Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
A noise woke Lawrence with a start. It was either the distant
gunning of a car engine or a barking dog, he was too
disorientated to tell which. Grimacing, he sat up and rubbed
his neck. He was only thirty-two but, after a night curled on
the hard seat of his pick-up truck with only a skimpy rug for
cover, he felt twice that. The sun was barely up. Shivering,
he slipped out of the cab and walked among the trees
for a piss.
The official, tourist board view of the ancient cathedral city
of Barrowcester (pronounced Brewster) was of a perfect
medieval hill town rising in glorious isolation from wheaty
plains and braceleted by the River Bross. From the best
angle -- and one only ever saw the best angle reproduced -- it
resembled an image of the New Jerusalem in an illuminated
manuscript. In fact it was only one of a chain of interlinking
hills, all of them lapped by the river, none so crowded as their
famous sister but all of them inhabited. Aerial photographs
and topographical maps showed the proud city as the head
of a small serpent or cornering sperm. With a few exceptions,
postal addresses grew less distinguished, property values less
impressive, as one passed away from the principal hill. The
final, least regarded hillock, the tail of the sperm, was mainly
given over to Wumpett Woods, named, it was thought, after
a corruption of worm-pit because the trees had sprung up on
the site of an ancient plague grave and unconsecrated resting
place for the city's outcasts.
It was here that Lawrence had begun his love affair with
trees. His boyhood home was two miles into the valley, on a
village's edge, and he would regularly ride over to Wumpett
on his bicycle, ostensibly to play with friends but actually
to be alone. Perverse by nature, he liked to climb a tree
which afforded a fine view away from the cathedral and
its precincts. For him it was the carpet of wheat, winding
river and vanishing motorway that suggested a future of
possibilities, not the spiritual and commercial symbols of
the city. A creature of habit, he always climbed the same
tree and came to rest at the same point, where a forking
branch provided a broad support on which he could relax
without flinching at every gust of wind.
There was no great revelation. He was simply sitting up
there one afternoon in spring, aged eight, when he noticed
unclasping sticky buds a few inches from his nose. When
he had done with examining them, he looked about him
and saw, as for the first time, how the skeletal shapes
rearing about him, barely touched with the year's first
green, echoed the veiny patterns of the leaves they would
soon unfurl. He became aware of the immense strangeness
of organisms he had so far taken for granted; their height,
their combination of hard and soft, new-born growth and
ancient timber. He was not bookish, but this one afternoon
fired his hunger for knowledge. With his next pocket money
he bought the Observer Book of Trees and, in the spring
and summer that followed, set about learning the names
and natures of every tree that sprouted in Wumpett Woods
or lay on the lane between them and his mother's house.
He learned and delighted in their peculiarities, inevitably
endowing them with human characteristics. The oak was
sturdy, the cypress sad, the poplar pliant, the beech smooth
and fresh. Yews in the graveyard were dark and secretive,
harbourers of spells, absorbers of corpse juice. Planes in
the cathedral close were urbane and -- when he looked
more closely -- florid, with their pompoms of seeds and
particoloured peeling bark. Horse-chestnuts were at once
benign and exotic; the virtuosic variety of their display,
from palmate leaves and creamy candelabra of blossom
to the spike-shelled testicles of their autumn fruit, left him
amazed they were not more celebrated. In time his studies
took him further afield and taught him the precisions of
scientific cataloguing, but Wumpett remained his primer
and first catalogue of an abiding fascination.
The first walkers and joggers of the morning had arrived.
As Lawrence climbed back into the cab, a dog was barking
urgently. Yawning, a cavern in his belly where he had failed
to eat the night before, he drove back along the road that
formed the spine of the hills, then swung off onto the drive to
his farmhouse. As always, the pleasure the building gave him
on first sight was immediately undercut by its reminders of
money he needed to spend. The paintwork on the windows
was flaking. A piece of guttering over the bathroom window
was coming adrift. He would soon have to get the entire
north wall repointed. The Boston ivy was invading the roof
and doubtless already loosening tiles.
He let himself in through the kitchen door and went
directly to fill the kettle. Filling the kettle, like peering inside
the fridge, checking the mail or taking a leak, was a settling,
regular thing to do on returning to a house. He had only been
away overnight but he felt such uncertainty in the familiar
environment that he might have been gone far longer and
become a stranger to the place. Its stillness seemed to challenge
his right to be there. He froze, a hand on the cold tap.
There was a splash of blood, long since dried, in the sink
and another, larger one on the floor below. Her head had
struck the enamel rim when she fell and she had slid with a
gasp to the floor and bled on the tiles down there. Shocked,
he set down the kettle, snatched up a wet cloth and scrubbed.
