Human Croquet (15 page)

Eliza licked the edge of her Christmas present handkerchief and bent down again to wipe the corners of Isobel’s mouth. She rubbed so hard that Isobel was forced to take an involuntary step backwards. From somewhere above her head, Gordon’s voice sounded hollow, ‘Don’t rub so hard, Lizzy, you’ll rub her out,’ and she could see Eliza’s eyes narrowing and a thin blue vein on her forehead – the colour of hyacinths – grow visible through her fine skin and begin to throb. Eliza folded the handkerchief in a neat triangle and tucked it into the pocket of Isobel’s plaid wool coat and said,
In case you need to blow your nose.

The novelty of rug-dwelling soon wore off. The children shivered disconsolately and ate jam sandwiches and Kit-Kats until they felt queasy. ‘This isn’t much fun,’ Charles said and threw himself off the rug into a pile of leaves and started burying himself like a dog. Having fun was very important to Charles, having fun and making people laugh. ‘He’s just looking for attention,’ Vinny said.
And he gets it – isn’t that clever?
Eliza said. Charles’ hair was almost the same colour as the dying forest – tawny oak and curly copper-beech. He could have got lost in the pile of leaves and never be found until the spring.

Vinny heaved herself up from the rug with a struggle and said, ‘I have to go and you-know-what,’ and vanished into the trees. Minutes passed and she didn’t come back. Gordon laughed and said, ‘She’ll go for miles, to make sure nobody sees her bloomers,’ and Eliza made a nauseated face at the idea of Vinny’s underclothes and got up suddenly from the rug and said,
I’m going for a walk,
without looking at any of them and set off along the path, in the opposite direction to Vinny.

‘We’ll come with you!’ Gordon shouted after her and she spun round very quickly so that her big camel coat swung round her legs, showing her dress underneath in a swirl of green, and shouted back,
Don’t you dare!
She sounded furious. ‘She has completely the wrong shoes on,’ Gordon muttered angrily and bowled a rotten apple overarm into the trees behind them. Just before she disappeared round the turning in the path, Eliza stopped and shouted something, the words ringing clearly in the crisp air –
I’m going home, don’t bother following me!

‘Home!’ Gordon exploded. ‘How does she think she’s to get home?’ and then he got up too and set off in pursuit of Eliza, shouting over his shoulder to Charles, ‘I won’t be a sec – stay here with your sister!’ and with that he was gone as well.

All sense of time had disappeared. It felt as if they’d been alone in the wood for hours. Where were Gordon and Eliza? Where was Vinny? Had she been eaten by a wild animal while doing you-know-what? Charles’ broad, jolly face had grown pale and pinched with worry. Eliza always told them that if they got separated from her when they were out then
you must stay exactly where you are
– and she would come and find them. Charles’ belief in this statement had waned considerably over the last hour or two.

Eventually he said, ‘Come on, let’s go and find everybody,’ and dragged Isobel up from the rug by her hand. ‘They’re just playing Hide-and-Seek probably,’ he said, but his whey-face and the wobble in his voice betrayed his real feelings. Being the grown-up in charge was taking its toll on him. They set off in the same direction that Eliza and Gordon had followed, the path quite clear – hard, trodden-down earth, laddered occasionally with tree-roots.

He was brushing his way through a curtain of twigs that snapped back and hit her in the face like thin whips. When she finally caught up with him he was standing as rooted as a tree with his back to her, as if he was playing statues, his arms sticking out from his body. In one hand he was holding the shoe. The fingers of the other hand were stretched out wide and flat and Isobel took hold of Charles’ sycamore leaf hand and together they stood and looked.

At Eliza. She was lolled against the trunk of a big oak tree, like a carelessly abandoned doll or a broken bird. Her head had flopped against her shoulder, stretching her thin white neck like a swan or a stalk about to snap. Her camel coat had fallen open and her woollen dress, the colour of bright spring leaves, was fanned out over her legs. She had one shoe off and one shoe on and the words to
Diddle-diddle dumpling
ran through Isobel’s head.

They cuddled up to Eliza, trying to keep her warm, trying to keep themselves warm – one on each side of her like some sadly sentimental tableau (
‘Won’t you wake up, Mother dear?’
). Leaves drifted down occasionally. Three or four leaves were already snagged on Eliza’s black curls. Charles stood up and, dog-like, shook leaves off his own head. It was really quite dark now, it was all very well saying follow the light but what if there was no light to follow? When Isobel tried to stand up her legs were so numb that she could hardly balance and fell down again. And she was so hungry that for a dizzy moment she wanted to bite into the bark of the tree. But she would never do that because Eliza used to tell them a story called ‘The Oldest Tree In The Forest’ so that Isobel knew the bark of a tree was really its skin and she knew how painful a bite on your skin could be because Eliza was always biting them. And sometimes it hurt.

