Mr Toppit (43 page)

“Oh, those awful suburbs. Mile after mile of ribbon development.”

“There wasn’t much in the boy’s statement.” There didn’t seem any point in telling her about it.

“Who are those people, those Sumners? Why can’t they mind their own business? Not everybody’s longing to be in the newspapers. Have you eaten?”

“I had something on the train.”

“Because there’s nothing here. You might have to go into town. Take the car.”

“I think I’ll go for a walk.”

“A
walk
? You’ll burn up.”

“Not for long. It’s shady in the woods.”

“I’ll be resting when you come back. Don’t let me sleep too long, will you?”

That was day one: a short walk just to acclimatize myself. It was on day two that I began to stake them out properly, the woods. I took a rucksack with me, some food and drink. I didn’t know how long I’d be—whether they were there already or whether they had yet to arrive. Although it was early quite a few people were around, cheerily saying, “Good morning!” to me, as if there was some bond that had to be acknowledged between strangers who happened to be sharing the same woodland path.

In the books, the Darkwood is always deserted. Our woods weren’t. People from the town walked their dogs, and kids rode mountain bikes along the paths. And, of course, there were the
Hayseed
faithful, fewer than there used to be but still a significant presence at weekends, as if the woods were a free
Hayseed
theme park.

The difference between us—Rachel and me—and the faithful was this: we really knew the woods; they didn’t. They tended to stick to the paths. They were amateurs. They didn’t want to get their shoes muddy. There were something like three hundred acres of woodland and Martha kept the main tracks cleared but the rest of it had become even more overgrown and jungle-like than it was when we were children. I shouldn’t think I’d set foot in them for five years and certainly hadn’t spent longer than half an hour there for much more than that, but all the markers we knew when we were young that led us to our places were still there, if you knew how to see them. We didn’t invent
the folklore of the woods. It was passed on to us by Arthur: he had grown up there, too.

There was the holm oak a few minutes up the main track that had split and grown up like a giant V and hid a little path that went up the hill to what we called Foxhole, a low cave that you could squeeze yourself into, which we believed, had it not been blocked by boulders, led to a secret tunnel that took you to the house. In the books, it was one of the ways Mr. Toppit traveled unseen. There was the little hut that when we were children had still had a wooden roof. Now it was completely collapsed, but it still had its floor made of pinecones set into the earth. About thirty yards above it, through tangled undergrowth, was our tree house—actually a large piece of metal railing that had been winched into a tree and laid on its side on the upper branches to make a flat platform.

For the time being I wasn’t going to any of those places. I had decided to head straight for what we called the Clearing: a strange formation of oak trees planted in an uneven circle, with a rough piece of limestone jutting up from the earth in the middle that we thought was an altar. That was where I was going to wait for a while.

At lunchtime I decided to move on. The woods were planted on a hill and I headed upwards to the part that flattened out on the top. We called it the Village. When the woods were planted, maybe two hundred years before, a series of ornamental paths had been laid out there at different levels so they crisscrossed each other with little brick bridges taking the higher ones over the lower. Most of the bridges had collapsed but there were still one or two that you could use. It was so overgrown now that foliage covered some of the lower paths, making them almost into tunnels. In the books, Luke Hayseed
believed that the area was the remains of a medieval plague village and there were bodies buried everywhere. It was the epicenter of Toppit activity.

I slept for a while in the shade, my head resting on my backpack, and when I woke, the sun was lower and light was slanting through the trees. Slowly I circled back towards the house, taking a different route but ending up at the Clearing. As I was leaving, something caught my eye—the sun glinted on a shiny object under one of the trees. It was a little pile of five chocolate wrappers. This wasn’t unusual in the woods, but I was far off the beaten track, away from the main paths where you would find all manner of junk strewn around. I bent down and picked them up. As clues go, it wasn’t much—Matthew wasn’t the only person to eat Crunchies—but my guess was that they were his binge of choice. They had arrived. It was getting dark and I wouldn’t be able to find them now, but I would come back early the next day.