The tile stain came off easily -- the tiles were relatively new
and she kept them waxed. The sink was harder to clean.
It was an old Belfast one, its creamy surface patterned with
cracks and prone to staining by coffee-grounds or fruit juice.
The surface coating of blood softened quickly and broke off
swiftly as a ripened scab. Beneath it, however, blood had
penetrated the cracks so that the sink appeared to have
acquired veins.
He opened a cupboard, battling as usual with its toddler-proof
catch, and found a bottle of thickened bleach. He poured
a searing puddle of the stuff over the stain and ground it in
with the vegetable brush. There was a cut on one of his fingers,
where his knuckles had struck a metal button on her jacket.
The bleach entered it and burned atrociously. A slender hank
of her hair had snagged in the gap between sink and wooden
draining-board. He teased it free and held it up in bleachy
fingers. Where it had been pulled from her scalp there was a
minute piece of bloodstained skin. He posted the hair into the
overflow vent at the sink's side and washed his hands, leaving
the bleach to soak into the porcelain.
He filled the kettle, as planned, slotted some bread into
the toaster and began to lay a small tray for breakfast; a
plate for toast, the big French cup she liked for her coffee.
He used a small, sharp knife to peel her an orange the way
she had taught him, slicing a disc through to the pith at each
end then severing the remaining peel at four equal intervals,
taking care not to puncture the flesh beneath, so that the
four pieces could be torn off easily with his thumb.
It was seven-thirty. She was asleep still and there were
no sounds of life from Lucy either. He would take Bonnie
the tray, setting it on her bedside table, then retreat in
humility to the armchair in the furthest corner to wait for
the scents of breakfast to wake her. He would probably cry
at the sight of her bruised body and the insufficiency of his
apology. He could not remember when he had last wept
for simple sorrow. He had shed no tears at an old school
friend's death. This had maddened her, he recalled, and she
had raged against his bottled-up emotions and his inability
to express them.
He had parked his truck at the side of the house and had
assumed her car was safely stowed in the barn beyond, but
now he glanced from the window, alerted by a sudden
cackle from the hutch where Lucy's bantams were stowed
overnight. The barn door yawned wide and he could see that
its gloomy interior was empty.
`Bonnie?' he called. `Lucy?' and, still mopping his hands,
he ran from the kitchen and into the hall. Lucy had a coat she
wore incessantly at the moment, a thickly quilted thing with
a curious, poppered pocket on its back where he jokingly hid
a chocolate bar when they took walks together, making her
laugh in her squirming effort to retrieve the treasure with the
coat still on her. The coat was gone, as were the matching
yellow boots and Bonnie's waxed jacket. He ran up the
stairs now, calling their names again. At first he might
have assumed they had merely got up early and gone out
somewhere. There were clothes. There were possessions.
Lucy's bed had been slept in, of course. He had tucked
her in himself the previous night. The bed he shared with
Bonnie, however, had not been slept in.
He saw then that certain crucial items had gone. Lucy's
favourite bear. Bonnie's aviator jacket. Bonnie's jewellery
box. Lucy's anti-asthma inhaler and the carton of drugs
that went with it. He tugged open their bedroom wardrobe.
Two suitcases had gone, one large, one small. And now
that he looked again, he saw that there was a rectangular
indentation on the bedspread, where she must have rested
the larger case to pack it. Not all the clothes had gone,
certainly, but she had taken anything of value or that she
wore regularly. She had spread out what was left along the
wardrobe rail, in an effort to cover her traces.
`Why?' he wondered. `Why feel guilty?'
She had every reason to leave. Right was on her side.
Then he realized that it was fear, not guilt, that made her
take steps to delay his discovery of the truth.
He sat down, in shock, then stood up and checked the
sock drawer where she liked to hide a small stash of cash
for emergencies. It was gone. As was her passport and their
only painting of any worth -- a small John Minton portrait
of a young man with bare feet, bought with her down
payment from McBugger. Lawrence laid a hand in disbelief
on the small rectangle where the painting had prevented the
yellow emulsion from fading in the scorching summer's light.
Drawn inexorably back to the bedroom, the focus of loss,
he tugged off his boots, crawled beneath the covers and
lay there, breathing fast. After spending the night failing to
sleep in the truck's harshly masculine cab, his body ached
all over as though it were he, not Bonnie, who had suffered
a beating.
