“I tell you what.” A thought occurs to me. “I’ll give you the encoded directions without the key, which I will keep. That way if something happens—we’re invaded or I’m drowned at sea—both halves stay separate. The enemy can’t break our code—”
“You hope.”
“—I hope—and you might not need it, with your fine memory.”
“I have a feeble memory. Muddy stockings. No hat.”
“It’s overtaxed today, perhaps. But it can learn.”
“I’d rather have a hat.”
As we turn back from the stream’s edge, a low-hanging and berry-laden branch plucks at my sleeve. I know it for a branch of elder by its toadskin bark, though for an instant in the churchyard tenebrae it puts on flesh and pale sinew, and by the mushroom light I’m gripped, breathing the summer allergens: a Brownian suspense of midge, spore, parasite, and loam. A hag’s cackle mimics the stream. June saunters on, trailing her hand in creepers and the undergrowth. With a sharp twist I partly free myself. June doesn’t hear when I call her. She slows, caught between seconds of a golden watch. The wood is large, larger, its silence long. Because I must, I face the other way, marking the stream. There, at the dead and living tree, is June’s image, a scattered reflection, its fine attentive features struck with a somnambulist’s weakness, mouth open in a silent O.
Her hands thrust at the sky in greedy victory. Soil riddles down her arms, her face, enters her mouth, mixes expressionlessly with her tears. Twigs pick my sides and I hear Mother Elder laugh as June’s gray ghost sinks to her knees beside the ingots’ grave. My slip of ciphered paper rattles in the wind. On it there now appear seven words, one sentence and a claim: I saw a lady sitting all alone.
“Come on,” the real June calls, from Chapel Hill. “Time to go home.”
High Street is deserted. We cycle north. I find it harder than I should to counter the cool breeze. We move in a thick green-lit sap. My body sways, the air resists. Of course, I have a damaged wheel, which doesn’t help: one rear spoke bends inward and clips the bike chain every sixteenth revolution with a click. At the fourth click, the chain comes off—unless I intervene. It makes for stop-start progress, getting off and getting on again, although the delays arguably help June, who rides slowly, to make up ground.
Except, she’s out in front of me today, drawn onward, reeled in by the same drowsy currents of air, the same forces of gravity that hamper me. I’m late. I’ve been so stupidly delayed. I’ve broken an unspecified curfew. The shops have all just shut. The town’s inhabitants hasten away down side alleys into stockrooms, shelters. They put their fingers to their lips. At the grocer’s, a pair of scales rebalances itself. Footfalls clap salesmen hurrying downstairs. The entry bell at National Provincial is a memory. Blinds blank the stenciled panes at Clem, Rollins & Joy, solicitors. The brass ring at the bottom of each blind wriggles upon its hook.
I sense enchantment in the lilac dusk. A pair of Gothic houses guards the turn from High Street to St. Nicholas’s Lane, and in the valley between gables floats the sun. Out of the bruised, polychromatic brick leaks hue, spirits with hollow-eyed faces that ask: Where have they gone? Where are the people from your past? This house, this open door, they’re yours: why hesitate?
Fear chafes the skin. June’s bike lies on its side against the door-up steps, as though this were her home, not mine. Her back wheel spins, ticks to a halt. She’s gone inside, the echo of her heels on the parquet. I step into the hallway with its antlers thrusting from the right-hand wall and cobalt-colored glass above the stairs, gelling the half-landing. The parlor door’s ajar and from within I hear voices, a solemn clock, polite sounds muffled by long, purple curtains and the listening woods of painted landscapes, heavy furniture.
I knock. The sound awakens sense.
Home is a force that acts on me whether I will or no, and under its impressive influence I gain mass, inertia, dragging my feet. It needs some great exertion of the will to overcome that force. I’m like a game of tennis played on the seabed.
June’s free of it. Massless she speeds, a particle of light, while I’m involved in treaclish stuff. Oh God, the prospect of small talk! Torpor. Decisions unmade, futures always merely to be entertained. However much the world ages, deformed by war and entropy, the parquet and the chevrons on my socks point the same way.
The parlor’s scarcely recognizable, the ceiling and its rose replaced by high arches and braziers. The stone-gray walls, running with damp, have been stripped of their bosky views and photographs of father in Madras. The hands have fallen from the clock, which still clucks with embarrassment above a murky rectangle where once a dresser stood. The books are gone from the glass-fronted cabinet between the bay window and fireplace. Missing: Kipling, Gibbon, and Wells, but also Heyl, Bohm, Kant, and Schrödinger. And Tenney Brewster’s Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know. Nothing so strange as empty shelves, the libraries of dust; or the ironical verdict of our barometer, hanging beside another ghost picture, predicting CHANGE.
Nothing, except where everything is strange and so familiar. The table, black, immense, carved from a single piece of oak, has been pushed closer to the fire. The damask tablecloth has been removed. That mossy-colored drape now shrouds a large freestanding oval object at one end of the parlor, near to the screen-partition doors.
The arts-and-crafts armchairs? No more. Two high-backed seats, ornately carved like bishop’s thrones, remain. June sits on one, next to the fireplace, facing the oval shroud. She looks puzzled and wan and turns her head as I enter, smiles with a shy perplexity that says: I ought to know what’s happening. Behind her is the other chair, its sides gripped by an angry little pair of hands.
The knuckles flush. A sharp voice fills the room with sarcastic ferocity: it is the voice of my brother.
“—a fantasy or prank, more like, which he has executed with his customary ruthless inconsistency. I looked perfectly normal yesterday.” The hands unflex, then seize the chair again. “It’s typical, Mother. No thought for anyone’s feelings except—”
“Alec, my dear.” My mother cuts him off. “At last! June said she’d found you loitering on the downs, counting daisies. Such a resourceful girl. I like her very much.”
Mother looks splendid in a red-lined cape and high collar, her skin moonshine, the cheekbones raised, the teeth one long enamel flash. Beneath the cape she wears a bell-sleeved purple gown with gold ceinture. And when she rubs her youthful hands, they move very convincingly.
“Pay no attention to poor John. He’s cross.”
“I’ll be the laughingstock.”
“Really,” Mother exclaims, not sounding at all shocked. “One never would have thought, at such a time as this—in time of war—the sacrifice of vanity—masculine vanity at that—so very terrible.”
The hands gripping the chair go white. “It isn’t vanity, it’s pride! A regiment needs solidarity. The ranks have to respect each other. That’s the core of army discipline. I’ve overall command of fifteen hundred men at Sidi Barrani, fifty light tanks, a very difficult chain of supply. And every day the threat of Italian counterattack—”
“‘We also serve who only stand and wait.’ And cook,” puts in Mother, busy behind the table with a wild array of beakers, flasks, and demijohns. “I’m making one of my potions. An elderflower cordial.”
“—while my brother, the famous don—what is it? Oh yes. Does something for the FO, that we don’t know about, can’t know about, but which we may be sure comes with a tidy salary, is well supplied, and bloody safe.”