Mary George of Allnorthover. Lavinia Greenlaw
and the trees grew happily over the edge but it didn’t make sense. Least of all here, where the world was flat and the dip below Ingfield Rise had been a place to get out from under the sky.
Tom was scared. If he could just find the house, know where it was. He crouched down and pushed his hands into the earth wanting to feel the full force of the world push back and steady him, but last year’s leaves and pine needles were loose dust. He felt the bubbles escape his chest and press into every part of his body. He tried to hold harder to the earth. I will float away, he thought, as each wave of panic left him with less and less sense of himself. I do not work, I am not flesh, I am light and air exploding.
And although Tom believed this, he settled slowly back into himself, his hands were his hands again and his heart forgotten. He decided to try once more. The hard light hurt his eyes as he emerged from the dullness of the trees. He concentrated, turning his head from right to left until he could be sure that there was the Ridge and Temple Grove marking the edge of Factory Field. He followed the land down without thinking and fixed his gaze on the point where the house should be, just past the fishing jetty, only five yards or so out now that the water level was so low. He walked towards it, bumping and stumbling but looking neither away nor down. It was no good, there was nothing to fix on, just the inscrutable dazzle of sun on water. The harder he stared, the more it kept shifting and shimmering and pushing him away. Tom reached the jetty and made for the shadows beneath it.
As well as being shortsighted, Mary had no sense of direction. More accurately, she had a strong sense of counter-direction and would set off cross country absolutely sure of herself, walking miles the wrong way. On the way home with her best friend, Billy Eyre, she would argue fiercely about which path to take, which corner of a field the stile would be in, that the road they wanted lay just beyond it. She was always wrong and Billy would put up a fight but secretly encourage her, enjoying the angry surprise on her face and the sulky calm that followed. He would go as far out of their way as she led him.
This morning Mary was tired and although it was only eight o’clock, the sky was not easy to look up into. She had walked for a mile without going wrong, as if not thinking about it kept her from losing her way. Beyond the reservoir was Temple Grove which gave out onto The Verges, which would in turn lead her home. The simplest thing to do was to walk round the water. It might be cooler, too. Mary made her way through the trees and found what was called the Other Gate, not the locked entrance to which licensed anglers had a key but a panel of the fence a little further along that had been expertly loosened and replaced. Even those with keys found it easier to reach the jetty this way, especially now that the lock on the real gate had grown so stiff. Mary heaved the panel a little to one side and slipped through.
The drought forced things open and they gave up whatever was once liquid inside them: the parched trees smelt of resin, the fence of solder and the jetty of creosote. The reservoir, though, had withdrawn into itself. Mary took off her boots, walked to the end of the jetty and sat down on the edge but it was no good, her feet could not reach the water. She walked along to a clump of trees.
Mary and Billy used to climb out along a low bough here. He would watch her take off her shoes and glasses, and walk swiftly to the end only to have to come back, take him by the hand and inch him along. Mary tried to explain how she could make herself light and steady by not looking, by insisting that there could be no wrong step, what it was to keep moving, not knowing when she had left the bank and was out over the water. Billy had tried once, without success, to get her to do it with her glasses on.
A girl had appeared in the tree over the house. She was standing up straight on the low bough, her arms spread wide. In quick, small steps she reached the end. Tom’s eyes followed her, went past and looked down and there was something, a shadow, like the darkening colour of a sudden change of depth. As Tom stared, the shadow took on shape and then it wasn’t shadow but a house, lingering like a deep-sea creature uncertainly beneath the surface. Its slate roof glittered for a moment and was gone but the girl was still there, not in the tree now but further out, where the roof had been, on the water.
A pale thing with cropped hair; a child in an old blue dress that might have been his mother’s. She was somehow in suspension, utterly concentrated but also on the verge of slipping away. Tom started to walk towards her, terrified he would make her disappear. Don’t move, he begged her silently, not till I get there and see where you are. But then he was crying and could not see, and the sun shifted, enlarged, glared, and somehow he had closed his eyes and when he opened them he was by the tree and there was a barefooted girl but she was beside him.
‘You frightened me.’ She leaned a little towards him, squinted and frowned. ‘Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t recognise you.’ He didn’t look up. ‘Are you in pain? Have you hurt your eyes?’
‘Are you from here?’ His voice was an uncertain roar. He had spoken to no one for days.
‘Oh! I’m afraid … I thought you were someone … I’m sorry!’ Embarrassed, and a little frightened, Mary turned and half walked, half ran to the jetty.
Tom could not move and did not know what to ask, but just as she disappeared he realised: ‘I know you!’
Mary, pushing on her glasses and throwing her boots over her shoulder, scrambled up through the trees and squeezed through the Other Gate. She heard another croaking shout as the loose panel fell to the ground with a clatter and twang, like tired percussion. She ran up the track, her bag banging against her knees, one hand pushing her glasses back up her nose. She stopped to shove her feet into her boots. There was no sign of him following, but Mary cut across Factory Field. Her panic was so great that she felt her body drag, as if the corn were as tall as it should have been and she was having to fight her way through slapping waves. She stumbled over the stile and down into the road.
As soon as Mary turned the first corner, she began to calm down. Her cheeks stung, each gulp of air caught like chaff in her throat and she could run no further. It was the reservoir that had panicked her, she decided, its artificial plantations and still water, not that man who looked so worried and ill. Her mother would have held his hand and talked to him in her cool, soothing way. Mary knew what that felt like: like being rescued not by an angel but by a statue of an angel, and folded in marble wings; and she had mistaken the man for someone she had thought of as a statue too, when she was a child, a church saint or an effigy on a tomb.
Mary skirted Temple Grove, a copse of spindly, tangled hazel, ash and willow: useful, adaptable, flexible trees that had been part of a parcel of land given to the Knights Templar after the first Crusade. The Knights learnt Euclidean geometry from the Arabic, and applied it to the building of their barns. While their wattle-and-daub farmhouses had lurched, buckled and been pulled down, these barns, with their perfectly balanced angles, were still standing. Nothing so regular had been built until the new houses after the last war, tessellated arrangements that had everything to do with numbers.
The Knights had prospered for a hundred years in austerity and chastity before the parish turned on them when the crusades failed, with accusations of idolatry, homosexuality and child murder. There was still a whiff of that six-hundred-year old scandal about the place. Saplings struggled up through nettles and brambles, only to give up before they emerged from the shadows. The wood was dark and difficult to find a way into. Those who wanted to walk their dogs, pick blackberries or bluebells, or tire out their children, went out through the other end of Allnorthover and into the Setts, a solid wildwood of oak, chestnut and beech with wide paths and clearings, National Trust signs, and bamboo and rhododendrons that made it seem like nothing more than an overgrown garden.
Temple Grove was where you went to build a den, try your first cigarette and, later, to drink cider round a fire, smoke dope and scare each other with stories about the Man in the Van and his goats, or about the day someone found a makeshift altar here, three bales of straw, a black candle and a chicken’s foot. Billy and Mary had done these things and had heard all the stories. Neither of them knew who was supposed to have found the altar but they believed it. Once, they had found a full set of women’s clothing, including bra and knickers, next to three old sofa cushions. The cushions had been ripped open and scorched.
At some recent critical point, Temple Grove had