Sophie (2 page)

I saw more of Sophie than anyone else, child or adult, and so I was wise to her ways and her habits. Where another person, a stranger, might have found some of Sophie’s behaviour strange—and certainly precocious—it never occurred to me that this was anything other than, as before, simply the way of things. So it was only natural that Sophie spoke differently, used a separate set of words, when she was alone with me. When at school, or with adults, I would sometimes grow frustrated with her, because she seemed so stupid; she would be unable to answer questions to which she had told me the answers years before, and would sometimes appear to have trouble finding the right word to use (and I knew she was pretending). It was annoying, at times, but when I questioned her about this, wanted to know what she was doing, she would only say that it was a game.

“It’s not a very funny game,” I said once.

“It’s not that sort of game, Mattie. It’s like—it’s a skive, you know? Like pretending to be clumsy so you aren’t asked to do the washing up.”

“How does it work?” I asked, rather intrigued by this.

“Well—in class, let’s suppose, if the teacher wants you to answer a question, and you know the answer, what would you do?”

“Put my hand up.”

“And tell her. Right?”

“Yes.”

“But if you do that, you’ll be asked more and more. Who’s the cleverest person in your class?”

“Robert. He always finishes first, and gets the most stars.”

“OK. But I expect that Mrs. Jeffries asks Robert more questions than she asks you?”

“Sometimes. And he has to do more of the workbooks, because he finishes first,” I said proudly, beginning to see the point that she was making.

“All right. So it would be easier to pretend not to know—just sometimes—so that people don’t take too much notice of you. Then you don’t have to work too hard, but you still do OK—you don’t come bottom in class or anything like that. Do you understand?”

“Yes!” I said, excited. “That’s really clever, Sophie.”

“It just makes sense. Teachers go very strange if you’re good at something. You know that girl who’s really good at maths—the one in the fifth form? She always has to sit in at break and do work, and they’re all talking about scholarships to her next school and so on. It’s a lot of bother.”

“Is that what you’re really good at?”

“I’m OK at maths. I’ve seen the books that the third form are using. I’m good at most things.”

“You’re really lucky,” I said. “I’d like to be good at everything. Then I wouldn’t have to do any work.”

She sighed. “Oh, Mattie,” she said, and cuddled me tightly. “That’s what I’ve been
saying
. If you were good at everything, you’d have to do far more work than you do now. . . .”

But this seemed silly, and I decided that she was making another one of her strange jokes, and forgot about it for a time. It was only after many years, when I had managed to achieve some degree of objectivity in relation to the memories of that earlier childhood, that I was startled to realize the elaborate deceit that Sophie practised in order to avoid detection as being “good at everything.” At seven years old, she had a more advanced and more subtle grasp of the nature and restrictions of intelligence than many adults. She also had a clear awareness of her own individuality, most especially in comparison with other children her own age.

And I, living in the shadow cast by a sun occluded of its own accord, hardly noticed at all—and what I did notice was a slender fraction of the reality. When Sophie came to take her entrance examination to her secondary school—which she did at age twelve, due to the somewhat unusual structure of our prep school, which accepted children of both sexes—she had to take an IQ test. For some reason this, far more than the prospect of the other impending exams, worried her; I assumed because she had never sat such a test before, and was unsure of what to expect. Several weeks before the exam was due, she bought a number of books designed to test your IQ at home, and went through them carefully, studying. She also completed the tests given in the books, marking her answers and tabulating her results. Many children—the more perceptive, anyway—know the trick of learning what to expect in IQ tests, and manage to bolster their results by as much as five or ten points. By the time the date of the actual exam arrived, Sophie had managed to maintain a steady result of around 125; bright, but not fiercely intelligent; in the top ten percent of the country, by average, but not in the top five. She was a solid enough candidate, considering the quality of her other papers, and the school was happy to take her.

I was ten at that time, of course. I looked through the spent and scribbled-on IQ books that Sophie had thrown away. It had taken her six or seven attempts before her results became constant, and she could accurately and consistently predict a score of 125; the last three tests all scored between 120 and 130. But the first test that she had completed, before she began to check her answers and learn what to do, indicated an IQ in excess of 180. The chart in the book didn’t go any further.

