Advent (7 page)

 
‘. . . and here we are!’

 
Gav blinked and looked around. He couldn’t recall arriving. He’d missed the last few . . . seconds? Minutes? The car was pulled over by a tall hedge. The headlights showed a straight lane that sloped down ahead. At the fringes of their beam he saw a bare field to the right. To the left, two tall, flat-topped pine trees were shadowed against the faintly lesser dark of the sky. Beneath them, a pair of rough stone posts flanked a driveway leading off into wooded blackness. Beside the driveway, a little way beyond the gateposts, was a house.

 
Hester Lightfoot had cut off the engine and was getting out. Feeling slightly dizzy, Gavin followed.

 
A gusting wind blew about. There was nothing to hinder it. In all directions the land fell away gently. Gav thought he knew now what it had been like for the first man on the moon, his foot touching down on the rim of another world, suspended in empty space. He saw a word carved in the nearer gatepost: PENDURRA.

 
‘Watch out – there’s a cattle grid at the entrance. Tricky in the dark.’ Hester felt her way over the bars without a backwards look. He had no choice but to keep following, until they were on the driveway, staring together at the house. With its cosy eaves and its little latticed windows, it could have modelled for a gingerbread cottage. Though every window was curtained, there were lights on inside, upstairs and down, and under the tiny pointed roof of a porch. Bare, twiggy stems climbed up over this shelter and along the guttering above.

 
‘There’s a car here,’ Hester said, peering round the far side. ‘And you can smell the woodsmoke. I’m afraid your train just slipped her mind. Or perhaps she got the wrong day. Shall we knock?’ She stepped under the porch, banged on the door and called out, ‘Hello? Ms Clifton? . . . This’ll give her a jump. I doubt she gets too many knocks on the door all the way out here. Still, it’s her fault for forgetting . . . Hello?’ – more banging – ‘Hello?’ Gav went to fetch his bag from the car, suddenly shy about arriving like this, not wanting to witness Aunt Gwen’s surprise and embarrassment.

 
But Hester was still standing under the porch light when he got back.

 
‘I suppose we’d better try the door.’ There was an iron latch below the keyhole. She lifted it and pushed. A crack of warm light appeared and brought with it a puff of air heavily scented with smoke.

 
‘Hello?’ she called again, more tentatively. ‘Ms Clifton? It’s your nephew. I’ve brought him from the station.’ She opened the door wider.

 
Gav looked over her shoulder into a low-ceilinged room glimmering all over with spots and shards of firelight. If any of its numerous candles had been lit as well as the fire, it would have sparkled like a gem. It was decked out with coloured and translucent stones, strung on lines and hung along the tops of the walls, dangling from sconces. Each of them caught some reflection of the embers. On a grand-looking dining table of dark wood, pillars of scintillating glass held coloured candles, red and purple and cream. On the wall nearest the door there hung what looked like a circular stained-glass window in a frame. Beneath it was a shallow side table covered in burned-out tealights.

 
Hester’s eyebrows had lifted slightly. ‘Well, at least we can be confident it’s the right house . . . Hello?’ She leaned inside the door and called more loudly. ‘Ms Clifton? Your nephew’s here!’

 
The draught from the door stirred some of the trailing ornaments. Spots of light pricked over them. Nothing else moved.

 
‘Oh dear. I’m much too British to go into someone else’s house uninvited . . . Hello? . . . It doesn’t look as if she’s here, does it? But she can’t have gone far. That must be her car outside, and the fire’s lit . . .’ She fiddled with her chunky necklace. ‘Perhaps she had to go down to the main house for a moment. I wonder if we should check. I don’t like to leave you here all alone.’

 
The words woke Gav from the half-trance he’d fallen into on the journey. Since waving goodbye to his mother, the afternoon had gathered a bizarre momentum of its own, carrying him along with it. Now, though, it had come to rest where he wanted to be. Time to take over.