Charles said, ‘We have to find Daddy,’ his voice shrill in the quiet, ‘he’ll come and get Mummy.’ They looked doubtfully at Eliza, reluctant to leave her here all alone in the cold and the dark. Her cheeks were icy to the touch, they felt their own cheeks in comparison. If anything they were even colder. Charles started to gather up leaves and pile them over Eliza’s legs. They remembered the summer at the seaside, burying Eliza’s lower half in sand while she sat in her red halter-neck swimming-costume reading a book, wearing the sunglasses that made her look foreign and glamorous, and stubbing out her cigarettes in the sand turret they’d built around her (
You’ve got me prisoner!
). For a warm second Isobel could feel the sun on her shoulders and smell the sea. ‘Help me,’ Charles said and she shuffled leaves forward with her feet for Charles to scoop up in handfuls and throw on Eliza.

Then they kissed her, one on either cheek, in a strange reversal of the bedtime ritual. They left reluctantly, looking back at her several times. When they reached the ditch of leaves they turned round one last time but they couldn’t see Eliza any more, only a pile of dead leaves against a tree.

The wood was full of noises. Occasionally the darkness was shot through by strange sounds – screeches and whistles – that seemed to have no earthly origin. Twigs snapped and crackled and the undergrowth rustled malevolently as if something invisible was stalking them.

Every direction felt unsafe. An owl swept soundlessly on its flightpath, low over their heads, and Isobel was sure she could feel its claws touching her hair. She threw herself on the ground in a frenzy of panic that left Charles unmoved. ‘It’s just an owl, silly,’ he said, yanking her back up on to her feet. Her heart was ticking very fast as if it was about to go off. ‘It’s not the owls we have to worry about,’ Charles muttered grimly, ‘it’s the wolves,’ and then, remembering that he was supposed to be the man in charge of this woeful expedition, added, ‘Joke, Izzie – forget I said that.’

Moving on was slightly less terrifying than standing still waiting for something to pounce, so they soldiered on miserably. Isobel found some comfort in the warm grubbiness of Charles’ hand clasped around hers. Charles remembered a snatch of verse,
It isn’t very good in the middle of the wood.

Tree after tree after tree, all the trees in the world were in Boscrambe Wood that night.
In the middle of the night when there isn’t any light.
Perhaps instead of letting them loose in her
big green field,
Eliza has chosen to set them free in an endless wood instead. Isobel thought she would have preferred it if she’d just returned them to the baby shop.

The path turned a corner and forked suddenly. Charles took the farthing out of his pocket and said, ‘Toss for it – heads right, tails left,’ in the manliest way he could muster and Isobel said, ‘Tails,’ in a weak voice. The coin landed wren-side up and the little bird pointed its beak at the left-hand path. As if on cue, the moon – full to bursting – dodged out from behind her cloud cover and hung over the left-hand path for a few brief seconds like a neon sign. ‘Follow the light,’ Charles said decisively.

The path was becoming overgrown, brambles reached out and plucked at their clothes and tweaked their hair like bird’s claws. It was so dark by now that it took them some time to realize they weren’t really on a path at all any more. A few steps further on and their Start-rite shoes began to be sucked into the ground. Everywhere that they tentatively poked their toes proved wet and boggy. They had heard stories of people being drowned in quicksand, sinking into bogs and they plunged on quickly through thorns to a higher and drier piece of ground.

‘Things can’t get any worse,’ Charles said miserably, just before the fog started to advance, wraithlike, towards them. It curled around the trees and grew thicker, like opaque water, wave after wave, engulfing everything in a ghostly white sea of fog. Isobel started to wail, very loudly, and Charles said, ‘Put a sock in it, Izzie. Please.’

Too weary to go any further, too confused by the fog, they curled up at the foot of a big tree, nestling in between its enormous roots, which arched over the ground like gnarled bony fingers. There were plenty of dead leaves here for a blanket but they remembered Eliza under her leaf cover and pulled their coats tighter. A cold counterpane of fog settled itself around them instead.

Isobel fell asleep immediately but Charles lay awake waiting for the wolves to start howling.