The hollow tree, p.19
The Hollow Tree, page 19
“I’d rather not . . . share. It’s something Dan wanted her to know. He told me to tell her.”
“And you’ve come down from Scotland especially?”
“Yes, from Leven.”
“You could have emailed, or called.”
“I very much felt the need to be here in person,” Shona said, as sadly as she could. “Some things are too important. I had to come.”
“Well, as I am sure Daniel told you,” Ms. Cox said, lowering her voice, “his mother is not very well and can get confused. Daniel valued the care and support we give her here. He used to visit every week. I never would have guessed . . .”
“No,” Shona said, and put a hand to her eye, as if to wipe a nascent tear.
“But who knows these things?” Ms. Cox said. “People can be in trouble, in deep pain and . . .”
“Not show a thing,” Shona said.
“Not give a glimpse of it to the outside world—to their friends or partners. I think it was that way with Daniel. You’d never know what was going in that head of his. And he was so pale. So pale. Pale and quiet. Like his mother.”
“He mentioned how much comfort he got, knowing she was here, being looked after,” Shona lied. “Still in his hometown.”
Ms. Cox smiled. “Well, I am not sure he thought much of Ullathorne, but he did visit. Is it true he sold his house in Darlo and moved into a caravan? I read somewhere.”
“I don’t know about his caravan,” Shona said, suddenly nervous. “I didn’t know that.”
“I’m sure I saw that in the piece about him in the Echo. Anyway—Ms. Merrygill will be having an afternoon snack soon and then we will be playing bridge. So you’re lucky, Eliza, to have arrived when you did.”
“Thank you,” Shona said. “I won’t take long. How is she?”
Ms. Cox looked at her hands for a moment. “I think it is fair to say the news will take a while to sink in. You’ve come a long way, and perhaps at the right time—before it does sink in.” She stood. “Do you mind me asking—how did you come by that walking aid? Is it temporary?”
“I had a mountain climbing accident,” Shona said. “When I was a kid.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“We all have our crosses to bear,” Shona said.
“Just like Daniel did,” Ms. Cox said. “You know, I think he probably wasn’t the same since his dad disappeared. He was just a bairn then. Ms. Merrygill won’t talk about that, of course.”
“Where did his father go?”
“Away travelling. Not sure if they ever got divorced. But it wasn’t a happy home. So, Dan took his mother’s name.”
“Oh—what was the married name?”
“I can’t remember,” Ms. Cox said briskly and, not looking at Shona, bustled out of the room. “Come this way,” she added, huskily.
They came to a door in a row of doors. Ms. Cox stopped and knocked gently before opening the door slowly and looking around its edge.
She turned back to Shona and nodded, and then pointed to a large digital watch on her wrist. “Ten minutes,” she said. “No longer.”
Shona nodded.
“Ten minutes,” Ms. Cox said to a passing nurse.
With Ms. Cox behind her, Shona entered the small room. There was a loud clicking noise as the door shut, and a sense of clutter, and of shadows crouched around old furniture. There were dark bookcases, a writing desk with flowers in a pot, framed pictures, and a large metal bed slung with a light blue blanket.
Near the bed, in a large chair with wooden arms, sat a silent, unmoving elderly woman. She was wearing a dark blue tracksuit, and had a blanket over her lap. She was pale, and had pale blue eyes. She was looking out of the netted windows to Ullathorne, blurred and indistinct outside.
“Hello, Martha,” Ms. Cox bellowed. The woman looked up, her face deeply lined. “This is Eliza, a friend of your Daniel. She’s popped by to have a word.”
“Hello,” the woman said, slowly, her voice as fragile as crepe paper. “Come and sit by me.”
“Ten minutes,” Ms. Cox repeated, and left the room. The door shut with an airless clunk.
Shona saw a low wooden stool, like a milking stool, by the bookcase. She put her stick to one side and crouched down on the stool. She turned the Dictaphone app on her mobile phone on, and let it record. Then she darkened the screen again.
