Darkest Part of the Woods (20 page)

Though the morning had been warm, the temperature outside came as not much less than a shock. Under a sky of a blue she wouldn't have expected to see for months it felt like spring, and inside her car it seemed close to summer. The trees around the university had stood up to last week's gales-indeed, there seemed to have been more upheaval in the forest behind Goodmanswood than anywhere else-and had been coaxed by the subsequent balmy days to let their buds appear. The world was changing, but the Sunday sound of bells reminded her of her childhood as she drove out of Brichester.

The edge of the forest was a tangle of fallen trees. Those that had sprawled onto the bypass had been cleared out of the way, though scattered twigs remained, snapping beneath the wheels with a sound and a sensation that put her in mind of treading on insects. As she drove past the Arbour she refrained from imagining how the gale and its aftermath had looked to her father's fellow patients. She rubbed at a pair of tears before accelerating away from the sight of her father's window, all too reminiscent of a frame emptied of an old photograph which had needed to vanish to make her realise how well loved it was. Then, through the confusion of entangled trees past which she was speeding, she glimpsed her mother.

She braked and peered into the mirror. Margo was examining a random arrangement of branches through the viewfinder of a camcorder. Heather reached to beep the horn and thought better of it, and wondered if she would only hinder Margo if she joined her. She was watching in the mirror as the trees closed around her mother when she almost lost control of the car, more so by clutching at the wheel. She'd seen that Margo was unaware not only of the vehicle but also of the presence at her back. It was Lennox, or a version of him.

The figure was crouching out of the shadows of a tree. It was thin as a giant withered spider or a spider's victim, and seemed to be twisted into the shape in which Lennox had given up his life. The next moment skewed trees intervened, cutting off Heather's view of the figure and of her mother.

She swerved into the first space she could find, almost running into the uprooted tree that had left the gap. She had no time to ensure her door was properly shut as a preamble to dashing the several hundred yards she'd had to put between her and her mother. Any breaths she might have used to call out to Margo were snatched by panic. A swaying lorry roared by on the far side of the otherwise deserted bypass as she clambered through a mass of leaning trees, which clawed at her with twigs and branches while bark shifted under her hands.

By the time she was able to see her mother she'd made so much noise that Margo had abandoned filming to gaze in her direction, ignoring the presence at her own back.

Except that nothing was there apart from a bunch of branches sprouting low on a tree.

Their shape was sufficiently reminiscent of Heather's final sight of Lennox to explain why she'd thought it was more similar, she told herself. Shadows that had aided the illusion must have moved on, and perhaps as she'd driven past the Arbour she had been reminded of the unrestrained comments that had brought the funeral to an end. She tried to finish off with a smile whatever expressions her face had been betraying as Margo said "Well, that was some entrance. What's the alarm?"

"I didn't want to lose you."

"Not much chance of that, I should think. I ought to know my way around at my age."

"I'm sure you do," Heather couldn't very well not say. "I was passing and I saw you but I had to carry on till I found somewhere to park. Am I interrupting?"

"I'm done for today," Margo said in a forgiving tone and held up the bagged camera.

"You'll have to see what I've made. You'll be amazed how much this changes things."

Heather glanced at the clump of branches. Their outlines were absolutely precise under the bright clear sky, just as they'd looked when they had appeared to take her father's shape. For the merest instant she had the impression that the phenomenon had reproduced itself elsewhere, but scanning the area showed her only the web of trees. "How?" she said.

"Colours, perspectives, even what you can see and what you can't if you play with the exposure. I had it looking like the middle of the night before, and you couldn't be sure what was there."

"Is that good?"

"I'm certain it's better than anything I've been doing recently. It's giving me more ideas than I've had since whenever. Maybe I should come back in the middle of the night and see what I can make that look like."

"Do you think that would be-"

"Oh, Heather, don't take me so seriously," Margo said with a grin so wry she might have been sharing it not only with Heather. "I'm just trying to show you how many ideas I'm getting."