The spring began to make itself known in our school playground, and there was colour for the first time in the flowerbeds and window boxes. The earliest manifestation of the new year had been the frog spawn, but now—making up for lost time, it seemed—there was life and growth everywhere. The trees on the hill behind our house cracked open with green, and the air began to lose the sting of winter, and become heady with the smells of leaf mold and sap from the sticky-buds in the lane. It became more reasonable to spend time out of doors, and Sophie and I availed ourselves of the chance to do so. It often appears to me, looking back, that I lived a huge part of my childhood outside.

Even the gardener acquired a newfound animation with the arrival of spring. Abandoning the seclusion of his shed in the orchard for greater and greater stretches of time, he moved about the garden as if on a predetermined path, from bush to shrub to sapling, carrying the instruments of his trade with him. Shyly, I stood and watched him when I could, for the gardener fascinated me in a way that no other adult ever had. He reminded me, more than anything, of the people and animals in
Alice in Wonderland
, which Sophie had read to me. I saw in his movements through the garden no kind of order at all; almost as if the reasons for what he was doing had been long forgotten. With two bits of board he gathered together the raked piles of leaves and put them in the wheelbarrow, ready to be taken over the stream to the bonfire. The places near the house began to look neat and well-tended, while the periphery of the garden remained chaotic and tangled as ever. My mother, who hardly ever set foot outside the house, never realized this.

One day, when Sophie was in her room doing homework and I was kneeling by the edge of the stream, watching the small fishes shoot back and forth under the water, the gardener came over to me. He walked awkwardly, as if not quite sure that he wanted to come close, and stopped a few yards off. We looked at one another in silence. From where I knelt, the gardener was outlined against the grey sky, his thin face hawk-like. He reached into one of the enormous pockets in his old brown coat and took out something fist-sized.

He held it out to me, not meeting my eyes. Excited, I took the thing from him carefully. It turned out to be a toad, cool in my cupped hands, and still sleepy from its winter rest.

“Thanks,” I said, genuinely pleased. The gardener jerked his head up once, a sort of backward nod, and tramped off along the bank of the stream, his boots leaving regular impressions in the soft earth. I held the toad, studying its humourous face and wonderful eyes, which were hard and crystalline, as if they were made of tiny shards of broken glass, and a golden colour of great clarity and beauty. The toad opened and closed its mouth thoughtfully, and pawed at my thumb gently with one arm. It didn’t appear to be in any hurry to go anywhere. After a little while, it peed on me. Enchanted, I ran to the house to share my toad with Sophie.

Unlike many girls, Sophie had no squeamishness for frogs or toads. She looked the toad over with appreciation. “He’s lovely,” she said. “Where did you find him?”

“In the garden,” I said. “By the stream.”

“He needs a home,” Sophie said. “Find a box or something and put some grass and soil in it for him to burrow in. Toads like to burrow.”

“And I like toads,” I declared. “This one’s a brown toad.”

Sophie wasn’t really listening. “If you like toads, there’s a good story I’ll read you,” she said. “We could start it this evening. And there are lots of other animals in it as well.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I’ll go and find the toad a house.”

My mother was in the drawing room. The standard-lamp by her chair was lit, and she was sitting, reading a magazine. I knocked on the half-open door with my free hand.

“Come in,” she said. I took off my shoes and crossed the carpet in my socks, feeling the lovely warmth of the pile through my toes.

“Mummy, may I please have a box to make a house with?”

She looked at me carefully. “Houses are girls’ toys, Matthew.”

I was too excited by the toad to think properly before answering. “Oh, this one’s not,” I said happily.

There was a long silence, and I knew at once that I had done something wrong. However hard I thought, I couldn’t see what it was.

“Don’t contradict me,” she said. I was suddenly frightened; the shadow of that shuffling, crumpled thing seeming to move over me for a moment. I blinked. “Do you hear?”

“Yes, Mummy,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I turned to leave; there were boxes in the kitchen, I thought, and no one would notice if I took one of those. But it was too late.

“What have you got there?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” I mumbled.

“What? Speak sense, for heaven’s sake. What are you holding?”

“It’s a toad,” I said, and held the toad out for her to see.

