The September Garden (29 page)

‘I know, lovie. Always hard to leave this place, isn’t it?’ She saw the taxi driver’s kind eyes glance shyly at her in his rear-view mirror. ‘Must be the most beautiful valley in the whole of Bucks, if not the world.’ He winked. ‘But just remember, it’ll all still be here when you get back.’

The taxi was passing Mr Pudifoot’s cottage and Nell was struck by a strange glimmer of hope. Blind, stupid and futile her optimism might well turn out to be, but she suddenly decided that this was her last chance to patch things up with Sylvie. Her cousin needed her. The trip to Normandy would give her a purpose, give her strength to keep going. Give her strength to forget.

She’d said her goodbye to the valley, to Kit, to the September Garden, and promised to be home soon.

Stay like this, she told her valley as the taxi chugged on. Look after him, won’t you? Stay just as you are, in all your blazing glory, until I return. Then the leaves can fall if they want to.

She stood with Nell outside the gates. The blue was flaking to reveal the dull metal beneath. She remembered her father painting the railings in the spring before Nell came to visit, the year before the war. He had spent hours sanding down, stepladder out, shirtsleeves rolled up. Meticulous movements of his rather fat fingers getting into all the angles, all the tight corners. Her mother had said, ‘Let’s pay someone to do it: Simon the fisherman, or Jean Ricard.’ ‘No,’ said Papa, ‘I want to do it myself. Then I know the job will be done properly.’

She glanced at Nell with an urgent desire to thank her for being at her side, to tell her how sorry she was. But her cousin’s inscrutable expression made her mouth dry, her tongue a dead weight. Nell was dressed in a pale-green suit and looked as pretty as a button; she’d done something different to her hair, twisting it up inside a new hat. They had never spoken of Alex, and they had only skirted
around John-James. Nell’s tragedy had done away with her childlike nature. Her new-found maturity placed a mask over her face which Sylvie could not see through.

She grasped a railing in her fist and peered across the short courtyard to the porch with the tall shutters either side, all so shabby now. Some tiles had slipped and fallen. Fragments of them lay scattered like rubbish in a corner. The shutters on the
salle à manger
were slightly ajar and she saw that the windowpanes were cracked. Behind the glass was darkness, a void. And yet behind that very glass had been her life, her childhood, her memory.

She opened the gate and stepped forward, with Nell mute beside her. There were cracks and pockmarks in the facade, the scars of the war. Someone had scratched a swastika into the wall by the front door. Beneath was carved one word, crude and misspelt:
colabo
. The door opened and her mother stood on the step, her arms outstretched. She looked weak and ill – more than ill, as if the light had been taken out of her. A weight of dread pressed hard on Sylvie’s back, like a heavy hand, pushing. She walked towards her mother, saw the opaque torment in her eyes and held her bony frame in her arms without speaking.

In the six years she’d been away, in her dreams she had returned to Montfleur. She walked the rooms and the staircases of her home as it had once been: gleaming parquet, slender windows, elegantly faded Louis XV chairs. The dreams often unfolded long into the night with a smothering sourness. Her unconscious journeys projected her here like a shadow on a wall. When she died, she thought,
I will haunt this place, just like I do in my dreams.
And now, the house she knew from childhood was gone.
The bricks and mortar may remain, but the essence of it was gone. And yes, she thought, this was to be applauded.

As she hugged her mother, she was aware of Nell making her way past her, along the hallway and into the salon at the back. Sylvie’s ears pricked when she heard a familiar voice exclaim from within, ‘Ah, little Nell.’

She pulled away from her mother and looked at her.

‘Adele Ricard is here to help me pack,’ Beth Orlande informed her.

‘And you,
Maman
, are coming home with me,’ Sylvie said. ‘Thank God, you are.’

The salon was as she remembered: chairs placed just so, facing the large stone fireplace, the
chaise
at an angle,
Maman
’s secretaire in the corner. But everything looked bruised, Sylvie thought, an inferior copy of itself.

‘Now, we will have coffee,’ Adele announced briskly, bearing a tray, ‘and my apple cake. I expect you have missed the Calvados apples, Sylvie?’

‘Among so many things,’ said Sylvie, sitting on a fireside chair. She fumbled with the knot of her headscarf, her fingertips shaking.

Nell was by the window, peering at the wall that divided the gardens, finishing a conversation she’d been having with Adele.

