He was telling me stupid jokes one day when I was about seven. It was a Saturday, because the remains of a cooked breakfast were still scattered on the dining room table; sunny outside but still cool. The French doors onto the terrace were open, letting a breath of air sneak in, just cold enough to tickle my ankles. I wasn’t really watching what Henry was doing as he reeled out his jokes. I wasn’t paying attention. I just followed him, stood close enough behind him to trip him, prompted him whenever there was a pause: Say another one! How do you know when there’s an elephant in your bed? You can see the “E” on his pyjamas. What’s brown and sticky? A stick. He had the biscuit barrel and he was cementing two plain shortbreads together with a thick daub of English mustard. The extra strong stuff, ugly colored, that Clifford liked on sausages. I was trying to remember a good thing about him, and now this.
I didn’t think to ask why. I didn’t ask where we were going. He wrapped the biscuits in a napkin, pocketed them. I followed him across the lawn like a tame monkey, demanding more jokes, more jokes. We went west, not south into the trees but to the lane instead; skirted along it, behind the hedge, until we got to Dinny’s camp. Henry hunkered down in the ditch, pulled me in with him. A foaming, pungent wall of cow parsley to sink behind. At this point only did I think to whisper, “Henry, what are you doing? Why are we hiding?” He told me to shut up so I did. A spying game, I thought; tried not to rustle loudly, checked beneath myself for nettles, ants’ nests, bumble bees. Dinny’s grandpa was sitting on a folding chair outside his battered white motor home, waxed hat pulled low over his eyes, arms folded, hands tucked into armpits. Asleep, I think. Deep, dark creases running from the sides of his nose to the corners of his mouth. His dogs lay either side of him, chins on paws. Two black and white collies called Dixie and Fiver, who you weren’t allowed to touch until Grandpa Flag had said it was OK. They’ll ’ave those fingers, you give ’em cause.
Henry threw the sandwiched biscuits over the hedge. The dogs were on their feet in an instant, but they smelt the biscuits and they didn’t bark. They crunched them down, mustard and all. I held my breath. I said Henry! in my head. Dixie made a hacking noise, sneezed, put her muzzle down on one paw and rubbed at it with the other. Her eyes squinted up; she sneezed again and shook her head, whimpered. Henry had his knuckles in his teeth, his eyes bright, intent. Lit up inside, he was. Grandpa Flag was murmuring to the dogs now, awake. He had his hands in Dixie’s ruff, was peering at her as she retched and snuffled. Fiver walked a small, slow circle to one side, heaved, threw up a disgusting yellow mess. A sob of laughter escaped around Henry’s fist. I was strangled with pity for the dogs, boiling with guilt. I wanted to stand up and shout, It wasn’t me. I wanted to disappear, run back to the house. I stayed, rocked on my crouched legs, hid my face in my knees.
But the worst of it was that when I was finally allowed to leave, a pinch on the arm to rouse me, we’d gone a scant twenty paces before Dinny and Beth appeared. The hems of their jeans soaked with dew, a small green leaf in Beth’s hair.
“What have you two been doing?” Beth asked. Henry scowled at her.
“Nothing,” he said. Able to inject a world of scorn into a single word.
“Erica?” She looked at me sternly, incredulous that I should be with Henry, that I should look guilty. That I should betray them that way. But where had they been, without me? I wanted to shout. They had left me. Henry glowered at me, gave me a shove.
“Nothing,” I lied. I was quiet and sullen for the rest of the day. And when I saw Dinny the day after, knowing that he had been home, I couldn’t look at him. I knew he knew. Because of Henry’s jokes.
“Rick? Can we go now?” Eddie’s head appears at the door to my room, where I, for once, have been skulking. Staring through the foggy glass at the white world beyond. Tiny crystals in the corners of the pane, feathery and perfect.
“The frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind,” I quote at him.
“What’s that?”
“Coleridge. Sure, Eddie, we can go. Give me five seconds.”
“One-two-three-four-five?”
“Ha, ha. Push off. I’ll be down in a moment-I can hardly go out in my dressing gown.” I was defiantly still in it when I opened the door to Maxwell earlier.
“Not today,” Eddie agrees, retreating. “It’s cold enough to freeze the arse off a penguin out there.”
“Charming, dear,” I call. The frost has cast the trees in white. It’s like another world out there-a brittle, albino world where white and opalescent blues have replaced dead grey and flat brown. It’s dazzling bright. Every tiny twig, every fallen leaf, every blade of grass. The house is made new; no longer the ghost, or the corpse, of a place I remember. I am soaring with optimism today. It would be hard not to be. After so many overcast days, the sky seems to go up for ever. It’s giddy, all that space up there. And Beth has said she’ll come with us-that’s how vibrant the day is.
When I told her Dinny was here she froze. I was scared for a minute. She didn’t seem to breathe. The blood could have halted in her veins, her ticking heart gone silent, such was the stillness in her. A long, hung moment in which I waited, and watched, and tried to guess what was next. Then she looked away from me and licked her lower lip with the tip of her tongue.
“We’d be strangers, now,” she said, and walked slowly into the kitchen. She didn’t ask me how I knew, what he looked like now, what he was doing here. And I found I didn’t mind not telling her. I didn’t mind keeping it to myself. Keeping the words he had spoken in my head alone. Owning them. She was relaxed again when I went to find her, as we made mugs of tea and I dunked Hobnobs in mine. But she didn’t eat that night. Not a Hobnob, not the plate of risotto I put in front of her, not the ice cream afterwards.
It’s the twentieth of December today. The car steams up as I drive east through the village and then turn north onto the A361.
“One more day, guys, and then it’s all downhill until spring!” I announce, flexing fingers stiff with chill inside my gloves.
“You can’t wish the winter away until Christmas has been,” Eddie tells me firmly.
“Really? Not even when my hands have frozen to the wheel? Look, I’m trying to let go and I can’t! Frozen on-look!” Eddie laughs at me.
“Keeping hold of the steering wheel while you drive could be considered a good thing,” Beth observes wryly from the passenger seat.
“Well then, it’s a good job I’m frozen on, I guess.” I smile. I take the turning to Avebury. Eddie’s been doing prehistory this term. Wiltshire’s riddled with it. We park, decline to join the National Trust, join instead the steady trickle of people going along the path toward the stones. The ground twinkles, the sun is overwhelming.
A fine Saturday and there are lots of other people at Avebury, all bundled up like we are, shapeless and dark, moving in and out of the ancient sarsen stones. Two concentric rings, not as high as Stonehenge, not as grand or orderly, but the circles far, far bigger. A road runs right through them; half the village is scattered amidst them, although the little church sits chastely without. I like this set-up. All those lives, all those years, piled up in one place. We walk all the way around the ring. Beth reads from the guidebook but I am not sure Eddie is listening. He has a stick again. He is sword-fighting somebody in his head and I wish I could see whom. Barbarians, perhaps? Or somebody from school.