The Memory of Trees (32 page)

Dora got an email requesting she call her doctor without delay just before eleven o’clock in the morning. She was in the lab and the work was serious. The Ash-back virus was always fatal to the host tree and its spread was something no one had discovered a way to impede, never mind stop. It was worse than Dutch Elm Disease, the last great arboreal pestilence to strike the British mainland. It was worse than acid rain. But Saul Abercrombie wanted ash trees in his forest and what he wanted, he tended always to get.

She was working on saplings rather than mature trees because Curtis was insisting on planting species at all stages of development. He wanted the forest to reflect faithfully the way woodland developed in nature. The Disneyland version wasn’t for him and Abercrombie was in agreement with the principle. The morning had gone well. Every sapling she had examined had been healthy. The consignment had come from Italy, which was allegedly virus-free.

Then she heard the ping of the email and read the message and remembered the X-rays she had undergone during her short spell at home in Hamburg between the job on Wight and coming to Wales. And she keyed in her doctor’s number with a more than averagely anxious thumb.

It had been the bicycle ride from Ventnor to Freshwater Bay that had done it. More specifically, it had been the long ascent before the steep descent into the bay. It had left her feeling tired and breathless. She had always been fit and strong, but there had been a hollow sort of feeling to the breathlessness. She had recovered OK, after her Coke at the café and her stroll on the beach. She had ridden back the route she had come without really struggling. But she had decided to get herself checked out, just as a precaution.

Her doctor cleared his throat. He was a sometimes colleague at the university, where he’d done microbiological research. He was a handsome man and she’d slept with him once, after a faculty party. He did triathlon in his leisure time and had a nice body. But he’d been a disappointment in bed.

A tumour about the size of a tennis ball, he told her, the sporting analogy registering with her as typical of him. Inoperable, probably too late to remove the lung, every likelihood that the disease had spread to major organs, though further tests would be needed to determine that. Given the size and malignancy of the growth her chest was harbouring, he didn’t give her any real chance of living beyond the end of the year. He was sorry. He was truly very sorry.

Dora ended the call. She was aware of a buzzing in her ears that was the sound of numbness. Her iPhone felt alien in her hand. She could smell wind soughing through the verdant land. Everything looked brightly coloured, like stage props, too big and garish, too rudely obvious to be anything but unreal.

She fumbled the pack out of her breast pocket and lit a cigarette. Of course she did, she thought, smiling inwardly, sucking the smoke deep, relishing it, grateful for the calming nicotine hit.

She had smoked since she was fourteen. She was thirty-seven. She’d had a two-pack-a-day habit for the best part of twenty years. Some people got away with it. Others didn’t. Was it fair? It didn’t matter whether it was or it wasn’t. She was at the young end of the spectrum but she certainly wasn’t blameless.

She had smoked unrepentantly. She had never wanted to give up and so she had never tried to. Now she wouldn’t have to, because smoking was giving up on her. She would be a statistic. That was her legacy and on that day and in that foreign place it seemed bitterly trivial to her.

Her whole life seemed suddenly trivial. Her principle ambition in going to Wales had been to fuck Tom Curtis, who to anyone with half a functioning brain was obviously still in love with the woman who had thrown him out in the autumn of the previous year. She hadn’t accomplished that, a sexual conquest that now didn’t matter to her in the slightest.

What had she achieved? The answer was nothing. She’d lived for the moment and some of those moments had been sensationally enjoyable. But her accomplishments were pitifully few. She’d written one or two well-received academic papers. She’d contributed to a couple of books on the subject of ecology. She’d recently saved a clutch of ancient oak trees for a grateful man who’d had the means to pay her generously for doing it.

She was toiling in a sort of half-trance on a vanity project of grotesque size in a location polluted by magic. The Abercrombie domain was awash with enchantment. They were all spellbound there, weren’t they? But it was a spell she would break, Dora thought with a grin, crushing out her smoke on a laboratory bench. She would break the spell if it was the last thing she did. She would do it while she still felt strong and able.

