It was not, in any way, a satisfying letter. In fact, it wasn’t a letter at all but a postcard, with Barney’s short message on one side, and a picture of a great big naked statue weeing into a fountain on the other. The postcard had been stamped and addressed and then, inexplicably, posted in an envelope with another stamp. Alice read it twice, then stared at the picture, as if the weeing statue might contain some hidden message she couldn’t understand.
It didn’t.
Barney, at Stormy Loch, for Visitors’ Day! In just under a week, he would be here, and she could show him everything – her little room, the farm, the keep, the castle … She could take him to Madoc’s field where they had counted hares and rabbits, they could look for red squirrels, they could go boating on the loch … She could introduce him to her friends …
So why was she not dancing about the room?
Perhaps if the postcard had not come today, when she was so happy … Perhaps if his message were not so short compared to her own long, chatty emails, and he had remembered that Alice had also mentioned Visitors’ Day to him, many times … Perhaps then she could have been over the moon. As it was, she was just … confused.
She tucked the postcard into her notebook, and laid the notebook neatly right in the middle of her desk. Then, still in her muddy clothes, she sat down and stared at it … Opened it, read a few lines of her latest story, about the drowned village in the loch … Picked up a pencil and tried to write, but gave up when no words came.
Barney, at Stormy Loch!
She didn’t know what to think.
The parcel from Italy arrived the following day by recorded post, a small yellow Jiffy bag tightly bound with brown tape. She took it to her room and lay with it on her bed, trying to guess what was inside. Barney had brought so many presents back from his travels – lace fans from Seville and elephant carvings from Kenya, Indian puppets, Italian sweets … She wondered what this one could be. The parcel weighed about the same as a short hardback book, and it was squishy, like bubble wrap, but inside the squishiness she felt something like a small square box. She almost opened it – angry, suddenly, at the secrecy, and the short letter. She went as far as asking Jenny in the dorm next door for some scissors, slid them beneath the brown tape – but stopped.
It’s a secret, he had written, and she didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
She put the parcel away in the drawer of her desk, and tried to forget about it.
Which on the one hand was a shame. Opening it could have avoided a lot of heartache. And danger, and betrayal, and the near-death experiences I’ve already mentioned.
On the other hand, opening it would have turned this into a very different story.
*
The weather was gloriously sunny for all of the week leading up to Visitors’ Day. More and more teachers moved their classes outside, with Madoc organising dawn hikes to the mouth of the valley to search for orchids, and Mr Busby, the biology teacher, leading pupils to the shallow end of the sparkling blue loch to look for newts. The major, ever optimistic, decided that Visitors’ Day should take place outdoors. A marquee went up for the picnic lunch and tea, an outdoor stage was erected for the entertainment. Rehearsals for the blue-painted Democracy Failing and the rendition of ‘Scotland the Brave’ with its extra Brazilian drums were moved to the rose garden, which overnight had burst into bloom and colour. Professor Lawrence, the chemistry teacher who had been perfecting her daytime fireworks, rowed out to the middle of the loch for a practice run and let off three flares which traced perfect arcs of pink, orange and green against the bright blue sky. To the Year Sevens, who had no summer exams, it felt like a holiday, yet still Alice could not shake off the feelings provoked by Barney’s letter.
On a baking Wednesday afternoon, Dr Csintalan, who taught literature, took to the loch with the Year Sevens for a poetry class.
They set out in a flotilla of rowing boats, with swallows dipping in and out of the water around them, right into the middle of the loch, where they formed a floating island, the prows of their boats touching, each craft secured to the next by students holding oars, and Dr Csintalan announced, ‘I will now recite a poem! ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, by Irish genius WB Yeats!’
‘What, here, sir?’ asked Zeb.
‘Yes, here! You will see how appropriate it is! Now, pay attention! I shall attempt to project my voice, but it is not so easy when one is wobbling about on water.’
Poetry was serious business to Dr Csintalan, raised by Hungarian immigrant parents on a steady diet of English classics. He stood up in the little rowing boat and, eyes closed, head thrown back, struck a dramatic pose. The children stared. Fergus nudged Jesse. ‘Rock the boat,’ he mouthed. Jesse, who liked Fergus better since they had won the orienteering exercise, but still did not approve of him, said ‘no’. Dr Csintalan opened his eyes and began.
‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree …’
It was a lovely poem, about a poet who wanted to go to an island in a lake, and build a cabin and grow beans and keep bees and listen to birds and crickets. Alice listened entranced as Dr Csintalan recited it from memory without once faltering.
‘I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.’
Dr Csintalan finished reciting, and gazed at the loch and the mountains like he had never seen them before. ‘I hear it in the deep heart’s core,’ he murmured. ‘Is there a more beautiful line in poetry? Yeats wrote this poem when he was far from home in London, about an island in a lake that he loved. I hear it the deep heart’s core – the idea that our heart is trying to tell us something, if only we would stop and listen …’
He saw Alice watching, and smiled.
‘Homework! Five hundred words on the deep heart’s core and what you hear when you listen to it. Yeats’s poem is about longing – for home, for beauty, above all for peace. What do you long for?’
Someone said, ‘For Rangers to win the Premiership,’ and everybody laughed.
‘No, no,’ said Dr Csintalan. ‘I am not asking, what do you want. I am asking, what do you long for?’
Alice looked around at her pensive classmates, and tried to guess their answers. She knew, for example, that Samira had a sister who was very ill in hospital. If Alice were Samira, what she would long for more than anything was for her to be better. And Duffy – how many times had she heard him rage against being so small? She could perfectly imagine him longing to be tall. She knew that Fergus, though he never spoke about it, longed for his parents to be back together, and she had guessed long ago that Jesse yearned for a talent he could be proud of …
What did she long for?
Fergus, who could never be serious for long, suddenly yelled, ‘Water fight!’ and splashed Zeb with his oar. Zeb leaned out to splash Fergus and accidentally on purpose fell into the loch, and then Duffy got overexcited and jumped in, and someone pushed Esme in, until the whole class was bobbing about in the water, including Dr Csintalan, and Alice forgot the question in the general mayhem and happiness. But later, doing her homework, she sat at her desk and stared for a long time at what she had written.
Once there was an old house in a garden full of trees, where a little girl lived with her family. Her mother would tell her stories every evening, and sometimes when it rained they would bake together, using a book of family recipes her mother had brought with her when she left her country. The little girl had a bedroom from which in the summer she could pick cherries, and the whole top floor was attics where her aunt could paint, and her father made her a swing, and people loved her, and she felt safe.
What I want most in my deep heart’s core is …
She stared and stared, but she had no idea any more what she longed for.
She only knew that she wanted it so much it hurt.