Seaward (2 page)

“Of course not,” Cally said.

“Your Aunt Tess will come and stay.” Her mother was looking at her but not seeing; she was lost in her own images. “I may be gone for a while—there are some tests they want to do. . . .”

“Tests?” Cally said. “On you?”

“Just checking up,” her mother said vaguely. “They want me to go tomorrow. Tess can't come till Sunday, though—”

Cally put an arm round her, feeling suddenly warm and maternal; it was an odd reversal, after all the years of running to her for comfort and support. “Just don't worry. You go. So long as you can rest while you're there.”

“Oh yes,” her mother said. “Oh yes. And I shan't be far away.” She patted Cally's hand, and kissed her, but the shadows were still in her face and eyes. Suddenly Cally felt was a long time since she had seen her mother smile.

But she heard her singing, that night, as she lay in bed: a strange, wordless half-tune that seemed to bring a flicker of memory into Cally's listening head from long ago. Her mother was in her own bedroom; she could hear her moving about.

Cally called, “Ma? What's that?”

The crooning stopped abruptly. “Just an old song I used to know.”

“Did you ever sing it to me, when I was little?”

“I may have done. Sleep well, now.”

In a little while she began to hum softly again, so that the music was still drifting through Cally's mind when she fell asleep.

•  •  •

When Cally came home from school the next day, the long dark-blue car was standing at the gate again. The driver jumped out when he saw her, and went round to open the rear door; her mother was sitting inside. She had a blanket wrapped round her knees, just as Cally's father had done, and again Cally thought she looked strangely like him: the same fragility, the same remote, shadowed eyes. She felt fear hollow in the pit of her stomach, but she smiled at her mother and slipped into the car to hug her.

Her mother kissed her cheek gently. I've left the telephone number, and everything you and Tess should need. She'll be here the day after tomorrow. Now you're
sure—”

“I'm going to be fine, Ma. If I get lonely I'll have Jen come over—or I can go to her house. Give my love to Dad. Is he—”

She stopped. After the first talk when they had faced her with the news of the disease that was wasting her father away, her parents had never mentioned it again; it was as if they felt safer in silence.

“There's money in the kitchen drawer if you need it,”
her mother said. She kissed her again. “Don't stay up too late, now.”

Cally grinned. “With Aunt Tess around? Goodbye, Ma.”

As she clambered out of the car, a figure in the front seat turned, and Cally saw that it was the woman with silver hair who had come for her father. She said nothing to Cally this time, but only smiled; the blue eyes were bright, watching.

Then the car was moving off, driving down the road. Cally waved it out of sight. She could see the white blur of her mother's face turned, looking back, all the way.

There was an unfamiliar itching in the palms of her hands; she rubbed them absently with her fingers as she went into the house. She was remembering what the silverhaired woman had said when she drove away with her father, that other day.
“We shall meet again soon. . . .”

•  •  •

In the refrigerator Cally found food for several days, carefully labelled: cold chicken, ham, stew to be warmed up. (“Heat in double boiler for fifteen minutes,” said the note in her mother's neat hand, “and DON'T FORGET TO PUT WATER IN POT!”) Cally made herself a cup of tea. She had expected to feel lonely but instead was cheerful; to be alone and in charge of the house was like a game, as if she were camping out. She found she was pleased that her aunt would not be coming to keep her company for two days yet.

Then she heard the singing.

It was her mother's wordless humming, the same oddly unfinished tune: a voice in the air. In the first shock she thought it was indeed her mother's voice, that she might have come back for something forgotten, but though she went through every room in the little house, in search of the singing that gently filled it, there was no one there. She checked the radio and television sets, and the record-player; all were firmly switched off. Yet the singing went on, soft, insistent, coming from nowhere: rhythmic waves of melody repeated over and over again. Cally was too puzzled to be alarmed. She sat on the stairs, chin on hands, listening, and gradually the singing died away.

After a while she thought she must have imagined it. She ate some supper, talked to her friend Jen on the telephone, watched a television film and went to bed. She slept deep, but when night faded to day she began dreaming of the apple tree at the end of the garden. She was sitting up there between the embracing branches, swayed by the wind, looking out at the great poplars that sounded like the sea, and the steady rustling breathing of the poplar trees grew higher and louder, filling her ears, wave after wave, filling the air. Cally woke gently out of her dream, the sound carrying her into consciousness as if she were borne in a boat—and when she was awake she found she could hear the singing again.

It was the same voice, the same melody, but not continuous this time. The familiar phrase came twice, or three times, then died gradually away into silence. For a few moments she would hear nothing, and then a snatch of it came again, far away. Silence once more: then it was back, clear, close, yet still untraceable.

Cally padded into her parents' empty bedroom and picked up the telephone.

“Jen?”

“Cally! I'm not awake. Are you awake? D'you know it's only seven o'clock in the morning? On a
Saturday?”

“Sorry,” Cally said.

“Lucky I got to the phone first. If you woke my dad—”

“I'm
sorry,”
Cally said. “I didn't look.”

Jen said, more normally, “What's up?”

“I can hear that singing again.”

“Like last night?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wow.”

“It's just the same, the voice like Ma's, the same song. Only now it comes and goes.”

“You sure she isn't there?”

“Of course I am.”

“Hiding under the bed maybe,” said Jen, and giggled.

“Listen!” Cally said suddenly. “There it is again, much louder, all round me. Listen!” She held the telephone out
to the room, to the air filled now with the strong sweet voice, the curving half-shaped melody pulsing in her ears. Then she brought the receiver close again. “You hear?”

