Advent Read online

  Marina looked up, holding her knife in mid-air. ‘If Gwen’s not coming till later, why don’t I take Gavin out to the point?’

  Tristram blinked. ‘Why, yes, my sweet. Or wherever you wish, if he agrees. I had hoped you would. As long as you’re careful.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  The knot in Gav’s stomach loosened. Thinking about his parents had suddenly made him dread the coming day, as if a phone might ring somewhere in the house at any moment, summoning him back. The exchanges between Owen and Tristram and Caleb had made it worse. He couldn’t help feeling there was something they weren’t saying in front of him. He’d vaguely assumed Marina would go off to school, leaving him adrift in the dark old house. The prospect of getting outside – Gav had no idea where or what the ‘point’ was, but she’d said ‘out’ – made everything a little better. He certainly wasn’t going to ask why she wasn’t going to school. No one had put the same question to him; the least he could do was return the courtesy. Plus, whatever kind of place this was, he could tell – he could feel – that it wasn’t meant for questions from outside. It held its secrets, as he held his. He understood what that was like.

  ‘That’d be great,’ he said.

  ‘Good!’ She hopped out of her chair, dropping her knife so that it clattered on the plate. ‘Then let’s—’

  ‘Marina! Let Gavin finish, please.’

  ‘No, it’s OK,’ Gav said quickly, taking a last bite and pushing back his chair. ‘Thanks very much, but I’ve had plenty. I had some toast at . . .’ and he realised he didn’t want to say Auntie Gwen’s name in case it made them solemn again ‘. . . at, um, earlier. Thanks anyway.’

  Marina bounced on her tiptoes and spun behind her father’s chair. ‘I should get clothes, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you should.’

  She leaned round to kiss his cheek. ‘Just a minute, then,’ and she ran out. Gav heard her feet on the stairs.

  She was back in the time it took Tristram to wave away Gavin’s perfunctory offer to help tidy up breakfast and direct him to a bathroom. He’d somehow expected the kitchen and bathroom to be different from the rest of the house, like when you visited a cathedral or a castle and found a modern toilet block hiding inside stone walls and arched doors, next to a café where everything was plastic and stainless steel. But the kitchen was completely in keeping with the rest of what he’d seen, thick with smoky warmth and streaked on its rough white walls with soot. There was wood stacked against a wall between great antique stoves of blackened bricks; iron pans and kettles hung above. It looked more like a historical recreation of a kitchen than a place where anyone could actually cook food, and, alarmingly, the same kind of surprise met him in the bathroom, although after a period of embarrassing indecision Gav had found a handle that made something a bit like flushing happen. Better than anywhere else? Was that really what Auntie Gwen thought? It was a useful reminder that she was in fact crazy.

  Marina was waiting at the foot of the stairs. Her father had vanished. Gav got the impression that he’d been transferred to someone else’s care, and Mr Uren, released from his slow courtesy, was now free to ignore him. It wasn’t a resentful feeling. The man had been polite enough, but Gav was much happier with him gone. What was it he’d said? You shall have the freedom of Pendurra. While you’re here, but Gav was determined not to think about the end of his freedom, for as long as he could get away with it.

  ‘All right?’ Marina smiled. She’d tied most of her blonde hair back behind her head with a ribbon, but quite a few bits had been missed and were falling in random tufts around her ears and eyes. It made her look even younger, as did the brown jumper that was a size or two too big for her. She also appeared to be wearing slippers or moccasins; whatever they were, they were leathery and soft and didn’t look right for going outside. Nevertheless she led him down the dim hallway to the door and, lifting an iron latch – the grey daylight briefly dazzled him – stepped out onto the gravel.

