Castle Of Bone (16 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Hugh’s mother called out from the kitchen as they went quietly up the stairs. “Hugh, Jean, food’s nearly ready.” “Five minutes,
five
,” Hugh shouted back.

They shut the door of his room and wedged it with a chair. As usual they had to wait for Anna who insisted on combing her hair very carefully. But at last, still without saying anything, they climbed into the cupboard, first Anna, holding the baby – she had taken it from Jean without a word, just holding out her arms, Jean surrendering without protest – then Jean, then last, Hugh himself. He had intended to leave the door open, but involuntarily gave a tug on the tie-rail and the door clicked into place behind him. “Don’t shut the other one,
don’t
,” Jean pleaded. Hugh had no intention of it, yet the door swung shut, seemingly of its own accord, set off by the movement of the other one. He put out his hand to stop it, too late, for the latch caught, and when he tried pushing it open, it appeared to have jammed. He could not open either door.

Jean was sobbing quietly beneath her breath. She was trying to disguise it, but every now and then a louder one broke out as a hiccup and a gasp. Hugh felt for her hand in the darkness and took it and squeezed it, and she squeezed back gratefully. He wanted to take Anna’s hand too, tentatively put out his own, but as he hesitated heard a whimper and remembered that she was holding the baby.

The baby whimpered again. The whole cupboard smelt of baby, the faintly sweet animal smell of milk, wet nappy and talcum powder. It was a big cupboard – yet Hugh would have expected it to feel much more crowded than it did, with the three of them and Penn inside it. But it felt as if the darkness reached for miles behind him, as if the back of the cupboard was not there at all, and when he reached out his spare hand it was almost a shock to find the cool grain of the wood beneath his fingers.

The grain, the whole feel of the wood was good, comforting. Hugh traced it out, his fingers almost as seeing as eyes, and he took Jean’s hand, the one he held, and placed it on the wood, so that she could feel it and be comforted as well.

He did not remember ever holding Jean’s hand before. As a family they did not often hug or kiss or touch. Penn and Anna’s family was much more demonstrative.

There was a sound in the cupboard now, a single note, yet containing all notes. At first it emerged from a single point, but then it hissed and swelled, spread further as if beyond the walls, as if thrown out into an enormous void. But at the same time it seemed to have joined itself into a narrower line of sound, like a telegraph wire above Hugh’s head, and he reached up his hand to find the brass hanging-rail which felt as thin and hard as he expected, but also alive, as if full of electricity, making his wrists, his arms, his hands tingle and shake with sound, with the echoings it threw so far away. The echoes seemed held and thrown by other places too. Hugh felt them by his hips but thinner, from the tie-rail that must have been, also by his head in triplicate, a more florid, curling sound, no doubt emerging from the three brass hooks. The sound ran down his arms, up into his head, until it seemed filled with the same echoes, filled with humming, heated wires, hissing, swelling, exploding. It was unbearable. Hugh cried out sharply, dropped Jean’s hand and clutched at his head with both hands. The echoes died. The darkness faded. It was like being in some vehicle, rushing towards a group of trees, the vision glassy and shimmering with the speed of it – he put out his hands to protect his head from collision, but then the world steadied about him. He was standing on the edge of a wood, dizzy still but no longer moving, quiet, in one place.

“That was a real bramble, it really hurt,” said an indignant voice. He looked round to see Jean holding out her leg, with a line of red beads in one place, on a white graze.

“And that’s real blood, so it can’t be a dream, Hugh.”

“Who said it was a dream?” Jean looked at him and nodded. She seemed much calmer. She was no longer crying, nor looked as if she wanted to. They stood side by side looking about them. The wood at their backs was low and scrubby, with untidy undergrowth, brambles and nettles and stunted saplings, and underfoot dead twigs and branches and the bleached-out leaves of many autumns; soft beneath but still faintly crisp on top.

