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She sat down on the bed beside Will, took his hand in hers and told him what was going through her head.
‘I know I’ll be pulled in to this half-assed relationship with Neil if I hang around here, and he’s probably more your type than he is mine. He’s a bear, you know. He hasn’t got a hairy back—’ she added hurriedly’—I know you hate hairy backs, but he’s big – and a bit of a lunk in a sexy kind of way, but I can’t live with him. Will. I can’t. And I can’t live here. I mean, I was staying for him and for you, and right now you’re not taking any notice of me and he’s taking too much notice, so it’s a bad deal all around. Life’s not a rehearsal, right? Isn’t that one of Cornelius’ pearls of wisdom? He’s gone back to Baltimore, by the way. I don’t hear from him, which is probably for the best because he always annoyed the fuck out of me. Anyhow, he had that line about life not being a rehearsal and he’s right. If I hang around here I’m going to end up moving in with Neil and we’re just going to get cosy when you’re going to open your eyes – and Will, you are going to open your eyes – and you’re going to say we gotta go to Antarctica. And Neil’s going to say: no you’re not. And I’m going to say: yes I am. And there’ll be tears, and they won’t be mine. I can’t do that to him. He deserves better.
‘So…what am I saying? I’m saying I have to take Neil out for a beer and tell him it’s not going to work, then I have to haul my ass back to San Francisco, and get my shit together, because baby thanks to you I have never been so untogether in my whole damn life.’
She dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘You know why. It’s not something we’ve talked about and if you had your eyes open right now I wouldn’t be saying it because what’s the use? But Will: I love you. I love you so much and most of the time it’s okay, because we get to work together and I figure you love me back, in your way. Okay, it’s not the way I’d really like it, if I had the choice, but I don’t so I’ll take whatever I can. And that’s all you’re getting. And if you can hear this, you should know buddy, when you wake up I will deny every fucking word, okay? Every fucking word.’ She got up from beside the bed, feeling tears close. ‘Damn you, Will,’ she said. ‘All you have to do is open your eyes. It’s not that difficult. There’s so much to see, Will. It’s icy fucking cold, but there’s this great clean light on everything: you’d like it. Just. Open. Your. Eyes.’ She watched and waited, as if by force of thought she could stir him. But there was no motion, except the mechanical rising and falling of his chest.
‘Okay. I can take a hint. I’d better get going. I’ll come visit you again before I go.’ She leaned over him and lightly kissed him on the forehead. ‘I tell you Will, wherever the hell you are, it’s not as good as it is out here. Come back and see me, see the world, okay? We’re missing you.’
II (#ulink_ed650a46-458e-5798-aced-e91d5a732006)
The morning after the incident at the Courthouse Will woke in a wretched state: aching from head to foot. He tried to get out of bed, but his legs replayed their imbecilities of the night before and down he went, with such a shout (more of surprise than pain) that his mother came running, to find him sprawled on the floor, teeth chattering. He was duly diagnosed as having ‘flu, and put back to bed, where he was plied with aspirin and scrambled eggs.
Sleet had come in the night, and slapped against the window through most of the day. He wanted to be out in it. His fever would turn the icy downpour to steam, he thought, as soon as it fell on him. He’d walk back to the Courthouse like one of the children from the Bible who’d been burned in a furnace but had come out alive; steaming, he’d walk the muddy track, back to where Jacob and Rosa kept their strange counsel. Naked, he’d go, yes naked, through the hedgerow, scraped and nicked, until he got to the door, where Jacob would be waiting to teach him wisdom, and Rosa would be waiting to tell him what an extraordinary boy he was. Into the Courthouse he’d go, into the heart of their secret world, where everything was love and fire, fire and love.
All this, if he could only get up and out of bed. But his body was cheating him. It was all he could do to get as far as the toilet, and even then he had to hold onto the sink with one hand and his penis – which looked very shrivelled and ashamed of itself right now – with the other, to be sure he wouldn’t fall over, his head was spinning so much. Just after lunch the doctor came to see him. She was a softly-spoken woman with short, white hair, though she didn’t look old enough to have white hair, and a gentle smile. She told him he’d get well as long as he didn’t get out of bed and took the medicine she was going to prescribe, then reassured his mother that he’d be right as rain in a week or so.
A week? Will thought. He couldn’t wait a week to be back with Jacob and Rosa. As soon as the doctor and his mother had gone he got up and made his uncertain way to the window. The sleet was thickening into snow, and it was sticking a little on the tops of the hills. He watched his breath come and go on the cold glass, and determined that he would make himself strong, damn it, simply by telling himself to do so.
He started right then and there: ‘I will be strong. I will be strong. I will—’
He stopped in mid-flow, hearing his Papa’s voice in the hall below, and then the sound of his footstep on the stairs. He started back to his bed, and just made the safety of the covers when the door opened and his father came in, his face more forbidding than the sky outside the window.
