(1990) Sweet Heart (13 page)

‘If you put your mother somewhere cheaper, we could afford to do a hell of a lot more now.’

‘I hope you remember that one day when your father’s old and infirm,’ she said angrily.

The first rock loomed our of the woods above her. She climbed over a fallen birch and stopped at the edge of a small clearing to get her breath back. The woods were dark and hemmed her in; they spooked her. Ben stopped, maybe sensing something too, and nuzzled his head against her leg.

She was the furthest she had been up here, beyond the point where she had met the old man, Commander Letters … or imagined him … or seen a time warp, a freak of the atmospherics. Or had met someone totally different, an innocent old codger with a fishing rod and had passed on his message to the wrong person.

She was nervous of meeting him again.

A shadow moved in the darkness through the trees, moved steadily, came out to greet her and she shrank back, goosepimples creeping over her flesh, until she realised it was just a bush behind a tree moving in the wind.

Two eyes watched her from under a dock leaf. Then the rabbit turned and scuttled through the undergrowth. Ben did not notice. She patted the dog, felt
comforted by his company, by his hair, his warm body.

‘Good boy,’ she murmured.

The track ahead was through bracken. She climbed on, under the overhang of the rock, past a narrow fissure which reeked of urine and where there was a used condom lying on the ground. Behind, a long way back, she thought she heard a child shout and a woman’s voice reply.

Then she could see the second rock a short distance above, and she stopped. There was no mistaking this rock, no saying it was just another rock and maybe …

Heart-shaped, distinctly heart-shaped. It sat at the top of a short escarpment silhouetted against the boiling sky.

It was the rock she had seen in her regression.

She stared for a long while, trying to remember, to think back to childhood, to the outings in the country she had had with her mother. On Sundays they took a bus or a train to the country. However hard up they had been, her mother had insisted on a weekly treat. Maybe they had come here one Sunday? Or seen it in a film? Television? A book? Hugh said it was an ancient monument, a religious stone. Maybe she’d seen it in a magazine? A documentary?

She bit her lip and climbed a steep narrow gully up through the escarpment, scrambling over several smaller rocks. She reached the top and stood in the open, on a bracken-covered knoll with the heart-shaped rock in front of her and shrubbery behind.

She gulped down air, staring at the view; the buffeting wind made it hard to stand still. There was a panorama across the treetops in every direction except straight ahead which was obscured by the rock. Fields and woods and spires, pylons, farms, several large houses, a glinting swimming pool in the garden of one, a tennis court. She could see part of the lake, and the
white columns and conservatory of Yuppie Towers.

The rock was a massive granite lump, with deep cracks and patches of lichen, rising out of a bed of dried bracken. It was covered in names and initials and messages, crudely carved, mostly weathered and barely distinct. P loves E. Chris l. Lena. Kenneth/Elizabeth. Anna l. Lars. Mary-Wilf. Arthur Edward loves Gwennie. D loves BJ.

D loves BJ
.

She looked closer.

D loves BJ.

The initials she had stared at in the regression as if she had known them.

She touched the rock; it felt, smooth, cold. Silent. Ben loped around below, crunching through the bracken. Up here was silence. Only the wind. She read the initials again.

Coincidence? Tricks of the mind? Like the chewing gum? The stables? The man with the fishing rod?

D loves BJ.

The tin. The tin she had carried up here in her regression. If that was here too? Her heart was hammering.

Chinese box, Tom had said with a grin. The Chinese box was a delicacy. You buried a tin full of maggots in the earth, with no food. When you dug it up a fortnight later the maggots would have eaten each other and there would be one left, fat, juicy, the survivor. You ate him.

She could remember the spot. There, barely ten feet away in the shrubbery. She went over to the dense undergrowth. Something was glinting. Excitement rose as she parted the bushes then fell as she saw it was just glass from a broken bottle. She cleared it and knelt down.

This spot here.

She stood up and walked away, feeling foolish. She gazed at the view, tried to fight, but slowly she was drawn back, slowly she walked across and knelt again. This time she began to dig with her hands, the sandy soil packing under her nails. Ben arrived and licked her face, thinking she was playing some great game.

‘OK, boy, help me dig! Big bones buried!’

