Double Vision

HAMISH HAMILTON

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

for David

No se puede mirar. One cannot look at this.
Yo lo vi. I saw it. Esto es lo verdadero. This is the truth.

– Francisco Goya

One

Christmas was over. Feeling a slightly shamefaced pleasure in the restoration of normality, Kate stripped the tree of lights and decorations, cut off the main branches and dragged the trunk down to the compost heap at the bottom of the garden. There she stood looking back at the house, empty again now – her mother and sister had left the morning after Boxing Day – seeing the lighted windows and reflected firelight almost as if she were a stranger, shut out. A few specks of cold rain found her eyelids and mouth. All around her the forest waited, humped in silence. Shivering, she ran back up the lawn.

Gradually she re-established her routine. Up early, across to the studio by eight, five hours’ unbroken work that generally left her knackered for the rest of the day, though she forced herself to walk for an hour or two in the afternoons.

The weather turned colder, until one day, returning from her walk, she noticed that the big puddle immediately outside her front gate was filmed with ice, like a cataract dulling the pupil of an eye. She heated a bowl of soup, built up the fire and huddled over it, while outside the temperature dropped, steadily, hour by hour, until a solitary brown oak leaf detaching itself from the tree fell on to the frost-hard ground with a crackle that echoed through the whole forest.

People had glutted themselves on food and sociability over Christmas and New Year and wanted their own firesides, so the first few evenings of January were spent alone. But then Lorna and Michael Bradley asked her to their anniversary party and, though she was enjoying the almost monastic rhythm of her present life, she accepted. Since Ben’s death that had been her only rule: to refuse no invitation, to acknowledge and return any small act of kindness – and it was working, she was getting through, she was surviving.

Once there, she enjoyed the evening, in spite of having restricted herself to just two glasses of wine, and by eleven was driving back along the forest road, her headlights revealing the pale trunks of beech trees, muscled like athletes stripped off for a race. She was leaving a stretch of deciduous forest and entering Forestry Commission land, acres of closely planted trees, rank upon rank of them, a green army marching down the hill. Her headlights scarcely pierced the darkness between the pines, though here and there she glimpsed a tangle of dead wood and debris on the forest floor. She kept the windows closed, a fug of warmth and music sealing her off from the outside world. The lighted car travelled along the road between the thickly crowding trees like a blood corpuscle passing along a vein. Somewhere in the heart of the wood an antlered head turned to watch her pass. Almost no traffic – she overtook a white van near the crossroads, but after that saw no other cars. The road dipped and rose, and then, no more than 400 yards from her home, where a stream overflowing in the recent heavy rains had run across the road forming a slick of black ice, the car left the road.

There was no time to think. Trees loomed up, leapt towards her, branches shattered the windscreen, clawed at her eyes and throat. A crash and tearing of metal, then silence, except for the tinny beat of the music that kept on playing. One headlight shone at a strange angle, probing the thick resin-smelling branches that had caught and netted the car.

She lay, drifting in and out of consciousness, aware that she mustn’t try to move her head and neck. She knew she was injured, perhaps seriously, though she felt little pain as long as she kept still. Saliva dribbled from the corner of her mouth, blood settled in one eye.

After what seemed a long time she heard the noise of an engine. Her own wrecked car filled with shifting parallelograms of light and shade as the other car’s headlights swept across it. The engine was switched off, footsteps rang clear on the road, slurred across the grass verge, and then a figure appeared at the window. A headless figure was all she could see, since he didn’t bend to look in. She tried to speak, but only a croak came out. He didn’t move, didn’t open the door, didn’t check to see how she was, didn’t ring or go for help. Just stood there, breathing.

She tried to lift her head, but a spasm of pain shot down her spine and she knew she mustn’t move. Slowly she slipped into unconsciousness, fighting all the way, then battled her way back to the surface, where now there were other voices, frightened voices – frightened of her, of what she’d become.

‘Ambulance,’ she heard. ‘Police.’

Then the familiar sound of somebody thumbing numbers into a mobile phone, and at last she was able to let go and accept the dark.

In something too high, too tight, for a bed. White sheets pinned her legs down. Walls the colour of putty. Mum’s voice, then Alice’s, but she knew they couldn’t be here, they’d left the day after Boxing Day, and so she refused to acknowledge them, these phantom relatives, and concentrated instead on getting some spit going in her mouth. Her tongue felt swollen, and was so dry it stuck to the roof of her mouth.

