Castle Of Bone (8 page)

“You all right, mate? You a student then? You’ve got the student look.”

Hugh shook his head, and walked away soberly. His panic worked through him; slowly cooled, uncoiled itself. He took in the ordinary zoo for almost the first time that day, the sour smells of animal and chip fat and DDT: how hot it was and how hopelessly crowded. There were queues for everything, lavatories, snackbars, camel rides. Thousands of children in their best clothes ran around freely, but increasingly fractious, while animals prowled behind bars or ditches, or lay stretched, panting, in the heat of the sun.

CHAPTER TEN

Anna and Hugh shared one boat; Jean and Penn another. Anna very slowly and deliberately climbed into a boat with Hugh, Penn visibly annoyed by this, Jean upset because Penn was annoyed at having to share with her. Her way of demonstrating it was to be sharp and bossy, organizing her face into a smile sometimes, but wasting it only on the water.

Penn demonstrated his annoyance by showing off wildly. He climbed to his feet, stood on the thwart, balancing precariously. Jean stopped smiling altogether, said “Don’t, Penn”, anxiously, first on his account and then on her own, as the boat swayed dangerously.

The boatman bellowed at them from his landing stage, threatening to fetch them in at once. Everyone rowing on the lake, the people walking along the shore, turned to look at them, making Jean blush scarlet. Penn muttered rudely, nothing that the boatman could have heard, sat down and began to row with furious but quite elegant efficiency, making the boat shoot through the water. He kept his eye triumphantly on Hugh struggling more clumsily at his oars behind, but though Hugh glanced round occasionally and coolly admired Penn’s skill, Anna ignored him, trailed her hand in the water, turned her eyes towards the sky. She smiled at Hugh when he looked her way, but he tried not to do it often. He liked to cut himself off mentally from everyone around him, usually annoying people thus, but he could not now quite cut himself off from Anna, which at this moment only annoyed him. He avoided her eyes. She was holding hands with herself again, and she wore as usual a dark-coloured dress. But today it did not overshadow her.

Penn rowed so much faster that they lost him soon, round an island in the lake. Hugh rowed on towards the island. The branches of weeping willow brushed his face and shoulders like bead curtaining. He pushed them gently out of his way. He had stopped rowing now, but the impetus of movement already gained took them as far as he wanted, between the other branches and the shores of the island. They slid through still water and came to a halt within a green cave.

Anna appeared to be asleep now. Hugh looked at her, then gingerly, carefully, laid himself back. The position he came to might, indeed should, have been uncomfortable, but was not so at all. He seemed automatically, without experiment, to have found a position into which every part of him neatly fitted, rested comfortably. He lay in contentment, gazing at a green ceiling. His hands and face were green-tinted, Anna’s too, but green differentially. Here and there pure sun fell through the willow fronds. Hugh was so comfortable now that he could forget specific bones, specific physical sensations. He and the shade and the tree and the sun were all one and the same, all melting together. It was a cool, detached, thinking place, Hugh felt – the words “Green thought in a green shade” came from somewhere, he did not know where. He could think green, cool thoughts about castles; about the castle, about the cupboard, green, calm thoughts, compared to his panic that morning. It was as if he had fought in a vast wind then, but now the wind had died. He found himself contented, not at all afraid.

Anna sat up. Hugh felt her first in the rocking of the boat, and when he sat up himself found her gazing over the side of it. The water was very green and thick, her reflection green and remote and strange. She stirred the water with her finger, the image of her face shivered, disappeared, came together, her hand pausing, then disappeared again. The small ebbs of water caught points of light that Hugh would not have known existed in this shade.

Hugh wanted to reach if not Anna herself, the image of Anna. Beyond, infinitely deep, as the water shivered and before it settled he seemed to see another image, of a castle, and he wanted to reach that too. He realized he wanted to think of it, to be reminded of it. He wanted terribly to reach it. But the water stilled, the castle was not there.

“The water’s filthy,” Anna said.

