In my head Henry is always bigger than me, older than me. Eleven when I was seven. It seemed an enormous gap at the time. He was a big boy. He was loud and bossy. He said I had to do what he told me. He buttered Meredith up-she always preferred boys to girls. He went along with her on the rare occasions she came out to the woods, and more than once helped her make a nasty scheme a reality. Henry: a fleshy neck with a receding chin; dark brown hair; clear blue eyes that he would narrow, make ugly; pale skin that burnt across the nose in summer. One of those children, I see him now, who is a grown-up in miniature rather than a child, who you can look at and know, at once, what they will look like as an adult. His features were already mapped; they would grow, but not develop. He wore himself in his face, I think, charmless, obvious. But this is unfair. He never got the chance to prove me wrong, after all.
Eddie still has the face of a child, and I love it. A nondescript boy’s face, sharp nose, tufty hair, kneecaps standing proud from skinny shanks in his school shorts. My nephew. He hugs Beth on the platform, a little sheepishly because some of his classmates are on the train behind him, banging on the glass, sticking up their fingers. I wait by the car for them, my hands puckered with cold, grinning as they draw near.
“Hey, Eddie Baby! Edderino! Eddius Maximus!” I call to him, putting my arms around him and squeezing, pulling his feet off the ground.
“Auntie Rick, it’s just Ed now,” he protests, with a hint of exasperation.
“ ’Course. Sorry. And you can’t call me Auntie-you make me feel a hundred years old! Sling your bag in the back and let’s get going,” I say, resisting the urge to tease him. He is eleven now. The same age Henry will always be, and old enough for teasing to matter. “How was your train ride?”
“Pretty boring. Except Absolom locked Marcus in the loo. He screamed the place down-quite funny really,” Eddie reports. He smells of school and it starts to fill the car, sharp and vinegary. Unwashed socks, pencil shavings, mud, ink, stale sandwiches.
“Pretty funny, indeed! I had to go in and see the head a fortnight ago because he’d shut his art teacher in her classroom. They pushed a block of lockers against her door!” Beth says, voice loud and bright, startling me.
“It wasn’t my idea, Mum!”
“You still helped,” Beth counters. “What if there’d been a fire or something? She was in there for hours!”
“Well… they shouldn’t have banned mobile phones then, should they?” Eddie says, smiling. I catch his eye in the rear-view mirror and wink.
“Edward Calcott Walker, I am appalled,” I say lightly. Beth glares at me. I must remember not to conspire with Eddie against her, not even over something tiny. It can’t be him and me against her, even for a second. She resents my help already.
“Is this a new car?”
“New-ish,” I tell him. “The old Beetle finally died on me. Wait until you see the house, Ed. It’s a monster.” But as we pull in and I look at him expectantly, he nods, raises his eyebrows, is not impressed. Then I think the manor might only be the size of one wing of his school-smaller than his friends’ houses, perhaps.
“I’m so glad it’s school holidays again, darling,” Beth says, taking Eddie’s bag from him. He smiles at her sidelong, slightly abashed. He will be taller than her eventually-he reaches her shoulder already.
I tour Eddie around the grounds while Beth settles down with his report card. I take him up to the barrow, skirt the dreary woods, arrive at the dew pond. He has found a long stick somewhere and swishes it, beheading the weeds and dead nettles. It’s warmer today, but damp. Flecks of drizzle in the breeze, and the empty branches knocking overhead.
“Why’s it called a dew pond? Isn’t it just a pond?” he asks, smacking the edge with his stick, crouching on supple, bony legs. Ripples fly out across the surface. The pockets of his jeans bulge with pilfered treasures. He’s like a magpie that way, but they are things nobody would miss. Old safety pins, conkers, bits of blue and white china from the soil.
“This is where the stream starts. It was dug out a long time ago, to make this pond as a kind of reservoir. And dew pond because it traps the dew as well, I suppose.”
“Can you swim in it?”
“We used to-Dinny and your mum and I. Actually, I don’t think your mum ever went all the way in. It was always pretty cold.”
“Jamie’s parents have got this wicked lake for swimming in-it’s a swimming pool, except it’s not all chlorine and tiles and all that. It’s got plants and everything. But it’s clean.”
“Sounds great. Not at this time of year, though, eh?”
“Guess not. Who’s Dinny?”
“Dinny… was a boy we used to play with. When we came here as kids. His family lived nearby. So…” I trail off. Why should talking about Dinny make me feel so conspicuous? Dinny. With his square hands so good at making things. Dark eyes smiling through his fringe, and his hair a thatch that I once stuck daisies into while he slept, my fingers trembling with suppressed mirth, with my audacity; to be so close and to touch him. “He was a real adventurer. He built a fabulous tree house one year…”
“Can we see it? Is it still there?” he asks.
“We can go and look, if you like,” I offer. Eddie grins, and jogs a few paces ahead, taking aim at a sapling, tackling it with a two-handed blow.
Eddie’s adult teeth haven’t sorted themselves out yet. They seem to jostle for position in his mouth. There are big gaps, and a pair that cross over. They’ll be clamped behind braces soon enough.
“What did I hear the other boys calling you from the train?” I call out to him.
He grimaces. “Pot Plant,” he admits, ruefully.
“Why on earth…?”
“Well, it’s kind of embarrassing… do I have to say?”
“Yeah, you do. No secrets between us.” I smile. Eddie sighs.
“Miss Wilton keeps a little plant on her desk-I’m not sure what it is. Mum has them too-dark purple flowers, with furry leaves?”
“Sounds like an African violet.”
“Whatever. Well, she left us in there on detention at lunchtime, and I said I was so hungry I could eat anything, so Ben bet me a fiver I wouldn’t eat her plant. So…”
“So you did?” I raise an eyebrow, folding my arms as we walk. Eddie shrugs, but he can’t help but look a little pleased.
“Not the whole thing. Just the flowers.”
“Eddie!”
“Don’t tell Mum!” he chortles, jogging on again. “What was your nickname at school?” he calls back to me.
“I didn’t really have one. Just Rick. I was always the youngest one, tagging along. Dinny called me ‘Pup,’ sometimes,” I tell him.
We are closer than many aunts and nephews, Eddie and I. I stayed with him for two months while Beth recovered, while she got help. It was a strained time, a time of keeping going and pretending, and being normal and not fussing. We didn’t have any big conversations. We didn’t bare our souls, pour out our hearts. Eddie was too young, and I am too impatient. But we shared a time of extreme awkwardness, of concentrated sadness and anger and confusion. We jarred along, the both of us feeling that way; and that’s what makes us close-the knowledge of that time. His father Maxwell and I holding hushed, strangled arguments behind closed doors, not wanting Eddie to hear his father call his mother unfit.
All that remains of the tree house are a few ragged planks, dark and green and slimy looking; like the rotten bones of a shipwreck.