(Originally published in Nightscript.)
You might say I couldn’t have been dead. But I accepted that my fight was over as I drifted like a feather, down into the soft spread of darkness. Then the darkness jolted from my lungs. There came the growl of a dog and distant words:
“It’s Catherine, isn’t it? There, there—you fell into the water but you’re fine now. You know who I am don’t you, Catherine? From Saint Jude’s?”
Life was burning back; I felt it scorch me. Something made of cloth was being rubbed against my skin.
“Careful does it,” said a different voice. “Just look at her arms.”
I could see the Reverend Wilfred Lowe more clearly now: his big, familiar face hovering somewhere over mine. “Time for that later, my love,” he said to the woman. “Just making sure she’s safe, that’s the main thing.”
I pushed myself up on my elbows.
“Now, don’t be scared, Catherine,” the reverend said. “We’ll help you. Not to worry, my dear, not to worry.”
But he spoke too late; I was on my feet by then, swaying in rhythm with a world swimming sideways. My two saviors edged towards me, but their kind faces and their soothing words filled me with sudden fear and I staggered back and half-fell, half-ran into the leaning gray reeds that spread out from the water’s edge. If I can reach the hawthorn trees, I thought, they’ll never catch me.
When I came to the road and was in sight of home, I still didn’t understand I wasn’t dead. I didn’t see how I could be alive.
•••
I’d been sent away to boarding school the year before, just after my fourteenth birthday. My father had been promoted to manager at the local bank and he’d asked me, what was money for, if not to give your only child the best? So that was that: out of the blue an exile, and expected to be grateful to leave my friends and everything I’d ever known, in exchange for extra Latin.
That Easter when I arrived at the railway station for the holidays, my parents weren’t waiting with the car. Instead, a man approached and introduced himself as the taxi driver they’d sent to collect me: I asked him why they hadn’t come themselves, but he couldn’t say. They could at least have warned me, I thought. But maybe something had happened; was Granny ill again? There’d been a stroke a few years before and you couldn’t help being afraid. Or could something have happened to them—my parents. What would I do then?
We drove past the floral display outside the church and the driver waved to Reverend Wilfred Lowe, who was standing by the gate like a guard. It was a small town, and so the reverend must have known he wouldn’t be seeing my family for the Easter services. My father was an atheist, for one. He didn’t advertise it for fear of offense, but he betrayed his lack of faith in the Deity by avoiding His institutions and His celebrations and by staying silent whenever He was praised. My mother’s beliefs were a more movable feast: a mess of palmistry and tea-leaves and color-illustrated myths; she’d even been to a séance once. It was as though, for her, the spiritual realm fulfilled a need for outré entertainment. But I don’t want to give the impression they were unconventional types; in fact, they went to great lengths to conform to their small society. They played tennis and golf and bridge, ran cake sales and charity events, and my mother was a keen gardener who’d won first prize for her flowers at the annual summer fete. Mummy didn’t work—this was fifty years ago—but she looked after her mother-in-law, who lived with us, and she looked after me as well, in a slightly more careless way.
That afternoon, the taxi stopped outside our house and I looked out, searching for my mother’s face. All the curtains were drawn, making me doubly sure that something had happened and so recently that no one had had time to tell me. At the best of times our house had an unapproachable look. It stood on its own a mile from town, backed by fields of fenced-in pasture, beyond which were woods and the many-forked paths that led up to Coldhill pond. The house’s dark windows looked down beneath a gray tiled roof, which on overcast days seemed to slide straight out of the sky. Its brick walls were dingy and mottled and its door, with a knocker like a small clenched fist, was the grim, unshining black of iron dug from a grave. In summer, when the roses in the front garden lifted their bright heads, the look of the house would jolly up, but that day was one of those when it turned a cold shoulder to the outside world.
After the taxi driver had helped me with my luggage and left, the front door opened: it seemed like my mother had been standing there, waiting for him to go.
“Mummy! You made me jump,” I said as I went to step inside, but she held me back with a hand on my arm.
“I didn’t have time to tell you, Catherine,” she said in a rush, “but we’ve got some guests. I know you’ll be on your best behavior, won’t you?” She turned her head. “Look—there they are.”
I looked past her down the black and white tiled hallway. At first, I thought they might be medical people, or undertakers.
“Oh. Yes. I see them…Is Granny all right?”
“Yes, dear,” she said. “Granny’s fine. She’s doing very well. Now go in and say hello to Mr and Mrs Kett.”
