Shadows & Tall Trees (5 page)

“We gave a photograph of him to a sculptor,” said Lisa. “Local man. Charming man. Excellent craftsman. Can you see the detail in that?”

“This way,” said Max, “it’s like Ian is always here, watching over us.”

I said I could see the effect they were aiming for. And I couldn’t help it, I actually laughed, just for a moment—I remembered that nasty, sulky godson of mine, and thought how unlikely an angel he would have made. If there’s an afterlife, and I have no reason to believe in one, God wouldn’t have made Ian Wheeler an angel, he wouldn’t have wasted the feathers on him. And I thought too of how, had he lived, he’d be a teenager, or nearly a teenager?—if he were still about by now he’d be even nastier and sulkier. Instead here he was, preserved as a three year old, forever in stone, with wings sprouting from under his armpits.

I apologized for laughing. “No, no,” said Lisa. “The fountain of remembrance is supposed to make you happy.”

We went back to the house. Lisa had prepared us a stew. “Only peasant stock, I’m afraid!” she said. The meat was excellent, and I complimented her on it. She told me it was venison. We opened the bottle of wine I had brought, and disposed of it quickly; then Max got up and fetched another bottle that was, I have to admit, rather better.

After we had eaten we settled ourselves comfortably in the lounge. Max took the armchair, which left me and Lisa rubbing arms together on the sofa. Max smiled, stretched lazily. “I like being the lord of the manor!” he said.

“It suits you very well!” said Lisa, and I agreed.

They placed another log on the fire, and we felt safely protected from the winter outside. But I thought there was still not much warmth to the room. It felt impersonal somehow, as if it were the waiting room for an expensive doctor, or the lobby of a hotel. It was neat and ordered, but there were no knick-knacks to suggest anyone actually lived there. No photographs on the mantelpiece.

There were more anecdotes of our childhood, and Lisa listened politely, and sometimes even managed to insinuate herself into them as if she had been part of our story all along. The wine was making me drowsy, so I didn’t mind too much.

I said how happy I was they were back in England.

“Oh, so are we!” said Max, quite fervently. “Australia was all well and good, you know, but it’s not like home. You can only run away from your past for so long.” It was the only time Max had ever suggested he had run away at all, and Lisa frowned at him; he noticed, and winked, quite benignly, and the subject was changed.

“It’s a lovely community,” said Lisa. “There are village shops only ten minutes’ walk from here, they have everything you really need. The church is just over the hill. And the local people are so kind, and so very like-minded.”

At length Max did his lord of the manor stretch again, and smiled, and said that he had to go to bed soon. “Church tomorrow,” he said, “got to be up nice and early.”

“Max does the readings,” said Lisa. “He’s very good. He has such a lovely reading voice. What is it tomorrow, darling?”

“Ephesians.”

“I like the way you do Ephesians.”

I expressed some surprise that Max had found religion.

“Oh, all things lead to God,” said Max. “It was hard, but I found my way back to His care.”

“Maybe you could come with us in the morning, John?” said Lisa. “You don’t have to believe or anything, but it’s a nice service, and the church is fourteenth-century.”

“And my Ephesians is second to none,” added Max, and laughed.

I said that would be very nice, I was sure.

“I’ll show you upstairs,” said Max. “Darling, can you tidy up down here? I’ll show John to bed.”

“Of course,” said Lisa.

I thanked Lisa once again for a lovely meal, and she nodded. “A proper peasant breakfast in the morning, too!” she promised. “You wait!”

“We’ve put you in Ian’s room,” said Max. “I hope you enjoy it.”

I must admit, the sound of that sobered me up a little bit. And as Max led me up the stairs, I wondered what Ian’s room could be—would it still have his toys in, teddy bears and games and little soldiers? Would it still have that sort of manic wallpaper always inflicted upon infants? And then I remembered that Ian had never lived in this house at all, he’d died years ago—so was this something kept in memorial of him? And I had a sudden dread as we stood outside the door, as Max was turning the handle and smiling and laughing and ushering me in, I didn’t want to go in there, I wanted nothing more to do with his dead son.

