Ninepins (16 page)

‘It was brilliant, Mum. Dougie got under the tree, all in among the presents, and started making this growly noise and ripping the paper to bits. I think he smelled those chocolate reindeer we got for the boys. Everything got wrecked. It was hysterical – Dad couldn't stop laughing.'

Then there was the stuffing and bread sauce to make for tomorrow's deferred Christmas dinner. Willow lingered to watch and Laura suggested she might like to do the brandy butter, which was usually Beth's speciality.

‘I wouldn't know how,' protested Willow.

‘That's OK. I can give you instructions. It's very straightforward.'

‘No, honestly. But I can peel potatoes.'

So Willow rolled up her sleeves and prepared the potatoes and parsnips and sprouts, and giggled like a little kid when Laura unconsciously began to hum
I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus
.

‘Do you think I should put the stuffing inside the bird or serve it in a separate dish?' Laura asked her.

The vegetable peeler halted. ‘Dunno.'

‘Well, the turkey takes longer to cook with it inside. But it depends if you think it tastes better.'

The peeler resumed, gouging viciously at a parsnip. ‘Don't ask me. My mother's a bloody vegetarian.'

Laura looked at her, curious at the sudden vehemence. ‘So, what then, you had nut roast, I suppose?'

‘Something like that,' said Willow.

Preparing all that food had failed to give either of them an appetite for lunch, so Laura suggested a walk along the lode towards Elswell. The day was bright, lifting by a few degrees the night's frost. The trodden earth of the path, though iron beneath, gave under their boots to a depth of a millimetre or so; the water of the lode might not be stone, but a lip of ice lined both banks and here and there in patches in midstream the surface had a treacherously glassy, criss-crossed look. On the north flank of the dyke, away from the sun, the tussocky grass still harboured pockets of white at its roots. Below the dyke to the garden side, the empty pumphouse, still waiting to dry out before renovation work could begin, sat stoical, its brickwork sheened in pearly grey.

They walked side by side without speaking. Laura let her eye drift along the southern horizon, enjoying the uncluttered line of the land, the pale empty chill of the sky. Willow's gaze was off to the north, where perhaps she might to be doing much the same. The fields between Ninepins and Elswell village were not large by the standards of the fens. The land to either side of the lode spread out in a patchwork of squares and strips, some ploughed to frozen clods, some harrowed and showing green with winter wheat, others lumpy with white-rimed beetroot and celery and cabbages. There were no hedges between the fields, which were demarcated only by smaller drainage ditches or simply by lines of yellow grass, toughened and slanted by the wind.

Trees and shrubs were few, and grew mainly along the roads and farm tracks, where the ground was banked up above the wet. There were none of the usual stately trees that define the English countryside – no oak, beech, ash or horse chestnut – but only scrubby hawthorn and wild plum and the inevitable, ubiquitous willow.

‘You've got the right name for living round here,' she said, breaking the long silence.

The girl looked at her, uncomprehending.

‘Willow.' She indicated a long row of it, edging a drove which zigzagged close to them on the north side. ‘There's almost nothing but, in this part of the world.'

‘That's willow? The one with the red branches?'

‘That's right.' That brilliant scarlet-orange of the willow rods, which was often the only spice of colour in the winter grey. ‘Willows love the damp. And their roots hold the soil together.'

Willow's eyes returned to scan the horizon. ‘Why are there no trees? No proper ones, I mean.'

‘Like oaks, say? Like the ones in the villages south of Cambridge?' Where the land had contours, where the land was truly land. ‘How long does an oak tree take to grow? Two hundred, three, four, five hundred years? This place was only reliably reclaimed more recently than that. When those trees were saplings this place was still a marsh.'

Listening, Willow nodded.

‘And think how deep their roots must need to go, some of those big trees. A hundred feet or more, perhaps. Here the water table is too high.' She always imagined it there, the black water, lying just beneath the surface, waiting to take back its own – as it had on the night the pumphouse flooded. ‘They'd never survive. The soil is too waterlogged. It would rot them from below.'