“Look, apples,” Jean said, and Hugh’s eyes following hers saw a young apple tree. It had only four apples on it, much too round and weighty for the slender tree – “They’re ripe,” Jean said, “do you think we dare eat one?” Hugh was tempted too. As Jean was not tall enough he himself reached up and picked the nearest green though ripe-looking apple, but an instinctive caution stopped him taking a bite out of it. “I’m not sure, I’m not sure it would be safe. Perhaps we’d better not.” Jean, cautious herself, accepted his caution without argument. Hugh put the apple in the pocket of his jeans where it made an awkward bulge and rubbed against his thigh as he moved. It was the first time in this place he had not been wearing pyjamas, he realized. How absurd he must have looked here in striped pyjamas from Marks and Spencers. Though this thought had never occurred to him at the time, he did, undoubtedly, feel easier in his jeans and T-shirt. He felt part of the country, belonging to it, instead of standing out as an intruder, a stranger, even though on the face of it, jeans, T-shirts, were no more appropriate.

The familiar landscape reached away. Part of its very familiarity, he thought, lay precisely in the way it changed each time he came, not just seasonally but in its very features. What was absent to his eyes was still held in his mind, was part of what he saw – just as some aspects of a friend may not be visible yet still remain part of him. And that he knew was a good analogy; this landscape assuming personality, assuming life as landscape in his own familiar world did not. There was no lake today for instance, but he recognized other landmarks – folds and dips and rises, groups and avenues of trees. The castle dominated everything. It was whole, no longer ruined, no longer forbidding, wrapped in sunlight, slumbering, peaceful. Yet it was also the centre of a vortex, drawing everything in towards it on invisible threads. It was like the twist of a kaleidoscope. The same elements formed a different pattern, but the pattern had always been present in the elements, the castle assumed only its obvious, rightful place.

“Is that where we’re going? Is that your castle?”

“I guess so; I can’t see another one.”

“You’ve been here before. How many times?”

“Every night since the cupboard came. That I remember anyway.” Jean drew in her breath. “Have you been into the castle?” “Only once, that I remember. And not right inside, just into a courtyard. It was ruined then.” Hugh wished he had not added this. Jean’s voice became higher, more anxious. “But how could it be? It isn’t ruined now.”

“It was probably just the way I saw it,” he said to comfort her.

Jean said wonderingly: “I didn’t know it would be like
this
.”

“Like how?”

“Ordinary.”

“
Ordinary?
” asked Hugh.

“Grass and trees and brambles which prick you. It’s like the park. I mean, like any walk.” “What did you think it would be like?” “I don’t know, I didn’t know – I couldn’t – but not like this. Like any bit of country. And it’s such a fantastic day.”

It was too, the best day of any that Hugh had been here, high summer, with a gentle easy sun, the heat not at all oppressive. The air hummed with insect notes, with the sudden chirpings of strong-legged grasshoppers, which stopped as abruptly as they started; high above there was a solitary lark. After the confusion of the cupboard everything seemed as simple, as clear-cut as its song. “I wonder where Penn and Anna are?” Jean asked, but she did not seem alarmed by the lack of an answer. The castle neither welcomed nor threatened them, and they walked towards it between swathes of green bracken, sharp-smelling and full of insect life. Beyond was grass burned pale yellow; it looked silky at a distance but felt prickly and brittle to walk through and to touch.

The path here was so narrow it could only have been made by rabbits. Jean went on ahead of Hugh. But suddenly, as they came round a curve of bracken which had temporarily blocked their view, she stopped dead, gasped and clung to him, her calm not as secure as it had seemed. “Look,
look
,” she said.

A little way ahead of them, picking its way across the rough ground, with swaying, jogging quarters, was the horse that Hugh had seen before, and on it the same rider. “It’s Penn,” Jean said, and the rider turning Hugh saw that she was right. The red hair was unmistakable. It looked as if he had seen them too because he jerked with his arm, up and forward, then spurred on the horse which moved into a canter, then a gallop. Jean dropped Hugh’s arm, stood for a moment, irresolute, touching her brown-stoned brooch. Then she started to run after him, stumbling, once almost falling. She stopped, seeing how hopeless it was, and waited for Hugh to catch up.

“It looks as if he’s going to the castle too,” she said. And then, with a start, “He isn’t a baby any more.”

“No. He’s a man,” Hugh said.

