much to take.
“Gavin – I have such a headache. I think I’ll go back to the hotel.”
“Playing up a bit, aren’t we? Not giving into hormones, are we?”
“I can’t speak for you.”
He stiffened. “I’ll walk you back if you must go.”
“It’s only across the street. You stay here and . . . sing. I’ll be fine.”
She saw his hesitation, but he was reluctant to give up his place as centre of attention, as relative of the resurrected hero.
She wriggled through the assembled singers and was out the door before he could follow.
Inverash became a place of unease. She took to keeping her curtains drawn and her window closed at night. It was small comfort because then she had to suffer the knowledge that the night air, thick and viscous, was pressing up against the window pane, feeling for a crack to slide through, oozing around the house, searching for a way in, wrapping it in cool heavy darkness, flooding it with a longing for . . . she didn’t know what. She didn’t want to know.
Rowan scoffed, saying that if Patrick came he would enter through the door like anyone else. It wasn’t a helpful reply. Kate found herself awake half the night, listening for a footstep on the gravel path outside, for the click of the old-fashioned latch. In the evenings, she found excuses to avoid the reading of the letters because the air outside was always thicker when they read of his adventures in Flanders, as if the telling drew him closer. She knew he was listening, reliving those days, watching her. It was intolerable.
Rowan was hurt by her early nights and the books she had to read for school, but it couldn’t be helped. Patrick wasn’t pleased either. Night after night she lay in bed, knowing he was out there. She heard the muffled laughter, the excited whisperings like the buzzing of insects, and then the heavy silence when Charlie and Alexander wandered off down the path and left Patrick alone. She never heard him or saw him but knew he was there, waiting. He was the gently insistent tap of the tree branch on the window, not blown by a stray breeze, but regular and rhythmic, guided by someone; he was thick like warm summer air, dense as cat’s fur rubbing at her wall, at her window, insistent, gentle, coaxing. He invaded her dreams in the form of a shadowy figure which ran silently into a brown mist and disappeared, and no matter how she peered, she could not see where he had gone. Once she woke to find herself at the window, hand clutching the curtain, ready to draw it back; another time she was in the hall at the front door. Both times she had a struggle to turn away: her hand would not let go of the curtain or the bolt; her feet would not take her away. Instead she listened and dreaded and sensed a smile in the darkness and, without her volition, her hand would reach forward to open, to let in a brownish mist or a lost soldier.
“What do you want?” she whispered each time, wrenching her hand away and holding it tightly behind her back.
No answer but the sigh of the waters of the loch and the whisper of leaves in the night breeze and a silence that listened hard. There was no one there and she did not know what that no one wanted.
Her last summer visit to Inverash was the time she sleepwalked to the parlour and woke up directly in front of the fireplace. He was smiling from the photograph frame, amused. She tried to turn away but was pinned to the floor where she stood while the colour crept into his face and made him seem alive. His head was tilted enquiringly at her. Rowan never believed that she had seen colour seep into the photo, but she had. He was warming up, gathering strength.
The following summer Kate said she was too busy to visit Rowan. And the next and the next. And soon Inverash and its unsettling experiences became part of childhood lore, a dream half forgotten, a nightmare half remembered.
The hotel was fifty yards down the street from Cafe Franz on the opposite side. Kate headed into the misty night, fishing her room key from her pocket as she went. She was thinking of Rowan and the old woman’s hurt at her defection, all the phone calls asking when she would come again, her own guilty irritation at having to fend off the gentle urgings to visit, year after year.
Then came the call she could not ignore. Rowan babbled and wept and made no sense at first. She’d had a visit from a man from the War Graves Commission. Patrick had been found. In a garden in Ieper. He was only bones, but his had been the easiest identification they’d ever had: his St Christopher medal had his name scratched on the back; there was a rotted leather pouch with his initials in brass on it, and inside that an oil-cloth parcel of letters safely wrapped, letters to him from Mother and Father, the address at Inverash still clear in Mother’s loopy handwriting. Oh, such a pang she’d felt to see Mother’s handwriting again! It had made her cry. Patrick was to be reburied on the day after Armistice Day, in a place called Ramparts Cemetery. She could not go herself at her age, but someone from the family should be there and that person should be Kate who was somehow closer to Patrick than anyone else. She would go, wouldn’t she?
Closer to Patrick than anyone else? Her heart thudded against her ribs when she heard that, but there had been nothing to do but agree. An hour after the phone call, Rowan called again.
“I forgot to say. The strangest thing. He came to the surface on the anniversary of his disappearance. The seventh of September. He’s come back out of that brown fog. I can hardly bear it – oh, where has he been?”
Gavin had laughed at that. “He was under the earth and had a modern development built over him, and he was lucky not to wind up under the patio or he’d never have surfaced.”
7 September. Two months ago. It was around then that Kate had conceived if the dates were right. Suddenly two members of the family had turned up unexpectedly, wanting to make her acquaintance, and neither of them welcome.
Why did that letter terrify her so? Kate quickened her pace. Perhaps everything would settle once he was properly buried. She went to cross the road and, with a spurt of dismay, realized that she had been so deep in her thoughts that she had overshot the hotel. She glanced back the way she had come. The mist, silvery under streetlamps and a moon thin as a sixpence, was rising, but she could see that she wasn’t even in the right street. She must have turned a corner or gone up a side alley. She stood for a moment, trying to get her bearings. The sky was bitter black and the small moon icily hard. Houses lined the street, their shuttered windows blind and unfriendly. She had no idea where she was. It was not possible to get lost on a fifty yard stretch of road, but lost she was. The sensible thing would be to walk back the way she had come, and yet going back felt wrong somehow. She hesitated. Ahead of her, the mist was sparse and ragged so that she could see patches of building and wall; behind, it was thickening to fog, dense and heavy, dimming the beams from the streetlights to a fuzzy glow. Her insides twisted. The fog was rolling towards her, closing in. It was impossible to stand where she was or go back. She plunged ahead, into the wraiths and wreaths of mist, with a rolling fog at her heels.
Somewhere close by, she could hear a piano playing and singing: “Lili Marlene”.
The re-enactors in full cry. So she wasn’t so very lost after all. The trouble was that, as she sped along, the music came from behind her, and then from her left, and then it was ahead and she thought she was running towards it. And she was running, skimming along past darkened houses, her feet knowing where to go and herself with no idea where she was. Then the singing faded and she was alone in the foggy dark. With a huge effort, she stopped dead in her tracks. A gate beside her, a neat little wrought-iron gate. And overhanging it, a rowan tree, its clumps of berries still scarlet, brushing cool and hard against her face as she put her hand on the gate. Of course she knew where she was now. Mr Westermann’s house. This was the garden where Patrick had been found, where he’d wrenched himself muddy from the clay earth and summoned help with a crooked finger.
She tried to back away but her hand was glued to the gate. Close behind, she heard whispering, an excited buzz, a silvery giggle. She drew closer to the gate to get away from the sound. Her eyes fell on the new flagstones.
