‘I don’t think so! Are those your only outdoor shoes?’
‘Yes, silly of me.’
‘You can wear some of Jesse’s boots, I’ll find some, your feet seem about the same size.’
‘Please don’t bother!’ Edward quickly put on his shoes, leaving his slippers. ‘Let’s go outside, look the sun has come out!’
They went out of the main door onto the pavement outside. The damp stones were becoming overgrown with creeping thyme.
In the bright light Edward gazed at his sister. She looked even prettier now in her brown dress. Her hair, revealed as a mixture of red and gold, was rather vaguely gathered with many visible pins into a thick flat mass which had slid down the back of her neck almost to her shoulders. Her small up-tilted nose was faintly freckled, her chin was small and round. Her complexion was childishly translucent with rounded reddened cheeks. The eyes, with lighter lashes, were dark grey. Meeting Edward’s gaze she looked away and a flush ran down onto the thin hair-encumbered neck. She vaguely and ineffectually patted her hair, dislodging a pin onto the ground. Edward picked it up and handed it back to her, and she laughed breathily, covering her mouth.
He said suddenly, ‘Did you ever see my mother?’
Not seeming startled by the question Ilona said, ‘No, she was just a legend when I was a child. Mother May was talking about her last night.’
‘Oh!’ Edward pictured that conversation, the three of them at the table finishing the elderberry wine. He said, to close off the subject, ‘What can I do that’s useful?’
‘Nothing. Mother May said you were to have the morning off.’
‘Then I think I’ll go for a walk. Will you come?’
‘No, I must work.’
‘I’ll walk down to the sea. It’s over there, isn’t it?’
‘The fen’s flooded, there’s no way.’
‘I could walk up to that wood.’
‘It’s very messy and marshy. I’m afraid there aren’t any good walks at this time of year. You could walk up the track and along the road, that’s quite nice. Lunch is at two, don’t be late, we work a long morning. Did you sleep well last night?’
‘Yes, fine. No owls or foxes, no poltergeists!’
Ilona, who was turning toward the door, paused. ‘You know there
are
poltergeists, it’s not a joke.’
‘Oh — come — ’
‘They’re just a sort of phenomenon, sort of chemical, not ghosts.’
‘I’ve heard stories. Perhaps it’s not all imagination or fakes. Aren’t they supposed to happen where there are adolescent girls?’ Edward was instantly acutely embarrassed by this remark.
Ilona however replied calmly, ‘Yes, Bettina says I attract them, they come to adolescent girls and virgins. Anyway, Bettina’s a virgin too, so no wonder they come here. They’re quite harmless, just a nuisance.’
‘Somehow I don’t like the idea!’
She opened the door to go in. ‘Of course if you get one in your bed you’re really in trouble!’
When Ilona had closed the door Edward waited a minute or two, listening to the silence, or rather to a vague soft bird and ‘river sound, and establishing some quite new sense of being alone. It had taken him about a second to grasp that this was a new aloneness, but he could not for some time work out what was new about it. It might just be that he was unused to being in the country, and even more unused to being there by himself. He walked a few steps and looked down the avenue at the way he had come yesterday. He had already decided that he was not going to follow his sister’s uninspiring advice about walking back to the road. The pavement, broad in front of the house, narrowed between the trees where it ran on, edged by big white flinty stones, for two hundred yards or so to meet the track. The trees were disorderly, irregularly spaced out and of various shapes and sizes, some enormous yews, three elegant elongated conifers, unawakened oaks and ash trees bleakly in bud, and numerous ash saplings. Some clean stumps declared where, no doubt, elms had once stood. Between the trees was grass which looked as if it had been cut, but not lately. Further back, on either side, were ragged lines of veronica, interspersed with tamarisk. Everything was wet and there was a moist spicy smell.