‘Look,’ said Alice. ‘She wants a drink.’

Her mother’s head came between her and the light. ‘Dead to the world. Can’t hear a word you’re saying.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. They always say, don’t they, “Keep talking”? You never know how much gets through.’

Was she dying? Couldn’t persuade herself it mattered much.

Water…

Alice’s scent, sharp and sweet. A spout pushed between her lips, jarred her teeth. Water, too much water, gagged, choked, spout pulled away, reinserted, gentler now, and she glugged, once, twice. Dribbles ran down the side of her neck, were dabbed away on a cold flannel. She stared at the cracks in the ceiling, only to find them replaced, almost immediately, by her mother’s and her sister’s heads.

‘Do you think she can hear us?’ Mum said.

She has been somewhere else. She remembers the trees, the dark road, the branches pushing through broken glass, the man by the window, breathing. But then it all begins to fade.

She tried to turn her head and couldn’t. Some kind of brace round her neck stopped her moving. Her right arm was swaddled against her side by the tight sheet. She could feel her arms, and her legs, and her toes. She wiggled them to make sure, remembering how her father, right at the end of his long illness, after the stroke, had hated the arm he couldn’t feel and kept pushing it away from him. At least she wasn’t like that. It all still belonged to her, this barren plain she looked down on from the height of her raised head, this fenland under its covering of snow.

She started to drift off again, heard her mother say, ‘We’re only tiring her. I think we’d better go and let her sleep.’

Somebody had sent roses. She opened her eyes and there they were, tight, formal, dark red buds, like drops of blood in the white room, but her eyelids were too heavy to go on looking, and when she opened them again the roses were gone.

*

As soon as she could support herself, they got her out of bed and made her sit in the armchair beside it. Her feet were cold. She was depressed, worried about the work she wasn’t doing. She’d taken on a big commission, a huge Christ for the cathedral, it should have been well on the way by now, and yet here she was, stuck in an armchair like an old woman, unable to move, helpless.

The physiotherapist came to see her, and then she started regular sessions in the physiotherapy room, where she stared in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors at the neckless creature she’d become. ‘Very good,’ the uniformed girls kept saying. ‘Very good.’ She hadn’t been spoken to in such jolly, patronizing tones since she was in nappies. She smiled, desperation simmering under the surface.

Back on the ward, she set off down the corridor clinging to the rail, forcing herself to keep walking, though each step sent twinges of pain up her spine. Now and then she met another patient, similarly handicapped, head on, and then they’d pause, assess the extent of each other’s disability, and decide, silently, which of them was better able to let go of the rail and stand unsupported while the other shuffled past. So much courage. So much decency. She was humbled by it.

But then it was back to the ward. Her room overlooked a courtyard where even evergreen plants, deprived of light, sickened and died.

‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ she said, when Alec Braithewaite, the local vicar and also a friend, came to see her.

He took a step backwards, raising his hands, pretending to be knocked over by her urgency. ‘Good morning, Kate.’

She sighed, accepting the reproof. ‘Good morning, Alec.’

‘How are you?’

‘Going mad.’

He came and sat beside the bed. ‘Nobody likes hospitals. The main thing is to get better.’

‘The “main thing” is the Christ.’

He smiled. ‘I’m pleased to hear you say so.’

‘You know what I mean, Alec. My Christ.’

‘Can you lift your arm?’

She tried, as she tried a hundred times a day. ‘No.’

‘When does it have to be finished?’

‘May. In time for Founders’ and Benefactors’ Day.’

‘That’s not too bad.’

‘Alec, it’s a massive figure. It’s barely enough time if I were all right.’

‘Can’t you negotiate another date?’

‘I’ve never missed a deadline in my life.’

She sat brooding, her chin sunk into the padded collar. She looked broken, Alec thought, as he’d never seen her before, not even in the first weeks after Ben’s death. ‘Then you’re going to need help.’

‘I don’t want an assistant.’

‘Other sculptors use them, don’t they?’

‘Yes.’

He leaned forward. ‘So what don’t you like about them?’

