Mr Toppit (44 page)

I think he thought I was going to hit him: he cowered as I knelt down by them. Rachel was covered in blood and she was very still.

“She wanted me to do it, too,” he said. “She asked me to.”

His arms were cut and bleeding. He held them up to show me, as if that proved something. All it proved was that he lacked the nerve to carry it through for himself. All it proved was that he would never be the person she was. He didn’t have it in him.

“Fuck off,” I said. I didn’t have time for him. He was irrelevant.

Her blood would go all over me but I didn’t care. I lifted her head and laid it in my lap. She was cold, but damp: clammy, I think you’d call it. Her hair smelled of the earth and leaves. I licked my fingers and tried to wipe some of the dirt off her face. I undid the chakra pendant from round her neck and put it into my pocket. I didn’t want it to go missing.

I said it was the only thing Rachel always kept with her through her years of drift. In fact, that wasn’t true, but I would not discover the other thing she had kept until some days later, when sorting out her things could be construed less as an intrusion than an attempt to be systematic. It was in her handbag, behind a little flap that you might easily have missed in a cursory rummage. She had always told me that the only significant thing she recovered from the bonfire Martha had had after Arthur’s death was the scrap of a story called “The Trip to Le Touquet,” but there had been something else. From the moment she found it, her plan must have been to destroy it but the act of doing so
became a curiously drawn-out process, a characteristically long work-in-progress. I doubt she would ever have done it. And, anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered as long as she managed to prevent me seeing it. That was what she was trying to do—to protect me. She’d thought I would be upset.

What was in her handbag, behind the little flap that you could easily have missed in a cursory rummage, was a couple of stained and charred bits of paper written on in Arthur’s hand: the first pages of the first
Hayseed
book. I suppose you might call it a first draft:

When you were young, or maybe not so long ago, not very far from where you live, or perhaps a little closer, Jordan Hayseed lived in a big old house. The woods behind the house were called the Darkwood and Jordan Hayseed thought he owned them, that they were his, that they were in his blood. If trees and leaves and brown earth could travel through veins, they did so through Jordan’s. But if he thought he was the only one to have them in his blood, he was very wrong, as wrong as it was possible to be
.

   I had to read it twice to spot the mistake:
Jordan Hayseed lived in a big old house
. Or not the mistake, depending on how you looked at it. Maybe I was the mistake. What had made Arthur change the main character? He had begun the first book after Jordan had died, had written it about his first son, the one lost to time and history. And he had imagined the kind of child he might have grown up to be, so unlike me. Years later, before the first one was published, maybe when Lila offered to do the illustrations, he had simply altered the name from “Jordan” to “Luke,” an act as simple as stealing down to the tree on Christmas morning while the children are still asleep and changing the name on a present. And that was what they were, the
books—a present, a gift, to me: unwanted, unasked-for maybe, but nonetheless valuable for that. The one thing I found hard to forgive Arthur for—and it’s odd to use the words “forgive” and “Arthur” in the same sentence: this was a man who had nothing to atone for, the one person with true dignity in this whole story—was that he didn’t give the present to both of us. It would have been so easy:
When you were young, or maybe not so long ago, not very far from where you live, or perhaps a little closer, Rachel and Luke Hayseed lived in a big old house
 … There was enough to go round. I wouldn’t have minded at all.

But, as I say, I wouldn’t discover all this until later. Now I’m sitting in the woods. It’s getting hot, not as hot as it will be by midday, but still warm enough to sit and feel the sun on our faces. Her head is a comfortable weight on me, like a heavy blanket. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay there before I have to start doing all the stuff that needs doing, but I’m not going to be hurried. All I want to think about is Rachel, but Martha and Lila keep straying in with their stories of Christmas in Lübeck, candles flickering on the tree, the carriage wheels making tracks on the fresh snow as they take their presents to Uncle Heinrich’s father, the Judge, while the little twins, Anna-Elisabeth and Elisabeth-Anna, are shouting with excitement after decorating the tree with the new ornaments that Mutti ordered specially from Hamburg and Fritzi, that bundle of energy, looking quite the little man in his new sailor suit.