  Crows drifted in and out of the fringes of the wood. Marina led him through a gap in a low stone wall and into an enclosed area of the garden where paths of unkempt grass ran between mostly barren flowerbeds. She chatted happily as they went, always halting to make sure he was right behind her; he felt like she’d trip over her own legs at any moment. He’d have liked to slow down and look around, or at least have a chance to take in the strangely antiquated scene in silence, but trying both to keep up and not to bump into her as she started and stopped used up most of his concentration, and whatever was left over he needed just to pretend to follow her enthusiastic chatter. She seemed to want to show him and tell him everything at once. She named each clump of green or brown and each tangle of sticks as they passed, with the manner of a museum guide introducing much-loved paintings. The botanical names meant nothing to him, though he quickly realised that everything in her world meant everything to her, so he did his best to nod and ‘uh-huh’ on cue. As far as he could see, the garden was just a rather sad mess of droopy green and dead brown. There were other things he wished she’d start explaining, but she seemed to get stuck on whatever was nearest. He didn’t want to sound bored, though, so he made an effort to think of something he could contribute involving gardening. He remembered looking out of Auntie Gwen’s kitchen window into her little garden plot and seeing that bush with its incongruously luxuriant pink flowers.

  ‘Oh yeah. What about—’

  ‘What?’ she said, stopping abruptly on a narrow path; he nearly lost his balance pulling up short behind her.

  ‘I just remembered. You know in the garden at Aunt Gwen’s house? There’s a really nice something I saw there. Some kind of rose maybe?’

  ‘Yes! I know the one you mean. It is a rose. It’s called Madeleine. It’s got these outrageously pink flowers in summer. Pinker than pink.’

  In the summer.

  Of course.

  She must have seen something in his face, because she stopped talking. They’d come to the far end of the walled garden, where an overgrown iron gate led out to a path between one side of the house and the edge of the wood.

  What she saw in his face was not belated surprise at a rosebush blossoming on one of the shortest days of the year. No: the thing that stopped her short was the mingled fear and astonishment in his eyes as he realised he was about to tell her something; the unfamiliar effort of choosing to talk instead of keeping silent.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Her oddly lopsided jaw had fallen half open.

  ‘That rose, it’s got flowers now. All over. I saw it this morning.’

  She looked at him, head tilted.

  ‘But it’s winter,’ she said, in a tone of voice Gav knew all too well. But there’s no one there, Gav. But that’s impossible, Gav. Don’t be stupid, Gavin. He remembered again why he didn’t tell people things.

  ‘Oh yeah.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘So it is. Must have missed that somehow.’

  ‘Roses don’t flower in winter,’ she said reasonably.

  ‘They don’t?’

  ‘No.’ Apparently she was as immune to irony as shyness. ‘None of the bushes do. They need it to be warmer. They eat the sun, sort of.’

  He watched her face, looking for veiled mockery, but she appeared to have been born without those veils. It was part of what made her look so much younger.

  ‘Oh right,’ he said.

  ‘So it can’t—’

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  ‘What?’

  Anywhere else, with anyone else, he’d have let it go. Forget it. My mistake. Clam up. Silently add it to the long list of small humiliations with which he recorded his days.

  But Marina didn’t seem to think he was stupid, or ridiculous, or lying. She just seemed mildly confused, as if she was in the middle of working out a not very complicated sum. To his surprise, he discovered that he wasn’t afraid of what she might say.

  It occurred to him that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt that about any conversat
ion with anyone.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you. See for yourself.’

  Her eyes twitched anxiously back to the house. ‘But I said I’d take you to the point.’

  ‘OK, we can do whatever afterwards. It’s just up the drive.’ It was an impossible thing, of course. He could only have missed realising it because he got so many other things wrong, all the time. Roses didn’t flower like that in the last days of November. But he’d seen it, it was there, and he was suddenly sure that Marina was also different enough from everyone else he knew that she ought to see it too. ‘It’ll only take a minute. Yeah?’

  ‘I’m not really supposed to go that way,’ she mumbled.

  ‘What? Why not?’

  ‘It’s not good for me.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘Going, you know. By the gate.’ The word ‘gate’ came out with a tiny clutch in the throat, as if she’d said ‘graveyard’ or ‘quicksand’.

