Sophie (15 page)

“That’ll do,” Sophie said. “Let’s go up to the hill.”

Neither of us looked back as we climbed the slope. We headed for the place on the outskirts of the wood where there was a fallen tree, and we sat on it and waited. The farm buildings lit up gradually as the light from the open doorway of the barn increased. We heard the distant sounds of crackling, and occasionally a short, metallic explosion, as of something giving way in the heat. The frame of the barn was wooden, and a section of the roof fell in, leaving a wide gap through which flames as tall as houses hooted and roared.

The whole hillside was lit with a strange, awful red, such as you might see in nightmares. We sat and watched, me kicking my feet, Sophie as still and quiet as a statue, until there was the sound of fire engines in the distance. We saw the flickering blue lights come tearing through the town, we saw them hose down the adjacent farm buildings and stand back to let the fire run its course. We waited for a long time, with the fire throwing our shadows out behind us.

“I shouldn’t think there’ll be much left,” Sophie said.

“No.”

“If there had been anyone in there, when it started, then I shouldn’t think there’d be much left of them, either.”

“Do you think Andy and Steven will find out?” I said.

“Yeah, they should do. You know where they live, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. She’d told me.

“Steven’s a bright boy,” she said, thoughtfully. “He’ll know what to do. I had a talk with him.”

“OK.”

She sighed. “It’s pretty, isn’t it? I’d like to stay longer.”

“We can, if you like,” I said.

“No. We’d better get going. There’s still a lot left to do.”

We set off through the grass, heading up the hill. Behind us, the roaring of the fire could still be heard, even after we had walked around the shoulder of the land and the farm itself was out of sight. There were thin, low clouds in the sky, and over towards the village they were stained bloodred. Now and then glowing ashes would spiral down out of the night air to settle and die on the ground.

When we were at the outskirts of the woods, Sophie stopped, looking down the hillside to the dark outline of our house. There was a single light burning in the drawing room window. She shrugged slightly, turned, and went on ahead of me into the shadows.

He is on his feet again, nervously pacing the room. The boards creak every so often as he walks. When he speaks, he is hesitant, edgy, clearly upset by what he is telling me. All the time he seems to be looking beyond the walls of the room—and I suppose, in a sense, he is doing exactly that.

“You went back to the quarry,” I say.

“Mm.”

“Talk to me, Mattie. She took you back to the quarry. What then?”

“We sat down on the grass,” he says.

“On the grass? Where?”

“Where we’d been before. By the rim of the quarry. We were too far from the fire to hear it, by then,” he adds.

“OK, so she took you back to the quarry,” I say. “What happened then? What did she say?”

He puts his palms flat against the far wall of the kitchen, leaning into it. “She said that there was some diesel in the shed where Ol' Grady was. That I should burn the holly bush, so that everything was taken care of. She wanted everything neat, everything sorted out.”

“Why didn’t she do it herself?”

“She said she was tired, and she didn’t want to do any more. She said I’d got the idea by now in any case.”

“Had you?”

“I thought I had. I thought she just wanted everything erased, so that there was nothing left of the secrets and so on.”

I remember something from earlier. “It wasn’t, though, was it? There were still secrets, even after the barn and the quarry books were gone.”

“I know,” he says, almost in a whisper. “I know.”

“And what about you, Mattie? What happened to you? You went back and found the quarry books for a reason. What was it?”

I can see where his fingernails have scored the old plaster. His face is turned away from me, but I can hear pain in his voice when he speaks. “I had to know everything for certain. I had to be sure.”

“You had to be sure of what you felt about her,” I say. I try not to make it a question.

“I loved her. She was the most important thing in my world.”

“She
controlled
your world, Mattie. Are you sure you loved her?”

“I loved her,” he repeats, stubbornly.

“You hated her. You didn’t know what you thought about her, so you went back to the quarry to make sure. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“I did
not
hate her,” he says, turning round to look at me. I struggle, using my feet, to kick myself upright against the wall until I am standing. He is still talking, oblivious. “I just didn’t understand her properly.”