“It’s a beautiful colour,” Hugh said.

“It looks like soup. It ought to smell horrible.”

“But it doesn’t,” Hugh said.

“It doesn’t smell nice, either.”

There was further silence. Hugh had no inclination to break it, but after a few minutes Anna said: “I was thinking about the cupboard; your cupboard.”

“Just for once I wasn’t,” Hugh said.

“What do you think, when you do think?”

“How should I know now?” Hugh did not want to commit himself.

“You must know!”

“Nothing useful, anyway.” But suddenly Hugh did want to tell Anna about the castle, everything. It was as if a space had opened in him, revealed something he did not know was there. The wanting sprang at him from nothing, but the desire fought inability, he could not tell her, could not find the means, words framed themselves only to split upon his tongue. She did not seem to want to be told in any case. Every time he thought he had gathered himself to speak she ran her fingers roughly through the water, or shook her head, or turned abruptly, or said something herself about ducks, the tree, the zoo, always something trivial, if not downright silly or at least it might have been downright silly, or she might have deliberately calculated silliness. Hugh would not have put that past her. Eventually he told her just about his experiments that morning, timing the brass buttons, though he missed out his wanting to get into the cupboard.

Anna was silent when he finished. Hugh watched her reflection in the water with almost the same curious nostalgia he had felt for the girl in the alder grove; both girl and reflection thankfully unobtainable.

“Would your old man be able to explain us anything?” asked Anna startling him. “The one in the shop, you said.”

“We could try I suppose.”

“Then go and ask him. If you want to know.”

“Do you want to know? But what do I say. Er um did you know you sold me a magic cupboard, sir?”

“That’s
your
problem not mine,” said Anna calmly. “Now listen, if someone got into the cupboard, they might be made younger, mightn’t they, just like Penn said?”

“We thought of that yesterday.”

“I thought of it, you mean.” But Hugh wanted to think about this even less than he had wanted to think about the old man, because of what had happened this morning.

“Anyone old could get into the cupboard and be made young again. They could grow old again and be made young again. They needn’t ever die.”

“I suppose they wouldn’t. But think of the practical problems.”

“They would be immortal,” Anna said.

“An odd sort of immortality. Gods are immortal, but they always stay the same. They don’t ever get old, get young again.”

“I’d hate that,” Anna said. “I mean I’d like to be immortal if I could go on changing. But I think I’d have to go on changing.”

“Some Indian religions say you change totally. After death you come back to life as an animal, insect, anything. I read that once.”

“That’s silly. You know it’s not what I meant.”

“I’d be a bird, I think, if I was allowed to choose.”

“I’d be a squirrel or a monkey. I’d like to leap and swing, like those gibbons in the zoo.”

“That’s flying too, of a sort,” Hugh said. “Would you really want to be made young, Anna, over and over again, to keep changing and never die?”

“I change anyway. I change every day, don’t you? I feel years older than Jean. Sometimes I feel years older than you.” Anna was laughing at him suddenly.

“You surprise me. Anyone would think you were Methuselah. You look ancient, I must say, Anna. Come off it, for heaven’s sake.”

“Come off what?” asked another voice. It was Penn this time, holding aside the trailing branches, letting in a swathe of light and sun, a view of the world outside. Hugh did not want it, world or light or Penn. He felt a sudden total fury. But Penn stood in the bows of his boat like a figurehead, triumphant, all his ill-humour gone; perhaps it had been transferred to Jean, who looked, behind him, red-faced and annoyed.

“He won’t let me row, Hugh. He hasn’t let me row at all.”

Penn laughed at her. “She is entirely in my power. If she snatches at the oars she’ll just upset the boat.”

“Hugh, he’s horrible, it isn’t, fair. Can’t I come with you, you’d let me row.”

