Darkest Part of the Woods (6 page)

"I think you should. Use my phone."

Sylvia leaned one elbow on her book and held the receiver away from her face so that Heather heard the shrill pulse. It repeated itself six and a half times before Margo said not altogether patiently "Hello?"

"Guess who this is."

"I'm afraid I couldn't say. If you're calling from America it's quite early here. I'm just at a crucial point in a piece I'm carving. If you'd like to leave me your name and number-"

"Heather didn't know at first either."

They heard a silence like the absence of a gasp, and then "Sylvia? Is that really you?"

"If it isn't someone must be using my body."

"You sound so far away."

"I'm not though, am I, Heather?"

For an instant Heather was tempted to join in the teasing, but didn't want to feel as young as her sister kept seeming. "Not any longer," she said.

"Are you there with her at work, Sylvia?"

"Stopping her doing it, right. Being all kinds of distraction."

"Why didn't you tell us you were coming home?"

"I didn't want you worrying where I was if I got delayed. It wasn't easy coming where I came from."

"All that matters is you're home. Stay there and I'll pick you up and we'll still be talking when it's dark."

"I thought you said you were in the middle of something important."

"Nothing's as important as you. It can wait a day. It's only a piece of wood with a mind of its own. I'll be there in half an hour or so. Don't you dare go far. Don't you let her, Heather."

"We won't," they said in chorus, at which they laughed so much that Randall ventured to join in. As they subsided and Sylvia replaced the phone, Heather admitted "I want to hear all about Mexico and wherever else you've been, but I really ought to get on with some work."

"I won't stop you." Sylvia brandished The Secret Woods as she hoisted the flap in the counter just enough to sidle thinly through. "I'll put myself away," she said.

"You can tell me all about your adventures later."

"Later, right." Sylvia glanced back as she moved into the shadow of bookshelves.

Her voice sounded both multiplied and muffled by wood as she said "I may have to save it till the book's done."

6

Behind the Houses

WHEN Sam had hobbled slowly up one aisle of shelves and halfway down another as though in search of some book he couldn't name, Heather went to him. "I shouldn't be too long now," she murmured. "How's the shop?"

"We had to get the window boarded up till a friend of Andy's dad can put in some glass tomorrow, so now nobody can see what we sell."

"Didn't you have any customers today?"

"That many," he said, splaying the fingers of his left fist twice while he reached past her for a book that lay on top of several upright ones. "Doesn't mean they all bought anything."

"So long as some did," Heather said, thrown by the sight of The Secret Woods in his hand. "Strange you should pick that up."

"What's strange about it?"

"Not so loud, Sam. You'll soon see."

"Will I want to?"

"I'm sure you will. Wait till you see why we're waiting," she murmured, and returned to her desk.

She saw him lower himself into a seat, apparently not noticing that he was opposite a more than pretty girl about his age, and frown over the book. She couldn't help wondering how he would greet Sylvia.

On catching sight of her, Margo had released a cry of mingled delight and dismay that had made all the students raise their heads like club members scenting an intruder. She'd stood on tiptoe to give Sylvia a hug across the counter as a foretaste of the one she'd delivered as soon as the flap was out of their way.

"Don't you ever stay away so long again," she'd whispered, and not much less fiercely,

"Look what happens to you when you do." At once she'd been abashed, not only by her words.

"Sorry. This isn't like me usually. Just years catching up with me. We're on our way now,"

she'd told everyone in the library. "Are you coming, Heather? Too much work, poor girl. Then we'll pick you up for lunch."

They'd eaten in Peace & Beans, the vegetarian restaurant on the far side of the campus, but Sylvia had consumed nowhere near enough to satisfy her mother.

"We're going to have to feed you up," Margo had declared, poking around in her vegetable moussaka as though hoping some meat might have sneaked into it. While she'd done most of the talking, to Heather she'd said only "Isn't he?" and "Isn't she?" and "Didn't I?" and more of the same kind of punctuation. She'd proposed that Sylvia should stay at Heather's, where there was more room-Heather would have made the offer herself if she'd had the chance.

