Human Croquet (31 page)

The first door I try appears to open into Mr and Mrs Walsh’s bedroom, huge twin beds like barges dominate a room heavy with brocade. The next room reeks of Dorothy. It’s frilly and girly and organized on lines of military precision – a shelf of science books, fiction in alphabetical order and toiletries laid out on the dressing-table with mathematical regularity. If a single Q-Tip moved in this room she would know about it.

I go up to the next floor and try another door. This bedroom is frilly and girly too but sporty as well – tennis rackets, sportswear and riding-hats everywhere – this must be Hilary’s room. On the bedside table there’s a photograph, head-and-shoulders, of a horse and on the bed a huge assortment of dolls – dolls with baby faces, dolls in full Highland regalia, dolls in flamenco dress, moppety rag dolls and antique dolls with yellowing ringlets and astonished expressions.

And there, incongruous amongst the dolls, lies the much bigger body of a supine Malcolm Lovat. He greets me cheerfully, and drunkenly, waving a half-empty bottle of gin in his hand. ‘Hello, Izzie.’

‘I didn’t think you were here.’ I take a swig of neat gin from the green bottle, slugging in a cavalier fashion, and I’m quite pleased with myself for not choking to death. ‘Smell that,’ Malcolm says, suddenly rolling over and plunging his face into the pillow, ‘essence of horse!’ How we laugh!

He pats the space next to him on Hilary’s (almost certainly) virginal divan and I squash myself into the space. ‘That’s a big dress,’ he says pleasantly and puts his arm round my shoulder and we lie there quite companionably, drinking gin and assigning imaginary personalities to Hilary’s dolls, most of which are extensions of her own character.

We’re approaching the bottom of the gin bottle now. The inside lining of my body feels as if someone’s set a match to it, a not entirely unpleasant sensation, and the distracted globe of my brain has turned into porridge. Most of Hilary’s poor dolls have been kicked to the floor by now. Or have jumped to safety.

I think I drift in and out of consciousness a few times. Time seems to have become slower, more viscous somehow, as if the molecules of time are indeed capable of changing state and are no longer an invisible gas but a flowing liquid (perhaps that’s the Heraclitean flow). ‘Kiss me,’ I mumble suddenly, emboldened by gin and the strange fluidity of time. Malcolm opens his eyes, I think he’s been asleep, and hauls himself up into a cobra position on his elbows and gazes at me. ‘Please,’ I add, in case he thinks I’m being impolite. He frowns deeply at one of the few remaining dolls – a baby-doll about the size of ‘our’ baby – and says, ‘Isobel,’ very seriously.

This must be it then – he’s realized the cosmic links that bind us, he’s about to kiss me and open the seals on our love – we will be transported to some transcendent place where the music is by the spheres and the lighting by Turner – I hope I don’t turn into a tree before this can happen, or go flying through time again. I close my eyes hopefully. And pass out cold.

But too late – I clutch my forehead in a vain attempt to staunch the throbbing and lean over the side of the bed and empty what remains in my stomach (bits of gin-soaked cocktail sausage mainly) all over Hilary’s startled dolls.

Hilary starts screaming at me, a torrent of ladylike invective that pours from her mouth in a tumbling stream of toads and ashes.

‘Drop dead,’ I moan at her.

‘And I don’t want to see your face in my house again, you little tart!’ he shouts, in character. I get as far as the wrought-iron gates before being overtaken by the most overwhelming lethargy. I am indeed a fallen woman, or at any rate, a fallen girl – fallen by a huge laurel bush by the wrought-iron gates, fallen and crawled under and curled up and snoring as quietly as a hedgehog, determined to hibernate. Snow begins to dust my face like cold icing-sugar.

I have several attempts at lighting up a cigarette and on the fourth, successful, attempt drop a lighted match on my dress and a large pink patch of it instantly melts and I narrowly avoid turning into a human torch. How shall I die? Fire or ice?

Somehow or other we end up at the top of Lover’s Leap once again but Loving and Leaping are the last things on our minds, wading through blood up to my knees would be easier and we both fall asleep the second the engine is turned off. When I wake up it’s cold. A drizzle of saliva seems to have turned to ice on my chin and my eyes are crusted with sleep. I root around hopelessly in the glove compartment and am surprised to find half a packet of stale custard creams which I fall on like an animal. After a while I nudge Malcolm awake and offer him one. It’s such a shame that I’m in no fit state (my head’s about to fall off) to sit and appreciate his beautiful profile, the curve of his lip, the black kiss curl that loops around his ear. I open the car door and throw up on the ground.