“I can't hear anything.” There was no longer a laugh in Jen's voice. “Except the wind. Look, Cal, there's half a gale blowing outside. It must be the wind in the chimney, or the telephone wires, or something.”

Cally said, “It's a voice, singing.”

Around her, the singing faded once more into a thread of sound, far away, that she could scarcely hear.

“That's weird. Cal, that's really weird. You better come stay over here.”

“You ever heard the sea?” Cally said, straining her ears to catch the plaintive rise and fall of the distant song. “I think it must sound like the sea. A long way off.”

“Come on over,” Jen said nervously. “Come and eat breakfast. I'll cook sausages.”

“I'll call you back,” Cally said. She put down the receiver and went out onto the landing, listening, hunting the sound. Nothing. She washed, pulled on a shirt and some jeans, went back into her parents' room—and then all at once the singing was back, different, enormously loud, and suddenly Cally was frightened.

The voice was strident, demanding. The phrase that had been a haunting, plaintive lilt in her mother's first gentle crooning had changed now to a pattern of hammer-blows,
beating at her ears. Cally wheeled about, her hands up in defence, terrified.

“Ma! Ma!”

It was instinctive, a cry for help.
Where are you? I need you, I don't know what to do, where have you gone? Ma, Dad, I can't do without you, you've always been here, come back, come back . . . .

But they weren't there in the empty house; she was alone with the beating voice. She knew it was not her mother's voice, for sure now; the harshness and fury in it were totally alien to that familiar gentleness. But why was this the same music her mother had sung, that last day?

Cally had a sudden nightmare image of her mother hostile to her, of a malevolence aimed at her which somehow was retribution for everything she had ever failed to do, or done wrong. In place of the loving forgiveness she had always known, in her mind she saw her mother's face twisted with ill-wishing, fierce as the throbbing song which so pressed on her now that she thought her head would split.

She whirled round again in the small sunny room and came up against her own image in a mirror. It was hardly recognizable: the face blurred like the face of a small distraught child, cheeks tear-stained, eyes red and staring. Cally looked at herself in horror. Behind her reflected figure, green branches tossed in the wind, the green of
the tall poplar trees filling half the sky outside. She gazed wildly at them, clutching for comfort from the reflection, and saw around them the carved frame of the tall cheval-glass mirror that was her mother's pride and joy, brought from some life before Cally had been born. Fish swam around the mirror, carved in oak, between leaves and strange flowers. She had enjoyed running her fingers over them when she was small; she remembered how she used to creep into the room when her mother was dressing, and how she would slip behind the mirror and tip it gently and her mother would haul her out, laughing. . . .
Remember, remember. . . .
She put her hands over her ears, fighting the harsh throbbing voice.

The sound grew no less, but rose unbelievably higher, louder; suddenly it seemed terrifyingly close behind her in the empty room. Cally could bear it no longer, she could think of nothing but that she must get away before it drove her mad. Without thought, she thrust her hands out to the mirror, pressing her rough-skinned palms against the cool flat glass.

And the glass seemed to melt under her hands as if it were water, and took her in, and she stepped through the mirror, out of the room.

W
esterly paused and looked about him; all around, the hills rolled to the horizon, purple and brown and green, curving one upon the other like lines of great sleeping animals. He was on the roof of the high country. Before him the faint grassy path rose higher still, through scrubby heather and gold-starred bushes of gorse, to the line where land met sky.

He forced himself on, feeling his pack heavy on his shoulders. The sun blazed down; he heard the swish of his feet over the grass, and the small song of the wind. Then gradually he thought he began to hear other sounds, bizarre, improbable: distant voices calling, and the clash of metal, and once the muffled neighing of a horse.

He swung round and looked behind him, over the rolling hills, but saw no movement, no one following.

At last he reached the crest, and suddenly facing him in the flaring sunlight was a great sweep of sky, the land falling away steeply at his feet. For a mile or more below
him, the moorland lay flat, like a huge plate set into the hills —and the new sounds were loud in his ears, rising from a strange pattern spread down there, bright against the brown land.

He stared, disbelieving. All over the plateau, spread in the shape of an immense square, he saw gleaming clusters of men in blue or gold: swaying, hovering in their places. He saw a crowd of golden foot-soldiers, waving swords, shouting behind the blazing reflections from their shields; among them he saw a group of horsemen in blue robes, blue banners flying, spears held for the charge but the horses held in check, waiting.

He saw towers so like castles that it was a shock to look again and realise that they were mounted on wheels, to be tugged and pushed by other groups of foot-soldiers in blue or gold. In another cluster of horsemen he saw a single mounted figure in black, holding a tall glistening cross high on a pole. Each small crowd seemed full of a fierce energy—and yet none moved. A shout rose from the far corner of the patterned throng, where most of the clustering figures shimmered sky-blue, and all at once a group of golden horsemen cantered forward through the motionless, menacing figures around them, turned abruptly to one side and reined in, their horses whinnying with impatience.

The movement seemed oddly, bafflingly familiar. Then above his head Westerly heard a voice, soft and musical
and yet seeming to fill the whole sky. It said with amusement, “Knight to king's pawn four. But that will do you no good at all.”

Westerly looked up. He had thought himself on the crest, but on a slope above him, two figures stood. He could not see them clearly against the bright sky, but they seemed far taller than human height: one a hooded form wrapped in a gleaming golden cloak; the other a woman, blue-robed, her hood flung back to show a mass of waving hair so fair it seemed to be white.