Chapter Nineteen
I lead the way into Heaton, following the same route that Nick took with Emma, Felix and me last week, out through Doverley’s hidden gateway, and across the frosty, sub-zero fields.
I don’t tell Mum everything as we walk, circumnavigating the huddling cows, clambering over first one wooden gate, then another, our feet crunching down into puddles of ice.
But step by step, question by question, I do tell her a lot.
By the time we approach the village, the church’s steeple coming into view in the pale-blue sky, she knows almost all of it: from the moment of my arrival at Doverley, when I somehow knew to skip that uneven front step, to the hours I’ve lost in the ruins of Iris and Robbie’s cottage, to the onslaught of memories that have increasingly filled my conscious and unconscious thoughts: of darkened nights, and cold moons, and smoky pubs, and uninsulated control towers, and apple cakes, and boiled sweets, and that nameless colonel, the woman in her wheelchair, and so, so much.
The only thing I don’t go into is how convinced I’ve become by the slips I’ve found myself taking, not only into Iris’s memories, but her world.
I’m not sure why I keep that to myself when I say so much else.
Perhaps I’m still too afraid of being dismissed, which probably isn’t fair – Mum doesn’t attempt to trivialise anything I tell her – but nonetheless, I remain silent on all that.
I think about it though, our entire walk through.
I’m still thinking about it as we approach Heaton, swapping the frozen fields for the gritted country road into the village.
Out loud, I talk to Mum about my trip to see Tim Hobbs, and how I felt as though I was visiting an old friend, and inside I replay those haunting moments I experienced in his lounge: first, seeing Robbie come to life in that photo, as though I really had been behind the camera’s lens; then, finding myself in the thick of the noise and heat of Bettys Bar, holding on tight to that hand around mine.
Robbie’s hand, I’m certain.
That woman was there in Bettys too, I’ve since realised: the same one I saw when I fell, whose arm I made Iris grab, and whose fine-boned features have remained with me since: so incomprehensibly familiar.
‘Will you visit Tim again?’ Mum asks, drawing my attention back to the moment.
‘I was planning to yesterday,’ I say. ‘I can’t stop thinking about him.’ I picture him now, all alone, just his memories for company. It’s always happening, he said of the war. Always. ‘I hated leaving him. He was so frail … ’
‘He is one hundred.’
‘But he’s got no one, Mum. And I think he’s really scared about whether we’re going to do his past justice with this movie. I’m scared about that. It’s all just … make-believe.’
‘What else could it be?’
‘I don’t know.’ I stare out at the glittering road. ‘The sets feel too pristine though. The base is too compact. Our costumes are so tailored, and we’re all made up perfectly, all the time … ’
‘Claude, you’re actors … ’
‘Right. And this’ll be a movie. A brilliant one, maybe. But still just a … movie. A one-hundred-and-thirty-three-minute cinematic recreation of something that I see really … I don’t know … ’ I search for a word ‘ … differently.’
Mum sighs. ‘I wish you’d never come here.’
‘I don’t.’ I turn to her, pouring into my stare how much I mean this.
‘I want to be here. I’ve always wanted it.
From the moment I picked up the novel. It’s only now this has happened that I’ve realized the …
ownership … I’ve always felt for Iris. Even when I was struggling in rehearsals, I could feel her … ’
‘Waiting for you,’ Mum says, finishing my sentence for me. ‘Yes, I know.’
She lets go another deep sigh.
And, silently, we keep walking, reaching Heaton, crossing the green for the churchyard and cemetery.
To my relief, the village is almost as deserted as it was last week.
The weather’s obviously keeping everyone inside.
Although there are a handful of people out – a couple walking a dog on the other side of the war memorial; a trio of kids kicking a ball on the brittle, whitened grass – they’re all too caught up in their own mornings to look our way.
I fix my own attention on the church as we draw closer, thinking again of that man who used to stare at me during Sunday morning services, with his hard blue eyes.
I still can’t work out who he might have been, but I’m unsettled enough by the emotions he stirs up in me that, as Mum and I enter the churchyard, I ask her if she has any idea who he was.
She doesn’t answer me.
Not straight away.
My question clearly upsets her though, because she dips her head, pinching the top of her nose with her fingertips.
‘Mum?’ I say, frowning. ‘Who was he?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says, in a tone that’s flat, and tense, but not, actually, particularly surprised.
Just as with that bird, I realize I must have spoken to her about this man before.
