Advent (45 page)

 
Hester sighed. ‘Oh well, I’m going to have to get this dealt with. Sorry. It’s hard to get by in the country without a functioning automobile. Someone’ll have to come and take a look at it.’ Thinking of the light switch, Gav imagined how that conversation might go. He was going to have to get away soon. ‘There’s a garage in town. They’re usually quite good about sending someone along. I’ve had problems with this old banger before. Probably something obvious.’ It was obvious enough to Gav, but he wasn’t going to tell her so. ‘I’ll go and give them a quick ring.’

 
Unsure what else to do with himself, he traipsed back into the house after her. She looked up the number, prodded buttons, looked at the receiver, shook it and turned a disbelieving look on Gav.

 
‘Not working.’

 
He pointed at the dangling cord.

 
‘Oh. Oh God, what an idiot. Forgive me.’

 
‘’s fine,’ he said, as she knelt down to reconnect the phone to the wall socket beneath.

 
‘Fiddly thing . . . There we go.’ It clicked in. No more than two seconds later, as she was getting back to her feet, the phone rang.

 
Hester let it ring ten times, fifteen, then shrugged at Gav and picked it up. ‘Hello?’

 
Her eyes closed wearily as she listened. ‘Yes, it is. Yes . . . No, I’m afraid I wouldn’t. I’m sorry . . . No, I have no comment at all. Excuse me.’ The receiver was still quacking as she replaced it.

 
‘Someone from the local paper again.’ She knelt down again. ‘That’ll teach me.’ She pulled the cord back out from the wall. ‘There. I’ve always hated this machine anyway. Just more disembodied voices in my ear, isn’t it? When you think about it. The last thing I need. I’ll walk up to the garage, it’s only ten minutes.’

 
Gav’s heart leaped. Ten minutes there, ten back, a few more to talk to someone. She’d be gone more than long enough. He didn’t need any time to get himself ready.

 
‘You’ll be all right for a bit?’ She was already pulling on a fleecy coat. ‘Of course you will, you’re not a child. Can I get you anything while I’m out? I’ll be passing the shop.’

 
‘Nah, I don’t need anything. Thanks.’

 
‘By the way, I wouldn’t answer the door if anyone comes. It seems unlikely this early in the morning, but just in case. That chap from the paper sounded alarmingly keen on getting his interview, and I’ve already had a note through my door this morning asking me to call the local priest. I imagine he’s concerned about my welfare. Such is the price of fame.’

 
He smiled uncertainly. ‘OK.’

 
‘Though I don’t have a spare key . . . Look, I’ll just leave the door unlocked. In case you want some fresh air or something. I won’t be long anyway.’

 
‘I’ll be fine.’

 
‘Just make yourself at home,’ she said as she went out.

 
‘Don’t worry.’ He wasn’t sure when, or even if, he’d see her again, so he added, ‘Bye.’

 
She grinned her wise and rueful grin, and closed the door behind her.

 
There was a travel clock in one of the bookshelves. Ten past nine. He let the second hand sweep a full circle before he moved at all. Then he knelt on the sofa and began sorting quickly through a stack of maps he’d noticed at one end of the shelves. He found the right one, an old and much-used copy worn badly at the folds, and opened it out.

 
It was the same one Auntie Gwen had on her desk, though of course Hester’s copy wasn’t overwritten with lines and circles and spidery annotations. He remembered where on the map those lines had converged. There was the name, printed in the Gothic-looking script that meant,
Historic building
.
Pendurra
. It looked so innocent there: tiny crooked pink rectangles for the house, wedges of green for the woods, the blue streamlets doodling through them. Pendurra. Just another place. It took him a little longer to work out where Hester’s house was, but eventually he spotted the name of a village and remembered it from the sign on the road. Lines and letters on a map. On paper it looked no different from any other patch of the country, except perhaps for the visible pressure of the sea, carving the coast into knuckles and hollows, thrusting long, branching estuaries inland like cracks in old concrete.

 
Hester’s village was on the wrong side of one of those cracks, the big one. Of course it was. She’d driven him round the river twice, there and back. But no more than a couple of miles west of where he was, a dotted line slanted across the blue tendril. A ferry.

 
Across sea and land.

 
He checked the clock again. Five minutes gone already. If he spent much longer sitting and thinking about it he might miss his chance. He couldn’t let Hester try to go with him. He couldn’t get her involved in whatever was waiting for him. He belonged away from people. His place was with the deep woods, the croaking voice in the chapel, the house overlooked by time. The girl no one else even knew existed. He had to vanish like Marina, like Miss Grey.

 
He should never have run away. It was Gavin who’d fled. Gavin, who still wanted to be like everyone else; Gavin, who thought he ought to know better.
Oh come on Gav
.

 
Gawain folded the map and stuck it in the back pocket of his trousers.

 
He was about to head out when he noticed a pad of paper and a biro on a side table. It occurred to him that he could probably do a bit better than one mumbled ‘Bye’.

 
On the pad he wrote:

Have to go. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Thanks for everything and don’t worry about me. Enjoy your walk.