‘Where to start? For one thing, they’re always art students, and they keep on asking questions. “Why did you do that? Why didn’t you do the other?” And even if they don’t ask, you can hear them thinking it. Nine times out of ten it just turns into a tutorial. I know it sounds terribly ungenerous, and I do – I do actually like teaching, but I don’t want to do it when I’m working.’

‘Does it have to be an art student?’

‘It’s the obvious pot to dip into.’

He shrugged. ‘Depends what you want.’

‘All I want is somebody strong enough to lift, who isn’t… too interested in what I’m doing.’

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Bit of bored beefcake?’

She refused to rise to him. ‘Doesn’t have to be a man. I do all the lifting normally.’

‘Do you remember the lad who used to do the churchyard after we lost the sheep?’

A hazy memory of a young man wielding a scythe in the long grass between the headstones. ‘Vaguely.’

‘He’s very reliable, and he builds patios and walls and things like that, so he must be fairly good with his hands. And I shouldn’t think he’s got a lot of work on at the moment. I know he was hoping to get a job in the timber yard, but I think that fell through. They’re very quiet at the moment. Shall I see if he’s available?’

‘That’s not a bad idea, actually. What’s his name?’

‘Peter Wingrave. I’ll give him a ring, shall I?’

He looked down at her, noticing the lines of tension around her eyes and mouth. What he thought she needed at this moment was faith, but he couldn’t say that. She’d come to church once or twice after Ben’s funeral, but only to show her appreciation of a difficult job well done. A youngish man, a violent death. It’s not easy in such circumstances to know what to say, particularly to a congregation of atheists and agnostics up from London on cheap day-returns. Kate made no secret of her lack of belief. He did wonder what she’d be able to make of this commission, but then he thought that the risen Christ was, among many other things, a half-naked man in his early thirties, and Kate did male nudes very well indeed.

‘How’s Justine?’ Kate asked, making an effort to set her own problems aside.

Alec’s face brightened, as it always did at any mention of his daughter. ‘Much better.’

Justine had been due to go to Cambridge last October, but in September had gone down with glandular fever and had to ask for her place to be deferred for a year. She’d been at a loose end ever since, mooching round the house, lonely and depressed. Alec had been quite worried about her, but now, he said, she’d got herself a little job as an au pair, twenty hours a week, and that gave her some pocket-money, and, even more important, a framework for the day. ‘The Sharkeys. You know them? Their little boy.’

‘Oh, yes. Adam, isn’t it?’

‘Anyway,’ he said, hearing the rattle of cutlery in the corridor outside, ‘I think I’d better be off and leave you to your lunch.’ He bent to kiss her, and she grasped his hand. ‘I’ll have a word with Peter as soon as I can.’

The doors swinging shut behind him let in a smell of hot gravy and custard. She never felt hungry, though when food was put in front of her she ate it all. She knew she had to build up her strength. As she ate, she thought about Alec, who was an odd person to find in charge of a rural parish. He’d written several books on ethical issues raised by modern genetics and by developments in reproductive medicine, including one on therapeutic cloning that Robert Sharkey described as the most level-headed discussion of the topic he’d encountered. And he did a lot of work with released prisoners, battered wives, drug addicts, even converting part of his own house to give them somewhere to stay. No, he was a good man, though she didn’t personally see that his goodness had much to do with his religion. And he had another claim on her affection: Ben had always liked him.

After the pudding – apple crumble indistinguishable from cement – she heaved herself out of the chair and started again on the long walk to the top of the corridor.

Winter sunshine streaming in through the tall windows created a grainy shadow that almost seemed to mock her efforts as she edged and shuffled along. Her walking was getting better, but she’d gladly have crawled around on her bum for the rest of her days if only she’d been able to raise her right arm above her head.

At night she lies awake, worrying about the Christ, her fingers aching for the scarred handle of her mallet, as her body aches for Ben, a cold hollow inside. She tucks her knees up to her chin, consciously foetal, but the position puts too much pressure on her back and she has to straighten out again and lie on her back like an effigy. She remembers going into the church at Chillingham with Ben, turning the corner into a side chapel, finding Lord and Lady Grey together on their slab. Holding hands? Side by side, anyway, in a silence that still, after five centuries, feels companionable. And that extraordinary domestic detail: the fireplace in the wall opposite their tomb. As once there must have been a fireplace in their bedroom. Firelight on sweaty bodies, the first time they made love, firelight on the cold alabaster of their effigies. And then her mind drifts to Ben’s grave in the churchyard here, backed by a low stone wall, dry blond grasses waving in the field beyond. And again she stretches out her legs, hears the rattle of the trolley bringing tea, and realizes that at some point in all this, surely, she must have slept.