Holding Sylvia's thin cold hands, she'd assured her she could stay for as long as they were sisters, and had made that her cue to return belatedly to work while Margo took Sylvia into town to buy her clothes. Heather wasn't about to resent that-she'd had presents from Margo herself, really quite a few of them. All she wanted now was for as many of her family as possible to be together.

She thought more than two young students were chattering and giggling in the corridor until the American voices outdistanced their echoes. Margo held the door open for Sylvia, who was loaded with three large shopping bags. "Sam,"

Margo called and put a quick though jokey finger to her lips. "Do you know who this is?" she asked in a whisper that would have reached the limits of a bigger room.

Sam leaned his hands on two pages of The Secret Woods and raised himself into a crouch. "Where did I see her before?" he wondered aloud.

"Let's get reacquainted outside, shall we?" Heather said and left Nick and Sarita to staff the desk for the evening.

Sam started when she touched his arm to move him. Once they were all in the corridor and the door was shut, Margo said not quite impatiently enough to leave affection behind "It's your aunt Sylvia."

"I know," Sam said, and turned to Sylvia. "I was just looking at you."

"Well, don't be shy of each other," Margo cried.

Aunt and nephew performed a hug that struck Heather as, at least on Sam's part, awkward. As they separated Sylvia asked him "When were you looking?"

"You're on your book I was reading."

"Heather was as well. Seems like it has a new lease of life."

"I feel as if we all have," said Margo. "She must have brought it with her, mustn't she, Heather?"

"I don't know who else could have."

Sylvia took Sam's arm. "I'm going to be rooming with you if that's all right with you,"

she said.

"Can't see how it couldn't be."

Perhaps it was his apparent confusion that inspired her to say "You've raised yourself a real knight, Heather. Remember when you told me one lived behind the house?"

"I can't say I do."

"When I was little and I asked who Goodman was and why it was his wood."

"I still don't remember."

"Now, girls," Margo protested, "you aren't going to start arguing as soon as you're back together."

"I think I rather grew out of knights. I'll be happy if Sam's just a good person," Heather said, and hurried Margo and Sylvia past his embarrassment, out of the door he was holding open.

A dusk that she could taste was settling over the campus, rousing floodlights in their burrows at the foot of the sandstone facade. "You'll have had enough of me for one day,"

Margo said to whoever might have. "Somebody call me tomorrow and we'll fix a date for dinner very soon."

"Can I visit dad tomorrow?" Sylvia said.

"So long as you don't let him know in advance that you're here," Margo said, apparently no more certain than Heather if the question had expressed eagerness or nervousness,

"otherwise he'll never be able to sleep."

She left Sylvia with another hug and restrained herself to a single backward glance. As Heather's party made for the Civic, Sylvia nodded at Sam's limp. "The wounded knight," she mused. "Mom was telling me how you hurt yourself fighting for the trees."

"Fell out of one, that's all."

"I doubt it's anything like all, Sam."

He was silent as a tree-stump until Heather took out her keys. "Shall I drive so you can talk?" he suggested.

"Girls in the front, boys in the back," Sylvia said at once.

Heather was silent while she drove through the evening migration. Indeed, nobody spoke until most of Brichester had withdrawn over the horizon and the woods loomed ahead like a storm cloud fallen to earth, its eastern edge flickering with headlights on the bypass.

Abruptly Sylvia said "When were you last in the woods, Sam?"

He took so long to reply that Heather almost urged him to speak up. "Must have been yesterday," he said.

"You didn't say you'd been there," Heather objected.

"Granddad wanted me to."

"In that case it was kind of you. Will you have much to tell him?"

"I don't know what he'd want to hear."

"The truth, I should think, unless there's anything that might distress him."

"Don't a lot of things?"

She would have had to lean sideways to observe Sam's face. Ahead [57 the interior of the woods was fluttering with elongated shadows, and she caught herself wondering how that might appear to Lennox-as though a vast dark shape was flexing all its legs? Perhaps it was this sight that prompted Sylvia to ask "What do you think we'd find in there now?"

"Whatever's usually there," Heather said.

"And what's that, Heather?"

"The sort of things woods generally have in them."

"Are you saying that because you read my book?"