The couple made no effort to approach me, so it was I who walked down the hallway to where they stood, beyond the last angle of the staircase. The only daylight entered from the glass above the door, and, that afternoon, theatrically steep white rays sloped down towards these strangers, Mr and Mrs Kett. Only someone who’d seen them would understand when I say that there was something undefined about their faces. The planes and contours seemed to sweep away, as if they couldn’t really be contained. Their cheekbones, their foreheads, their eyes, pitched forward, whilst remaining at the same time still. They were tall and slim, their hair fair and long, and they wore pale, loose clothing; the woman a long dress, and the man a shirt and trousers, possibly silk. But this was only an impression: it would be hard to give details or to be definite. It was like looking at a pencil sketch with highlights and unfinished lines, where forms are hinted at as they blend into the background paper. I’d never seen anything like them. It was the 1960s, but where we lived, you’d never have known. No one stood out, no one had glamour: no one glowed like Mr and Mrs Kett. How on earth had my mother found them?
“I’m very pleased to meet you,” I said and held out my hand for Mrs Kett to shake. Her mouth was a small shadow in her unfixed face. She made no move to take my hand so I let it drop, but neither she nor Mr Kett took their eyes from me as they silently, just perceptibly, shifted their heads. I didn’t find it at all rude, this unwillingness to small talk. Instantly, it won my admiration. They were wonderful, completely captivating, and I was very, very impressed. Then my mother’s voice broke the spell, calling to them from the kitchen, and they moved away, like beautiful wraiths. I wanted nothing more than to follow them, but I knew my grandmother would be expecting me; she’d be waiting in the living room, whose door stood open across the hallway. I’ll find them afterwards, I thought, when this is out the way.
The living room ran the length of the house, and that afternoon, with the curtains drawn at the front and only partly open at the back, it wasn’t much brighter than the hallway I’d just left. Despite its generous size, it was a room with a closed-up, shut-in feel, crammed with furniture and thick-shaded lamps and too many paintings in heavy, ornamental frames. Granny was sitting at the end in her usual chair, looking out at the back lawn. Although her speech hadn’t fully recovered since the stroke, her mind had stayed keen, and I saw with some relief that she’d taken up knitting again: from her thinnest needles, a fine lace shawl was growing, falling in red filigrees across her lap. She looked at me eagerly as I leaned to kiss her, and kept her eyes fixed on me as she strained for speech. I knelt by her chair and waited, holding her hand, until she said: “Help me…with this.”
“Oh, Granny,” I said. “You know I can’t knit like you can. I’d be no help, would I? Anyway, you’re doing so well without me. You’re so clever at things like that.”
She looked at me with bemusement, and for a moment I wondered if she knew me, or if she thought I was someone from the past. Clearly frustrated, she felt around again for words.
“Catherine…undo…this.”
I squeezed her hand: “Oh, Granny. It’s so beautiful, I can’t. I’d ruin it.”
Her eyes grew wide, as though amazed. Why on earth was she was talking to me about her knitting? She knew I was hopeless at it. Had she forgotten?
“Have you seen our guests?” I asked. She closed her eyes and shook her head. “The Ketts?” I tried again. But the change of subject didn’t help; tears escaped from beneath the crinkled eyelids and slipped into the hollows of her face.
I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know what I’d done to upset her, and I was thinking it would be best if I just left, when my mother came bustling into the room. She looked at me accusingly: “What’s wrong with Granny? Catherine—what on earth have you said?” She fussed across and started stroking my grandmother’s hair.
“I only asked her if she’d met the Ketts.”
“Of course she has. She loves them just like we do. Don’t you, Hilda?”
Granny’s head had fallen forward. Somehow, within seconds, she was asleep.
“I’m sorry. I honestly don’t know what I did to upset her,” I said, and then, softly: “Mummy, I wanted to ask—how did you meet them, the Ketts?”
She didn’t look at me as she absorbed my question. Her top lip thinned and then she said, in the voice she used to close inquiries down: “Through a friend. Now, why don’t you go into the garden and say hello to Daddy?” She gave me a quick smile. “He’s taken the week off, so we can all be together. Isn’t that nice of him?”
•••
I found him at the end of the long walled garden, where the apple trees were. He was standing over a pile of junk, emptied from the tumbledown brick outbuildings which my mother used for potting seedlings and storing tools. She must be having a re-design, I’d thought as I walked down; there was bare earth in the borders where the perennials had been, and shallow trenches dug into the lawns and vegetable beds. She’d always liked to move things around from time to time, although I’d have expected to have heard about a major plan, as this one seemed to be.