‘They had a ladder, do you remember? Kept popping up, with their little faces. They were such naughty little beans.’

Sylvie’s mother interjected, bristling defensively, ‘Well, you know, Nell, the Androvsky family were taken away. But that was after I had gone so I don’t really know much about it, really.’

‘We can all take a good guess what happened, Madame,’ Adele said. ‘I expect they ended up in Drancy. Trains left there, we know now, for Auschwitz.’

‘No need to be so brutal,’ scolded Beth. She poured coffee with a pale-knuckled, shaking hand.

‘The
children
?’ Nell exclaimed.

‘When their parents were sent away they were left behind. They came to live here with Monsieur Orlande. We hid them in the spare bedroom. Your room, actually, Nell, do you remember?’

‘See, there you are.’ Beth’s voice was shrill with justification. ‘He did what he could. Claude was a good man. Of course,’ she said, handing a cup to Nell, ‘we have no sugar.’

Sylvie stood up suddenly, desperate for a change of air. ‘
Maman
, will you take me upstairs, for a moment? Show me my room? I really want to—’

Her mother’s face broke into a broad smile. ‘Oh,
ma chère
. Of course.’

Sylvie trod the stairs with care, as she had always done – in an attempt not to make any noise. She hurried along the long landing past the closed door of what had once been her parents’ bedroom. Up another flight, and the sickness in her stomach began to churn.

She opened the door to her old bedroom and walked over the Paris carpet, looking around the serene white-painted walls, at the bed with its French Grey drapes, and the little armoire in the corner. Her dolls, her ribbons, her shoes were in tidy rows, the bed made up, the crisp sheet turned down. A pain settled over her heart as her mother began to speak.

‘Adele kept the room aired and clean for you, all through the war,’ Beth was saying proudly. ‘I’m afraid it could do with a bit of a going-over now, but everything is still here. Everything you own, Sylvie. I wanted to keep it for you. For when you came home.’

Sylvie’s memories bubbled like poison under the surface of her skin.

‘You needn’t have bothered.’

She walked to the window as her mother’s open-mouthed, shocked silence bore down on her. The garden was forlorn, left to rack and ruin, but she remembered clearly the rows of beans, the mounds of lavender, the stables at the end. Poor old
Monsieur le lapin
. It wasn’t Nell’s fault. She knew that then, and she knew it now. If only she could tell her so.

‘I had hoped to slip through Montfleur without attracting attention,’ she told her mother. ‘Thought my headscarf might do the trick, but no such luck. I saw them looking. The intakes of breath, the raising of eyebrows. I heard them say it.
La fille du collabo
.’

‘But that’s why I am so desperate to leave,’ said her mother, wringing her hands in agitation. ‘I take it that you are settled in England, and would not want to return here? I wasn’t sure what your plans were. I am so glad you came back for me.’

Sylvie turned to her. ‘I never wanted to set one foot in this place again. I’m only here to bring you home.’

An understanding filtered softly over her mother’s features. ‘He wasn’t a bad man, Sylvie. He was caught in the middle. Damned if he did. Damned if he didn’t. And for it to end like that. So barbaric. He didn’t stand a chance.’

She stared at her. ‘
Maman
, I don’t want to sleep in this
room tonight. I’d rather sleep on the
chaise
in the salon.’

Her mother recoiled. ‘But we kept it all for you. We have it all laid out. Fresh sheets. Every week.’

Anger simmered inside Sylvie’s bones. She stared at her mother’s pathetic face, at her broken tooth, and had to look away. Through the open window, Adele’s and Nell’s voices drifted up as they stepped out of the vestibule and lingered on the path below.

‘… the old fort at Cherbourg was the German headquarters … soldiers in the cafés, asking girls to dances. We refused, of course. Always said we were washing our hair.’

Nell pondered on the unimaginable dangers and prompted Adele to continue. Sylvie found herself smiling – her cousin, forever the reporter.

‘We’d tune into the Free French in London,’ Adele went on. ‘The World Service. My husband was in the Resistance. He died just after D-Day.’

Hearing Nell’s sudden exclamation of sorrow, Sylvie glanced angrily at her mother. ‘Just because my father is dead,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t transform him – suddenly – into a good man.’

Leaving her mother speechless, she hurried down the stairs and along the garden path, catching up with Adele and Nell outside the stables.

