Darkest Part of the Woods (2 page)

"I'm not understanding you, Lennox."

"The one who came last. Sister Twig."

"Are you talking about Sylvia? She's somewhere in America. It was Heather who stayed, and you won't even look at her."

"It's all right, mummy. I understand why dad wants Sylvia," Heather was quick to say.

"Only why are you here, dad? You don't need to come here any more."

His gaze drifted towards her and grew unexpectedly sad. She wasn't sure he was responding to her until he said "Why are any of us, Heather?"

"I can't say," she admitted, hoping fiercely that he'd reverted to his old self.

"Can

you?"

"Didn't you hear?"

A flashlight must have shifted, which was why the trees beyond him appeared to edge attentively forward. "Hear what?" Margo demanded impatiently. "You're the lecturer."

He clapped his hands, a sound that rattled through the woods. With delight or incredulity he declared "They never heard."

Heather made herself relax before her innards tightened too much. All of his fellow patients had burst out laughing-a woman whose fingers were clasped prayerfully together so hard they gleamed white, a man apparently unable to prevent his head from ducking from side to side, a woman digging her fingertips into her cheeks as though to support her protuberant eyes, a man whose fists had spent minutes in beginning to open towards the mound, another poised in a crouch that seemed on the point of dropping him to his knees. Four male nurses from the Arbour who had been attempting to persuade them off the bricks fell silent as the five turned just their heads to Lennox. He glanced at each of them, a smile trembling on his broad thick lips. "Maybe," he said at last, "his mouth's full."

Not all of his companions were happy to greet this with laughter, but the woman with clasped hands and the crouched man made up for the rest. "Well, okay," Lennox said when they eventually subsided. "We may as well go."

He gestured to include Heather and Margo and the nurses in his invitation as he stepped off the bricks. He'd barely started across the clearing when the other patients followed him.

"Fair enough, that's the way," Heather heard a nurse murmur to his colleagues. "Just stay close."

She saw the flashlight beams jerk among the trees, casting a net of shadows over Lennox and his followers. "Thanks, Heather," Margo said and gave her a shaky hug. "I don't know what I'd do without you."

"You'd do pretty amazingly," Heather assured her, "as if that's news to anyone."

Margo kept hold of her. "My car's at the Arbour. Shall I drive you back to yours?"

"You don't want to be walking alone in the woods now it's dark," Heather understood aloud. As they reached the edge of the clearing she took Margo's arm and glanced back. She might have turned her flashlight beam that way if she had been by herself. Instead she shone it forward, illuminating her mother's route, and saw how the nurses appeared to be using their lights to herd the patients between the scaly columns in the dark. There was nothing behind her that she hadn't already seen, she reflected. Three decades must have exposed more of the ring of bricks, that was all. When she and Sylvia were children they had called it the path that led to itself.

2

The Rumour of a Book

"HERE comes a casualty of progress," Randall said and at once seemed not to know if he should have.

Heather looked up from comparing two imperfect copies of A Description of a journey through the English Shires on Foot and Horseback. Sam was limping across the room, apparently unaware of the admiring glances of several students, most of them female. His long serious face and the stubbornly inquisitive expression that was seldom absent from his deep blue eyes reminded Heather of her father, Sam's grandfather. She had to assume Randall meant to ingratiate himself by commenting "You're hobbling well."

"I'd stand a chance in a cripple competition, you mean."

"I didn't say that." Perhaps suspecting he'd appeared to come too close to doing so, Randall added "Was it worth it?"

"Was

what?"

"Was your protest worth going to hospital over?"

"You sound like my dad."

"I hope that's acceptable, then."

Sam planted his elbows on the counter. "I don't know why you'd want to," he said, and stared at him.

Heather marked her place in both books and stood up. "Time we were on our way.

These won't come to any harm from being a day older."

"I'll drive if you like," said Sam.

'Will you be taking the bypass?" Randall enquired.

Sam turned his back. "Just because we tried to stop them cutting down the trees," he threw over his shoulder, "doesn't mean it isn't there."

