Castle Of Bone (4 page)

“What do you think. Raffia?”

“No, platinum actually,” Penn said, sarcastically.

“Gold would be prettier. Not that this is exactly pretty.”

“Platinum’s more valuable. I mean what
wood
, fool, idiot.”

“
I
don’t know,” said Hugh.

“I thought you did carpentry?”

“New wood’s different, it’s white; well, yellowish.”

“What sort of wood might you use to make a cupboard?”

“Mahogany, pine – oak . . .”

“Well which is this then?”

“It doesn’t look like any of them to me. Mahogany’s redder, oak’s darker and much coarser-grained. I don’t know otherwise. There are lots of strange African woods they use now. It could be anything.”

Penn went over to the window then. Anna, very deliberately, moved away. “Could it be ash?” he asked, gazing out.

“Not possibly; it’s the wrong colour. They make boats from ash, mostly anyway. It doesn’t try to spring straight when you curve it, which is good for the ribs of boats.”

“Gawd, aren’t we knowledgeable,” said Penn.

“So, what about it?” asked Hugh.

“It’s a fat lot of use when you can’t even tell what sort of wood this cupboard is.”

Hugh went to Penn at the window. There was an acacia tree beyond the ash, its trunk split and twisted. But he had never heard of acacia furniture. Next door there was a pear tree.

“It could be fruit wood of some kind,” he suggested cautiously. “You know, apple wood or pear. They have a very fine grained wood like this.”

“Pretty big fruit trees. Look at the apple tree in your garden. You couldn’t make a chair leg out of that, let alone a cupboard.”

Anna had been moving about behind them. Suddenly they heard a click and both jumped round – Hugh momentarily surprised that he could be so easily startled, though Penn, he noticed, moved just as warily. Anna was standing by the cupboard. She was expressionless, but the cupboard doors were closed.

At that moment came another sound and Jean walked in. “What a
mess
,” she said briskly. And indeed, books, clothes, papers, were strewn everywhere. Hugh thought he must have slept very untidily as well because the blankets were half off his unmade bed, and he noticed footmarks on the sheets where his slippers had been, which he covered hastily and guiltily.

“That doesn’t make it look any better, Hugh,” said Jean in her primmest voice.

Penn had Anna by the shoulder and was shaking her.

“What did you do, Anna? Why did you shut the cupboard?”

“I put something in. I wanted to see.”

“What, Anna, what did you put in?”

“Whatever’s
happening
?” begged Jean.

“It was Hugh’s sweater; your red woollen one.”

“My wallet was leather; pig skin,” shouted Hugh, at last remembering it.

“
Pig
skin,” said Anna, with triumph in her voice.

“I suppose you think,” said Penn sarcastically, “I suppose you think –”

“Wool comes from sheep,” Jean cried excitedly.

“Well, fancy, as if we didn’t know,” said Hugh.

“Well, Anna, are you expecting a sheep now?” But though Penn’s voice was light, amused, he and all of them turned simultaneously to stare at the cupboard doors.

“I can’t hear anything,” said Jean after a moment, tentatively.

“Did you expect to? I bet nothing happens at all.”

But they watched the cupboard, all of them. They waited painfully, anxiously – in hope – fear – anxiety that something would or would not come out of it. They waited for such sounds as they had heard yesterday, but there was only the commonplace chirping of the sparrows in the ash tree and the low plaint of a car coming up the road. (Hugh could tell it was up, not down, because cars going down made lighter sounds that disappeared more quickly.) The front gate clashed behind the milkman. They heard the whine and rattle of the red milk float.

Penn looked at Anna triumphantly; stared round, boldly, at the rest of them. Then he marched to the cupboard and pulled open the door. No red sweater lay on the shelf now, where Anna must have put it, only a heap of fluff such as a sheep leaves behind in a hedge; except that there was more of it and yellow; the sheep must have been recently dipped.

“You see,” said Anna. “You see, Penn?”

“And you put a woollen sweater in? Are you mad, Anna, we might have got a sheep. Coping with that pig was just about enough.”

“A moment ago you were saying nothing would happen. You can’t have it all ways, Penn,” said Hugh.

“Poor Anna,” Jean said.

But Anna had begun to laugh. A moment later so had Hugh and Jean, and then, after staring round all of them in turn, slightly red-faced, rather indignant, Penn followed too, if not with much amusement. Hugh was watching Anna more; slightly pink, dishevelled, laughing, she looked quite different suddenly. She noticed his eyes and turned away, jerking her head down sideways, so that hair fell across her eyes, and when Hugh saw her face again all the colour had ebbed, leaving it as pale as usual above the short, unsuitable black dress.

They retired to the garden shortly afterwards. The sky was entirely blue, and the sun beginning to be hot. They lay full in the sun, near the old climbing frame which had half its rungs missing and leaned at an angle of forty-five degrees. Jean’s cat got up from it when they appeared and took to the more adequate shade that was made by Hugh.

Penn, though still noticeably annoyed with Anna, had regained his composure and was at his bossiest; suggesting what he called a controlled experiment; they should each, he said, bring a selection of objects to put in the cupboard; they would see then what came out of it. They would have to be careful, naturally. There were things made from animals much more dangerous than pigs.

“No elephant’s feet,” said Jean, inclined to giggle still.

Hugh irritated by Penn took up the game at once.

“Or leopard skin.”

“Or shark’s teeth necklaces,” said Jean.

“Sharks wouldn’t be dangerous unless they brought the sea as well,” said Hugh.

“Do you remember the one in the Natural History Museum? That’s huge. One that size would split up the cupboard walls.”

“It would split my room.”

“Suppose it wouldn’t get into the cupboard in the first place?” said Jean.

“How would we ever manage to explain a shark?”

