(1992) Prophecy (12 page)

His eyes brightened. ‘Gosh, yes! Is that really old?’

She nodded. ‘Ten thousand years; perhaps more.’

‘Do you think it’s worth a lot of money?’

She shook her head. ‘The countryside’s covered in them.’

‘I’ve never seen one before.’

‘You’ve probably never looked.’ She handed it to him. ‘You keep it.’

‘You should keep it really, because you found it.’

‘It’s a present.’

‘Hey! That’s great, wow! Thank you.’

She walked on, feeling she was getting somewhere with Oliver’s son after all. But she was taken aback by his next remark.

‘Do you think the dead stay dead, Frannie?’

Mindful of his mother, she deliberately played down her response. ‘I don’t think that oyster’s going to come back to life.’

‘Its spirit might.’

A combine harvester chomped through a cornfield on their right. The stubble stretched out into the distance, short and spiky, and Frannie breathed in its dry, prickly smell. Edward was a strange boy, she thought. Old for his years, he slouched as he walked, as if burdened by a thousand worries.

As they approached the rear of a massive corrugated-iron barn, a bang like a muffled gunshot rang out,
making Frannie jump. Captain Kirk barked. There was the clatter of what sounded like an enormous ratchet, and another bang. Edward sprinted on ahead.

Oliver’s Range Rover was parked on the concrete hard in front of the barn. The barn’s doors were open and there was an old-looking single-engined biplane inside, its wingspan taking up almost the entire width.

Oliver had both hands close together in the centre of one blade of the propeller and slowly rotated it anticlockwise, while Edward stood several feet away, watching him. There was a deep sucking noise from the engine. He rotated the propeller completely a couple of times, then tensed up, gave the blade a sharp downward pull, and stepped quickly back and to the side. There was another much louder bang as the engine fired and died, a splutter as the propeller made a half-turn, then the ratchet sound again as it swung to a halt. A small puff of oily blue smoke drifted over Frannie. Oliver looked engrossed and Frannie began to wonder if he’d simply wanted to be on his own for a bit.

He turned and smiled cheerily at her, pushing his hair back from his forehead with a grimy hand, sweat pouring down his face. ‘Got her started last weekend; have to try to run her again for a few minutes to get the oil circulating, but she doesn’t seem to want to know.’ He gazed at the aeroplane admiringly. ‘What do you think of her?’

The plane reminded Frannie of First World War movies. A primitive, open two-seater, with struts and wire rigging between the wings, it sat on a flimsy-looking undercarriage, its nose in the air. Parts of the skin of the fuselage and wings were missing, exposing the skeletal frame beneath and the cylinder block of
the engine protruding from the nose. In contrast, the propeller appeared immaculate; it was made of dark, varnished wood and held in place with a polished aluminium spinner.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Frannie said. ‘Have you actually flown her?’

‘Not this old girl. She hasn’t been airborne for about thirty years. I bought her as a complete wreck five years ago. A few more months and she’ll be up there.’

‘Yeah!’ Edward said excitedly. ‘Daddy said we can fly to France!’

Oliver looked at his watch. ‘I’d better get to the estate office. My three o’clock appointment will be waiting.’

‘No peace for the wicked,’ Frannie said.

‘None. See you in an hour or so.’ He began closing the barn doors. Frannie and Edward helped him, then Oliver drove off in the Range Rover.

‘Would you like to see the lake now?’ Edward said.

‘Yes, sure,’ she said, feeling slightly out on a limb at being abandoned again by Oliver, and wondering suddenly if Dom’s snobby mother hadn’t been too far off the mark when she had asked Oliver if she was the nanny. She felt a sudden flash of anger as she wondered whether Oliver had conned her into coming down here in order to look after Edward. Once again, she pictured the party taking place that night in London. Had she made a mistake?

They skirted around the side of a ploughed field, jumped a ditch and came out at the bottom of the visitors’ car park. Captain Kirk ran on ahead then bounded back and walked beside them. They climbed over a fence and walked across a broad, sloping meadow. ‘Do you like it here, Frannie?’ Edward asked.

‘It’s very beautiful.’

‘I had to really twist Daddy’s arm to make him see you again.’

