Cryers Hill (29 page)

She does read well, give her that. Lispy. Nice. No pauses, much.

She can read true words. She knows the code. She is a git.

'OK, good, Jane. Very nice, thank you. Sean?'

Godnose.

'Would you like to finish the very last sentence for Jane?'

No. 'Yesmiss.'

'Good boy. Off you go. From
OK?'

Timmy's mother was busy ironing. 'Oh dear, it's you, is it?' she said. 'What's the matter now?'

'Sean?'

Black and white. Easy and peasy. Laid out in code. You had to know the code. You had to get the ever-changing never-ending inexplicable shapes. Black and white, it should be easy. There are more than fifty thousand galaxies in space. These are only words. Why couldn't he read them? Whie?

W
ALTER AND MARY
walk clockwise around the cricket green in Montague's Meadow. Walter would have preferred to go to the woods, but Mary insisted. He walks with his hands at his back, ignoring the sunset over the pavilion and the cruising dragonflies. He inspects the grass instead with forensic interest. Mary hums a tune.

'Don't you know any others?' he asks.

Mary blows in his ear. 'Wait your turn.'

He will end up on his knees in his father's allotment, he thinks. He has known it always. It is waiting for him, that scene, as it waited for his father, as it will wait for his son when he comes. It is a dark and certain shape, and a tunnel of time will lead him there. If he does not leave soon, the pattern will not be broken.

Mary is lunging at dragonflies. She trips about, hands outstretched, spinning left and right. She chants:

'The first butterfly you see
cut off its head across your knee.
Bury the head beneath a stone
and lots of money you will own.'

Walter has reached the bench; he sits down to watch her. Now that he has decided he feels better. Each thing he studies now, the shadowed green, the insects, the sunset, Mary, each is loaded with significance. These are the things he will leave behind. These are the things he will learn to love.

Walter and Sankey walk up Deadman's Hill, where the line of elm has stood guard for hundreds of years. Walter has his .410 on his arm, and they have two rabbits apiece. Walter has not broken his friend's nose or defamed his God after all. He has forgiven him instead. Sankey, by turn, has not broken his friend's lantern jaw either. Walter reckons Sankey is a child when it comes to matters of the heart. Sankey reckons Walter is a child when it comes to matters of the heart.

Sankey says his knee is paining him on account of Edna Green's bicycle, which he felt obliged to ride after she had kindly offered it for his Saturday rounds, but is, he explains, not fit for human usage.

They stop at the gate to watch the view below them. On winter mornings mist and cloud gather in the valley and smoke up the woodland like a forest fire. Today the sun has glazed all the green hillside, coppice and pasture and pulls the birds into busy patterns across the sky. They stand for a time before Walter speaks.

'I've been considering trying my luck in the city.'

'There's none too many jobs.'

'No, but I could try my luck.'

'What is there to see except motor cars?'

'I don't know. See what I can see. P'raps fate has a surprise in store.'

Sankey is quiet for a while.

'Restless legs, that's your trouble.'

'Most likely.'

'Restless legs.'

It could have been the storm that did it. Sankey suspected as much. Storms had a way of redesigning what was assumed to be permanent. The good Lord had sent storms since the beginning of time for the purpose of rearranging, redefining.

Sankey would not have been at Sladmore Farm for a start were it not for the storm, but there he was among the ruins of the two-hundred-year-old oak tree, which had been hit by a lightning bolt and shattered into thousands of pieces. A pity as it was a great old tree, the pride of Cryers Hill, and had survived being hit by both a truck and a motor car, as well as a fire in the nearby barn. Moreover, the ghost of a child skipped around it at night, and her songs could be heard from the outbuildings. Now the tree was gone. Only half its charred trunk remained, revealing ropy cables at its core. Above, it has been cross-sectioned, leaving spliced upper branches to sway and creak flimsily in the breeze, like the mast and rigging of a stricken boat. Folk are arriving to take firewood and souvenirs. Sankey ties up a bundle of good sticks for his stove and listens as people discuss the tree. They remember how it was spared in the last big storm before the war; they agree the pity of it all; they thank their fortune things were not worse, that they suffered no more than the heads off their nasturtiums. Morning, Sankey, they say. No, none of us got a wink, not one wink of sleep. Still. Alive to tell the tale, they say.

Not everyone is alive to tell the tale. The facts are gathering on Dorrie Penn's tongue. She lives next door to Mr Looker, so she has heard it from the horse's mouth. Sankey hears it now hushing around him. The Pages' cottage on Boss Lane near Gomms Wood has been hit and gutted by the lightning. Tom Page was asleep in his bed and most likely knew nothing about it. Poor Tom. His son George was killed at Passchendaele and his wife, George's mother, died quietly afterwards from grief. She turned her face to the wall. That's what Dorrie Penn said. After her boy was killed in Belgium she turned her face to the wall.