My father kissed me and then slumped down on a packing crate. “Oh, it’s a job, clearing all this,” he said. He had a thin, bloodless sort of face, but he was very fit, what with all the tennis and golf he played, so it surprised me that this not very heavy work had left him hot and breathless.
Around the open doors of the two small buildings were heaps of flowerpots and trays, watering cans, baskets, coils of wire, battered tins of preparations.
“But doesn’t Mummy need all this stuff?” I said, starting for the first door.
“No!” he shouted, as soon as I moved. “Leave it alone!”
I turned around, startled.
“Why’s that?”
“We can’t disturb them. Can’t you see?” He nodded at the little building.
“What am I meant to be seeing?”
And then I did see something through the cobwebby window; a smudged movement, the sort you catch at the corner of your eye, the kind a small, fast animal makes.
“Is something in there?” I said.
“The Ketts. We really shouldn’t interrupt them. They’re cleaning that one up for more guests. They don’t need us getting in their way. They have to do things how they like them.”
“The Ketts?” I felt myself flush as I spoke their name. “But I thought they were inside the house? Why would guests want the shed?”
“Better ask your mother,” he said. He shifted on his crate and looked up at me with shining eyes. “So you’ve seen them, have you? Aren’t they wonderful?”
“Oh yes. I’ve never seen anyone like them. Where ever do they come from? I asked Mummy but she wouldn’t say.”
He gave a short laugh and raised his eyebrows. “You know, I didn’t think to ask her that. But I’m just very glad they came, to tell you the truth. It’s been such a pleasure having them around the place. Yes, last week, I think it was, they came. Such marvelous people. You know—there is such a thing as the perfect guests. People say there isn’t, don’t they, but there is.”
I took another, newly curious look at the old building, at its missing roof tiles and mossy bricks, finding it hard to picture what the Ketts could hope to do in there. And then, behind the dirty glass, I glimpsed another movement, which could have been anything; the loose flutter of a dress, or a silky sleeve, or the turning of a face.
•••
For the rest of the afternoon I lay in my bedroom, getting up every now and then to fetch a glass of water. My parents were somewhere outside, working on the sheds, and so, I imagined, were the Ketts. I didn’t want to interfere. I didn’t want to upset them in any way, however small or unintended. Really, if I were such a considerate person, I should have spared some time for my grandmother that afternoon, instead of lazing around on my bed; I could even have tried to help her with her knitting if she liked. But her outburst earlier had scared me. How could I know what might make her cry? What was the right thing to say? I even convinced myself it would be kindest not to disturb her later by going in to say goodnight. So I lay there, thinking about the Ketts, trying to hold the image of them in my head.
At eight that evening, my mother called all of us except Granny into the dining room and, with some ceremony, lit candles in her best silver candlesticks in honor of our guests. The table was polished to a mirror sheen, and my father sat at its head, with my mother and I at either side. The Ketts sat at the other end, separated from us by empty chairs, which seemed to me to be a gesture of politeness, a shy reluctance to impose. The table made an island in the candlelight, framed by a fitful darkness from which our guests’ faces arose, part-concealed and indistinct. Small reflected flames quivered in our cut crystal glasses as we drank, and we drank a lot (for the first time ever I was allowed wine) because we had no appetite for food. We spoke sometimes: we must have chatted away quite happily, because I have a memory of easiness, lightness, of feeling that we were basking in the fascinating company of the Ketts. I do remember asking my mother about the new guests that were coming and her telling me: “We’ll always keep a welcome for friends of Mr and Mrs Kett.” And we raised our glasses and drank toast after toast to lasting friendship.
I wasn’t at all resistant to alcohol of course, and after dinner I went straight up to bed. The room spun when I lay down and then an annoying restlessness, a kind of twitching, nervous pain, built up inside me until I couldn’t bear it any longer. I hopped up and bumped around my room, hoping movement might ease the horrible feeling, but after a few circuits came to rest at the window that looked down onto garden at the back. My parents and the Ketts were out there, standing on the soil where the grass had been. Our guests were making wide, languid gestures, like people turning in their sleep, and my parents, rooted to the spot, were watching and listening, caught in a kind of rapture. It was so predictable, normally, life at home, and my parents never seemed to know quite what to do with me, but now we were all coming together, all doing new and interesting things, due to the inspiring presence of the Ketts. It felt like the deepest honor anyone could ever receive had been bestowed upon us.
