Darkest Part of the Woods (16 page)

"The

grave..."

"Whose grave?" Margo cried "You're making me wish it was yours, Lennox."

"Mine," said Sylvia "You're telling us he..." Margo said as if her mouth would scarcely work.

"Finish it, dad," Sylvia begged.

"The grave shall be a cradle," he said, and stared not much less than imploringly at her.

Sylvia fingered her tongue and scrutinised the result before flicking away the grains of soil. "I'm sorry, I don't get it."

"Be glad you don't. You'd be as crazy as your father," Margo said and slipped an arm around her. "Come away from him."

"Don't do this, Sylvia," he pleaded. "You're making me forget. Help me remember."

"How?" Sylvia asked in much the same tone, and a tear found a path down her muddy cheek.

"She's going nowhere with you," Margo said, hugging Sylvia to her.

"Then you'll excuse me if I go by myself."

His sudden assumption of dignity seemed ponderous, so that his surging forward out of a crouch took Heather unawares. He was striding fast towards the gates before she called "Dad, wait"-for what, she couldn't think. She wasted another second in gesturing Sam to follow, and one more in saying "Quick." Lennox was nearly at the bypass when they sprinted after him.

He heard them, and ran through the gateway as if trying to imitate his elongated prancing shadow. When Heather heard the thunder she bought at first it was coming from the woods. She could almost have imagined that the darkness the trees were using to hold themselves still vas owning up to its nature. Then she realised what she was hearing. “Dad," she nearly screamed.

He didn't falter; if anything, he put on speed. As he dashed into the road, the lights of the oncoming lorry turned him incandescent and the giant trumpet of the horn seemed to greet him. It only arrested him. He was standing in the road, his torso contorted towards the vehicle and his arms outstretched in a parody of an embrace, when he was flung with a sound like the thump of a vast drum across the metal barrier, as though he was being offered to the forest. His luminousness went out, and he sprawled at the edge of the trees. As the lorry groaned and panted to a halt it ploughed into the hedge beyond the Arbour, and Heather began to tremble with more than the chill of the December night. For a heartbeat she was convinced that the snapping of twigs came from the shape that lay twisted on the far side of the road. It twitched once and then was as still as the woods.

17

A Yuletide Rite

CHRISTMAS Eve might have been peaceful except for the wind from the woods.

Whenever it revived, Heather saw them flex their multitude of bared claws, and couldn't help bracing herself yet again before its chill reached across the common. It seemed to carry a smell of turned earth, but perhaps that was rising from the churchyard, where the wind set the few leaves that still clung to the infrequent trees chattering like flattened desiccated birds and sent a flight of them scuttling and scraping among the headstones. It did its best to dislodge Margo's headscarf while it flapped the priest's black robe and fluttered Sylvia's voluminous overcoat as if the garment was being kicked from within. One of the undertaker's men smoothed down a troubled tuft of hair, whose roots didn't quite match its blackness, as he and his colleagues stooped to ease the coffin out of the hearse. Margo was the first to pace after them, holding Sam by the arm. Heather followed, staying close beside Sylvia as Terry did in case she needed support, into the church.

While it was Victorian, the architect had done his utmost to render it Norman.

It seemed to Heather to be overgrown with leaves: masses of them carved on the thick arches of the doorway and windows, arrangements of them concealing the roots of the stout round pillars

and encircling their capitals beneath the heavy reddish vaulted roof. Later someone had undertaken to relieve the austerity by replacing the plain windows with stained glass, most of which included images of leaves. Heather was unnecessarily aware of all this, and felt that her grief was staying out of reach, hovering over her like a cloud laden with unshed rain. She trudged past the couple of dozen pews, which were less than a third occupied, and waited while Sam limped aside to let Margo sidle along the left-hand front pew. As Heather joined her she enquired none too quietly "Do they have to be here?"

"They ought to be, shouldn't they?" Sylvia murmured.

Most of the congregation were from the university, even if retired, but scattered among them Heather saw five patients from the Arbour-the five to whom Lennox had introduced her and Sylvia. They appeared to have tried to position themselves in a circle, which was less undermined than emphasised by the presence of two male nurses and Dr Lowe. He nodded gravely to the Prices as they turned towards the altar.