A nurse crashes through the swing doors, red-faced, cheerful, rotund, rustling in her plastic apron, squeaking on rubber-soled shoes.

‘Physio today, Mrs Frobisher,’ she says, pouring beige tea into a cup.

Physio every bloody day.

When they’d done everything they could to get her mobile, they let her go, though she had to return to the hospital twice a week for more physiotherapy.

In the car, being driven home by her friend Angela Mowbray, Kate felt optimistic. She’d been managing better the last few days, and she knew the physiotherapist was pleased with her. Another fortnight and she’d be all right, perhaps even well enough to do without the bloody assistant. Alec still hadn’t got back to her on that.

Angela looked sideways at Kate, thinking the surgical collar looked a bit like a ruff, reflecting light on to her face, emphasizing the lines of tiredness, the blue shadows underneath her eyes. Kate said she hadn’t been sleeping well in hospital, but then nobody could. Footsteps squeaking up and down the ward, blinds on the corridor side left up because you had to be observed all the time, and then there were admissions, sometimes in the middle of the night. The memories of her hysterectomy were fresh in Angela’s mind. Poor Kate, she thought, and such a bad patient.

They were approaching the scene of the crash. Angela slowed down – had to, it was a dangerous bend – though, imagining what Kate must be feeling, she would have preferred to pick up speed and get past as soon as possible.

‘Do you mind if we stop here?’ Kate said.

Surprised, Angela pulled over on to the grass verge. Kate got out. It was a struggle and Angela came round the car to help, but by the time she got there Kate was shakily standing up.

‘Why do you want to stop?’

‘I just want to see where it happened.’

Kate walked along the verge, thinking she might not recognize the spot, but there was no danger of that. Skidding off the road, the car had left scars, flattened bracken, made tyre tracks in the mud, smashed stripling trees – and then her nemesis: the tree whose branches, broken by the impact, had reached through the shattered windscreen to get at her. She had a flash of it happening again and closed her eyes. The trunk had proved solid, though the roots had been disturbed. She looked down and saw how they’d been prised loose from the earth. At that moment a light wind started to blow between the trees, a current of air moving at ground level, quickening the forest floor. Dead leaves rose up and formed twisters, little coils and spurts of turbulence, and the shadows of branches danced and shook on the snow-stippled ground.

Then it was over and the wood was as quiet and still as it had been before.

Kate was aware of her breathing, the sound, the movement of her ribs, and the sight of it too, furls of mist escaping from her lips to whiten the air.

Angela shifted behind her. Coughed. She thinks I’m being eccentric, Kate thought. Well, she can talk.

There was something else, something she needed to get clear, a memory that bulged above the surface, showed its back and then, in a burst of foam, turned and sank again. It was the sound of her breathing that had summoned it. She groped after memories that dissolved even as she tried to grasp them. She had a sense of missing time. The minutes – how many minutes? – she’d drifted in and out of consciousness, while somebody had stood by the car, breathing, watching, not calling for help.

But all her memories were confused, and for large stretches of time she had no memory at all. Nothing about the ambulance journey or the arrival in hospital, nothing about the emergency treatment, the fitting of the back brace and the surgical collar, nothing about that. Nothing, in fact, until she woke the following morning to find her mother and Alice by the bed. So probably her memory of the man who’d stood and watched her was a distortion. A symptom of concussion.

Two days after the crash a young woman doctor had sat by her bed for half an hour, asking her questions about what time it was, who she was, where she was, why she was there, and, although she hadn’t felt confused or uncertain of the answers, she’d got most of them wrong.

It was a relief to turn and see Angela’s worried face.

She made herself smile. ‘Lucky escape.’ She was thinking of another road, in Afghanistan, the road Ben had died on. For a moment she felt a deep affinity with him, a closeness, and then it vanished, and the loneliness rushed back, worse than before. She raised her hand to her neck and touched Ben’s amulet, feeling the disc cold under her fingertips, rasping it along the chain. ‘That’s that, then,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

Two

Back home, Angela bustled around quite as if the place belonged to her. Kate would have liked to make herself something to eat, but Angela had brought stacks of home-made food from her freezer. Feeling useless and too tired to protest, Kate sat in her armchair and let Angela get on with it.

