Advent Read online

  ‘Are you sure? You’ve never been here before, and I think you said there’s no phone. I’d really be very happy to wait with you. God knows I’m not busy, and that way if she doesn’t come for a while I can drive you somewhere to—’

  ‘No, really. Thanks. It’s OK. And thanks for the ride, that was great, I can’t believe she forgot to pick me up but then I sort of can believe it too if you see what I mean. I’ll be OK now.’ He could see the doubt in her face and began to feel desperate again. ‘I can get myself unpacked while I wait, sort my stuff out.’

  ‘Well, at least let me come in and make sure there’s food. Or I could give you a ride down to the village. There’s a shop there that stays open lateish, in case you needed anything. She’ll probably be back by the time we return, and I’d certainly feel better—’

  Very clearly, another woman’s voice said, ‘Let the boy go in.’

  Hester stopped in the middle of her sentence, with her mouth open. There was no one else there. The voice had been close by, soft but rough, just like Miss Grey’s. Gavin looked around for her before he could stop himself, forgetting that Hester was watching him. Then he noticed Hester gaping silently.

  She stared back at him as if he’d sprouted an extra head.

  ‘A-and,’ she stammered, ‘and better if there was someone here, but . . . but all right. If you’re sure. All right, then. I’ll . . . ah,’ and she looked back towards the car in confusion. She turned to go, stopped and faced Gav again. ‘What did you . . . ?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything. I thought . . .’ He was seized by the urge to get inside and shut the door. Had Hester heard the voice? What else could have startled her like that? ‘Thanks again. Thanks. Bye now.’

  ‘Well.’ She made a visible effort to recover her composure. ‘Goodbye, then. Tell you what – I’ll come back tomorrow, around this time, just to set my mind at rest.’ He protested distractedly as he picked up his bag and stepped into the house, but she was leaving and he was about to shut Miss Grey out and that was all that mattered now. ‘There, that’s the second time I’ve broken my promise not to bother you any more.’ He was just closing the door behind him when she called over the noise of the wind, ‘And, Gavin? It was a great pleasure to meet you. Good night.’

  ‘Thanks. Night,’ he answered hurriedly, shutting the door.

  Four

  Silence.

  No father, no mother. No screaming, no babble, no chatter. No one at all.

  He began to hear what there was to be heard.

  His own breath, still rapid after he’d been startled by the voice that was surely Miss Grey’s. The wind in the branches outside, now comfortingly muffled. The steady hiss of the fire. He heard a car engine start, rise and fall – Hester must be turning round – and then rev up and quickly fade.

  He eyed the door behind him warily, listening. He couldn’t hear anything moving outside, but there was so much darkness around the house; he hadn’t seen a single other light from its porch. Let the boy go in. Who else could Miss Grey have been speaking to? What was she doing out there? Pursuing him? How could someone else possibly have heard her?

  The door had sliding bolts at the top and bottom. He pushed them across. In another room a tinny clock struck six. It made him check his own watch: still not working.

  He dropped his bag on the stone floor and emptied his pockets on top of it: ticket, keys, wallet, phone. He dropped the watch too.

  Further in the house, behind the wall where the round glass picture thing hung, he saw the bottom of a narrow staircase, carpeted in threadbare green. Opposite the foot of the stairs a heavy curtain hung across a doorway. The room he was in bent round the stairwell. It felt ridiculous to tiptoe, but he did anyway, passing in front of the glass circle; he now saw that its mosaic pieces portrayed a woman’s face (high cheekbones and dreamy eyes) seen head-on, with wild hair flowing out behind, in a lurid array of colours. The Mother, maybe? The table beneath with the tealights did look a bit like a makeshift shrine. He looked around the corner. At the far end of the dining room an open doorway led to a kitchen. Branches of something that bore red-orange berries and slender, feathery leaves had been tacked up in bunches over the door.