When I got home Martha was already eating her supper and smoking a cigarette. Doreen had left her some little ramekins of broccoli in cheese sauce, covered with silver foil in the fridge, which she had heated. I made myself scrambled eggs and joined her.

“Where have you been?” she asked, only mildly interested.

“In the woods. Walking.”

“You can’t have been all this time. The whole day.”

I shrugged. “It’s good to take some exercise. I sit in an office every day.” With my abysmal track record in sport at school, becoming the kind of person who took exercise would have required a change of personality so extreme that even Martha might have noticed, but she tended to take things at face value.

“Get me another drink, will you? A small one. Vodka, no ice.” I don’t know why she bothered to tell me: her drinks order had been set in stone since I was a child.

When it was time for bed and she was going round switching off the lights—it never occurred to her that other people might want to stay up later than she did—I said, “You remember when I was in America?”

“Have you counted the ashtrays?”

“Staying with Laurie? When Rachel came out?”

“Was there one in the kitchen? Do you ever hear from Laurie?”

“Not since that summer in LA.” I’d seen photographs of her. A couple of years before she’d been in England promoting her book, which had some silly title like
The Flaws of the Fathers—A Personal Journey Towards Acceptance
. I hardly recognized her in the pictures. She was thin as a rake now and looking rather glamorous.

“I never liked her much,” Martha said.

“I met Wally Carter when I was there.”

“Wally,” she said, with an expression of distaste on her face. “Didn’t he die?”

“Yes. A couple of years ago. Graham told me. He was pretty doddery when I met him. He told me something. He told me about Jordan, what happened to him.” I wasn’t going to go into any detail. I just wanted her to know that I knew, for the record.

It needed an action replay, really. If you’d slowed down the film you might have seen something pass across her face. Otherwise you wouldn’t have noticed. It was just too fleeting.

“Don’t put the butts in the rubbish,” she said. “There’s a lot of paper in there. If you’re going to do that, put water in the
ashtray first. It’s like a tinderbox in here.” Then she picked up her various bits and pieces, her book, cigarettes, and spectacles, took a last look round the room and went out, leaving one light for me to turn off. I could hear the stairs creaking as she went up to her bedroom.

Day three did not get off to the start I had planned. For one thing I overslept. I had meant to get up at dawn. The other thing that happened, which I could not have foreseen, was that Lila turned up. In fact, that was what woke me: the sound of car doors slamming. When I got downstairs, Martha was at the front door and Lila was being maneuvered through it in her wheelchair by the taxi driver. This was the last thing I needed. I was late already.

Martha threw a helpless look at me. “Lila, this is insane!”

“No, Martha. What is insane is that you never call me back. I’ve left message after message for you. I know you don’t want to burden other people with your worries, but you don’t have to suffer alone. What you are going through, my darling! Oh, poor Rachel. I know she’ll be all right. She’ll turn up, of course she will.”

“We’re fine, Lila. Anyway, Luke’s here. He’s helping. He’s been marvelous,” Martha said desperately.

“I’m glad you’ve woken up to your responsibilities, Luke. Martha told me how seldom you come to see her. Did you get my birthday card? Perhaps it was lost in the post.”

“No, I did get it. Thank you.”

“It does not take much to send a little acknowledgment, you know. Just a stamp. And a little lick.”

“Lila, you really mustn’t stay,” Martha said firmly. Then she produced her trump card. “You won’t be able to go to the lavatory. You know there isn’t one on the ground floor.”

“No, it is all arranged. Trevor is coming back to pick me up after lunch. I have made smoked-salmon sandwiches on brown bread for us. The wholemeal one you like. And don’t worry about the lavatory arrangements, my dear. I have a little bag. It was changed this morning so I will be fine. It’s very discreet. Perhaps you could wheel me through to the sitting room, Luke. I must let poor Trevor go.”

I felt like a trapped animal. The wheelchair was much lighter than I’d thought it would be. Lila seemed to have shrunk since I’d last seen her. You could almost have fitted someone else into the chair with her: maybe her doctor had ordered one several sizes too large by mistake. As I pushed it, a terrible gurgling noise came from somewhere underneath her.