"I'm saying it because it's just a wood."

At the limit of her headlamp beams a lorry shuddered half out of the inside lane. "Have there been many accidents along here?" Sylvia said.

"More than there used to be before they widened it," Sam told her. "The workmen had some with their equipment when they were. They kept saying someone in the woods was distracting them. Wouldn't you know they said it was us."

Sylvia peered into the oncoming forest, and Heather resisted imagining how it might look to their father, as if the dark or something else as vast was stalking many-legged under cover of the trees. Her sister seemed entranced by whatever she was seeing, until she demanded

"Is that him?"

Heather gripped the wheel as the car threatened to veer. "Who? Where?"

"Dad."

Of course, the Arbour was in sight on the opposite side of the bypass. A man was standing in the gateway, back-lit by the floodlights of the hospital, and lowering from his mouth a trail of smoke. "He'll be a nurse," Heather said.

"Where's dad's room?"

"Upstairs at the front."

Sylvia covered her face and made herself as small as she could without removing her seatbelt. The car had rounded the curve towards Goodmanswood, and the trees had put out the lights of the Arbour, before she lowered her hands and sat up. "Mom said I shouldn't disturb his sleep."

As Heather turned onto the Goodmanswood road the woods and their mass of shadows continued to sidle alongside until the first crooked line of small ungainly cottages intervened.

Once the houses had grown larger and newer the High Road sailed by, keeping, its shops and scattering of restaurants alight for almost nobody just now. A side street bulky with pairs of houses brought the Prices to Woodland Close, where several little girls with coats over pale blue ballet costumes were being escorted by parents into the community centre. "Did you ever go to that school, Sam?" Sylvia said.

"It wasn't one by the time I started."

"There was so much to see out of the windows I don't know how often the teachers had to tell me not to look."

Presumably she had been looking at the woods. Heather parked on the flagstones outside the house and heard the dogged rhythm of a piano underlining the voice of a ballet teacher: "All be trees." Sam took charge of the bags of shopping while Sylvia hoisted her shoulder bag, and it was only then that Heather thought to ask "Where's your luggage?"

"I left it in London till I knew I had a place to stay."

"How could you think you wouldn't have?"

"Maybe I thought you might feel I'd been away for so long I'd turned into a stranger."

"You're no stranger than you used to be, Sylvie."

"I'll take that as a compliment, shall I? I can't tell you how it feels to be home."

Heather thought Sylvia's eyes must be unfocused by emotion, since she appeared to be gazing not so much at as through the house. Sam had barely opened the front door when Sylvia stepped over the threshold. As the keypad of the alarm ceased beeping under his fingertips she advanced to hang her shoulder bag over the end of the banister, then stretched her arms wide, embracing everything she saw.

"That's where the trees came," she said, pointing to the corner where the staircase met the wall.

"We still have one every Christmas," Heather said.

"Here's where I used to lean my bike till mom got tired of the marks on the carpet,"

Sylvia said, and pushed doors open. "Here's where we watched too much television if you believed mom, except she thought any was too much. What's this room now, just somewhere to sit and read? We did a lot of that too, Sam, only it was our playroom as well. This is still the dining-room, I bet, and I know where the kitchen is. How about my room?"

"You can have, it's the guest room now. It used to be dad's study."

Sylvia scampered upstairs so fast she almost neglected to grab her bag. "That's where we used to hang our schoolbags when we came home," she remembered. "Who's in my room now?"

"Right now, nobody," Heather said, since that was how the question had sounded.

"It's Sam's room."

"I hope you'll let me come in sometimes, Sam, for old times' sake."

As Heather opened the door of the guest room she heard dogs start to bark nearby. The room was still recognisable as a study. The reference books and filing cabinet full of their father's papers had been transferred to the university, but Margo had left his desk and its chair as though they might one day summon him back. Heather found herself willing Sylvia to like the rest of the room, the plump green quilt, the fat green pillows, the wallpaper patterned with leaves, but her sister went straight to the desk. She sat on the chair, dropping her bag next to it, then interwove her fingers to prop her chin. "You don't know how much I appreciate this, Heather."