Anna said nothing. Penn stiffly, red with annoyance, said they weren’t here to talk about sharks, and what time would they meet that afternoon to try the cupboard out?

“No,” said Hugh violently. “Not this afternoon.”

“But whyever not.”

“It’s my room, my cupboard, isn’t it? No, no, no.”

Penn was silent for a moment. Both Jean and Anna appeared asleep, while Hugh stroked the cat frenetically. After a moment it twisted from his hands and went. Penn changed his tactics, began most uncharacteristically slowly, patiently.

“But look Hugh, you can’t leave everything lying round your room much longer. Suppose your mother comes up.”

“She never does.”

“Just occasionally she does,” added Jean, from where she lay apparently asleep.

“She’s just as likely to be suspicious if we’re up there all afternoon on a day like this.”

“She’s never suspicious. She never bothers to be.”

“She does bother,” Hugh almost shouted, then added in a lower voice, “I don’t want to do it this afternoon, I tell you. I just don’t want to. It is my room, isn’t it?”

“So you’ve already said,” agreed Penn. But Hugh’s agitation had neatly calmed his. “All right, all right,” he was saying amiably. “Not this afternoon. Tomorrow then. Who cares?”

It took Hugh a moment to realize he had won his point, and he was left bewildered, mentally unsteady. It was like pushing all your weight against a door which then opened easily, leaving you staggering.

CHAPTER SIX

Hugh lay on his back, gazing up into the sky, feeling the prickle of grasses under him. They had come to the park for the afternoon, all four of them. The girls did not usually accompany the boys but now whatever they did or did not do seemed related in some way to the cupboard – rather as a shadow belongs inextricably to the solid object from which it falls. Everything seemed necessarily to involve all of them, even when it did not actually involve the cupboard.

Anna, however, had complained of a headache after a while, somewhat whinily; a migraine she called it.

“You’re always having headaches,” Penn said brutally, but when Anna had set off for home in search of aspirin he had watched her across the grass till she was out of sight, a thin, small, solitary figure.

There were willow trees, four of them by an empty stream, one bent almost parallel to the ground. Penn sat astride this as if it was a horse, while Jean, a little pink in the face at having Penn all to herself, leaned against the same tree.

“Migraine is awful,” Hugh heard her say, from where he lay separate. “One of the mistresses at school has migraines. She has a terrible headache and she can’t see anything; just a little pin point is all she sees.”

A pin point; a little pin point, Hugh thought. He was looking up into the sky. He felt – for the vast sky was nothing to his eyes, invisible layers of air and atmosphere – as if his vision too had narrowed some little point, which he could not decipher immediately, and after a while with staring up his eyes seemed to be making rings of air, as water looks when a stone falls and ripples spread about; except that these rings moved inward, centripetally. He moved his eyes away, sideways into grass. The stems were magnified, juicy, huge. When he looked up again the speck, the pin point, was nearer – had resolved itself into a hawk, hovering; even from such a height it could, he knew, see things move among these same grass stems. It continued hovering with blurry wings – the moment, held, appeared an hour. Then suddenly it stooped, fell, but jerked itself up before reaching earth, veered off, with slow and easy strokes.

“A kestrel,” Hugh heard Jean telling Penn. But she only knew because he, Hugh, had pointed kestrels out to her at other times. They had left the willow tree and were desultorily playing cricket, Penn solo in effect, diving, catching, exercising himself. From where Hugh lay, if grass looked like trees Penn looked like a giant.

Hugh, his face burning, eased himself back till he lay partly screened by bracken. The sky looked blue again and was cut by the little teeth of the bracken fronds. There was a sharp, green smell, and tickings from insects he could not see. The cricket bat flashed in corners of his vision, but though he searched the sky he could not see the kestrel any more and so he shut his eyes, let his thinking narrow to a single point; a point he had pursued, yet avoided, all day long.

He thought of dreams; that flowed in your mind when it was freed by sleep, but always remained inside your mind, did not involve physical, breakable, bones and flesh and skin.

But this world he had been into twice had made him cold; it had made him wet, so it could not be a dream world. It had to be altogether another world, another time, like Thomas the Rhymer’s fairyland, where a man lived for years while no time passed in his own world. Or else – and at thought of this Hugh contracted with fear – or else, he emerged from it after what seemed but a few days, and found that hundreds of years had gone by; so that he was a stranger, out of time.

But if it had not been a dream, the reality he had experienced had been of a different kind. It was as if everything he knew had been taken apart and then put together in a different way, in a pattern just as agreeable yet apparently wayward, because it was not the pattern in which he normally lived. He might follow it in time but it would take him time to do that; as eyes take time to adjust from light to dark.

It was a world, Hugh thought, in which animals, trees, landmarks were not just animals or trees or landmarks, but friends or enemies, or both at once. He remembered suddenly, vividly, the alder trees; which had surrounded him like friends, but then tried to hinder his going, like enemies. And the birch trees – once when Hugh looked back they had seemed peaceful, harmonious, like slender peaceful women; but the next moment they had appeared as warriors, with twigs and branches for arrows and for spears.

It all came back to Hugh now, what had happened to him last night. What dream he’d had. It was not a dream, he knew, but he did not know what else to call it. And that evening, Monday, when he found himself back in this other place, it was as if he had never been away.

Light came slowly. He was still walking through the same bleak landscape, towards the same castle, which looked farther away than ever, because now Hugh could see, between it and him, the deep folds in the country which he would have to traverse. There was one fold immediately below him. A group of willow trees stood at the centre of it, beside a little stream.

The snow was patchier than it had seemed at night and the land beneath it, tired and brown and dim, was made drearier if anything by the strengthening daylight. The light was at the same time strong yet bleak; it bleached out the castle which no longer looked as if it was made of glass. It looked more like a castle made of bone.