Turning away from the avenue, Edward walked along the front of the hall and the plain wall which masked Transition and then along the front of West Selden, passing a door in the middle of the façade. Ahead of him he could see a group of dark ilex trees where a path meandered, and on the right a plot with vegetables, two greenhouses, and a curious overgrown rectangle which was probably an abandoned tennis court. On the left were outhouses, a big open wood store, and a yellow tractor. Further on ahead, beyond the ilexes, was an orchard and a grove of tall leafless poplars. Walking upon wet irregular stones, between which sturdy dandelions were thrusting up their green spears, and meeting now the full force of the east wind, he walked round to the back of Selden, and then on to the stables courtyard. The stables, ‘very pretty’ as Ilona had said, their stone walls decorated with lines of flints which looked like little faces, made another handsome house, long and broad, with a turret and a golden weathercock in the form of a fox. Edward did not dally here for fear of meeting Mother May or Bettina, feeling shy of the former and in awe of the latter. Moving out of sight of the near windows he stood back and looked up at the tower. Any tower has charm, and this one was indeed impressive, but Edward was not sure that he liked it much. The hexagonal walls were of concrete, and covered by erratic stains, certainly accidental, which might be imagined to look attractive. On one face a shaft of small-leaved ivy had been allowed to climb almost to the top. The windows formed a more striking form of decoration, dotted about apparently aimlessly over the surfaces, some being mere slits, the others mostly squares, some large, some small. Each window was framed by a black metal lattice, whose rusting was no doubt the source of the erratic stains. Edward had been disappointed and a little hurt at not being allowed into the tower. Perhaps Jesse had indeed wanted to ‘show it off’ himself. Or had just not wanted Edward poking around in his work places.
Hoping he had not been noticed, he turned away from the house. Among a few swift clouds the sun was shining. A path at his feet led away eastward between gorse bushes. The sea must be there and not far off. He began to walk down a slight slope and entered at once into a meadow which was covered with small glittering yellow starry flowers. He looked with amazement at the flowers whose almost metallic brightness gave out a light which hung like a yellow powder above the lush grass. They were certainly not buttercups. He thought they might be celandine, and stooped to pick one. As his fingers snapped the frail stem he felt guilty. He stuffed the flower roughly into his pocket and walked hastily on toward a line of willow trees. It seemed to him that he had seen these flowers, this meadow, somewhere before. Perhaps it was in just such a meadow that the secretive girl with the butterfly net had been pursuing the flying fish. When he neared the willows he saw that they were rising out of water; while the path, now rather wet, turned a little to the left of them upon higher ground. Beyond, Edward now saw what he took to be the sea, but quickly realised was a dazzling sheet of flood water out of which trees and bushes were raising their heads. Upon the water here and there, their enamelled backs polished by the sun, water birds were sailing, ducks, geese, some birds quite strange to Edward, and a distant pair of swans. He walked on, thinking to skirt the flood, but was now increasingly surrounded by dark pools and clumps of reeds and humpy banks of mud. The path had now given up, or else he had lost it, and he was walking upon a black sinewy surface, springy underfoot and less muddy. Then as he looked, trying to see a way, the light changed, the sun was clouded and the water in front of him became dark, almost black. He stopped and looked back. Seegard, upon which the sun still shone, was already far away, now seen to be upon a slight eminence. As Edward turned about, straining his eyes, he was suddenly removed as if his surroundings had been quickly jerked upward. He did not sink, but fell abruptly, vertically, as the surface beneath his feet gave way and his legs descended into two watery holes. He stood for a moment ridiculously, then sat down, his arms and bottom creating similar holes in the treacherous elastic surface upon which he had been walking and which he now saw to be made of thick blackened mats of old reeds suspended above a base of cold watery mud. He struggled up cursing and was relieved to find that he was able to stand, in water not up to the knee, and laboriously lifting one foot after another out of the black sticky compound, to retrace his steps until he was on firmer ground. He was soaked to the waist, but at least the sun had come out again. Then, where the path ought to have been but was not, he was confronted by an expanse of flooded grass, the green tips just above the surface, and, at a distance, a curious semicircle of stone, which he made out to be a partly submerged bridge. Seegard had changed its position too, lying farther off on his right, and some trees seemed to have sprung up to conceal some of Selden. The wood however, upon its low but presumably dry hillock, was now nearer, appearing indeed as the nearest available solid ground. Edward stepped out into the meadow, with water to his ankles but fairly sound going underfoot, and soon crossed the half-drowned bridge over what was evidently a flooded river. Here he was presented with a small dryish slope and indeed a path. The sun was warming and he hoped drying his wet muddy clothes. He turned, shading his eyes, but could not see anything behind him except muddy watery fen. He thought, suppose Jesse has come home while I’m away, suppose I arrive back covered with mud and late as well? He looked to his watch but remembered he had left it in the bathroom. He decided to follow the path a little bit up the hill, and was soon among trees.
The wood, clearly the work of nature not of man, was a wonderful mixture of every sort of tree. There were oaks and ashes and beeches and larches and firs and wild cherries and some of the largest yews Edward had ever seen. It was an old wood. The old tall trees made a labyrinth of colonnades and archways and vaulted halls and domed chambers, and if Edward had not entrusted himself to the little path he would soon have been lost. Some birds were singing, nearby a blackbird and a loud wren. Distant rooks cawed sadly. Occasionally, some sunlight fell upon the path, which was dry and brown, crisscrossed with ridgy tree roots, almost like steps, and scattered with the mysterious dried-up fruits of various trees fashioned into little brown toys and emblems, which crackled pleasantly underfoot. All round about the antique carpet of fallen leaves stretched far away. The path was steeper now and there was a larger light ahead. Edward began to walk faster and after a minute or two he came to a
place
.