She took one of the quads from the motor pool at the compound. Nobody turned a hair. She turned a couple of heads, but she was used to doing that. She’d been doing that ever since her adolescence. Nobody challenged her right to the bike. She was high up in the chain of command. To her own mind, Dora was already history. To the people around her, she thought ironically, she was still somebody, deserving of respect and even deference.

She rode to the woods. It was a perfect June day. On the way to the woods the air was rich with grass scent. Smoking had never noticeably impaired her sense of smell. The forest was cool and dark and she twisted and turned through what all their industry had created with dapples of light painting the loamy earth through the leaf canopy. Her senses tingled. The air was syrupy with birdsong. She didn’t honestly know when she had felt more alive.

Eventually Dora came to the cliffs. She paused in the bike’s saddle to appreciate the boundless view and then dismounted and walked the cliff edge until she came to a spot where she could safely descend. She was agile, gifted with excellent balance. It didn’t take her long to reach the beach.

She crouched and sifted a handful of sand through her fingers. It was fine and yellow and there was a quartz sparkle to it in fragments infinitesimally small. The world was complex and beautiful.

She had tried to preserve the beauty of the natural world and in some small ways she had added to it. That was an accomplishment of sorts. It would have to do. There wasn’t time for further achievements. Illness was ugly and debilitating and when it was terminal, it didn’t enable the hope ambition required. She could do no more, really, than she had already.

At the edge of the sea, Dora took off her clothes. She had lost a little weight. She had put that down to the rigours of the work but now knew it was the tumour feeding hungrily on the healthy parts of her. She still looked good. Her skin still had the tawny spring tan she had acquired during her weeks of false summer earlier in the year on the Isle of Wight. Her muscle tone was good. She was firm and slender and golden and still, apparently, flawless.

She walked into the water. It was surprisingly warm and so buoyant with salt that she felt almost weightless when she was immersed only to her waist in it. When it reached her chest, she started to swim. She was an excellent swimmer and swam front crawl with a determined rhythm and a metronomic stroke.

She stopped once. She looked back to the shore. She was a long way off the beach by then. Treading water, she thought she saw a slight figure, a dark shape against the pale grey of the cliffs. But it could have been a shadow or smudged trick of perspective from that distance. If it was a figure, it didn’t move. It stood entirely still.

The sea or perhaps the distance she had swum through it from the land sluiced away the enchantment. It felt a little like waking from a nap she’d been lulled into unexpectedly. Clarity returned to her mind for the first time in what felt like weeks and she remembered what she had seen when she’d clambered on to Tom’s shoulders and levered herself through the crack in the cave gallery wall.

Who could inhabit such a place? If Amelia sheltered contentedly in so dismal a refuge, what sort of creature did that suggest she was? Yet she did shelter there. It was her refuge. And Dora had kept her secret as she’d been requested to do in return for future favours only hinted at.

She’d been mesmerized. The trees were spreading malevolence across Abercrombie’s domain and Amelia was at the dark heart of it all. People were disappearing. She shivered, the unplumbed void beneath her feet feeling chilly and fathomless. They weren’t buying flights with what they’d been paid, the people vanishing. She’d been wrong about that in her desultory exchange of the morning with Tom. It was Amelia’s doing, wasn’t it?

She was rather glad that it wasn’t her problem. She thought it might be too much for cute, hapless Pete Mariner to handle. She thought it might be too much for Tom Curtis to deal with, strong and capable as he was. The owner of the land was dying and his titular claim was being called into question. His pretty daughter was a sentimental fool incapable of doing anything but decorating a room with her vapid prettiness. All in all it was a bleak situation. She thought it probably hopeless.

Dora turned and swam on. Sometimes people left notes, didn’t they? She hadn’t been close enough to anyone to leave a note. Maybe that was a sort of indictment, but it was also a fact. A note would have been melodramatic and absurdly personal, addressed to Tom or to Pete. It would have been completely inappropriate.

She swam. There was a swell, the further out she got and the water grew darker and cold. She was a good swimmer but in that wilderness of water, exhaustion eventually took her and when the moment came, she surrendered quite gratefully to the enveloping embrace of the deep.

