Here’s the dew pond. Where it always was, but it looks so different in winter colors. It sits in the corner of a large field of closely grazed turf. The field stretches away to the east, woods to the west. Those woods would shed a dappled green light onto the surface; a cool color, cast from branches that fidgeted and sang with birds. They’re naked now, studded with loud rooks clacking and clamoring at one another. It was irresistible on hot July days, this pond; but with the sky this drab it looks flat, like a shallow puddle. Clouds chase across it. I know it’s not shallow. It was fenced off when we were children, but with a few strands of barbed wire that were no match for determined youngsters. It was worth the scratched calves, the caught hair. In the sunshine the water was a glassy blue. It looked deep but Dinny said it was deeper even than that. He said the water fooled the eye, and I didn’t believe him until he dived one day, taking a huge lungful of air and kicking, kicking downward. I watched his brown body ripple and truncate, watched him continue to kick even when it seemed he should have reached the chalky bottom. He surfaced with a gasp, to find me rapt, astonished.
This pond feeds the stream that runs through the village of Barrow Storton, down the side of this wide hill from the manor house. This pond is etched in my memory; it seems to dominate my childhood. I can see Beth paddling at the edge the first time I swam in it. She stalked to and fro, nervous because she was the eldest, and the banks were steep, and if I drowned it would be her fault. I dived again and again, trying to reach the bottom like Dinny had, never making it, and hearing Beth’s high threats each time I popped back into the air. Like a cork, I was. Buoyant with the puppy fat on my chubby legs, my round stomach. She made me run around and around the garden before she would let me near the house, so I would be dry, so I would be warm and not white, teeth chattering, requiring explanation.
Behind me, there are distant glimpses of the house through the bare trees. That’s something I’ve never noticed before. You can’t see it through summer trees, but now it watches, it waits. It worries me to know that Beth is inside, alone, but I don’t want to go back yet. I carry on walking, climbing over the gate into the field. This field, and then another, and then you are on the downs-rolling Wiltshire chalk downland, marked here and there by prehistory, marked here and there by tanks and target practice. On the horizon sits the barrow that gives the village its name, a Bronze Age burial mound for a king whose name and fame have passed out of all remembrance: a low, narrow hump, about the length of two cars, open at one end. In summer this king lies under wild barley, bright ragwort and forget-me-nots, and listens to the endless rich chortling of larks. But now it’s more brittle grasses, dead thistles, an empty crisp packet.
I stop at the barrow and look down at the village, catching my breath after the climb. There’s not much movement, a few ragged columns of chimney smoke, a few well-swaddled residents walking their dogs to the postbox. From this lonely hill it seems like the center of the universe. This populous village! Coleridge pops into my head. I’ve been doing the conversation poems with my year tens. I’ve been trying to make them read slowly enough to feel the words, to absorb the images; but they skim on, chatter like monkeys.
The air is biting up here-it parts around me like a cold wave. My toes have gone numb because my shoes are soaked through. There are ten, twenty pairs of Wellington boots in the house, I know. Down in the basement, in neat rows with cobwebs draped around them. That one horrible time I didn’t shake a boot out before putting a bare foot inside, and felt the tickle of another occupant. I am out of practice at living in the countryside; ill-equipped for changes in the terrain, for ground that hasn’t been carefully prepared to best convenience me. And yet when asked I would say I grew up here. Those early summers, so long and distinct in my mind, rising like islands from a sea of school days and wet weekends too blurred and uniform to recall.
At the entrance to the barrow the wind makes a low moan. I jump two-footed down the stone steps and startle a girl inside. She straightens with a gasp and hits her head on the low ceiling, crouches again, puts both hands around her skull to cradle it.
“Shit! Sorry! I didn’t mean to pounce on you like that… I didn’t know anybody was in here.” I smile. The wan light from the doorway shines onto her, onto golden bubble curls tied back with a turquoise scarf, onto a young face and an oddly shapeless body, swathed in long chiffon skirts and crochet. She squints up at me, and I must be a silhouette to her, a black bulk against the sky outside. “Are you OK?” She doesn’t answer me. Tiny bright posies have been pushed into gaps in the wall in front of her, snipped stems neatly bound with ribbon. Is this what she was doing in here, so quietly? Praying at some half-imagined, half-borrowed shrine? She sees me looking at her offerings and she rises, scowls, pushes past me without a word. I realize that her shapelessness is in fact an abundance of shape-the heaviness of pregnancy. Very pretty, very young, belly distended. When I emerge from the tomb I look down the slope toward the village but she’s not there. She is walking the other way-the direction I came from, toward the woodlands near the manor house. She strides fiercely, arms swinging.
Beth and I eat dinner in the study this first night. It might seem an odd choice of room, but it is the only one with a TV in it, and we eat pasta from trays on our knees with the evening news to keep us company, because small talk seems to have abandoned us, and big talk is just too big yet. We’re not ready. I’m not sure that we ever will be, but there are things I want to ask my sister. I will wait, I will make sure I get the questions right. I hope that, if I ask the right ones, I can make her better. That the truth will set her free. Beth chases each quill around her bowl before catching it on her fork. She raises the fork to her lips several times before putting it into her mouth. Some of these quills never make it-she knocks them back off the fork, selects an alternative. I see all this in the corner of my eye, just like I see her body starving. The TV pictures shine darkly in her eyes.
“Do you think it’s a good idea? Having Eddie here for Christmas?” she asks me suddenly.
“Of course. Why wouldn’t it be? We’ll be staying for a while to get things sorted, so we may as well stay for Christmas. Together.” I shrug. “There’s plenty of space, after all.”
“No, I mean… bringing a child here. Into this… place.”
“Beth, it’s just a house. He’ll love it. He doesn’t know… Well. He’ll have a blast, I’m sure he will-there are so many nooks and crannies to explore.”
“A bit big and empty, though, isn’t it? A bit lonely, perhaps? It might depress him.”