The fields rose up in a gradual swoop towards a line of trees, and the light was so clear that up there above the branches she could catch sight of a moving thing, a buzzard, a pair of buzzards, black, hovering and wheeling over the cropped treetops. Everything so still, so calm, and so ordained. Everything seemed beautiful, as it must be to those who have just been given a reprieve. A friend had loaned her a cottage for the remainder of the vacation, and sitting as she did, very quietly, she looked at the fields on one side and through the opposite window at the woods, tall, towering, each branch attuned to every shift of wind, so that when a storm was due they creaked, and when it struck they swayed and heaved like creatures seized. Deer grazed in the field in broad daylight, and sometimes they lifted their haughty heads and stared across. The crop planted there was soft, feathery, like cress. A haven. The kitchen walls were green, the chairs a lighter green, with some gold scroll on the back as a decoration. The Christmas tree was her own handiwork; green branches wound with isinglass and dotted with tiny bulbs, gauze arms, gauze limbs, a woodland Buddha holding its breath. There were paper roses, too, white, with an edging of crimson, and a cloth angel at the top.
Each day she had walked and met the country people, all of whom saluted her, talked to her, one woman confiding that she didn’t like Virginia, the owner of the cottage, found her stuck-up, because she didn’t mix. A forester led her up a slip road to find the holly with the berries on it. The ground underfoot was wet and loamy, his stick squelching into it as he chatted, told her that he was called Greg but that it was not his real name. His real name was Angus, but he answered to Greg; it was the only thing he answered to. Born and bred in the locality, he identified each tree, each hoof mark, each bird call. She saw a hemlock tree for the first time, brought back by a Lady Sophia from the East fifty years before. The lords and ladies, he said, had strange habits and weren’t always lucky despite their money. His mother had worked in the Abbey as a junior maid, getting up at five to light the fires and heat the irons in order to iron the gentlemen’s shirts before they went riding. The Abbey had burned down. He pointed across to the turretted grey ruin and the one wing which remained, a low storey, like a cloister, leaded windows ivied, wintry, ashen gloom.
Staying out of doors shortened the time. She walked and talked, thinking that she must not suppose how they would greet her; she must behave as if she had seen them yesterday and not as if a passage of weeks had expired. The trees were sombre now, armies of them, with ventricles of sky between the trunks, the sky a saline blue, and she thought, When I don’t see these blue gashes and when I don’t see the trees distinctly, then it will be time to turn back.
The dark steals in on each and every feature, each skein of it as precise as dawn but the reverse of dawn. The earth and the briars grew indistinct, and soon it seemed as if it were her own sight which was deserting her and not the night itself coming on, the soft circumventing cloak of night. At moments she lost her way, strayed into the wood, then back onto the path again, then downhill by the stream, which in the dark seemed to gurgle more recklessly. She could not see the stream or the floats of weed that lay on the surface of the water and brushed it like tender brooms. Everything was a spectre now: briars, bushes, old compost bags that resembled whitish corpses and trees imprisoned in cages of mist.
They would probably see a change in her, some aging perhaps, some aftermath of shock, but they would not say so, they would put it away for a future time, the way we do when young, put away what we must later look at, a look that often so appals us; it is as if our eyes are flung into a bath of bleach and henceforth stripped of every soft solacing image. The owl had already begun its battle cry, a cry in which pity and rage were wrought into the same single note, coming first from one direction, then another, as it darted through the woods.
Walking towards the cottage she heard them and ran up the flight of steps to greet them.
“You’re here … you’re here,” she said, expecting them to run to her as they had always done, but instead, they waited on the threshold, paused, the distance being too much, the constraint too great.
“The train was earlier than you said,” Paddy told her. He looked older and rougher, and both of them looked unkempt.
“I meant to be here to pay the taxi,” she said.
“We paid,” Tristan said as he ran his finger over various objects to acquaint himself with them.
“Isn’t it pretty?” she said, and then proudly, though shyly, she turned on the switch so that they would see the little stencils of silver light on the tree and see its beauty to full effect.
“Who sent the cards?” Paddy asked.
“They’re not for us,” she said abruptly, and clutched them lest he might daub them. They were for Virginia, who was on safari in Africa. One depicted horses, nags, standing in a snowy field staring at one another across a snow-topped fence, their shanks deep in snow and their expressions sad. The second was much more elegant, greenish horses in a green paddock, being led out by stable boys, while the gentry waited for the carriages. The third was of Big Ben faintly outlined in a column of mist, which bore no resemblance to the monument she had gone to see on her second day in London and had stared up at, unable to muster any excitement. It had seemed so tall, the decorative parts too far away. All around, the Houses of Parliament and the black-and-gold ironwork had struck her as imposing, having the weight of history without the hum of life. The flag posts bare of flags looked like thin white-robed postulants.
