, she realised, stepping from the train, it was part of another century. They would descend with their cases, bags and boxes to be met by a charabanc, which would transport them to the small wooden bungalow – more of a hut, really – with the corrugated-iron roof amongst the sand dunes, which probably no longer existed.
She stepped from the train now, as she had done then, full of excitement and mystery and a queasy sense of expectation in her stomach. She saw from the digital display that the next train back was due in an hour, so she decided to take a walk.
By the sandy path along the tracks at first, which ran along a slight rise above the metal-green sea. It had been trodden into hard sand by generations of feet, some of them bare, some of them sandalled, like hers. The path departed from the tracks then and she descended gradually into a lowland landscape, towards a small glistening river threading its gentle curves through unkempt fields. The sandy path gave way to wooden girders that were once railway sleepers, which led her towards a handrailed walkway beneath a bridge, which carried the tracks above her over the river. She crossed that walkway, remembering her footsteps as a child, into the flatlands between the river and the sea.
There were herons there, picking their way along the mudflats. A kingfisher darted, its blue wings close to the brown muddy waters.
She remembered every detail from her childhood holidays, but assumed the tiny, tin-roofed cabin her family had shared would have long been destroyed. By wind and rain and tidal erosion. There had been high dunes, where there was now a flat, rocky shore. She saw a copse of trees then, among the lowland fields and a ruined monastery or farmhouse, and remembered with a shiver the stories told about it. The Taw Wood, they had called it, inhabited by Captain Mildew, a figure made out of the furred bark of trees and the strange mushroomy growths around their roots and clad in dead mildewed leaves with moulding twigs for hands and a mouth of old man’s beard. Those mildewed webs that were his would entangle the careless ones; the roots dragged only downwards, towards the toadstool growths beneath. He was a shapeshifter, though, and some of the stories had him in a more forgiving light, a resplendent youth this time, lithe and muscular, naked but for a covering of green moss all over his mysterious skin. Girls would tease each other about him, daring the bravest among them to enter the Taw Wood, lie on the dead leaves and suffer the Captain’s embrace. And when once a local girl fell pregnant, rather than point the finger at a local boy, the rumour grew that Captain Mildew was to blame. She stared at it now, from the mudflats, and wondered at the fact that they had called it a wood at all. It was a thick, unsightly gathering of trees, hedged round by a ruined wall. She remembered the terror she once felt, her friend Daisie May’s hand curling round hers as they approached it, daring each other to enter. A boy had enticed her in there once and once only; Jimmy Banks was his name and he used her terror of the Captain to make sure she clung relentlessly to him, her arms tight around his waist while his hand played with the elastic band of her summer skirt. He drew a kiss from her by a tree with long curling shreds of bark and she could still remember the ecstasy before she broke free and ran back out through the Taw Wood, leapt the wall and only felt safe again when the wet sand of the mudflats curled between her naked toes. She went barefoot the whole summer then.
And she took her shoes off, an adult now, the young girl just a memory, and felt the sucking damp of the mud between her toes. She made it to the grassy bank by the crumbling wall and entered the dark copse of trees. And once inside there the world seemed to have fallen away; she could have been a young girl again. Nothing had changed. The curling shreds of bark were still hanging from the tree trunks. The overhanging foliage still worked its dark magic, creating an umbrella of deathly quiet while the breeze from the river soughed outside. She rubbed her shoulder blades against the bark and arced her head back and stared upwards, at the gnarled ascent of the tree trunk that grew ever more slender, like a long uncertain finger, reaching towards the foliage above. The sunlight came through it, in shimmering darts of silver. She saw a bank of moss against an old fallen log. It had an indentation in its crest, as if a hand had scooped out the hard wood hidden by the moss, or as if generations of wanderers, like her, had lain there. She sat down on it, and felt the moss give way beneath her buttocks, like a soft cushion. Then she laid her head back, and imagined her hair, dangling backwards towards the dark grass below, as if she was outside herself, hidden amongst those shaded trees, observing. Where the bee sucks there suck I. In a cowslip’s bell I lie. Were there cowslips around, she wondered, hidden in the thick, lily-like grasses that must never have caught the sunlight? That was a quote she remembered from a school play, and she had played Ariel and the same Jimmy Banks had played Ferdinand and she remembered now the passion with which she had hated his Miranda. Geraldine was her name, Geraldine Dukes, a small, too-well-shaped girl with a much-envied bosom. And it was the same Geraldine, she remembered, that had dared her enter here with the same Jimmy Banks, and as she felt her body now ease into its bed of moss she remembered the childhood wonder of it all, only marred by his incessant attempts to pull at her underthings, attempts that she never quite rebuffed, since the ripple of his uncertain fingers was after all part of the thrill. She must have fallen asleep then, lulled by the gentle winds through the late-spring foliage. And the last thing that ran through her dreamy mind was the word that the strange salesman had repeated: specific. The salesman from Blackpool, Liverpool, Hartlepool, though he didn’t look like he came from any of them.