  ‘You mean you never go to the lodge? Aunt Gwen’s house?’

  Her hands fidgeted. ‘Yes, I’ve been there a few times, but I’m not supposed—’

  ‘You did last night.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Last night, when you were sleepwalking. I saw you.’

  She stared wide-eyed. Her voice fell to a guilty whisper. ‘Did you? Where?’

  ‘Come on.’ He started back towards the path and after a few moments she followed. ‘I was in the room downstairs and I heard this banging on the door and I looked out of the window and it was you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Look at your hand. No, the other one. See that bruise on the side?’

  She turned her wrists as if wringing out an invisible towel, so he took the right one in his hand, feeling as he did so a strange blush that seemed to go down from his face into his chest rather than the other way around. Her hand was very small and very alive. He twisted it over gently and pointed out the mark.

  ‘There. See? That’s from banging the door. Aunt Gwen’s.’

  Then he was holding her hand up close to both their faces, the two of them leaning together, and she was looking up at him with her unnervingly defenceless expression, and nothing else was happening at all as the distended seconds passed by. He dropped her hand. The blush turned round and started going in the normal direction. He set off again, to conceal it.

  She scurried beside him. ‘What else did you see me do?’

  ‘Not much. You stood there whacking the door for a while. Then it was like you gave up and sort of slunk off. You scared me shitless, actually.’

  ‘You were frightened? Why?’

  Once more he glanced at her sharply, trying to catch something that would expose her innocent-sounding question as a trick. Once again he found nothing.

  ‘Well, OK, I had no idea who you were or anything, I just heard this banging in the middle of the night—’

  ‘The middle of the night?’

  ‘Yeah. Actually it was almost exactly midnight. And so I look out the window and there’s someone I never set eyes on in my life, wearing like a sheet or something, and you’re hammering and shouting at—’

  ‘Shouting?’

  Her voice had shrunk with sudden fear. For a confused moment he wondered if it would help if he stopped and held her hand again, but the moment passed, as such moments do.

  ‘OK, not shouting really, just talking.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘Not sure.’ He tried not to think about the eerie moan. Come back, come back. ‘I couldn’t really tell.’

  ‘I had a dream.’ They were in under the trees. It couldn’t have been an hour since Gavin had walked the other way down this same path, but already it felt as if that journey had taken him into a new country, a new world, like the night passage in Hester’s car. ‘I definitely did, but I can’t remember it at all. Did you ever have that feeling when you went out in your sleep? Like something happened it was incredibly important to remember, but you couldn’t?’

  ‘Kind of the opposite, actually.’ He could hardly believe he was saying it, putting into words something he would never have said aloud even to himself. ‘Most of my dreams it’s really really important to try and forget.’

  He waited for her to ask what she meant, but for once she was quiet. Perhaps he’d finally said something in her language, something that didn’t need translating.

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘let me show you that rose, OK? I know you don’t believe me about it, but it’s there.’

  ‘Hey! I never said I didn’t believe you!’

  ‘Yeah, well, I could tell. I’ve had a lot of practice.’

  ‘Practice?’

  ‘With people not believing me.’

  ‘You have? OK, try me again.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Try again. See if you can tell.’

  ‘Um . . .’

  ‘Tell me something and then tell me if I believe you or not. It’s a test. A what-do-you-call-it? It’s how you find things out. An expedient.’

  ‘Experiment?’

  ‘That’s it! Go on, then.’

  She appeared to be completely serious. He was going to tell her that it wasn’t a game, that it was actually the whole story of his miserable life, but she was looking at him with such an air of earnest anticipation that he didn’t have the heart.

  ‘Er. OK. So. There’s this rose in Aunt Gwen’s garden and it’s flowering. Now, today. Even though it’s winter and everything. How’s that?’

  She was shaking her head. ‘Useless. Do a new one.’

  ‘Why? That’s not unbelievable enough for you?’

  ‘Just for fun. Otherwise it’s boring.’

