Winter Wood Read online

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Together they walked down the gently sloping patch of ground towards Mill Farm. A couple of the downstairs lights had already come on, and everything was quiet and peaceful. It looked as though the builders might have knocked off early for a change.

  After tea her mum said, ‘Come upstairs, Midge. I’ve got a surprise for you.’

  Midge thought that she could guess what it was. She followed Mum up to the landing, and from there towards the door of her old bedroom.

  ‘Ta-da!’ Her mum gave the freshly painted door a push, and flicked on the light switch. ‘I made them finish it today,’ she said. ‘I told them – “No more excuses. Just get it done.” What do you think, though? Isn’t it great?’

  Midge stepped into the room and looked about her. She wouldn’t have recognized it. The heavy swagged curtains, the frilly lampshades and the chintzy matching valances had all gone. Now there was beechwood, and chrome, and a blue bedside lamp that shone softly against the clean white walls and made a starry pattern on the ceiling. A plain blue coverlet on her bed . . . stripped and polished floorboards . . . a creamy sheepskin rug. It was gorgeous – a picture from a catalogue. In fact it looked just like the catalogue that she and her mum had chosen all these things from. Everything new, and perfect. And different . . .

  ‘Oh, it’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Really lovely. Thanks, Mum.’

  ‘Well, you deserve it.’ Her mum kissed the top of her head – something Midge actually found quite annoying. ‘And I’m sorry that it’s taken so long. I’m afraid that everything does seem to be taking a bit longer than we’d hoped. Anyway, now you can move in properly. Go and get your clothes and things out of my room and start putting them away. I brought that little silver bowl of yours in and put it on the desk, next to your laptop, but I’ve left everything else for you to sort out. It’s a very nice little bowl, by the way. Where did you get it?’

  Midge looked across at Celandine’s cup, sitting prettily on her new desk.

  ‘Oh . . . it was a present,’ she said, deliberately vague. ‘A friend gave it to me.’

  ‘Really? Who was that – Azzie? It must have cost her parents a fortune. Well, they could afford it, I suppose. Um . . . towels. I knew there was something else. I’d better find you some.’

  Midge remained in the centre of the room for a few moments after Mum had gone, trying to take it all in. She had so loved it here when she had first come to stay – loved the silly fussiness of it, the daft curtains and the pointless frills. And now it was different and new and modern like everything else. She knew she should be grateful, and she was, but she wished that something could just stay the same.

  The sheepskin rug didn’t appear to be the kind of rug that wanted to be stepped on, at least not by someone wearing shabby trainers. Midge walked around it and sat on her bed, jiggled up and down on it a couple of times to test the mattress. She looked at Celandine’s cup, brilliant in the gentle blue light that shone onto the desk that would also serve as her bedside table. Silver, her mum had said. Silver? How could that be? Midge reached out for the cup – and immediately fumbled it, almost dropped it in fright. There! It had happened again, just like before . . . a snatch of song . . . a chorus of many voices raised in harmony. The little people singing. On and off like a radio . . . just a brief burst of sound inside her head, no time to catch any of the words.

  A funny feeling spread about Midge’s shoulders, and she turned round. The big old photograph was on the wall behind her. They’d put it in her room, just as she had asked them to. It was beside the new wardrobe, hidden from her view until now. The glass had been cleaned, and the lacquered frame was shiny black, polished. Celandine. That extraordinary-looking girl, gazing down upon her. The decades of kitchen grime and grease had been washed away, and now every detail of the photograph was clear and focused – the pale face, the wicker box, the sombre grandmother clock in the background. Twenty-five past ten. And the hands . . . the hands that held the little bridle. Midge could somehow feel the texture of that bridle, how the leather was smoother on one side than the other. She could hear the faint jingling sound that the three little bells made, and the deep hollow tick of the clock in the background. She knew how chilly the air had been in that little parlour, long ago, when that photograph had been taken, and how tight and uncomfortable that dress. Somehow she just knew. It was almost as though she had been there herself. Such a strange sensation, but she wasn’t afraid. There was no need.