 
He put the pad down in front of the door, stared at it, then picked it up again and without knowing why added:

Stay warm.

 
He walked out of the village fast, head down, the low sun sending a long shadow before him.

The first time Horace saw them come out of the house, he jumped up from his desk so abruptly the chair fell backwards behind him and clanged appallingly loudly against the radiator. He threw himself to his bedroom floor, convinced he’d given himself away, before finally gathering the courage to worm his way back to the edge of the window. He heard the slam of car doors. They’re leaving, he thought! They must be going back there! He knew he could reach Pendurra faster. It was a good twenty minutes to drive round. He could beat that, if he ran down to the beach where he kept the boat and then ran up through the woods on the other side.

 
But then the two of them got out of the car, looked at it moronically for a bit and went back inside the house.

 
Confused, the only thing Horace could think of was to keep watching. He’d almost missed them coming out. You had to be patient to be a secret agent, he told himself. Heightened senses. Ready to swing into action at any moment.

 
When he saw the Nutty Professor come out on her own and head up the road, and realised the kid must be alone in the house, his pulse went wild. This was the chance, he told himself. Get a closer look.

 
He kept forgetting things. He raced downstairs to get his shoes on, then raced back up to collect his keys. Then at the front door he noticed he’d put his school uniform on, out of habit. The blazer had bright yellow lines on it. He hurried back up the stairs to his room to collect his dark coat and his cap, then down again, already convinced that even those few seconds away from the windows were too many. Then he stopped with his hand on the latch, suddenly realising he didn’t have a plan.

 
At that moment he heard the kid come out.

 
And then he hardly knew what he was doing at all, because this was it, this was the moment, this was when he had to be the hero, and there was no time to think about it. He waited for what he thought was just long enough, then let himself out, pulled his cap down and followed.

Gawain walked fast out of the village, westward, the sun at his back. He crossed the street a couple of times to avoid people, or places where there might be people: shopfronts, a bus-stop, a house with an open door. He didn’t slow down until he’d left the houses behind and come out between hedges and placid trees, their every leaf alchemised into gold by dew and the rising glory behind. Every minute or two a car would come past and he’d squeeze tight to the hedge, automatically. His thoughts were far away.

 
He stopped at a junction in the road to check the map, leaning against the signpost where a steep lane came up from the left. Through the alley it carved in the hedges he saw a green ridge in the distance. The water between it and him was invisible, hidden in its valley, though the map showed it wide as a bay. In any direction but the way he was heading, the sun stung his eyes. He stuck the map back in a pocket and set off again.

 
The road led him on westwards a few minutes before forking into two narrowing lanes. He turned left and soon found himself descending through a green tunnel of overhanging trees, mercifully empty of any traffic at all. Holiday houses, glum in their winter exile, appeared beside the road. Where the descent flattened, he walked round a tight curve between whitewashed walls and came out suddenly by the river.

 
The river!

 
The water glinted almost at his feet. All around it the land folded tightly downwards, as if hiding it under a fringe of black rock and hanging woods. He’d arrived among a cluster of buildings strung along its bank, overlooking a strip of beach. It was as much a finger of the sea as a river, though upstream, to his right, it seemed ready to narrow and quieten just where the far side of the little cove he was in cut it off from view. To his left, the near side of the cove ended in low cliffs that hid the sea. Straight across from him was a postcard-quaint village gathered around the mouth of a creek. There were boats moored between, most covered in tarpaulins, as if hibernating. From among the buildings behind came occasional voices, the noise of windows opening. Morning sounds.

 
Further downstream on the opposite bank, the broad Pendurra woods curved round and closed off the view. They didn’t look so deep or dark. He could see the edge of them, and the top. Just a patch of green, like on the map, with normal stuff around it, roads and farms and fields.

 
Was he really going to go back there and try to understand whatever secret it hid, try to make sense of everything he had seen and heard? Him?

 
All he had to go on was what Miss Grey had given him – a name, and a few words, a senseless promise – and the memory of turning Marina’s hands in his. He’d find her, somehow. He’d trust Miss Grey, like he should have all along. Things had only turned bad when he’d started trying to know better than her.

 
He looked at his feet with a twinge of guilt.

 
Nothing incomprehensible about that instruction.
Don’t put them on again. Let the earth hold you up.
Mad, maybe, but not incomprehensible.

 
He’d put his shoes and socks on that morning, up in Hester’s tiny spare room, because . . . For no particular reason. Because that was what you did in the morning, what normally happened. You put your shoes on.

 
A small floating jetty stuck out from the edge of the beach, its landward end mounted on wheels so it could follow the tide up and down. That had to be where the ferry went from, Gav thought, though there was no boat tied up to it. All the vessels on the moorings clogging this patch of the river were silent and unmanned. The only activity was on the shore beyond him. Someone at the far end of the beach had unloaded a small inflatable from the back of a Land Rover and was hauling it down to the water.

 
Gawain sat on the edge of the road, took off his shoes and stuffed his socks inside them. He dug his toes into the sand. He thought it a bit unlikely that Miss Grey would only have wanted him to go barefoot once he got to a beach, but it was a start, he told himself. Got to start somewhere.