Sandlands (7 page)

Her mother had had one not unlike it only smaller, which she used to keep her buttons in. Mum's would have been from the 1930s but the design, she supposed, had remained the same for decades. How long had the tin lain here? Seventy, eighty, ninety years? Since before the war, she'd guess, at very least.

She cleared away the dirt from around the edges of the tin, exposing the catch on one side and the hinges at the other, all of them browned and scaled with rust. It would no doubt be easier to open if she lifted it free of its resting place, but she found she was loth to do so; she felt the unswerving scrutiny of the barn owl from above her and was deterred. Instead, with the box
in situ
, she leaned forward and felt for the catch, working her fingernails underneath, prising and tugging until with a snap the corroded metal released its grip. She lifted the lid.

Inside was a small, flat, oblong bundle some four inches by three, wrapped in a kind of thinnish, greying cotton cloth and tied crossways with string like a brown paper parcel. The knot was not tight but it was old, and took some time to loosen and undo, before she was able to pull back the folded material – which appeared to be an old-fashioned gentleman's handkerchief – and see, inside, a sheet of paper, closely folded. Buried treasure, indeed – she felt like Howard Carter. Or perhaps this was the treasure map. Take ten paces west and five paces north. Three hundred silver pieces; dead men tell no tales. But light as she might try to make of it, Rebecca found her hand was shaking as she reached for the folded paper.

It was a letter. There was no salutation, but a letter was clearly what it was, penned in fading blue-black ink and the looped copperplate handwriting that the older mistresses still hoped to instil when Rebecca was at school, a rounded hand, too, painstaking and uneven, suggesting youth and hesitancy. A girl, she thought, or if a young woman then of only scant education. The paper was cheap and flimsy, worn tissue-thin along the folds so that she feared it might fall to pieces in her hands.

Oh, but Tuesday seems
a thousand years away
, the letter began, so that Rebecca half wondered if this was not the start, and there was a missing sheet.
A thousand years – how ever I
shall I bear it? Of course you must go to
Ipswich to see about the stock like you said, and
tomorrow's being washday I'll be at the tubs,
and Mrs Jillings chivvying from dawn till night, no chance
to slip away. But two whole days and not to
see your face – I swear I'll die! Yesterday in
the woods was perfect heaven. There's some might think
it wickedness to say so, but 'tis simple truth, and
the Reverend says it be no sin if we speak
the truth. For heaven it surely was, with your sweet
kisses and the way you pulled my arm through yours
as we walked along the path, and the posy you
picked and set in my corsage so bright and brave,
like as I were some fine young lady in her
carriage. My love, I live for Tuesday when you'll
come again – at the time that we said, and at
our own special place, and I'll wear the blue
ribbon again that you kissed when you pulled it from
my hair, and you said was like to cornflowers in
the barley. Golden brown as the ripe barley, that's
what you said to me as you looped a lock
about your finger, like in a poem – like words from
a proper book of poetry. No one's ever likened
my hair to anything before, saving for the belly of
a weasel, which the butcher's boy used to say
to bait me. But oh, two days, two whole days
apart! I think of you all night and day. Your
own loving Annie xxx

Under the first letter was another folded sheet and beneath that another and another, a bundle of maybe ten or twelve in all. She could take them home and read them – could take the tin – but it felt wrong, somehow, like theft, or sacrilege. He had chosen to hide them here, the unnamed man or boy. Was this in fact their ‘own special place'? And he'd put them here for another reason, an irrational conviction told her; he'd placed them under the patient surveillance of the owl.

Not this owl, her own owl, obviously, but a perhaps long-dead forebear. How long did barn owls live? An oak, of course, might live for a thousand years – but how long could it survive once split to the core? Life expectancies, however, as she well knew, were fragile and contingent things.

She laid the letter back with the others and refolded it in the handkerchief, closed the lid of the Oxo tin, then raked back the leaves and bones and soil. It could stay there for tomorrow, beneath the careful eye of the watcher of souls.

 

My love
, began the second letter,
I was in heaven
again today at seeing you, though it be for only
one short hour. I took a scolding from Mrs Jillings
for being so late returned with the duck eggs from
Bradcock's, but I showed her the tear in the
bicycle tyre just as you told me, and she said
no more, only pressed her mouth together all tight and
sour, and I dare say she'll have it from
my eleven and six come Friday. Oh, but an hour
was far too short, just sixty little minutes, so few
you could near as count them going by! And then
I had to go, and you as well, and we
won't be together again till Tuesday, but I'll
see the back of your head in church on Sunday
, your dear head with your clean collar and your own
soft, sweet hair that smells like a kitten's fur
. I blush to write these words but I wish we
could be together – be truly together, I mean to say
, like a man is with his wife. Her ladyship has
sixteen for dinner on Saturday and Mrs Jillings has had
me polish the silver till my fingers ache and I
've a blister on my thumb the size of a
ha'penny. You'll think it foolishness I dare say
, but it wasn't my own face that looked back
at me from the spoons and candlesticks but yours, your
sweet own face. I kiss all ten of your fingertips
, my love, and wish the minutes gone till Tuesday comes
. Your ever-loving girl, Annie xx

 

There was nobody at home in any case to show the tin to now even if she had a will to take it – not for five years, since Bob died. That was what she missed the most, still missed at times with an unexpected, almost visceral intensity which was just as sharp as the very first day: she missed having someone to tell the little things, to share the small excitements, the small frustrations. Yes, she could tell Janet about the letters, could even take one and read it to her when she rang on Sunday – she was a good girl and never missed – but it wasn't the same thing. Jan visited, too, whenever she could but London was a long way and she was very busy with her job, and Ellie and Josh had their friends and their exams. Besides, she shouldn't grumble because it wasn't just her and it wasn't just Janet. Everyone's families moved away. There wasn't a lot for them here in the village – and certainly nothing for a corporate credit analyst. Rebecca slid the second letter back in the pile and shut the tin. Then she stepped back and looked up to where the barn owl squatted, its round eyes fixed upon her, unmoving and unmoved.

