Will adored hearing his father talk this way, even though much of what Papa said was beyond him. And his father loved to talk about his ideas, though Will had heard him once fly into a fury when Eleanor, Will's mother, had called her husband a teacher.
'I am not, never have been, nor ever will be a teacher!' Hugo had roared, his always ruddy face turning a still deeper red. 'Why do you always seek to reduce me?'
What had his mother said by way of reply? Something vague. She was always vague. Looking past him to something outside the window, probably; or staring critically at the flowers she'd just arranged.
'Philosophy can't be taught,' Hugo had said. 'It can only be inspired.'
Perhaps the exchange had gone on a little longer, but Will doubted it. A short explosion, then peace: that was the ritual. And sometimes a fond exchange, but that too quickly withering. And always on his mother's face the same distracted look whether the subject was philosophy or affection.
But then Nathaniel had died, and even those exchanges had ceased.
He was injured on a Thursday morning, crossing the street: run down by a taxi, the driver racing to carry his passenger to Manchester Piccadilly Station in time for a noon train. Struck square on, he was thrown through the window of a shoe-shop, sustaining multiple lacerations and appalling internal injuries. He did not die instantly. He held on to life for two-and-a-half days in Intensive Care at the Royal infirmary, never regaining consciousness. In the early hours of the third night his body gave up the fight and he died.
In Will's mythologized version of the event, his brother had made the decision, somewhere in the depths of his coma, not to come back into the world. Though he was only fifteen when he died, he had already tasted more of the world's approbation than most men who lived out their Biblical spans. Loved to devotion by those who'd made him, blessed with a face nobody could lay eyes upon without wanting to love, Nathaniel had decided to let go of the world while it still idolized him. He had been adored enough, feted enough. He was already bored with it. Best to be gone, without a backward glance.
After the funeral Eleanor did not stir from the house. She'd always liked to walk and windowshop; she no longer did so. She'd had a circle of women-friends with whom she lunched at least twice a week; she would no longer come to the phone to speak to them. Her face lost all its glamour. Her distraction turned to vacuity, her obsessions grew stronger by the day. She would not have the curtains in the living-room open, for fear she saw a taxi. She could not eat, except off white plates. She would not sleep until every door and window in the house had been treble-locked. She took to praying, usually very quietly, in French, which was her native tongue. Nathaniel's spirit, Will heard her telling Papa one night, was with her all the time; did Hugo not see him in her face? They had the same bones, didn't they? The same, French bones.
Even at the age of thirteen, Will had an unsentimental grasp of the world; he didn't lie to himself about what was happening to his mother. She was going crazy. That was the simple, pitiful truth of it. For several weeks in May she could not bear to be left alone in the house, and Will was obliged to skip school (no great hardship there) and stay at home with her -banned from her presence (she had no wish to see a face that resembled a poor copy of Nathaniel's perfection) but called back with sobs and promises if he was heard opening the front door. Finally, in the middle of August, Hugo sat Will down and told him that life in Manchester had plainly become intolerable for all three of them, and he had decided they would move. 'Your mother needs some open skies,' he explained, the toll of the months since the accident gouged into his face. He had, in his own words, a pugilist's face; its monolithic rawness an unlikely rock from which to hear fine distinctions of thought and vocabulary spring. But spring they did. Even the simple business of describing the family's departure from Manchester became a linguistic adventure.
'I realize these last few months have been troubling to you,' Papa told Will. 'The manifestations of grief can be confounding to us all, and I can't pretend to fully understand why your mother's distress has taken such idiosyncratic forms. But you mustn't judge her. We can't feel what she feels. Nobody can ever feel what somebody else feels. We can guess at it. We can hypothesize. But that's it. What happens up here-' he tapped his temple, '-is hers and only hers.'
'Maybe if she talked about it-' Will tentatively suggested.
