Mythago Wood - 1 (13 page)

The girl again. From the woodland, close to the brook, she ran the short
distance to the coops, and crouched there for a full ten minutes. I watched from
the kitchen, then moved through to the study as she prowled the grounds. J aware
of her, following me silently, watching. She does not understand, and I cannot
explain. I am desperate. The girl affects me totally. J has seen this, but what
can I do? It is the nature of the mythago itself. I am not immune, any more than
were the cultured men of the Roman settlements against whom she acted. She is
truly the idealized vision of the Celtic Princess, lustrous red hair, pale skin,
a body at once childlike yet strong. She is a warrior. But carries her weapons
with awkwardness, as if unfamiliar.

J is unaware of these things, only the girl, and my attraction. The boys have
not seen her, though Steven has talked twice, now, of visions of the antlered
'shaman' form that is also active at this time. The girl is more vital than the
earlier mythago forms, which seem mechanical, quite lost. She is hardly recent,
but behaves with an awareness that is uncanny. She watches me. I watch her.
There is more than a season between each visitation, but her confidence appears
to be growing. I wish I knew her story. My surmise must be close, but the
details remain elusive since we cannot communicate.

And a few pages later, written some two weeks after the previous event, but
not dated:

Pages are missing thereafter, pages of immense relevance since they certainly
deal with my father's efforts to follow the girl back into the woodland,
documenting the passages and pathways that he used. (There is, for example, a
cryptic line in an otherwise routine account of the use of the equipment that he
and Wynne-Jones had devised: 'Entered through hog path, segment seven, and moved
more than four hundred paces. There is a possibility here, but the real way in,
if not the obvious way, remains elusive. Defences too powerful, and I am too
old. A younger man? There are other pathways to try.' And there it breaks.)

The final reference to Guiwenneth of the Green is brief and confused, yet
contains the clue to the tragedy that I had only just come to recognize.

September 15th, 42. Where is the girl? Years! Two years! Where? Is it
possible for one mythago to have decayed, another to have replaced it? J sees
her. J! She has declined, she is close to death, I know she is close. What can I
do? She is haunted. The girl haunts her. Images? Imagination? J more often
hysterical than not, and when S and C around, she remains coldly silent,
functioning as a mother but no longer as a wife. We have not exchanged . . .
(this latter is crossed out, though not illegibly). J fading. Nothing in me
hurts at the thought of this.

Whatever illness had afflicted my mother, the condition had been exacerbated
by anger, jealousy, and ultimately, perhaps, by grief at the way a younger and
astonishingly beautiful woman had stolen my father's heart. 'It is the nature of
the mythago itself . . .'

Something like panic had affected me, and early the next morning I ran around
the woodland, until I was breathless and saturated with sweat. The day was
bright, not too cold. I had found a pair of heavy walking boots, and carrying my
'sawn off spear, I had patrolled the oakwoods at the double. I called for
Guiwenneth repeatedly.

The question haunted me as I ran, a dark bird darting about my head. Was she
mine? Or was she Christian's? Christian had gone into the woods to find her
again, to find the Guiwenneth of the Green that his
own
mind had
generated as it interacted with oak and ash, hawthorn and scrub, the whole
complex lifeform that was ancient Ryhope. But whose mythago was
my
Guiwenneth?
Was she Christian's? Had he found her, pursued her, and forced her to the
woodland edge, a girl who was afraid of him, contemptuous of him? Was it from
Christian that she hid?

But the doubt nagged at me, and the question of Guiwenneth's 'identity' began
to become an obsession.

I rested by the sticklebrook, a long way from the house, at the place where
Chris and I had waited for the tiny ship to emerge from its forest journey, all
those years before. The field was treacherous with cow-pats, although it was
only sheep who grazed here now, clustered along the overgrown stream bank,
watching me sideways, and with suspicion. The wood was a dark wall stretching
away towards Oak Lodge. On impulse I began to follow the sticklebrook back along
its course, clambering over the fallen trunk of a lightning-struck tree, forcing
my way through the tangle of rose briar, bramble and knee-high nettles. Early
summer growth was well advanced, even though the sheep penetrated as deep as
this to graze the clearings.

I walked for some minutes, against the flow of the water, the light dimming
as the canopy grew denser. The stream widened, the banks became more severe.
Abruptly it turned in its course, flowing from the deeper wood, and as I began
to follow it so I became disorientated; a vast oak barred my way, and the ground
dropped away in a steep, dangerous decline, which I circuited as best I could.
Moss-slick grey rock thrust stubby fingers from the ground; gnarled young
oak-trunks grew through and around those stony barriers. By the time I had found
my way through, I had lost the stream, although its distant sound was haunting.

Within minutes I realized I was seeing through the thinner wood at the edge
to open land beyond. I had come in a circle. Again.

I heard, then, the call of a dove, and turned back into the silent gloom. I
called for Guiwenneth, but was answered only by the sound of a bird, high above,
flapping its wings as if to make mockery of me.