“What I didn’t bring was The Big Book of Hayseed. So heavy! We’re up to volume six,” Lila said proudly. “I’ve just finished clipping the pieces about Rachel departing from her clinic. What an unpleasant tone some of them have. So unnecessary.”

“Oh, Lila,” Martha said, exasperated now, “you don’t have to include everything.”

“You know me, Martha. I’m a completist.”

I deposited them in the sitting room. I had to get out to the woods. “Will you make us some coffee?” Martha said. She looked so frantic that I couldn’t refuse. It wouldn’t take long.

From the kitchen, I could hear Lila talking. “We should go back to our German lessons,” she said. “We haven’t talked about our dear relations for, oh, so many years. Such a long time.”

It was going back more than a decade, to the days when they had sat talking about the family Lila had invented to help Martha with her German conversation, the prosperous Untermeyers in
turn-of-the-century Lübeck, with their sick relatives and thriving shipping business.

“Oh, really, I can’t,” Martha said. “I’m too rusty.”

“It will relax you. It will take your mind off things.”

When I took the tray through, Lila had already started. I had done enough German at school to be able to understand.

“We’re all so worried about Uncle Heinrich’s leg,” she was saying. “He’s a martyr to illness.” I almost laughed. I remembered Rachel and me being hauled over the coals for asking Lila how Uncle Heinrich’s treatment for syphilis was coming along. “Cousin Liesl is distraught, particularly with Christmas so close.”

Martha was staring directly ahead. She wasn’t saying anything.

Lila went on, “Since he returned from Bremerhaven it’s got much worse. Such a long journey! Liesl said the twins missed him so much they cried themselves to sleep every night.” Silence. “Martha?” Lila pronounced it in the German way, “Marta.”

With nothing from Martha she continued, “The dear man! He’s only recently got over influenza. And their little Fritzi—I hope he’s not going to catch it. He’s so smart in his sailor suit. Such a bundle of energy, that child! So looking forward to Christmas! The decorations Mutti ordered from Hamburg have just arrived. The tree will be spectacular!”

There was a long pause. Martha’s head was bowed and tears were running down her face. Finally, in halting German, she whispered, “The poor little boy. I hope no harm comes to him.”

I would have stayed, I really would. I wanted to, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to go. I should have gone hours ago. I put the coffee tray down and crept out of the room as unobtrusively as I could. As I reached the door to get outside Martha called my name, but by then it was too late. I was out. I had gone.

My heart was beating fast when I reached the woods. The sun was higher now, rising above the trees. There must have been a lot of dew in the night because everything smelled so fresh. I was running, not fast, more like a trot. I wasn’t sure where I was heading but it would come to me, like an instinct. There would be a sign. There were always signs if you knew how to see them.

I turned off the main path at the big V and headed upwards towards the tree house. I thought that was where they might have slept. I climbed up—rather harder to do than I remembered—but there was nothing up there. I considered shouting for them, but thought better of it: I absolutely didn’t want to frighten them off.

I wanted to go to the quarry next, but it was more difficult to find than I’d thought because the noose appeared to have been taken down—a piece of frayed rope that had always hung from a huge oak behind which was the track that led there. Without it I was traveling blind, not helped by the fact that the woods were so much more overgrown than they’d used to be that you couldn’t tell what was a path and what wasn’t.

When I finally reached it I found something. The quarry was a great bowl-like crater that had been excavated out of the hill. Arthur told us that the stone from which our house was built had come from there. One side was more or less sheer, too steep to climb although we had tried enough times, and at the bottom, where it was sheltered, there was the remains of a fire. It was still warm, and peeking out of the ashes were more chocolate wrappers. I wasn’t some kind of Red Indian tracker like you see in movies so I had no idea how long ago they had left, but I knew I was getting close.

In the end, it wasn’t difficult. They were at the Clearing. Rachel was lying on the ground and Matthew was next to
her, leaning against one of the trees. He was whimpering like a child. You’d have thought, with eating all that chocolate, he would have been spotty, but his skin was extraordinarily clear: pale, almost blue, particularly under his eyes.