Advent (12 page)

 
Miss Grey wanted him to be here.
Let the boy go in
. She’d found her voice.
Come
, she told him. And here he was, and someone else could hear her, and one of those things that couldn’t
actually happen
had been right outside the door, making the house shake with its dead white fist.

 
He sat and stared at nothing. The heaviness washed over his eyes. The fire whispered to him quietly, and more quietly. He began dreaming even before he fell asleep.

Morning crept through the house like disenchantment. Gavin woke with a stiff neck and a groggy head. There were sounds in the house, ordinary domestic noises: a scraping plate, a cupboard door closing. Auntie Gwen must have got up before him. He rubbed his eyes, not quite recognising where he was. The room had changed its character completely by daylight, as strange rooms do. The dullness of a cloudy morning had got inside it. It looked tired, safe. Birds sang outside.

 
Something in the kitchen got knocked over. Auntie Gwen had always been clumsy. Dad had jokes about her magnetic hands that repelled everything. Gav wondered when she’d got back.

 
He stretched and got up.

 
‘Auntie Gwen?’

 
The cat miaowed from another room.

 
There was no one in the kitchen. The cat had been nosing its bowl around on the floor. As he watched, it jumped to the countertop and tried to push open the handle of a cupboard, then sprang down again, leaning against his shins, demanding food. He found the right box in the cupboard and left the cat crunching and purring while he went upstairs.

 
‘Auntie Gwen?’

 
He looked in every room, heart sinking as his memories of the night started to come back clearly and the brief comfort of the dawn drained away. The air of sudden abandonment in the house had been a bit creepy in the dark. Now it only made the place dreary.

 
She still wasn’t home.

 
He opened all the curtains as he went, at last seeing the landscape the house sat in. It took a small effort of courage when he got to the living-room windows and thought of what he’d seen outside them in the night, but he opened those curtains too, looking out onto nothing more sinister than a patch of muddy lawn, the driveway, a simple iron fence beyond and then an empty field sloping down, just grass and the sky, with a faint concentration of cloudy brightness low and to the right suggesting that the sun might be rising. On the other side of the house, through the kitchen window, the view was blocked after a few feet by a tall hedge of something evergreen and glossy, shaded by taller trees behind. There was the edge of a clothesline, and under it one corner of a vegetable patch. Nearby sprawled a rosebush, in full flower, pink saucers defying the morning dullness. From the upstairs windows he could trace the passage of the driveway, starting at the gateposts where Hester had pulled up her car, past the front of the house, and then away to the left down the slope of a hill, where it disappeared into a brown and crooked wood.

 
He’d read about this kind of house. They built them at the entrance to fancy estates, like a guardhouse. Aunt Gwen was the estate’s gatekeeper.

 
Or had been.

 
While Gav made himself toast and tea, he wondered what to do. He’d spent most of the last four years desperately wanting to be left alone. Now he’d got his wish. It wasn’t exactly what he’d hoped for. He’d always imagined himself making Pot Noodles every couple of hours and otherwise alternating between computer games, reading and naps. Not once had it occurred to him that isolation would be so unsettling. He tried to picture himself staying and waiting for Auntie Gwen to show up. The hours chiming away, staring out of the windows, the unease gathering quietly at his back, growing. No. It would be awful.

 
So if he wasn’t staying in, he’d have to go out.

 
The bathroom upstairs was too cold for anything beyond the most cursory splash, but he changed out of the clothes he’d slept in. He removed the chair wedged against the front door. It felt now like a stupid thing to have done, but still he had to go twice around all the windows to make sure there was no one or nothing anywhere near the house before he could slide the bolts back, and his heart was pounding as he opened the door.

 
He stepped out into a wide, quiet, chilly nowhere, crossed only by the neglected driveway. Somewhere in the middle distance there was the sound of a tractor chugging. It felt as if the farm machine must be on a different continent. Around to his left Auntie Gwen’s car was pulled up on a patch of ground off the track. Out here it looked more like an incongruous piece of garden sculpture than a vehicle. Gav couldn’t picture an engine shrinking the big green-grey world around him, collapsing its miles to scant minutes, carrying him back to towns and timetables. He was on his feet, and there were only two ways to go: right, out the gate into the lane, or left, down the driveway under the trees. Right would mean starting back the way he came, in the direction of the little station, and then the big one, and then home. Jamming his hands down in his trouser pockets, he turned left.

 
As soon as he stepped onto the driveway he heard a skitter of feet. Down in the shadows under the trees, someone had run round the curve of the drive out of sight. Someone small, smaller than Gav. He’d seen no more than a vanishing blur of dark clothes when he’d looked up. He was going to shout, but the stillness made him shy; he couldn’t break it. The footsteps faded quickly.

 
He waited a short while, watching, then shrugged and followed on down the road. Experience had long since taught him to do his uncomfortable best to ignore things that came and went around him.

 
He walked into a wood. It smelled secret and autumnal, the musk of a thick layer of leaf mould sodden by the night’s rain. There were still brown and withered leaves on the branches above, obscuring the day. In among the trees some tangly evergreen shrub had spread and grown over head height. The driveway curved and descended, shutting out the light behind. For the first stretch it was pitted and mossy; then the paving gave out and it became a pair of gravel tracks overgrown with grass. There was no sign of whoever had run down here a minute earlier, if anyone had.
Oh come on Gav.
The track he followed felt increasingly like it led nowhere at all, as though he was the first person to set foot on it for years and years.

