Advent Read online

  A few cars idled in front of the station, but none of them contained Auntie Gwen. The mist that swallowed headlights and rear lights up and down the road might as well have marked the edge of the world.

  He went back to check the platform again. A clump of people had formed at the far end, most of them school kids, though he noticed Hester Lightfoot there as well. He wanted to avoid the other kids almost as much as he wanted to be out of sight of her, so he sat on the least illuminated bench he could find and waited until the last of the passengers had scurried away.

  Minutes passed. No Auntie Gwen.

  The night and the cold closed around him.

  Three

  Gavin had made two more trips out of the station to check the road when he returned to the bench to find the crazy woman standing beside it.

  ‘You look like you’ve been stood up,’ she said.

  He was about to slip behind his usual no-it’s-OK-I’m-fine routine, until it occurred to him that when she was so obviously right, denying it would sound stupid. Besides, he’d been waiting for more than twenty minutes and was beginning to wonder what he was going to do.

  ‘Looks like it, yeah. It’s my aunt. Being late, it’s her thing.’

  ‘Your aunt, did you say?’ An odd frown wrinkled her face for a moment.

  ‘Um, yeah.’

  ‘May I ask . . . is she a maternal or paternal aunt?’

  Gavin hesitated, suspecting some sort of odd joke, but Hester seemed to mean it.

  ‘My mum’s sister. Maternal aunt.’

  ‘Ah. Idle curiosity only. Is she coming a long way, then?’

  ‘Not sure. I’ve never been around here before. Dunno where her place is. It’s, um . . .’ and he unzipped his bag and dug out the letter again. ‘Here,’ he said, holding the back of the envelope under one of the grimy platform lights so they could see the scribbled address.

  ‘Pendurra! Goodness me, how very grand.’

  Grand? he thought. Auntie Gwen?

  ‘That’s a bit of a journey. Mind you, most places are a bit of a journey from there. Are you related to the Urens, then? How inexcusably nosy of me, I am sorry, but then after badgering you on the train I’ve already made an idiot of myself so I might as well keep at it.’

  ‘No, no, I’m not . . . Er, Aunt Gwen’s not from here, she came to live here a while ago. I think she’s like a housekeeper there or something.’

  Hester Lightfoot looked past his shoulder for a moment and then her eyes widened. ‘Oh yes! Yes, someone told me once that her name was Guinivere. Small woman, always dresses in black, lots of bangles, rather . . . distinctive character?’ Gavin was nodding. ‘I should say I don’t know her myself,’ Hester went on. ‘Everyone says she’s very nice, just not the norm for that corner of the county, it’s a little more predictable . . . But anyway! Isn’t that odd? I know your aunt, almost. I don’t think anyone knew she even had a family.’

  He’d wished her away over and over on the train, but now Gavin found himself quite relieved to be talking to her.

  ‘Looks like she forgot about her family this evening, at least,’ he said.

  She was obviously so amazed to hear him make even half a joke that she examined him doubtfully before chuckling.

  ‘Hmm. Well, I’m sure you won’t mind me saying, but she does have a bit of a reputation. It’s probably entirely undeserved. I suspect the locals think she’s unreliable just because they’ve seen her wearing purple lipstick. Did you try ringing her?’

  ‘Nah. She hasn’t got a phone.’

  ‘Of course not. Have you checked to see if she left a message?’

  It would never have occurred to him, and he admitted it.

  She went into the ticket hall, and he heard her talking through a partition to the one person on duty. She took longer about it than he expected and eventually he went in after her.

  ‘. . . So if she does show up you can let her know that I’ve given him a lift already? . . . Hester Lightfoot. Here – I’ll write it down’ – she found a pen on a string and the back of an abandoned ticket – ‘and my number too, but if she comes, you can just tell her Professor Lightfoot picked him up. All right? . . . Thanks very much.’ She pushed the ticket through the window and turned back to Gavin. ‘No message for you, and I don’t see why you should have to hang about here in the cold when I’m going the same direction anyway. I hope you don’t mind. We just have to take the branch line a few stops and then I can drive you round to Pendurra. It’s only a little further for me, and I know the very house where your aunt lives. Quite a coincidence. I’m not sure I haven’t even been inside it, ages ago. Anyway, it sounds as if my train has finally arrived. Do come with me. It’ll save you having to wait who knows how long.’ She led him back along the platform.