He sat and scratched himself.

She dug down several inches, felt something hard which grazed her finger, and she clawed the soil away around it until she could see that it was a piece of flint.

She widened the hole, winced as she scraped her hand on a sharp stone. She dug beneath it, felt the cold slime of a worm stuck to her fingers and shook it free with a grimace.

Stupid, she thought, standing up. Daft. Should have brought a spade. Need a spade. She shook some of the sandy mud from her hands and stared at the small molehill she had made. Her watch said quarter to eleven. A spot of rain struck her face. With her boot, she shovelled the earth back into the hole and trod it flat, then hurried, half walking, half running, back to the house.

It was past twelve when she got back to the rock, her lungs aching, perspiration guttering down her body.

She sat for some minutes listening to the silence, the wind. Blue crevasses were appearing in the grey sky and it was getting brighter. She turned the trowel over in her hands; the rusted old tool was slightly bent and there was a crust of earth on the blade.

She glanced round. Ramblers in orange waterproofs had trudged up the track behind her, but they had turned off at the fork. Her hair thrashed her face. A voice inside her whispered
Go back! Forget it!

She went to the shrubbery and knelt. Her pulse tugged at the base of her right thumb, as if someone was
pinching at the skin. She felt a weird throbbing up her right arm and a tickling at the back of her throat. She glanced around once more, then began to dig.

Half an hour later the sky had brightened a little more. She had dug a crater eighteen inches deep and was wondering whose land this was and whether people were allowed to come along and dig holes. Did it belong to some farmer? The National Trust? Was an irate gamekeeper going to march out of the trees?

Ben had gone off somewhere and she felt very alone. Exposed. The silence was eerie. Forget it, there’s nothing. No tin. She rammed the trowel into the earth, more in frustration than an intention to go on digging, and a metallic clank rang out.

She froze.

She raised the trowel an inch and pushed down again. The clank again. Duller.

She began to dig more carefully, feeling her way around the object, then dumped the trowel and used her hands. Something sharp grazed her finger and there was a trickle of blood in the mud. She dug with the trowel again, cutting the soil away on each side.

Then it was free, and she levered out a small mud-caked object. It was light, weighed scarcely more than the earth that was stuck to it. Something inside rattled, rattled again because she could not hold it steady.

She scraped the mud away with the blade of the trowel. Pitted metal showed through. A small square tin, three inches across and an inch deep. In parts the rust had eaten almost through it. She closed her hand around it, felt the edge. She could hear Ernest Gibbon’s voice, probing.

What are you carrying? Why are you burying it?

It was this tin she had been carrying. Shiny and newer, but this tin. She was certain. And she was afraid to open it.

She looked into the crater. Two halves of a worm wriggled at the bottom.

Sometimes when you open the tin the maggot’s bigger than you think
.

The lid was held on by pressure. She tried to pry it off with her hands, but it would not budge. She used the blade of the trowel as a lever and twisted. The edge of the lid curled upwards then came free with a pop and a faint hiss of trapped air and fell into the hole.

A heart-shaped locket lay in the tin.

She stared at it, transfixed. An inch-high enamelled heart, ruby red, with a tarnished gold chain which spilled out and slithered down over her wrist, icy cold. It glinted dully in the sunlight that broke through the cloud. She blinked.

She knew this locket.

Knew that inside it she would find a note, carefully folded. Her head throbbed and her vision became blurry. Slowly, with fingers that felt like hams, she lifted the locket out. There was a tiny hinge and an even smaller clasp which, though rusted, moved under the pressure of her thumbnail. A minute piece of paper nestle inside, yellowed, brittle, folded several times. The wind fluttered it and she shut the locket, scared it would blow away. She felt giddy.

She wet her fingers with spittle and wiped them as clean as she could on her jeans then, shielding it from the wind, she took the tiny square out, and unfolded it. The ink was blurry, smudged, brown with age, and the paper so brittle she was frightened it would disintegrate. The handwriting was just legible.

‘Dear Rock, I love him. Please bring him back. Barbara.’

‘What are you doing?’

It felt as if a lever had been pulled inside her, switching her blood flow from slow to fast. A small boy
was watching her, brown-haired, an earnest freckled face. He was about seven.