The fire was already laid and only needed a match put to it. Angela propped a newspaper up against the hearth, and a photograph of burning cars was sucked into the draught. The paper darkened, grew crisp and thin. An orange glow began at the centre of the page, which blackened round the edges until, at the last second, Angela whisked it away, filling the room with a spurt of acrid smoke.

This is like old age, Kate thought, looking round the room. Shadows leapt across the walls, tentative flakes of snow fumbled at the window pane and were whirled upwards out of sight. Watching them, she tried to trace the progress of a single flake, but her eyelids were heavy, and when she opened them again Angela was putting a tray with pâté and warm bread rolls on to the table beside her chair. She watched Angela’s faded English-rose face turn pink again from the warmth of the fire. A strange girl – though she shouldn’t say girl, Angela was forty-five if she was a day, but girlish still in many ways, gushing, giggly, inclined to develop crushes on people. Also stoical, unassuming, brave.

And a trial at times, Kate thought guiltily, wanting to be alone. All those times when Kate had tried to talk about her grief for Ben, and Angela had gently, but firmly, reminded her that she had lost Thomas and William and Rufus and Harry. Yes, Kate had wanted to say, but Ben was my husband, and they were like, well,… SHEEP?

She’d always managed not to say it, remembering the time she’d switched the television on to watch the six o’clock news and seen Angela rolling around on the muddy ground, displaying her knickers to the whole nation, as she defied the men from the Ministry of Agriculture who’d come to kill her ‘boys’. It had taken three policemen to hold her down. And anyway who was she to quantify somebody else’s love or decide how much grief was reasonable? She remembered watching Angela feed them, how they’d all stopped cropping the grass and answered her with their plaintive cries when she called their names.

Kate ate and drank and drifted off to sleep again. When she woke, Angela was putting on her coat. ‘You sure you’ll be all right now?’

‘Quite sure. Thanks. I’ll just sit over the fire a bit longer.’

‘I’ll be in again tomorrow first thing. Ring if you need anything.’

After she’d gone, Kate stood for a long time by the window, listening to the minute creaks the house made – wood and stone still settling after five hundred years – and watched the snow, falling more thickly now, cover the ground. Darkness seemed to rise in a blue vapour from the snow. She went back to the fire, wondering how she should spend the next few hours. Having slept, she supposed, for an hour or an hour and a half, she now felt too awake to go to bed.

In the hospital, with its unchanging routines, she’d been protected from the urgency of time passing, but now she counted the days lost since her accident – nineteen. She was tempted to go across to the studio, but knew she mustn’t. The desolate expanse of floor, the tall windows open to the night sky, no, she wasn’t ready to face that yet, and anyway there was nothing she could do. By now there should have been a roughly carved figure standing there. Instead there was nothing, not even an armature, and it would take five to eight days of hard work to produce that.

And she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t work at all without an assistant, and even the best assistant would leave normal working hours curtailed. She regularly started at five or six o’clock when things were going well. That would have to change, and not only that. The way she worked. Everything.

She hobbled back to her chair, missing the other patients whose slow progress back to mobility had mirrored her own. Round about now the visitors would be leaving. The nurses would be stuffing flowers into vases, drawing the blinds, settling people down for the night – and her solitary, shuffling progress suddenly seemed lonely and pathetic. Sometimes the only cure for feeling sorry for yourself is a good long sleep. She would make herself stay up till ten o’clock, make a few calls, watch television, have a couple of stiff whiskies and go to bed.

She was just about to switch on the television when she heard a car approaching. The forest road at night was not much frequented even in good weather, and she wondered who it might be, and hoped it wasn’t Lorna or Beth or Alec come to see how she was. The car slowed to take the bend. She pictured the unknown driver spotting the damage to the trees and wincing – though by now the snow would have covered the tyre marks on the verge. She waited for it to pick up speed again, but it slowed still further, crawling along, looking for the entrance. A shifting skein of light drifted across the wall and stopped as the car stopped. Going to the window, she opened it slightly and heard the crunch of approaching footsteps, but could see nothing. The drive was thickly lined with rhododendrons that in winter formed a long dark tunnel. The footsteps grew louder. A young man with bent head, his dark hair stringy with melted snow, emerged from between the bushes. The security light flicked on as he broke the beam, and flung his shadow behind him up the wall of thick green rubbery leaves.