The telephone woke him three hours later. He lay,
immobilized by apprehension, watching it ring and then
straining his ears to catch any message the caller might
leave on the answering machine downstairs. It was John
calling from the workshop to ask where the hell he was, his
voice poised between peevishness and concern. There were a
couple of estimates to make. One was for a felling job at the
Deanery garden in Barrowcester, where a cedar planted too
close to the house had cast all the garden rooms into sinister
shade. Also a young widow towards Arkfield was keen to
restore a nut walk now that her late husband's money was
out of probate. John would go in his stead but did so with a
bad grace as he had set aside the morning for updating their
books and filing their VAT return. Lawrence rolled over to
stare at the other wall. He was not especially fond of John
and had long suspected that John did not entirely like him.
This had never been a problem. On the contrary, it meant
that they never socialized and so had the perfect business
relationship.
The telephone rang again twice. Neither caller left a message
and finally Lawrence slept. He dreamed he was being
hunted through a moonlit wood by his father-in-law, who
had two Dobermans and a rifle. He awoke to several more
telephone calls. His mother rang, `just for a chat darling,'
John called again, angry now, and his father-in-law asked
about their plans for Christmas, staking an early claim on
his daughter's calendar.
From the rumbling in his stomach, Lawrence judged it
to be mid-afternoon when a car drew up in the yard and
someone gave the doorbell three long, insistent blasts. Then
there were footsteps around the side of the house and back
again, the sound of the letterbox clunking open and John's
voice calling through it. Lawrence remained in silent hiding
until John grew embarrassed at shouting into an apparently
empty house and drove away.
As it grew dark, hunger pulled Lawrence back to the
kitchen. He found bread and crushed some overripe
Camembert between two slices. Eating proved a comfort -- despite
the unpleasant similarity between the lingering smell
of bleach and the ammoniac tang of the cheese rind -- and
he felt able to drink a bottle of claret, which went
down more easily than the cheese had done.
Fumbling in the gloom, he found the keys to the pick-up
and decided to drive to the workshop to apologize to
John for his absenteeism. Having omitted to turn on the
lights, he backed into the flank of one of the outbuildings
with a dull thud, followed by a wrenching tinkle
as he cursed and pulled away. Jumping out to inspect
the damage, he dropped the keys and was unable to find
them in the dark. Groping in the wet gravel, he jarred a
shoulder blade painfully on the corner of the open door.
This sobered him up sufficiently to realize he was too
drunk to drive, so he abandoned the hunt for the keys
and returned to the house, where he opened a second bottle
because the first had been such a comfort. Melancholy
followed hard on the warmth this generated, however, and
anxiety came close behind. Half-way through the second
glass and the remains of the Camembert, eaten without
bread, he telephoned his father-in-law, something he never
did when sober.
`Charlie, it's Lawrence. How are you?'
`Lawrence? I'm fine. Are you okay? You sound a bit ...'
`I'm fine. Fine.' Lawrence slurred the words in his effort
not to. `Charlie, I know this sounds stupid but is ... Are
Bonnie and Lucy with you?'
`No. I was just going to ask how they are. I rang earlier.
Bonnie hasn't called me in weeks.'
`Oh. Well. I just wondered ... Thanks, Charlie.'
`Lawrence? What's up?' Charlie's tone hardened.
`Nothing. We ... We had a bit of a fight, that's all. I ...
I hurt her.'
Lawrence hung up rapidly, fumbling with the receiver
and feeling slightly sick. Seconds later the telephone rang.
He picked it up, heard Charlie shouting and hung up. It
rang again. This time he let the answering machine take
the call. Charlie ranted about what he would like to do
to the man cowardly enough to hit his daughter, which
portions of his anatomy he would like to sever, how he
would then force-feed them to said coward before kicking
his face to a pulp and breaking both his arms. He sounded
unhinged. Channelled through the machine's tiny speaker in
the darkened hall, his fury had nothing to feed off, however,
and soon began to subside.
`Lawrence?' he called out. `Lawrence, pick up the telephone.'
Lawrence obeyed.
`She's left me,' he said immediately. `She took Lucy. I
don't know where she's gone. I thought she might have
come to you.'
`You're drunk.'
`Of course I'm drunk.'
`You're pathetic.'
`I know.'
`How could you, man?'
`I ... I don't think that's why she left. She must have
planned it. She went so fast. I spent the night out in the
truck on Wumpett. I came back early this morning and
they'd gone.'
`So why hasn't she rung me?'
`Well I dunno. Maybe she --'
`If Bonnie was in trouble, the first thing she'd do would
be to ring me.'
`She's probably --'
Lawrence hung up as his father-in-law started to rant
again. He lurched into the hall and tugged the answering
machine cable from its socket. After a few seconds, the
telephone by the bed began to ring. It rang so incessantly
that Lawrence had to take refuge outside in the cab of the
pick-up. He turned on the radio, curled himself in the rug
and slowly passed out while a hushed stream of tearful
ballads and dedications for the late-night lovelorn drained
the truck's battery.
