The Small Hand (11 page)

Eighteen

lay awake for a long time that night. I had been given a stiff whisky on arriving at the Merrimans’ and then encouraged to have a hot bath. Lady Merriman was anxious for me to stay in bed and be given supper on a tray, but I wanted to get back to normality by eating with them, talking, giving all my news about the First Folio, so that I would not have to spend time alone going over what had – or had not – happened. I was quickly restored by the good malt and deep hot water and felt no after-effects of my having – what? Tripped and fallen, knocking myself out? Fainted? I had no idea and preferred not to speculate, but certainly I was not injured in any way, apart from having a sore bruise

on my elbow where it had hit the ground under my weight.

Lady Merriman said little but I knew that her sharp blue eyes missed nothing and that, in spite of her usual quiet reserve, she was the one who had raised the alarm and who had guessed where I might be found when I failed to arrive at the house.

She told me that the police had been called first, but that there were no reports of road accidents.

‘Then I had a sixth sense, you know,’ she said. ‘And that has never let me down. I knew you were there. I hope you don’t think that weird in any way, Mr Snow. I am not a witch. But people don’t always like it if you mention things of this sort. I have learned to stay silent.’

‘I am very grateful for your sixth sense,’ I said. ‘Nor do I find it in the least weird. A lot of people have a slightly telepathic side to them … I am inclined to think it fairly normal. My mother often knew when a letter would arrive from someone, even if she was not expecting it and indeed hadn’t heard from that person for years.’

‘My husband is sceptical, but you know, after all this time even he has learned not to argue with my instincts. It doesn’t often happen but when it does …’

‘Well, thank God it did today. I might have been lying there all night. I probably tripped on some of that wretched broken pathway and bumped my head.’

She said nothing.

THE EVENING WAS enjoyable because of my host’s obvious delight in hearing that he was very likely to be the owner of a First Folio within the next few weeks. How it was to be transported to him was a minor problem, though I warned that it would have to be done before Christmas or he would not get the volume until the spring – the monastery is usually snowed in between early January and March. He suggested the best and safest way was for me to travel to collect it – I knew the place, I would be trusted and naturally both the book and I would be heavily insured. But everything in me recoiled at the idea of returning to Saint Mathieu, not because of the responsibility of carrying the book but because I felt that anything might happen in that place, as it already had happened, and I did not trust that I could travel there and back without the return of something that would once again cause me to experience terror. Because I realised that, other than the slight mishap today, I had never actually come to any real harm. What I had experienced was the extremes of fear and they were dreadful enough for me to want to avoid them at all cost. I could not speak of any of this. I simply said that I felt a professional firm used to transporting items of great value would be better bringing the Folio to England. I knew one which was entirely reliable, if costly, and Sir Edgar agreed to let me suggest the arrangement to the monastery once the deal had been finally agreed and the money paid.

IT WAS A CLOSE, thundery end to the day. The doors were open on to the garden and we could see the odd flash of lightning over the sea in the distance. Sir Edgar had brought up a bottle of fine old brandy to celebrate his latest acquisition and we talked on until late. Lady Alice glanced at me occasionally and I sensed that she was concerned, but she said nothing more until we were going upstairs just after midnight.

‘Mr Snow, I have been rummaging about and finding some more things about the White House and its garden, if you are still interested. I have set them out in the small study for you – do look at them tomorrow if you would like to. But perhaps you’ve had enough of all that after your visit there today. I spoke to a friend who lives not far away and she said the place has been quite derelict and shut up for some years now. Everyone wonders why no one has bought it or had it restored. It seems terrible for it to be allowed to fall to bits like that. Anyway, I wish you a good rest and you know where the small study is if you do want to have a look through what I found.’

I had bidden her goodnight and closed my door, walked to the window and was standing looking out into the darkness and listening to the thunder, which was now rolling inland towards the house, before the meaning of what Lady Alice had said hit me.

It was hopeless then to try and sleep. I read for a while but the words slid off the surface of my mind. I opened the window. It was raining slightly and the air was heavy, but there was the chill of autumn on it.

I put on my dressing gown, but as I moved towards the door the bedside lamp went out. There was a small torch lantern beside it for just this eventuality and by the light of it I made my way quietly across the wide landing and down the passage that led to the small study. My torch threw its beam onto the wood panelling and the pictures on the walls beside me, mainly rather heavy oils of ancient castles and sporting men. Sir Edgar had a very fine collection of eighteenth-century watercolours in the house but up here nothing was of much beauty or interest. Once or twice my torch beam slipped over the eyes of a man or a dog, once over a set of huge teeth on a magnificently rearing stallion and the eyes and the teeth gleamed in the light. The thunder cracked almost overhead and lightning sizzled down the sky.