“She abandoned you,” I say. The tape round my wrists is still tight. “You hated her because of that. What do you wish had happened, Mattie?”

“Nothing! I never hated her! You don’t know anything about this. What you’re saying makes no sense.”

“Really?” I am shouting at him, now, trying to force the words through the sleeting memories that I cannot see. “How many have there been, Mattie? Which one am I?”

“I don’t know what you mean!”

“How many before tonight?
How many Sophies, Matthew?
”

He rocks back on his heels, his eyes wide with shock. His mouth opens, but he seems unable to articulate anything.

“Which number am I? Look at all the candle stubs, Mattie. How many have there been, over the years? You’d got pretty used to this, hadn’t you? Only you’d never told the whole story before, so this time it’s been different. What did you do with them, Mattie?”

He shakes his head as if dazed. After a time, words come again, slowly, uncertainly. “I loved her,” he says. “I know I did.”

“How many Sophies?”

“I loved her. I just didn’t understand. And I was too scared, when she asked me.”

His face is terrible, knotted with conflicting feelings. He seems poised on the brink of something.

“I was too scared.”

I hesitate, then take a step towards him. “Tell me what happened,” I say. “Finish it.”

He nods. “All right. It’s time it was finished, I think.”

We climbed the fence where the fallen branch had brought it to the ground. The little area of clear turf was dark, but we could see the lip of the quarry easily enough; the pale stone below reflected the faint light from the night sky. Above, in the gaps between the clouds, the stars were sharp and the moon half full. The woods rustled gently with night breezes. We had left the barn behind us: on the walk to the quarry, even the smell of smoke had been drawn out of our clothes. If we chose not to think about it, there was nothing to remind us of it.

“It’s good, here,” Sophie said. “I think I like this place best of all. It’s always been special.” She paused. “Do you think you’ll come here again?”

“When you’re away?” I said.

She raised one eyebrow. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “It won’t be the same.”

“I suppose not. Oh, wait a minute.” She searched through the pocket of her anorak. “Here. Keep hold of this for me, will you? I’ll explain in a bit.” She had taken out the key-ring I’d seen her with earlier, and unhooked a small grey key. I took it from her carefully.

“Hey,” she said, sounding surprised. “Look what I found.” She held out her hand a second time. In the palm was a round, dark medallion of some kind. “Do you recognize it?” she said.

“What is it?”

“It’s your ammonite,” she said. “The fossil you gave me. I kept it safe.” She looked at it, weighing it. “Do you want it back?”

“No,” I said. “I gave it to you. Keep it.”

“Thanks.” She didn’t look up from it. “This was your best one, wasn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Yeah. I think so, too. Thanks, Mattie.”

“It’s OK,” I said, embarrassed.

“I wonder if I ever gave you anything like that in return,” she said, half to herself.

“Lots of times,” I said. It was a strange remark, and it had surprised me.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes it doesn’t seem like that at all.”

We sat quietly for a while, looking at the trees and the eerie shapes made by their branches and leaves against the sky. Sophie picked up a pebble and turned it around in her fingers before letting it drop to the grass. I pulled my anorak tighter around me.

“You cold?”

“No,” I said.

She looked away again. “I’m not going away to school,” she said. “You knew that, though.”

I was silent.

“You knew that, didn’t you, Mattie?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Anyway, I’m not. I’ve thought about it for a long time. This is all over, you know. It’s all finished. The barn, the quarry, the house. Mummy. Us. Everything. It’s all gone.”

I found my voice at last. “Only because you made it finish,” I said, and some of the hurt must have come through. She looked up at me, and her mouth was slightly open. The expression in her eyes was that of someone betrayed.

“I didn’t make it finish,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“You burned the barn,” I said.

She blinked, and I realized she was blinking away tears. In eleven years, I had never seen Sophie cry. “It’s over in any case, Mattie,” she said. “That’s just how things have turned out. I tried to find ways to change things, but I couldn’t.”

Again, I could find nothing to say to help her. When she realized I wasn’t going to speak, she struggled on alone.

