Come Away With Me

I passed it quickly. The path turned to the right and led through the woods. I climbed up the chiselled steps cut into the tree roots on to a higher path that ran above the creek. The trees grew close here, close and dark, and I felt myself melting into them, gliding over fallen brown pine needles as soft as cotton wool until I was at one with the trees, as if I were tree and shadow.

The creek glittered at a steep angle below me and I heard singing. Clear through the wood someone was singing in a high, childish voice although the words were lost to me. When the singing stopped there was a smattering of clapping, then a pause and someone started to play a recorder. Slowly I made my way towards the sound.

The trees grew thinner by a clearing and beyond it there was a small gate in the middle of a hedge. The sounds were coming from the other side. I moved towards the gate and saw the old manor house, which stood on a steep slope facing the wood and creek. A lawn sloped down to the latch gate and not far from the gate, on an even patch of grass like a small terrace, a semicircle of people were sitting on chairs playing musical instruments.

The terrace had been made to catch the early morning sun. The people were swathed in coats and scarves. They were making a lot of noise and seemed excited. Then I saw they were children. The recorder player stopped and made an awkward bobbing bow, and the others put down their instruments and clapped.

I watched them. I saw something was wrong. Their movements were disjointed. They seemed unable to keep still. Some children got up and ran around in circles, their limbs flaying out at odd angles.

A man with a beard called out, clapped his hands for order. He got the children sitting down again and a tall, lanky boy started to play the violin. He played beautifully. The music was haunting and the children swayed and rocked to the sound. He played for two or three minutes, then his concentration suddenly went and he stopped mid piece and stared straight across into my eyes.

The sudden silence shivered, unbroken. I held his eyes and grief rose up in me like an echo. His fear was mirrored in me. I felt the form of his fleeting, terrifying confusion.

The man with the beard touched his arm. So soft were his words to the boy that I could not hear them. The children rushed from their chairs and surrounded the boy. They threw their arms round him, making small noises of comfort and encouragement. They patted and stroked and keened to him until he jerked back into life.

I turned and ran back into the closeness of the trees. I followed the path of soft pine needles as it wound back down to the water and into sunlight. It felt as if the boy’s eyes followed me into the shadows. What am I doing? What am I doing? Someone tell me.

TWENTY-ONE (#ulink_91d93be1-e009-5ce3-bca4-e0b53c7cadf4)

Adam and Ruth took the path through the woods. This route was quite new and part of a Job Creation scheme. It didn’t lead anywhere but meandered in an arc above the water and came out where the awful yellow house now stood.

Not many people used the new route, they preferred to stay on the open creek path rather than enter the shade of the trees, but it had been a boon for the Manor House, a school for autistic children. The children and teachers could now wander through a little latch gate straight on to the creek.

As they passed the gate Ruth and Adam saw a semicircle of chairs with musical instruments lying abandoned on them, looking poignant and incongruous.

They walked in a circle and came back to the old barn where Adam had been fishing without success. They sat on a bench and finished their sandwiches and apples in the sun. Adam checked his line. Not a bite.

Ruth held her face up to the thin warmth of the sun while Adam took something revolting off his line and put something else on to the hook and cast again. He was humming and Ruth smiled, feeling relaxed.

‘OK,’ she said after a minute or two. ‘I’d better go back to the cottage and garden. Heaven knows when we’ll be down again. I’ll see you later, hon.’

Adam turned and grinned. ‘Don’t bank on fish for supper, will you?’

‘You’ve still got time!’ Ruth felt relieved that he was happy again.

Walking back to the cottage she saw that the best of the day was nearly over. Clouds hovered and the persistent mist was going to roll in again. She could almost feel its damp hand touching her face and coming up through her feet. She hurried to get her plants in.

Adam was fishing just beyond the ivy-clad barn. He had been fishing for a long time as if he were determined to catch something. I watched him from the trees, just inside the wood where the pine needles were dry. Ruth had gone and Adam was alone again. I stared at the back of his head. It was so familiar, the angle at which he held it, the shape of it, the way the hair grew, just like Tom’s. I loved watching him.

There were no walkers on the paths and the sun was sliding in and out of cloud. The warmth of the day would soon slip away.

Adam placed his rod between two sticks and turned. He looked up into the wood where I was sitting and he shivered, pulling a sweater over his head in a swift movement. Then he turned quickly back to his rod, fiddling with the bait on the end of his line. I saw that his shoulders had suddenly become hunched and tense, his movements nervous.

My throat caught. A pulse beat painfully in my head. He knew he was being followed and watched. I was frightening him.

I shivered too. The boy playing the violin had hurled me back from some strange place. His eyes, staring straight into mine, had registered the bewilderment of a life he could not quite grasp; a world where everyday actions become a constant battle with fear.

I recognised, for a bleak and startling instant, the dark and lonely place he inhabited. A place where you can no longer control your thoughts or your actions or judge them. A world where it is impossible to relate to anyone; where the simplest decision is too difficult. In the boy’s eyes I caught a brief reflection of myself and with horror realised I might be going out of my mind.