  There were a couple of dirty plates and saucepans by the sink, but no other sign of Auntie Gwen. Nor was she in any of the upstairs rooms, though an oddly intimate smell lingered in what was obviously her bedroom, in a way that made Gav a bit uncomfortable, as if he’d burst in on her in her pyjamas. The ceiling there sloped down almost to the floor, and an indecipherable jumble of stuff had been pushed into both corners. The only light in the room was a small lamp with a heavy red shade. He felt sure she wouldn’t have left the light on if she’d gone far. There was a bathroom next door, the inhospitably chilly, unmodern kind, and at the end of the upstairs hallway another bedroom, which also had bunches of the orange-berried branches tied over the lintel. Pinned to the door itself was something he thought must be mistletoe. It looked like the stuff on Christmas-card pictures, though he’d never actually seen it before. The bedroom beyond was unlit, neat, odourless and anonymously orderly.

  His room. She must have made an effort to leave a space cleared of her personality, somewhere his parents would approve of their only child occupying for a week.

  Going back down, he hesitated before pushing through the drape at the bottom of the stairs. It turned out he needn’t have.

  He couldn’t suppress a smile as he surveyed the benign chaos of his aunt’s living room. Here was the real Auntie Gwen, the exact visual equivalent of what he remembered her conversation being like: a picture of enthusiastic untidy muddle. Over it all hung the scent of something woody and spicy, conjuring up her presence immediately, almost as if she were sitting in one of the chairs across by the fire. The same aroma used to arrive with her whenever she visited. Dad liked to make a show of sniffing the air when he got home from work and (as long as Mum was in earshot) mutter, ‘Ah yes, that new fragrance, Imbecility by Dior,’ or, ‘Mmm, eau de mented.’ She’d once shown Gavin how you dripped the drops of oil onto the little clay dish and then set it over the pot where the candle burned. She did it reverently, like she did most things, especially things involving candles. He looked around and spotted the pot on a huge heavy desk, surrounded by papers and scattered books. There were piles of books on the carpeted floor, books stuffed into odd pieces of dark and bulky furniture that were never intended to be shelves, books dropped in the corners of the chairs and resting, open, over the back of the long sofa that stood between him and the fireplace. Among the books were so many loose sheets of paper that it looked as if a couple more volumes had been systematically shredded and scattered like seed. Perhaps she hoped they’d take root in the mess and grow into new books. There was, he noted with a sinking heart, no TV.

  A framed black-and-white photograph on the desk caught his eye, and after a moment’s hesitation – the room was so obviously a repository of everything Auntie Gwen was thinking and doing, and its messiness so perfectly matched her own cheerful incoherence, that walking through it felt like snooping into her head – he picked it up.

  It was a portrait, very faintly blurry, of an unconventionally beautiful woman with unblemished skin and a round mouth and hair that glistened. She was turning away from the camera, and her eyes were closed. It didn’t look like a family picture, but it was the only one in sight. He put it back where it had stood, at the edge of the desk, under the room’s single standing lamp.

  Most of the desk was covered by an unfolded map, a proper detailed one at a scale that showed every twist of every track and each border of every field. It was so heavily marked with lines and circles and tiny pencil scribblings that Gav could barely make out the features it charted, but in the top corner he recognised the name of the station where Hester had left her car. Near the middle of the sheet was an area where many of the straight pencil lines converged on a number of small circles, and although any names had been obliterated under Auntie Gwen’s graffit
i, it was obvious that this was where he was. The pattern was like spokes on a wheel, leading into the centre: Pendurra. He examined the map for a while, trying to imagine the open sea out there in the night, the river with its narrow branchings fingering their way into valleys somewhere down beneath him.

  The book lying face down and open on one corner of the map had a picture of Stonehenge on its cover and was called Geomancy. Stacked nearby, interleaved with torn yellow Post-its shelving out of them like fungi on the trunks of old trees, were Mysteries of Stone Age Britain, The Ley-Hunter’s Field Guide, Antiques of— no, Antiquities of Devon and Cornwall, The Track of the Wild Hunt . . . Around and beneath the map, sheets of paper written over in Aunt Gwen’s cuneiform handwriting spread chaotically. A few appeared to be diagrams with labels; some looked like lists with multiple crossings-out and insertions; most were chunks of written notes he didn’t want to look at too closely. He had a strong feeling that visible energies would feature heavily in them.