‘Monsieur Androvsky once told me about Ullis and Tatillon,’ Nell was saying. ‘The two horses that used to live here.’

Sylvie looked at the faded signs above the twin stable doors.

‘We never had horses, Nell,’ she gently chided. ‘Only rabbits.’

Nell protested, ‘No, there were horses here a long time ago, when Monsieur Androvsky was a young man. Oh, I can still smell it.’ She was standing where the narrow stone steps disappeared up into darkness. ‘That faint whiff of straw.’

‘Nell, you’re being too ridiculous,’ said Sylvie. ‘How can you smell it when there haven’t been horses here for years?’

Adele put her hand on Nell’s shoulder. ‘You were always so fanciful, so sensitive, little Nell,’ she said.

‘Will you tell us what happened?’ Nell asked. ‘To the two children?’

Sylvie’s mother had followed them out to the yard. She now stood with her arms folded, her face downcast. A twitch had appeared above one of her eyes. Sylvie thought how sunken she was; how she was crumbling away.

Adele said, ‘The night we planned to send the children down the lines, I hid them up there in the stable loft. We thought it would be easier that way.’

Nell said that she wanted to go up and take a look. She’d never dared to before.

Sylvie followed her cousin and Adele up the steps. She sensed her mother climbing silently behind her.

‘
Sacré bleu
,’ Sylvie muttered, her eyes blinking in the darkness. ‘I was never allowed up here as a child, and I can see why. It’s a positive deathtrap.’

‘Can someone help me, please?’ came her mother’s plaintive voice from below.

‘Here, allow me.’ Adele stooped, gripped her under the armpit, and with one strong pull, hauled her up.

They stood close together in the half darkness. Sylvie’s nostrils were warm with timber dust and the musty scent of
confined air, her head almost touching the sloping ceiling. As her eyes adjusted she began to make out the pale faces of her mother, her cousin and Adele, their eyes like dark pools. She saw pinpricks of daylight through the roof tiles. They looked like stars in a night sky. She remembered the tree house at Lednor and how it had been the most wonderful place. This loft was draughty, dusty and festooned with cobwebs. It was not a place anyone would want to stay for very long.

‘The same night Estella and Edmund were hiding in here, there was a Resistance operation,’ Adele whispered, as if she might wake the children. ‘It went terribly wrong and it was not possible for us to deal with them. It was a dreadful mix-up. We should never have …’

The break in her voice scratched at Sylvie’s nerves. She felt her heart quicken with dread.

‘And then, Monsieur Orlande betrayed the children.’ Adele’s shoulders shuddered.

Nell covered her mouth with her hand and looked away.

‘How
dare
you!’ Beth cried out.

‘I’m afraid it’s true, Madame. That dreadful morning, to save the cell, the town, himself, he sacrificed the children. He redressed the balance. And I watched him do it.’ She wept in the gaping silence. ‘We are guilty. All guilty.’

Sylvie’s legs turned to liquid. She span around, sat down hard on the dirty floor. She leant forward, her chest sinking, her head collapsed under the weight of the shock that came at her like a physical blow.

‘He
betrayed
them,’ she hissed, ‘like he betrayed
all
children.’

‘Oh, Sylvie.’ Her mother was there in front of her, her
face aged with distress, her eyes bright with tears. ‘It’s awful. So awful. I am so sorry.’

‘Why are you sorry?’ screamed Sylvie. ‘You will forgive him, like you always forgive him and, again, forgive him!’

Her sobs filled the rafters and the dark corners where the children had crouched and waited.

She felt Adele’s hands scrabbling for hers in the half darkness, placing in them some crumpled folded pieces of paper. She stared down at her lap in the gloom, trying to make them out.

‘These are pictures that the children drew the night they were here, Sylvie. I’d like you to have them.’

In the gloom of that stable loft, Sylvie could hear Nell weeping and the footsteps of her mother as she hurried back down the steps. She felt a soft puff of relief, as if someone just then had breathed gently on her throat.

She gazed down at the pictures, smoothing her fingers over the wrinkled paper but unable to see clearly what the children had drawn for all she could think was that he was gone.

At last, at last. He was gone.

