The Offering (8 page)

Towards the end of April my mother began making bread (it was cheaper than buying it), rolling the elastic dough, furling it under and flinging it up with a floury bang. It smelt cold and fleshy, her offering, uncomfortably human; it had to sleep for a night before it could function and when we weren’t looking it grew magically beneath a tea towel. Then she murdered it all over again and shut it in the oven, where it rose, splitting and golden, smelling of savouriness.

My father made more enquiries about work, more trips to the bank, more prayerful petitions. He shook the gas bottle hard and made a reserve can of petrol. The banks would open soon, he said. My mother said of course they would and smiled at me. The tadpoles I caught in the quarry began clinging to the lid of their bucket, their eyes black with the implacable fury of frogs. Elijah caught rabbits and my mother skinned and roasted them or put them in stews.

‘We can’t afford not to,’ she said.

‘You get used to that in the country,’ my father said. ‘You see where things really come from.’

I refused to eat the rabbits, but I couldn’t avoid knowing how good they tasted because the gravy was flavoured with them and the kitchen filled with their aroma.

The field at the back of the bungalow broke out into gold, honeysuckle tapped at the sitting room window, a cuckoo could be heard in the thicket. We went out in the car less and less and when we did my father switched the engine off to go downhill. We had ‘reserve’ petrol in one can and ‘reserve, reserve’ in another. We had to buy groceries in the garage because the supermarket would not cash my father’s cheques. It was twice as expensive as the supermarket but he didn’t complain.

‘God will provide,’ he said.

Towards the end of our time at the bungalow we began to notice one another, we coughed for no reason in each other’s company; awkward, as if we were strangers; we jiggled our feet. We were playing house, staying up past our bedtime, camping out on our own. We were watched, or behaved as if we were. One evening of warm rain when the light wouldn’t go we played catch. We became conscious of our bodies in the strange light. My father took charge – ‘Left a bit! Further back!’ He tore about, the high-school athlete; my mother was blotchy, panting, tormented by gnats. I jumped and ran faster than necessary.

The game went on too long, our smiles became tight, our shouts half-hearted, the land closer, the stillness disturbing. We were children putting on a play, but there was no audience except rabbits and bats. It darkened at last. There was no one to call us in but we went anyway, proclaiming our fun, aware that something, somewhere, was not right.

Dr Lucas says it is not uncommon for there to be a crossover between the conscious and the unconscious during hypnotic retrieval, that the past can be thought of as a layer of sediment at the bottom of a pool, which when stirred rises in flurries. This often results, he said, in loss of clarity for a while.

Since my therapy began, things from long ago, sounds, smells and textures, have been flooding back. I look up from a book, I wake at night, the sky takes on a particular hue, there is a velocity in the air – and I am back at the farm, something gives way and suddenly beneath my fingers are not words but a gatepost, not paper but the bark of a pine. Just now I was woken by someone running by with a trolley and I was back in the courtyard the night we chased the horses with saucepans. I heard the sound of hooves on cobblestones, saw the whites of their eyes, the steam from their nostrils. I could smell the stench of oil and grass, of manure and water. At such times I wonder whether lives interrupted run on parallel lines, whether there are times that stretch out and have a life of their own, continuing somewhere else in the ether, and during those times what is impossible becomes possible and what is unreal, real.

In the Platnauer Room I travel back with the doctor. Twice now, as I have gone under, I have had the impression I was standing on the bank of a river. A field of white flowers lies behind me. The low light is blinding the fields as it dies. I wade into the water. When it reaches my jaw I slip under. For a moment there are ripples, then all trace of me vanishes. When I return to the surface it is either calmly – forehead, nose, neck, breasts – or all at once, gasping and shedding droplets. The doctor is the redeemer. He brings me back. Time and again, no matter what has happened in that nether region, the Platnauer Room appears in all its warm insincerity. Time and again, I stand once more on the bank of myself, shiver and rub myself dry.

‘We’re making excellent progress,’ Dr Lucas says. He looks jubilant, his eyes glittering more than ever. ‘You’re highly hypnotizable, Madeline, as is often the case with amnesia sufferers.’

