Darkest Part of the Woods (32 page)

"I never said it was easy for you, but you wanted to go, didn't you?"

"Are you saying you don't want to make anything of yourself?"

The question and indeed the entire argument seemed dwarfed into insignificance by the visions that had come to Sam in the night. "All I'm saying is that's you," he said, and in a desperate attempt to lessen the scrutiny he was enduring "It isn't us."

"Hold on, old chap, I think that's a bit much. You can't use these ladies as an excuse for hanging about. Your mother wants to stay near Margo, maybe your aunt does as well, and anyway you know why Sylvia wouldn't want to venture far just now. Only forgive me if I'm blunt, but that's got nothing to do with you, has it? There's no way you'll be involved, so there's no point in making it sound as if the family's the reason why you won't move yourself."

Sam gazed hot-eyed at him in a vain attempt to render himself unaware of Sylvia.

"It's only you who's making out I did."

"So what reason are you giving us?"

"I told you, I can't leave. Something won't let me." As he spoke he grasped how true that was, which dismayed him so much he tried to take some of it back. "My mind," he said.

"Please promise me you won't say that to Fay Sheridan."

"You're talking as if this is all about this Fay woman," Sam's mother objected.

"It seems to me it's about Sam."

"Let's leave Fay out of it by all means."

"I won't ask if your relationship with her has to do with more than Sam."

"You can. It has."

"And was he supposed to help that?"

"You're asking if I used him to attract her, is that what I'm hearing?"

"You'll hear what you choose to hear, Terry, and it wouldn't be the first or the dozenth time either."

Sam might have been grateful that their attention had wandered away from him if that hadn't left him more aware of Sylvia's. He sensed that he wasn't alone in finding the argument wholly irrelevant, beside some much greater point, and whose view was he sharing if not hers?

"What's this got to do with anything?" he blurted.

His mother looked betrayed, his father justified. "Fair enough, you're the subject," his father said. "Tell us what you think the trouble is with your mind."

"When I tried to leave I nearly had a breakdown."

"That'll be a bit of an exaggeration, will it?"

"It won't, no. I couldn't remember where I was supposed to be going, I couldn't think at all. I couldn't do anything except come back."

He heard his aunt's lips emit a small moist sound. When he glanced at her, unable to predict what she might say, she was gazing at him as though he'd conveyed more than he knew.

"All right, old chap, you're with the family," his father said. "What do we think he needs?"

"Understanding,"

said

Sam's

mother.

"To stay," Sylvia said almost as immediately.

"We can do better than that, can't we?" When nobody responded other than by staring, Sam's father said "Shall I tell you what I think's wrong with your noggin, Sam?" m "Not drugs,"

Sam's mother said at once.

"Of course not drugs. He says not and I believe him. I wouldn't think he'd go anywhere near those after what they did to his grandfather.

“No, Sam, I wonder if when you fell out of that tree you hurt more than your leg."

"I

don't

know."

"It's a possibility then, isn't it?" Sam's father asked the women. Since that received only a guarded assent from Sam's mother and none from Sylvia, he went on. "Better find out what someone thinks who knows more about it than we do."

"Did you have anyone in mind?" Sam's mother said not much less than accusingly.

"I seem to recall you and Margo felt Lennox's doctor at the hospital was a good sort."

Though Sam's mother didn't quite grimace, Sam could tell she was distressed, whether by remembering how the doctor had failed to save Lennox or by the notion of sending her son to the Arbour. "Let's see if it happens again first," she said. "You'll be giving the interview another try next week, will you, Sam?"

He felt as though she'd missed the point only Sylvia had understood, but he said "I'll call dad's friend."

As her face restrained itself from showing her opinion of that, his father said "Can I ask you to undertake a bit more?"

"Depends if she wants me," Sam said, however dishonestly.

"I'll do my best on that front. What I'd like you to promise is that if you find you still have trouble leaving, you see the doctor."

"I'll see someone who knows about it."

"I expect that'll do." All the same, he let his gaze linger on Sam's face before sending himself to his feet with a slap of the thighs. "Well, if everyone will excuse me I ought to be on my way. Things to catch up with in town," he said, then grabbed Sam's hand to clasp it in both of his. "You'll be fine, old chap.

