Authors: Penelope Farmer
He went down the hill, back to the junk shop, pushed the door and went straight inside. The smell and the dim light were immediately wholly familiar. But when his eyes had accustomed themselves to the gloom, he saw that something else was different, more, very very different. He ought to have known why immediately. But it was as if he had seen the shop in a dream before; he could not visualize, merely summon up a feeling of what it had been like. Not until he deliberately stopped himself trying to remember and let impressions sweep over him unimpeded, did he realize what had happened. The shop was emptier, not just a little, much emptier. The furniture was still there, or a fair amount of it, blocks and forms and shadowy shapes, but most of the clutter had vanished from the surfaces and nothing hung from the ceiling now. There had been no tables outside the shop either, Hugh remembered suddenly, no boxes of books and junk and jewellery, and piles of 78-speed gramophone records. He wondered what had happened to everything. It could not, surely, have been sold in just a week.
The shock was as great as the first time; of coming from light into shadow, from warmth into chill. First he noticed the difference, then at last he placed it, the relative emptiness, then he saw the blind head – on a table now, in a corner and without its wig; and then he saw the old man looming from a doorway.
“I was only looking,” Hugh said, apologetically.
“Looking’s free,” observed the old man: at which Hugh, instantly, from nothing, wanted to laugh, an emotion puzzling to him, almost embarrassing, and quite inappropriate in these circumstances; but the pert girl in the chemist’s had said exactly the same thing, and it seemed so out of place here, like a dirty limerick spoken in the school chapel. He stared at the old man defiantly. “I’ll go on looking then,” he said.
His eyes had adapted to the dimness now. He saw a single object on every single piece of furniture, or on a wall above, a whole range of objects, each one as separate and distinct, as before they had been indistinguishable amid the general clutter; yet each one at the same time related to all the others, though how he could not say. There was the familiar yet still disconcerting blind head. There was a squat stone figure of a monk; an eighteenth-century miniature, a wooden oval disc with a face carved on it in relief – it should, he guessed, have hung upon a wall, but now lay face upwards on a marble stand – and another wooden head, more jutting and ornate, which might have been one of a pair supporting a doorhead or a mantelpiece. There was a group of pottery figures, a sailor, a girl, a curly-tailed dog, all brightly painted so far as in this gloom it was possible to tell; a medallion very tarnished which looked old – was it Roman? Hugh wondered. It had a face on it too, and so did the small chipped saucer on the table next to it, a formal portrait head. On the wall above these, equidistant from both, hung a little print of a man on horseback, etched or engraved, brown-spotted with damp.
Everything, every object had a face, Hugh realized, the same face, one he half recognized, but could not place. The looking, however, so absorbed him that the voice from the inner doorway made him jump uncomfortably.
“You came with your father before, young man.”
Hugh turned towards the voice, the shadowed face. “We bought a cupboard. Yes,” he said.
“Ah yes. I remember it; a cupboard with qualities.”
“Some qualities,” Hugh said. “It was a very ugly cupboard too.” For a moment he only remembered the ugliness of the cupboard, and nothing else at all.
“You may call it ugly if you like.”
“It
is
ugly. It’s why I came. I came about your cupboard.” Hugh spoke quietly. He had thought he would have to force himself to be calm, but it was not difficult at all. He felt calm and controlled and certain what he meant; at the same time cut off, separate from everything. “Your cupboard changes things,” he said.
“It’s your cupboard, not mine. You bought it from me. Or your father did. It is his cupboard I should have thought. What did you expect? What was I supposed to offer you? Continuity? Security? Immunity? Immunity from what?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you buy a cupboard you don’t expect it to change things. That’s all.” The words were protesting enough, but Hugh, feeling it entirely absurd that he had to protest at all, could not put much heat into his voice. All at once the whole thing seemed ridiculous. He was himself ridiculous. “It changes
people
,” he said trying to retrieve the seriousness of the situation, and yet somehow not able at this moment to feel serious enough, in spite of everything.
He wondered, suddenly, what Anna would have thought.
“It’s not so unusual for people to change,” said the old man, prim as a governess.
“Not like that they don’t. What’s it made of?” Hugh managed to sound a little more insistent; yet still, inappropriately, wanted to laugh.
“What would you have liked it to be made of? Gingerbread?” asked the old man. But now he turned and led Hugh out of the shop into his little back room, flicking a switch as he went, so that they passed from dimness to light again – which made Hugh blink uncomfortably. There was a bare bulb swinging idly on a long flex, throwing shadows of itself upon the walls. There was a table with papers on it, an unlit gas fire, an electric kettle, but, surprisingly, not a single chair or stool. The old man’s face had turned to islands and shadows now.
“You should have warned us,” Hugh said. “Why didn’t you warn us?”
“Would you rather it had not changed things? You could have bought some other cupboard. Cupboards are not in short supply.”
“It was the only cupboard in your shop, though,” said Hugh. He avoided answering the real question. But the answer came rushing at him even so, and he resented this answer, because the cupboard had been, to say the least of it, inconvenient, upsetting everything he had meant to do, destroying his solitude, stopping his painting, imposing impossible problems on him, and leaving him to solve them without Penn, alone.
“I might be glad in a way,” he said angrily, then laughed out loud. “It’s all right for Penn. He can’t notice anything, he doesn’t have to do anything. He just has to be looked after. Jesus, I wish it had happened to me, not Penn.”
“But you are not Penn,” the old man said. “What you have to do is different.”
“Then you do know about it?” But the old man looked at him and shook his head very slightly. They stood in silence for a while. “What’s the cupboard made of?” Hugh asked. The old man went past him back into the shop and fetched a chair, but neither of them sat down on it. They continued to stand beneath the naked, swinging bulb, which went on swinging for reasons of its own, making little reflections of the room and them.