She barely noticed her Auntie Beth drifting around the house at Lednor, such was her plaintive withdrawal into her own shadow. But whenever Nell did encounter her, on the stairs or in the garden, she saw grey hair unwashed and tangled, slippers mismatched, heard her muttering to herself, fingertips twitching in unconscious agitation. And she could not help the compassion that lifted out of her chest for her frail aunt. Even more so, because Sylvie refused to visit Lednor.

After the revelations in the stable loft in Montfleur, Nell explained to her mother, the two women had barely spoken to each other. The journey home to England had been awkward, arduous. Nell had watched the choppy heavy-grey waves from the prow of the cross-Channel steamer, urging England to appear out of the drizzling horizon, longing for it to take shape, craving for Lednor, for home. She’d done her duty in accompanying Sylvie back
to Montfleur and left her cousin and her aunt to prowl the ship like strangers.

Her mother begged her to become arbitrator, to telephone Sylvie and ask her to reconsider. After all, Auntie Beth was contrite and suffering more than she needed to, was desperate to make amends with her daughter. Nell reluctantly dialled the number for the mews.

‘I’m glad you telephoned,’ Sylvie said, quite calmly, surprising her. Her voice contained an edge of humour. Nell braced herself. Sylvie making jokes was lethal; a symptom of something much darker brewing underneath. ‘Yes, I will come up to Lednor. Just to warn you, however, I will be liaising closely with Mrs B to ensure no
lapin
for dinner.’

She arrived the following afternoon just after their mothers had left for the cinema.

Nell was nervous of Sylvie, skirting around her as she took off her coat and put her suitcase upstairs, wishing her mother and aunt had stayed in to shield her from the hardness that veneered her cousin’s face, those beautiful, unreadable eyes.

‘They’ve gone into Aylesbury on the bus,’ Nell explained. ‘Even Mrs B decided to join in. It was Mother’s idea, an outing to cheer your mother up. And the perfect day for sitting indoors in a cinema, looks like it’s going to tip it down.’

Sylvie followed her into the kitchen, unusually reticent, and sat herself near the warm Aga, pushing her hands up the sleeves of her cashmere cardigan. Outside, the day grew blustery and rain started to fall from voluminous grey clouds.

‘I’m glad they’re out, and we have the place to ourselves,’
said Sylvie. ‘I’ve always liked good old Mrs B’s kitchen. Most comforting.’

Nell agreed that it was and offered to make some hot chocolate. She talked about the weather, wondered what the film would be like, asked about the mews house, anything to stop Alex rising between them.

Sylvie politely took the steaming cup of milk and, dipping to her bag on the floor, said, ‘I have something in here for you, Nell. You didn’t get a chance to see them properly at Montfleur. I’ve brought the drawings.’

Surprised, Nell took them, unfolded them, smoothed them out over the table.

They sipped their hot chocolate in silence, contemplating Estella and Edmund’s innocent imagination. When Nell dared to look at Sylvie she saw that she also had tears in her eyes.

Nell said, ‘I know what we should do with these.’ She went to the dresser and found an empty biscuit tin, saying that it would do and that Sylvie should put the drawings in it. ‘Make sure the lid is tight. That’s it. Come with me.’

Sylvie protested that it was raining, but Nell chivvied her up, putting on a raincoat of her mother’s and handing Sylvie her own old hand-me-down mac from the hall cupboard.

‘I’m surprised this old thing hasn’t been given to Miss Trenton for the jumble,’ she protested.

They left the house and ran together across the lawn through the rain, wet beech leaves blowing in their faces, their hair whipped madly by the saturated wind. Breathless, the shoulders of their coats wet already, their shoes soggy, they stopped by the bourn under the big willow tree.

‘Can you do it, Sylvie? I think you should do the honours.’

‘Hold the bottom of the rope ladder for me, then.
Merde
, I’m surprised it hasn’t rotted away after all this time. Ouch, that’s my stocking gone.’ And then, ‘You’re right, I can’t fit through the entrance. Six years ago it was a bit of a struggle – but now certainly not. It’s definitely built for children.’

‘Push the tin in as far as you can.’

‘Have done,’ she called down. ‘It’s over by the eaves, away from any gaps. It is rather dry up here, surprisingly so. That’s good. Job done.’ Sylvie made her slow way back down the ladder, swinging over Nell’s head while she held it steady.

Sylvie landed with an elegant thud on the ground and the cousins faced each other under the shelter of the branches where the raindrops barely reached them.

