The Memory of Trees (8 page)

‘How much is in the bag?’

‘Nineteen thousand pounds. Walking around money, he calls it. I kept a thousand for the actual walking around. That’s the balance.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘You’ve heard of him?’

‘Everyone has. He went to prison after that student protest in Red Lion Square. He was fashionably militant, back in the day. They tried to link him in court to the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Group. But it was the seventies, the days when police routinely fitted people up. He’s certainly proven since he’s no anti-capitalist.’

‘What else?’

‘What I just said. Conspicuous consumption is the phrase, isn’t it? Drugs, hostess bars in south-east Asia, casinos, mansions, all the paraphernalia of being rich when you’re not a family man.’

‘He has a daughter.’

‘So do lots of men. Paternity is different from parenting. It’s just biology.’

‘He’s dying.’

‘What are you doing for him, exactly?’

‘It’s a secret. I mean, I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement.’

She nodded, smiled slightly and looked at her perfectly shaped fingernails, which were lacquered a deep shade of red. ‘It involves trees. If twenty grand is walking around money for his pet planter, it must involve some really esoteric and valuable trees, species that have to be stolen and smuggled. Or it involves a huge number of trees, planted on a vast scale somewhere. That second option would be my guess. This is Saul Abercrombie you’re working for. He’s spent his entire adult life empire building.’

From his position by the window, Tom Curtis looked back towards the woman with whom he used to share his life and tried to view her objectively. She was blonde and slender and, even though she was seated, the length of her legs suggested she was quite tall. She was dressed in engineer boots, Earl jeans and a white fitted shirt, and had a high-boned hauteur which the cool appraisal of her green eyes emphasized.

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t see Sarah objectively at all. He could acknowledge that she was physically attractive and knew that she was successful at what she did. But she had the power to break his heart and she had used it in a way he thought both calculated and cruel, and in doing so had harmed their daughter. Charlotte was the most precious person to him in the world.

‘What about my proposal?’ he said again.

She smiled. Her smile was complex, not good-humoured or accommodating, but a cold warning of what was to come. ‘You can’t buy access to your daughter.’

‘I’ll spend every penny he pays me on legal fees if I need to. Don’t make me take that route, Sarah. It’s so wasteful.’

‘I won’t be bribed, Tom.’

‘This way we both benefit.’

‘I won’t be bought.’

He nodded. He would have to pass Charlotte’s things on the coat rack at the foot of the stairs on the way out. Her school coat and her satchel hung there on a peg. He would inhale for a breath the sweet aroma of his daughter’s hair and skin and, this close, not seeing her would be unbearable.

Sarah stood. She spread the fingers of her elegant hands to dust imaginary debris from where it might have gathered in her lap had they eaten anything. They hadn’t. He was the debris. She was brushing him away. It had become a gesture she performed now every time they were obliged to meet. He thought that she was completely unaware of it.

‘Charlie has written you a letter.’

He hated their daughter’s name abbreviated. ‘When did she do that?’

‘She’s been working on it for a week. She finished it yesterday. She’s been quite stressed about it, actually.’

‘Then let me see her. I’ll put her mind at rest.’

‘It’s addressed and stamped in the envelope. You might as well take it, since you won’t be in Lambeth to get it through the post.’

Outside, he walked through the rain for a while. He couldn’t bring himself to read Charlotte’s letter just yet. He needed to recover from his encounter with Sarah. He walked along the chestnut-lined path at the rear of the development that led to the river. Over to the right, through the dripping tree trunks, was the park in which he had played with his daughter on the infant rides in the years before she was old enough for school. He could see their shapes in bright pastels through the prevailing gloom.

He reached the river. The surface was stippled in places with the current and dimpled everywhere with rain. It was still quite early in the morning and the boat houses opposite were brick follies in lingering mist where the far bank reached down through grand sweeps of garden from great detached houses no more in this light than ghostly suggestions of stone. At the water’s edge, willows bowed and wept. Kingston was a lovely place in which to live. The richer you were, the lovelier it became for you.

