‘But I did see her. I can see people who are dead,’ said Freddie.
Annie gasped and her darning needle paused in mid-air, the long brown strand of wool slowly slipped out of the metal eye and trailed over her lap. Freddie turned and looked at her.
‘Can’t I, Mother?’
Levi looked flummoxed, the colour spreading again from his collar and over his neck.
Annie leaned forward, the darning needle still in her hand. Her bust heaved with the dilemma she now faced. Pacify Levi, or protect Freddie, or tell the truth? She took a deep breath.
‘Levi,’ she said. ‘He’s got the gift.’
Levi sank back into a confused silence.
‘It’s in my family,’ Annie said. ‘My mother had it, and my Nan. Whether you like it or not, Freddie’s got it. He can see people who’ve passed on. It’s a gift, Levi. A gift.’
‘Tis wrong,’ shouted Levi. ‘I’m telling ’e. Wrong. Bad, that’s what. And I don’t want no son of mine doing it. I don’t want no fortune-telling or mumbo jumbo in this family. D’you hear? I won’t have it. I might be poor, I might work in a corn mill, but I’m honest. I don’t tell no lies.’
‘Tell him, Freddie,’ encouraged Annie. Freddie was edging nearer and nearer to her, backing away from his father, glad of Annie’s warmth and support.
‘I do really see people,’ he said. ‘Not all the time. Just now and again. But why is it wrong to see nice people? They aren’t bad just because they’re dead, Dad, are they?’
Levi didn’t answer. Instead he took out his pipe, tapped it on the hearth and started stuffing a fruity mix of tobacco into it. He lit a dead match from the fire and disappeared into the curls of blue smoke. Then he coughed convulsively, growling and retching. Words had abandoned him again, leaving him spluttering like a clogged engine. Exhaustion, frustration, the war, the corn mill, all of it loomed between him and his longing to be a good father. Levi was fighting his own war, and he wasn’t winning. All he could do was put up barriers of discipline, whether he agreed with it or not.
‘Now you listen to me,’ he drew Freddie close again, noticing the torn shirt and yesterday’s bruises. ‘I forbid you ever to speak of this again. D’you hear? If you do see people, as you say, then you are not to speak of it. Not to me, or your mother, your sisters and brother, or Harry Price.’
‘And not Doctor Stewart either,’ added Annie.
‘Or the vicar.’
Freddie studied their frowning faces in the firelight. From now on his life would be ring-fenced. Secret. A secret life. That’s what he would have. He’d say yes and no, and go to school, and stand in the queue for the shop, and carry his dreams in a secret golden box inside his head. But when I’m grown up, he thought, things will be different. No one will tell me what to do and what not to do.
Chapter Four
GRANNY BARCUSSY
Twice a year Freddie was sent on ‘his holiday’, a mile across the fields to where Levi’s mother lived alone in her farmhouse. He didn’t have much to pack, a few matchboxes, a pencil, a tobacco tin and a precious fishing net. This time he had something extra.
‘When you give a present, you wrap it up in something,’ Annie had said. ‘Brown paper and string, and sealing wax. But we haven’t got any of that now the war is on. Wretched war. I’ll be glad when it comes to an end.’ She rummaged in the kitchen cupboard and fished out a piece of butter muslin. ‘Here you are. Roll it up in that.’
Freddie took the soft butter muslin and wrapped the present for Granny Barcussy, and tied it round with a frayed blue ribbon.
‘I used to wear that in my hair, when I was a girl,’ said Annie, taking the ribbon and tying it in a bow. ‘There. That looks like a present now. But don’t you let your father see it. He’ll . . .’
Freddie nodded. ‘I know.’
‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over,’ said Annie, and she packed it into the old carpetbag with Freddie’s pyjamas, and a dead pigeon.
‘Do I have to carry that?’ asked Freddie, looking at the iridescent greens and purples in the pigeon’s neck, and its head flopped sideways, the eyes closed under white lids.
‘’Course you do. Don’t be so silly. I’ve got to send something for you to eat. Granny will make a pigeon pie.’
Freddie looked at his mother anxiously.
‘How are you going to go out, Mother? When I’m not here.’
‘I shan’t need to.’
‘But what if you do?’
‘I’ll manage. Now don’t you worry, Freddie. You like going to Granny don’t you? Just remember she’s eighty-one. You get the wood in for her and feed the chickens – and don’t go playing by the river – and don’t loiter about daydreaming. Go straight there.’
Freddie still worried about his mother as he waved goodbye and set off across the fields which were wet and squishy underfoot. He knew the way well. Over the sheep pastures, through the woods and down towards the river valley. The baby lambs and the song thrushes cheered him up, and the thought of a holiday, and the present tucked in his carpetbag under the wings of the dead pigeon. And he had another surprise, hidden in one of his matchboxes.
He was climbing the stile into the woods when a strange feeling crept over him like a warm wind blowing on his skin. Something, or someone, was inside the woods, waiting for him to jump down from the stile. Freddie perched on the rail, the carpetbag clutched in his hands looking, searching the flickering twilight of the woods. He could smell the primroses and the moss, and he could smell the person who was waiting. He smelled of sweet meadow hay and boot polish.
Freddie got down from the stile and started to walk over soft pine needles on hushed footsteps. It was silent under the tall conifers, but he could hear the whisper of soft-treading feet padding beside him, and the swish of a cloak brushing his skin. He stopped under a lime tree, and the other feet stopped. But still he couldn’t see anyone, even when he sat down against the cool trunk of the lime tree, and searched the space with his eyes.
The sun had gone behind a cloud and the lights of the wood vanished into translucent gloom. Around his legs were the amber spirals of young ferns uncurling from dark leaf mould, and pale mounds of primroses which seemed to shine with a light of their own. The light that appeared in front of Freddie was primrose-coloured, a tall shimmering shape. He reached out and touched it, and it felt like velvet, indescribably smooth and lingering, a sensation that infused his skin with secret energy.
Freddie closed his eyes and visualised the space around him, something he practised doing often. The scene came instantly to life. First he saw the energy of the sap rising from the tree roots below the soil like fountains of glistening light, green gold and lemon gold, branching into thousands and thousands of arteries that trickled through the new young stalks and leaves. He listened and he could hear the subtle high-pitched music of growth; each tree sang with a different voice, the voice of its growing. The sky between the leaves rang with the hum of honeybees in the lime flowers.
‘The bee-loud glade,’ Freddie thought, remembering the poem he had learned at school. ‘This is like Innisfree. I’ll live alone in the bee-loud glade.’ He loved the poem because to him it was about a man who wanted to live alone where no one could tell him what to do.
With his eyes still closed, and believing himself to be alone, Freddie decided to say the whole poem aloud, say it to the singing trees and the dancing lights of the wood that were coming alive in his vision. He took a deep breath and began: