Castle Of Bone (2 page)

CHAPTER THREE

The houses were joined, a pair, tall, pointed and curious; either unsymmetric without the other. Their windows had stonework like eyebrows over them. Along this road all the houses were in pairs but no pair was like any other one, the gables different in particular, some as curvilinear and plump as in this pair they were angular and sharp. The right-hand house had recently been converted and Penn and Anna’s parents had bought the flat made of the top two floors. All the paint on this house was new, builders’ sand and ladders still littering the garden at the front of it. But Hugh’s and Jean’s parents had lived in the whole of the left-hand house as long as Jean at least could remember, and it had not been painted for easily as long as that. The paint was a faded pink, the stonework yellowish. Rhubarb and custard Penn called it when he wanted to annoy Hugh.

The cupboard arrived there that evening, long after Hugh had given up hope of it. The sun – a fire between crimson and scarlet – squatted on the skyline as they carried it in through the garden gate; two men in stained white aprons, oily-headed, who mopped themselves and complained bitterly, in dualogue, when it came to lugging the thing up three flights of Victorian stairs. How in all the supernatural . . . could it be so heavy they wondered, and indeed Hugh wondered too, for as cupboards go it did not look particularly heavy. Its doors, swung open, looked thin as matchboard.

“Shoddy, there you are, Hugh, I told you so,” declared his father with gloomy satisfaction. “Ain’t known another like it, for weight not,” the balder of the two men said as he closed his fingers round Hugh’s father’s inevitably flamboyant tip.

“It’s hideous, monstrous,” Hugh’s father said with enjoyment, examining the cupboard carefully again.

But when Hugh went to bed that night, his clothes were still strewn about the room. He did not know what had stopped him putting them away in the cupboard. Not laziness certainly, though he was usually lazy about such things. But some odd reluctance that he did not try to explain.

And in bed, when he shut his eyes, the empty cupboard assumed . . . in the darkness . . . What it assumed did not frighten, so much as exhilarate him; his heart thumped extraordinarily. Yet he would not let himself analyse what he felt, he forced his mind away into pictures, images.

He began to try to visualize the cupboard. He had tried before, that morning, after they had bought it. His father had decided to have a drink and Hugh had sat on the wall overlooking the river with a glass of Coca-cola beside him, trying to remember what the cupboard looked like.

But he had not been able to. If momentarily he had caught some detail, immediately he had attempted to fit another to it, it would slide away again. He had had a very strong feeling of it, yet could not translate this visually; which had annoyed him because as a rule he was not only observant, but practised consciously retaining what he observed, in order to use it in his painting. He had come to do this almost automatically. Yet now in bed though he had seen the cupboard once again, when he tried to visualize it, still no picture came into his mind.

Instead he saw other images from that morning beside the river: the Coca-cola – a dark elliptical liquid in the glass with a small white moon in it of reflected light – when he had raised his eyes from that, there had been across the river a group of trees, and now in bed that image crowded out the nearer one. They were a group of willows and alders, the alders darker, dourer-looking than the pollarded willow trees.

The group seemed to be closing in on him, rushing towards him through his head. In a moment he could focus on one tree only, in a moment more could see only an area of trunk quite close to him. He reached out a hand, involuntarily. He touched wood. His fingers scraped on, scraped up, wood bark. He opened his eyes. He was standing among alder trees, facing one trunk, one tree. When he took his hand away from it there was green, from the bark, beneath his fingernails.

The trees that morning which had stood in line, now encircled him, and there were no willows, only alder trees – there was a fire too in the middle of the grove, burning fiercely, with hints of blue and green flame. A girl sat by the fire, feeding it big and little sticks. Hugh could not see her face because her head was bent away from him, but she had very black, very straight, hair and a red dress and bare white feet.

He realized that he himself was still wearing pyjamas. Seeing the girl, he clutched the jacket about him for it was flapping open, having lost all but one of its buttons. (He had told his mother about the buttons, several times – “Oh, I’ll sew them on for you, love,” she had said each time, but the jacket had always come back from being washed, neatly folded but still buttonless. Jean would have sewed them on, if he had asked, but Hugh had never remembered to ask her.)

The girl made no move. She did not look at Hugh. He was not even sure that she had noticed him. The river ran beyond the alder grove, and on the other side of it, near the bridge, a man stood fishing. Beyond the river was the hill.

There was no town now. The hill was bare except for a few trees, and on top of it a square and turreted castle. The falling sun caught one side fleetingly and made the turrets look as if they had been painted red.

The instant Hugh saw this castle he knew he had to reach it. He began to move but meanwhile the girl poked at the fire so violently that it glared for a moment with brilliant light, with particularly bright and fiery heat, and the heat felt like a wall through which he had to break. It receded behind him afterwards. Immediately he pulled himself through what felt like another wall – of what he did not know, only that it was hostile to him – and so passed out of the ring of alder trees.

He did not look at the girl again. He had never properly seen her face, but the way she had moved stirred some memory in him, which was quickly gone.

He crossed the river then, by the bridge, not the arched stone bridge that he knew, but a flat wooden one, standing on wooden piles driven into the river-bed. Though broad enough to take a cart or chariot it had no sides to it. It felt curiously comfortable and warm to Hugh’s bare feet, as if it was alive, with warm blood in it.

The sun was vanishing behind the hill. Clutching his jacket round him Hugh went on, through chillier air and fading light, thorns and stones attacking his feet, his legs beginning to ache. He could not see the castle any more. It might have been the slope which hid his view, it might have been the growing darkness. He went on anyway, climbing steeply now.

CHAPTER FOUR

The next morning, Sunday, Hugh’s mother at breakfast pointed out what dirty nails he had.

“They’re green, Hugh. They’re disgusting. Whatever have you been doing?”