‘Are you making a wish?’ he said.

She nodded and managed a weak smile. A voice called out. ‘Timothy! Come on, darling!’

He scampered out of sight. ‘Mummy! Mummy! There’s a lady up there making a wish!’

Her face was burning red with embarrassment. And guilt. This was someone else’s locket, someone else’s note. She had no business digging it up, reading, prying.

She refolded it, placed it inside the locket and snapped it shut. Then she laid it in the tin, closed the lid firmly and put it in the hole. She scooped the earth in and stamped it down with her foot. When she turned around, the boy was there again.

‘Is that your doggie?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘What’s he called?’

‘Ben.’

‘I made a wish here,’ he said.

‘What did you wish?’

‘I wished that the rock would make my daddy better.’

‘Did it work?’ she said smiling, almost relieved to have company.

‘No.’ His face puckered. ‘He died.’

Tom hit a four off the first ball.

‘I knew he could bat,’ said Vic, the landlord from the George and Dragon, as glumly as if he had been clean bowled. ‘I can tell a good bat when I see one.’

‘Well done, darling!’ Charley yelled, applauding the loudest. She stood beside the tea table, watching as the bowler paced out his run, rubbing the ball on the left cheek of his buttock. He started his run, slow, quick, slow, quick. The ball sailed through the air, Tom lunged out, missed, and it passed the wicket keeper.

‘Yes! Go!’ yelled the batsman the far end, already halfway down the crease. Tom ran, made the far crease long before a fielder ever got to the ball. There was more clapping. Fielders waited as the second batsman took his guard.

Charley felt a spot of rain on her face. The doilies under the cakes on the trestle tables flapped in the wind. Viola Letters’s terrier ran in and out of the table legs yapping.

Charley squatted, patted the dog and tickled its chest. ‘Hey, chappie, are we going to make friends?’ It licked her hand tentatively.

Hugh Boxer came over, padded up, a weathered bat under his arm, cap tugged down over his head, wearing an old-fashioned college cricketing jumper and baggy
white trousers. The outfit suited his aura of faded nobility.

‘That was a bloody fine hit,’ he said. ‘Bold shot for an opener. He looks like rather a useful player.’

‘He used to be very good.’

‘Still is. Thank you for last night by the way,’ he said.

‘I hope you enjoyed it.’

‘Very much. It was a good evening. Laura’s a bright girl.’ His eyes were probing.

‘Yes, she is,’ she said. ‘I went up to the rocks this morning, the Wishing Rocks.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘You’re right. It’s a pretty walk.’ She glanced at her nails, which were not completely free of mud, then back at Hugh. ‘This custom — of burying things — does it still go on?’

‘You might get the odd kid doing it occasionally. I think people have got more cynical about things like that these days.’ He stretched down to tighten a strap on one pad.

There was a crunch and a silence on the pitch. The middle stump was bent backwards behind the batsman. Tom was at the other end she saw, relieved.

‘I’m on parade,’ Hugh said, and grinned.

‘Good luck!’

‘I’ll need it.’ He strode out, tugging on his gloves, pads flapping.

There were a couple of hundred people, Charley estimated, crowded around the jumble stall and the tombola and seated on the benches in front of the tiny pavilion. Several families lay sprawled on picnic rugs around the boundary, and two old buffers sat in front of the wooden scoreboard in deck chairs, surveying the match from under their green sun visors.

A batsman stood at a practice net while two others alternately bowled at him. He returned the ball each
time with a proficient
snick
. A group of children played their own game with a tiny bat and a rubber ball. Hamburgers and hot dogs sizzled on a griddle, and the banner ‘NSPCC CHARITY MATCH’ shook precariously in the wind.

‘’Ow much is the cup cakes?’ a child asked.

‘Twenty pence,’ Charley said.

He handed her a grubby coin, which she dropped in the tin, and helped himself to a pink one.

Viola Letters stood on a milking stool behind a trestle table covered in upturned cups on saucers, and peered into a massive steel urn. There was a half-hearted ripple of applause as Hugh reached the crease, and the unfortunate opening batsman arrived back to face his team mates.