“I am so sorry to hear about your son, Martha,” Shona said.
Martha’s hands were gently crossed on her lap. She had two rings on her ring finger, one with a small diamond. The skin around her eyes was as grey as a dove.
“He is gone now,” she said, nodding, her tight white hair unmoving. “But he said, you know, that he had always been there.”
Martha spoke clearly but slowly. She moved a hand upward; in it was a crumpled tissue. She wiped away water from her eyes.
“John was too hard on him,” she said. “Far too hard, I always said. Spare the rod and spoil the boy, he said. But he was too hard on the lad. And me an old mother. I’m sorry, I am being rude, can I get you tea and a biscuit?”
“No, thank you,” Shona said.
Martha turned her head, and looked at Shona. “I don’t know you.”
“I’m a friend from Dan’s work.”
“I don’t know you,” Martha said again, and looked to the window, and the inaccessible world beyond. “I knew what he was doing. And now he’s gone.”
“What was he doing?”
“When he were a lad, he used to cry a lot, he was a shy boy. Afraid of his own shadow,” she said. “He wet his bed. Piles of sheets in the mornings.”
She turned her head a little, but did not move. Dust drifted through the light. The books sat stacked on their unread shelves like blank gravestones.
“He was quiet,” Martha said. “Such a bonny baby. Then his father left and he was never the same. Never the same. He missed his daddy.”
“When did you last see him?”
“He was a sickly child. He had whooping cough, the mumps, suffered terribly with the measles,” Martha said. She blinked slowly.
“When did you see him last?” Shona said, persisting.
“He used to go into that room of his,” Martha said.
Shona’s phone buzzed: a text from Ranald, her editor. She ignored it.
“There was always something going on in that room of his,” Martha said. She turned to Shona again, and looked past her. “His room was full of letters.”
“Did he write a lot? Of letters?”
“He would lock himself away,” Martha said, shaking her head.
Shona rubbed her face. Her time was running out, and she needed more. “Did you know he was sad?”
“He came and saw me on the eve of Epiphany,” Martha said, her eyes unseeing. “He held my hand and said I would be taken care of. He’d sold his house, he said, was moving into a caravan. He would be happier there, he said. He said he was nearer to the stones, to the rocks.”
“A caravan.”
Martha smiled. “It is lovely. Have you seen it? He showed me a lovely picture.”
“No.”
“He’s growing vegetables. He’s saving up, he said. You wouldn’t know Ullathorne. Not with that accent. Ullathorne gets very dark. Winter is like a cold hearth. I think people from outwith Ully do not understand it. How cold it is, how hard it gets.”
“He was telling me about something terrible that happened when he was young, about his friend Andrew,” Shona said.
Martha turned her face the other way. “Poor bairn,” she said, softly. “Poor wee bairn.”
“Terrible business,” Shona said.
“Police came around. Blue lights in the kitchen. John upstairs, writing. Police came—Harmire—to speak to Danny but of course he knew nowt. How could he. He left with his friends. He was scared, I was scared. But then . . .”
“But then . . . ?”
“It all went away. It all went away, didn’t it?” Martha smiled. “The inspector never came around again.”
Shona sensed a body by the door outside. Someone was going to open it. A shadow fell.
Martha’s eyes began to glitter.
“Did Daniel leave Andrew with his friends, that night?” Shona prompted.
“He came home. Left his chips by the front door. I remember: the police saw them. Chips and gravy.”
The door opened, and a nurse in brown appeared. She said, “Time now, Martha,” and nodded to Shona.
Shona stood up. “I am so sorry about your son.”
Martha put her hand out, and Shona held it. It was weightless.
“Will you come again?” she said, with a half-smile.
“I live in Scotland, but I’ll try,” Shona said, and her stomach turned over. Everything was too awful. She wanted, suddenly, to be at home with her father.
