Chapter Fifteen
FIFTEEN
The air is heavy with fragrant heat; melting rubber, hot clay. The tails of smoke. Sam, Bert and I walk slowly down Beacon Terrace, washed in a vast blanket of stillness. We talk quietly about the curfew and the heat wave. I tell Bert about Oscar and our impending marriage and he congratulates me. Bert tells me he’s just celebrated his seventieth birthday and laughs when I tell him he looks like Des O’Connor, adding, “You must tell my wife that, she’d be thrilled!”
As we draw up outside his house, directly next door to the Webbers, we all fall silent, looking at the chalk markings on the ground, the small pile of offerings by the door. A votive candle has been left, guttering in a glass. Bert sighs.
“That poor girl. She must be scared stiff. I hope you can help her, Mina.”
“Mina thinks that breaking the witch’s bottle triggered an intensely psychological reaction in Alice.” Sam is smoking, leaning against the fence where the chalked writing reads bE Not afrAId. He looks more settled now, less like someone peering over the edge of an abyss.
“Ah, interesting that you think it’s a psychosomatic symptom. It’s amazing what the mind is capable of. You know my grandfather fought on the western front back in the First World War? He was a stoic man, very brave but very quiet. He came back with tinnitus and a limp on his left side but at least he came home. A lot of men weren’t so lucky. Right up until he died, my grandfather insisted he and the other members of his battalion had seen an angel with long white hair walking across the battlefield on a cold November morning. One of the soldiers had actually called out to her, ‘Hoy there, are you mad?’ but she had kept on walking, smiling as if she knew a secret. My grandfather said she was barefoot and that’s how they all knew she was divine.”
“Wow.”
“There’s a lot of those stories that came out of the war. They became a tool for propaganda, a divine providence that served to boost morale. Angels and ghostly bowmen and riders with flaming swords. But my grandfather, and the ninety other men that were with him that morning, would swear on the Bible that what they saw was a guardian angel walking through the barbed wire and the mud and bodies with no shoes on her feet. How do you explain that?”
“I wouldn’t try to,” I answer. “It’s a form of collective consciousness, it doesn’t need explaining. What it needs is dismantling, slowly. Taken apart bit by bit so that the lack of plausibility becomes evident.”
“Is that what you intend to do with Alice?”
I think of that soft scratching in the chimney.
“Perhaps. But this town doesn’t help. Hagstones, apotropaic marks—Banathel has a real problem with witches, doesn’t it?”
Bert laughs softly. “Once upon a time, maybe. The witches were drawn here by the Devil, if the old stories are true. About a mile west of here is a ring of stones, said to be a coven turned to stone for dancing on the Sabbath. Thirteen stones for thirteen bewitched women. As kids we always kept away from them, even on bright and sunny days. There’s something about them that is… sunken, I suppose. There’s just some places that feel like that, isn’t there? Like there is a thinness to them, something unreal.”
I think of the house on Tanner’s Row and nod. “You a historian, Bert?”
He laughs, slightly abashed. “God, no. I’m something of an amateur at best. I dabbled in it when I became interested in genealogy—people and places are often tied together, so researching one naturally led to looking into the other, I think.”
Bert turns to look at his house, the garden neat and tidy and squared away, lawn trimmed to a dark green inch, and sighs.
“I’d better go and see how she is. Mary likes having Stevie over—she always did enjoy the company of children—but it exhausts her now.”
“Have you any children of your own, Bert?”
“No. We just took in the waifs and strays. It’s not so easy these days with Mary so ill and my arthritis playing up but we manage. It fills the house, having children there.”
He looks morose for a moment, deep in thought. I wonder what it must be like to watch the person you’ve spent your life with—your love, your comfort—fading away. It must be a soft pain, slowly blooming. Flowers and thorns.
I watch as he walks up the pathway to his house and lets himself in through the front door, raising a hand to Sam and me as he closes it behind him. Then I tilt my head back and look up. A plane is slowly crossing the sky, trailing a white cloud of vapor. I watch it a moment and think of Crete, and swifts’ nests and yellow dresses and my dead brother reaching for me in a photograph, his mouth partly open as if saying Tell me about the ice.