‘All right,’ he said, without a word of greeting, ‘I want an explanation from you, my lad, and I don’t want any of your lies. I want the truth.’ Will said nothing. ‘You know why I’m home early?’ his father demanded. ‘Well?’
‘No.’
‘I got a call from Mr Cunningham. Damn lunatic, calling me in the middle of the day. He tracked me down, he said, tracked me down, because his son’s in a terrible state. Can’t stop the boy crying, apparently, because of some damn thing you’ve been up to with him.’ Hugo approached Will’s bed. ‘Now I want to know what stupid stories you’ve been putting in this brat’s head, and don’t shake your head at me like that, young man, you’re not talking to your mother now. I want answers and I want the truth, you hear me?’
‘Sherwood’s…not quite right…’ Will said.
‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’ Hugo said, spittle flecking his lips.
‘He says things without really knowing what he’s saying.’
‘I don’t care what’s wrong with the little bugger. I just don’t want his father coming to find me and accusing me of raising a complete idiot. That’s what he called you. An idiot! Which you may be, by the way. Have you got no sense?’
Will was starting to get tearful. ‘Sherwood’s my friend,’ he spluttered.
‘He’s not quite right, you said.’
‘He isn’t.’
‘So what does that make you? If you’re his friend, what does that make you? Have you got no sense? What were you up to?’
‘We just went looking around, and he…he got scared…that’s all.’
‘You’ve got a peculiar idea of fun, putting nonsense into a little boy’s head.’ He shook his head. ‘Where’d you get it all from?’ he said, already giving up on his son. Plainly he didn’t want an answer, though Will so much wanted to give him one, so much wanted to say: I didn’t make up anything, you dead-eyed old man. You don’t know what I know, you don’t see what I see. you don’t understand any of it—
But he didn’t dare speak the words, of course. He just cast down his eyes, and let his father’s contempt fall on his head until it was all used up.
Later, his mother came in with pills for him to take. ‘I heard your father having a talk with you,’ she said. ‘You know he’s sometimes harsher than he means to be.’
‘I know.’
‘He says things.’
‘I know what he says and I know what he means,’ Will replied. ‘He wishes I was dead and Nathaniel wasn’t. So do you.’ He shrugged, the ease of the words, the ease of the pain he knew he was causing, exhilarating. ‘It’s no big deal,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I’m not as good as Nathaniel, but I can’t do anything about it.’ All the time he was talking, looking at his mother, it was not her he was seeing, it was Jacob, giving him a moth to burn, Jacob smiling at him.
‘Stop it,’ his mother said. ‘I won’t listen to you talking like this. The way you behave. Take your pills.’ Her manner suddenly became detached, as though she didn’t quite recognize the boy lying in the bed. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll have Adele heat up some soup for you. Just make sure you stay under the blankets. And take your pills.’
As she exited she threw her son an almost fearful look, the way Miss Hartley had at school. Then she was gone. Will swallowed the pills. His body still ached and his head still spun, but he wasn’t going to wait very long, he’d already decided, before he was up and out. He’d drink the soup (he’d need the sustenance for the journey ahead) and then he’d dress and go back to the Courthouse. With his plan made he got out of bed again to test the strength of his legs. They didn’t feel as unreliable as they had a little while before. With some encouragement, they’d get him where he needed to go.
III (#ulink_7a66ddad-ba1d-5c9d-a19c-391dd7f2bdfb)
Though Frannie wasn’t sick, she suffered a good deal more than Will had the day after the night in the Courthouse. She had managed to smuggle Sherwood and herself into the house and upstairs to clean up before they were seen by their parents, and had entertained the hope that they were not going to be questioned until, out of the blue, Sherwood had begun to sob. He’d been thankfully inarticulate about what was causing him to do so, and though both her mother and her father quizzed her closely she kept her answers vague. She didn’t like lying, mainly because she wasn’t very good at it, but she knew that Will would never forgive her if she let any details of what happened slip. Her father simply grew cold and remote when his first fury was spent, but her mother was good at attrition. She would work and work at her suspicions, until she had them satisfied. So for an hour and a half Frannie found herself quizzed as to why Sherwood was in such a state. She said they’d gone out to play with Will, become lost in the dark, and they’d got frightened. Plainly her mother doubted every word, but she and her daughter were alike in their tenaciousness. The more Mrs Cunningham repeated her questions, the more entrenched in her replies Frannie became. At last, her mother grew exasperated.