Laura was speaking largely to herself, doing little more than thinking aloud. Doubtless she was boring the poor kid. Though it didn't appear that way, for Willow was looking thoughtful. ‘Waterlogged,' she murmured, as if she, too, were speaking to herself.

At the first of the brick cottages which marked the road and the beginnings of Elswell, they turned round by mutual consent and headed back the way they had come. On their outward course, Laura had been conscious of no breath of wind but now, turning back towards the east, she felt its sting on the bare skin of her face. Within a hundred yards, her eyes were blurred with tears and Willow's, beside her, looked the same.

‘This is more like it,' said Laura with a grin. ‘This is how a Christmas walk ought to be. Absolutely freezing.'

Willow nodded but she didn't smile. After a little way she said, ‘Can't say I've been on one before.'

‘A walk on Christmas day?'

The silence was affirmation.

‘It's something we've always done. Just along the lode for some fresh air, while the turkey's in the oven.' When it was just she and Simon, before Beth was born, they used to eat their Christmas dinner in the evening to give them longer out of doors. One year they walked almost to Ely. ‘There's never any shortage of it here. Fresh air, that is.'

Presently, Willow said, ‘Janey wasn't a big one for walking anywhere. She'd take the car to post a letter.'

‘How many Christmases did you have at her house?'

‘Two. It was OK, actually. Lots of people about, so plenty of laughs. And Janey could cook all right. She always did about six sorts of potatoes, so there was something everyone liked. Roast, and boiled, and mash, and chips.'

‘Chips with Christmas dinner?'

Willow grinned. ‘You'd be surprised. Chips are the only thing some people will eat.'

‘Don't tell me. Ketchup as well as cranberry sauce?'

‘You bet.'

Laura rubbed her gloved hands together, palm over knuckles, coaxing them to warmth. ‘It can't have been easy, though, for some of the kids.'
For you
, is what she meant.

Willow did not respond. She was staring into the distance, where the lone grey square of Ninepins had risen into view.

Gently, Laura pushed. ‘At Christmas, I mean, being away from their families.' Thinking about past Christmases. Happy memories or unhappy ones: either way, it could only be painful.

The reply, when it came, was gruff. ‘Bloody glad to be there, some of them.'

And what about you?
But it was too much. Of course she couldn't ask it – any more than she could reach out and hook Willow's hand under her arm, as she itched to do, and pull her nearer as they walked along.

Instead, she tried another tack. ‘So you never went for walks at Christmas before that, either? With your mum?'

She wondered if she had gone too far and alienated her companion, because Willow's eyes remained fixed ahead and she didn't reply. The rasp of her breathing in the cold air had ceased. Then quite suddenly she exhaled on a short, percussive sigh, which was half way to being a laugh.

‘It wasn't like that. She didn't really do Christmas.'

 

That evening, when Laura had taken the car to go and fetch Beth home, Willow reached under the spare bed and took out the blue shoebox. It had dried out completely now. The cardboard had rehardened, slightly out of shape and more rigid than before, with long creases set into the sides and lid. Inside, the contents were all edged in blue where the colour had run from the box. She lifted out a handful at random. Unlike the box, the paper within seemed to have softened in the water and kept its softness as it dried, like tissue or fine blotting paper. Peeling apart the individual sheets without ripping them required slow patience, teasing apart the places where they were stuck. Where there was handwriting, the ink had blurred and fuzzed. Most of it, though, could still be read.

The photographs had fared better. Their glossy surface may have repelled the moisture, their colours perhaps more securely fixed. One or two had glued themselves together, but the rest were intact.

Methodically, she worked through the small stack of prints until she found the one she was looking for. It was taken on an old Instamatic camera her mother had once had, a junk shop relic of the 1970s. The picture was of Willow at the age of five or six, holding a camping kettle and squinting at the lens. On her head was a white denim sunhat.