  Each time he stopped to look at anything, the silence became oppressively thick. The thought of Miss Grey wandering in the night outside, watching the house, was like a pair of eyes on his back. He made sure all the curtains were drawn tight.

  The best way to keep busy while he waited, he decided, was to get himself something to eat. He went back to the kitchen and found a stocky fridge with a big blunt handle, which turned out to hold bowlfuls of what his father liked to call ‘chicken feed’: grainy, persistently brown salads. There was an open packet of biscuits on a counter by the sink, so he took a few of those instead and, spotting a carton of instant hot chocolate, lit a burner on the stove under a battered metal kettle. The clankings and clatterings in the kitchen dropped into the stillness of the house like pebbles in a pond, and were as quickly swallowed.

  What did she want from him?

  He meant to take his mug of hot chocolate back to the messy living room, sit down by the fire with any book he could find that didn’t look too forbiddingly weird, and get comfortable. As soon as he passed the front door on his way back, he knew it wouldn’t work.

  He leaned an ear to the door, held his breath and listened. The only sounds outside were the bodiless sighs of a gusting wind.

  He slid the bolts back, listened again, then pushed the door open a crack.

  ‘Are you there?’ he said. It came out as a whisper.

  He swung the door wide and faced the dark.

  ‘Miss Grey?’ he said, louder.

  The light under the porch was still on, and beyond that the curtained windows illuminated faint swatches of the grassy verge in front of the house, but all the rest was nothing. Hester had said the place where they’d got off the train was only a few miles away. If so, those miles had to be constructed of solid night. There was not even an inkling of the underglow that lit every night sky Gavin had ever seen, the electric afterimage of the city.

  ‘Just go away,’ he said. ‘OK? I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to listen to you. This is my holiday. Leave me alone, all right?’

  He nearly jumped out of his skin as a swift, small shadow darted out of the blackness towards his feet. A cat. Just a cat, speeding inside the house. He turned almost as fast, pulse racing, and bolted the door behind him.

  The cat, a scruffy tortoiseshell, sized him up from under the table. He tried to laugh at himself for having been so startled by it. Actually, he should have expected it: he’d seen boxes of cat food in the kitchen cupboards. It looked like it was hungry now. It yowled at him, tail stiff, and followed him to the kitchen. He tipped some dry food into a bowl, but it only nosed at it and then chirruped again, twisting round his legs.

  ‘Fine, then,’ he said. ‘Suit yourself. I’m eating.’

  The company of another living thing was enough to diminish the eerie feeling that gathered in the silence of the house. Despite the various signs of Auntie Gwen’s weirdness – the hanging crystals, the candles, the shrine, the mistletoe, the mess – Gav had to admit the firelight and the low ceilings and the mismatched, used-looking furniture made it cosy. He took his mug and a plate of biscuits and pushed back through the heavy green drape into the living room. He sat down in the chair nearest the fire. Half a second later the cat appeared, jumped into his lap and began kneading his legs.

  Next to the arm of the chair was a box covered in a scarlet blanket, doing duty as a side table. This too was piled with Auntie Gwen’s reading. He picked through the books, not very hopefully. Wicca Almanac. He thought he recognised that one; it must have come with her to London once. The White Goddess. Moon Magic. Et cetera. There was also a big, expensive-looking photo album. Treasured Memories, it said on the cover, embossed in gold. Slightly guiltily, Gav picked it up. He felt like Mum, poking around someone else’s things, but he needed something to look at while he waited, and he was curious about what kind of photos Auntie Gwen kept. He couldn’t think of anytime he’d seen her holding a camera.

  But it wasn’t a photo album; it was a scrapbook.

