The Spider Truces (23 page)

The garden and rooftops were thick with snow. Ellis stomped his feet into his boots. When he reached the car the snow was up to his knees. He wandered around the cottage, inspecting the depths of the drifts. On the front lawn, he encountered his father doing the same. Denny ignored his son but, momentarily, they were shoulder to shoulder beneath the old cobnut tree and wearing identical clothes, Denny in his current winter coat and hat and Ellis wearing Denny’s old ones, relegated now to gardening use. Mafi’s voice rang out from her bedroom window.

“Yoo-hoo!”

She held Ellis’s new camera to her eye and took a picture of the two men, staring up at her, incredulous of her recovery.

Mafi held court, a glass of whisky cradled in her porcelain hands.

“I kissed a German,” she told them, out of the blue. “I was picking hops at Boughton in 1941 and a German plane appeared, firing at vehicles on the main road. It swooped over the farm. Everyone ran for their lives except me and Doris Uden. I saw him as clear as if we were dancing together at the Leas Cliff Hall. He was a handsome devil and he flew right at us. I blew him a kiss and he blew a kiss back.”

Denny went downstairs to cook the lunch.

“Don’t be stingy, Denny, I’m hungry as a horse,” Mafi called out. “I might meet that handsome German in heaven when I die,” she confided to Ellis.

“You’re not going to die now.”

“Don’t be so silly. This is pure willpower. A parting gift.” She winked at him. “The day you returned from Europe, your father sat at his bedroom window all day, peeking out from behind the curtains, waiting …”

“He was fast asleep when I went up to see him,” Ellis said.

“If you believe that you’re a fool,” she told him. “Anyone can lie in bed and shut their eyes.”

Denny O’Rourke sat with his aunt all afternoon. Ellis split cherry logs in the back garden and shovelled the snow away from his car in a futile gesture of intent which ignored the reality that the village was cut off. Every now and then he stepped inside and could hear muffled conversation and laughter from Mafi’s bedroom.

Ellis took a glass of whisky to his bedroom and hid from his father there. When he was sure Denny had gone to bed, he watched a film on television and smoked cigarettes throughout, having not had one all day. In the early hours, he put on his boots and his dad’s old coat and walked into the village, through deep snow. Footprints mapped everyone’s movements, from their front doors and back again. There were no secrets in a snow-bound village. The night was still and stingingly cold. Ellis felt the tops of his ears burn and his lips and jaw became numb. The village green was a lake of bright, reflected moonlight. Ellis’s breath billowed towards the star-flecked sky, a smoke signal for a soul on its way.

He looked in on Mafi. The moonlight was pale blue on the walls of her bedroom and on her skin, taking the blemishes of age away from her face and hands, leaving her ancient but flawless. Beautiful. He studied the rise and fall of her breathing the way a parent watches their newborn child.

When Ellis woke he sensed he had slept late. The sky was a single enormous pearl light bulb emitting soft, even light. He listened carefully to the quietness and in it he detected sound. It was the discord of absence. The afterglow of departure.

His dad pushed the door open delicately. He placed a mug of tea down for Ellis and sat on the side of the bed. He looked his son in the eye. The grave censoriousness had left his face.

“Mafi died an hour ago,” he said.

Ellis nodded and smiled at his dad. Then he fixed his gaze on the bedroom door as it moved back and forth in a draught.

“Were you with her?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good.”

They sat for a while not knowing how to cross the few inches that separated them. Ellis’s gaze moved from the door to his dad’s hand, resting on the blanket beside him. He considered laying his younger, thinner hand upon it but couldn’t.

“I don’t want you to be upset,” Denny said sternly. It was almost an instruction.

That’s right, Ellis thought, you don’t. You don’t want me to experience grief or harm or heartache. That’s all you’ve ever tried to deny me.

Ellis waited for Reardon at the foot of the green. The sun dazzled from a cloudless sky but there was no thaw. Russell Grey stepped out of his back door and sucked on a cigarette. He was wearing a dressing gown, long johns, combat boots and a woolly hat. They watched as Katie Morton’s father appeared at the top of Wickhurst Lane in his suit and overcoat, with a scarf throttling him and a Russian-style winter hat pressed down on his head.

“Dressed by his wife,” Ellis said, loud enough to be heard.