Just tell yourself you will. We all have our days off mentally, don't we, girls, but there isn't much that won't fix in my experience. Remember you've got everyone in this room, Sam, and Margo too if you need her."

Sam felt that his father's touch and his intended meaning had both fallen short of him.

When his father released him at last, Sam watched his parents make for the hall. As soon as they were out of the room he limped to close the door. He heard them murmuring outside the house, presumably about him, but that wasn't important now. He turned to Sylvia, who looked pinned down on the couch by her midriff. "You can't leave either, can you?"

"No." She said that as though the admission was a release, and he couldn't tell if the gleam deep in her eyes was of fear or delight or both, or even more that he might not want to learn. "None of us will," she said.

28

A Private View

HERE'S all my family where I live at last," Margo cried. "I just wish you could all see what I have to show you and not just all but one."

She was bustling about the living-room of her apartment, which occupied the top floor of a large two-storey house on the eastern side of Goodmanswood. Like the largest space-her studio-the room faced the restless woods that appeared to be clawing darkness down from the night sky smudged by the glow of the intervening streets. Heather found the woods as distracting as Margo's behaviour, her hurrying to refill the glasses of champagne and Sylvia's of sparkling water between repeating offers of the trayfuls of hors d'oeuvres she'd prepared as if she was determined to transform the smallish room cluttered with venerable furniture into the location of her latest opening. "Sit down then, someone," she cried now. "You have a seat, Sylvia. I do believe you're bigger than yesterday."

As soon as Sylvia deposited herself on half of the couch, Sam limped to the farthest chair. "Are you going to be lonely over there, Sam?" Margo protested at once.

"No room for that," he said, largely to himself.

"Is he a tad nervous about the imminent event? Is that the trouble?"

"Hardly imminent yet," Heather said, having gathered that Margo meant the birth rather than tonight's show.

"You'd think it was, looking at her," said Margo, holding out a tray until Sylvia took a morsel in each hand. "I'm right, though, aren't I? Don't be afraid of our Sylvia, Sam. She's the same person she's always been. There'll just be more of her for a while."

While Heather thought Margo had identified one reason for his nervousness, she was certain that he didn't want attention drawn to it. As he performed an understated mime of not knowing where to rest his gaze, Margo turned to Sylvia.

"Maybe when he's old enough or she is you'll be bringing Natty to see my new work somewhere else."

"I'm sure it'll be a different place."

Heather tried not to feel that Sylvia was sharing a secret with herself or at least not with the person she was supposed to be addressing.

Had she felt that sometimes when they were little, perhaps in the woods? Before she could begin to grasp the memory, Margo said "I guess if we can all settle ourselves it'll be show time."

Sitting next to Sylvia, Heather felt dwarfed by some aspect of her.

As Sylvia sent down the last of her handfuls of food to the source of the hunger, Margo switched on the video camera that was hooked up to the television. "It'll be bigger when it's finished," she said.

"What will?" Sam was apparently nervous of knowing.

"The image. When Lucinda exhibits it, I mean."

"Has she seen it yet?" said Heather.

"Heavens no. This is only the raw material in no kind of shape. just wanted my family to see what I've made of the woods so far." |H Margo crossed to the light switch she added "I hope I haven't got anyone expecting too much." Heather didn't know what to expect. She seemed to glimpse still treetops across Goodmanswood raising themselves as though Margo had released them or alerted them by switching off the light. "Now it's dark," Sylvia said.

It was partly suspecting whom this was meant for that made Heather ask "Does it need to be?"

A silence gave her time to be uncertain who would answer. "Some of the footage is,"

Margo said.

She took hold of various items of furniture on the way to entrusting herself to the last available chair and picking up a remote control in either hand. The television responded first, displaying a carnivorous plant in the act of closing a beaded leaf on a fly already torpid from the effects of being snared. Though the film was speeded up, this only made the insect's feeble struggles look more desperate, while the inexorable movement of the vegetable mouth continued to appear gloating, positively conscious. Then, as Margo turned on the video camera, greyness flooded the screen like a sudden fog that momentarily hid the woods before they lurched into the room.