 

In some cultures, Rebecca learned, the barn owl is an ill-starred omen. Creature of the night, it is a malevolent force, a feared spectre, the harbinger of doom. For the superstitious minds of ancient Rome, to dream of an owl meant shipwreck; the cry of an owl foretold an imminent death.
Yesterday, the bird of
night did sit even at noonday, upon the market place
, hooting and shrieking.
Witches, it was said, could take the shape of an owl and suck the blood of the newborn. In Arabia, the stories told how owls were evil spirits and would carry off children during the night. To the Japanese, the barn owl is demonic, an unclean soul, believed to bring disease and pestilence, causing children to sicken and crops to fail, while in old Russian folklore the owl's twilight call speaks out the names of the soon-to-die.

 

Why did you not come today?
I waited and waited in our special place, at eight
just as you said, and watched and watched but you
never came. I know it was eight – I'm sure
I heard the church clock chime – or if it was
after it was not long past, as fast as I
could get away without Mrs Jillings thinking aught amiss. She'
s such a body for her snooping and prying, I
swear she's like a prison turnkey, even in the
evening when my time's my own, and I've
cleared the grates in the morning room and back parlour
and banked up her ladyship's bedroom fire, and she
had no business to be minding where I went, the
mean old shrew. And I ran all the way once
I came to the woods and there was nobody to
see, and I wouldn't for the world have kept
you waiting, and when you weren't there I swear
I felt quite cold all over, quite desolate like you
said to me you feel when we're apart. But
oh, my love, it was torture to wait and wait
and you not come, and at last to have to
go back home not seeing you. At first I thought
of dreadful things, how you might have met some accident
upon the road or on the farm, some bull run
wild or the crush of a cart's wheels. But
then I thought a thing more dreadful still, that you
are turned cold and did not wish to come – that
you love me no longer. And I could bear anything
but that – could bear death or influenza or the scarlet
fever, or fifty of Mrs Jillings' scoldings, or even to
be apart from you, for ten or twelve or a
hundred days, if only I can be sure that you
still care for me. Your constant loving Annie xxx

 

‘Mum?'

Rebecca thoughts were adrift as she picked up the phone, and it took her several seconds to register her daughter's voice.

‘Mum. Are you OK?

‘Oh, hello, Janet.'

‘Only you didn't answer when I called on Sunday. Where were you? Were you out? I was worried about you.'

‘I was here. Maybe I didn't hear it ring.'

There was a pause on the line. The cottage was two-up, two-down; the telephone stood on the kitchen windowsill, two feet from the sitting room door.

‘Are you sure you're OK?'

‘I've just been busy. A bit distracted, that's all. Thinking, you know.'

Another pause. ‘It's not... Mum, you haven't got symptoms back again? Have you been to the doctor? Had a check?'

‘No, no – nothing like that. Honestly, Jan, don't worry. It's really nothing. I'm fine.'

 

You came
! My love, you came, and I was so happy I
could have danced, or laughed out loud or cried, or
all those things together. But the time for our meeting
is always so short, so dreadfully short, that for all
I try not to think of it, I am watching
and fearing for its ending even as soon as it
's begun. It was sweet heaven when you held me
in your arms tonight, and pressed me against you, and
under you, on the grass beneath the trees. If I
close my eyes I can still feel the weight of
your body and smell the smell of you and taste
your skin, the warm salty taste of it like sweet
gammon ham, and remember the touch of your lips at
my throat. Does it shock you when I write these
things, that I'd never be so bold to speak
aloud? I swear I even shock myself, and tremble to
think of the Reverend's Sunday sermons, though it felt
no sin to be lying there with you, it felt
only sweet and right and true. It is meant to
be, my love, with all my heart I'm sure
. And I can bear with comfort now the full five
days and five long nights till we can be together
again, though it draggle and straggle like half a lifetime
– I can bear it with good cheer because I know
you care for me. Your own, for always, Annie xxxx

 

Many legends portrayed the barn owl as entirely benign, in spite of its nocturnal aspect. Endowed in popular belief with the gifts of foresight and sagacity, the owl was the favourite and familiar of Athene, Greek goddess of wisdom. The bird's reputed magical inner light, which enabled it to hunt by night, gave it great vision and prescience, the power to ward off evil. The owl protector accompanied Greek armies to their wars; the sight of an owl on the eve of battle presaged victory. The Dakota Hidatsa people, too, saw the owl as a protective spirit for their warriors. For the Hopis tribe barn owls were the guardians of all hidden and underground things, the tenders of seed germination. More domestically and closer to home, in Yorkshire the barn owl is still a friend to shepherds and farmers, warning them of coming storms. Zuni women in New Mexico place an owl feather in their baby's cradle to help it sleep; the watcher in darkness will keep the infant safe while the mother takes her rest.