The undertaker's men were lowering the coffin onto the stand, so soundlessly that Heather was confused to find herself thinking how still the forest could be. She watched the priest climb the steps of the pulpit with a slowness that gave him the appearance of being elevated by the half-inflated balloon of his roundish pale bland wrinkled face. He inserted his plump fingers between one another on top of the wooden-leafed pulpit and inclined his balding head, then raised it and his soft bedside voice. "We are gathered here to remember Lennox Weaver Price. Tributes will be paid by some of his former colleagues at the University of Brichester, where he was respected both for his teaching and his research..."

"Before he tried to bury his own daughter alive," Margo muttered.

Sylvia reached across Heather to take their mother's hand. "Don't, mom."

"Maybe it's me that oughtn't to have come."

"You know you should," Sylvia said, and slipped past Heather to sit between her and Margo. "You'd feel worse if you stayed away. He couldn't help what he did."

"Don't tell me that. Anybody could, especially when it's their own child."

"No, mom. You have to believe me. I was there, remember."

All the same, it wasn't clear how much she had forgotten or preferred not to recall.

Heather hadn't even been able to judge when the drugs had worn off. For days after their father's death Sylvia had seemed hardly to know where she was or what she felt. Margo had done her almost unrelenting best to ensure Sylvia at least felt protected, and hadn't concealed her relief when Sylvia had refused anybody else's counselling. She'd told the police only that Lennox had drugged her and that she was certain he must have thought she was dead when he'd buried her-why he'd done so, she couldn't say. The police had found the shallow hole he'd dug within the exposed foundations in the depths of the woods, and the coroner had accepted Sylvia's version of events. Now, however, Margo said "You won't convince me."

"Then I won't try any more. Just listen to what we all have to say about him."

Having lapsed into silence, the priest was observing their dispute. His expression suggested he was understudying any one of several stained-glass images of Christ in the windows. "Shall I continue?" he said.

Margo barely held her hands out, not bothering to turn up their palms, and it was left to Sylvia to tell him "You should."

"Professor Dyson, former vice-chancellor of the university, will now share with us his memories of Dr Price."

The professor came with a pair of sticks. He took some time to arrive at the pulpit, and not much less to be assisted into it by the priest, all of which was insignificant compared with the period he spent remembering Lennox with, it seemed to Heather, almost as many wheezing breaths as phrases. He praised her father's professionalism and the results he'd achieved with students, then hitched himself down from the pulpit and along the aisle. At last the sounds of wood on stone ended, but only until the priest announced Dr Bowman, who was accompanied by a solitary stick. She had a good deal to say in favour of The Mechanics of Delusion and its author's commitment to research before she returned to her pew. Heather didn't know to what extent the hollow bony clicks of wood on stone were making her uneasy and how much was her anticipation of the next speech. The edge of the pew felt moist as new wood, presumably because her grasp on it was, as the priest said "And now Sylvia Price will speak for the family."

"You don't have to say anything," Margo muttered.

"I want to, mom."

"You want to put yourself through this in your state?"

"Especially in that."

Margo frowned into her eyes, then released her in something like despair. "I shouldn't stop you if it means so much to you," she murmured. "Just be careful, that's all I ask."

It wasn't clear whether she meant Sylvia to take care what she said or of herself. At least a scan at the hospital on Mercy Hill had confirmed the baby was unharmed. Heather massaged her sister's shoulders as they went by. Sylvia grasped the sides of the pulpit as she ascended the steps, her long voluminous dress matching the priest's robe for blackness. She moved her hands to the leafy front edge of the pulpit as though exploring an aspect of the wood. Her fingertips ranged back and forth like branches swaying in a wind as she spoke.

"I guess most people who know our family would think I never really knew my father, even less than my sister did. I was pretty young when he went away, but we used to go and see him, and usually he'd ask how I was getting on. Sometimes he'd want to hear everything I'd done since we last met, and I'd feel like I couldn't tell him enough to satisfy him. I think he always wanted to be the father he wasn't allowed to be."