She stopped and stared at him. ‘Pardon?’

‘Daddy wasn’t brave enough. He said he’d be too embarrassed and that anyway you might not like him.’

‘It was you? You made him put the advertisement in?’

He shook his head. ‘I told him that he had to try to find you. He thought you were nice, but he’s very shy, really.’

‘So how did you persuade him?’ Frannie asked.

He looked rather pleased with himself. ‘I did keep nagging him a bit. But I don’t think he needed that much pushing.’

They walked on through some trees, and Frannie smiled to herself, her anger fading. She was amused by the boy’s precociousness. A clock chimed three times in the distance. They passed a collapsed stone folly, and came into a walk of lavender bushes past a cluster of small headstones, most of them overgrown with moss and lichen. On one she could just make out the words:
Sam
(
Nimo San
).
Labrador. 1912–1925
.

Edward stopped by a lavender bush, and pointed at it, announcing ‘
Nana atropurpurea
.’

‘What?’ she said, unsure if she had heard correctly. She was startled by a growl from Captain Kirk and turned, wondering what was wrong with the spaniel. Then she realized it was growling at Edward.

Edward walked on down some timber steps and stopped by a rhododendron. ‘
Rhododendron campanulatum
,’ he said.

The spaniel growled again more deeply, baring sharp white teeth that rose from gums brimming with saliva; its soft hair seemed to rise and harden like spines and
its dark brown eyes boiled inside their whites with a sudden rage that frightened Frannie. The dog was crouching on its rear haunches, as if its rear paws were embedded in the earth, its head craning forward, the growl deepening into a ferocious snarl. It pulled itself forward in sharp jerks as if trying to free its rear legs from the ground and launch itself at the boy, and she dived in panic, grabbing it by the collar to restrain it.

Captain Kirk’s head spun round, the jaws showering her with saliva and she just managed to withdraw her hand and jump back before the teeth snapped on air. The dog turned to Edward again, simmering, the snarl deepening. Edward stood his ground in silence, staring back hypnotically. Frannie felt the hairs rising on her own body, the onlooker in a private duel. The dog made a lunge forward towards the boy, then stopped as if restrained by an unseen force. It tried to lunge again, and stopped once more, seemingly made powerless by Edward’s concentrated stare.

Frannie watched in horror as the spaniel’s hair slackened, then it let out a whine and began to shake, backing away, whimpering, and finally retreating like a banished demon.

There was a strange hush. The sun went behind a cloud and Edward stood in silence, as if nothing had happened. Frannie turned to watch the dog but it was almost out of sight, heading back towards the house. She was shaking, not knowing exactly what she had just witnessed.

‘What’s the matter with Captain Kirk, Edward?’

He said nothing at first. Then he suddenly pointed to another rhododendron across the track that had white, trumpet-shaped flowers. ‘
Auriculatum
,’ he said.

‘Have you been learning Latin at school?’ she asked, her voice quavering.

He studied the bush for some moments again, as if he had not heard her, then continued along the track through increasingly dense shrubbery until they came down on to level ground, and Frannie could see water beyond a screen of reeds. The lake was a good quarter of a mile across and longer in length.

She followed him along the bank towards a sorry-looking boat-house, its white paint stained green with moss and peeling away in chunks. Edward pulled open the rotting door with some difficulty and they went into the dank, shadowy interior. A cobweb brushed Frannie’s face and she jerked her head to one side, instinctively putting up her hands and feeling the sticky strands on her fingers. Her nostrils were filled with the unpleasant mushroomy stench of rot.

‘You get in first and sit down,’ Edward commanded, pointing to a narrow wooden pontoon.

Dazed into compliance, she placed a foot carefully in the bottom of the boat, avoiding the oars. It rocked precariously and she grabbed the side with her hand, steadied herself, then brought the other foot in and sat down quickly.

Edward untied the boat, pushed it forward and stepped in, sat down and fitted each of the oars into the rowlocks. They drifted out of the boat-house into the sunlight, now bright again.

As the boy rowed, Frannie felt the pull of the little boat through the water and listened to the splash of the oars. Then Edward let the boat drift forwards on its own momentum, and she let her own thoughts do the same: Jonathan Mountjoy; ‘Is she the new nanny?’; Sarah Henrietta Louise Halkin. The onyx slab on the floor. 1963–1988.