Mr Morton stepped gingerly across the ice, scowled at Ellis and bade Russell Grey a good morning as he began a four-mile walk to the mock-Tudor-fronted office he had moved his insurance business to after his son’s imprisonment. The two men watched Mr Morton struggle up the ice slope out of the village.

“Mad,” Russell Grey murmured.

“Not when the alternative is staying at home with Mrs Morton,” Ellis said.

“Their daughter’s not exactly Meryl Streep, but fair play to you, they all count.”

This observation aired, Russell Grey returned indoors to his flat above the post office and to the wife who still sported the beehive hair-do that had scared Ellis as a child, although she no longer dyed it blue.

Ellis jogged on the spot and cursed into his scarf at the cold until Reardon’s tractor appeared. It barely slowed at all as Ellis leapt on to the trailer. It was the first vehicle to get out of the village since the snow came. Mr Morton politely declined Reardon’s offer of a lift as they passed him. They came to a halt at the top of Hubbards Hill, on the edge of the common. Shaded from the brilliance of the sun, the common was frozen over. Through a labyrinth of white-capped branches, Ellis found four slow-moving figures in black. He saw their top hats first and then the thick fur-lined boots into which their trousers were tucked. They carried a polished cherrywood coffin, upon the lid of which were four pairs of immaculately polished black shoes. On the far edge of the common, a hearse was parked up where the snow dunes had swallowed the road.

The coffin lay on the dining table whilst the men prepared Mafi’s body upstairs. They carried her down in a large sling and this, in particular, Ellis and his dad made sure they didn’t see. The coffin was returned to the trailer. Denny O’Rourke and his son sat alongside it with three of the men whilst the head undertaker went on foot, ahead of the tractor. At the church, they left Mafi’s coffin on trestles in front of the altar. Denny O’Rourke went into the garden as soon as they got back. He was mute and impenetrable. Ellis went to Mafi’s kitchen and took a Mackeson’s bottle opener from the drawer and placed it in his pocket. It was all he wanted of hers.

He screwed two planks of wood to the wheels of the hay cart and pulled it out of the valley. It took him two hours to reach Hildenborough station. The train from London was pulling away and Chrissie was standing on the platform, a suitcase and half a dozen carrier bags of food at her feet. They loaded the bags on to the cart. Christmas-tree lights shone from the windows on Scabharbour Road as Ellis and Chrissie trekked back towards the village. They stopped at the five-bar gate opposite Mackley Farm and looked across to the Rumpumps. The snow blanket on the landscape glowed in the dusk and, already, Ellis couldn’t remember how the village looked without it.

“I’ll be glad when this is over,” Chrissie said.

Ellis wondered if the lame, lonely widows and widowers inside the almshouses on Glebe Road ever looked out of their windows at this view and thought the same thing.

I’ll be glad when this is over
.

The horror of growing old shot through Ellis’s young mind for the first time.

“Jesus Christ …” he muttered.

They wrapped their arms around each other and Chrissie had her cry.

There was a note on the kitchen table from their dad. He had returned to the church.

“Dad’s not taken the torch, Ellis,” Chrissie said. “Go and meet him halfway so he’s not walking back in the dark. Please.”

Ellis turned each corner expecting to see the shape of his father against the snow, but reached the church without encountering him. The nave was in darkness and the altar lit by a single, harsh bulb, high above. Silhouetted by this light, Denny O’Rourke stood rigidly beside his aunt, his hands pressed down on the coffin lid, his head bowed.

Ellis watched with a certain reverence. This could be any moment in time, he realised. Any moment in any year since 1971. His dad had been standing here ever since that date. When he held Ellis in his arms, when he carried him on his shoulders, when he led him across the Marsh, when he smiled at him and laughed with him, when he resented him and ignored him, through all these times Denny had also been standing at a coffin, head bowed, presuming no one could see.

Ellis felt suddenly agitated by his invasion. He feared that if his father saw him now then he would never look his son in the eye again, never forgive him for being here. So Ellis crept away, but as he reached the door he heard a sound which compelled him to turn back. He saw his father look to the heavens and fight back his tears with a sharp intake of breath. He pressed harder down on the coffin, bowed his head again and gasped for air. Then the sobbing came. His shoulders heaved and cries battled their way out of him. He inhaled again, fighting valiantly, but the battle was lost and the tears and sobs burst out of his shaking body. His dignified, upright frame buckled and he slumped forward on to the coffin, resting his forehead against it as he wept. Ellis stared
open-mouthed
. He was seeing the unseen, touching the unknown. He was watching God. Then the panic returned to him, for if his dad knew he was a witness to this, their estrangement would be complete. His heart raced as he tiptoed to the door and slipped away.