I found a number of magazines and newspapers laid out on the round table, opened at articles about the White House and its garden, but there were none of the photographs I had been given a glimpse of earlier, though I looked closely for the picture of myself, as a small boy, sitting on the bench with Hugo and the other child, presumably a friend. There was no reason why it would be here, of course – these were all photographs taken professionally, showing the splendour of the garden in its heyday, the royal visit. Two things made me shine the torch closely and bend over to peer at them. One was a photograph of Denisa Parsons. I had seen her before in the magazine Lady Alice had first shown me but here she was, I guessed, a decade older. She was a smart woman, her hair pulled back, wearing a flowered afternoon dress, earrings. Her head was thrown back and she was beaming as she pointed something out proudly to the King. I looked closely at her features. There seemed precious little resemblance between this handsome woman with the rather capacious, silk-covered bosom and the ragged, wispy-haired figure in the ancient mackintosh who had greeted me that afternoon. But faces change over the years, features decay, flesh shrivels, skin wrinkles and discolours, hair thins, teeth fall out. I could not be sure either way.

The second item was a long article from
The Times
about Denisa Parsons, the famous garden creator, internationally celebrated for what she had done at the White House. Pioneer. Plantswoman. Important Designer. Garden Visionary. The praise was effusive.

There was little about either her earlier life or her family, merely a mention of an ordinary background, marriage to Arthur Parsons, a Civil Servant in the Treasury, and two children, Margaret and Michael.

The paper was dated some thirty years ago.

I went back to my room, where the lamp had come on again. The storm was still prowling round and I could see lightning flickering across the sky occasionally as I lay in bed, sleepless.

Do I believe in ghosts? The question is common enough and, if asked, I usually hedge my bets by saying, ‘Possibly.’ If asked whether I have seen one, of course until now I have always said that I have not. I had not seen the ghost, for ghost it must surely be, to whom the small hand belonged, but I had felt it often enough, felt it definitely and unquestionably a number of times. I had even grown accustomed to it. Once or twice I realised that I was expecting to feel it holding my own hand. But in some strange way, the small hand was different, however ghostly it might be. Different? Different from the woman at the White House. Was she a ghost? Or had she been, as I had first assumed, a visitor, or even a squatter in the empty place, an old bag lady pretending to be Denisa Parsons? Someone who had once worked for her perhaps? The more I thought about it, the more likely that explanation seemed. It was sad to think that someone had gone back there, broken in and was living among the dirt and debris, like a rat, bundled into old clothes and spending the time looking through old scrapbooks and albums of the place in its heyday. But people do end their days in such a state, more often, I think, than we know.

It was only as I felt myself relax a little and begin to slip down into sleep that I remembered the part of the garden to which she had led me and which was tended and kept up, the grass mown, the hedges clipped, as if in preparation for opening to a party of visitors. I was confused about the place. I had walked across so many different stretches of lawn, gone through several arches cut in the yards and yards of high dark hedge, down steps, towards other enclosures, so that I had no sense of where the abandoned garden ended and the tended area began. And how many pools were there and where had the bench been on which I had apparently sat with my brother and our friend?

I drifted from remembering it all into dreaming about it, so that the real and the unreal slid together and I was walking in and out of the various parts of the garden, trying to find the right gap in the hedge, wanting to leave but endlessly sent back the way I had come, as happens to one in a maze.

I was alone, though. There was no old woman and even though at one point I seemed to have turned into myself as a boy, there were no other boys with me. Only at one point, as I tried to find my way out through yet another archway, I felt the small hand leading me on, though it felt different somehow, as befitted my dream state, an insubstantial hand which had no weight or density and which I could not grasp as I could the firm and very real flesh and bone of the hand that tucked itself into mine in my real and waking life.

Nineteen

left for London the following morning feeling unrefreshed – I had slept, fitfully, for only a few hours and felt strung up but at least I left Sir Edgar a happy man and he had given me a new commission. He had become interested in late medieval psalters and wanted to know if I could obtain a fine example of an illuminated one. It was a tall order. Such things came on to the market very rarely, but putting out feelers, talking to people in the auction houses in both London and America, emailing colleagues, even contacting the Librarian at Saint Mathieu des Etoiles, would be very enjoyable and keep my mind away from the business at the White House. I also had some nineteenth-century salmon fishing diaries to sell for another client.