I sit on the couch, reorientating myself. The Platnauer Room basks in the glow of feigned intimacy conferred by the table lamps and soft furnishings. I was glad to see when I came in today that the irises had finally been replaced by arum lilies. So far they are having no effect on me at all.

He scribbles in the notepad. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Tired.’

A white face peers back at me in the window, reflected in the glow. It looks frozen, like an insect caught in amber or a foetus in formaldehyde. I turn back to the room.

‘So what have you discovered?’ I say, sceptical and at the same time curious to know.

‘That the farm was much more than a place to you; it’s the site of a personal mythology.’

In spite of myself I am rather impressed by the sound of this. But I laugh and say: ‘You mean I’ve made the whole thing up?’

‘No,’ he says, ‘though really it sometimes matters less what a patient fabricates than the reasons they may have for doing so; but no, in this case what I am saying is – well, you know what a myth is, don’t you?’

‘A story,’ I say.

‘Yes; an account, passed down through generations, usually of a key event in the history of a people or some sort of phenomenon – often involving a supernatural being. The year at the farm made such an impression upon you that you have effectively explained yourself by means of it; your reason for living is there; and your reason for dying. Your story began and ended within that small radius. We’re out of the story altogether at the moment, we’re languishing in an appendix, we’re stuck in a footnote – perhaps we’re not even in the book proper at all, but on the flyleaf, in the small print. You can’t begin a new book because you can’t close this one. Someone has whitened the words out –
you
whitened them out but you’ve forgotten. We’ve got to retrace them, and you have to find the courage to read them out, for the first time, to me. And when we have both heard them the book can be closed and reshelved, and you can begin reading something else.’

There is an uncomfortable sensation in my sternum. I swallow but it doesn’t disappear.

‘D’you see?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long were you at the bungalow before you found the farm, Madeline?’

‘Two months.’

‘Did your father manage to find work before you moved?’

‘No. But by that time the bank strike had ended.’

‘You seem to have been troubled by money constantly.’

‘We trusted it would work out.’

‘Because God would provide for you.’

‘Yes.’

‘And He stopped helping you because—’

I flush. ‘I told you.’

‘Remind me again.’

‘Because of sin.’

‘You sinned?’

My heart beats hard. ‘They did – she did – I did; what does it matter?’

He inhales, as if deciding something, and says: ‘I’d like to go forward to the day you discovered the farm, the very first glimpse of it. Can you tell me about that?’

It is May, early afternoon. My father comes into the kitchen long enough to say: ‘There’s a farm for sale.’ By the time my mother puts down the tea towel he has gone. He is waiting in the car when we get outside and begins to drive before she has shut the door.

We went through town and followed the river. Where the land flattened we turned left at a bridge into a tunnel of trees; shade closed over us like a hand and a bird clattered away, calling. The hedges were filled with wild garlic. Branches brushed at my hair. We came out of the trees and the road rose in front of us. The sun was lustrous, roughened at the edges like silk. We were afloat that afternoon, setting sail, and reflected upside down in the bonnet of the car, sky, trees and clouds were also sailing. At the top of a hill where a line of three trees stood like sentinels against the sky we turned left. A rutted track led upwards and I caught the smell of bindweed and thyme. The higher we climbed, the stranger I felt. Was it then I remembered it?

The track wound steeply between wrestling hedges. Fields fell away on either side into the blue. At the top a gate, paint flaking, swung wide under my hand and we drove into a courtyard blanched by heat. The barns were red roofed, whitewashed, crumbling; the house damp, dark: a dark house standing in its own shadow, beneath towering clouds.

We got out and shut the car doors and the noise they made was instantly swallowed as if it had never existed. The only sound was the rushing of a slight breeze and a faraway tinkling that summer days seem to contain. My father’s eyes became soft, almost sad, I thought. He stood there just looking.