Hugh thought: I had green nails in my dream.

His mother did not often notice such things. But when she did it was with a vehemence that made him immediately rebellious, even about things to which he was usually indifferent. He and his mother were like two loose ends of charged wire these days, touched together they sparked dramatically. So now, he rushed from the kitchen, shouting, and ran upstairs as noisily as he could, slamming the bathroom door on his way past.

The noise chastened him a little. He flung himself down on his bed with a feeling of anti-climax, regretting his half-eaten and now unobtainable breakfast. Almost immediately he picked himself up and went down to the bathroom on the half-landing and scrubbed his nails clean. By the time he started back upstairs to his room, he was feeling perfectly calm, though the tips of his fingers were smarting.

At the third step up he began to have a most odd sensation. He had been thinking about the cupboard, waiting empty, in his room. And suddenly it was as if the idea of it had gone outside his mind; it was as if it was pulling him from his room, while at the same time something else tried to drag him back. This something Hugh recognized after a moment as his own alarm; making him resist the pull ahead, as the gravity of an object makes it resist the contrary pull of a magnet, until he recognized what it was; then, fear lessening, the pull became irresistible and he went on up and in. To find what? Nothing as far as he could tell that was not entirely ordinary. The sun had sought out and lit the cupboard making it look cheaper, more featureless than ever. A bird shifted in the ash tree outside the window. In order to create some movement, anything, to release and justify the tension he had felt, Hugh picked up a shirt and flung it on his unmade bed.

Shortly afterwards Penn arrived to see Hugh and with him Anna, to see Jean. All of them drifted into Hugh’s room to look at the new cupboard.

“It’s not much to look at, is it though?” Jean had said.

The pig emerged from the cupboard not long afterwards.

When the pig had finally disappeared, they continued walking through the park. No one suggested it – no one at first said anything. They had just looked at each other and walked on, over rough grass and reddish, stony paths. Even Penn had lost his ebullience, and Jean did not attempt her usual underrunning commentary of sensible suggestions and sensible explanations. They were all stunned; partly by fear, not so much of the pig itself, but of its inexplicable appearance; partly by simple astonishment. They were much more frightened now than previously because at first there had been no time for fear.

“What would we have done with it if we had caught it?” Penn said, at last. “Perhaps it’s just as well we didn’t.”

“We couldn’t possibly have caught it,” Jean said.

They were walking on open ground just here, at almost the highest point of the park. Two men were trying to fly kites – South American bird kites – scarlet, widespread, magnificent. But there was scarcely enough wind, the birds tugged up occasionally as if about to soar, then more often dipped, fluttered, dived back to earth.

“As if they were wounded,” Anna said. They went through a gate into the plantation. There was a stream there and water plants, rushes and irises and orange flags, and trees, birch trees mostly, dappled, insubstantial-looking, some black and white, others with bark as satiny and wood as rough, but with a russet, even purplish sheen on them; trees like snake skin, Hugh thought.

“Like giraffe’s legs,” Anna said.

“Whatever are you talking about?” Penn asked.

“Enormously tall giraffes,” said Hugh.

“They mean the birch trees, I think,” said Jean.

“Don’t be an idiot, Ann,” Penn spoke with such scorn that Hugh came in to rescue Anna, though it was impossible to tell from her face whether she needed rescuing or not.

“What do you think happened, Penn? That pig, I mean.”

“I can’t believe it did happen. It’s impossible,” said Penn.

“But it did; we know it did,” said Jean.

“Of course I know it happened. I never said it didn’t. I just said it seems impossible. There must be some logical explanation. There always is a logical reason if you look hard enough. You’d think a car impossible if you didn’t look inside the bonnet.”

“Clever Penn,” said Jean, a mixture of admiration and sarcasm in her voice. Perhaps, just, admiration more.

“It could have been magic,” Anna said.

“Oh,
Ann
. I
said
. There must be some logical explanation.”

“Well, how else did a pig appear in an empty cupboard?” asked Jean.

“We all saw it was empty,” added Hugh.

“It could have come upstairs . . .” But even Penn knew that it had not. “It could have come in at the door,” he suggested defiantly. “Who was looking at the door? No one was.”

“Oh, come off it,” said Hugh. “A thing that size. And you heard what a racket it made afterwards.”

“Magic,” said Anna, looking obstinate. Hugh had never known her speak as much as she had today. Normally she never said anything, not when he was around anyway, and she looked timid, even terrified; she appeared the opposite of Penn, negative to his positive, a small shadow beside his large sun.

“Well I don’t believe in magic,” Jean said.

“Not like some,” interrupted Penn.

“But I just don’t see how else . . .”

“Suppose it was just a hallucination after all.”

“Suppose we imagined it. Suppose it never really happened.”

Hugh, looking round him now, could almost have believed Penn, almost wanted to believe him. They had reached a space of emerald grass fringed by more silver birches and rowan trees. The grass was too green, too soft, too smooth; the rowan berries scarlet, the tree trunks speckled black and white. It looked as unreal as elfland, Hugh thought, a place to which men were enticed in fairy tales and from which they never returned – like Sir Orfeo, or Thomas the Rhymer – except that both those had returned at last.

There were other people here and a dog or two, walking across the grass; but they dissolved into the landscape, they seemed no more real than it. Not even time seemed real any more to Hugh. Thomas and Sir Orfeo had left time as well as space when they went to fairyland, and now he and Penn and Jean and Anna were outside time too because what had happened could not belong to time, which was reality, or the reality they understood. The pig must be a hallucination. It had to be.

But even as he thought that, Hugh remembered it; its bulk, its thunderous careering, the smell and sound of it, the bristles on its skin. This place might seem unreal, but nothing could have looked more real than the pig, or been more real.