Polly and Liv’s paper blizzard. I rubbed my hair as if little scraps still clung there.
The fire didn’t last. I upended the box and pulled it apart. The cardboard burned only a little longer. The cold coming in more than outdid any warmth from the brief flames. I put out the embers and closed the flue.
I stretched out on the couch, and put my feet up on the far armrest. If I rested, in a few days I’d be ready to climb the fence, or at least to troll the edge of the property, looking for a break in the hedge.
I tried to read. I chose the Linda Paul book because it was on top. It was described on the back as a “romp”: Susan Maud gets into “hot water” pretending to be a famous reclusive novelist who has failed to show up for a party.
Most of the scenes take place in a borrowed manor house, so my imagination had little work to do. Despite the cover illustration, for the heroine I pictured Gretchen’s nanny. She was blond and from the correct era; why not? When, later in the book, contradictory features were specified, the nanny persisted in my mind.
I thought again of Wesley from cricket camp. Some of the other boys had played a stupid trick. They told Wesley false descriptions of people: ginger hair, fat, even a limp, more and more exaggerated lies to see what they could get away with. Wesley finally caught on. It was horrible. He’d been betrayed in a way we couldn’t comprehend. Despite learning the truth, he couldn’t shake the false images out of his head.
I sat up. Perhaps neither could Gretchen.
The handwritings were intolerably contradictory. Something in our assumptions or her memory wasn’t right. Ginny’s death date? A misprinted year on the newspaper poem? Perhaps there was a third sibling who wrote “Mother” and “Father”; perhaps those older photographs weren’t of relatives at all. What if the whole box had nothing to do with Gretchen? What if a former resident of her mother’s house had left their own family mementoes behind?
No, that was too far. Too many of the photos matched her expectations for the whole to be entirely random. But an idea just as huge loomed up in my mind.
What if the “nanny” was Gretchen’s mother?
Her mother, and perhaps a hanger-on who’d joined Linda Paul for a few adventures, then been cut off? Who then pretended to actually be her idol?
It all made sense. She called herself Linda Paul. She gave Gretchen a set of books upon completing sixth form, and signed them herself. She took photos of Gretchen and her teenaged friends, and labelled them. Everything else, which perhaps she’d stolen, had been written by Linda-the real Linda-and her sister, Ginny. This fit. This justified the contradictions between the handwritings in the same way that ellipses had explained retrograde. Gretchen had been uniquely vulnerable to such a ruse: a small child, just losing her sight…
Words jumped around on the page in front of me; either my hands shook or I wasn’t focusing. I looked at a print on the wall to test my eyes: It was still.
I looked back at the page. Susan Maud juggled two conversations, one as herself and one as the famous author. Double-meanings and misunderstandings were tossed and caught and balanced.
The words leapt again. I looked up at the wall; the print was steady. My hands were shaking, that’s all, out of cold or exhaustion. I closed the book.
I checked the print regularly. If the horse in the picture stayed serene, I was well enough. It was only my body that shivered; my eyes, and by extension my head, were fine. I was fine. The horse never moved even one leg or flicked its tail. I know because I checked over and over to be sure.
The rain kept on. Not constantly, but enough to ensure that mud stayed mud. Builders failed to appear. I reread half a dozen Discworld books. The throbbing in my ankle dulled somewhat, though it still couldn’t bear much pressure. Solitude and inaction squeezed me from all sides; after three days I popped out of Dovecote like a cork.
I thought the drive would be the safest and most direct route out. That’s what comes from not paying attention.
Unlike in the house, where I held on to the golf club’s flat metal head and used the rubber handgrip against the smooth wood floor, outside it worked better right-way-around: with the head of the iron slicing into the thick mud. It hit hard-packed earth not far down. My progress achieved a nearly jaunty rhythm. How high was the fence, really? How long was the holly hedge? I was sure there would be someplace to burst through. There had to be.
When I’d come to Dovecote, it had been dark. But that was no excuse for not having noticed the brief change that had happened under my feet, a sudden switch from pounding dirt to thumping across planks, then pounding dirt again. The planks covered a ford across the drive, a ford which had been a ditch when I came and was now a rain-filled brook. The planks now just underwater kept cars from getting mired. Wheels would just splash through and ride them.
In my state, mud would have been preferable to wood. I plunged my golf club cane into the shallow, flowing water, expecting to work it deep into sludge until it was a secure hold to help me through.
Instead, it hit plank and slithered forward, splashing me facedown into the wet. I hit the front of my head on the far side. It was all I could do to pull my face up out of the water. The brook wasn’t running hard, but it was enough to nearly roll me. It prowled over me, an endless glide of cold. My forehead bled. I couldn’t see where the golf club was.
I sputtered. It wasn’t worth the energy to yell.
I propped myself up on my hands and knees. I didn’t know if I could make it over the fence now. If I couldn’t, but tried, I might not be able to get back to the house either. I backed out of the water on my hands and knees.
I looked back at the house. This time, the light in the window was true: my light, my little lounge, a real haven, not a trick of the moon.
I turned around and crawled back.
The fever lasted days.
The house, which had seemed so big, shrank down to the room around me. The patterned wallpaper hemmed me in. The fence and holly hedge around the grounds seemed hardly necessary.
I don’t usually dream. People don’t believe that. Or, I should clarify, women don’t usually believe that. It’s been insisted to me over and over that I must dream, and that my denial of it is some sort of a “repression.”
An old girlfriend used to ask me first thing, before I was properly awake, what I had dreamed. Not if, what. I never had the answer she wanted.
But, in this fever, I dreamed.
I was back at school during a half-term, as I’d once fantasised. I had the buildings all to myself. I scrawled on blackboards; I ran in the corridors.
Then the holiday ended. I waited, but no one came back.
I rationed the food. When I was ready to try escape again, I went better prepared.
I had no cane anymore. My right foot had improved, but the left still required some coddling. I didn’t want to crawl through the ford. It was too cold to get wet again. I tested the red wagon by the fireplace for my weight. It bowed a little but held. I could ride it over the planks.
I’d found secateurs in the kitchen. I could try cutting through the hedge, or even attempt cutting the wires of the fence. I tossed them in the little wagon and dragged it outside.
There was no rain, just a damp haze in the air. I shuffled forward on my knees, pulling the wagon behind. I looked like an actor playing at being a little boy.
I think it was that ridiculousness that made me first angry at rescue. That, and the single-mindedness that comes from desperation. I’d planned to go down the drive. This car blocked my plan.