“It’s not easy to put into words, Mattie. I don’t know if I understand it all myself. But if I had gone away to school, and left you, it would have torn everything apart.
Everything.
It would have destroyed—everything.” She was casting about in desperation for words that would make sense to me, but we both knew she wasn’t succeeding.

In the end, I said, “You’ll do the right thing. You always work things out.”

She smiled slightly at that. “You’re OK,” she said again.

The wind moved slightly in the dark trees behind us. At the far end of the quarry, just visible, the stems of the tall weeds stirred and quivered. The ground underneath me was cold through my jeans.

“I want you to promise me some things,” Sophie said.

“OK.”

“In the back of the shed where we found Ol' Greedy there’s a grey can. It’s got diesel in it. Use it to burn the holly bush, OK? I can’t be bothered, but it would make everything symmetrical at least. Will you do that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re not sad, are you? Don’t be sad, Mattie.”

“I’m not sad,” I said. I thought of the afternoons we had spent in the holly bush, with Sophie reading to me or telling me stories. Those afternoons didn’t feel as if they belonged to me any more; they had somehow become the property of someone else, without my noticing. I didn’t even feel jealous of whoever it was that had inherited them from me.

“What else?” she said to herself. “You’ll have to call Daddy, of course. I should think he’ll probably be quite pleased, once he stops being shocked and so on. He always liked you, you know.”

I hadn’t known; I said nothing.

“He’ll manage everything,” she went on. The words were very measured, very careful, and I got the feeling that she was trying hard to cover up what she was really thinking. “Well. That’s about it, I think.”

“Sophie? I still don’t understand.”

She reached out, took my hand and squeezed it tightly. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything’s going to be OK, you’ll see. Trust me.”

He hits his forehead with the heel of his palm. “Why did she say that? That everything would be all right? She must have known it wouldn’t be true.”

“Maybe she thought it was the best thing to say,” I suggest.

“Do you think she really meant it?” He is almost pleading.

“I don’t know. I don’t think she would have lied to you.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She loved you too much,” I say. His eyes widen as he stares at me. I keep talking, trying to get the sense of what I am feeling across to him. “She loved you too much, Mattie. She didn’t really have any choice. Things were always extremes with Sophie, always superlatives. I don’t think she had any control over
that
. She couldn’t change the way her mind worked. And if she had been able to, and had made herself average, then she wouldn’t have been able to look after the pair of you. She needed to be different.”

“I couldn’t believe she’d leave me behind,” he says.

“I want you to promise me some things,” she said. “Will you do that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“OK. Good. Listen carefully.” She outlined the events of the evening as they would eventually be told, and I sat in front of her on the turf taking in the details dutifully. It was all easy enough to remember.

“You’re going to have to wait a while, at home,” she said. “To make sure everything is timed right. Do you think you can do that?”

“I think so,” I said. “I’ll try.”

“That’s great. That’s all that’s necessary.”

Overhead, the sky was becoming thickly sown with stars as the clouds pulled away. The thin breeze of earlier had dropped, and we were left sitting in a strange, unearthly calm. The night, through the woods, seemed very deep.

She looked at me, her face serious. “Mattie?”

“Yeah?”

“You’ll be OK, won’t you?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know if I was frightened or not. “Yes,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of.

Sophie looked at her watch. “One last thing,” she said. “You’re going to have to be very brave, and do exactly what I tell you. You’ve still got the key?”

I nodded, and showed it to her.

He walks over to the door into the garden. He appears to be thinking; he is frowning, and his hands twist against one another involuntarily. There is a long pause. Light is seeping through the cracks in the window boards; pale, early dawn light, but light even so. The room is a ghostly grey. The candle burned out unnoticed while he was speaking.

I am left here staring at a man I hardly knew yesterday. Overnight, everything I thought about him has been turned around, thrown apart; he isn’t the person I took him for at all. But, at the same time, I am no longer afraid of him. I’m not sure why. It’s as if we came through all this together. In a sense, I suppose, we both have. And, strangely, understanding what he has been saying has meant thinking, at least a little, the way that Sophie thought. I don’t yet know what to make of this—don’t know whether it frightens me or not.