"I hope the rest are better than that one." Unless Heather's expression conveyed the response, she kept it to herself. "So long as it's working for you," she said aloud.

"You can buy shares in that, and I'll tell you one more thing-it's what Lennox would have wanted."

Heather kept her gaze on Margo's face and told herself there was nowhere else around them she need look. "I wouldn't have expected that to mean so much to you."

"Forgive me, Heather, I don't think you like me to say this, so let me try and put it positively. Maybe not having as much imagination as the rest of the family is one of your strengths."

"Then I'd better hang onto how I am," Heather said stiff-mouthed.

"That's right, don't you change. I'm sure none of us would want you to."

Heather did her best to meet that with a smile before ridding them of the subject.

"Where are you parked?"

"At

home."

"You're saying you've walked all this way through the woods?"

"I still can when I want to. It's only an hour's walk," Margo said, then glanced at her watch. "Well, okay, maybe I was more. Shows how many ideas it was giving me that I didn't notice."

"Would you like me to run you home?"

"That would make me happy. We can talk a while longer."

Heather went second so as to assist Margo over any difficulty, but of the two of them her mother appeared to be more at home in the woods. Heather saw the surrounding trees rearrange their positions without moving, as if in a slow secret dance. Whenever she held onto a tree to clamber over it she felt the bark shift or prepare to shift, and remembered how the Christmas tree had seemed to change in her grasp. She opened the passenger door for Margo before hurrying around the car to shut herself in and send it fast into the road. "So where were you coming from?" Margo said.

"Work. Well, not work, but the library."

"Good to hear you're so fond of your job," Margo said as if she didn't quite have time to attend to Heather's words. "Is your sister any nearer finding one yet?"

"Not that she's told me. I don't know if she's looking very hard."

"She'll have too much on her mind, I expect. You'll remember how it can be, and of course she has a book to work on."

Heather remembered staying at work until Sam's imminence had bundled her off to the hospital on Mercy Hill, but she could see no point in arguing. "She isn't costing too much to feed, is she?" Margo said.

"Not much at all."

"That sounds like too little when she's no longer just herself."

"I can't stand over her and shove it in her mouth. I could never make her do anything she didn't want to do."

"Maybe she's afraid of being too much of a burden on the household, what with Sam not having much of a job either. Don't tell her in case she feels obligated, but I'll help. Make whatever tempts her and a lot of it."

"Don't leave yourself short," Heather said, hoping she didn't sound jealous.

"You haven't told me yet why you were at work. Okay, before you correct me, not at work."

"I was trying to find out why dad kept saying Selcouth."

"And did you?"

"He was someone who used to live round here."

"That's all you discovered."

"No," Heather admitted and used a glance in Margo's direction to convince herself that only the depths of the woods were appearing to pace the car. "The story goes that he was some kind of, I suppose the term would be a black magician. You can still see the ruins of his house. That's where we found dad and the others the night he led them over the road."

"Will you be telling Sylvia?"

"Why, don't you think I should?"

"I can't see why I'd think that. It'll just be another reason for her to go in the woods."

Heather's dismay at realising this hadn't occurred to her must have been apparent, because Margo said more sharply "You haven't been trying to put her off again, have you?"

"I think I've given up."

"She'll be glad. You can respect her feelings even if you don't understand them."

"Fine, her feelings are her own affair, but I'm not so sure I like her involving Sam in them."

Margo turned a gaze on her that Heather could feel on her cheek. "Being sympathetic won't do him any harm."

"Maybe I'm afraid she'll ask too much of him."

"That wouldn't be like Sylvia, would it? I'd say she asks too little of any of us." Margo kept gazing at Heather, less intensely now. "Don't feel excluded because they've grown close,"

she said.

"I don't," Heather felt compelled to say as the forest hid behind the first houses of Goodmanswood. In a couple of minutes she halted the car in front of the tall broad house, once a magistrate's, of which Margo occupied the top half.