  Midge waited as her racing heart begin to calm itself. She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. No, this was nothing to be afraid of. It was just a picture. A picture of a girl with wild fair hair, buttoned and booted and pinched and pinned to within an inch of her life. Celandine, her great-great-aunt. A girl who smiled with her mouth because she’d been told to, but whose eyes and thoughts were for ever elsewhere, somewhere far beyond the camera. Dark, dark eyes that looked over the shoulder of the photographer towards . . . what? Howard’s Hill? This was one thing that she didn’t know.

  You’re lovely, though, thought Midge. You’re the best thing in this room, and you belong here with me. A moment of understanding came to her then – a jump of realization and certainty. This was your room, wasn’t it? You lived here. You sat here, and slept here, and read your books here, and looked out of this window, just as I do. You lived in this room, didn’t you? In this very room . . . where I was born.

  The light from the blue lamp glowed softly in the picture glass, and Midge gradually saw that the hazy image of her own puzzled face was also reflected there, a shadow of her ancestor’s. A big lump came to her throat, and it was hard to swallow it away. She thought – it’s you and me, isn’t it? Just the two of us. There’s nobody else to help us in this. It’s just you and me . . .

  She kept staring at the photograph, lost in her own swirling thoughts, until gradually she felt her shoulders begin to sag, a sense of comfort stealing over her. It would be all right. She shouldn’t worry so much. She must just take each day as it came, and do the best she could.

  Eventually she heard quick footsteps coming along the landing.

  ‘Towels.’ Her mum swept in, a brisk presence, and Midge reluctantly turned away from the photograph.

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  ‘Forgot to ask you, darling – how’s that headache of yours?’

  Midge considered for a moment. ‘Gone,’ she said.

  Chapter Two

  ‘UNCLE BRIAN, WHAT do you actually know about Great-aunt Celandine?’

  Now that the photograph hung in her room, Midge’s curiosity had been rekindled. And after all, there was no reason why she shouldn’t ask questions. Celandine was family, wasn’t she?

  ‘What do I know about her?’ Uncle Brian was making heavy work of filling the new jug kettle. He hadn’t realized that there had been no need to take the lid off, and now he was searching for the plastic filter that had popped out and disappeared into the washing-up bowl.

  ‘Um . . . well, not much really. She was my grandfather’s younger sister – your great-great-aunt. There was always some talk . . . some suggestion . . . oh this thing is ridiculous! Why don’t they just keep things simple? OK, that’s it – I’ve had enough. Hang on a minute, Midge . . .’

  Midge waited as Uncle Brian put the new kettle to one side and rootled around in the cupboard beneath the sink. He found what he was looking for – the old whistling kettle – filled it at the tap, and plonked it on top of the Rayburn stove. Water glooped out of it and spat up at him from the hotplate.

  ‘There! What could be easier than that? Stick to what you know, I say.’

  Midge laughed. She liked the fact that Uncle Brian had resisted too much alteration to his part of the house. The old kitchen had been treated to some double-glazed windows and a fresh coat of paint, but by and large it was still the warm and friendly place that it had always been. The big Welsh dresser remained, and the little travel alarm clock ticked
cheerfully away on the top shelf. The picture of Celandine was now in her own room, of course, and the space where it had been was taken up by a new noticeboard – already overcrowded with bills and receipts.

  ‘So.’ Uncle Brian reached up for a couple of mugs from the dresser. ‘Great-aunt Celandine. Sounds like something from a play, doesn’t it?’ He made his voice go deep and echoey. ‘Great . . . Aunt . . . Celandine. Yes, there was always the suggestion that she was a bit . . . what’s the word? . . . fey, perhaps. Believed in fairies and suchlike. Or so my old dad used to say. Tea? It was also said that she was run away with by the gypsies. I’d forgotten about that. Terrible really. It used to be a kind of family threat when your mum and I were kids. “If you don’t do so-and-so, then the gypsies’ll come for you – just like they did your Great-aunt Celandine.” Total nonsense, of course.’

  ‘But what happened to her? Is she still alive?’ Midge tried to sound casual.

  ‘Alive? No. Couldn’t be. I’ve got no idea what happened to her. Grew up and moved away, I suppose. The farm was passed down through the sons – the way it usually was in those days. From Great-grandad to Grandad, then to my dad, then to me. Girls . . . well, girls weren’t . . .’