When she awoke, everything had changed. It could have been minutes, it could have been an hour later. There was a hard wind ruffling the foliage above her. Her hair was dirty with moss, her head was splitting with an ache and there were goosebumps of cold along her naked arms. She felt all of the terror of childhood and gathered her shoes and ran and only stopped running when she felt the mud squishing once more between her toes.
She washed her feet in the sandy shallows of the river. She walked back, then, barely making the next train. She managed her appointment in the clinic and slept, after the treatment. She dreamed of mossy arms embracing her, the bark caressing her face while leaves above her shifted, like faery fingers. And two weeks later, the pregnancy stick turned pink.
And maybe that was what the darkness was about, she thought, as she retrieved the half-burnt bread from the yellow toaster, stuck in two more pieces and slathered the burnt ones with butter. She could never quite free the memory of her pregnancy from a niggling, subterranean feeling of guilt. The salesman, with his mirrored scarves and his absurd mirrored ball. She had done something, and wasn’t quite sure what it was. She had paid him, for services rendered, for a prediction that she knew he had made from the mantelpiece brochure. But still, she had paid him, as if his nonsensical patter had some hidden value, unexpressed. That afternoon nap, in the train that led to her childhood station. She had departed from the normal progression of things in some shocking, unwarranted way. She had never told Jim, with his naive, bland hopes for a family, about that lost afternoon in the Taw Wood. And when her child was eventually born and the quite wondrous Andy arrived, she always felt undeserving of him, as if he was an unwrapped parcel, an unwarranted gift that would someday be snatched away from her.
He had grown, though, quite happily, and not at all unlike normal boys. Grimly attached to her, and vaguely tolerant of his father, with his odd obsession with the different varieties of marmalade.
‘What will it be this morning, son? Thick-cut tawny? Or the lemon-zested thin Seville orange slice?’
He could be forgiven this obsession, since he worked as a sales rep for Intercontinental Preserves, travelled widely and often, plugging their wares. His absences weren’t unwelcome to her. They would make quite a comfortable, shadow-wrapped pair while he was away. Andy would help her cut the privet hedges back, which always seemed about to overwhelm the gardens of their little bungalow. He would abandon his group of rough neighbourhood friends and spend every moment with her. What kind of boy is it, she sometimes wondered, that would walk the streets clutching his mother’s hand, clinging to her bathing things while she swam in the river, nurturing every possible moment they had alone together? And that closeness would retreat then, back into invisibility, when his father returned.
What kind of boy, she wondered again, cutting the slices of Edam neatly on to each buttered piece of toast and placing the finished sandwich under the grill.
He was standing in the darkened hallway, not quite looking at her every time she looked at him. But every time her gaze left him, she felt his gaze return. He had always welcomed her matching glance before. Whenever their eyes had met, while her husband dozed by the fireplace or nattered on about marmalade sales, it was as if on an agreed signal; they had looked at each other just so, just then, from an instinct that only they understood, that only they shared.
Whatever that closeness was, it had vanished now. And something about his stillness told her it had vanished for ever. There was just dark and light in that hallway, as if all of the shadows had defined themselves clearly, all too clearly.
Had something happened, during those lost hours in the mirror-maze, something that could never be spoken of? She thought of carnivals and predators, of the upturned face of the smiling clown, how the smile was painted over his lips and could well have concealed the grimace of . . . the kind of man that lurked around fairgrounds, she supposed, around children’s playgrounds. And she thought of other things that couldn’t be spoken of: her lost hour in the Taw Wood, for instance; was it similar to her son’s lost hour in someone’s amazing Hall of Mirrors? What was the name on the neon sign? Burleigh, she remembered. She imagined a Hall of Mirrors then, diminishing her child into infinity. There was a question she should ask, she felt, but she couldn’t find the words. And then again, she thought, and felt the tears welling in her eyes once more, every boy grows up. And she couldn’t stop the tears flowing and couldn’t blame the onions.