 
The long curve soon brought him in sight of the lower end of the wood. When he saw the corner of a building, he stopped.

 
Ahead, the overgrown track ran out from the trees into a wide clearing, on the far side of which Gav could now see a garden border, and immediately behind that the wall of a very old house: sea-grey stone, punctured seemingly at random by narrow arched windows that looked as if they were barred against daylight, and a slate roof streaked by rain.

 
Pendurra.

 
It didn’t look like it wanted him anywhere near it. He felt ridiculously out of place. The thought of explaining himself to whoever lived here was more alarming to Gavin than facing disembodied voices and dead girls and whatever else Auntie Gwen’s home might throw his way. The point where adults got involved was, he’d finally confirmed (thanks to Mr Bushy), always the point where everything fell apart.

 
Still, he had to ask someone about Auntie Gwen.

 
As more of the house came into view, though, he wondered whether there’d even be anyone to ask. He came out from under the trees into a scene of profound desertion. The buildings ahead seemed as dormant as the garden in front of them, winter-stiff. The driveway ran through a wet lawn of ankle-high grass to the front of an ancient, sullen building; heavy gables, small mismatched casemented windows on upper floors, chimneystacks jutting up like solitary reefs. It was nothing like a ruin, but even in a partial glimpse it gave the impression that whoever might once have lived there had long since covered all the furniture in dustsheets, locked the doors behind them and left the place to see out the decades on its own.

 
Woodland spread away on either side like arms opening wide to embrace the house; left, down the slope, which began to descend more steeply, and right, along the flank of the hill. In the broad space bordered on each side by the sweep of the trees was a garden of dry stems, bare branches, brown seed heads left as relics of the last summer, and patches of evergreen. It looked as big as a small park to Gav, while the house was a manor, almost a castle. Except that – like the garden – it felt out of season, its romance faded.

 
The front doors were dead ahead. They were dark wood banded with iron, and if they’d been taller they wouldn’t have looked out of place barring the entrance to a prison. The prospect of approaching them suddenly seemed unthinkable: scrunching over the gravel beneath the blank windows, climbing the single step, knocking. He felt like a boy in a fairy tale. He’d taken a wrong turn in the forest and ended up at the gates of an enchanted palace no one was supposed to find.

 
Stuck for a moment, unable to turn back or go on, he was rescued by the sight of the door opening. A man was coming out, half backwards, waving goodbye to someone inside. Gav stifled the urge to bolt out of sight. Better to look like he knew where he was than to be spotted disappearing behind a bush. The man looked up at him in surprise, squinting slightly through little round glasses. Gav felt his face settling into its habitual rigidly indifferent mask, his reflex when being squinted at by strangers. He made an effort to look less hostile.

 
The man’s appearance helped. Everything about him exuded unthreatening friendliness, from his unaffected smile as he approached to his stripy sweater and his scuffed corduroy trousers. He was shortish, a bit stocky, neither young nor old and had the kind of unremarkably pleasant face that you find hard to remember afterwards. His presence completely changed the character of the house and grounds. All at once it just looked like a big old place in the country. For the first time that day Gav thought that maybe Auntie Gwen would turn up in a minute, falling over herself with apologies at having forgotten to pick him up, and they’d have a week’s holiday together just as he’d been expecting when he got on the train.

 
He was just beginning to wonder why this thought made him achingly, unbearably sad when the man hailed him.

 
‘You must be Gavin, Gwen’s nephew. Hello, welcome!’

 
‘Uh, yeah. Hi.’

 
It was an unspeakable relief not to have to explain who he was. In fact, he apparently didn’t have to explain anything. The man shook his hand and smiled as if meeting him here was the most natural thing in the world.

 
‘It’s good to meet you. Quite a place, isn’t it? I wish I could say I live here, but I’m just on my way home. I only stopped in to see Mr Uren. I’m Owen. Friend of the family. I live just up in the village. I’m the priest, for my sins.’

 
‘Nice to meet you.’

 
‘They’ve been looking forward to your arrival.’ He nodded back in the direction of the front doors. ‘Were you on your way to the house? I can introduce you, if you like. Since you’re here. A bit less intimidating that way. Not that there’s actually anything to be intimidated by. What do you think?’

 
Gav couldn’t see an obvious way to mention Auntie Gwen and found that he was utterly unprepared to say anything else.

 
‘Tristram wouldn’t mind you knocking on the door yourself – they’re expecting you – but since we met . . . Gwen’ll be along in a bit, anyway, won’t she.’ Gav couldn’t tell whether this was a guess or whether Owen knew it for a fact, and the confusion threw him off still further. ‘But why don’t I show you in now? That way you won’t have to feel like a trespasser if you want to go on exploring on your own. It’s that kind of place, isn’t it,’ he finished, motioning around encouragingly.

 
‘Um, yeah.’ Gav felt himself being shepherded towards the grim doors, but had no idea how to stop.

 
Owen seemed determined to put him at his ease no matter how long he had to go on. ‘Mr Uren can seem a bit distant when you first meet him. Like his house, I suppose. They’re both very different from what you or I are used to. At least I assume you don’t live anywhere like this? London, wasn’t it? But you’ll feel right at home with him very soon, I promise you. Anyway, I needn’t tell you – your aunt’s known the place almost as long as I have. And she tells a good story, doesn’t she?’ Gav opened his mouth and tried to take the chance to say something, but Owen misinterpreted his stall as shyness and kept moving, encouraging Gav to follow. They’d reached the front door; Owen pushed it open. ‘In we go. Tristram?’