  There were quite a few newspaper cuttings, some fading to sepia brittleness. There were photocopies of pages from books, and more bits of paper in her writing. She’d made notes on the pages of the album in many places. There were a few photos, all with a note written beneath them recording the date they were taken. There were a couple of postcards as well, carefully glued in. With a start, Gavin saw among the scraps a sheet in his own handwriting, in a scrawly version from years ago. It was a letter he’d sent her, just a couple of lines, with a bad scribbled drawing beneath them. He’d completely forgotten it. Why had she kept it, stuck in here with everything else?

  D. A.G.

  Thank you for the picture. That is not what she looks like at all. You have made her much too smooth. Here is my drawing of Miss Gray though I am not too good at drawing, I only got a 63 in art.

  Love from Gavin

  On the facing page was the picture Auntie Gwen had sent him. He remembered it now. Memory jogged, he glanced across at the framed photo on the desk. It was the same face. Auntie Gwen had more or less copied the photo. Her drawing showed the same head in the same pose, but with eyes open, the lips tighter, the cheekbones sharper, the whole face rendered more elfin and fantastical. She’d sent it to him as a present, with a note asking if it looked anything like Miss Grey. It was embarrassing to see his reply again, his childish handwriting, his fixation with marks, and beneath the message the even more comically childish pencil drawing representing the best Miss Grey he could do at the age of ten.

  On the next page of the album another letter was stuck in. Above it Auntie Gwen had again pencilled the date, two weeks later than the previous letter.

  D. A.G.

  Thank you for the postcard. That is much more like Miss gray, though she looks a lot nicer. And she isnt made out of wood or her name would be Miss brown. I am much too busy to write any more letters now. [That came straight from Dad. He chewed his lip in shame as he read it.] How are you.

  Love from Gavin

  And there it was, the postcard she’d sent, or at least another copy of the same picture, pasted in next to the letter. A picture of a wooden statue, a woman’s head and raised hands, angular and grotesquely emaciated. It was supposed to be a bit like his own crude drawing; he could see that now. But it didn’t actually look much like Miss Grey; he must only have said it did to stop Auntie Gwen sending him any more pictures. It occurred to him that maybe this had been the last postcard he’d had from her. Years ago – five years.

  Under the postcard she had written, neatly, Donatello, Maddalena. The name, or names, didn’t mean anything to him. He couldn’t remember Auntie Gwen ever talking about anyone Italian.

  Gavin began to flip through the album.

  Then he wasn’t flipping at all, but reading.

  He read some of the pages over and over again.

  He didn’t look up until he was startled by the wheezing and chiming of the clock on the mantelpiece. Seven o’clock. He probably should have been wondering serio
usly about where his aunt had gone, but instead he was wondering what she’d been doing in this house all these years, whether there really was some point to all the mysteries she’d collected in this book.

  He was also thinking about Hester Lightfoot.

  The very last items in the scrapbook were two small clippings from newspapers. Over the first Auntie Gwen had written, Oxford Mail, 18 November. It read:

  Professor Hester Lightfoot has resigned her position as fellow in anthropology at Magdalen College.

  Professor Lightfoot became a controversial figure earlier this year when she admitted on a radio programme that she had cause to doubt her own mental health. Despite the support of colleagues and students, who maintained that her remarks had been taken out of context, there were calls for her to be suspended from teaching. The Mail has now learned that she has resigned voluntarily. Neither Professor Lightfoot nor Magdalen College is making any comment, although sources at the college privately insist that it continues to support the professor and that the decision is entirely her own. Barry Squibb (19), a student of

  And there the column ended. The second clipping was labelled, Western Cornishman, 21 November. This time the headline was included:

  ‘NUTTY PROFESSOR’ RESIGNS

  Falmouth-born Hester Lightfoot, a professor at Oxford University, has resigned. Dubbed ‘the Nutty Professor’ after she made public reference to her mental-health problems, Lightfoot has surrendered her prestigious post before the end of the university term. No one so far has commented on the reasons for her decision. In a BBC programme broadcast in April, Lightfoot confessed that she sometimes ‘heard voices’ but claimed she was not delusional because she knew the voices were not real. She owns a house in Mawnan Smith, where villagers describe her as a regular visitor.