The door bell rang.

She almost knew who it was. The name was on the tip of her tongue, but to be on the safe side she put the chain on before she opened the door and peered through the crack.

‘Hello?’

‘I believe you’re looking for an assistant.’

‘Ye-es.’

‘Alec Braithewaite sent me. I used to do the churchyard last summer, do you remember?’

‘Yes, of course.’ She released the chain and opened the door. Light streamed on to the path, catching his glasses so that for a moment he looked blind. ‘Come in.’

He stepped over the threshold, bringing with him a smell of wet hair and wool, and began stamping his snow-clogged boots on the mat, shaking off thick curds of white. Snowflakes caught in his hair and on his shoulders dissolved as she gazed.

‘I didn’t realize it was still snowing.’

‘It’s not.’ He smiled. ‘I knocked a branch and got a shower. I think I’d better take my coat off. I’m only going to drip all over your carpet. And these,’ he said, looking down at his feet.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know your name.’

‘Peter Wingrave. Look, would you like to ring Alec and check?’

‘No, it’s all right. He did mention you.’

She was thinking it was no wonder she hadn’t recognized him. Last time she saw him he’d been suntanned, stripped to the waist, wielding a scythe on the long grasses between the headstones. She’d bumped into him once or twice as she was walking across the churchyard on her way to the shops, and they’d exchanged a few words about the cull. ‘Isn’t it awful?’ they’d said in passing, as people did who weren’t directly involved. There was no ignoring it. Clouds of oily black smoke from the pyres dominated the skyline. The smell of burning carcasses had hung over the village for weeks.

The cull was the reason for his presence. Until last summer the grass had been cropped by sheep imported for the purpose. Black sheep – she suspected Alec of a clerical joke. They kept the grass down and their droppings, even when deposited on a grave, were not too offensive – or at least nobody had complained. ‘Cows, now,’ Alec had said, ‘I don’t think we could go as far as cows.’ The great thing was they fed themselves and didn’t need to be paid. But then the men from the Ministry came and carted them off to be killed. Peter was more expensive than the sheep, but also, she couldn’t help thinking, more decorative. She remembered him clearly now, sweat glistening on his arms and chest, his jeans slipping further and further down his hips as he swung and turned. As a young single woman, she’d have been seriously tempted. Even as a happily married middle-aged woman, she’d paused to admire the view.

He stood up, flushed from the effort of getting his boots off, wriggling his toes in their damp socks. The boots were old and obviously leaked.

‘Come through,’ she said, hobbling ahead of him into the living room.

‘Oh, a real fire. That’s nice.’

An educated voice, deep, pleasant. She wondered how he’d ended up doing unskilled jobs – but that was his business. And anyway, she thought, gardening isn’t unskilled – it’s just badly paid. He’d shown plenty of skill with that scythe. ‘Do you know, I think you’re the only person I’ve seen using a scythe.’

A small shrug. ‘I grew up in the country.’

‘Oh, whereabouts?’

‘Yorkshire. My grandfather used to use one. But you’re right, I think he was the only person I ever saw doing it. Though it’s not difficult, once you get the rhythm.’

‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Yes, please.’ He looked around for clues and spotted the whisky bottle on the table. ‘Whisky’ll do fine.’

She poured two large glasses. ‘Well,’ she said, lowering herself cautiously into the armchair, feeling like a frail old lady in contrast with his obvious strength and vigour. ‘Alec said he was going to have a word with you.’

‘Yes, he rang a couple of days ago. I left a message on your answering machine, asking if I could call round.’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t got to the answering machine yet. I only came out of hospital this afternoon. So you’re a gardener?’

‘Mainly, yes.’

‘Must be pretty lean pickings at this time of year?’

‘Awful. Basically it’s dead between November and March. There’s very little.’

‘So how do you manage?’

‘Do a bit of tree surgery. And I’m trying to specialize in water gardening, because actually this is the best time of year to dig ponds. If you leave it till Easter, you’ve missed half the season. And then if it gets too bad, I give in and get a job in a restaurant.’