"Want to come up and talk some more?" Margo said.

Just now Heather wasn't anxious to renew the confusion she'd experienced on visiting Margo's studio last week. Those of Margo's carvings that hadn't been included in the London exhibition were as vital as ever-far more so than anything in the retrospective had seemed.

Heather had been unable to pin down an impression that the effect derived from some relationship between the shapes of the carvings and that of the forest visible over the roofs. "I'd better get back and see what they're up to," she said.

Before the words had finished escaping her she wished she had chosen them better. "I'll pass on your love," she added, squeezing Margo's hand as it supported her mother off the passenger seat and out of the car. Once she'd watched Margo withdraw into the house with a wave that looked either tentative or unfinished, she drove home.

Several houses along the route were caged with scaffolding while their roofs were repaired after the gale. Hers had needed only a few slates replacing, and Margo's had survived intact. Sometimes the oldest things were the strongest, she thought, hoping that was true of her mother. She coasted along Woodland Close to the accompaniment of distant church bells that sounded as though they were tumbling down a possibly bottomless hollow. She stopped the car outside her gate, then eased the door shut rather than slamming it as she climbed out. Half of the gate was open, and a woman was peering into the house.

Despite the heat, she wore a mousy overcoat that looked at the very least second-hand.

Much of her black curly hair was sprouting from a pair of rubber bands placed rather less than symmetrically on either side of her head. Her hands were pressed against the glass as she peered into the living-room. The object resting on her insteps was not a dog but a shabby shoulder bag. "Hello?"

Heather enquired as she unbolted the other half of the gate.

She had to step forward and repeat herself before the woman twisted her top half around, leaving grey handprints to fade from the pane. She looked younger than Heather, though her face was pale and creased as crumpled paper and not much less scrawny than its bones. "Nobody's home," she said in a high fast Californian voice.

"I am."

This earned Heather a scrutiny that narrowed the woman's left eye even more than the right. "I guess you could be her sister," she allowed at last. "You're a bit alike."

"Glad to hear it. I take it we've spoken before."

"I don't know about that," the woman said, and squeezed her left eye shut while staring at Heather from beneath her raised right eyebrow. "You don't sound too much like anyone I spoke to."

"Blame the phone. You're Merilee, aren't you?"

"Suppose I am?"

Heather chose to be amused rather than offended by her wariness. "Then you can more than suppose I'm Heather, Sylvie's sister."

"Whose?"

"We've been through this. Sylvie. Sylvia. Sylvia Price."

Merilee tried closing her right eye and widening the left before she admitted with some reluctance "Okay, so maybe we did speak. I have to be careful with people I don't know."

Heather wasn't about to ask why. She parked the Civic beside Sam's car while Merilee resumed pressing her hands against the window. Heather was only starting to climb out of the car when Merilee turned, palms squeaking across the glass.

"Can I wait?"

"You might need not to be in a hurry."

"Well, I am. I have to fly back to the States tonight. It's the end of my vacation."

"You'll have left your luggage somewhere, then."

"Everything I have is safe," said Merilee as though Heather wanted to learn too much.

Heather inserted her key in the front door but didn't turn it. "Did Sylvia know you were coming?"

"Why would she have gone out if she had?"

Though Heather was tempted to answer that, it seemed more important to discover "So if you haven't been in touch with her, how did you know where to find us?"

"Asked."

"Asked..."

"People who know you. Seems like anyone round here does."

"You'd better come in," Heather said and was aware of sounding bent on hiding the visitor from the neighbours. She pushed the door open and saw a page from a message pad lying on the stairs. She was reaching for it when Merilee, having followed almost on her heels, demanded "Who's that about?"

Her wariness was so apparent that Heather felt bound to show her the note. Sam's taken me walking, it said. You know where. Back while it's light. Merilee performed the routine with her eyes as though to parody the unease Heather was experiencing, then grimaced. "I can't wait that long."