“I’d love a visit,” Martha said.
“Now, now,” the nurse said.
“I’d like another visit.”
“I will visit,” Shona lied, smiling.
Martha was crying without moving. A tear slowly rolled down her smooth cheek. She gently pulled at Shona’s hand, and she moved closer, almost crouching.
“‘I’m talking to myself, Mam,’ he would say,” she said, quickly, quietly. “He said he was talking to himself—in his room. That he could speak to himself. That he was already dead. That’s what he said. He told me one night. After Jack left me. Off to write his books, and never came back.”
Shona felt a deep shiver run through her. Her shoulders shook. Martha’s eyes had become hardened and fixed. She felt the woman’s breath on her face.
“Come on, Martha,” the nurse said, bustling into the room. “Let’s not start all that silly business again.”
Shona withdrew her hand, like taking her fingers from a soft pocket.
“That’s no way to talk to me, is it, nurse?” Martha said, annoyed, looking up, turning her head to watch Shona leaving the room.
“That’s no way to talk, is it?” she said again, and Shona left the room.
Martha’s voice, wordless, could be heard down the hall, fading softly as Shona walked away.
The hard light rolled over Shona in waves of destruction.
20.
Alison was leaning on her kitchen island, her face in her hands. Margaret Gildersleve had emailed her. Alison could not shake Peg’s words from her mind.
Her children were outside slumped on beach chairs in the long garden, watching images roll and flash on their devices. Airplanes moved heavily across the blue London sky, slowly knitting a cat’s cradle of jet trails.
Nigel was back from his alleged business trip. He said he had something to tell her.
She looked about her unlovely house. It was tall and narrow, and in central London: it would sell for a lot of money. They would sell this place, and she and the children would live somewhere else. Away from the city and its incessant demand. From the noise.
They would move into a place of greater quiet, where a deep river ran, and old trees overhung. Where rock and stone stood, and the hills embraced a valley, and time slowed, and there was time to think, and do, and be. The children would not miss their overpriced, demanding, average school. They would not much miss their empty, hectoring father.
Nigel walked into the kitchen, his flip-flops slapping. He was tanned and tall and was still damp and pink from the shower, his heavy head of hair gleaming.
“So,” he said, curtly, as if addressing a meeting.
She stared into the stone spirals on her kitchen countertop.
We have found something in the woods, Peg had written.
“Well,” he said, clapping his hands together. He lowered his head, and his eyes grew wide. His voice became his version of low, and soothing.
“I think it is time we have a little chat.”
“You know at some point you need to move out,” she said.
He blinked heavily. “Can we talk first?” he said. “We need to. I think now is the time. The conversation.”
She knew what it was. She felt it in her body. There was dread in her, but there was no sorrow. She had searched for it, but there was none. Alison had felt deep and angry sorrow before, and this feeling was not the same. This was another place, another feeling—closer to an extended irritation. The heat and itch of a slowly emerging spot.
She turned and looked through the windows at the children. Their tawny heads. All she needed was them. Their frail hands held back the darkness.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said.
“To the pub?” he said.
She looked at his wide face. It struck her, as it had before, as less a face of a grown man, with all the lines of loss and painfully salvaged joy that might feasibly mean, than a moveable screen built for melodrama. She felt a passing twinge of sorrow for him. She had learned, over the years, that instead of deep convictions, or real emotions, he had only a thinly felt series of poses.
“No, not the pub. Somewhere out of sight—away from the children,” she said.
She slipped off her high chair and walked past him, checking her phone. Nothing new. No more news. She had texted and received no reply.
In Deepdale, Peg had said. We have found something.
She padded past the newly carpeted stairs, the large, framed portraits of the family taken in a white studio, a stand of tennis rackets, lacrosse sticks, and golf bags. All the future landfill of their comfortable, unsustainable lives.