‘You used to be terrified of a blue-eyed man,’ she says, confirming it.
‘No one ever brought you to this church though. So far as I’m aware, you’ve never set foot inside it.
’ We come to a halt at the cemetery gate.
‘There were these two little boys you kept asking for, as well, wanting to know where they’d gone.
One in particular, you fixated on, insisting that he was looking for you.
Waiting. It made you so … desperately … sad. ’
‘What about that bird?’ I say, the question leaving my cold lips quietly.
‘Yes, you used to talk about the bird too. Not much to me. I wasn’t here.
You know that.’ Her eyes, overly bright in her cold face, strain with guilt.
It’s not the first time she’s looked at me like this.
I’m not sure she’ll ever forgive herself for leaving me as much as she did back then, no matter how many times I tell her she needs to.
I try to do it again now.
‘Mum, stop. You’re too hard on yourself … ’
‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘You needed me. You really needed me, and I was no use to you. I was young, heartbroken, afraid of everything, letting you down most of all, and you weren’t … Well … ’ Her brow pinches. ‘… straightforward.’
‘Oh.’ I grimace.
‘No, don’t look like that.’ She reaches for my hand.
‘You were gorgeous, and sweet, and precious. But you weren’t like other children.
You saw the world differently to the rest of us.
You heard it differently. That bird you used to talk about, it was alive to you.
Nan thought, the way you described it, that it might have been a hawk, they used to have them here when she was a child, but she could never hear it.
No one could.’ She places her other hand around mine.
‘I remember, on your fourth birthday, I took you out for a walk, and you kept pointing at the sky, asking where the bird was, but I couldn’t tell you, and you just started …
wailing.’ She widens her eyes, remembering.
‘I realise now how frightened you must have been, but then, I didn’t know what to do.
I thought you were going to make yourself ill, so I lied to you, said I’d seen it flying away, but you didn’t believe me.
You just kept crying.’ She pauses, studying me. ‘Do you remember?’
‘No.’ I try to, delving into the depths of my mind, but I can’t find anything there. ‘I don’t.’
‘And what about here?’ She nods in at the cemetery.
I turn to look, my eyes moving over the slumbering space, taking in the trees, the patches of green where their branches have protected the earth from the frost, and all the graves, disordered and unplanned, squeezed together over the centuries.
‘Yes,’ I say, feeling a stirring of recollection. ‘Yes.’
Then, ‘Where are Nan and Grandad?’
‘They’re not here,’ Mum says. ‘They never have been.’
Slowly, barely aware of my own movement, I turn back to face her.
She stares at me, her face taut with emotion, her breath, seemingly, held.
‘What?’ I say, numbly.
‘They were cremated. I scattered their ashes up on the peaks.’
‘But … ’ I frown. ‘What?’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I remember us burying them … ’
‘You don’t, my darling. You just don’t.’ She forces the words out in a strangled rush.
‘I know you’ve always thought you do, and I tried when you were little to convince you that you didn’t, but you got so upset.
Hysterical.’ She gives me a helpless look.
‘In the end it just felt kinder to leave it. Then, the lie … grew … ’
‘They really weren’t buried?’
‘No.’
‘What about the funeral?’
‘I didn’t take you. You were too little, had been through too much … ’
‘Mum –’ I place my hand to my head, fighting the absurdness of what she’s telling me – ‘this can’t be right.’
‘It is, Claude.’
‘Then why are we here?’
‘Because you ran away here, the day before the accident. Grandad found you curled up among the graves, fast asleep, your face all swollen with tears.’
I stare, appalled.
‘I know,’ says Mum. ‘I know.’
‘Why have you never told me?’
‘Because I didn’t want to. It was awful.
Traumatic. Then the crash happened, and that was …
god … ’ She exhales a white puff of breath.
‘So much worse. I’ve never wanted you to come here again.
Until this bloody movie, I never thought you would.
But now … Now … ’ She fills her cheeks with another deep breath, letting it go.
‘Now, I wish I’d asked my dad which of these graves he found you by. ’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘It didn’t feel relevant. You were four years old, and had run away to a cemetery. That was all I cared about. But … ’ Her forehead creases. ‘… I’ve been wondering if you might know.’
‘Mum, I don’t remember doing this … ’
‘I think you should go in anyway,’ she says, and in one quick movement, opens the gate. ‘See if your feet will tell you the way.’
‘Mum, come on … ’
‘Just try,’ she says. ‘I’m with you.’