The Lives She Left Behind (21 page)

Left to himself, he kept vigil for the men in the plane as the wood and fabric slowly burnt away to leave the metal frame and nothing else that was recognisable. He thought about the waste of
life, he thought about the hard and hopeless wars he had known, and most of all he thought suddenly and unexpectedly about his sons, his once and only sons. Like an image bouncing to infinity in
two mirrors, the modern boy remembered the wartime man remembering poignant lines from long ago.
Old men who stay behind, do not inflame the young with words of war. The ruin that you risk
should be your own, not theirs
. The words brought the taste of tears.

He came back to the present, shocked by the remembered deaths and by the scale of his second-hand grief. Sitting down, he leant back against a tree and stared at the tower, trying to pull more
of that out into clear sight. Sons? When? They had sons? He sat stock-still and stopped thinking completely, hoping it would all come back, and in that state the tower itself disappeared and the
trees grew back, thick, all over the avenue cleared to make the vista, and he lost himself in the dense woodland for two, three, four hours without any awareness of the time passing.

He came back to himself with a jerk as if someone had shaken him by the shoulder. The tower stood before him, a hundred yards away across the open ground. He could see the entrance, could see a
family milling noisily around it, apparently arguing. An overpowering sense came to him that he had just missed something, that he had come back to the present a moment too late. It pulled him
towards the tower, filled him with the image of climbing up it so that he could feel his legs taking him up the long spiral stairs. He got up stiffly and, leaning on his bicycle, began to push it
across the short grass, the front brake rubbing with a twig trapped between brake block and rim. He bent down to pull the twig free, then straightened as a shiver like a waterfall ran right through
his soul.

This time it was no random wartime ghost. Something delightful was boiling up inside him, filling him to bursting. He knew it was Gally. He knew she was right here, close by, so he laid the bike
down and once again he turned right round to find where this feeling was coming from. He felt it everywhere and nowhere that he could precisely locate. Then he looked up.

The top of the tower hung over him, bending back from the passing clouds. A head appeared, craning over the battlements right up there, then two others close together, too distant and too dark
against the bright sky to discern separately. As he saw them the electric joy compressed in him burst out and met its pair, connecting and clutching and pulling them together, and he heard a girl
scream.

The tower was a soaring construction of dark brown brickwork, massive and so high it made the girls feel dizzy as their eyes climbed it. The stone figure of a king, crowned and
armoured, stared out from a niche over the arched doorway.

They went up tightly turning stairs which spiralled up inside a corner turret. Dim light washed in from arrow slits every twenty steps to show them their footing. Halfway up, they heard
footsteps coming down, echoing, long before they saw the slow-moving couple responsible. They had to squeeze against the wall to let the elderly pair by, both so intent on their nervous descent
that they seemed not to notice the girls. Then, finally, there was light ahead and at the top, they ducked under a low parapet to climb out on to the roof of the tower and the roof of the
world.

To the west, they looked down on woodland far below, plunging down the side of the ridge to a chequered plain of tree-lined fields. A long smudge of white smoke gave a distant hamlet a
comet’s tail. The sun and the wind sent vast cloud shadows trudging north-east. The girls stared over the battlements at the wide earth.

‘How high up are we?’ Lucy asked.

‘A hundred and sixty-one feet,’ said Ali.

‘How do you
know
stuff like that?’

‘I read what it said on the way in.’

‘Well, aren’t you clever.’

‘It feels higher,’ said Jo. ‘Much higher. I don’t know how high a hundred and sixty-one feet is, but I feel as high as a hawk.’ For the first time in her whole
life, she felt in exactly the right place, surrounded by vast possibilities and the prospect of joy. This was where Gally had told her to come, but where was Gally?

She walked to the next side of the triangle and the other two followed. There were hills in the distance and something more manicured, like parkland, beyond the immediate trees. Ali had the map
out.

‘I think that’s Stourhead over there,’ she said. ‘It’s National Trust. We could have a look round it if you like?’

‘Boring,’ said Lucy.