‘I don’t want you seeing that Rabjohns boy again,’ she said. ‘I think he’s a troublemaker. He doesn’t belong here and he’s a bad influence. I’m surprised at you, Frances. And disappointed. You’re usually more responsible than this. You know how confused your brother can get. And now he’s in a terrible state. I’ve never seen him so bad. Crying and crying. I blame you.’
This little speech brought the matter to an end for the evening. But sometime before dawn Frannie woke to hear her brother sobbing pitifully again, and then her mother going into his room, and the sobbing subsiding while quiet words were exchanged, and then the weeping coming again, while her mother tried – and apparently failed – to soothe him. Frannie lay in the darkness of her room, fighting back tears of her own. But she lost the battle. They came, oh they came, salty in her nose, hot beneath her lids and on her cheeks. Tears for Sherwood, whom she knew was the least equipped to deal with whatever nightmares would come of their encounter at the Courthouse; tears for herself, for the lies she’d told, which had put a distance between herself and her mother, whom she loved so much; and tears of a different kind for Will, who had seemed at first the friend she needed in this stale place, but whom she had, it seemed, already lost.
At last, the inevitable. She heard the handle of her bedroom door squeak as it was turned and her mother said:
‘Frannie? Are you awake?’
She didn’t pretend otherwise, but sat up in bed. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Sherwood just told me some very strange things.’
He had told everything: about going to the Courthouse in pursuit of Will, about the man in black and the woman in veils. And more besides. Something about the woman being naked, and a fire. Was any part of this true, Frannie’s mother wanted to know? And if so, why hadn’t Frannie told her?
Despite Will’s edict, she had no choice but to tell the truth now. Yes, there had been two people at the Courthouse, just as Sherwood had said. No, she didn’t know who they were; no she hadn’t seen the woman undressing, and no, she couldn’t be certain she would recognize them again (that part wasn’t entirely true, but it was close enough). It had been dark, she said, and she had been afraid, not just for herself but for all three of them.
‘Did they threaten you?’ her mother wanted to know.
‘Not exactly.’
‘But you said you were afraid.’
‘I was. They weren’t like anybody I’d ever seen before.’
‘So what were they like?’
Words failed her, and failed her again when her father appeared and asked her the same questions.
‘How many times have I told you,’ he said, ‘not to go near anybody you don’t know?’
‘I was following Will. I was afraid he was going to get hurt.’
‘If he had that’d be his business and not yours. He wouldn’t do the same for you, I’m damn certain of that.’
‘You don’t know him. He—’
‘Don’t answer me back,’ her father snapped, ‘I’ll speak to his parents tomorrow. I want them to know what an idiot they’ve got for a son.’
With that he left her to her thoughts.
The events of the night were not over, however. When the house had finally become quiet, Frannie heard a light tapping on her bedroom door, and Sherwood sidled in, clutching something to his chest. His voice was cracked with all the crying he’d been doing.
‘I’ve got something you have to see,’ he said, and crossing to the window he pulled back the curtains. There was a streetlamp outside the front of the house, and it shed its light through the rain-streaked glass onto Sherwood’s pale, puffy face.
‘I don’t know why I did it,’ he began.
‘Did what?’
‘It was just there, you know, and when I saw it I wanted it.’ As he spoke he proffered the object he’d been clutching. ‘It’s just an old book,’ he said.
‘You stole it?’ He nodded. ‘Where from? The Courthouse?’ Again, he nodded. He looked so frightened she was afraid he was going to start weeping again. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m not cross. I’m just surprised. I didn’t see you with it.’
‘I put it in my jacket.’
‘Where did you find it?’
He told her about the desk, and the inks and the pens, and while he told her she took the book from his hands and went to the window with it. There was a strange perfume coming off it. She raised it to her nose – not too close – and inhaled its scent. It smelt like a cold fire, like embers left in the rain, but sharpened by a spice she knew she would never find on a supermarket shelf. The smell made her think twice about opening the book; but how could she not, given where it had come from? She put her thumb against the edge of the cover and lifted it. On the inside page was a single circle, drawn in black or perhaps dark brown ink. No name. No title. Just this ring, perfectly drawn.
‘It’s his, isn’t it?’ she said to Sherwood.
‘I think so.’
‘Does anyone know you took it?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
That at least was something to be grateful for. She turned to the next page. It was as complex as the previous page had been simple: row upon row upon row of writing, tiny words pressed so close to one another it was almost a seamless flow. She flipped the page. It was the same again, on left and right. And on the next two sheets, the same; and on the next two and the next two. She peered at the script more closely, to see if she could make any sense of it, but the words weren’t in English. Stranger still, the letters weren’t from the alphabet. They were pretty, though, tiny elaborate marks that had been set down with obsessive care.
‘What does it mean?’ Sherwood said, peering over her shoulder.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before.’
‘Do you think it’s a story?’