But I did go in, of course. And it was a perfectly ordinary room—there was nothing of Ian in there at all as far as I could see. Empty cupboards, an empty wardrobe, a little washbasin in the corner. Large bay windows opened out on to the garden, and there was an appealing double bed. My suitcase was already lying upon it, it had been opened for me in preparation, and I couldn’t remember when Lisa or Max had left me alone long enough to take it upstairs.

“It makes us happy to have you here,” said Max. “I can’t begin to tell you.” His eyes watered with the sentiment of it all, and he opened his arms for another hug, and I gave him one. “Sleep well,” he said. “And enjoy yourself.” And he was gone.

I went to draw the curtains, and I saw, perhaps, why this was Ian’s room. I looked out directly upon the garden. And from the angle the room offered I could see that all the random charm of it was not so random at all—that all the winding paths, the flowerbeds, the aches, all of them pointed towards a centrepiece, and that centrepiece was the pond, and in the centre of that, the fountain. Ian stared out in the cold, naked with only bare feathers to protect him, his mouth fixed open in that silly round ‘o’.

I pulled the curtains on him, got into my pyjamas, brushed my teeth, got into bed. I read for a little while, and then I turned off the light.

I felt very warm and comfortable beneath the sheets. My thoughts began to drift. The distant sound of running water was pleasantly soporific.

I vaguely wondered whether it were raining, but the water was too regular for that. And then I remembered the fountain in the garden, and that reassured me. I listened to it for a while, I felt that it was singing me to sleep.

I opened my eyes only when I remembered that the pond was dry, that the fountain wasn’t on.

Even now I don’t want to give the impression that I was alarmed. It wasn’t alarm. I didn’t feel threatened by the sound of the water, anything but that. But it was a puzzle, and my brain doggedly tried to solve it, and its vain attempts to make sense of what it could hear but what it knew couldn’t be there started to wake me up. I don’t like to sleep at night without all things put into regular order; I like to start each day as a blank new slate with nothing unresolved from the day before. And I recommend that to you all, as the best way to keep your mind healthy and your purpose resolute.

Had Max or Lisa left a bath running? Could that be it?

I turned on my bedside lamp, huffed, got out of bed. I stood in the middle of the room, stock still, as if this would make it easier to identify where the sound was coming from. It was outside the house. Definitely outside.

I pulled open the curtains, looked back on to the garden.

And, of course, all was as it should have been. There were a few flakes of snow falling, but nothing that could account for that sound of flowing water. And poor dead Ian still stood steadfast in the pond, cold I’m sure, but dry as a bone.

I was fully prepared to give up on the mystery altogether. It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t keep me awake—far from it, now that I focused on it, the sound seemed even more relaxing. And I turned around to pull closed the curtain, and go back to bed.

If I had turned the other way, I know I would have missed it.

The window was made up of eight square panes of glass. I had been looking at the garden, naturally enough, through one of the central panes. But as I turned, I glanced outside through another pane, the pane at the far bottom left, and something caught my eye.

There was a certain brightness coming from it, that was all. A trick of the light. But it seemed as if the moon was reflecting off the pebbles on the path—but not the whole path, it was illuminating the most direct way from the house to the memorial pond. The pebbles winked and glowed like cat’s eyes caught in the headlamps of a motor vehicle.

And there, at the end of that trail of light, at the very centre of the garden, there was the fountain. And now the fountain was on. Water was gushing out of Ian’s stone mouth, thick and steady; I could see now how his posture had been so designed, with his little hands bunched up, and pressed tight against his chest, to suggest that he was
forcing
out the water, as if his insides were a water balloon and he was trying to squeeze out every single last drop.

There was nothing even now so very untoward about that. If the fountain was on, so it was on. But I changed the direction of my gaze, I looked out at the garden through the central pane again—and there the fountain was dry once more, the garden still, the pathways impossible to discern in the dark.

I’m afraid I must have stayed there for a few minutes, moving my head back and forth, looking through one pane and then through another. Trying to work out what the trick was. How one piece of the window could show one view, the other, something else. I’m afraid I must have looked rather like an idiot.

And I tried to open the window. I wanted to see the garden without the prism of the glass to distract me, I wanted to know what was real and what was not. The catch wouldn’t give. It seemed to freeze beneath my fingers.