I was following and scaring the one beloved person left to me. Ruth and Adam had walked past me as I lay among the fir needles while the fragile rays of the sun touched my face. I could have called out, almost touched them, but I did not. I had trembled with wanting to shout, Help me. Help me.

Now I knew there was only one thing I could do. I could not leave Adam frightened. I must reassure him that no one wanted to hurt him, let him know it had only been me following him. Only me.

I picked up my coat and moved out of the wood across the deserted path to the small windowless stone barn. Pressed against the wall, I looked at him through the gaping hole. I was so near to him. I would call out to him in a minute. I would call out that it was only me, Jenny, but somehow it seemed hard to find my voice as if it had disappeared inside me.

Adam’s collar was caught inside his jacket, exposing that tiny bit of white neck. I want to hold him. I want to hold him. I am so tired. I will put my coat on the ground. I will rest for a moment, for a moment, until I stop shaking, then I will call out to him.

TWENTY-TWO (#ulink_ac3f71bd-8ca4-5b6c-ab76-03b073f1cf50)

Ruth lifted the primroses out of the orange box and began to plant them under the window. She was shaking the earth out of the box when her eye caught a name in a headline in the old newspaper lining it.

She flicked the dirt away and looked closer. There was a picture of an army officer called Tom Holland. He had been killed by a bomb. It had been placed under his car in London. He had been driving home from the zoo with his small daughter. Ruth looked at the date. It was 20 August 2005.

His good-looking face smiled up at her. Ruth rocked on her heels in shock and sat on the hard ground. Oh, Jenny.

Ruth stared down at the photograph and her world receded fast and dangerously in a rip tide. Memory culled, blotted out all these years as if it had never happened, flooded sickly back.

She was once more among the coats, the dusty, sweaty, charity shop smell of them; lying, almost naked, with this man pictured here.

Tom Holland…Just a boy when she met him. Here he was, this same man, dead; murdered. This was what happened to the man she so casually conceived a baby with in a cold room at a Christmas party. It was Adam’s face looking up at her. His face was an older, eerie version of Adam. The face she had taught herself to forget. This man had been Jenny’s husband.

Ruth lifted out the paper and turned to the inside page. There were pictures of Jenny. There were pictures of a dark little girl with Jenny’s laughing eyes and wild curly hair. Ruth’s hands trembled. She wanted to cry out, Why didn’t you tell me the truth, Jenny? Why didn’t you tell me you lost both your husband and child in this terrible tragic way?

She would have understood so much more, Jenny’s almost catatonic grief, her sudden illness. Ruth remembered the way Jenny had looked at her, her odd behaviour when she stayed at the house. Her preoccupation with Adam…

Oh, my God! Ruth jumped to her feet. I’m so stupid. I’m so slow.

She was out of the gate and on to the path running, running, the breath catching painfully in her chest. Through the beat of her heart and the noise of her feet, Ruth heard Adam screaming.

James Brown parked the car by the upturned boats on the grass and strode towards the cottage. The front door of the house was wide open. He called out as he walked down the path. There was evidence of someone recently gardening. A fork and trowel lay discarded on the path. A page of an old newspaper was blowing around the garden and, irritated by it, James grabbed it as it blew around his feet.

He stared down at the photographs of a wrecked car, obscenely mangled. Pictures of his daughter, granddaughter and son-in-law were blowing about in the wind. The world seemed suddenly silent as he stood looking at the images engraved indelibly on his mind. Out of this silence he suddenly heard a woman screaming.

He moved quickly back to his car and grabbed his doctor’s bag, then made his way purposefully along the side of the creek towards the intermittent sounds. He was too old to run. It would serve no one if he had a heart attack. As he got nearer to the sounds, two white swans flew over him in perfect unison across the water into the mist. Underneath them the creek shimmered for a moment in late-afternoon sunlight.

From the path he caught a glimpse of movement on the foreshore at the mouth of the creek. It was hard to make out what was going on. As he rounded the corner of the derelict barn and crunched over seaweed and pebbles, James saw a group of people at the water’s edge in the mud.

They were bending over someone. A man in waders bent and lifted a small body and carried it up on to the shingle. A muddy, frightened boy was being clasped by a blonde woman.

James broke into a run, his heart racing, towards the fisherman who was splashing out of the muddy water and laying Jenny carefully on to the ground. ‘I’m a doctor. I’m her father.’

He turned Jenny on to her stomach but before he had time to pump her free of water she started to retch and vomit. Relieved, James turned her on her side and held her there, realising she couldn’t have been in the water long. He bent and felt her pulse, pushed her hair away from her muddy face, laid the back of his hand on the side of her neck. She was going to be all right but she was shivering with cold. He looked up at the fisherman. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘Don’t thank me,’ the man said. ‘It was the lad that went in the water after her. I was fishing by the lake, I heard him yelling. I just helped pull her out.’

James took his mobile phone out of his pocket to ring for an ambulance, but abruptly changed his mind. He turned as the boy, covered in mud, walked towards him. He recognised Ruth despite the fact that she too was dishevelled and muddy.

‘Is Jenny going to be OK?’ the boy asked anxiously, his teeth chattering with cold and fright. His vivid blue eyes stared out at James from his dirty face.