  The school kids were noisily pushing inside a still noisier train that had just chugged in. Hester took a few more steps that way, then saw that Gav had stopped following. She turned back until she was peering intently at him from rather too close. Her expression had become startlingly earnest again, full of something that he hadn’t expected to see there and couldn’t fathom.

  ‘It’s all a bit peculiar, I know. To say the least. But do let me give you a lift. Please. Fellow travellers.’

  Caught off-guard, and used to enforced consent, he mumbled some kind of incoherent agreement.

  ‘Good, wonderful!’ she said, snapping back into the bright and unembarrassed mode he’d assumed was her natural state. ‘The branch-line train doesn’t leave for another few minutes. If you want to let anyone know . . .’

  Gavin had completely forgotten promising Mum he’d leave a message from the station. He reddened, realising what he’d have to say.

  ‘Oh yeah, good thought, thanks. Oh wait, is there a payphone or something? Mine’s not charged.’

  ‘I think there’s one in the café.’

  ‘Ah, thanks. I’ll catch you up?’

  The station café was empty of everyone but a couple of well-wrapped pensioners, morbidly stirring their tea. Gav stared at the phone. He paused for only a few seconds. That other train would be leaving soon. There was no time to worry about what he was doing.

  The past few years of trying to bury his secret life had turned Gavin into a practised liar. By the time his father’s voice had finished reciting its message, he knew what to say.

  ‘Hi, Mum. I’m calling from the station . . . Got here fine. Auntie Gwen was a bit late, but she just came so, um, we’re leaving now for her place. Ah, oh, by the way, it may be a couple of days before I can leave another message, my phone’s run out and . . . I must have left the charger at home. Apparently Auntie Gwen knows a place I can charge it, but she won’t be going there for a bit. Anyway, whatever, she said not to worry, OK, Mum? So I’m fine, hope you’re having a good time. OK. Bye Mum.’

  He ran out of the café, only just remembering his bag. Two minutes later he was squeezed in among the school kids as the train clattered and growled away from the town into the night.

  Once or twice in the next half-hour Gavin wondered whether he was about to become the victim in the kind of story you read about in the newspapers. All the pieces were in place. He’d left a message for Mum telling her not to expect to hear from him. He’d gone off with a total stranger. She was, obviously, a nutter. He imagined some old snapshot of himself smiling out from the paper, beside an article detailing the mutilations he’d suffered before his body had been found abandoned in the woods. Nevertheless he kept following. He followed Hester off the train at a tiny station on a hillside above a town. He followed her into a boxy old car, barely listening to her apologies for the clutter and the smell – ‘Oh dear, the mice must have made their way in while I was away’ – and the encouraging monologue she kept up – ‘It really isn’t all that far as the crow flies, hardly any distance at all, but we have to wend our way round the river. Probably half an hour or so. You can’t get much speed up in the lanes and even less when it’s foggy. Who knows, we might run into
your aunt coming the other way . . .’ The only time he properly panicked was when the passenger door had clicked shut beside him in the station car park. His hands had balled into fists in his pockets and for a few moments he was convinced that this time he’d made a seriously stupid mistake. As she banged the gearstick into reverse, he was about to throw the door open and jump out, when a phrase she’d used popped into his head: fellow travellers.

  By the end of the few seconds it took him to dismiss it as just another of her meaningless oddities, it was too late; they were out on the road and moving.

  It was like being driven along a narrow trough at the bottom of the sea. High rough hedges closed in on both sides of the car and the headlights picked out nothing beyond the next winding of the road. Sometimes trees bent over them and the trough became a tunnel, a circle of white mist enclosed in a frame of skeletal branches. Occasionally they would pass a house stranded in the dark, the sight of its solitary windows only making Gav feel more like he was entering a labyrinthine wilderness. Hester, though, seemed sure that this tangle of sunken alleys was taking them somewhere: Pendurra. The way she was talking about it made it sound as if she was pleased to have an excuse to drive that way.

