There’s something wrong with Django’s reasoning that I can’t quite put my finger on, and I don’t much want to anyway, because I find it’s so much easier knowing it all has a purpose.
‘They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. That… that is what’s written.’ Django is leaning out at the window, shouting up at the sky. ‘A new heaven,’ he says, ‘and a new earth.’
And it feels new. Everything lifts and pulses with a vividness I’ve never seen before. I find myself inclined to laugh. ‘Look at this place, though,’ I say, ‘this house, that lawn, those trees. You can see why I wanted it.’
Somebody must have moved first or we must all have felt drawn by the evening air because here we are on the steps by the front door. House martins wheel restlessly above us and the shadows on the grass are merging into one shadow. We cross the lawn to the orchard and wander among the trees, dividing and dispersing and regrouping according to some logic that I think would be apparent to me if I was sitting on a branch looking down. Then one after another we fall on our backs and watch the sky.
‘Let’s go for a spin.’ It’s Aleksy talking. I think he means this – what we’re already doing – spinning through space while we cling with our backs to the ground. But he says, ‘Let’s go for a spin in Jason’s beautiful car.’
It’s a preposterous idea. But the car’s still there, by the front door, where I abandoned it in my fever. And here we are, and none of us with a better idea. So we run from the orchard and across the gravel drive and through the grass. Abigail is ahead of me and I see how lovely she is, moving with a swaying ease that takes her no effort. So much of Deirdre’s elegance is stitched together and slipped on like her dress. It’s all coded messages, referring to something other than itself.
We reach the car and climb in, except Maud, who backs away shaking her head. Aleksy takes the driving seat with Deirdre beside him, her stockinged feet on the dashboard, Django and Abigail and me sprawled in the back, all of us laughing as the car jerks forward and we sink against the cushioned leather, breathing its luxurious smell. We curve round over the lawn and back to the drive, heading towards the house. The arch of the inner gateway passes over head and we’re in the stable yard, vibrated by cobbles. The horses whinny in their stalls, setting up a din in the hen house.
Aleksy pulls us into a tight circle and just before we hit the stable door he brakes, throws us into reverse and forward again, and here we are back on the drive. The moon has risen to greet us. I think we might lift our weight off the ground and spin through wisps of cloud to join it. But instead we drift on to the lawn and down towards the corner where the grass breaks up into wilder growth and the brook runs among weeds and rushes. We bounce over the rough ground, and it seems nothing for such a vehicle to hop the brook, squeeze between saplings and flatten itself under the lowest railing of the fence to reach the road which is its home. But Aleksy hits the brakes. We tilt into the brook and the car stalls.
Deirdre stops laughing and Abigail is clutching my arm. We stare through the windscreen at the church tower and the dark space where the road disappears among trees towards everything we’ve lost and everything that threatens our existence. Then we climb out of the Merc in silence and wander back the way we came, spreading out now the car isn’t here to hold us together, Deirdre with an arm round Aleksy’s neck, Django going his own way. Abigail gathers up Maud and leads her towards the house. After a moment I find myself alone on the lawn and no reason to be here or anywhere in particular.
Agnes
I went with Dell this morning to fetch water from the river. I work with her every day now. When my limbs ache and my head is fogged from labour I find I can forget my troubles. Dell loads the bowls and bottles on a cart and wheels it through the forest paths. Their name for the river is the canal, and a strange looking river it is, as straight as a furrow and edged with bricks, except where its walls have tumbled in. We walked beside it for a while in search of blackberries, pulling the water cart among the ruined towers. Here and there the flow is held up by great walls where the endtimers built bridges and left no space underneath for the water, so it must find its way through cracks and crevices to spray down like piss buckets emptied from cottage windows.
When we’d filled our pans with blackberries, Dell said she had something to show me. She took me off the path towards a building that stands high as the Hall, though breached near the roof. She pulled aside a crumbling piece of iron that left its red stains on her, and there was a break in the wall, enough for us to crawl through on our bellies.
We stood up in a vast room. A staircase rose curving towards patches of sky. We walked among aspens, stepped over rusting roof beams and branches where woodlice lived. The air had the forest smell of dank earth and thick unweeded growth. The deep din of the woodland was dulled by the walls, but a startled jay rose up with a clamour and a pair of squirrels leapt away out of sight. Climbing things covered the walls and straggled above us from the galleries – ivy and bindweed and long flowered honeysuckle. Dell took a handful where she stood and pulled it aside. And I caught the stink of mildew. There were shelves tightly packed with what I took at first for narrow boxes, each a different colour, each with the faded marks of writing that I strained to read, turning my head to follow the run of letters. She reached out a hand, pulled a box from the shelf and gave it me. An edge of it split and broke into layers like onion skin. And I saw at last what it was, what they all were, what I think they had been all along to my eyes, while my mind had said this wasn’t possible – a flood, a dizzying bee swarm of books, an orchard branch so laden you’d fear it would break.
Not four books only, then, with the Book of Death. Not five even with my own secret book. Not ten or twenty. As I pulled aside more strands of ivy, I saw enough for every person in the village each to have one. And more than that – more than I knew how to count.
I reached for another and opened it, stiff and cracking, to a page as ridged as a barley field when the wind blows. Another would hardly open, lying damp in my hands, its edges ripe with mould. I found pages on which the ink had faded almost to nothing, pages that were more hole than paper, and a nest of mice that fell squealing among the roots at our feet and scattered into corners.
But my eyes had found a text. And in another book a second text. And every text was a voice speaking through my voice.
‘The world seemed getting larger round poor Gwendolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the midst.’
‘Because what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row only – finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that’s all.’
‘I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and it had all been a mistake to think you just died.’
‘You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight and a half years ago.’