I even drove some twenty miles further, taking an indirect route back in order to avoid going anywhere near the lane leading to that place, though I knew I would not succeed in forgetting it. But I told myself sternly that speculation was fruitless.

As I neared London the traffic was heavy and I was stationary for some fifteen minutes. There was nothing remotely unusual about the place – an uninteresting stretch of suburban road. I was not thinking of the house or the garden or the hand, I was making a mental list of people I could contact with my various client requirements, remembering someone in Rome, and another in Scotland who might well be interested in the fishing books.

I glanced at the stationary traffic in the opposite lane, then in my rear-view mirror at a lorry. It did not matter that I was delayed. I had no appointment to rush to. I was simply bored.

I cannot say that anything happened. It is very difficult to explain what took place, or did not, as I waited in my car. Anyone would tell me that my imagination had been thoroughly wound up and become overexcited and likely to react to the slightest thing, because of the events of the past few weeks, and they would be right. And that is the point. My imagination did not play tricks, I heard, saw, sensed, smelled, felt nothing. Nothing. There was nothing. The strongest sensation was one of nothingness, as if I had been abandoned in some way. Nothing would come near me again, I would not be troubled or contacted. Nothing. I would never feel the sensation of the small hand in mine, or wonder if I was being watched, if something was trying to lure me into whatever lay ahead. Nothing. There was nothing. It had left me, like a fever which can suddenly, inexplicably lift, like the mist that clears within seconds.

Nothing.

I was entirely alone in my car, as the traffic began to nudge slowly forward, and I would be alone when I reached my flat. If I went back to the White House, or to the monastery, I would be alone and there would never again be a child dashing across the road through the storm in the path of my moving car.

Nothing.

I felt an extraordinary sense of release.

Half an hour later, as I walked into my flat, I knew that it had not been a fantasy, or even wishful thinking. I was free and alone, whatever it was had left me and would not return. How does one account for such strong convictions? Where had they come from and how?

Would I miss the small hand? I even wondered that for a fleeting second, because before it had begun to urge me into dangerous places, it had been strangely comforting, as if I had been singled out for a particular gentle gesture of affection from the unseen.

But the one thing I could not forget was the photograph the old woman had shown me of Hugo, his friend and me in the White House garden. I certainly had no recollection of the day or the place, but that was not surprising. I could only have been about five years old – though in the way details remain, I had remembered the Fair Isle jumper so clearly. I would ring Hugo when he was back from the States and ask him about it, though I really had no particular reason for my continuing interest except that coincidence sometimes forms a pleasing symmetry.

A COUPLE OF days later, I had a call from a dealer in New York who had a couple of items I had long been in search of and, as there were various other books I could ask about for clients while I was there, I left on a trip which then took me to San Francisco and North Carolina. I was away for three weeks, returned and flew straight off again to Munich, Berlin and then Rome and back to New York. By the time I was home, several missions having been successfully accomplished, it was late September. I was so involved with work in London for the following week or so that I completely forgot everything that had happened to me and the business of the photograph did not cross my mind.

And then I came in after dining with a potential client from Russia, to find a message from Hugo on my answerphone.

‘Hi, Bro … it’s been ages … wondered if you fancied coming up here next weekend. Benedicte’s playing a concert in the church – you’d like it. Time we caught up anyway. Give us a call.’

I did so and we arranged that I would drive up to Suffolk the following Friday evening. Hugo always had an early start to his school day, so I didn’t keep him long on the phone, but as we were about to ring off, I said, ‘By the way … I don’t suppose you remember this any more than I do – but when we were kids, did we go with the folks to see a garden in Sussex? It was called the White House.’

I do not know what I expected Hugo to say – probably that he had no more idea than I did.

Instead, he said nothing. There was complete silence for so long that I asked if he was still there. When he did reply, his voice sounded odd.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘here.’

‘You don’t remember anything about it, do you?’

Another silence. Then, ‘Why are you asking this?’

‘Oh, I just happened upon a photograph of us there – sitting on a bench outside. You, me and a friend.’

‘No. There was no friend.’

‘So you do remember it?’

‘There was no friend. I’ll see you on Friday.’

‘Yes, but hang on, you …’

But Hugo had put the phone down.