Chrissie knotted Ellis’s tie for him.

“Got some news,” she said.

“You’ve worn out your G-spot?”

“Good news for you, what’s more. Or could be.”

“What?”

“I’ve hooked up with Milek.”

Ellis let this hang for a moment.

“Milek the photographer?” he checked.

“How many Mileks do we know?”

“When you say ‘hooked up’ I presume you mean spread your legs, wide open like a giant clam?”

“You presume correctly. Extremely pleasant it was too.”

“Why didn’t you say so before, when you gave me my camera?”

“Because we hadn’t hooked up then. This is very fresh Yuletide news.”

“And why does this news relating to your rarely unshared bed concern me?”

“Because he’s a photographer and he might give you some work.”

“Carry on knobbing.”

She hushed him, seeing her father appear.

“Time to go,” Denny said brightly. He had equipped himself with an armour-plated smile to see out the morning.

From the window, Ellis saw Gary Bird’s mother and her neighbours emerge from the cottages across the lane. They were dressed in their best and tiptoed through the snowdrift to the middle of the road, like farmyard geese. Mrs Bird held her palms upwards and grimaced at the sky. Ellis, Chrissie and Denny walked through the village and up to the church. Some of the villagers waited at their gates holding sprigs of holly and fell in line behind the O’Rourkes. An hour later, when they followed Mafi’s coffin across Glebe Road into the new cemetery, the world was a blinding whiteness again and the snowflakes were like feathers.

Denny O’Rourke changed out of his suit as soon as they returned home. He clambered into the hatch attic where the thaw of the previous night was dripping in. Ellis found him contorted beneath the low roof, repositioning buckets.

“Dad, I’m off now,” Ellis said.

“Doesn’t make sense,” his dad replied. “These drips aren’t the drips we’re getting downstairs.”

“So, what’s new?” Ellis sighed. “I have to go, Dad, the snow’s settling again.”

“Drive safely,” his dad muttered, monotone, without looking at his son.

The seatbelt pulled tight against Ellis’s chest. He watched the weeping willow at the foot of the garden become ghostly then disappear as snow covered the windscreen. Within this white veil, he pictured his father on his knees, his shoulders bearing the weight of the immense slanting roof. He started the engine, flicked on the wipers, and drove away.

Denny O’Rourke remained on his knees in the attic, arguing with himself between action and inaction. He crept towards the attic door then stopped and stared at the aperture to the outside world, paralysed by indecision.

Chrissie lay on her bed with headphones on, listening to Mafi’s favourite tape of Delius. Tears streamed across her cheeks.

The patch of snowless ground, where Ellis’s car had been, glowered at Denny. He followed the wayward tyre marks across the ice and on to the lane. He looked across the cottage’s vast cat-slide roof to the virgin white slope of Hubbards Hill above the village. In the lost perspective of whiteout, the hill seemed vertical. Mountainous. Dangerous.

Ellis’s ascent out of the valley was slow. He crawled the car slowly around the patchy snowdrifts on Glebe Road and the packed ice alongside the war memorial, but at the
mid-point
of Hubbards Hill, where the bridge crossed a deserted, snow-strangled main road, the wheels spun and the car slid inexorably backwards. It was a silent, serene sensation and although his heart sank at the prospect of further captivity within the village, Ellis made no attempt to fight the slide. There was no point. He was no longer the driver but the passenger, on board a smooth-moving ship, gliding across mirror-calm water into a port not of his choosing. The surrounding trees and fields were silent but complicit. They folded in on him as he slid homewards. As the car came to a halt, it spun gracefully. The valley panned through Ellis’s windscreen and he was left facing the village. He looked at the cloudless blue sky and heard a girl shriek with laughter. In his wing mirror he glimpsed a boy and a girl playing in the snow, disappearing behind the toll cottage by the bridge. Smoke billowed from the chimneys. His eyes drank in the panorama of whiteness and the punctuations in the snow of cottage, farm, tree, gate and fence. The children laughed again, this time from a distance. The sound seemed to echo and then the world fell silent and cold. The car slipped again, skating a little further and coming to rest against the hedgerow, a yard inside the village sign.