'Words aren't absolutes. I've told you that before, haven't I? What your mother says and what you hear aren't the same thing. You understand that, don't you?' Will nodded, though he only grasped the crudest version of what he was being told. 'So we're moving,' Hugo replied, apparently satisfied that he'd communicated the theoretical underpinning of this.
'Where are we going?'
'A village in Yorkshire, called Burnt Yarley. You'll have to change schools but that's not going to be much of a problem for you, is it?' Will murmured no, it wasn't; he hated St Margaret's. 'And it won't hurt for you to be out in the open air a little more. You look so pale all the time.'
'When will we go?'
'In about three weeks.'
CHAPTER II
i
The move didn't happen quite as planned. Two days after Hugo's conversation with Will, quite without warning, Eleanor broke her own rules and left the house in the middle of the morning and went wandering. She was escorted home in the late evening, having been found weeping in the street where Nathaniel had been struck down. The move was postponed, and for the next fortnight she was watched over by nurses and tended to by a psychiatrist. His medications did some good. Her mood brightened after a few days - she became uncharacteristically jolly, in fact, and dived into the business of packing up the house with gusto. On the second weekend of September, the delayed move took place.
The journey from Manchester took little more than an hour but it might as well have delivered the two-vehicle convoy into another country. With the charmless streets of Oldham and Rochdale behind them they wound their way into open countryside, sweeping moorland steadily giving way to the steeper fells, whose lush green flanks were here and there stripped to pavements of grim, grey limestone. The wind blew hard on the hilltops, buffeting the high-sided van in which Will had asked to be a passenger. With map in hand he followed their route as best he could, his eyes straying from the road they were taking to venture where the names were strangest: Kirkby Malzeard, Gammersgill, Horton-in-Ribblesdale, Yockenthwaite and Garthwaite and Rottenstone Hill. There was a world of promise in such names.
Their destination, the village of Burnt Yarley, was to Will's eyes indistinguishable from a dozen other villages they'd passed through on their way: a scattering of plain, square houses and cottages built of the local limestone, and roofed with slate; less than half a dozen shops (a grocer, a butcher, a newsagent, a post office, a pub), a church with a small churchyard surrounding it, and a steeply humped bridge rising over a river no wider than a traffic lane. There were, however, three or four more substantial residences on the outskirts of the village. One of them would be their new house, he knew: it was the largest house in Burnt Yarley, so beautiful that according to Will's father Eleanor had cried with happiness at the thought of their living in it. We're going to be very happy there, Hugo had said, offering this not as a cherished hope, but as an instruction.
ii
The first sign of that happiness was waiting for them at the front gate: a plumpish, smiling woman in early middle-age who introduced herself to Will as Adele Bottrall and welcomed them all with what seemed to be genuine pleasure. She instantly took charge of the unloading of the car and the removal van, supervising her husband Donald and her son Craig, who was the kind of sullen, thick-necked sixteen-year-old Will would have feared an arbitrary beating from in the yard of St Margaret's. Here, however, he was a workhorse, eyes downcast most of the time, as he lugged boxes and furniture into the house. Will was given a glass of lemonade by Mrs. Bottrall and wandered around the house to survey it, coming back to the front now and then to watch Craig at his labours. The afternoon was clammy - thunder later, Adele promised, it'll clear the air - and Craig stripped down to a threadbare vest, the sweat trickling down his neck and face from his low hairline, his neck and arms peeling where he'd caught too much sun. Will was envious of his muscularity; of the curling hair at his armpits, and the wispy sideburns he was cultivating. Pretending a concern for the care Craig was exercising with the tables and lamps, he idly followed the youth from room to room, watching him work. Occasionally, Craig would do something that made Will feel as though he shouldn't be watching, though they weren't particularly odd things for anyone to do. Passing his tongue over his frizzy moustache; stretching his arms above his head; splashing water on his face at the kitchen sink. Once or twice Craig looked his way, a little bemused at the attention he was getting. When he did Will made sure he was wearing a facsimile of that indifference he'd seen on his mother's face so often.