Heather thought their mother might have felt accused, and laid a hand on Marge's stiff unyielding brittle arm. "Anyway, I grew up and went away myself," Sylvia said. "I can tell you I was trying to be like him, like everything I admired about him. Maybe one reason I came home this time was I thought I'd managed. I believe he wanted me to know he thought I had."

For a moment Heather took her pause to mean she was keeping a memory to herself, and then she heard the interruption, a repeated scratch of something like a fingernail. It came from the direction of the coffin-from the window beyond it, where a leaf or a large insect was twitching next to Christ's left foot. Heather saw the oddly symmetrical leaf detach itself from the pane against the outside of which it had been held by the wind. It vanished into the clouded gloom that appeared to be draining colour from the image in the glass.

"I know some people say he tried to harm me at the end," said Sylvia. "The papers did.

All I can say is maybe nobody alive knows what he meant to do. Wait, that isn't all," she said as Margo gave signs of being unable to stay quiet. "That last day he was more like the father he wished he could be and I did than I'd ever seen him. If anyone hasn't heard I'm pregnant, well, I am, and I think knowing that let him be everything he could be. That's how I want to remember him, as my baby's grandfather. He saw one grandchild, and I only wish he could see another."

As Margo emitted a muted sniff, Heather had the surely unworthy notion that in some way Sylvia had won. Sam restrained himself to looking embarrassed as his aunt took three steps down from the pulpit, so measured that Heather could almost have imagined she was being guided by the child inside her. Heather saw Terry wonder if he should move to offer Sylvia his arm, but it wasn't her state that made Sylvia falter. A voice had said "He did."

The bench slithered beneath Heather's hands as she twisted round. Nearly the whole of the congregation was staring at Timothy, the man who was convinced rare species inhabited the woods. Only his fellow

patients continued to watch Sylvia, who spoke so low she might not have wanted an answer.

"What do you mean?"

Timothy's head seemed determined to nod at the same time as it shook. "He could see deep into you," he said.

"Into everyone, you mean."

"Into his own most of all. He told us once that nothing sees like blood."

This was too much for Margo, who retorted "Blood didn't mean much to him at the end."

"It must have," Timothy insisted. "He said nothing mattered more than who you made.

The closer you were the more you'd understand."

The priest cleared his throat with some vehemence. "If I can remind everyone where we are and why..."

"Let's talk later," Sylvia said to Timothy.

"The later the better," Margo mumbled, and waited for Sylvia to rejoin her. "Why do you want to talk to them?" she demanded under some of her breath.

"Because they knew dad. They must have spent more time with him than I ever did."

Margo seemed to think this deserved either no response or only one best left unsaid. She made a show of concentrating on the priest as he invited the mourners to reflect on the occasion or pray in silence. Heather was delving into herself for more of a sense of her father than she was able to resurrect-perhaps it was the presence of his fellow inmates at her back that enveloped her mind in the notion of following him into the woods-when the priest broke the hush with a last few words. As the undertaker's men stepped forward to heft the coffin, a taped soprano began to sing "I know that my redeemer liveth." With a kind of defiance, and to nobody in particular, Margo explained "He used to say Handel was one of his favourite things about England."

Heather was reminded instead of the professor who'd invited Lennox to study the effects of the forest, only to succumb to Alzheimer's and lose himself in the woods, in whose midst he had starved to death. A cold wind that smelled of earth came to meet the coffin and the Prices as they emerged from the church. Margo glanced back, visibly about to tell Sylvia to button up her coat if she hadn't already been doing so. The five from the Arbour had turned to face the coffin as it passed, and now Heather heard them-not only them, she reminded herself- shuffling in pursuit. The wind raised the hair on the heads of all the undertaker's men as they paced towards the side of the churchyard nearest to the woods. The late afternoon sky was as sombrely clouded as it had looked through the windows; Heather could have imagined that the restless bony mass of the forest was dragging darkness to earth. The four men in black halted by a gravestone that gleamed white as a child's first tooth. While they deposited the coffin on a platform in the open grave, the priest folded his hands as if tacitly inviting prayer and stood behind the stone that bore Lennox's name and dates. When nobody else gave any sign of making a move, Sylvia lifted a pinch of earth from beside the grave and scattered it along the coffin lid.