"I'll see you in the morning, Randall." Heather restrained herself to saying only that until the door Sam limped to hold open for her had closed behind them. "Now what was all that about?" she said low enough not to echo in the sandstone corridor.

"Me being a stool."

"You aren't, and if you were it wouldn't be an excuse, so what was the problem?"

"I'll go and apologise if you like."

"You'd only confuse him. Leave it for now. That doesn't mean you shouldn't apologise to me."

"Sorry, mum."

He lowered his head and widened his eyes at her from under his brows like the little boy she didn't think he'd quite stopped being, and she hid an affectionate smile. "Stop that," she said. "Just remember I have to work with him. Any objections?"

"How would I know? I don't know him. Am I going to?"

"Maybe if you visit me at work. I hope I haven't just seen how You'll treat any man I'm friendly with."

"Such as who?"

I wasn't thinking of anyone. You're the only man in- my life at the moment."

Sam closed the massive door out of the university. "I'll drive you to the Arbour and then I can go home and finish making dinner."

"I haven't left you much to finish," Heather said, though it was far more than his father, Terry, would have undertaken.

"Grandma will drive you home, won't she? If you're late do you mind if I eat and come back to Andy and Dinah's?"

"Be careful driving," Heather said, "be careful whatever you're doing," and wondered if she would ever be able to relinquish being so much of a mother.

He let them into the Civic with her keys and sent the car into the traffic more immediately than she would have risked, and drove through several amber traffic lights that she would have found too stern a caution. Mist was shortening the streets of increasingly small houses that bunched together on both sides of the road through Lower Brichester. The town petered out with a scattering of bungalows, beyond which the road met the motorway on the far side of fields spread with tattered tarpaulins composed of last night's rain. Less than five minutes later-more if Heather had been driving-the car swung off the motorway onto the Goodmanswood bypass, and in another five it swerved across the road into the grounds of the Arbour.

The private hospital stood at the end of a lazily winding drive. Originally a broad three-storey house built by a landowner, it had grown six new ground-floor rooms behind itself. A minibus was backing onto the gravel in front of the left-hand bay window, beyond which a man had thrust his fingers in his ears while the bus reiterated in a high sharp voice "Beware vehicle reversing." Sam halted the car and ducked out of reach of the kiss she aimed at him. As the car veered away with a stony screech, Margo hurried out of the wide front entrance.

"There you are," she said as if she had begun to doubt the possibility. "Dr Lowe is ready for us."

The tall minutely stooped doctor turned from murmuring to the receptionist at her desk between the feet of a pair of curved staircases. He used a fingertip to separate a tuft of his greying hair from an arm of the silver spectacles that looked too flimsy for his broad round face. "Shall we go along to my office?" he said, holding out his palms well short of Heather's and Margo's backs to guide the women into a brief corridor.

Two pastel abstracts that might have started life as landscapes flanked his door, and Margo dealt them each an unfavourable blink. The office into which he bowed the women seemed both fat and dark with the leather of several chairs and with the bindings of dozens of nearly identical volumes shelved to the right of an extensive pine desk, an impression scarcely relieved by the' view of the twilit lawn staked out by a few trees more solid than the misty woods across the bypass beyond the high wall. Dr Lowe indicated a couch and sat on the nearest chair rather than behind the desk. "I don't know if anyone thanked you for helping yesterday," he said, "but let me start by thanking you both. I believe you were instrumental in persuading Lennox to come back to us."

"I don't know if we did that, did we, Heather?"

Heather didn't immediately respond, having only just recalled that the man she'd seen watching the minibus had been among her father's companions in the woods.

The memory felt more like a fading dream. "I don't," she said.

"But if we hadn't been around there mightn't have been enough people to cope."

"I won't deny there could have been a problem," Dr Lowe admitted. "We'll be discussing patterns of staffing next week."

"And maybe hiring some extra staff?"

"As you're aware, we don't have problems of containment as a rule."