‘They’re safe up there,’ Sylvie said. ‘No adults will ever find them there.’

Later, in the lamplit drawing room, Sylvie opened the trunk that stood in the centre of the Aubusson rug. It had arrived yesterday from Normandy for her mother. Nell poured them both a sherry and busied herself perusing the shelves in the alcoves, chancing upon some of her father’s old books. With broken spines and yellowing pages, they should, she decided, have been thrown out years ago. Kneeling down to peer along the bottom shelf, she was surprised at what he’d left behind – most of his life, it seemed. He had walked out of the house five years before with the clothes he stood up in.

She commented as much to Sylvie, saying she ought to
clear them away, and wondered why her mother hadn’t.

‘Hanging on to him, isn’t she?’ said Sylvie. ‘I think we can all be guilty of doing that. How is Uncle Marcus, anyway? And his young teacher bride?’

‘Hasn’t been a teacher for years. Drummed out of the profession for running off with a married man.’

‘Well,
they’re
married now, aren’t they?’

‘Their baby is due in a few months, and he is on crutches. Has to sleep downstairs, Diana tells me. She hopes he will be better by the time the baby comes.’

‘He won’t be much use around the house, will he?’

‘I don’t think he ever was.’

They laughed dubiously.

‘Ah, here we are,’ said Sylvie, drawing out a pale-blue photograph album from the trunk and wiping the silk cover with the cuff of her sleeve. ‘Come and look at this, Nell.’

She sat beside Sylvie on the rug as her cousin carefully opened the wedding album. The dust made her sneeze delicately and Sylvie commented that even her sneezes were pretty. Between the thick wax-paper leaves half a dozen photographs had not seen the light of day for years. Uncle Claude stood in the studio in front of a curtain, while Auntie Beth sat on the edge of an overstuffed chair. She was demure in a cloche, her white gown trimmed with a band of fur. Claude held his gloves and bowler hat in front of him. His moustache in those days was neat and small.

‘Why did they bother to include this one?’ Nell wondered. ‘Uncle Claude must have moved as the shutter closed. His face is a blur.’

‘Just as well, I say,’ said Sylvie, snapping the album shut
and burying it back in the trunk. ‘Who wants to look at him, anyway?’

Nell wondered and then bit her tongue. She said cautiously, ‘Of course, my mother burnt her own wedding album on the infamous bonfire.’

‘The first time I met Alex. The day we both met him.’

Nell looked at Sylvie, braving the full force of her intense and contrite violet-blue eyes, and then turned her face away.

‘Thank you for coming with me to Montfleur,’ Sylvie said quietly.

Nell blurted, ‘I left John-James when I didn’t want to. I don’t want to do that again in a long time.’

She felt Sylvie’s hand on her arm. ‘I asked a lot of you. I only did that because I needed you.’

Nell shrugged, unable to contemplate this notion.

‘Nell, it’s not your fault.’

‘Oh, it is,’ she said, her own voice drilling painfully through her head. ‘I fell asleep. I should have watched him, always, watched him. The vicar’s been up to bless him, you know. Everyone has been so kind. But it’s so cold out there. So cold.’

Sylvie knelt up and her arms went round Nell. Sylvie’s sweet, powdery perfume enveloped her. Tears raced down her cheeks.

‘I knew Alex loved you,’ she heard Sylvie say in her ear, ‘that’s why it drove me mad.’ She drew back. ‘I was under the influence, completely, but hadn’t a cat in hell’s chance. And yet still I clung on. Where’s the dignity in that? I wouldn’t give up for a whole year. Not until he came home from Gibraltar. At last he came home, and finally I took off
my engagement ring. There was no fight left in me. That was the night I knew. He loved you. He wasn’t interested in me. Nell, you are made for each other.’

‘But how can I do it to him, Sylvie?’ Her words were shredded with pain. ‘Don’t you understand? I have left it far too long. How can I tell him about his baby? He will hate me. John-James would have been four.
Four
.’

Rain darkened the window, the evening was falling fast. A splatter of drops hit the glass hard, water poured down the drainpipes and gurgled along the gutters. The storm pounded in her head, making her remember dawn in Mr Pudifoot’s cottage, the watery light through the little window. Alex holding her as if she was a precious thing, as if he would never let her go. ‘How can we ever even try …?’