 
‘Oh, it’s fine. Don’t worry, I’ll be totally fine now. Aunt Gwen’ll be along in a minute. Fire’s on and everything. I’ll . . . I can just wait for her. No problem. Thanks.’

 
‘Are you sure? You’ve never been here before, and I think you said there’s no phone. I’d really be very happy to wait with you. God knows I’m not busy, and that way if she doesn’t come for a while I can drive you somewhere to—’

 
‘No, really. Thanks. It’s OK. And thanks for the ride, that was great, I can’t believe she forgot to pick me up but then I sort of can believe it too if you see what I mean. I’ll be OK now.’ He could see the doubt in her face and began to feel desperate again. ‘I can get myself unpacked while I wait, sort my stuff out.’

 
‘Well, at least let me come in and make sure there’s food. Or I could give you a ride down to the village. There’s a shop there that stays open lateish, in case you needed anything. She’ll probably be back by the time we return, and I’d certainly feel better—’

 
Very clearly, another woman’s voice said, ‘Let the boy go in.’

 
Hester stopped in the middle of her sentence, with her mouth open. There was no one else there. The voice had been close by, soft but rough, just like Miss Grey’s. Gavin looked around for her before he could stop himself, forgetting that Hester was watching him. Then he noticed Hester gaping silently.

 
She stared back at him as if he’d sprouted an extra head.

 
‘A-and,’ she stammered, ‘and better if there was someone here, but . . . but all right. If you’re sure. All right, then. I’ll . . . ah,’ and she looked back towards the car in confusion. She turned to go, stopped and faced Gav again. ‘What did you . . . ?’

 
‘I didn’t say anything. I thought . . .’ He was seized by the urge to get inside and shut the door. Had Hester heard the voice? What else could have startled her like that? ‘Thanks again. Thanks. Bye now.’

 
‘Well.’ She made a visible effort to recover her composure. ‘Goodbye, then. Tell you what – I’ll come back tomorrow, around this time, just to set my mind at rest.’ He protested distractedly as he picked up his bag and stepped into the house, but she was leaving and he was about to shut Miss Grey out and that was all that mattered now. ‘There, that’s the second time I’ve broken my promise not to bother you any more.’ He was just closing the door behind him when she called over the noise of the wind, ‘And, Gavin? It was a great pleasure to meet you. Good night.’

 
‘Thanks. Night,’ he answered hurriedly, shutting the door.

Four

Silence
.

 
No father, no mother. No screaming, no babble, no chatter. No one at all.

 
He began to hear what there was to be heard.

 
His own breath, still rapid after he’d been startled by the voice that was surely Miss Grey’s. The wind in the branches outside, now comfortingly muffled. The steady hiss of the fire. He heard a car engine start, rise and fall – Hester must be turning round – and then rev up and quickly fade.

 
He eyed the door behind him warily, listening. He couldn’t hear anything moving outside, but there was so much darkness around the house; he hadn’t seen a single other light from its porch.
Let the boy go in.
Who else could Miss Grey have been speaking to? What was she doing out there? Pursuing him? How could someone else possibly have heard her?

 
The door had sliding bolts at the top and bottom. He pushed them across. In another room a tinny clock struck six. It made him check his own watch: still not working.

 
He dropped his bag on the stone floor and emptied his pockets on top of it: ticket, keys, wallet, phone. He dropped the watch too.

 
Further in the house, behind the wall where the round glass picture thing hung, he saw the bottom of a narrow staircase, carpeted in threadbare green. Opposite the foot of the stairs a heavy curtain hung across a doorway. The room he was in bent round the stairwell. It felt ridiculous to tiptoe, but he did anyway, passing in front of the glass circle; he now saw that its mosaic pieces portrayed a woman’s face (high cheekbones and dreamy eyes) seen head-on, with wild hair flowing out behind, in a lurid array of colours. The Mother, maybe? The table beneath with the tealights did look a bit like a makeshift shrine. He looked around the corner. At the far end of the dining room an open doorway led to a kitchen. Branches of something that bore red-orange berries and slender, feathery leaves had been tacked up in bunches over the door.