How had my father entered the woodland? How had he managed to penetrate so
deeply? From his journals, from the detail on the map that now hung upon the
study wall, he had managed to walk some considerable distance into Ryhope Wood
before the defences had turned him around. He had known the way, I was sure of
that, but his journal had been so pillaged by the man in his last days -hiding
evidence, hiding guilt, perhaps - that the information was gone.

I knew my father quite well. Oak Lodge was a testament to many things, and to
one thing in particular: his obsessive nature, his need to preserve, to hoard,
to shelve. It was unthinkable, to me, that my father would have destroyed
anything. Hidden, yes, but never obliterated.

I had searched the house, I had been to the manor, and asked there, and
unless my father had broken in one evening to use the vast rooms and silent
corridors to his own ends, then he had hidden no papers at the manor house
either.

. One possibility remained, and I sent a letter of warning to Oxford, hoping
that it would arrive before I did, something that could not be guaranteed. The
following day I packed a small bag, dressed smartly, and made the laborious
journey by bus and train to Oxford.

To the house where my father's colleague and confidant, Edward Wynne-Jones,
had lived.

'I'm Anne Hayden.'

'Steven Huxley. I'm sorry about the short notice ... I hope it's convenient.'

'Perfectly convenient.'

She was in her mid-thirties, soberly dressed in grey skirt and a grey
cardigan over a high-necked white blouse. The house smelted of polish and damp.
All the rooms were bolted on the corridor side: a defence, I imagined, against
intruders coming in through the windows. She was the sort of woman who summons,
unbidden, the epithet 'spinster' in untrained, inexperienced minds, and perhaps
there should have been cats clustered about her feet.

In fact, Anne Hayden was far from living in a style that appearance would
have suggested. She had been married, and her husband had left her during the
war. As she led me into the dark, leathery sitting-room, I saw a man of about my
own age reading a paper. He rose to his feet, shook hands and was introduced as
Jonathan Garland.

'If you want to talk quietly, I'll leave you for a while,' he said, and
without waiting for an answer went away, deeper into the house. Anne made no
more explanation of him than that. He lived there, of course. The bathroom, I
noticed later, had shaving things lining the lower shelf.

All of these details may perhaps seem irrelevant, but I was observing the
woman and her situation closely. She was uncomfortable and solemn, allowing no
friendly contact, no touch of rapport that would have allowed me to begin my
questioning with ease. She made tea, offered me biscuits, and sat totally
silently, for a while, until I explained the reason for my visit.

'I never met your father,' she said quietly, 'although I knew of him. He
visited Oxford several times, but never when I was at home. My father was a
naturalist and spent many weeks away from Oxford. I was very close to him. When
he walked out on us I was very distressed.'

'When
was
that, can you remember?'

She gave me a look part-way between anger and pity. 'I can remember it to the
day. Saturday, April the 13th, 1942. I was living on the top floor. My husband
had already left me. Father had a furious argument with John ... my brother . .
. and then abruptly left. It was the last I saw of him. John went abroad with
the forces and was killed. I remained in the house . . .'

By dint of careful questioning, gentle prompting, I pieced together a story
of double tragedy. When Wynne-Jones, for whatever reason, had walked out on his
family, Anne Hayden's heart had broken for the second time. Distressed, she had
lived as a recluse for the years following, although when the war ended she
began to move in social circles once more.

When the young man who lived with her brought a fresh pot of tea, the contact
between them was warm, briefly expressed and genuine. She had not ceased
feeling, even though the scar of her double tragedy was blatant.

I explained in as much detail as I felt necessary that the two men - our two
fathers - had worked together, and that my father's records were incomplete. Had
she noticed, or discovered, journal extracts, sheets, letters that were not
Wynne-Jones's?

'I have hardly looked at anything, Mr. Huxley,' she said quietly. 'My father's
study is precisely as he left it. If you find that a touch Dickensian, you are
welcome to think so. This is a large house, and the room is not needed. To clean
it, and maintain it, would be unnecessary effort, so it is locked and remains so
until he returns and tidies it up himself.'

'May I see the room?'

'If you wish. It's of no interest to me. And, provided you show me the items,
you may borrow anything you like.'

She led the way up to the first floor, and along a dark corridor whose
flower-patterned wallpaper was peeling badly. Dusty pictures lined the walls,
dim prints by Matisse and Picasso. The carpet was threadbare.

Her father's study was on the end; the room overlooked the city of Oxford.
Through its filthy net curtains I could just make out the spire of St Mary's.
Books lined the walls so heavily that cracks had appeared in the plaster above
the sagging shelves. The desk was covered by a white sheet, as was the rest of
the furniture in the room, but the books themselves laboured below a depth of
dust as thick as a fingernail. Maps, charts and botanical prints were stacked
against one wall. Stacks of journals and bound volumes of letters were thrust to
choking point into a cupboard. Here was the antithesis of my father's
meticulously laid out studio, a cluttered, confused den of labour and intellect,
which confounded me as I stared at it, wondering where to begin my search.

Anne Hayden watched me for a few minutes, her eyes narrow and tired behind
the horn-rimmed spectacles she wore. I'll leave you for a while,' she said then,
and I heard her make her way downstairs.