‘Open the door to him,’ Sylvie said. ‘Because, by golly, when you were with him, however briefly, you were truly Nell and I want Nell back. The girl I remember.’

‘But you hated me.’

‘I hated myself.’

This alarmed Nell, silenced her. She looked at her cousin’s beautiful, rigid face.

Sylvie said, ‘I wanted to be like you.’

‘But my parents always said I should be more like you.’

Sylvie crowed, ‘
Parents
? What do they know? Look what they’ve done!’

Nell pondered, staring at the pile of her father’s books, registering the sweet whiff of dust, of disintegrating paper.

‘Come with me,’ said Sylvie, snatching at her hand. She pulled her out into the hall, sat her on the telephone stool and rummaged in her handbag.

‘I expect the Hammonds still live there.’

‘Where?’

‘The family home in Kingston. He stupidly gave me his parents’ telephone number.’

Nell looked in awe from her cousin’s face to the battered little black book she was holding open, the page turned to GHI. This was the girl who had tormented her, who had terrified her and yet had tried to love her. Clarity switched on in her head, like a light, opened her mind to a startling reality. Not daring to think of what she was doing, her fingertips trembled as she lifted the receiver and waited for the operator. She dictated the number and listened to the rhythmic clack-clack-clack of the exchange whirring, imagining the wires suspended through the wet darkness across the fields.

The shrill ringing started and she mouthed to Sylvie that the call was going through. Her cousin got to her feet and left her to it, shutting the drawing room door behind her.

A click and a hard echo billowed in Nell’s ear. Her heart rapped in her throat, choking her. Her blood pounded cold and visceral, deafening in her temples. She did not hear the car draw up outside the front of the house.

‘Hello, hello. May I please speak with Alex Hammond?’

The front door burst open with a thump and clatter, and Auntie Beth stumbled in, her face crumpled with grief, wet with tears and rain. Her hair was a halo of grey around her head, standing on end. Her chaotic voice pitched high to the ceiling as she shouted, ‘I didn’t know, I didn’t know what he did. How could I know? I didn’t
know
!’

Nell bent her head, crushing her finger into her ear to stopper the sound, to listen hard down the telephone line.

‘Hello? Hello?’ she said, deep into the receiver.

Mrs Bunting and her mother hurried in behind Auntie Beth just as she fell to her knees in front of Nell. ‘He sent them to the camps.
He
sent them,
not
me. But they still shaved my head, did you know, Nell? They shaved my head.’

Nell looked up to see her aunt right beside her, looming maniacally close, her face in tatters. ‘And now my daughter hates me. Where is she? Where is she?’

Behind her, Nell’s mother gesticulated furiously for her to put the telephone down and help her.

A voice in her ear said, ‘Nell, is that you? Are you still there?’

Mrs Bunting said, ‘It was the newsreels. We had to leave the cinema.’

Auntie Beth pressed her face to the floor and wailed, ‘They thought they were going to take a shower. They had no idea. They trusted him. They trusted me.’

Sylvie emerged from the drawing room and knelt down by her mother, placing a hand gingerly on her shoulder. Sylvie looked up at Nell, bewildered. ‘Please help me.’

Nell flinched at the pain, sheer translucent pain, masking her cousin’s face.

She replaced the receiver.

Next morning, the storm had passed. At first light, Nell opened her eyes and looked across to the twin bed where Sylvie was sleeping. She had intended to sleep in the Lavender room, but then, at the last moment, at bedtime, they had decided to share. Kit was scratching at the door and gave a rough bark. It was not like him at all, he was normally such a good dog and stayed downstairs in the kitchen.

Nell walked over to the window and opened it a fraction. The woods were dripping, drenched, but the sky was clear, the green scent of moss reached her as she shivered in her dressing gown. Kit howled.

‘
Sacré bleu
,’ Sylvie said, waking. ‘What on earth …?’

‘He wants to go out. He sounds rather desperate. Do you fancy an early walk?’ Nell asked, expecting a negative response. But, again, Sylvie surprised her.

Vaporous mist lay across the valley bottom like a whisper. The ascending autumn sun was breaking through. It was going to be a beautiful day. They plunged into Lednor woods, glorious in gold, as Kit bounded ahead, seemingly tracking a rabbit, or a fox. Every so often he’d glance back to check they were still there. The silence was absolute. The spaces between the trees chilled, breathless and still.