“Willingly,” Hugh answered lazily. It was as if a switch had flicked, his fury gone utterly, he could not remember what it felt like. “I hate rowing myself.” But he found when he came to it that he was less happy to relinquish his companion. He would rather have rowed with Anna or with Penn than Jean, who moved into his boat clumsily, not rocking it too much, but still much less neat than Anna, who smiled gently as she sat herself down in Penn’s boat.

Their hour was almost up. Penn rowed off at full speed, widening the gap between their boats at every stroke. Anna sat in the stern with her back to Hugh and Jean. Her voice and Penn’s floated across the water, but Hugh could not hear anything that was said. Jean’s rowing was perfectly adequate, but she kept up a running commentary on the techniques involved, that he did not feel in the least like listening to. She fell silent at last out of weariness; but Hugh did not offer to take over the oars. Aware, without guilt, that he was being mean, he lay with his hands behind his head and simply enjoyed himself again, let the sun, the slight wind, the cool movement of water calm him, just as he had been calmed earlier in the willow grove.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

They went home as they had come, by bus and underground. In the tunnels, in the dark, the distances seemed interminable if you once began to count. But when the train broke out into the light, when the eye had something it could reckon by, even twice the distance might seem half the length. So time always was in part what you made of it, Hugh thought, a little comforted. It made the cupboard seem a shade less ruthless, a shade less arbitrary.

They walked in at the front gate, hot and cross after the walk from the station.

“Where’s Humbert?” Jean asked at once. Humbert was the cat, Jean’s in effect, because no one else took much notice of him, except, occasionally, their father who fondled him extravagantly before visitors, or when he felt some kind of need to show affection. In the summer, in the heat, Humbert’s favourite place was beneath the ash tree in the front garden – he had been sitting there when they went out, but was not on their return.

“He’ll be somewhere. He could be anywhere. You know what cats are like.”

It was odd that Jean worried so very soon. But when they did begin to look for him he was nowhere to be found. His dish of food had not been touched either.

Jean was beside herself. She seemed at the moment too easily upset, who was normally quite calm and organized. She went all round the house, all round the garden, calling quietly, “Puss, puss, puss.” To no avail; by bedtime she was crying unashamedly.

“We shouldn’t have gone out. We shouldn’t have left him. It’s all our fault.”

“Don’t be silly; Ma was here.” And they’d often left him, Hugh pointed out, gently. He’d often gone off and then come back. Cats were like that, independent, solitary. “I’m dead sympathetic to cats,” Hugh said with feeling; remembering he’d hardly been left alone to paint for a week, and wishing, almost, that the cupboard had never happened.

He went upstairs to bed still thinking of painting, not thinking about the cupboard at all. But there had been a tree in his most recent painting, somewhat abstract but a tree for all that, dominating it, and it was a tree he began to feel as he neared his room; an ash tree, he decided, because that was where they’d last seen the cat. He expected the cupboard to be a tree, to have taken root, to be growing in his room. He opened the door quite sure of that, to find only the ordinary shoddy-looking cupboard, marked by nails where there had been a mirror, and the ash tree as usual outside his window. Yet he had imagined an ash tree in his room, with a smooth trunk and sprays of little leaves.

His mind kept on going back to it. Lying in bed he found himself in a boat, floating beneath the shade of a huge ash tree. Tonight he felt wholly as if in a dream. A boatman stood in the bows of the boat and poled it with a long grey pole. Hugh could not see the boatman’s face but this did not worry him – he seemed to know everything, somewhere in his mind.

The castle lay ahead of them across the lake. Hugh looked for and found its reflection in the water, but under the lake he saw another world again, the castle surrounded by flowing grass and trees, trees with fruit on them and some with flowers, all greenish-tinged, all the other colours there but subordinate. Hugh longed for the castle, stretched out his hands to its reflection, the boat gentling and gliding under him. His hands touched the water, stirring it, and ripples came and broke the world. Then he awoke to lie quite calm and peaceful, his body, released, almost floating in the bed. He did not need to move to make himself comfortable. He fell asleep like that and did not dream, and woke in the morning lying as before, not a limb having shifted, not a finger.