She recognised the room in which she stood only from the photograph. It was in Peterborough, she thought: a bedsit her mother had rented for a while. But although the background was familiar – the low, Formica-topped sideboard behind her younger self, the framed Van Gogh irises, the yellow wall – she could conjure nothing of the rest of the room. Nor could she remember the hall or stairway or the outside of the house, or any of the other tenants, but she knew there was a bus-stop at the end of the street, outside the shop with the photograph of the racehorse. A bookmakers, she now assumed. Back then it had never occurred to her to wonder what was inside the shop; she had only been entranced by the horse, which was taller than she was, almost the full height of the window, and which galloped towards her, suspended in motion with all its hooves off the ground at once.

The other clear recollection was what her mother was saying as she took the photograph. ‘This is to remember us setting off. We'll take pictures of everything we do, and afterwards we'll get a scrapbook and stick them all in.' But there never was a scrapbook, nor any other photos.

It had been dark when her mother shook her awake.

‘Come on, baby. Get up.' There was urgency in her voice, a suppressed excitement. ‘Let's get you dressed. We're going camping.'

It was something they had never done – not then, though there was one time years later, at Glastonbury, in a van belonging to a man called Snake. Camping had made her think of story books. She had an old picture book with a torn cover that she'd found in a room they once slept in, about Orlando the marmalade cat who went on a camping holiday, with a little green tent like a wigwam, and a fire made of twigs, and a kettle hanging between two forked sticks.

‘Like Orlando?' she remembered asking.

Her mother went round pulling all sorts of things out of drawers and cupboards and piling them on the carpet. Clothes for herself and clothes for Willow, T shirts and shorts and jumpers; knives and forks and spoons and the plastic bowls, one red and one yellow, that she'd had when she was a baby and might break the proper ones; blankets and sheets and a thermos and the tin-opener; the frying pan from its hook, and the little tin camping kettle. Willow had never seen the kettle before. At least, it wasn't something they ever used or that she'd noticed packed in the boxes when they'd moved house. She liked its round shape, the high curved handle, the stubby spout. It was exactly like Orlando's kettle in her book. She recalled picking it up and stroking it – or was that something her mind had constructed later, because she was holding the kettle in the photograph?

‘Are we going to the seaside?' Willow had wanted to know.

But Mum told her they were going to the countryside. She said they'd find a place near the woods where they would gather wood for a campfire, and there'd be a stream nearby where they'd draw their water for cooking and washing, and where Willow could clean her teeth.

‘We'll find wild garlic and pick nettles for soup, and maybe there'll be mushrooms in the wood that we can fry for our breakfast. If it's fine weather, we'll sleep out under the sky. I'll show you the houses of the zodiac and tell you the meanings of the constellations, and you can count the stars until you fall asleep.'

She had no recollection of packing the things or what they carried them in, or whether there was even a tent. Her only memory was of being at the bus stop and gazing at the suspended racehorse. She was fascinated by the pieces of soil thrown up by its feet, which hung in the air, so still that you could see the grass stuck to them. She loved its narrow nose, which looked so velvet soft she could have stretched out her hand and stroked it, if she could have reached. And if it hadn't been split by those two terrible nostrils, which she didn't let herself look at properly in case she could see right inside its head.

The bus didn't come.

On the backs of all the photographs, as nearly as she knew them, Willow had written the dates. Vince, who had the files, had sat down and helped her; he'd seemed to think it served a purpose. For this one, she wasn't sure of a year. It must have been 1999, she supposed, or maybe 1998. But for once she could be certain about the date.
December 25
.

 

‘We saw a heron, Mum.'

Beth burst into the kitchen ahead of Vince and Willow. Laura hadn't joined them for the Boxing Day walk, but had sent them the other way along the lode, towards the main road and beyond in the direction of Wicken and Ely, while she stayed behind to keep an eye on the turkey.

‘It was in some bushes on that lower path – you know, where the fishermen are, sometimes – and it didn't see us 'til we were almost up to it, and then it flapped up right in front of us. It was huge.'

Her cheeks were flushed but she was scarcely wheezing at all. This cold, clear weather was what she needed. ‘Seriously, it was massive. It didn't half make us jump. Willow shrieked.'