‘Cooking?’

‘No. Chopping veg and loading dishes.’

‘Sounds pretty dire.’

‘It is, yes, but it’s only for a few months. As soon as the grass grows the phone rings.’

He had a charming smile.

‘Did you train as a gardener?’

‘No.’ A pause. ‘No, I read English.’ He raised the glass quickly to his mouth, hiding his lips.

All right, she thought, no personal questions. Well, that suited her. The last thing she wanted in the studio was chatter.

‘I can give you references. People I’ve worked for.’

He fished in his pocket and produced a sheet of paper, folded twice and slightly damp. Five people were listed on it, four of whom she knew fairly well. ‘Fred Henderson. He’s got that big place just outside Alnwick, hasn’t he?’

‘Yes, that’s right. I did his water garden. He went in for it in a big way when he retired. In fact I think it’s the biggest job I’ve ever done.’ He smiled. ‘What can I say? The patio’s level. The ponds don’t leak. The waterfalls work. And the stream’s full of fish.’

She smiled back at him. It was impossible not to like him. ‘Shall I tell you what I want first? Then you can judge for yourself if you can fit in with it.’

He nodded, watching her intently, rocking the whisky from side to side in the glass, amber lights darting across his fingers. He had big hands.

She sensed he was desperate for work, that chopping veg and loading dishes might be looming, so she didn’t bother making the hours attractive. Eight till four, five days a week. Saturday mornings would be great if he could manage it. ‘And I’ll pay whatever Fred paid. Is that all right?’

‘Fine.’ He looked at her – perhaps he sensed desperation too. ‘You haven’t said what you want me to do.’

‘Driving, lifting, making an armature…’ She waited.

‘I know what it is. I’ve never made one.’

‘I’ll show you.’ It hurt her to say it, to think of other hands on her work. ‘I can’t do it.’

‘Alec said it’s a statue of Christ. How big?’

‘Fifteen feet.’

‘Fifteen?’

‘Yep.’

He was looking at her, assessing the extent of her disability. ‘How high can you raise your arm?’

She pulled a face. ‘Shoulder height.’

‘You’ll need a scaffold. I can’t see you shinning up a stepladder’ – he nodded at her stick – ‘with that.’

‘Could you make one?’

‘Yeah, it’s not difficult.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yeah, no problem. Anyway, I’ll bounce up and down on it first, so if anybody breaks their neck it’ll be me.’

‘Might be as well.’ She smiled. ‘I don’t think my neck could take any more.’

‘How long do you have to wear the collar?’

‘Another month at least.’

‘But you will get the mobility back?’

‘So they say.’

A pause. ‘So how shall we leave it?’ he asked. ‘Do you want to check with Fred first?’

‘No, I need to get started. How about tomorrow?’

‘Are you sure you’re well enough?’

‘I’ve got to be.’

‘Well, if you don’t feel up to doing much, I can always be making a start on the scaffolding.’

She felt relieved beyond measure. It had all happened so quickly, so easily. Her first job tomorrow morning must be to ring Alec and thank him. It was a bit late tonight, she thought, glancing at her watch.

Immediately, Peter put his glass on the table and stood up. ‘No, don’t get up,’ he said, seeing her reach for her stick. ‘I can let myself out.’

She heard him pulling on his boots, grunting with the effort, and then went to the window to watch him go. The security light flicked on again as he crossed the beam. He seemed to sense her watching and without turning round raised his hand as he disappeared into the dark tunnel of rhododendrons.

A moment later she heard the car start. The noise was distorted, as every noise here was, by the wall of trees. He reversed, turned, and then she heard the hum of the engine diminishing into the distance before being swallowed up by night and silence. Then there were only the trees, and a few flakes of snow shuddering on the black air.

Three

The following morning, after seeing Peter start work on the scaffold, Kate accepted Angela’s offer of a lift into the village and went to see Alec Braithewaite.

It was a cold, clear day, the grass around the headstones rimed with frost. A trail of muddy, trampled snow led up to the rectory door. She rang the bell and heard it clang deep inside the house, a vast, draughty Georgian mausoleum of a place. She wondered why Alec didn’t protest to the bishop and insist on being given somewhere more sensible to live. Justine was only left at home because the wretched glandular fever had kept her back for an extra year, and Kate found it impossible to imagine what it would be like for one person living here alone.