‘Richard and Hilary,’ Malcolm says, his voice blank with disbelief.

The snow is now swirling around in the darkness in a menacing kind of way. We are driving past Boscrambe Woods, the trees an inky black mass at the side of the road. Abruptly, Malcolm swings the car into one of the entrances to the woods and parks in front of a row of fire-beating brooms that poke up towards the stars. They’re in the wrong place. There could be no fire in these woods tonight. The ground is hard as iron, the waters in the streams turned to stone. When Malcolm turns the engine off it’s quieter than anything I’ve ever heard.

‘Come on,’ Malcolm says, opening the car door, even though the snow is now blowing a blizzard. Reluctantly I tramp into the wood behind him. In the wood there is no blizzard, everything is still. The snow must have been falling for hours longer in the wood than outside the wood (how could that be?), for snow is piled up everywhere – Christmas-card snow, winter-wonderland snow, crisp and virginal. The bare branches of the deciduous trees, rimmed with snow, spring and arc overhead like the vaulted roof of a great cathedral. It
is
like being in church, hushed and reverent, but more spiritual.

The wood is full of evergreens too, firs have gathered from all over the world – the Norway spruces
(abies picea)
and lodgepole pines
(pinus contorta),
alpine firs
(abies lasiocarpa)
and European silver firs
(abies alba),
the balsam fir
(abies balsamea)
and the beautiful noble firs
(abies procera)
crowd together under their snowcoats like an eternal Christmas waiting to happen.

We plod along, silent in the silence. It’s like being the last two people in the world. Perhaps we are, perhaps we’ve entered a time warp that’s propelled us forward to the last, cold days. Only in the wood can you truly lose track of time. A rabbit bounces across the snow in front of us.

Ahead of me, Malcolm stops suddenly and, turning to me, puts his fingers to his lips. A red deer, a female, is standing ahead of us on the path, sniffing the air for us, knowing we are here but not quite seeing us. Then, in one startled leap, she’s gone, crashing through the frozen branches so that the sound of snapping twigs echoes noisily in the cold silence around us.

‘That’s lucky, I expect,’ Malcolm whispers, and puts his arms round me. His breath is warm on my frozen cheek. This is it then. I close my eyes expectantly … ‘Time to go home,’ he says suddenly, and ploughs back through the snow, dragging me by the hand. I expect if we weren’t still full of Beefeater’s anti-freeze we’d both be dead of the cold by now.

We find the car covered in a thick eiderdown of snow and have to brush it off with our poor ungloved hands. The tyres spin on the snow as the car reverses on to the pristine road. The snow has stopped falling now and we slip and slide down the twisting road. ‘I think you’re the only person I can be myself with,’ Malcolm says, more articulate than he’s been for hours. Why does everyone have so much trouble being themselves?

He glances across at me to check whether I understand what he’s trying to say and from nowhere a deer suddenly appears ahead of us, caught in the headlights. Nightmarishly mute, I lift my hand and point at it. Malcolm carries on blithely about his true self and his problems finding it but then he follows the direction of my pointing finger and horrified stare and says, ‘Oh shit—’ It looks exactly like the deer we’ve just seen in the wood (although they all look alike really) but this is no time to be making comparisons. Not such a lucky deer, after all. Time starts to slow down. Malcolm slews the car to one side to try and avoid the deer. I can see it clearly – its eyes rolling, wild with terror, its muscles moving and rippling beneath its velvet skin as it gathers itself into one great desperate leap.

The deer jumps free. And so does the car – taking off, jumping clear of the road, flying slowly through the air, gliding down the steep bank at the side of the road as if it had wings, all in perfect silence, as if the soundtrack to the world has been turned off, but then it hits the ground for the first time and sound returns suddenly – the noise of metal rending and glass breaking, the sound of the world ending, as we bounce off the snowy ground, splintering a young tree, crashing through gorse in a mad flurry of snow, the car an unstoppable wild animal intent on self-destruction before finally being tamed by a big sycamore standing sentinel in the frozen field.