Leaning over the stone parapet, they looked down at a wide avenue of grass stretching away below them. The old couple were making their way slowly across to their car. The tower was a triangle
and they walked on to the third wall. From here they looked almost south, right along the top of a wide domed ridge thick with trees, the tallest of them barely half the height of the tower. There
were patchwork fields on both sides but ahead, the promontory seemed to stretch to the far horizon, dividing the land.

Ali still had the map open. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Just over there at the end of the ridge. The trees are in the way but that’s where it is.’

‘That’s where what is?’ asked Lucy.

Ali pointed at the map. ‘Rupert’s village. Pen Selwood, the place with the three castles.’

‘I can’t see one castle, let alone three. How far is it?’

‘Close – a couple of miles, maybe a bit more. The trees are in the way.’

Lucy looked over Ali’s shoulder at the map. ‘Show me the place?’

‘There. Do you see? Cockroad Wood – it says “motte and bailey” just by it and there’s Ballands Castle, same again.’

‘That’s two. I can’t see another one. Are you sure that’s it?’

‘Absolutely sure,’ said Ali, with an edge of excitement in her voice. She searched the map. ‘Look, there’s the earthworks symbol, where it says Pen Pits. Anyway, the
village is marked. It’s Pen Selwood. Don’t you remember? That’s what he said – Pen Selwood.’

Jo was not listening. She was standing a little away from them, searching her mind for Gally, who had gone ahead of her and, surely, should be here. She cast around in growing panic. There was
no sign of her friend anywhere, in the back of her head or in the world outside. Wasn’t this where he was meant to find her? She looked out, then saw a movement below and glanced down. A boy
was pushing a bicycle towards the tower from the edge of the trees. She stared at him, feeling something disturbing and almost like a fever rising in her, then reached out to grip the parapet as if
it might be the only way to stop herself falling towards him.

The door to the stairwell spat a squabbling family out on to the roof like a Roman candle launching star shells. Four teenagers emitting sharp, derisive yells, an angry red-faced father and last
of all a large mother, puffing and out of breath. Two of the teenage boys started a strident ‘It was him, it wasn’t me’ argument.

Ali turned the map around and looked out towards the invisible village. She walked towards Jo as if to show her. Lucy followed. They peered down to see what had caught Jo’s attention. The
boy with the bicycle was right below them. They couldn’t see his face. He stopped and stared down, inspecting his front wheel.

‘There’s a path,’ said Ali. ‘That’s going in the right direction.’

Lucy leaned over, looking down, just as one of the teenagers aimed a wild swipe at the other, who grabbed his arm. The first boy pulled away and ran, chased by the second. The running boy
tripped, swore and fell headlong just as he reached the girls. Two of them had turned to face the noise. Jo was still staring down at the boy with the bicycle and the boy suddenly looked up.

However it began, the end result was horrifying. One, or perhaps two, of the girls screamed. Bodies collided, legs tangled, and in a moment Lucy felt a violent impact and found herself tilting,
falling, already more than half over the parapet, head down, staring at the hard, hard ground twenty storeys below. She felt herself sliding helplessly beyond the point of no return, the stone
scraping at her waist then her hips as her feet came off the ground in a second which seemed to last a whole minute. With absurd clarity, she saw the pale face of the boy with the bicycle far down
below, looking up then dropping his bike and starting to run.

‘He’s going to catch me,’ she thought, and knew he couldn’t and that, quite madly, she was about to be dead. Then came an immense tug on one of her legs and on the belt
of her jeans. Jo and Ali both got their hands to her and hauled her back with adrenalin strength, scraping her arm raw on the stonework.

Afterwards they went over and over what had happened. By that time they were sitting on a fallen tree trunk down at ground level. They were all three in shock.

‘You grabbed me,’ Ali told Lucy, ‘then we both fell against Jo.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Lucy said, still shaking. ‘I think he ran into Jo and then both of them hit me.’

‘I thought you fell first, Ali,’ said Jo. ‘You screamed.’

‘That wasn’t me. I thought that was you.’

‘They might have taken a bit more notice,’ Lucy complained as the other family, still arguing, came out of the tower’s entrance and walked away without even a glance at them.
‘I mean, their stupid son nearly killed me.’