 
There were a couple of dirty plates and saucepans by the sink, but no other sign of Auntie Gwen. Nor was she in any of the upstairs rooms, though an oddly intimate smell lingered in what was obviously her bedroom, in a way that made Gav a bit uncomfortable, as if he’d burst in on her in her pyjamas. The ceiling there sloped down almost to the floor, and an indecipherable jumble of stuff had been pushed into both corners. The only light in the room was a small lamp with a heavy red shade. He felt sure she wouldn’t have left the light on if she’d gone far. There was a bathroom next door, the inhospitably chilly, unmodern kind, and at the end of the upstairs hallway another bedroom, which also had bunches of the orange-berried branches tied over the lintel. Pinned to the door itself was something he thought must be mistletoe. It looked like the stuff on Christmas-card pictures, though he’d never actually seen it before. The bedroom beyond was unlit, neat, odourless and anonymously orderly.

 
His room. She must have made an effort to leave a space cleared of her personality, somewhere his parents would approve of their only child occupying for a week.

 
Going back down, he hesitated before pushing through the drape at the bottom of the stairs. It turned out he needn’t have.

 
He couldn’t suppress a smile as he surveyed the benign chaos of his aunt’s living room. Here was the real Auntie Gwen, the exact visual equivalent of what he remembered her conversation being like: a picture of enthusiastic untidy muddle. Over it all hung the scent of something woody and spicy, conjuring up her presence immediately, almost as if she were sitting in one of the chairs across by the fire. The same aroma used to arrive with her whenever she visited. Dad liked to make a show of sniffing the air when he got home from work and (as long as Mum was in earshot) mutter, ‘Ah yes, that new fragrance, Imbecility by Dior,’ or, ‘Mmm,
eau de mented
.’ She’d once shown Gavin how you dripped the drops of oil onto the little clay dish and then set it over the pot where the candle burned. She did it reverently, like she did most things, especially things involving candles. He looked around and spotted the pot on a huge heavy desk, surrounded by papers and scattered books. There were piles of books on the carpeted floor, books stuffed into odd pieces of dark and bulky furniture that were never intended to be shelves, books dropped in the corners of the chairs and resting, open, over the back of the long sofa that stood between him and the fireplace. Among the books were so many loose sheets of paper that it looked as if a couple more volumes had been systematically shredded and scattered like seed. Perhaps she hoped they’d take root in the mess and grow into new books. There was, he noted with a sinking heart, no TV.

 
A framed black-and-white photograph on the desk caught his eye, and after a moment’s hesitation – the room was so obviously a repository of everything Auntie Gwen was thinking and doing, and its messiness so perfectly matched her own cheerful incoherence, that walking through it felt like snooping into her head – he picked it up.

 
It was a portrait, very faintly blurry, of an unconventionally beautiful woman with unblemished skin and a round mouth and hair that glistened. She was turning away from the camera, and her eyes were closed. It didn’t look like a family picture, but it was the only one in sight. He put it back where it had stood, at the edge of the desk, under the room’s single standing lamp.

 
Most of the desk was covered by an unfolded map, a proper detailed one at a scale that showed every twist of every track and each border of every field. It was so heavily marked with lines and circles and tiny pencil scribblings that Gav could barely make out the features it charted, but in the top corner he recognised the name of the station where Hester had left her car. Near the middle of the sheet was an area where many of the straight pencil lines converged on a number of small circles, and although any names had been obliterated under Auntie Gwen’s graffiti, it was obvious that this was where he was. The pattern was like spokes on a wheel, leading into the centre: Pendurra. He examined the map for a while, trying to imagine the open sea out there in the night, the river with its narrow branchings fingering their way into valleys somewhere down beneath him.