•••
When I got up the next morning, I went to the window again. They were out there already, at not even seven ’o’ clock. My parents were marking out lines with sticks and string, while, with their backs to me, the Ketts might have been Roman emperors directing their slaves, as they sipped their wine, and watched. But that’s not to say there was anything imperious about them, not at all. My parents’ shining faces, their giddy, rushed actions, showed them to be as excited and willing as children on Christmas Eve.
A delicious thought occurred to me as I dressed: I could have a quick look in the spare room, where the Ketts were staying. Here was my chance, now the coast was clear, to see something of their secret selves. Just a look, just a peek at the little things they kept about them. I’ll only be in there a few seconds, that’s all, I thought, as I crept along the landing. They’ll never know, I said to myself, as I pushed open the door. But there was nothing there, no sign of them, no clues; no socks, no scarves, no hairpins, no books, no magazines. They’d brought nothing with them, and didn’t even seem to have slept in the bed.
I had no appetite for breakfast when I went downstairs, so I drank a cup of tea and more water, which I tinted pink with the dregs from an open bottle of wine. On my way out to the garden, I looked round the living room door: my grandmother turned her unsteady head and for a moment I thought the look in her eyes was not frustration at her efforts to speak, but hopelessness.
“Help…with this,” she said.
I laughed an uncomfortable refusal and told I’d see her at lunchtime, but that now I had to go outside because we had guests. I knew how condescending I sounded, how weak my excuses seemed, but I really intended to make it up to her later, when I had more time.
It had rained during the night and the freshly dug earth smelled of rot and leaves and mushrooms. A grid of taut green string stretched out before me over the remains of the grass and as I looked, it seemed to levitate, rising and rolling into a slowly spinning maze. Of course, that’s what it was—a maze: lines joining and dividing, dead ends, reversals.
“Why didn’t you tell me what you’d got planned?” I said when I reached my parents, who were busy shoveling soil into a wheelbarrow. “What a wonderful idea! And you’ve got to let me help.”
“Oh, darling, would you?” my father said. “You know, it’s a big job with just us.”
A few feet away, the Ketts seemed to be smiling. They leaned against each other, loose and relaxed, drowsily sipping their red wine. I didn’t ask, but I knew this project must have been their idea. It was so adventurous, so daring.
“And then we’ll have to get the stones to finish it. We’ll need all our strength for that,” my mother said. “There’s going to be walls. Walls all around it, so you can get lost.”
“That’ll be even more incredible,” I said and I jumped down into the trench they’d dug. As they handed me a shovel, I looked to check if the Ketts were watching, but they were drifting away, down towards the outbuildings at the back, behind the trees.
“Are the Ketts all right?” I asked. “Mightn’t they get bored?”
My mother stopped digging for a moment. Her curled hair was bound up in a spotted scarf, and her chin was smeared with dirt. “Oh no,” she said. “They’ve got lots to do today. They’re getting things ready for the other guests.”
“And when will they be here?”
“Oh, I don’t know that yet,” she said, and I knew, by the way her top lip tightened, that it would be futile to question her further.
At midday, or thereabouts, we stopped for lunch, but none of us were very hungry and we made do with a crust of bread left over from a previous day; but we had water and several glasses of wine, which was what we felt was needed. Then we went back to the garden, with me forgetting the promise to look in on Granny, although I’d made it only hours before.
It was hard to gauge our progress from ground level, but as we dug, Mr and Mrs Kett would appear from time to time and by the subtlest of signs, they let us know that we were doing well. I would see the blur of their flowing clothes, the slow expressive gestures of their hands, the eloquence of their hazy eyes, and understand how truly glad they were to see people so committed and hardworking. And we worked at a breathless rate, my father wheeling the earth we’d removed round to the front of the house, where he tipped it over the rose beds and the gravel path. We’d see to it later, my mother said, when we had more time. I reveled in the simple pleasures and discoveries of our task: the hair-like roots ripped from the turf, the round brown stones that tumbled from my digging blade and the fat worms that flipped about in panic when I lifted them away. We didn’t really talk, so deeply were we focused on our work, so determined to complete it as quickly as we could, to impress the Ketts.
By the evening, we’d dug out half the former lawn, the borders and two of the vegetable beds. I went upstairs to change before dinner and was astounded when I looked down and saw the intricacy of what we’d created. It was going to be stupendous; like nothing I’d ever seen.