He would go back to his flat and pack what was necessary for a prolonged stay in Wales. He wouldn’t need much. He wanted a couple of pairs of boots and his climbing cleats, abseil gear and some foul weather clothing.

He wanted too the bag of sea shells he had collected with Charlotte during their week in Swanage of the previous summer. She had presented them to him almost ceremonially at the end of their little holiday. He had come to regard them in the period since, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, as his hoard of lucky charms.

Swanage had all the charm a coastal resort on the Dorset coast should properly possess. That’s why he’d picked it. There was a tiny fairground and a crazy golf course on its pretty, banked promenade. There was a seafront museum. Fishermen caught crabs from its short wooden pier. Out over the shimmering July sea, the Needles announced the presence of the Isle of Wight in pillars rising as pale and distant as a mirage. Charlotte had built her sandcastles and collected her shells against their distant backdrop.

And there had been nothing at all sinister about it, he thought, staring now at the Thames in the rain, remembering his encounter of the previous day with whatever had lurked in the Welsh mist at the edge of Saul Abercrombie’s ancient domain.

Wales wasn’t England. It had a bloodier history in which oppression figured fairly large. But the seaside was a British tradition and there were Welsh Coastal towns sharing the wholesome charms that Swanage possessed in such happy abundance. They had whitewashed cottages, welcoming quayside pubs, lettered rock and shrimp fleets crewed by men with smiling, ruddy faces.

The Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas had written his verse masterpiece about just such a Welsh port. Curtis remembered studying
Under Milkwood
at school. Maybe it was people. You needed the presence of people to humanize a place, to give it compassion and humour and a soul.

It wasn’t just that Abercrombie’s Pembrokeshire tract was wilderness though, was it? There was more to it than its barrenness and the absence of a resident population. He had to admit to himself that it was genuinely sinister. He had the strong feeling it was, in some shiftless way, unsafe. And he had no choice but to go back there, if he was to gain the means to alter the awful domestic situation it was presently in his power to do nothing at all about.

Tom Curtis craved a friendly face and a bit of human warmth after his glacial encounter with the mother of his child. He decided he’d walk along the bank under Kingston Bridge and on the half mile or so to the Riverside Café. Customers would be few this early on such a rainy morning. He liked the café’s proprietor and as he walked he hoped that he’d be the one doing the serving behind the counter, whistling as he always did when he worked.

After a cup of coffee, he’d walk on to Surbiton and take the fast train to Waterloo. It was a good idea to avoid Kingston Station, where he’d often stood with Charlotte on their way to her ballet class or Forest Club meetings, trips going back to the days when she still thought trains had the names he’d had to make up for her as they waited for theirs on the platform. He hadn’t known until after the split the previous autumn that memories could bring pleasure and pain simultaneously.

John was there behind his counter with a greeting quite out of keeping with the grey, lightless morning. Curtis had often brought Charlotte to the café in the past, but John would be too tactful to mention his daughter unless he did. He was a man who fished and did a bit of bird watching during his downtime, and had a deep love and respect for nature. He wasn’t pompous or precious about it; it was there in his smile when he saw a heron or kingfisher out over the water. He was fascinated by the mechanics and science of Curtis’s craft and by the impact it could have on the character of the land.

Curtis was his only customer. The café’s glass door and walls were steamed with condensation, adding to the sense of seclusion in the building. Outside, the promenade was empty of pedestrians. Beyond the opaque glass the river swam brown and swollen with the rain that had been falling without pause since early the previous evening.

Bespoke cakes iced by hand were on display under Perspex domes. Most of the juices in their refrigerated cabinet racks were organic. The coffee was fairtrade. John knew his clientele.

‘Working on anything much, Tom?’

And so Curtis told him about Pembrokeshire. He didn’t name his employer, was vague about the location and only hinted at the scale of the project, but described something of the wilderness bordered by the sea which he had briefly explored and would work on there.

‘I think I‘ve only been to Wales once, to Anglesey as a kid,’ John said. ‘I was about seven. Don’t remember it at all.’