C
urtis first went to the spot from where Crawley’s thorn bush had ripped itself from the earth on its journey to devour the yews at Puller’s Reach. It had only made a thousand metres or so south by the time they’d burned it to carbon and ash. He remembered the way it had risen, like some arachnid creature threatened and poised for a venomous counter-strike. He wondered if it had also sunk something of itself at that moment.

He found the place. Once it had been marked by Freemantle’s abandoned Land Rover and the empty casings of his shotgun cartridges. They had long vanished from there but it was easy still to identify the area he was looking for. The hole was narrow, not much wider really than one of his arms. He’d brought a plumb line with him and he fed it into this cavity in the earth. It was just over eight feet deep.

That was probably deep enough, he thought. Heat rose, didn’t it? It was a scientific truism that heat rose. If the bush had thrust something of itself eight feet deep when they’d incinerated what they could see of it with the flame throwers, then it could have survived. Pale in the rich earth, that root could flourish. It could grow strong and push up into the light and then it could begin to roam again.

He thought it probably had. Crawley’s brother had said he’d endowed his hybrid creation with a cunning gift for survival. Crawley’s brother, a gifted botanist but a man Crawley had hinted dabbled in darker and less precise arts than botany. He’d been a man who’d doted on his nieces. He’d created his vicious plant as an act of retribution not just against the land, but specifically against the creature which had killed them.

It was just a theory. Curtis thought it plausible only because he had encountered the bush himself. He’d tried to avoid the temptation to endow it with qualities beyond those possessed by a plant. But he’d thought it crafty. He’d seen a show of its barbed malice. He’d counted the avian casualties impaled on its lethal spikes. If it didn’t think, it possessed instincts he’d only otherwise seen in life forms with a measure of intelligence.

If it had survived the burning, he was pretty sure he knew where it was. It had retreated to its original home to gather and grow and replenish itself. It had returned to the dark, deep shelter of the well Alfred Crawley had dug when he’d first come here and then returned to after the death of his daughters. That had been its first real home, a hundred and fifty years ago, when it had only been the size of a bonsai tree, different from a bonsai tree because it hissed and shivered and thick gauntlets had been required even then to handle it.

Curtis had brought a tool with him. Saul Abercrombie sometimes walked with the use of a stick. There was a small collection of them. They resided, when he wasn’t using them, in a tubular metal holder under the coat rack in the hallway of the house. Curtis had taken one he’d never seen his employer use and therefore didn’t think he would particularly miss. It was silver topped and made of black polished hardwood. He thought it probably Victorian, which was really quite appropriate.

He used it when he got to Loxley’s Cross to try to locate Crawley’s well. He knew that the hatch over the well was turfed. There was a chance the wood underneath had rotted. If he plunged suddenly through turf and crumbling timber, he’d have found what he was looking for. He might plummet through darkness to a watery death. Or he might descend suddenly into the snarling embrace of the growth he had tried to destroy, which had become strong and sinewy and massive and quite bloodily vindictive again.

He quartered the ground. He walked methodically. It was almost an hour before his tapping was rewarded with a sound more hollow than the meek thud of a walking stick’s rubber ferule on solid earth.

He determined where the edge of the well-cover lay. Sound told him this, his gentle tapping signalling through its percussive response that the hatch was circular and about six feet across. It was a generous size for a well, but Crawley had been a prosperous man and he had been ambitious to live there in some style before events in his life took the disastrous turn they did. He’d bought ponies for his daughters. He’d planted his monstrous maze.

Curtis put the walking stick down and lay on the ground so that only his head and arms were over the hollow place. Then, with his elbows on solid earth, he pried the grass and soil away in a small patch and revealed the thick tongued-and-grooved oak boards of the well cover.

He heard a skittering sound. It came from inside the well. It sounded like the hasty clamber of giant limbs up the length of the stone pit on the brink of which he lay. Then it stopped. It stopped completely and there was no sound at all. They would be very pale, those groping limbs. They had re-grown in the pitch darkness.