The Memory of Trees (6 page)

Freemantle emerged from the house and marched over to them.
He’s been for the tree
, Curtis thought. It was obvious from his determined stride and the clothing and industrial gloves he wore and the smirk of triumphalism spread across his face.

The yew was lashed to a low-loading trailer behind a Land Rover at the front of the house. Its foliage was an intense green rising from its gnarled trunk but its roots looked pale and somehow loathsome exposed to the light, more than anything like the trailing innards of a mortal creature.

‘We need to get it into the ground as quickly as possible,’ Curtis said.

Freemantle said, ‘Where do you want it?’

‘Puller’s Reach.’

‘There’s another vehicle with a small digger on its trailer in one of the garages at the back of the house,’ Abercrombie said. He rubbed the dry palms of his hands together. ‘This is an auspicious moment,’ he said.

It took just over two hours to get that first tree successfully into the ground, once they had reached the site. It was a small tree and rose to a modest height, no more than eight feet at its tip when it was firmly anchored in the willing earth. It looked much bigger, of course, because it stood so solitary in the surrounding flatness of the grass. Curtis planted it about thirty feet from the cairn, which it dwarfed in its size and vibrancy.

The cairn was a monument. The tree was a living thing, its leaves responding to the caress of the wind with a shiver there in the exposure of its new-found home. It wouldn’t be alone for long, Curtis thought. But Abercrombie was right, wasn’t he? It was the first and would always have that distinction.

The yew was positioned a dozen feet from the cliff edge. A person could walk around it without risking a fall. And Saul Abercrombie did this, six or seven times, pausing at the start or the conclusion of each circuit – for it was both – before striding around it again. There was a ceremonial or ritual character to this progress that made it seem much more dignified than ridiculous. It occurred to Curtis that the last thing he felt like doing was laughing at the man.

Freemantle opened a bottle of champagne and produced four flutes. Abercrombie raised a toast. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Curtis took only a token sip of his drink. His mind was on the magnitude of his task. He was thinking about personnel he could recruit and plant equipment he could hire and trees he could source at short notice. He was wondering how much stuff he could delegate to Freemantle, a smart man with a substantial ego with whom he felt already he could very easily clash.

He’d had no alternative but to accept the job. The pay was going to enable and secure his future, legitimate access to his daughter. The ten-week time frame, though, was ridiculous. He knew it and suspected that his new employer did too. But when you’d been given seven months to live it was probably only human nature to try to accelerate the achievement of a life’s ambition.

They’d do it before he died. If his condition didn’t deteriorate and the prognosis proved correct, he’d live to see his forest realized. They might by then have to carry him on a stretcher through the permanent twilight of its leafy glades, but they’d do it. It wasn’t a reversal of nature. That lonely yew looked firmly rooted, very much at home despite its isolation. They would collude with nature to restore something that should never have been taken from the land in the first place. Nature would be their ally and friend.

To Abercrombie, once the tycoon had completed his ceremonial laps of the yew, he said, ‘Do you own this copse in the Black Mountains?’

‘I’ve made some good buddies in the Kingdom of Wales.’

‘With a view to buying trees?’

‘It was probably at the back of my mind.’

‘How many can you personally deliver?’

‘I’d say at least a thousand, perhaps as many as twice that. It’s nowhere near enough, Tree Man.’

‘It’s a start,’ Curtis said. ‘I’d suggest you get Sam on it right away.’

When they returned to the house he went back to the room he’d been given the previous night and switched on his laptop and began work in earnest, contacting potential suppliers, recruiting manpower, arranging plant hire.

He emailed Dora Straub, with whom he’d worked on a project in the German Black Forest two years earlier. She was engaged in academic research, attached to the Ecology Department at Hamburg University. He thought that she could probably arrange a short-notice sabbatical for work as challenging and interesting as this was likely to prove to be.

He phoned Pete Mariner and reached him, as expected, in the pub. Pete was totally focused on the job in hand when he was working and totally intent on spending what he’d earned when he wasn’t. The fact that he was in a boozer in Tottenham was great news for the Pembrokeshire project, as far as Curtis was concerned.

