‘Being mad isn’t an excuse for being vague. Can we at least have specific madness?’
She ignored me. If you didn’t catch it and understand it first time, she wouldn’t go back. I knew why. Nobody had listened to her when she was sent here and so she tended now to wave something interesting under her interlocutor’s nose, then snatch it away since they weren’t listening anyway. Then, like she didn’t want to but found she couldn’t countenance not doing, she said, ‘Your grandfather wrote a letter for the priest, so I suppose you had better take that. Your father never delivered it.’
Some gears in my mind clunked and made a grinding noise. ‘But Harry was there eighty years ago,’ I said, trying not to sound too gentle. There’s something horrible about the way visitors speak to mad relatives. Madness of the Brislington kind was not a loss of reason but reason disorientated and funnelled in the wrong direction. ‘It won’t be the same priest.’
‘Take it anyway. It will be in the top drawer of your father’s desk, if Charles hasn’t chopped it up for firewood.’
‘He hasn’t. And I will take it, but—’
‘Well, you never know, it might help.’
‘How?’
‘Feed the pheasants, Merrick.’
I hadn’t opened the old study door for years. Nobody had. It stuck at first. When it juddered open I expected the air to be stale, but it was fresh and cold because there was a hole in the ceiling and a spear of sunlight where some more roof tiles had fallen through. The desk wasn’t locked. It had three top drawers along its width and the first I opened was full of farthing coins and odds and ends Dad must have turned out of his pocket: bits of interestingly knotted string, a few white pebbles. The next was empty except for the letter. Caroline had told me exactly what to look for, although it wasn’t addressed. The envelope was old and much folded, the edges worn. One had torn a little and the creamy paper inside showed through. The only thing to say whose it had been was the seal on the back, from our grandfather’s signet ring. When I picked it up, it exposed the corner of a little book that had been tucked underneath. I lifted the book out slowly. I’d seen it before.
It was a storybook my father had made for me when I was four or five years old. There was no writing inside – he’d told me the story, not read it – only ink pictures, dotted with gold. He drew beautifully and he had used to read it by candlelight, which had brought out all the gold flecks in among the black ink drawings, made when he’d still more or less had the money for gold ink. He had bound it and covered it too, in velvet rather than leather, to make it soft to hold. I opened it, carefully, afraid it would crack.
The story was about a woodcutter who lived on the edge of a great forest, the sort that we didn’t have in England any more. The trees were drawn bleak and Schwarzwald-ish, in grey light. The woodcutter worked on the border and never strayed in, because it was dangerous, but one morning an elf came out and decided he quite liked the woodcutter’s company and stayed for a while. But eventually he heard bells ringing for him inside the forest, and went back. He didn’t forget about the woodcutter, but time being different for elves, he lost track, and when he came back, it was the woodcutter’s grandsons he found working on the edge of the forest, the woodcutter having died years ago.
I could remember Dad turning pages for me. He’d always worn the same coat, which was too big for him because he had inherited it from his father, so he had rolled the sleeves back. The lining was an elderly but beautiful Indian chintz, brilliant complicated birds on a blue background that had faded from wear and sun to nearly white. I could remember those cuffs but not his face.
As I let the book fall closed, a page slipped forward, not attached to the others. It was another panel in the story. I didn’t remember it. I couldn’t make it out at first and I had to raise it towards the light.
It showed a man trapped in a growing tree. The bark and the roots had twisted around him, holding him upright, though he was asleep or dead. They had angled him upward a little, as if they were offering him to the sky. There were vines around the roots and they were flowering. Haloes of uninked spaces around them made them look like they were glowing. The petals were moulting, and in the air where they fell, they had left tiny wakes of light like firework embers, done in hairlines of white ink. There was no sun. The man was facing mostly away, his head resting against a loop of the vine that twined around his arm. It had pulled the collar of his shirt down over his shoulder. Along his collarbone were freckles, marked on in the very faintest sepia, like someone had flicked ink at him and he had scrubbed it off days ago but not all its ghosts.
I couldn’t remember anything about a scene like that. In the story the elf had gone off to be with his friends and the woodcutter had, I supposed, lived happily ever after, since he’d had children and grandchildren. The way it was drawn was different from the other pictures in the storybook; more detailed, less like makebelieve. I touched the ink, suddenly sure he had drawn it – or the man at least – from life. It was too good to be imaginary. Where he had pressed hard the thick paper was still furrowed. I turned it over but there was no note to say when or where he had done it.
I slid the extra drawing back into the book, then put the book into his desk again and closed the drawer. Not sure how else to keep it flat and from any more damage, I tucked the letter into the paper pocket inside the cover of my sketchbook. Easing over the crooked floor and out to Gulliver, who was sprawled at the top of the stairs, I wondered if there was a grimmer version of the story he hadn’t told me: a dead man trapped in a tree somewhere and cradled in those glowing vines, somewhere so cold he was frozen perfect. The portrait had seemed like a memorial.
PART TWO
SEVEN
Peru
January 1860