Justine’s mother, Victoria, had left eight years ago, in a scandal that rocked the parish, though as far as Kate knew no other man had been involved. Alec, pursuing her down the garden path, was supposed to have asked, as she heaved her suitcases into the waiting taxi, ‘Is there anybody else?’

‘Yes!’ Victoria had roared, at the top of her voice for the whole village to hear. ‘Me.’

Angela deplored this behaviour, which she regarded as unforgivably selfish. Kate secretly applauded. Everybody had thought that Alec would leave the parish as soon as another living could be found, but he’d elected to stay, mainly for Justine’s sake – the local girls’ high school had an excellent reputation and Justine had been very happy there. But she’d now left school, and Alec still showed no inclination to move on, though he often talked wistfully about his desire to do more obviously valuable work in some inner-city parish. Like opening his door in the middle of the night to kids off their heads on crack, Kate thought. He was probably safer here. She rang the bell again. The last time she’d spoken to him about his plans he’d seemed to feel guilty that his life had settled into an undemanding groove, ministering to the spiritual needs of what Angela called ‘green-wellie Christians’ – weekenders who wouldn’t have dreamt of attending church in the city, but who in the country dropped in to morning service on their way to the Rose and Crown, as if – Angela again – God was thrown in as a job lot with Labradors and waxed jackets.

There were the locals, of course, but they turned up only two or three times a year: Easter, perhaps, Harvest Festival and the Christmas carol service. All dates at or near the main pagan festivals, as Alec cheerfully pointed out. She rang the bell again, thinking she might as well be waiting for some little Victorian maid ninety years dead to get up from her grave and answer the door.

Instead she heard the slap of bare feet on lino. A disgruntled voice called, ‘All right. I’m coming.’

The door opened and there was Justine, flushed from sleep, big-breasted inside a too-tight Snoopy T-shirt, yawning, showing the pink cavernous interior of her mouth as uninhibitedly as a cat. ‘Dad’s in the church, I think. Do you want to come in and wait?’

Looking at Justine’s bare feet on the coconut mat, Kate said, ‘No, it’s OK, thanks. I’ll have a walk across.’

She trod carefully across the cattle grid at the entrance to the churchyard – put in, at some expense, to contain the sheep – clinging to the railings because there was nowhere to put her stick. She missed the mournful clanking of the sheep’s bells as they moved between the graves. Slowly, carefully, up the path, one step at a time. It was a struggle to turn the iron ring and push the heavy door open. That didn’t bode well – she must be weaker than she thought. She shuffled, in her new three-legged state, into the cold, hassock-smelling interior, with its fugitive glints of multicoloured light on the stone flags.

Alec was kneeling at the altar rail. He didn’t look round as she closed the door quietly behind her.

A sulky central-heating system, just turned off after Holy Communion, distributed the smell of warm dust evenly around the church, without making any noticeable difference to the temperature. Shivering, she looked up at the crucifix above the chancel arch and beyond that at the rose window: Christ in Majesty, surrounded by concentric circles of apostles, angels, prophets, patriarchs and saints. At the moment she hated all representations of Christ, impartially and with great venom. If they were good, they underlined the folly of her thinking that she had anything new to contribute to a tradition that had lasted 2,000 years. If they were bad – like the painting in the Lady Chapel of Christ in a chiffon nightie, its diaphanous folds failing to hide the fact that there was nothing to hide – they seemed to invite her mockingly to add to their number.

She tiptoed down the aisle, away from Alec, who had still not looked up, and concentrated on the engravings of Green Men that decorated the roof bosses. What faces: savage, angry, tormented, desperate, sly, desolate. She’d noticed them first at Ben’s funeral and had been paying them regular visits ever since. Images of the Green Man were everywhere these days. A secular world sifting through pagan images, like a rag-and-bone man grubbing about for something – anything – of value. A symbol of renewal, people said, but only because they didn’t look. Some of these heads were so emaciated they were hardly more than skulls. Others vomited leaves, their eyes staring, panic-stricken above the choking mouth. No, she thought, wincing with pain as she craned to look at them, they were wonderfully done – some anonymous craftsman’s masterwork – but they were figures of utter ruin.