There was a pause while my mother observed the toad. Then, “Take it outside, Matthew, and get rid of it.” I must have looked distraught, because she added, in a different voice, “It wouldn’t like living indoors in any case, Matthew. It would most probably die, which would be upsetting for everyone. Let it go in the garden.”

And then she sank back into her chair an almost imperceptible distance, indicating that the matter was closed. I nodded, and left, collecting my shoes at the door.

“What did you think?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I thought anything. I didn’t hate her, if that’s what you’re asking. There wasn’t anything else. You get used to what’s around you.

“It was just the way of things?”

He gives a start. “Yes.” His eyes narrow for a second as he looks at me, and then he relaxes. “I began hating her much later. Because—because of a lot of things.”

I fix my eyes on a neutral area of the floor and say nothing.

two

The day was bright, with the fresh clarity of late spring. There was birdsong as we picked our way up the hill, the craggy stone wall to our right. There was a path worn through the field’s edge here, and flat, smooth stones as big as plates and cartwheels nosed out of the packed earth under our feet. Sophie covered the ground easily, sometimes stretching her arms out as if she were balanced on a high wire, sometimes pointing things out to me as I followed behind her. At the base of the wall grew clumps and scatterings of wildflowers, and some of these Sophie would pick, slowly building up a colourful bunch as we proceeded.

I was somewhat out of breath by the time we had crested the hill. The newly green trees, their leaves still crumpled from being buds, heralded the lip of the quarry, and we drew nearer with excitement. The quarry was icy and too far away to walk to comfortably in the winter, and so for a few months we had not seen it—had, in fact, confined ourselves to the garden and the lanes around the house, and the village. The forced proximity with my mother was uncomfortable enough on its own, but there was also a separate, almost tangible, sense of being constrained. Sophie had told me halfway through that week that, on Saturday, we would go to the quarry again, and I had been in a state of eager anticipation ever since.

The fence around the rim of the quarry was very old. It had been made of wooden slats at first, but when these had become silvery-grey with age, and started to fall apart, someone had interlaced the slats with wire—mostly wide-meshed fencing wire, but also some barbed wire along the top. The whole effort gave the impression of having been made without conviction, and the faded warning signs had not been replaced or repainted since I was born. It was with only a little effort that we could scramble around to a convenient gap. The quarry itself was fairly shallow on three sides, with a steeper fourth side where the cages were. Turning our feet sideways on, and shuffling rapidly downhill, Sophie and I traced a path down the scree and out onto the quarry floor.

We examined it carefully.

“There’s been some rocks down, over there,” I said, pointing.

“It’s not surprising,” Sophie said. “Winter weather does that sort of thing. The rocks freeze up in the cold, and then crack and fall down.”

I wasn’t interested. “Let’s look for shells.”

Sophie nodded. “Right. Go and see if the bag is still there.”

With a delicious sense of adventure building inside me, I trotted off across the wide expanse of strewn rock, heading for the cages. There was always something dangerous, and therefore exciting, about retrieving the bag at the beginning of a quarry afternoon. To do so meant to scramble up the loose rock at the foot of the steeper wall, and to get right up close to the mouth of the nearest cage. The cages were, in fact, more like caves with doors; deep holes extending horizontally into the rock face, and set with huge iron bars to stop people going in. The floor just inside, where you could still see it, was littered with ancient cans, brown with rust, their nature unidentifiable. There was a smell at the mouth of a cage that was something of damp, but more something else entirely.

The bag was there; I snatched it up, and hurried back to where Sophie was standing, my heart pounding, grinning like mad.

“There!”

Sophie took out the hammer, and we found a rock large enough to use as a crude, knee-high table.

“You can start looking for good rocks, now,” she said. “Pick the ones with shells on the outside, OK?”

“OK,” I said, and began searching among the debris.

Also in the bag, of course, was the large biscuit tin in which Sophie kept her books. While I was crouched down, turning over lumps of rock, Sophie would amuse herself by writing in her books, sometimes just a little of her funny scrawl, sometimes pages at a go. She wasn’t really writing, though: I was old enough to know enough of reading and writing for myself to see that Sophie’s Biro was scribbling gibberish, not real letters and words. But then, many of the things Sophie did were strange. She had been writing in the quarry books for as long as I could remember.

“What are they for?” I asked her once.

“It’s a bit like a diary,” she said.

