Leah continued her tour, drifting from room to room on soft feet as if she might disturb somebody; but none of the other rooms seemed to have been occupied in years. They were full of random items of furniture and junk – one bedroom contained three commode chairs and a shop window mannequin – and crumpled cardboard boxes of books and magazines and blankets and toys and kitchen oddments. The attic bedrooms appeared to have been used as storage space for decades. Boxes and trunks stood in lopsided piles in all three of them. Leah picked her way to one of the dormer windows and peered out at the view. On the window sill, a dusty old fruit box held a stack of pictures in frames, most of which had lost their glass. Leah brushed some mummified flies aside, and flicked through them. Bleached watercolours; a small print of Charles I; another of kittens playing with wool; an embroidery sampler, the motto so faded she could hardly read it, with a small striped cat arching its back amidst flowers in one corner; a sepia picture of the house, with the caption Cold Ash Holt Rectory, 1928 typed neatly along the bottom. Leah drew this photo out, and took it down to show Mark.
The downstairs was better furnished, and better equipped, but it all had an air of long neglect that made Leah slightly sad – gave her a feeling of nostalgia, as though she herself missed the people who had once lived here as much as the house itself appeared to. A door that seemed to go down into the cellars was locked, and Leah left off rattling the handle with a tug of regret. She went back to the kitchen, where Mark had turned on a tinny radio and the lunchtime news was filling the room. His back was to her, at the stove, gently frying the omelette with a meditative air. Leah slid onto her stool, and he looked around as her knee knocked the counter.
‘I don’t suppose you know the property features writer? I suppose the place should go on the market. For a while I’d hoped Dad might come back to it, but he’s not going to. The sooner we all accept that, the better,’ he said absently, as if she’d never left the room.
‘The property features writer? Like I said, I don’t work for a paper. I’m freelance,’ Leah reminded him carefully. His moods seemed to chase across him like clouds on a windy day, and they consumed him. Even now, with his back to her, tension seemed to radiate from him. Leah shuffled Hester Canning’s letters and put the old photo of the house to one side, at a loss for something to say.
‘What’s wrong with your father? Is he ill?’ she asked, before she could stop herself. Mark glanced at her again, as if trying to read her face, to judge her worth. A heartbeat later his eyes softened, and his face fell into the tired lines she was becoming familiar with.
‘He’s in a care home. For the elderly.’ Leah studied him, trying to guess his age and therefore how old his father might be. Mark caught her scrutiny and smiled a tiny, bitter smile. ‘He’s seventy years old, in case you’re wondering. But he has early-onset dementia.’
‘Oh. I’m… really sorry to hear that.’
‘It’s wretched. It’s a wretched, awful thing to happen to a good, kind man; and it’s completely unfair. Which is how life is, I suppose. The last time I went to see him, he didn’t recognise me at all,’ Mark said, in a monotone, as he came over to the island with the frying pan and served the omelette onto two plates.
‘Thank you,’ Leah murmured.
‘Don’t mention it.’ He sat down opposite her and started to shovel the eggs into his mouth as if she wasn’t even there, his gaze far away again, jaw working mechanically. Leah picked up her fork and began to eat slowly. He’d scorched the bottom of the omelette, and the mushrooms hadn’t cooked through, sitting hard and dry inside the folds of egg. She picked at it politely, trying to keep a smile from her lips as she watched Mark chew and chew at his raw mushrooms, his attention finally returning to the room, and to her. ‘This is bloody awful,’ he said at last, and Leah smiled ruefully, nodding her head. ‘Come on, let’s go to the pub.’
After a better lunch of sandwiches and beer, they walked out into the water meadows. The rain had cleared and left the sky china blue, with fat white clouds bowling above their heads as they made their way along a footpath that ran beside a lake, away from the canal. The ground squelched beneath their boots, the turf seeming to bounce as if floating on liquid.
‘These lakes probably weren’t here when Hester wrote the letters, and the fairy pictures were taken,’ Mark told her, marching along with his hands thrust into his pockets.
‘How come?’
‘They’re flooded gravel pits, for the most part. There are still some gravel works around here, even today. It was big business at one point.’ He sniffed – the cold breeze was making both their noses run, and had brought a flush of colour to his cheeks, a shine to his eyes that made him look more alive.
‘I suppose it would have been more open, too – less footpaths and fields and more common land and water meadow?’ she asked. Mark shrugged.
‘Yes, I’d have thought so. Here’s a bit of the river. It weaves in and out of the canal all the way along here – between Newbury and Reading. Sometimes the river and the canal are the same thing, sometimes they’re separate. And all the way along there are these little streams and tributaries and lakes.’
‘I suppose the chances of the tree in the picture still being there are…’
‘Slim to nil, I’d say. It looks like an old tree in the photos, and if it was old a hundred years ago… well, even if it wasn’t chopped down to make way for something, it would have come down of its own accord,’ Mark said. He stopped to consult the photos again. In the study at his father’s house, they had found an original copy of a pamphlet written by his great-grandfather, Albert Canning, about the pictures and the circumstances of their production. In it were the two pictures Leah had seen online, and a couple more besides, in which the thin figure was less distinct. ‘Well, there are rows of tall trees like that here and there all along the canal and the river braids.’ He glanced up at her and shrugged one shoulder. ‘We’ll never know if we’re looking at the exact ones, but those over there are as like them as any, and there’s a hollow in front of this bit of the river, just like in the picture. It’s as good a guess as any,’ he said, handing Leah the pamphlet and gazing around at the landscape.
Leah studied the picture hard again and then looked up. Mark was right – the landscape was as similar to the picture as any they had seen that morning. The sun seemed preternaturally bright after so many wet days, and she shielded her eyes with the pamphlet. The stream by their feet was quick and clear, cutting through the cropped turf with keen efficiency as it hurried by. On its bottom were brown and orange pebbles, chips of grey and white flint and knots of green weed that streamed with the current. The short grass was peppered with pellets of sheep and rabbit shit, and the hedgerow beyond was pocked with burrows and rodent diggings. Suddenly it was spring, as though all it took was the sun to shine for Leah to see it. Dandelions with fat yellow manes; the little white daisies of childhood; tiny purple blooms with hairy leaves that she did not recognise. She crouched and picked up a stick from the ground, throwing it into the stream and watching it whisk away. On the other bank, a startled pheasant bolted away from them, legs pedalling comically. Leah smiled and took a deep breath. The breeze was damp and cool, and tasted of earthy minerals, soft rainwater; but the sun on the top of her head had warmth – a wonderful glow of heat she hadn’t felt since the September before. She tried to imagine the eerie light of the photograph, settled over the bright scene in front of her. Had the photographer used a filter of some kind? It didn’t appear to be misty, exactly, but there was some kind of unfamiliar, pallid glow, softening all the outlines just slightly, just enough to allow doubt to creep in. Doubt, or belief. Leah took another deep breath, all the way to the bottom of her lungs.