‘I don’t think they saw how it happened,’ said Ali judiciously.

‘Stop being so bloody fair,’ snapped Lucy.

It all went round in circles but they talked it out endlessly as they needed to do, until the remembered image of horror had been slightly dulled by the repetition. There was no single version
of the true course of events, but Jo could not say plainly what she had felt. She kept it to herself because she knew she had no choice, but above all it was an enormous disappointment that there
was no sign of him when they had reached the ground. The boy and his bicycle had disappeared utterly.

Exhaustion had followed in the footsteps of shock. They wanted to eat and then to sleep somewhere well away from the loom of the tower. They were all three eager to be somewhere else.

There was indeed a path through the trees but it curved off left and then hairpinned round right, twisting until they were no longer sure they were heading in the right direction. Lucy kept up
with the other two as if she had a new grasp of what mattered in life. The business of finding their way allowed them to put what had just happened behind them.

They came to a fork where a smaller path went off to the right and the main track curved away. Ali’s map didn’t help. It had been opened too many times and a diamond of paper had
gone missing from the double fold just where she thought they were.

‘Which way?’ Lucy asked.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘You’re always sure – at least when there’s a map involved.’

‘Well, I’m not this time,’ said Ali. ‘There’s a hole in it.’

‘We could toss a coin.’

‘Or we could follow the arrow,’ Jo said abstractedly. She was searching the path ahead and the bushes each side, hoping to see the boy or something.

‘What arrow?’

She pointed at the ground ahead. Three sticks in the middle of the path pointed down the left fork. ‘That one.’

It was too perfect to be accidental. ‘It’s probably kids playing,’ Lucy suggested, prodding the sticks with the toe of her shoe.

‘Well, anyway, if I had to guess,’ said Ali, looking up towards the sun as if that might help, ‘I would say that’s probably the right direction. Let’s try
it.’

It was right. It joined a wider track and brought them to a tarmac road, climbing up from a valley to their left and curving away to go straight ahead into trees.

‘That’s it,’ said Ali, looking at the map. ‘That’s exactly where we wanted to be. See? There’s the bend.’

They walked on into the woodland and these were higher, darker trees, closing out the sky, surrounding them with shaded hiding places and foreboding. They walked more slowly and closer together
and when they saw an earth rampart ahead, coming out of the woods each side, they stopped. The road ran through it as if through a gateway, as if demanding permission to pass.

Lucy peered at it. ‘What’s
that
?’

Ali brought out her map again. ‘I think it’s a hill fort.’

‘Is it one of the three castles?’

‘No, they’re Norman. This is much older.’

‘Do we have to go through it?’ asked Lucy.

‘No, of course not,’ said Ali, looking back at the map. ‘We don’t have to do that at all. We could go back down the road and all the way round to Stourton, then through
Zeals and back to Pen Selwood that way. It shouldn’t be more than – oh I don’t know – fifteen miles? Or we could walk straight through here and it’s a mile and a half
at the outside. That’s a tough call. I just don’t know how to choose.’

‘It’s creepy,’ Lucy said. ‘It reminds me of
The Lord of the Rings
. There’ll be a Ringwraith or something like that waiting inside.’

‘Don’t be so stupid. You just need to . . .’ Ali broke off, suddenly noticing Jo, who was staring ahead, her face white and her lips moving almost silently. Ali strained to
hear what she was saying.

‘Now what’s the matter with
you
?’ Ali asked. ‘I don’t know what’s happening today. The world’s gone mad. Come on, let’s go,’ but Jo
didn’t move, ignored her, stared ahead as if Lucy had spoken the truth and some bad spirit was waiting in ambush. She was shivering, calling silently for Gally, needing support.

Lucy frowned at her, looked away and waded into the long grass on the verge. She came back holding a piece of paper. ‘Someone’s messing around,’ she said. ‘They’ve
left us a message.’

Ali turned to her. ‘What does it say?’

‘It says, “There’s nothing here to hurt you. Have no fear. Walk on.”’

Jo turned slowly and held out her hand for it. The pencilled message was written in capital letters on a sheet of ruled paper torn from a notepad. A rough hole had been punched in the top.