“What do you write down?”

“Oh, lots of things. You know what a diary’s like, Mattie. You tell what’s happened to you that day, who you saw and what you did. It’s like writing a letter to someone, except you never send it.”

“Why do you do it, then?”

She smiled. “So that you’ve at least told
yourself
, you see?”

I didn’t see. More interesting than Sophie’s quarry books were the other things in the bag, the funnily shaped hammer with one flat end and one long, chisel-like end, for chipping and splitting rocks; the selection of chisels for use when the hammer alone was inadequate; the old screwdrivers, for scraping away the rock on delicate shells. It was mostly shells that I found in the quarry, and mostly one sort: round, curved ones, as large as Sophie’s thumbnail. Very occasionally, there were other sorts of shell, spiral shapes and roundels that were larger and far more impressive than the common ones. I was intrigued beyond measure by the shells—the way that they were seated so deeply in the rock. Sophie explained that they were shells from sea creatures, and that the quarry was a seabed from many years ago. It was obviously just a story, but it was such a strange and splendid story that I adopted it at once as truth. But I never found any fishes in the rock, no matter how hard and long I looked.

Sitting on the quarry floor, the sky was outlined with the branches of trees. Everything else was bleakly empty, with only the cages (at the one end) and some tufts of scraggy weeds (at the other) to suggest that you were anywhere other than a different planet.

I look back at myself now, and it is only an understanding of Sophie’s astonishing mind that prevents me from feeling a kind of contempt for myself. Sophie never lied to me. To other people, yes; and with measured and assured conviction, and she was never caught. But everything she told me was true. As I grew older, and gained some knowledge through my own schooling, and through dealings with others, I realized that some of the childhood fables I had grown up with—the fossil seabed on the hill behind our house, for example—were not fables at all, but plain fact. Sophie always told me the truth. But it was only very much later that I began to see that, if the most part of something is truth, then it follows simply that the remainder is likely to be as well. And so it was only very much later that I went back to the cages, on a foul and darkening day, with drizzle drifting across the empty quarry and the sky as bleak and bare as rock, to find out the truth.

He sits staring at the floor, his hands clenched together. His posture, opposite me, mimics mine, and his breathing is harsh like mine was earlier. After a while, he looks up.

“I didn’t believe you enough,” he says simply.

“When?”

“At any time. It doesn’t matter. Perhaps if I’d known enough to believe you, we—”

“We wouldn’t be here now?” I wonder if the words are safe.

He nods. “Not like this. Perhaps we
would
be here now, but—not like this.”

“Is that the only thing you’d change?”

He looks up, and there is a curious respect in his eyes; something I hadn’t thought I would see. “No. Hardly.”

“What else, then?”

His expression hardens. “Don’t push me, OK?”

I lower my eyes. “OK. Sorry.”

I wonder how long this has been in his mind, this confrontation with the past. I have begun to understand what I am caught up in, but despite the comprehension I still find it almost impossible to believe that we are sitting here talking through events that happened almost twenty years ago. The candle flame shifts, fluttering like a tongue. The corners of the room, I have seen, are littered with waxy stubs. Outside, the storm comes and goes. He must have been prepared for this night for some time.

“Sophie?”

I look up, startled.

“What would you change?”

I almost smile; the question begs an obvious response. Instead, I concentrate, scared that this is another test, not knowing what happens if I fail.

“I—I don’t know.”

“Oh, come on,” he says, annoyed. “You can do better than that.”

“I think I’d tell you more,” I say, letting the words out slowly, watching all the time to catch a glimpse of the wrong reaction from him. There’s nothing. “I think—I mean, you seem to know everything now in any case. Don’t you?”

“I know
what
happened. I just don’t know
why
. Why did you do it?”

“Do what?” I ask. A look of confusion crosses his face.

“Oh, all the things you did,” he says vaguely, and looks away. I say nothing, wary of the fact that I seem to have come near to something very dangerous.

The holly bush was a favourite place of mine. Set well back in the less tended regions of the garden, it was in reality more of a tree than a bush; the sagging lower branches, however, had drooped to the earth and rooted there. There was thus formed a sort of teepee-like hollow in the centre of the spiky foliage, as high at its centre as the lowest branches stemming from the trunk, into which a determined child could scramble through a less dense patch at one side. This entrance was itself screened from view by a scraggy privet hedge, and the whole hideout ensured a privacy that was implicit, but not actually guaranteed, in the rest of the garden.