‘I hope you’re not planning to sleep with my daddy.’

Her mouth dropped open in amazement. Edward was leaning over to one side, staring idly at the water the way she had been, with a distant expression on his face. She watched him for a moment, wondering if she had misunderstood. ‘Pardon?’

He did not look up or acknowledge her. His face remained blank and unreadable. Was it his mind that was disconnected or hers? she wondered.

A fish rose near them and left behind an eddy of disturbed water that slowly broadened out until the surface was smooth again, as if the water had forgotten it had ever happened. Oliver had told her last night at dinner, when he had been talking about mathematics and gambling, that a coin could not remember which way up it had landed the previous time it was flipped. It was always an even chance whether it would be heads or tails the next time, regardless of how many times one or the other had come up before. Water had no memory either. Humans remembered everything – too much sometimes – Oliver said, so that at times it was difficult to look back clearly to both before and after an event had happened. The brain played tricks constantly, he said.

She watched the small boy with the intelligent brown eyes and sad, freckled face, and tried to work out what trick her own brain might have just played on herself.

Frannie was hot and sticky and her top was damp with perspiration after the climb back up from the lake. They emerged through a ride of giant beech trees at the rear of the walled kitchen garden. The intensity of light had gone from the sun and the caw-caw-kercaw of a pigeon carried through the air like the last post from a lone bugler.

She felt uncomfortable, as if Edward was playing a
game with her for which she had not been given the rules, and she wondered if he was deliberately trying to undermine her confidence. Yet he was only eight; surely he was too young to be that devious? His mood changes left her not knowing whether left was right or right was left. She couldn’t find her feet with the boy and she wondered if it was her fault or if there was another reason. She thought about the dog, wondering where it was now and whether its fury had been deliberately provoked by Edward for her benefit. She found that hard to believe because it had seemed so spontaneous.

Edward had become chatty again in the last ten minutes. He asked her more about fossils and she explained to him how you could date the past from them, enjoying seeing the deep interest he took.

As they reached the front door, he said to her: ‘Can you play ping-pong?’

‘I haven’t for ages.’

‘Would you like to have a game?’

She smiled, feeling a bit weary. ‘All right, but a quick one. I’m tired.’

He gave her such a mischievous look that she felt like putting her hand out and tousling his hair as a gesture of affection, but remembered the faint look of irritation on his face when his father had done that. Something else stopped her too: she daren’t.

Before their game, they both went into the kitchen to make themselves a quick sandwich. Frannie finished hers first and she wandered off to look in the library as she waited for Edward. It was a surprisingly small and narrow room that seemed to double as a study. Several large hand-drawn charts were pinned to the walls either side of the desk. One looked like a family tree. Another was a mass of mathematical calculations. All
the rest of the walls were lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves, which she would have liked to look at instead of playing ping-pong but she felt that duty called.

Her reverie was broken with the arrival of Edward who, worried in case she changed her mind, led her upstairs and along the dark corridor past her room. As they drew up to the next door, Edward said: ‘That’s my room. I’ll show it to you later if you like.’

‘Thank you.’

They passed a couple more doors, then the passage dog-legged left. Edward climbed up a narrow staircase into a huge, gloomy attic-playroom that seemed to span the entire wing of the house and which housed the ping-pong table.

She acquitted herself well at the ping-pong table despite losing. After promising to go with Edward to see the orchard the next day, she made her excuses to him and went to her bedroom. She closed the door, relieved to be on her own for a few minutes.

Through the open window she noted that the visitors’ car park was empty and the windows of the ticket hut were closed. A crane-fly flew clumsily around the room, bumping against the window and the walls.

I hope you’re not planning to sleep with my daddy
.

A bead of perspiration slid down her forehead and Frannie put her hand in her pocket, but could not feel her handkerchief. She dug deeper, but the pocket was empty. She remembered wiping her forehead during the game, and went back up to the attic-playroom. The meagre daylight coming in from the small dormer windows, too high for a child to reach, gave a prison-like feel to the room.