He’d only just got Pete on board when Dora’s emailed reply reached him. She was very interested, she said. She was ninety per cent sure she’d be able to do it and would let him know for certain in a couple of days.

He worked solidly for two hours, then answered a soft knocking on his door and discovered Jo outside it, carrying a tray with coffee and biscuits. She asked whether he would be joining them for dinner and he said he didn’t think he would – he’d scavenge something from the kitchen later, if that was OK.

Francesca ate dinner with her father. His mobile rang as they were finishing and he retrieved it from a pocket and answered it with a frown. He didn’t say anything, just listened and stared absently at one of the paintings on the wall opposite where he sat before grunting an acknowledgement and breaking the connection.

‘Bad news?’

‘Nothing to get hung about,’ he said. ‘Sam’s in the comms room. Satellite’s picked up a fog coming in. Dense, localized.’

Francesca put down her knife and fork to either side of her plate. ‘Is this the start of it?’

He smiled at her. ‘Is this the start of what?’

‘Even if I was a believer,’ she said, ‘one tree wouldn’t do it.’

‘Sam says’

‘Sam,’ Francesca said. ‘You put a lot of store in a man you buddied up with in rehab, Dad. Sam’s a coke-head.’

‘Was, sweetheart. Past tense. And so was I, when I met him.’

‘You should tell Tom Curtis.’

‘That I met my do-do guy in rehab?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Sam thinks you have the hots for our tree man.’

‘For Christ’s sake. I only met him yesterday.’

‘Honey, even I can see he’s easy on the eye.’

‘I think you ought to tell him. Not just because he’s picturesque, either. He’s obviously decent and conscientious. He deserves to be told.’

‘He’ll find out,’ Abercrombie said, ‘in the fullness of time, if there’s anything to tell, if any of it turns out to be anything other than weird Celtic bullshit. You’re not really sold on it, so what exactly would you tell him anyway?’

‘I think this place affects people in strange ways. You hear and see things here that aren’t real.’

Her father laughed. ‘Hallucinations?’

‘It’s to do with scale and remoteness. It’s a wilderness. All that space and isolation plays on the senses.’

‘You’re talking about creative people, wild imaginations, tuned to atmosphere in a way most people aren’t. He won’t be sensitive to the same vibes you are. You’re a painter. He’s a guy who plants trees. It’s a practical skill. Artist versus artisan, honey.’

‘Curtis thought he saw something down on the shore this morning. He thought he saw a man who looked like his twin, staring at him.’

‘He seemed pretty chilled this afternoon.’

‘The stare was hostile. He felt threatened.’

Her father shrugged.

‘Who would you say it was?’

He didn’t say anything for a long time. He put his fingers to his throat and stroked the place housing the tumour that would end his life when it erupted and he drowned in his own haemorrhaging blood. That was Francesca’s thought and she could see her father read her mind, seeing it there.

‘I’d say it was a ghost, baby,’ he said. ‘But you don’t believe in those. Yet you’d still like me to share a bunch of myths about this place with Tom Curtis that risk freaking him out and scaring him away when he’s planted only a single tree. Women are such contradictory creatures.’

‘I don’t actually think anything would scare him away,’ Francesca said. ‘Folklore certainly wouldn’t do it.’

‘Because he’s brave?’

‘Because he’s desperate. He needs the money too badly. You know he does. It was one of the reasons you gave him the job.’

‘He got the gig for a whole stack of reasons. But I do think it sort of cool that he’s so broke. It makes him keen. God loves a trier and so do I.’

There was a knock at the door and Freemantle entered the room. He did so on silent feet. Francesca thought you didn’t need to see or hear him to know who it was. You could smell his aftershave and sense his bulk and eagerness.

Without turning, Abercrombie said, ‘What you got, Sam?’

‘Cold spots are still registering low temps. Raven Dip’s about five degrees below ambient, Loxley’s Cross the same.’

‘Puller’s Reach?’

‘Just the fog bank. It came in low and it’s dense.’

‘Well,’ Abercrombie said, ‘you want the sea, you gotta take the weather. Mother Nature’s sometimes a bitch.’ He stood, signalling that the meal and conversation were both over. ‘That’s the deal, people,’ he said.

