Advent (63 page)

 
But where had it started? What had set her off?

Jess!!

chap girl?

(O.J.)

key chap Joshua Acres

Gav could feel the tumble of her thoughts, one after another. She sees someone called Jess, or hears the name, or remembers the story. Jess, the girl who came to the chapel once, years ago. Owen Jeffrey knew about it. He’ll be able to tell her. There he is: O.J. And in the meanwhile she wants to go to the chapel, so she reminds herself where they key is hidden. And then . . .

 
He thought of the figure in the poisoned firelight and shivered again. He couldn’t bring himself to think of what happened after that. But what about whatever had happened before? What had got her going?

 
He looked around the back of the car as if Horace was still there. He was going to ask him to repeat what he’d told Gav and Marina in the woods. Gav hadn’t really paid attention at the time. Too busy feeling sorry for himself. But he did remember something about Horace going and fetching a letter for Auntie Gwen. And after she’d read it, she’d been crazily overexcited.

 
A letter.

 
He was holding it. This was it. The top piece of paper, just arrived. The thing that had got her going, that had made her think of the woman with the baby and the key to the chapel and Swanny and (underlined twice, all capitals) Gavin.

 
He blew on his fingers to try and loosen them a little, then worked them between the sides of the envelope.

 
A handwritten letter. Gawain’s fingers went still. He thought his heart did too; for a few seconds it seemed that everything stopped and the snow outside hung suspended like tinsel.

 
The handwriting was his mother’s.

 
He took the letter out and unfolded it. There was the date, at the top. Last Thursday.
Thursday 24 November.
Mum was always so anal about including that stuff. That was the day Auntie Gwen’s letter had arrived, the one he’d stolen from Mum’s desk and read on the train. So this was his mother’s reply. Posted Thursday. It would have arrived at the post-office box in Falmouth on Saturday, just like Horace said.

Dear Gwen

Thank you so much for coming to the rescue. I’ve been at my wits’ end wondering what to do. This couldn’t have come at a worse time for me. I feel like the worst mother in the world but I’m going to take you up on your offer. We had a friend all arranged for the evenings and overnight but she can’t manage days as well and I can’t bring myself to leave Gav at home by himself. I know I ought to cancel the holiday but we booked ages ago and you know how Nigel gets. He and Gav aren’t getting along very well at the moment I’m afraid. It wouldn’t have been a very happy week for anyone if we’d stayed. Gav will be on that train on Monday.

I’m sure he’ll be fine for the journey. Really I don’t see why he wouldn’t have been fine at school. Given the amount we pay them I would have thought they could at least have kept him there while they talked to us. Of course he won’t tell me anything about what he said to the teacher but he seems no different from always. Just please make sure he leaves messages occasionally. I made him promise but I doubt that means anything to him. I’ll check the phone whenever I can.

You know, he’ll be happier with you. You can never tell with him but I think he’s really looking forward to spending a week down there. I hope the two of you have a lovely time together.

Gwen, I lay awake all last night thinking about this and I’m going to ask you a big favour. It’s a terrible thing to ask but I’m at the end of my tether, I really am. Gav won’t talk to me at all and Nigel’s the proverbial brick wall when it comes to anything like this. I’m sure that must be why Gav talked to the teacher. He can see it’s a dead end at home. He doesn’t trust us any more. Why should he? When Nigel and I agreed to bring him up after Iggy died we never thought about the fact that we were agreeing to lie to him for ever, but that’s what it comes down to. I just have this feeling now that I can’t begin to be any sort of mother to him until I stop pretending to be the mother I’m not.

Of their own accord Gawain’s eyes stopped moving. For forty heartbeats they dwelled on that one full stop. Then he read on.

Can you see what I’m asking? I swore I’d never tell him but I never swore not to ask someone else to. I’m such a coward. I know, I ought to sit down with him myself. But I promised Nigel. And – this isn’t easy to write, Gwen – it will be better coming from you. Gav has so much of Iggy in him. They’re supposed to be my genes too but you and Iggy were always much more alike. Gav would have been so much better off with you than with me. I really think it’s time he knew the truth.

(
Truth hurts
, whispered a voice somewhere, a lost voice.)

Would you find a quiet evening to sit down and tell him? And tell him I asked you to. Tell him I want to try and start again. I don’t know if it will help. But you’re the only person I’d ever trust to be with him when he finds out.

I’m sure he’ll want to know about his father too but Iggy never said anything about him. All I know is she was with some Christian place at the time. Funnily enough it was somewhere down near where you are now. Maybe I should have moved to darkest Cornwall too instead of being the sensible one who stayed in London and got the job and the husband. She was calling herself Jess, I remember that. You know how she always said Ygraine was too posh and Iggy was too silly. She wanted the baby to be Gawain though so she must have liked the Arthurian business more than she ever let on. After she died Nigel put his foot down and said it was a stupid name and made me change it. Like he makes me tell everyone my name’s Isabel. I don’t know if you want to tell Gav that as well. It seems fair somehow. I doubt his relationship with Nigel can get any worse so I can’t see it doing any extra harm. I should have stood up to Nigel but getting him to agree to bring up Iggy’s baby was such a battle I didn’t have the strength for anything else. Gav can blame me if he likes. I deserve it.

