‘Listen – you’ve got a concussion, your eyes aren’t even. Sit down.’
He did as he was told. I perched on some of the ruined brickwork too. Gulliver put her nose on his knee. He didn’t usually like her, but he stroked her ears. I rubbed some ash off his jacket. He smacked my hand.
‘Don’t,’ he said. He sounded more tired of me than he ever had. ‘How did this happen?’
‘There was some glass on the ground. The crows took it, the sun was out . . .’
He seemed not to hear. ‘What are we going to do about a hole in the wall?’
‘Some of the bricks will be all right. We can board it up for now,’ I said, knowing it wouldn’t just be for now.
The rain turned harder and the fires in the main tree went out. The gardeners were in the hall with buckets. All that was left of the rotten branch were chunks of charcoal. I helped Charles around to the back of the house and the kitchen door, ashamed, because two years ago I could have carried him. I got him to sit down at the big table, where there was some abandoned dough because Sarah must have gone outside to see what was going on. I poured him some rum, some of the strong fantastic Jamaica kind. I bought it from smugglers in town. I could probably have bought it legally, but edging into the back of the Creely brothers’ bakery was a tradition I was trying to keep alive from when Dad had taken me when I was tiny, and in any case, I liked the idea of bakers smuggling in rum from Calais.
He told me to stop fussing before long, but I left Gulliver with him. I went out into the rain to see if the gardeners were all right and rounded them up to count heads. They were all there, though some of the younger ones were shaken. Aware that Charles wouldn’t like it but deciding that now was a nice moment not to care, I herded them all round to the kitchen to share the tea. In fact, Charles seemed relieved to see other people. The gardeners, big men for the most part, were just as relieved to have somebody fragile to be kind to and within a minute or so they were all talking as if they had always belonged together. Gulliver wagged her tail, pleased.
Sisyphus came to stand with me by the stove, where I had the small of my back propped against the hot part just above the oven. I didn’t remember jolting anything, but something right under my spine hurt and the heat helped. He smelled of sweat and grass. I breathed in slowly, because I missed it, being fit enough and quick enough to sweat over real work.
‘Where did you say that tree was from?’ he said.
‘Peru.’
‘They must have problems out there.’
I smirked into my cup.
He was quiet for a while. Then, ‘Right. I’ll get them to have a look through the woods. Give them something to do, find your mystery man.’
I nodded and waited with Charles and Gulliver. It was nasty of me, but I liked Charles a lot better when he was upset than at equilibrium and we laughed together for the first time in years. But when the gardeners came back, they hadn’t found anything. The greenhouse was empty and so were the woods, which were too overgrown to walk through without a struggle. Even the old charcoal pits were impenetrable. There was no one there and in the end I doubted what I’d seen. It must have been my own footprint in the greenhouse, but hazed and distorted as the water dried.
I felt uneasy when I went back out the next day, but the greenhouse was the only warm place I could go. By the time I came to open the glass door, I was convinced that I must have been telling myself stories. But someone had put the map of Peru back on its hook. I eased aside the ferns and looked under the couch. There was no one, but the statue had moved again. It was back by the grave, but not like it had been before the storm. It was facing me this time. No one would admit to having moved it.
THREE
When Charles tapped on the greenhouse door a few days later I got up too fast, worried, and swayed when my weight went too far on to my bad leg. I’d never known him venture so far from the house. Thinking that it must be an emergency, I pulled the door open for him and moved one of the wooden benches closer to the tiny ceramic stove I was burning twigs in. It gave off just enough heat to keep tropical things alive. He propped his canes against the pottery and sat down on the spare stool, then caught the edge of the workbench when it wobbled. He looked at his hand and brushed the earth off against his trouser leg.
‘Good news,’ he said, and it really must have been good, because he looked cheerful. ‘I’ve a friend near Truro with a parsonage that’s about to be empty. The parson is going to Bristol, apparently. He asked if you’d like to take it. The telegram just came.’
I didn’t know what to say at first. I hadn’t known he had been asking for me, or that he had wanted me out of the house so much. It was like being hit by a cricket ball, nowhere near a cricket pitch or players. I had to sit holding it before I could understand properly. Eventually I said, ‘I can’t be a parson. I thought Deuteronomy was the academic study of Germany till I was eighteen.’
‘It’s only Truro, we’re not talking about Canterbury. There’s a little cottage near the church. Own garden,’ he added, nodding at the seed trays and the grafted saplings. He smiled, properly. He often smiled – he was a beautifully mannered man – but not in private and it made me feel like he hadn’t quite recognised me. ‘I said you’d be delighted, of course. Decent salary, and you can start next month.’
‘I don’t want to be a parson – where did this come from?’
His grey eyes turned hard. ‘One of the gardeners has raised some concerns. I’ve told them all to keep an eye on you. He said that you thought the statue had moved.’
‘It has. Someone moved it.’
‘No one’s moved it, Merrick. The thing must weigh a ton and a half at the inside.’
‘I know that, but—’
‘You’re getting towards the age that Mama was,’ he interrupted. ‘And I’m sure she began by thinking her mind was hiccuping.’
‘Well, if I’m going to go mad I’m sure I’ll find something to fixate on, whether it’s a statue or a tree near a parsonage or whatever. Why not sign me up to the asylum now?’
‘I can’t afford to. You know how much it costs to keep Mama at Brislington? They have silver pheasants wandering the courtyards, for Christ’s sake.’
‘I was joking,’ I said flatly.
‘I know you were. It was in such poor taste that I decided to ignore it,’ he said. He looked out at the grave and the statue. ‘It isn’t good for you to be here, in any case. Perhaps you might fixate on something else, but that wretched thing means something to you and perhaps whatever that is will fade if you don’t see it every morning. There is such a thing as out of sight, out of mind.’
‘If you’d let me oversee the gardens it would bring in a lot more than a parsonage and I wouldn’t be sitting here all day,’ I said, though I knew it was dangerous.