‘Oh, but of course.’ I saw it then, Sarah’s purpose in pulling this page from the book. ‘She meant her own sadness to be losing you, to be losing her love, her hope in life.’
‘And all that’s in this paper, among these marks? How can you know, from so long ago and her not here to tell you what she meant?’
I could see Dell didn’t understand me – she has no sense of writing, of how powerful and beautiful it is. ‘It’s what the writing says,’ I told her, ‘and the meaning she found in the writing – a fifth meaning, you see, just for you.’ I thought of how I might explain this. Of how I might understand it myself, what Sarah had done with a single stroke of her pen. ‘Like a message,’ I said, ‘but written in ink.’
‘I get it. It was her way of passing me the word.’
Dell smiled and I saw in her face for the first time her mother’s loveliness. And I was filled suddenly with such longing that I couldn’t sit with her, but walked out among the ruins. For want of the broad fields of my childhood rising up on to the moors where the sheep graze in summer, I looked up at the sky and imagined myself rising into its emptiness. There were faint clouds misting over the moon and I told myself that this was the same moon that shone right now over the village, and that however far you travelled it would be there just the same, but offering no comfort. I wept then for the sadness of things and thought myself a page torn from my own life, and my life like the Book of Air spoiled for ever.
Jason
Django’s back. Abigail came to my room at dawn to let me know, while I was still in bed. She asked me not to be angry. I was too weak to argue with her. My temperature’s been up these past few days. These fevers come and go like aftershocks and I pay them no attention, except they slow me down. She told me Django wants to apologise to me for burning the books. He acknowledges that he had no right to do it without my permission. He knows what he did was wrong. Perhaps he said these things. Abigail wants me to believe that he said them, anyway.
She sat on my bed and felt my forehead. ‘You’re warm.’
‘Just a bit. I’ll be all right.’
‘You push yourself too hard.’ Then she rested her hand against my chest. ‘And there’s so much sadness and trouble in you.’
‘In all of us.’
‘Yes. It’s not just our bodies we need to take care of.’
It was nice to be touched by Abigail, to feel the tension ease in me and my resentment at Django loosen its grip.
He’d turned up with food apparently – mushrooms and blackberries – and asked if he could cook, to make things right between us, all of us eating together as a gesture of reconciliation. Those things he probably did say. They sound like Django.
He’s laid the table in the dining room and got a big fire going and lit candles. I don’t know what kind of sense this makes. Django’s a pyromaniac. So as a punishment he gets to light candles – from a meagre supply that we can’t begin to replenish until spring. But to please Abigail, and because I haven’t the strength to fight, or the means to win, I sit with them, while Aleksy raises a glass of water to the cook and to peace in all our hearts and to the sown wheat.
While Django is serving dinner, Aleksy leans towards me. ‘We all lost things,’ he says. ‘It makes us grip tight to what we got left. Your books. Deedee’s wallet. I understand.’ He pulls something out of his pocket. It’s a pipe. ‘This I carry with me always. Maybe I never see tobacco again.’ He shrugs. ‘Even so.’
Django’s stew has an earthy smell. There are a few woody carrots chopped up in it and a small amount of rice and a lot of herbs and two kinds of mushrooms. The mushrooms have been delicately sliced and lie in cross section on the plate – pale flat ones and smaller darker ones with pointed caps and stringy stalks.
Their fibrous texture makes me long for meat. Deirdre sits beside me in a low-cut dress with flimsy straps to remind us all of a lost world.
We talk about the day’s work and what must be done tomorrow. Aleksy has some news. One of the two sows, which he found rooting in the wood and enticed home with a bucket of milk and peelings, is definitely pregnant. There’s a surge of optimism. I listen to the others talking and begin to feel better. With the first frost we’ll slaughter one of the cows and roast joints of beef. Next year, if we survive the winter, we’ll have potatoes and parsnips and we’ll grow tomatoes in the greenhouse. And by the autumn there’ll be bread if we live that long. And sooner than that we’ll make a churn if the cows keep giving milk, and fry our mushrooms in butter, and our eggs too if the hens and geese keep laying, and we’ll experiment with better ways to make cheese, hard nutty cheddar that will sit in the cellar with the apples and feed us like kings all through next winter. Our ambitions grow extravagant. I begin to talk as freely as the others. I eat Django’s strange stew and feel my resistance slide away.
It’s a warm evening and the fire is hot so Maud opens the windows and we watch the glow of the sun and the shadows drawing lines across the lawn. Our laughter blows out over the valley, is inhaled back into the room, drifts out again to settle in the undergrowth where the remains of human habitation are slowly rotting. Purple leaves stir at my elbow and I sense some creature scratching among the roots. A single leaf brushes the branches as it falls. Settling softly, it shrinks and dwindles into mulch. I wonder that I can hear so sharply and see so acutely into the shadows, bending my vision over the window sill, watching time accelerate, but I find it’s not so surprising after all because my head has floated away from my body and time jumps randomly at every pulse.
Aleksy laughs with his mouth wide open, his head pushed forward, the lips drawn back from the teeth. Beside me, Deirdre makes high gasping noises that remind me of the monkey, and I wonder if it is the monkey, chattering somewhere among the trees, and Deirdre has opened her mouth not to laugh but to express astonishment at Aleksy’s teeth, which are like the teeth of a horse. Sitting with her back to the fireplace, Maud laughs with her hands across her mouth because her head has imprisoned such monstrous secrets that no sound can be trusted not to let the cat out of the bag.
‘Say it, Maud,’ I tell her, loud in her face. ‘Just blurt it out.’ And she looks at me amazed as if I’m the one who’s mute.
Time lurches forward. I know this because Django is sitting on the floor beside the fire, playing his clarinet. He blows into the flames and his notes scatter with the ash. Another lurch, and he’s back at the head of the table with his bowler hat on and we’re eating his blackberries. My spoon tilts and the berries scatter across the tablecloth. I hunt them down among the vegetation – the stalks and blooms that interweave in repeated patterns across the table to where Abigail sits watching me with open-mouthed surprise.
I’m drunk. I look at my glass, lift it to my nose and sip, but taste nothing but water.
‘It’s time you all knew about Simon.’ Django says this, and I’m surprised because no one knows more about Simon than me. ‘Look, everyone,’ he says, ‘there’s something I want to show you.’ He takes a scrap of paper from the pocket of his deckchair blazer and unfolds it. It’s from a newspaper – a photo and a column of print. ‘Someone left the paper on the bus. It was turned to that picture. I saw at once.’
The cutting passes around the table. It’s from another time – an age of buses, an age of newspapers piled in their thousands at tube stations, commuters thronging the escalators, millions of words printed morning and night. The picture swims up at me in bright colour then settles back into shades of grey. It’s Simon, my Simon, standing outside a pub, and a policewoman holding his hand. What’s this new trick? Cleverer than a bunch of flowers – Django’s pulling bits of our past out of his pocket.