‘It’s not much like England. It’s remote, all a bit strange. It has its own character.’

John laughed. ‘I don’t know. One Butlins camp’s much the same as another. Same climate, anyway. I remember it rained.’

‘This place is completely wild. I think there might be some folklore attached to the region, or to particular spots there. I haven’t gone into it. Not yet, anyway. I’ve only been on the job four days. But it’s intriguing.’

John fixed himself a cappuccino and joined Curtis at his table. He picked two lumps of brown sugar from a small bowl heaped with them and stirred. He said, ‘Couldn’t help you with any of that. But I know a man who might be able to.’

Curtis smiled. John wasn’t a creature of the Internet age. He was unaware that anyone with a laptop and broadband could access information about virtually anything just by tapping a couple of key words into Google. He wasn’t stupid. He was just old school when it came to arcane knowledge. He was the sort who got on the butcher’s bike he rode, pedalled off to a reference library and looked up his facts about fish and fowl in a book.

‘Chap who comes in here mid-afternoon most weekdays,’ he said, ‘semi-retired professor. He does a bit of lecturing at Kingston University and he’s from here originally, but he was at Oxford when he worked full-time. He was chair of something.’

‘Really? Chair of what?’

‘Blowed if I can remember.’

‘It might be geology, John. It might be astro-physics.’

‘It’s something to do with history, because he knows about paganism and Celtic myths, all that stuff.’

‘How do you know he does?’

‘You know how I know. I talk to my customers. I was talking to him only yesterday about Stonehenge.’

‘Know much about Stonehenge?’

‘I didn’t. I do now. He certainly does.’ John stood. ‘Andrew Carrington,’ he said.

‘Professor Carrington to you,’ Curtis said. He drained his cup.

‘I’ve got his card behind the counter, Tom. Give him a ring.’

‘I can’t cold-call an elderly academic and then interrogate him because I’m curious about some remote Welsh wilderness.’

‘Yes, you can. He likes talking. When I see him this afternoon, I’ll tell him to expect you to call.’

It was how John operated. He made connections. To him, the world was a genial, intimate place without much decorum beyond a please and a thank you when you ordered your food at the counter. It had made his café a very popular place with its regular clientele.

Curtis tucked the card into his wallet, thinking it was an authority in family law he really needed to be recommended and not some elderly bloke inclined to bang on about Neolithic Britain. He hefted the bag, which was canvas and wet and quite heavy with the weight of the stacks of notes it held, secure in their rubber bands. He’d bank the money in Surbiton on his way to the station. It was just after half nine in the morning and the shops and offices on Victoria Street would be open for business now.

Two hours later he was about to leave his flat in Lambeth, having packed everything he thought he might need. Now he felt strong enough to read the letter from his daughter folded in his pocket. He took it, tore open the envelope and went and sat on his bed to read it.

Dear Daddy,

I hope you are happy and not sad like the last time I saw you when you cried but I had to write this letter, Daddy, because I am worried about you. I am worried because of the dream I keep having when you are being chased by the spooky trees and they don’t catch you because you escape down the very steep hill to the beach.

The beach is not safe in the dream. It is dark on the pebbles and the sky is dark and there is a monster living there.

Do you remember last summer when we were all still living in the same house and Mummy went to China for a job and you took me to the seaside on our holidays? The beach there was full of pretty shells and we paddled and you made sandcastles and I trampled them down.

There was nothing scary. Except for the big crabs in buckets on the pier, which were a bit scary but not very.

In my dream, Daddy, everything is scary. The sea is red and has a disease and monsters live on the beach. And the trees are spooky and alive and they have crunchy voices like leaves when your feet swish through them but they say actual words.

Please, please stay away from the place in my dream, Daddy. Please promise me that you will.

With All My Love,

Charlotte

Dora Straub wasn’t in Hamburg. She was on the Isle of Wight, booked into the Hamboro Hotel in Ventnor by a successful British film actor with a house in Bonchurch Village.