‘I don’t think so. It isn’t printed, like a proper book.’ She licked her forefinger and dabbed it on the words. It came away stained. ‘It was written by him,’ she said.
‘By Jacob?’ Sherwood breathed.
‘Yes.’ She flipped over a few more pages and finally came to a picture. It was an insect – a beetle of some kind, she thought – and like the writing on the preceding pages it had been set down exquisitely, every detail of its head and legs and iridescent wings so meticulously painted it looked uncannily lifelike in the watery light, as though it might have risen whirring from the paper had she touched it.
‘I know I shouldn’t have taken the book,’ Sherwood said, ‘but now I don’t want to give it back, ‘cause I don’t want to see him again.’
‘You won’t have to,’ Frannie reassured him.
‘You promise?’
‘I promise. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Sher. We’re safe here, with Mum and Dad to look after us.’
Sherwood had put his arm through hers. She could feel his thin body quivering against her own. ‘But they won’t be here always, will they?’ he said, his voice eerily flat, as though this most terrible of possibilities could not be expressed unless stripped of all emphasis.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They won’t.’
‘What will happen to us then?’ he said.
‘I’ll be here to look after you,’ Frannie replied.
‘You promise?’
‘I promise. Now, it’s time you were back in bed.’
She took her brother by the hand and they both tiptoed out along the landing to his room. There she settled him back in his bed, and told him not to think about the book or the Courthouse or what had happened tonight any more, but to go back to sleep. Her duty done she returned to her own bedroom, closed the door and the curtains, and put the book in the cupboard under her sweaters. There was no lock on the cupboard door, but if there had been she would have certainly turned the key. Then she climbed between the now chilly sheets and put on the bedside light, just in case the beetle in the book came clicking across the floor to find her before dawn; which possibility, after the evening’s escapades, she could not entirely consign to the realm of the impossible.
IV (#ulink_29f2e1ba-d921-594d-977d-e66c4be3667a)
i
Will consumed his soup like a dutiful patient, and then, once Adele had taken his temperature, collected his tray and gone back downstairs, quickly got up and dressed. It was by now early in the evening, and the sleety day was already losing its light, but he had no intention of putting his journey off until tomorrow.
The television had been turned on in the living-room – he could hear the calm, even tones of a newscaster, and then, as his mother changed channels, applause and laughter. He was glad of the sound. It covered the occasional squeak of a stair as he descended to the hallway. There, as he donned scarf, anorak, gloves and boots, he came within a breath of discovery, as his father called out from his study demanding to know from Adele where his tea had got to. Was she picking the leaves herself, for Christ’s sake? Adele did not reply, and his father stormed into the kitchen to get an answer. He did not notice his son in the unlit hallway, however, and while he whittered on to Adele about how slow she was, Will opened the front door and, slipping through the narrowest crack he could make so as not to have a draught alert them to his going, was out on his night-journey.
ii
Rosa didn’t conceal the satisfaction she felt at the absence of the book. It had burned up in the fire, and that was all there was to say in the matter. ‘So you’ve lost one of your precious journals,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’ll be a little more sympathetic in the future when I get weepy about the children.’
‘There’s no comparison,’ Steep said, still searching the ashes in the antechamber. His desk was little more than seared timbers, his pens and brushes gone, his box of watercolours barely recognizable, his inks boiled away. His bag containing the earlier journals had been beyond the scope of the fire, so all was not lost. But the work-in-progress, his account of the last eighteen years of his vast labour, had gone. And Rosa’s attempt to equate his loss with what she felt when one of her brats had to be put out of its misery made him sick to his stomach. ‘This is the labour of my life,’ he pointed out.
Then it’s pitiful,’ she said. ‘Making books! It’s pitiful.’ She leaned towards him. ‘Who’d you think you’re making them for? Not me. I’m not interested. I’m not remotely interested.’
‘You know why I’m making them,’ Jacob said sullenly. To be a witness. When God comes, and demands we tell Him what we’ve wrought, chapter and verse, we must have an account. Every detail. Only then will we be…Jesus! Why do I bother explaining it to you?’
‘You can say the word. Go on, say it! Say forgiven. That’s what you used to say all the time. We’d be forgiven.’ She approached him now. ‘But you don’t really believe that any more do you?’ She gently reached up and put her hands to his face. ‘Be honest, my love,’ she said, suddenly soft.
‘I still…I still believe there’s purpose in our lives,’ Jacob replied. ‘I have to believe that.’
‘Well I don’t,’ Rosa said plainly. ‘I realized after our fumblings of yesterday, I have no healthy desires left in me. None. At all. There won’t be any more children. There won’t be any hearth and home. And there won’t be a day of forgiveness, Jacob. That’s certain. We’re alone, with the power to do whatever we want.’ She smiled. That boy—’
‘Will?’