Francesca got up and walked past where Freemantle stood without a word or a look and went to her studio. Night was descending. She would work on the painting she was close to having completed for an hour and then have an early night. An early night still seemed a paradoxical thing in her father’s company, a kind of contradiction in terms. He had lived all the way up, as the saying had it. But he was dying now, his strength depleted, and the nights were ending earlier all the time for him.

She could see the contradiction in the position she had taken over dinner with her father. She knew from her own experience that the place they were in evoked sensations in people that were unfamiliar and unnerving. At least, they did in her. She thought they did too in her father and in Freemantle, whom she suspected was thoroughly spooked by the whole domain.

She refused to accept the myths as the cause of these sensations. The stories were scary. But they were monstrous and outlandish and only an ignorant medieval mind convinced of a vindictive God and dark magic and a flat earth with an edge to fall off if you ventured too far could take them as anything other than gory folkloric metaphors. They were a thousand years old, the stories. They were impossibly remote from the real world.

Yet she wanted Curtis told about the mythic history of the place when it had been thickly forested. She wanted him told about the creatures abiding in its permanent twilight and the things legend insisted they had done.

Her father would have spotted this flaw in her reasoning. He hadn’t pointed it out, as he would have in the old days. Instead, he had diverted her with some flattering guff about her distinguishing artistic status and heightened creativity. The cancer had mellowed him into this approach to verbal conflict. Where once there had been the ferocity of clashing wills, now there was gentle cajoling. It was just avoidance.

She felt nostalgic for one of the blood and thunder rows between them of the old days. But to have one of those would mean her dad was getting better and he wasn’t and wasn’t going to. Those dramatic conflicts were a part of their shared past. The curtain had been drawn on them. The theatre was dark.

She looked at the painting on the easel and sighed because she knew she couldn’t paint. She had told Tom Curtis the truth when she had told him that she painted only in natural light. What she’d actually done, she realized, was taken refuge in the studio to get away from Sam Freemantle because she found it so difficult to tolerate sharing space with the man.

Curtis being around made things more endurable. It was one of the characteristics that she liked about him. But she knew that he was going back to London the following day to sort out his affairs before the start of the project proper. He’d be back before long. He was in his room now translating the challenge into practical terms and it was necessary. He was putting the wheels in motion and they were gigantic wheels that would turn slowly at first but gather unstoppable momentum really fast.

Francesca went over to the pile of canvases leant against the wall and fingered through their stacked edges until she came to the representation of the knight from the stained-glass window in the church at Raven Dip. When she got the opportunity, she resolved there and then that she would inform Curtis of his real identity. She would tell him who he was and what it was said that he had done. That much at least, he surely had the right to know.

Curtis worked till midnight. He wasn’t disturbed again. He slept soundly but rose just after six thirty, fully alert, rested enough but strangely eager to see how the tree he had planted had fared through its first night on this remote and secretive domain. The sun was just creeping over the eastern horizon as he zipped on his jacket and fired up a quad and set off westward, chasing his own shadow, towards Puller’s Reach and the edge of the new world he was now involved in creating.

Fog had rolled in off the sea. It lay opaque in a low bank in front of him. It was uniform in its density, the low sunlight unable to pick holes or fissures in it anywhere so that it gave the impression of being solid. It was unmoving, like it had settled there forever, obscuring the land, making a sudden, lurching trap of the cliff edge for anyone blundering into it.

Curtis didn’t blunder. He ditched the bike before the fog bank enveloped him and felt his way into a grey and uniform universe that felt damp and cold on the skin and smelled intensely of the sea. It whitened the ground under his feet, the blades of grass dim and petrified. He held out his own hand and looked at it: the flesh was pale, corpse-like and indistinct, a memory summoned from a sinister dream, right there in front of him.

For no reason he could have rationalized, he began to feel a chill of foreboding. He told himself it was the silence imposed by the mist, which deadened sound, as mist is apt to. He told himself it was the chill and the fact that, unable to see what it was he might share the mist with, he felt suddenly vulnerable.