“These are just tokens … your real present is in the envelope,” she said, handing them shoe boxes which she had clumsily wrapped. She saw them look at each other with a glance that was both mischief and shame, mischief because they were pleased at what they were about to find in the envelope and shame because they had been so reserved.
“Open them,” she said as she went across to put on the kettle and get the Christmas cake which she had won at the hospital fête.
“Is Mama better?” Tristan called.
“I went a bit bonkers,” she said, to try to make them understand.
“You’re not bonkers,” Paddy said, and gave her a startled look that said, Don’t utter such nonsense, that is not how a mother should speak.
“You were just in a brown study,” Tristan said tenderly, and then, as if he might ennoble her with it, he handed her an oblong packet with the name of a Chinese restaurant in Chinese lettering. Where it said To and From he had written her maiden name and his own name in full. It was a calendar of bamboo, and on its pale wheat-coloured surface, two young pandas were gorging on lush leaves of bamboo.
“It’s lovely,” she said. It bore the name and telephone number of a restaurant in Wales and the hours when orders were taken.
“They gave it to me,” he said, somewhat abashed, as if to apologise for such a gift. Paddy’s was a tablespoon, its front rim worn to a knife edge where it had scraped the leavings from many a saucepan.
“Do you know what I dreamt?” he said, and went on to tell her, “I dreamt that we met Emily Brontë and I said, ‘Excuse me, Emily Brontë, why did you write only one novel?’”
“And?” Nell said, putting the thin lip of the spoon to her lips by way of showing how thankful she was.
“And then,” he said, waving his arms, “she danced away in a white shroud.” How she longed to kiss each of them, to kiss them again and again, but she daren’t. The screech owl intruded upon her longing, the same sound, jarring, relentless, out there in the dark, perched now in some tree, digesting its prey or affirming its indignation. They listened, waiting for each repetition, each pause, and suddenly Tristan suggested that they go out in the woods, go “nargling.”
“It’s too dark, pet,” she said, pointing to the pane of glass that was itself a sheet of darkness, like a river.
“But here’s a torch,” Paddy said, picking up the one she had set aside for their arrival, meaning to meet them with “Yoo-hoo” and “Mind the step” as they came up the pink, wavery steps which in daylight looked like kidneys.
“A little adventure,” Tristan said. It’s what they wanted. In the woods there would be no hesitations and no wonderings, there would be the reunion, she dreamed.
Out there they feigned fear of beasts, yet hoped that some animal would spring on them and imagined the glassiness of deers’ eyes staring into theirs, the deer that she sighted each evening as they bounced through the garden, their startled expressions and grey-white rumps all that she saw, since they moved like meteors.
“Ssh, ssh,” one or the other said as they slipped on fallen boughs or got caught in a thicket of briars, each claiming to be blinded, their shoes squelching, their socks sodden, while they asked the moon to please, please show herself. At moments clouds passed over the moon’s face, quickly, then were whisked away to be replaced by the next batch and the next, like creatures paying their respects.
“We’re sorry about Granny’s death,” Paddy said, regretting that he had not posted the card which he had bought for her as a Christmas gift. It was a prayer called “Desiderata,” which advised people to go placidly, which poor Granny hadn’t, and what a pity that she had not received it in time, or it might have saved her.
“Poor Granny,” Tristan said, trying to sound both sorrowful and grown-up.
In the darkness and hiddenness of the woods they had found each other again, found the mislaid tenderness and the little scraps of news that had to be exchanged about this and that. The woods with their unseen menace made them cling and gabble as they defied the dangers and marvelled at a sky of stars that had come out. Sometimes stars are content in their own bright sockets, but that night they shone with an added verve and an added intensity, as if they were chattering one to the other, across the reaches of sky, and how pleasant it was to wonder what these stars were saying, what euphoria had got into them.
“Stars are like the people sleeping in their houses with the lights on,” she said, recalling the poem that Paddy had sent her.
“I have lots more to show you … better ones,” he said.
“And moi,” Tristan said, and started on about a story he had written, “The Good Mother Heberdeen,” who lived on the edge of the moor and helped people, helped shepherds and travellers to escape the Nasty Brigands, gave them jam, a special jam which she kept in red jars with a sealed top and spread on scones for them. Once they tasted it, they turned into other shapes and levitated across the misty moors. With each description of Mother Heberdeen, her knuckles, chicken meal under her nails, her scones and the magic jam, Nell saw a picture of her mother emerge, and thought they must never know; if they knew they would take her mother’s side, they would turn against her, and fearing it more than anything, she gripped their hands and in the knotted dark began to chatter, recounting snatches of things, jokes, hospital meals, country superstitions, like some mummer who believes with sound it can efface what must not be said. Her energy quite prodigal as she strode with daring buoyancy.
“Mam-ma!” they said, delighted by the sudden levity.