  ‘Important?’

  Uncle Brian leaned against the sink with his arms folded, and sighed. ‘It was all the farm, you see. That was what was important – the farm, the land. We’ve got a few family records in a box somewhere, but it’s nearly all connected with business. So many heifers raised. So much grain bought and sold. Nothing much there to do with people at all. Very few photos. No letters or anything like that, not that I’ve ever seen. I really don’t know much about those who lived here, let alone those who disappeared. One of ’em was killed in the First World War, I do know that. Some others emigrated – grandmother’s two sisters, I believe. A few of them are buried in the churchyard at Statton, including my mum and dad. Apart from that I’m pretty hazy on family history.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The kettle, which had been muttering away to itself for the last half-minute, now began to properly whistle, and Uncle Brian pushed himself away from the sink in order to tend to it.

  ‘Why? Are you interested in that sort of thing?’

  ‘Yeah. Sort of. I’d just like to know.’

  Uncle Brian brought milk from the fridge. ‘Well, I suppose there would be parish records – births, marriages, deaths and so on. Might be worth a shot, although if Great-auntie had been buried locally then we’d probably know about it. She’d be over the same churchyard wall as the rest of ’em.’

  ‘But if she’d moved away to London or something then there wouldn’t be any records here?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. And you have to remember that families do lose contact with one another. More so then than now, perhaps. Just a move of twenty or thirty miles in those days might mean that you lost touch with a brother or sister altogether – and especially if you hadn’t been that close in the first place. Tell you what’ – Uncle Brian placed three big mugs of tea on the kitchen table – ‘I could ask at the pub, if you like. There’s a couple of old boys down there who know a bit about local history. Easier than going through parish records, and just as likely to turn something up. Take a mug of tea through to Katie, will you? See if you can’t get her to buck up a bit. Last day of the holidays and I don’t think she’s spent more than an hour of it away from the sofa.’

  ‘OK. Thanks, Uncle Brian.’ Midge picked up two of the mugs, took a quick sip out of one of them, and wandered through to the sitting room.

  ‘Hiya,’ she said.

  Her cousin Katie looked up from the magazine she was reading.

  ‘Oh. Hi, Midge. Is that for me? Do you know’ – Katie pushed herself into an upright position and held out her hand for the mug of tea – ‘I just refuse to believe that it’s school again tomorrow. It seems like we’ve only been on holiday for about ten minutes. God, I hate school, don’t you? The sooner it’s over and done with and I can get down to something useful, the better.’

  Midge sat beside her cousin on the sofa, and glanced at the open magazine. ‘How to tell when he’s two-timing you . . .’ she read. ‘What do you call useful?’ she said.

  ‘Well, something real. Something that matters a bit more than simultaneous equations and . . . and physics. God, I hate physics. I’m thinking of becoming a fashion editor, actually.’

  ‘First week back shouldn’t be too bad,’ said Midge. Then she remembered something. ‘We’re supposed to be going on a trip, I think, this Friday. Some butterfly farm.’

  ‘Oh, that.’ Katie didn’t sound too impressed. ‘We went there in Year Eight. I thought I’d die of boredom.’

  Midge stared out of the window of the school coach and watched the winter countryside roll by. The sun was shining, and it was dreamily pleasant to see the light dancing on the watery fields.

  She had little or nothing to say to the girl who sat next to her – Kerry Hodge. What a moke. All teeth and adenoids. Kerry Hodge didn’t seem to be able to breathe without making a constant gurgling sound – little bubbles of spit that popped and crackled at the corners of her perpetually open mouth.

  From the rear seat of the bus came the loud chatter of those who always occupied that privileged position: Rhona McAllister and her admirers. As a new girl, Midge had not yet achieved back-of-the-bus status. Nor front-of-the-dinner-queue status, for that matter. She was strictly in the middle for everything. It didn’t bother her. There was nothing so special about Rhona’s circle of buddies, male or female, that Midge felt desperate to be a part of. Most of them seemed a bit thick, really. Turnips. She missed her friend Azzie, quick-thinking, tap-dancing Azzie, who could run circles round this lot, physically and verbally, before they’d have time to blink. And she missed London, the buzz of it, far more than she’d thought she would. Everything was slower here.