"So why did you yesterday? You aren't someone else who blames Lennox for everything."

"Someone other than whom, can I ask?"

"It seems like half of Goodmanswood sometimes, doesn't it, Heather?"

"Quite a few people at least."

Margo sniffed at the revision. "I'd say more than that think he's responsible for everything that happened in the woods."

"It does appear to be the case," the doctor said, "that Mr. Price was the instigator. He asked reception to look for something he told her he'd mislaid, some book he needed to consult.

It was just a diversion. He wouldn't name the book."

"I wasn't talking about yesterday. I meant the reason we came to England in the first place," Margo said with some bitterness. "And incidentally, he's still Dr Price. The university wouldn't take that away from him."

"Dr Price, I should have said, of course. I'm certain anyone who knows the facts appreciates what he did. It's tragic that he should have been one of the victims of the very threat he identified. The sad truth is pioneers are often misunderstood." Having paused to observe that she was to some extent mollified, Dr Lowe said "The problem, as my colleagues and I see it-"

"You've had your heads together over Lennox."

"We had a conference this morning, since you were coming in."

"So you could give us your final decision."

"Hardly final. I'm of the view that nothing is when it comes to the mind. But it does appear that our other casualties of the sixties. Would that have been when you were born, Miss Price?"

"Mrs. Harvey," Heather felt compelled to say, though she no longer was. "I was a couple of years old."

"And her sister was born two years later. Why?"

"In case the family dynamics are relevant. I was about to say the others seem to look to Dr Price to lead. They see him as the man who knows."

"Knows what?" Heather might have said, but Margo did.

"If we could establish that we might be on the way to helping them instead of merely containing them. They keep it very much among themselves, whatever they think. It's as much of a secret from the other patients as from us. I'm not suggesting it has any reality, only that it might give us more of an insight into this persistent mental state. Meanwhile Dr Price is the one who directs them."

"He brought them all back here last night," Margo said.

"He did, but only after he'd led them out. It isn't an incident we'd care to see repeated.

Apart from stretching the staff too thin, any of his group might have come to harm on the road."

"So

you

suggest......

"One proposal was to split them up by transferring them to separate facilities.

Of course there aren't any within a good few miles."

"You'd have a whole lot of upheaval for nothing. Don't you realise "

"I do, Mrs. Price. It was one of our newer people who proposed it. I've been here long enough to know your husband and the others would just make their way back to the Arbour."

Heather remembered the last time Lennox had, Margo's midnight phone call wakening eight-year-old Sam, her father's expression when she'd next visited him, a secretive justified look. "If that's not your solution," Margo said to Dr Lowe, "what is?"

"I believe we may have to try stronger medication."

"So you can have him more docile," she said, and rubbed the corner of one eye with a folded forefinger. "So there'll be even less of him."

"I do assure you if there were some viable alternative I'd be inclined to favour it."

"Have you found out what set him off yesterday?" Heather hoped aloud.

"Thus far that's one more piece of information we can't persuade him to share."

"I wonder if he might tell me or mother."

"Since when has he told us anything like that, Heather? I don't know any longer if it's him or the medication that's shutting up so much."

"By all means give it a try," Dr Lowe said. "I'll take you to him." Margo was the last to stand, so slowly that the couch might have been uttering its weary creak on her behalf. Once they were all in the corridor, however, her stride took on some impatience. "Is Dr," the doctor said, increasing his stoop towards the receptionist, "is Lennox still in his room?"

"He hasn't come down, doctor." I Dr Lowe led the Prices along the corridor above the one that contained his office. Two watercolours that might have involved a glance at mountains faced each other across the passage, and he knocked at a door beside the less specific of the pair. When that brought no response he eased the door open. Heather's father was sitting on the end of the bed, his back to the pale greens and blues of the simply furnished room. His forearms rested on the windowsill, holding him in such a low crouch he might have been trying to hide from the woods, which were dim and blurred except for lights that swarmed up the outermost trunks to vanish under the glistening foliage. "Lennox, we've come to see you," Margo called.