There was a whitewashed dairy and sheds and a stone kennel by the gate with a sloping red roof. The courtyard was large, the house white, except where damp seeped from its edges. It had been quite grand once, you could see; there were elaborate gate pillars and a porch. A water-pump with a very tall handle stood in the middle of the courtyard, a wall capped with a hedge separated the garden from the house, and through an archway I could see a tall pine covered in creeper, the shape of its uppermost part suggesting a giant question mark.

This was the place, the season late May. We stayed all afternoon.

I don’t know if it was because I was very hot or very excited, or because I was still feeling as if I had seen the place before, but it occurred to me that every surface in this place had been written upon. Perhaps the thought simply presented itself because there were layers upon layers: whitewash, paint, damp, rust, creepers, moss. The ‘words’ were unreadable, scribbled over and under one another, not in lines but in clusters, as cells might burgeon, or marginalia; as if once upon a time some attentive reader had seen fit to annotate this place to an obsessive degree, one asterisk leading to another, and another, a footnote referencing itself. I traced the text with my eyes, along the bottoms of the walls, along the guttering and eaves, in between cobbles, across the corrugated roofs of the sheds and the fine grass threading from the middle of the courtyard to the bottom of the drive, like body hair descending from a navel.

There were more puzzles: the cobbles in the courtyard spelt out three numbers: two, four, and eight, and we could not see why until my father suggested that the water-pump was a sundial. At the end of the house in the courtyard there were steps set into a waist-high wall enclosing a semicircular pit. Railings ran along the top of it and a gate was set into the wall and a tap into one side, and there was a hole in the ground like a plug. My mother speculated that it was an ancient sheep-dip. There was a machine in the dairy that was taller than me and filled the whole room, with wooden paddles and wheels that no one knew what to make of. The barn was the most impenetrable place of all because it was so dark. Where the light did shine through, in chinks and nooks and a tiny smeared window, weeds grew and spiders spun, but the rest was a medley of gleams, streaks, blotches and objects that loomed half formed out of shadows.

Beside the front door of the house, as if in some sort of welcome, stood a thick stone wheel that glinted, with a hole bored into its centre, from which ran a long red line. I thought it was some sort of altar and the suspicion was confirmed when I touched the line and smelt my finger. It smelt like iron.

‘A millstone,’ my father said.

‘What’s this?’ I said, pointing to the red.

‘Rust. Where the spoke went through.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

My father struggled with the front door, then it budged suddenly and with an odorous gush of damp we found ourselves in the hall. Inside the house the inscriptions continued: ivy had made its way in at the top of the door and bindweed at the bottom. A trail of ants was marching across the tiles; the door frames were full of tiny round holes; mould had made delicate patterns on the walls; and something had left a stain where the light could not reach it, a strange shape, like a star. To the right, in the linoleum-floored kitchen, damp made the walls bubble and bulge, and the hot sills were mottled with spider dung.

In an alcove at the side of a woodstove was a statue of the Virgin.

‘That’ll have to go,’ my father said.

So he had decided already; the house would be ours. He strode around those rooms as if someone were timing him; he had seen all he needed to see of the kitchen and utility room while my mother and I were still exploring the hall. We heard him shout: ‘Look at this!’ and arrived in the doorway of a large room in time to see him stagger backwards from the window in a shower of wood flakes. His face was rapturous.

‘They’ve got the old shutters!’ he said. He tried to put back the shutter but had to settle for propping it against the wall. ‘Nothing that a few screws won’t fix!’

My mother stood at the window, looking into the garden. She was rosy-cheeked, as though she had just woken to a wonderful surprise.

‘Can you imagine yourself here?’ my father said.

‘Yes,’ she said. She inhaled deeply and then let her breath go, giving him a look intended only for the two of them.

Beside the fireplace there were wall cupboards and, inside, many old books.

‘Ready-made library!’ my father said to me. I think he expected that to sell the place to me.

We went back into the kitchen. In one corner, stairs led upwards. I went last, trailing my hand over the banister that had been painted so many times it was both sticky and slippery. A corridor ran along the back of the house and we went into each of the bedrooms leading off it, Elijah’s claws clattering on the floor, his tail swinging this way and that like a flag moving ahead of troops.