She went into the front room. He did not seem to have followed her. The room had no television and was rarely used. She had once thought that adult guests could gather there and talk seriously about the world. It never happened. Instead, three large cream settees sulked around an elaborate fireplace, under a chandelier, and threatened a low table with heavy books glossily advertising things she did not really care about: architecture, international travel, business, the Himalayas.
A paperback book about self-improvement was on the sofa, something Nigel had been reading since he told her their marriage was over. Alison took the book and threw it across the room. It landed behind a chair.
She looked at the rest of the books—she would burn them all. She sat down and crossed her legs and Nigel loomed in the doorway.
He mouthed almost silently—“Are the kids okay?”
“They’re fine. Fed and watered.”
“What was that noise?”
“Nothing. A car.”
Nigel was now barefoot. “How’s your mother?”
Alison blinked. Her mother was fine, a widow living in a bungalow in Cornwall, as far away from Tyrdale as she could manage. She went to church twice weekly and was involved in committees. She refused the policeman’s pension, and lived frugally.
“Mum is fine. Still a big fan of Jesus. Why?”
He sat down, and began to wring his hands, his long hairy fingers. He was blinking rapidly.
Alison knew, or nearly knew, that Nigel had met someone else. Finally, someone else to inflict himself upon.
There had been a period when they met, when he had been long-haired and handsome, and his scattergun red-trousered enthusiasms had seemed the kaleidoscopic interests of a man in love with life and all it could offer. And after the religious silence of her mother, the lies and corruptions of her father, his world seemed something to marvel at: something vast and multicoloured. But the endless swirling confetti clouds of his interests, she realised were just that, a swirl of weightless colours. A two-dimensional whirl of nothingness.
“Alison,” he said.
“Nigel Osbourne,” she said.
To think, she remembered, she had been unsure about marrying him, this erratic, rackety man. Until the board had told her: Say Yes to No. And so she had said yes to N.O. The letters still speaking to her, long after the glass had stopped moving.
Gary Watson had always taken its messages so seriously, all those years ago. She wished she had not.
“You look so tired,” Nigel purred.
“Nigel, let’s get this over with,” she said. “For both our sakes.”
He turned his head slightly, as if reluctantly accepting a bad offer, and carried on. “Ultimately, Alison, I see this as good news. This is in fact wonderful news.” He patted his hands on his knees. “For both of us. But there is no easy way to say this . . .”
Alison suddenly felt violently impatient. She stood up.
“I have met the most wonderful person, the most wonderful woman,” Nigel said, with a tremulous voice.
She felt herself begin to shake. She looked to the fireplace.
There were hard black fire irons there, that could easily shatter his fragile skull. Despite his height, he was as weak as a gosling. She was stronger than him. She could break open his face, drag the body to the ornamental pond, sink him in the water, and drive away. It would be a long time before he was found.
He was still talking. He had clearly practised this speech, as he was now gaining confidence, and his voice was clear and unruffled.
“. . . we understand each other, ultimately, in a way which really speaks to me at this time in my life. And, to be frank, we have fallen in love! Which is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?”
He shook his head, as if in wonder. His hands splayed out, touching at the thumbs. “Do you not want to know who she is?” he asked, as if surprised.
“No,” she said, staring into the fireplace. “I do not give a fuck.”
He looked momentarily stunned, then carried on. “We should now move on to the next phase: make our arrangements, disinvest, de-couple, disentangle, re-combine. We can talk to Derek. We can talk about our assets, about the house, the children . . .”
She nodded. Then, she began to speak—about the children, about their house—and was pleased with how calm and focused she was. She was making sense. She was not expressing anger, or disappointment. Her tone was even and unemotional. She agreed they could speak to their financial advisor, and talk about the house, the assets, the money.
As she spoke, she was aware that another, cool, eyeless part of Alison was looking at the table, and the shape and solidity of its surface. Then she realised she had said her piece, and there was nothing more to say. She had detached, and reattached. And Nigel was talking on again. His words, his deep voice, rolled on.