All the men in the Page family go to violent ends it was said. This sounds unlikely until you think it through: two fires, a flood, war, a fall from a rick, a firearm incident, a bolting horse incident, war, a lightning bolt. Not a single Page man now remained to face his fate. All had been wiped away, one after another. There was a nephew, somebody pointed out. He had moved to the New Forest. A quietening then while everyone considered the kind of untimely death he might expect there.

Sankey sees Mary Hatt. She is walking away. He hadn't noticed her at the lightning tree, but sees her now plain as day with her piece of wood in hand. He follows her. He means to call out to her, but thinks he will catch up with her first. She walks with small steps like a child or a nun. In spite of this, oddly, he finds himself lagging behind.

By the time he crosses Cryers Hill Lane into the woodland he has lost sight of her. He runs, pausing only to be sure there is not another direction she may have taken. He is a hundred yards down the path before he finds her. She is lying on her side, tipped over like a clockwork toy.

'Mary?' The sound of her name in his mouth makes him stumble; it is a word belonging to prayer.

'Mary?'

She is fallen across the path, her feet in the shade. Her eyes are open and so Sankey speaks again. 'Mary?' But she does not respond or look at him, but only stares, not at him, not at anything; her eyes are dull as if she were blind or deceased. She is gone from herself, this is how it seems.

'Mary?' Sankey whispers it as though she were asleep. Do not wake the dead, he thinks, and no. 531 from
Sacred Songs
balloons up in him in spite of everything.
In the shadow of the rock, let me rest, let me rest.

Sankey kneels beside her. He is tempted to touch her forehead, to stroke her hair, when he notices a tremor in her jawbone. There is drool on her lip, catching the light. The light lasers through the foliage, heating her hair, warming her cheek and falling across her throat. Sankey half rises and looks around him as though there may be a doctor lurking or an instruction pinned to a tree. But there is only him and a large tatty crow and the fallen Mary. What is this? Something in the day is shifted, something is realigned. He too is sliding with it. She is trembling now, a volcanic thing. He knows the cure for the faints: smelling salts to bring them round and tea for the shock. Good. Better that another female were present though, girls know the correct procedure when it comes to falls, shocks and ailments. Anthrax. The cattle had it, Cramer's herd. It was in their feed, the seed cake from Eygypt was contaminated. Surely girls didn't get anthrax? She suffered the fits from time to time, yes. The fits it could be. Sankey is afraid to touch her but he will force himself.

She makes a noise, a tiny leak out of her mouth. He can't tell if it was a sensible word or not. He crouches lower and places his face in front of hers so that she may see him through her unseeing eyes.

'Mary?' She stares blankly into the dim hollow of his devoted heart. He takes her hand and the light beams flare, igniting her. Surely she'll be right as rain in a moment. Girls do fall over, it is well known. He would like to help her, but cannot think of a way. On the other hand p'raps he ought to run. A person happening along may assume an incorrect assumption. He will get into trouble. Trouble that he does not deserve, in point of fact.

The light takes him by surprise as it refracts quite suddenly through the trees. It bounces into his face, making him start. Mary sits up in a single sudden animal movement. She is bright as gas. The light is pouring from her mouth and eyes, viscous and drifting, like nitrogen. It fills her up and spills brilliantly out. She is lit as though he had struck a match inside her. It electrifies the trees and blinds him with its whiteness. She is a human flare. What is this? Sankey clasps his hands to pray. O angel of God, preserve me this day from all sin and danger. But he knows of course. He realises he has suspected all along. Suspected but did not dare to hope. He kneels before Mary and bows his head.

'Queen of Angels. Mother most pure. Virgin most merciful, have mercy on us.'

'Never shone a light so fair,
Never fell so sweet a song,
As the chorus in the air,
Chanted by the angel throng.

Weary and sore distressed,
Come, come, come unto me,
Come, come, come unto me,
Come unto me and rest.'

He has been a fool. It is all now quite beautifully clear.

Sankey has often wondered how the chosen few know they are called. Now he understands. The signs are unmistakable. A bright margin of light has appeared at the edges of his day, as though his life were catching alight. His blood is hurried up and his mouth is frothing with sacred talk. The burst of energy in his arms and legs makes him feel he could jump the houses, the hills, the earth itself. And the presence in his heart of a fiery truth, a
knowing,
quick and fizzing and waiting to be spoken, confirms his best suspicions.

Sankey runs to Uplands. He runs to the hill where the wind drags the giant trees to the ground. He falls to his knees and the wind roars into his throat and into the chambers of his faithful heart. The wind flings his prayers about and pulls the clouds apart. The light falling from the sky appears to Sankey to be as holy as the first light on the world. 'One there is who loves Thee,' he assures his God. And he lays himself down under a pink enflamed sky that is scratched with gold, weeping tired tears of joy.