Sophie, using an old tent from one of the sheds, and my help, had lined the holly bush with canvas, making it thoroughly waterproof under most normal conditions. The floor was covered as well, and it was lit by candlelight. The execution of this project took us a full fortnight during the summer, working every afternoon; the results, however, justified the time spent. Completely secluded, the holly bush was perfect in its isolation. I dearly wanted to spend a night in it, but there was no chance of that. The thick smell of the old canvas greeted you as you pushed your way under the heavy swatch of holly branches, and as the chamber inside filled with the hot smell of candles you could easily imagine yourself to be anywhere in the world. Sophie and I would sit with our backs to the central trunk, our legs pointing to the edges of the cone-shaped cavity. Bricks, taken from next to the farmer’s barn over the hill, and carried back one or two at a time over the course of many days, were built up into little pedestals for the candles, set at regular intervals around the periphery and roofed with tiles. Sophie was too practical to have thought of having the candles standing around unprotected.

She came back from the library while I was kicking my heels and singing quietly to myself. In one hand she had three books: a
Winnie the Pooh
, a thick hardback entitled
Introduction to Human Biology
, and a book of comic verse illustrated with colourful cartoon people. She was in a bad mood.

“It’s bloody aggravating,” she said, dumping down the books and struggling through the door-flap.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Look, I lit all the candles.”

“It’s the library that’s the matter,” she said. “Stupid old
cow
.”

“Who?”

“That woman in charge. They only let me take out three books, and I can’t ever get what I want. I have to take out two kids’ books and pretend they’re for me, and then ask for everything else by name and pretend that they’re for my parents. It’s a bind.”

“Why do you have to do that?”

“Because it would look odd if I went in every week to get my parents books, and if I just picked up the ones I wanted, instead of asking for them, they think I just want to look at pictures of tits and willies. So I have to say, 'Ex
cuse
me, but my father asked if I could pick up a copy of something called—I think it was, Boyer and Davison’s
Introduction to Human Biology
.' And I have to flutter my eyelids. Bloody hell.”

“Can I have this one?” I said, picking up the
Winnie the Pooh
.

“Yeah. It’s good, you’ll like it. I’ll read you some of it this evening, and the poems as well.”

“We’ve got some
Winnie the Pooh
at school,” I said. “And a picture on the wall.”

Sophie had her book open, resting it on her knees. I looked over her shoulder, secretly interested by her mention of tits and willies, but the picture on the page she had opened was of a man apparently covered in pieces of meat. Disappointed, I turned back to my own book.

We read for a while and then, taking
Winnie the Pooh
with us to read before bed, set off for supper. My mother never queried our long absences from the house, as long as we were present for meals; indeed, I’m not sure that she even recognized that we were gone most of the time. She had relatively little to do with us, and Sophie always made sure that I brushed my teeth and was in bed on time. If I woke up with a nightmare, she would as often as not bring me something to drink and soothe me back to sleep. Knowing that her room was only a few yards away was a comfort that I kept myself aware of when the light was out. My mother perhaps thought that all children were as quiet and untroublesome as Sophie and I.

The story that night made me laugh with delight, and Sophie’s variety of voices for the different animals had us both giggling. I went to sleep smiling, and the night was unperturbed by dreams.

He is smiling gently. “The holly bush is growing back again,” he says. “I had a look. I don’t think the main trunk ever died. It doesn’t look the way it used to, though. One of the things that has changed.”

“You can’t stop things changing,” I say.

“I never wanted to. Don’t be stupid.” He frowns. “That was what you wanted to do.”

“I did?”

“All along. I never realized until—later.”

“Are you sure that was how it was?”

“Yes.” He pauses, looking at me curiously. “You wanted to keep everything the same. I didn’t see it at the time. Strange, because you were so clever in one way, it always seemed like you were completely in control. Anything you wanted to happen, happened. You never even thought about it.” He pauses again. “Maybe that’s how you killed Ol' Grady. Anyway. It was like none of the ordinary rules applied to you. And when you couldn’t escape them, you just broke them.”