They were walking on a paved track now which led straight down towards the castle. There had been an avenue of oak trees along it yesterday and even without them a shadow seemed to fall across Hugh’s mind. “Look at the orchards,” Jean said; “I’ve never seen so many apple trees.”

Nor indeed had Hugh. Before it had seemed as if the castle had stood on the edges of the world. He could not remember seeing anything beyond it, but did not know which was the truth, that his memory refused to tell him what was there, or that the castle had in reality stood in vacancy, on the brink of a void now quite filled with apple trees laid out in triangular patterns or as vast five-pointed stars. They were above the orchards still as they came down a slope to the castle, so that the patterns were clear, reaching as far as their eyes could see.

They went on downhill. The castle loomed up and soon filled all their vision. Around it was a bank of smooth green turf, and beyond that, a moat full of glassily green water, reflecting turrets and gates and towers and the grey stone of the walls. Jean saw Penn on his chestnut horse whose colour almost matched his own brilliant hair, ride ahead of them across the drawbridge. The archway beyond gathered him into its shadows, then hid him entirely. Otherwise there was nothing, no sign, no sound, not a flicker of life from any opening or battlement, nor from anywhere. Insects had ceased to sound, the lark – or any bird – to sing. The seeming lack of life, however, was no more oppressive than the heat of the sun. It was peaceful and comfortable. And again, the silence was not a negative but a positive force, not muffling sound, but having a clarity which at once both heightened sense and soothed it, healing Hugh’s anxieties, calming him as a salve might soothe a wound. The very stones of the castle as they soaked up light, transmitted calm, and now that Hugh was so much closer he could see that they were less severely, uncompromisingly grey; he could see green tones and bluish-purple ones, and even in places a soft pink one, like the tones in bare flesh.

They stepped on to the smooth green turf. It was not in fact grass, but some close-cropped, thick and curly plant which gave beneath their feet like moss, and loosed simultaneously a powerful scent.

“It’s camomile,” said Jean, excitedly. “It’s camomile, Hugh, did you realize? I’ve seen it at Kew. It’s what they’ve got on Buckingham Palace lawns.” Hugh’s mind made a little, sharp, almost external and totally ridiculous image of a scarlet-coated guard in a sentry box up against the castle wall. And then suddenly, as if someone had flicked a switch, he had the same sense as he had the last time he remembered coming into this world; of being in two places at once; of doing two separate things at once.

He was gliding up a long tunnel, underground. He had no evidence for it being underground, but knew for certain that it was. There was no sound, not a footfall anywhere. Doors fell open smoothly to let him pass. The ceilings and walls and floors were of the same substance, glassy, reflecting, though reflecting shapes rather than shadows and images, but the doors that opened to him were at once, and alternately, opaque and transparent; when his eyes had accepted their transparency, they would become suddenly opaque, when his eyes had adjusted to their opaqueness they became again transparent.

At the same time as this he was stepping on to the drawbridge and walking across it. He could feel it shake under his feet, and he had a sense of echo, of hollowness beneath, but heard the sound within his mind, not actually aloud. In a moment they had left the drawbridge, had entered the shadow beneath the archway, then passed out into the light beyond. Looking back through the arch, Hugh saw the world outside as a little bright snapshot, as infinitely remote as a holiday postcard.

He continued to walk in his glass tunnel. At the same time this was now his other world, grey walls, paving stones, beneath a sun that shone from a soft blue sky; a benevolent eye, observing them.

The studs in the huge oak door were like eyes too, as they had been before. Yet they were more brilliant today than threatening, multiple brilliancies, each stud reflecting another little bright sun like the pupil in an eye, and together he saw now, forming the same five-pointed star shapes as the apple trees had. The bird handle of the door stared out from among them as fiercely as ever. But its eyes went beyond Hugh and Jean as if the enemy lay elsewhere. The whole effect was of enormous energy and splendour, the more so in their setting, that quiet grey court. Hugh turned the bird head, wrenching it with both his hands; and this time it moved and the door fell open. He felt himself sucked inside by some invisible, inaudible force and pulled Jean with him, after him. The door closed itself behind them.