At least, their image did. The trees themselves and their elongated shadows were quite still. Heather deduced that they were in the depths of the forest, since there was no sound, no hint of a world beyond. The image wobbled and then stabilised as the camera began to zoom forward, appearing to pass through entrance after scaly wooden entrance on the way to some goal. The automatic focus kept wavering as if the trees were losing substance and then forming themselves afresh. As the zoom reached its limit, the clump of trees on which it settled lost all focus, swelling up like greyish tentacles or fingers full of poison, and a vague movement flickered across them. "What was that?" Heather felt delegated to ask.

"Me not getting it right first time," Margo said, presumably taking the question as a criticism. "Then I figured out I ought to use the manual focus," she explained over the next shot. It could have been of the same trees, but the zoom was even slower. As each pair of encrusted tree-trunks advanced to frame its progress they grew intensely clear, and Heather could have fancied they were taking hold of layers of her consciousness. The forest was silent except for the occasional creak of the camera as Margo filmed; it sounded more like wood than plastic. Heather was thinking she ought to find something to praise when, to the extreme left of the image, a shadow or a more solid presence dodged out of reach of the zoom.

"What-" she was unable not to blurt.

"It must have been me," said Margo.

"I don't see how. You've gone beyond your shadow."

"Then it was something behind me and taller than me, except I'm sure it wasn't anything," Margo said and reversed the tape. "There, you see? It was nothing at all."

Heather could only assume the furtive movement had been the effect of a speck of dust or a transient flaw in the tape, since it didn't repeat itself. "I hope nobody's thinking this is how it will look when it's finished," Margo said.

"This is just the raw material."

"What was in your mind?" Sylvia murmured.

"Making you look again. That's all my work can ever be about, isn't it?"

"Look for what?" Sam said uneasily.

"Keep watching and maybe you'll see."

Heather wondered if Margo wasn't sure. She saw her mother's shadow ensnared by trees, split into thin inhuman fragments and transformed into wood. The image had begun to spin, turning wholly over and righting itself, as the zoom advanced. Perhaps it was this disorientation that made her feel she kept missing glimpses of movement at the very edge of the image. If they had really been present, wouldn't Margo have seen them and reacted to them?

Not necessarily, given the gathering twilight, which had Heather hoping Margo was close to the edge of the woods. That only showed how irrational she was letting herself become, since her mother had already returned safely from them. The camera lingered over yet another vertiginous zoom through the intricacies of the forest, drawing each layer of tree-trunks into focus and absorbing the dimness.

The zoom had almost reached its limit when a clump of trees that filled the screen appeared to acknowledge it or Margo by bowing towards it and stretching out the tips of their branches. "How did you manage to achieve that?" Heather was anxious to know.

"Oh, it's full of tricks. I wouldn't be surprised if I haven't even used some of them yet.

Camera tricks, I mean."

Heather thought Margo might as well have admitted she had no idea. "So that's all I've done so far," Margo said. "As I say, it won't look anything like that when it's finished, but what does anyone think?"

The footage had left Heather feeling she'd been in the woods for hours. She was trying to summon up a different comment, since the dim figures of her sister and her son had uttered none, when another image of the woods appeared on the screen, and then Margo did. "Well, look at me," Margo said. "I forgot I did that."

Heather thought she looked nervous, both on the screen and in its glow. She was wandering away between the trees and peering around at the gloom. She halted beside a stooped deformed tree as if she'd noticed something Heather was unable to distinguish. Then, so slowly that to begin with Heather couldn't be sure it was happening, Margo set about assuming the posture of the tree, raising her left shoulder in imitation of a fibrous swelling on the trunk, twisting her left arm into a shape Heather imagined would have been worse than painful so as to copy the position of a crippled branch, letting her right arm droop almost to the obscure mosaic of fallen leaves to emulate another. As she bent low, the camera inched down to follow her, and Sam turned a gasp into a whisper. "What's holding the camera?"