  ‘. . . same family living there since who knows when. That’s very unusual these days. The old estates, the grand houses with land around them, they’re ruinously expensive, needless to say, and the land doesn’t make money any more. No one knows how they’ve managed to keep it going. Though I gather he did something in the navy. It’s not as if he’s out and about drumming up business opportunities like some of them are. A sight of Tristram Uren these days is rarer than spotting one of those choughs.’

  What? he thought, before remembering the illustration from her book.

  ‘Of course, this being the country, there’s gossip instead. Maybe folklore would be a better word for it. I have at least one near neighbour who’s quite certain there are vaults of pirate gold under the house at Pendurra. In fact that’s probably one of the more plausible rumours I’ve heard. Still, it’s a curious old place. Rather lost in time, if you know what I mean. I’m sure your aunt’s told you all about it? See, now I’m being nosy again. It must be something to do with coming home. I told you I was going native.’

  She hadn’t put any kind of question to him for a while, so he reacted slowly.

  ‘What? Oh no, Aunt Gwen’s not in touch much.’ For an unpleasant moment he remembered the way his father liked to tell stories about her to embarrass his mother. ‘I thought she just sort of helped look after the place.’

  Without warning they were under a few scattered streetlights, and the hedges had given way to houses walling in the narrow road. Passing through the village, Gavin saw a cluster of masts.

  ‘Here, we’re turning round the end of the river now . . . Just have to wiggle along the other side for a few miles. Then you know as much as anyone else does. When your aunt first came to live here – what is it, ten, twelve years ago? – a few people got very overexcited. New and unusual happenings at Pendurra. Or at least something to talk about. It’s all quietened down since then, as it tends to. Once it turned out she did shopping and grew petunias like the rest of us. Though that neighbour, the pirate gold one, still thinks she’s a witch.’

  ‘She is a witch,’ Gav said. ‘Or says she is. At least she said it to me once.’

  ‘Oh, is she? Well, it’s the trendy thing, I suppose. I ought to talk to her myself, perhaps she . . .’ The sentence trailed off and left an uncomfortable pause. When Hester got herself going again, a few twists of the road later, she’d relapsed into merely pointing things out as they drove by. To Gavin, it was all just patches of dark, and anyway, he was remembering Auntie Gwen, how she solemnly explained to him as they walked in the park one weekend that she didn’t believe in God but worshipped rowan trees and someone called the Mother. At the time – it had been during the last of her few visits to London, a number of years ago, before the world had turned against him – he’d been happy to listen. He liked the stories she told about animals and trees and the weather, and most of all he liked the feeling of sharing a secret with her. But he’d been confused by the way that whenever the two of them were alone together, she’d start asking him what he saw everywhere, bending down to him with an impossibly eager look in her eyes and whispering things about visible energies. (At first he’d thought she was saying ‘vegetable energies’ and it was to do with giving up meat like she had.) After she’d gone, his parents sat him down and explained that Auntie Gwen was weird, so he forgot about it. Then a bit later on they began telling him – Oh come on Gav – that he was weird too, and he wished he could talk to her, but she wasn’t invited any more.

  Now his father and mother were hundreds and hundreds of miles away and he was winding through the night towards her home. The hedges shrunk beside them, the road broadened enough to let two cars pass, and they drove up out of the thin fog. A field of brilliant stars spread overhead, smudged with cloud.

  ‘Nearly there,’ Hester was saying (as she had been for a good fifteen minutes), but Gavin didn’t care. He didn’t care that he was lost in the dark with a total stranger; he didn’t care that Miss Grey had turned crazy and started screaming nonsense at him on trains. Unutterable joy was consuming him. It seemed to be flooding down from the sky, and each breath he took sucked more of it inside him. It was the feeling he knew from the end of his flying dreams, the moment just before you remember that you have to wake up, but it was as if this one time some kindly lord of the dream had told him the alarm would never go off.