Of course the wood was full of places, celebrations and juxtapositions, mossy alcoves, primroses showing off in the dead bracken, circlets of greenery where the sun managed to shine, long fallen trees as clean as bones. But now Edward, coming out into a larger clearing, stopped as one who, exploring the palace, accidentally opens the door of the chapel. The elongated oval sward, though shorter, not two hundred yards in length, curiously reminded Edward of the stadium at Delphi. He shivered. The birds were silent here. The grass was short and fine as if prepared for some game. The spreading branches of two enormous yews at the far end framed a black tunnel. Nearer, round the edges of the space, rows of very tall beech trees soared in smooth shafts. The regularity of the trees and the perfect shape of the level grass suggested some work of human intelligence, something perhaps made very long ago, but certainly tended or renewed in recent years. Following the Greek idea, he saw it as a
dromos
or
temenos
, a sacred area. The most striking feature of the scene however, and the one which in a mysterious way identified it, was a large vertical stone rising from a circular stone base which, standing near to the far end of the glade, was framed in the black archway of the yews. Edward began to walk towards it over the short grass, emerging now into sunshine. He stopped close to the object. The lower broader part, which was about three feet high, made of some dark stone, appeared to be a section of a fluted column. The vertical shaft above, of a lighter greyer stone which glittered with points of light, was more roughly cut, a single battered erection, tapering slightly toward the top. It stood, with its base, a little higher than Edward. He came closer, and touched the pillar, stroked it, it felt warm. Looking down he noticed at the foot, where it fitted into its pedestal, cement had been added, perhaps lately, to keep it firm. The surface round about the fluted column was smooth and polished and looked to Edward like marble. As he now walked round the thing he saw something else, something yellow, lying upon the pedestal, a bunch of celandine, the flowers only a little wilted. He looked round at the silent empty grass and at the shadowy wood and at the black cavern under the yews, and began to walk away. Then, yielding to a superstitious craving, he returned and taking from his pocket the celandine he had picked earlier, threw it down near the other flowers. He walked quickly and then, avoiding the yew trees, ran out of the glade.
The path which had led him to the place was now not to be seen, but trusting to his sense of direction he went on downhill making a slower pace through the undergrowth of the wood, ash saplings and hazels and little thorn trees. As he went, plunging downward, treading upon brittle bracken and dead leaves, he felt something like a physical change, as if a cloud of gas or pollen or some intense infusion were blowing into his face and enveloping his body. His head seemed to be opening up into a vast area, as if it were literally painlessly splitting and being joined to some enormous pale cloudy sphere up above. Thoughts then came in a rush. Of course as Edward had been looking at the house and walking through the celandine and struggling in the fen and making his way to the wood, he had been thinking not only about what he saw and where he was going, but about Mark Wilsden, and more vaguely about Jesse. Whatever Thomas McCaskerville might think about it in terms of ‘a change doing him good’, Edward had not imagined that coming to Seegard would alter in any way his awful guilty loving mourning for Mark. That must remain private and untouchable and secret. To imagine that some new scene would automatically banish the dark burden which he carried was to be unworthy of the gravity of what he suffered. He merely found some relief in running away and being somewhere quite else where, in a place unknown to those closest to him, he could hug his misery. The ‘connection’ he had spoken of to Thomas had seemed just that of a continued doom. The idea of Jesse, certainly striking, seemed in that context accidental. Now with an equal obviousness, streaming into him through the top of his head, came the insight that here was no accident, and that he had come to Seegard as to a place of pilgrimage, carrying his woeful sin to a holy shrine and to a holy man. He had never thought of Jesse in such terms before, had indeed avoided thinking of him at all, nor had he seen this in his first hours at the place or in connection with the women. The women, though amazing, were minor figures, not even acolytes. They were another thing. Mother May’s letter with its postscript about their having ‘read about his mishap’ was another thing. Jesse had not summoned his son out of some vague kindly impulse to cheer him up. It would not be like that between
them. They
were being drawn to a fated meeting at a crossways. Jesse might well be unconcerned with Edward’s needs, but Jesse was Edward’s fate and his
answer
. That it might be a dark answer seemed a little less terrible, now that the element of accident was removed.