Can you do this for me? Please do. You’ll have to, because I’m going to tell Nigel you’ve done it. I truly don’t know how he’ll react but that’s my problem. He hasn’t hit me yet so I suppose I’ll survive.

Oh and that reminds me of a small but horrible thing I should tell you. Nigel wouldn’t let Gav see any of the postcards you sent. He intercepted them and threw them away. I won’t try and explain why or I’ll go mad. But just so you know, if Gav looks blank when you mention them. There. Now you know what my life is like. Funny isn’t it, when we were growing up the story always was that Iggy was the evil twin and I was the good one. Little did they know.

Sorry for all the misery. This is what comes of not getting any sleep. I’ll put Gav on that train and then at least I can spend my week thinking of him being happy. I’m so sorry to put this burden on you without being able to talk beforehand. Get a phone for God’s sake.

Your failure of a sister

Iz

Twenty-nine

The boy was
the only moving thing in a world suspended by winter. Bunched in the trees, crows watched him as he struggled up the lanes, bearing round his neck the door to all the magic in the world. They saw he was too small to carry such a burden and cawed their eager disapproval.

 
It was little more than a mile from the beach where he kept the boat to his house, but the steep rise from the river and the high lane clogged with snow would have made it a hard mile for anyone, let alone a numbed, freezing, unravelling child. By the time Horace reached the village his eyes were stinging with tears. The clamminess in his crotch had turned icy; his shoes were full of melting snow; he stank of sweat and misery. He put his head down so no one would stop him or talk to him. He counted his steps through the village to keep him going, twenty, then another twenty.

 
No one saw him but the crows. People were stranded far from their houses, or huddled inside them, barricaded against the storm. The half-daylight was beginning to fail. Wrapped in the prophetess’s cloak, Horace passed their windows like a ragged shadow. Around him rose the white humps of buried cars, barrow-mounds of an arctic necropolis.

 
The crows murmured to each other in their roosts. A thought spread among them, a restless discontent mixed with excitement. In twos and threes they shuffled from their branches and dropped into the air, following the boy.

 
At the place where the roads met they rested on a roof of thatch. They passed their thought among each other in soft harsh trills. Under that roof, in the pub, John Patrick Moss cocked an ear, shook his head, flipped his phone up again for maybe the fiftieth time and made his fiftieth attempt to see in the picture it displayed something other than what was there. After a while he opened his briefcase to get out his notebook.

 
He couldn’t find it. He remembered worrying he’d left it at the nosy neighbour’s house. No choice but to go back out in the cold and knock on her door again before it got too dark. He stared unhappily at the last third of his pint and held his head in his hands.

 
The carrion birds waited for Horace to reach the joining of the roads. Their numbers grew. Their thought amplified. A memory was mixed in with it, a memory five hundred years old. They smelled it like a change in the wind.

 
The boy struggled past the pub, crossing the road so he wouldn’t pass under its windows. Faint with exhaustion and hunger and disarray, he dragged himself down the lane, past Myrtle Pascoe’s house and up to his own front door. He pushed a trembling hand inside the cloak, inside his school blazer, looking for the pocket where he kept his keys. His fingers felt like frozen meat.

 
The keys were not there.

 
Snivelling tears came faster. They dribbled into his mouth. He patted all his pockets, turned them inside out. His keys lay where they’d fallen, in a crevice between the back seat and the door of a crashed car on the other side of the haunted river, for ever lost. Horace bent double and gritted his teeth.

 
The house was dark.

 
He rang the bell but he knew his mother wasn’t there. She’d gone out that morning. Working all day, like usual.

 
‘Mum,’ he whispered. ‘Mum.’ A crow sneered at him from the roof.

 
He tried to be brave. He tried to think. It was impossible. Horrible things had got into his head. He needed Mum to tuck him into bed the way she used to when he was little, light the nightlight and sit by his bed until the bad dreams went away.

 
She was never there when he wanted her any more. She was always too busy. Cleaning houses, helping people. Other people.

 
A small flicker of hope twitched beneath the weight of misery. Hadn’t she said she was going to come back in the afternoon to help the professor with her unpacking?

 
Through the crystals of dirty tears clogging his eyelids he blinked at the house opposite. She might just have got back before the snow started. He tried to think when the blizzard had begun, but he couldn’t remember a time before the snow any more, before the angels and the demons. It was his only chance anyway.

 
He dragged himself over the barriers of snow in the lane, squeezed himself past Hester’s car and stood on the doorstep looking for the bell. The carrion birds wheeled silent and unnoticed above, a black and hungry cloud, waiting to break.