Then there was a knock at my door.

It brought me back to myself; rather, it wasn’t until then that I realized it, that I was on the verge of hysteria, or panic at the very least. I don’t know whether I had cried out. I thought I had been silent all this while, but perhaps I had cried out. I had woken the house. I was ashamed. I forced myself to turn from the window, and as I did so, with it at my back, I felt like myself again. I smoothed down my pyjamas. I went to open the door. I prepared to apologize.

Lisa was outside in a white night dress. She came in without my inviting her to do so, smiled, sat upon my bed.

“Hello, John,” she whispered.

I said hello back at her.

“Did you never want children of your own? I’m curious.”

She began unbuttoning her night dress then. I decided I really shouldn’t look at what she was doing, but I didn’t want to look through the window again either, so I settled on a compromise, I stared at a wholly inoffensive wardrobe door. I said something about not really liking children, and that the opportunity to discover otherwise was never much likely to present itself. I was aware, too, that something was very odd about her arrival and the ensuing conversation, but you must understand, it still seemed like a welcome respite from the absurdities I had glimpsed through my bedroom window.

She seemed to accept my answer, and then said, “Would you help me, please?” Her head disappeared into the neck of the night dress, its now loose arms were flailing. I gave it a tug and pulled the dress off over her head. “Thank you,” she said. She smiled, turned, pointed these two bare breasts straight at me.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Are they better than you were expecting?” I endeavoured to explain that I had had no expectations of her breasts at all. She tittered at that, just as she had when she’d curtseyed to me in the driveway; it was a silly sound. “They’re new,” she said, and I supposed that made sense, they seemed too mirror perfect to be real, they seemed
sculpted
. And they didn’t yet match the colour of her chest, they were white and pristine.

I wanted to ask her about the view through the window, but it seemed suddenly rather impolite to change the subject. What I did ask, though, was whether she was quite sure she had the right bedroom? Didn’t she want the one with her husband in it? And at this her face fell.

“Max hasn’t told you, has he?”

I said that he hadn’t, no.

“Oh God,” she said. “Bloody Max. This is what we. . . This is why. God. He’s supposed to tell. Why else do you think he brought you here?”

I said that we were old friends, and at that she screwed up her face in contempt, and it made her rather ugly. I suggested that maybe he wanted to show me the house and the garden.

“Max hates the fucking house and garden,” said Lisa. “He’d leave it all tomorrow if he could.” She grabbed at her night dress, struggled with it. “Bloody Max. I’m very sorry. We have an agreement. I don’t know what he’s playing at. This is the way
I
cope.” She couldn’t get her arms in the right holes, she began to cry.

I said I was sorry. I asked her whether she could hear running water anywhere, was it just me?

“I’ve always liked you, John,” she said. “Can’t you like me just a little bit?”

I said I did like her, a little bit. More than, even.

“Can’t you like me for one night?”

I tried asking her about Max, but she just shook her head, and now she was smiling through the tears. “This is the way we cope. Can’t you help me out?” I said, yes. I said I could help her out. I said I was puzzled by the fountain outside, but by this stage the night dress was back over her head again, maybe she couldn’t hear.

She said, “Now, don’t you worry. I’m not going to do anything you won’t like.” Then she climbed on top of me and gripped me hard between her thighs. She let her long hair fall across my face, then she whispered in my ear. I expected her to say something romantic. She said, “I won’t get pregnant, I’ve been thoroughly sterilized.”

I hadn’t touched a woman in years. Not since I was at school, not since Max had discovered girls, and had started touching them, and I had touched them too so he wouldn’t leave me out.

But even accepting my unfamiliarity with the whole enterprise, I don’t think I did an especially good job. To be honest, I let Lisa do all of the work, the most I contributed was a couple of hands on her back so that she wouldn’t fall off and sprain herself. And I listened to the sound of the fountain outside; sometimes the mechanical grunts of Lisa would drown it out, and I’d think maybe it was over, but then she’d have to pause for breath, or she’d be gnawing at my neck with her lips, or she’d be sitting tall and gritting her teeth hard and screwing her eyes tight and being ever so quiet, and I could hear the fountain just as before.