  He felt a twist of anger. Boring? Fun? How could she have any idea what it was like for him?

  ‘Right, then.’ He stopped on the driveway. They were under the trees at the edge of the wood, the lodge beyond. His face felt hot and he spoke too fast. ‘Try this one. There’s a woman nobody except me can see. She’s followed me around my whole life, but she doesn’t actually exist. I was sitting on the train down here yesterday and she got on and shouted at me. How’s that? Believe me?’

  Something odd happened to Marina’s face. Her hands went slowly to cover her open mouth, and her eyes opened wide. He braced himself for whatever she was about to say. Oh come on Gav. But he never found out what it was, because in the stunned silence that followed his confession the door of the lodge opened. The gardener-pirate Caleb emerged, looked down the track and saw them.

  ‘Hoi!’ He waved as if to shoo them back into the woods. Still tingling with the adrenaline fizz of having told Marina – told anyone – what he just had, Gavin stood his ground. Shut up, he hissed silently at himself. Stop letting all this stuff out. It’ll only make it worse. But he was still wondering why doing it had felt almost like a relief when Caleb strode down to them.

  ‘Hey.’ He propped his hands on his hips. ‘Where’re you two off to?’

  Marina looked at Gav. ‘We were just going to look at something in Gwen’s garden.’

  ‘Whose idea was that, then?’

  ‘Gavin’s. He thought—’

  ‘You can’t go up by the gate.’ He straddled the track like a sentry, barring their way. ‘You know that.’

  ‘We weren’t going to. Just to the lodge.’

  He glared at them as if he thought Gavin might have been trying to abduct her. ‘Thought you were heading out the other way.’

  ‘We’re going to. Right after Gavin shows me something.’

  Gav stared at his toes, cheeks burning again. Now Marina was making him sound like some kind of pervert.

  ‘Nothing to see in there,’ Caleb said, with a finality even she couldn’t miss.

  ‘Oh. All right.’

  ‘Don’t want you wandering around this morning, OK?’

  This was how it always was with adults, Gav told himself bitterly. How could he have thought Pendurra would be any different? He’d hardly met this bloke and already
it was obvious that Caleb thought he’d done something wrong.

  ‘What do you mean? Why not?’

  Caleb twisted the lanky hair behind his neck. His look kept straying over their shoulders, as if something might be lurking there. ‘Jus’ don’t want you to. There’s a good lass. All right?’

  ‘But Daddy said—’

  ‘’s only for an hour or two. Couple of things I want to check on first. All right?’

  ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘Course.’ Even to Gavin, who’d only met Caleb that morning, this sounded totally unconvincing, but Marina apparently accepted it at once.

  ‘Well,’ she said meekly, ‘OK.’

  ‘Good lass. You could show your friend here round the house.’

  ‘Actually Gavin’s my cousin.’

  ‘Cousin, then. Lots to see indoors.’

  ‘But we can do that when it gets dark! I want to—’

  ‘Jus’ this morning. Promise?’

  ‘OK, then.’ She crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘Course not. ’s only . . .’ He stared down into the sombre mass of winter trees. ‘Might be someone poking around. Jus’ like to keep an eye on things.’

  Gav remembered the small figure he’d glimpsed for a moment as he’d left the lodge that morning, but there was no way he was going to say anything. At least half of Caleb’s surliness felt like it was directed at him, and his only defence was the old one: tight-lipped silence.

  ‘Someone’s come in?’ Marina sounded disproportionately alarmed by the idea.

  ‘Dunno. Let me worry about that, all right? Anyway, you promised now.’ He cracked a grim smile and prodded her arm.

  ‘But what about the garden? Gavin—’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Gav said. ‘Come on.’ He started back towards the house without waiting for her. What would be the point, anyway? he thought. Even if they went to see that rose, he knew it would be dry and dead. You’re imagining things. Oh come on Gav. No need to go looking for humiliation when it seemed to be able to find him all by itself.