  There was one girl who was OK, Samantha Lewis. Sometimes she and Sam were paired off in chemistry or physics lessons, and they got on well enough. But Sam was really part of Rhona’s crowd, and so that’s where she was usually to be found during lunch break, or once school was over.

  Break times were the hardest. Midge sometimes sought out one of her cousins, just to have someone to talk to and be with, but as Katie was in the year above and George in the year below this could be a bit awkward. And it was different at school. Katie and George each had their own friends. They weren’t very often at Mill Farm during term time, and so she didn’t see as much of them as she had expected.

  ‘Shall we work on our ashignment together?’

  ‘What?’

  Kerry Hodge had turned to speak to her. Midge felt a speckle of saliva land on the back of her wrist, and she surreptitiously drew her hand into the sleeve of her blazer in order to wipe it off.

  ‘Er . . . maybe. I think we’re supposed to try and do it by ourselves.’

  ‘Mish Oldham saysh we can work in pairsh if we want.’ The wretched girl was like a watering can.

  ‘Does she?’ Midge was non-committal. She turned back to the window and said no more, hoping that this would be enough to make Kerry take the hint. Ten minutes’ conversation with that one and you’d be needing a bath towel. And in any case, she suspected that ‘working together’ with Kerry would simply mean that she’d end up doing her assignment for her. Plus, of course, it would be social suicide to be seen hanging around with a dreg like Kerry. It was bad enough having to sit next to her on a bus, let alone be her work partner.

  But then she felt mean. It wasn’t Kerry’s fault that she had trouble breathing normally. Or speaking normally. Or eating, drinking, thinking . . .

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll do questions one to five, you do six to ten. Then we’ll meet up and swap answers.’ It was a compromise, but it was as far as she was prepared to go. Also, she reasoned, if Kerry’s answers turned out to be rubbish, then there’d still be time to complete the assignment by herself.

  ‘OK.’ Kerry seemed happy en
ough with that. ‘Want some Juishy Fruit?’ She offered Midge a stick of gum. ‘Shtops my mouth getting dry,’ she said.

  Midge gave Kerry a quick glance. Was that supposed to be a joke? But there was little to be gleaned from the expression on Kerry’s goofy face, and so Midge resisted the impulse to laugh. Instead she just said, ‘Er . . . no. I’m OK, thanks,’ and continued to gaze out of the window. It was pretty funny, though, and she had to bite her lip as she imagined herself telling Azzie about it in their Friday night chatroom sessions.

  The bare countryside gave way to the outer suburbs of town, and then a long straight road bordered by open parkland and a big cemetery. Eventually the coach pulled into a broad driveway, and Midge caught a glimpse of the brightly painted sign as they passed through the entrance – Tone Vale Butterfly Farm. The coach wound on amid high banks of rhododendron bushes and finally came to a halt in front of a large white building. There was a general bustle of movement as everyone began to collect their question sheets and lunchboxes together. Miss Oldham stood up at the front of the coach and called for quiet.

  ‘I hope I don’t have to remind you of the purpose of this visit – Carl, are you with us? Good. Today’s exercise forms part of this term’s science project . . .’

  Midge had discovered that she’d trodden on a piece of gum, Kerry’s probably, and was more concerned with scraping that off her shoe than listening to Miss Oldham. ‘. . . marked as coursework . . . sensible behaviour at all times . . . lunch in the gardens at twelve-fifteen, provided the weather stays fine . . . to either myself or Mr Edmunson . . . and leaving at two-thirty sharp . . .’ The bits of teacher-speak continued to drift over thirty heedless heads, as everyone bumped and shuffled their way down the centre of the coach and out onto the sunny tarmac. ‘Don’t chase the peacocks, don’t touch the displays, don’t all try and crowd into the shop at the same time . . .’

  Midge stared up at the main building. It was big enough to be a mansion, but the white painted walls and small plain windows made it look as though it might once have been something official rather than a rich person’s home. The grounds were pretty though – quite exotic – with tall yew hedges and monkey-puzzle trees and spiky shrubs. Already some of the boys were opening their lunchboxes and throwing bits of bread to the peacocks.