“What shall we do? How can we get Penn back?”
“The cupboard is made of apple wood,” said the old man slowly and deliberately.
“A mighty big apple tree to make a cupboard. And so what? It’s wood like any other wood.”
“Not
an
apple tree. It need not have been a cupboard either.”
“What’s so special about an
apple tree
?”
“
The
apple tree. Aren’t you an educated boy? What does it signify?”
“I don’t know, I don’t care. But what about the other trees?”
“Alder,” asked the old man, “and birch?” “And willow and holly,” said Hugh. “And ash . . .” He waited. The old man finished it. “And oak and apple. Would you rather it had been an ordinary cupboard?” he went on.
“I don’t know. Why should I tell you?”
“Then why should you expect me to answer your questions? The shop is closed. Didn’t you see the notice? You are taking up my time and there is not much left of that, if you choose to destroy it as I fear you will.”
“The door was open. I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“The sign said closed,” insisted the old man. Hugh saw this sign now out of the corner of his eye, the old man edging him backwards, through the shop. Indubitably, it did say closed, in large black letters. The door was open and Hugh outside.
“I must have forgotten to lock it,” the old man said and smiled and locked the door in his face and pulled down a blind, leaving Hugh foolish, baffled and uncomfortable, alone in the cobbled street.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Hugh took the longest way home possible: first along the river, by the crowded towpath, then around the green, through the town and past the station. He walked abstractedly, his eyes to the ground, sometimes kicking at it resentfully. The world beat outside him, but he was no part of it; when he bumped into people their glares and rebukes at once both alarmed and failed to touch him, to mean anything. He scarcely looked up or bothered to apologize, just dawdled on moodily, pushing out his lower lip, a habit he had when sulking, or rather he had used to have, for he had mostly grown out of this by now.
The crowds thinned out as Hugh left the shopping street. Walking up Chapel Road over the railway bridge he met scarcely anyone at all.
He paused there. He leaned on its painted steel wall, rested his head upon his hands and gazed at the other world, the railway, below him. There were no trains now. Before him reached an expanse, a prairie of shining steel, the criss-crossing of parallels an almost illusionary perspective reaching as far as he could see. It bore no relation to the journeys it provided for, juddering along in hot and dirty trains, brought to his mind rather the image of another illusionary perspective, in the dream, not-dream, he’d had last night; the expanse of shining water in the centre of which stood the castle he had to reach, surrounded by fruit trees. The word Avalon slid into his mind, suddenly; he did not know where it came from. But before he could start trying to remember, a voice said behind him.
“Hugh. Hugh.” He had not heard a car draw up; he almost jumped out of his skin, turning to find a familiar white but rather grubby Renault behind him. Out of it leaned Penn’s mother.
Hugh made his face as blank as he could.
“Do you want a lift, Hugh?” she asked. There was nothing he wanted less, least of all from her, but his mind was beyond finding credible excuse, even if he had the energy to use it. For it would have needed energy to refuse her. Her kind of forcefulness carried everyone along.
“Are you thinking of painting it?” she asked. Hugh stared at her in bewilderment. “Paint what?” he asked, thinking of the castle. “You were such miles away,” she said.
She was, on the face of it, the reverse of Hugh’s mother, thin, dark and quick, with a pointedness about her, and an impression, almost, of glitter. The kind of clothes she wore, and made her daughter wear (always in or beyond whatever fashion happened to be, or else, triumphantly, scorning it) which quenched Anna, seemed to set her alight. Today she wore a tight black T-shirt, white jeans, and on her head, tied gypsy fashion, a black and white silk headscarf; glitter was provided by long jet earrings which swung when she moved her head.
She looked like a bird, Hugh thought; a magpie perhaps, she was so very insistent, so very black and white. He remembered with relief, and laughed to himself that his father always called her Birdfeet. His own big, slow, fairish mother, it suddenly occurred to him, looked much more likely to be the mother of the large red-headed Penn than Penn’s mother did herself.
“Hop in,” she said leaning over and opening the car door. When Hugh continued to gaze at her, unmoving, she patted the seat. “Get in. Get in,” she urged again, her head slightly inclined, one eyebrow raised, asking questions without pronouncing them.
He attempted to arm himself, mentally, against her; sat on the edge of the seat, praying for the journey to be over quickly. “Shut the door,” she told him. For he had not shut it completely; he might, deliberately, have left himself a means of escape. It was always the same with Penn’s mother. He never knew whether he liked her or not. For one thing she always seemed much more interested in his painting than his own mother ever was, indeed far more interested than in the athletic achievements of her own son, Penn. (“What that means is having to stand for
hours, freezing,
on the edge of some muddy field. They’re all so covered in mud I can never tell which Penn
is
,” she had said to Hugh’s mother in his hearing, though he’d never heard of her actually going to watch Penn take part in any game.) But she did not show her interest in Hugh by asking questions. She was much more tactful (or subtle) than that. She broke down his guard by saying nothing, or by looking at him inquiringly, or by seeming amused or impressed, changing each attitude as he fathomed it for another; so that he never knew quite where he was, whether she was laughing at him or taking him seriously. Yet he felt that unlike most people he knew, unlike his mother, she understood sometimes what he was trying to say. Sometimes this exhilarated him. At other times he resented it very much; he did not want anyone getting inside his head. Almost always when he saw her advancing on him he attempted to escape, and if he could not, deliberately put up his guard, resisted her interest, calling her Birdfeet in his head to put her in her place. But almost always before he realized, she’d broken down his guard again.
Today his preoccupations were beyond anything even she could guess he thought, with a slight sense of triumph, feeling her glance at him, enquiringly, as they drove on up the hill. She did not fail to notice the total panic which suffused him upon her turning the car into their own road.