  ‘. . . and here we are!’

  Gav blinked and looked around. He couldn’t recall arriving. He’d missed the last few . . . seconds? Minutes? The car was pulled over by a tall hedge. The headlights showed a straight lane that sloped down ahead. At the fringes of their beam he saw a bare field to the right. To the left, two tall, flat-topped pine trees were shadowed against the faintly lesser dark of the sky. Beneath them, a pair of rough stone posts flanked a driveway leading off into wooded blackness. Beside the driveway, a little way beyond the gateposts, was a house.

  Hester Lightfoot had cut off the engine and was getting out. Feeling slightly dizzy, Gavin followed.

  A gusting wind blew about. There was nothing to hinder it. In all directions the land fell away gently. Gav thought he knew now what it had been like for the first man on the moon, his foot touching down on the rim of another world, suspended in empty space. He saw a word carved in the nearer gatepost: PENDURRA.

  ‘Watch out – there’s a cattle grid at the entrance. Tricky in the dark.’ Hester felt her way over the bars without a backwards look. He had no choice but to keep following, until they were on the driveway, staring together at the house. With its cosy eaves and its little latticed windows, it could have modelled for a gingerbread cottage. Though every window was curtained, there were lights on inside, upstairs and down, and under the tiny pointed roof of a porch. Bare, twiggy stems climbed up over this shelter and along the guttering above.

  ‘There’s a car here,’ Hester said, peering round the far side. ‘And you can smell the woodsmoke. I’m afraid your train just slipped her mind. Or perhaps she got the wrong day. Shall we knock?’ She stepped under the porch, banged on the door and called out, ‘Hello? Ms Clifton? . . . This’ll give her a jump. I doubt she gets too many knocks on the door all the way out here. Still, it’s her fault for forgetting . . . Hello?’ – more banging – ‘Hello?’ Gav went to fetch his bag from the car, suddenly shy about arriving like this, not wanting to witness Aunt Gwen’s surprise and embarrassment.

  But Hester was still standing under the porch light when he got back.

  ‘I suppose we’d better try the door.’ There was an iron latch below the keyhole. She lifted it and pushed. A crack of warm light appeared and brought with it a puff of air heavily scented with smoke.

  ‘Hello?’ she called again, more tentatively. ‘Ms Clifton? It’s your nephew. I’ve brought him from the
station.’ She opened the door wider.

  Gav looked over her shoulder into a low-ceilinged room glimmering all over with spots and shards of firelight. If any of its numerous candles had been lit as well as the fire, it would have sparkled like a gem. It was decked out with coloured and translucent stones, strung on lines and hung along the tops of the walls, dangling from sconces. Each of them caught some reflection of the embers. On a grand-looking dining table of dark wood, pillars of scintillating glass held coloured candles, red and purple and cream. On the wall nearest the door there hung what looked like a circular stained-glass window in a frame. Beneath it was a shallow side table covered in burned-out tealights.

  Hester’s eyebrows had lifted slightly. ‘Well, at least we can be confident it’s the right house . . . Hello?’ She leaned inside the door and called more loudly. ‘Ms Clifton? Your nephew’s here!’

  The draught from the door stirred some of the trailing ornaments. Spots of light pricked over them. Nothing else moved.

  ‘Oh dear. I’m much too British to go into someone else’s house uninvited . . . Hello? . . . It doesn’t look as if she’s here, does it? But she can’t have gone far. That must be her car outside, and the fire’s lit . . .’ She fiddled with her chunky necklace. ‘Perhaps she had to go down to the main house for a moment. I wonder if we should check. I don’t like to leave you here all alone.’

  The words woke Gav from the half-trance he’d fallen into on the journey. Since waving goodbye to his mother, the afternoon had gathered a bizarre momentum of its own, carrying him along with it. Now, though, it had come to rest where he wanted to be. Time to take over.

  ‘Oh, it’s fine. Don’t worry, I’ll be totally fine now. Aunt Gwen’ll be along in a minute. Fire’s on and everything. I’ll . . . I can just wait for her. No problem. Thanks.’