That evening, when we gathered in the candlelight around the smooth and shining table, I suppose we were all too tired to eat. Instead, we lifted the cut crystal glasses in shaking hands and drank toast after toast with our guests. To friendship, we said. To getting the job done, we said. To dreams, we said, again and again, as the exhilarating hours fled by. Sometimes our guests seemed to retreat into the dark, but then the candle flames would straighten and briefly reveal them, bathed in snowy, moving light. Eventually, so overcome by intense emotion that I could hardly speak or see, I left the table, embarrassed at myself, not wanting the Ketts to know how weak I really was.
I should’ve been exhausted, but my heart was beating so fast, and my limbs were aching and twitching in such an uncontrollable, internal way, that I passed the night in a fever of restlessness, my waking thoughts as unlikely and confused as the dreams which suddenly took me. It’s possible I was genuinely ill, because in the morning I couldn’t remember how I came to be standing outside the old brick outbuilding, my hands pressed against the misted glass, my eyes unblinking, fixed upon the dark interior. My mother found me and told me to come away, and soon, after forgoing breakfast, we started digging again.
What about Granny, I thought as we got near lunch. Did I see her last night? No— I’d forgotten. With everything going on, the usual routine had just fallen away. And what were the odds of finishing the maze anytime soon? Perhaps we had overestimated our abilities. I had the feeling that the Ketts, who had seemed so happy with us before, were starting to think the same way. I started to feel that they were disappointed with our progress, that they expected more. They came into sight less frequently, and there was a different quality to the movements they made; a touch of impatience in their graceful limbs, a reproach in their inscrutable gaze. They lit a fire at the end of the garden, presumably to burn the stuff from the sheds, and I could see the flames, intensely red, rising up from the pile of rubbish. Please don’t let them leave, I thought, please never let them leave.
We drank water for lunch and at a quarter past four, my father fell forward into the trench, and lay there, panting, his eyes wide and trying to turn backwards in his head like a stricken beast. He brushed my mother and me away and pulled himself up.
“I’m sorry, girls,” he said. “What an old fool. Overdone it a bit, that’s all. I’ll go and sit inside with Granny for a while, and leave you to it. What d’you say?”
An hour later, my knees gave way. My mother said she thought it was probably time to stop, and, mainly because I couldn’t face the stairs, I went to join my father and Granny in the living room. They were sitting in their chairs by the window, staring out at the garden. They’re as tired as me, I thought, as I dragged over a chair to sit beside them.
•••
It seemed they had forgotten about us, my mother and the Ketts. I could hear my mother talking to our guests as she moved around the house; sometimes her high-pitched laugh, sometimes murmured words, from the dining room, or the hallway, or moving upstairs.
“Help me with this,” Granny had said when I’d taken my seat, and I’d answered: “How can I do that, Granny, when I can barely lift my head?”
Her hands trembled, white against the lacy red knitting that fell across her lap.
“Well, perhaps you’d like to help me instead, Catherine?” my father said. His voice was strange and I leaned forward, trying to read his face, but it was becoming as vague and unknowable as the Ketts’.
“Daddy, I’m not making excuses,” I said. “I don’t think I can move. I’m so exhausted.”
He looked at me with the same bemusement as Granny. Was it his idea of a joke, a way of saying I was being selfish by not helping with her damned knitting? Was I supposed to say yes just to please her, and then make a mess of things? I would’ve gone up to my room, but I didn’t have the strength to move.
The evening darkened, but not one of us rose to turn on a light. Outside, the sky was solid, black marble streaked with grey, but the house around us was fragile, whispering with breath. The whirr of a moth in another room, the slow drip of the kitchen tap, seemed as near as the echoing tick of the glass-cased clock that sat upon the mantelpiece. Every so often, I caught a glimpse of gossamer movement which barely registered on the air, and I would anticipate the appearance of the Ketts, but each moment of anticipation seemed to rob me of that wished-for possibility.
Moonlight gleamed on the carved wooden arms of our chairs, and fell across my grandmother’s white hair and my father’s open eyes. It glinted on something lying in the garden; the steel of some tool we’d left behind. The light fell across my feet, which I noticed were bare.
When the birds began chirruping at dawn, I seemed to hear them as through an illness; queasy, garbled caricatures. The thick pile carpet lapped wet against my feet: when I tried to move my toes, it released an odor of decay, and I closed my eyes in fear of filaments and spores and green clouds of dust. Help me, I thought, and something moved inside me. Was that a voice, or the sound of something walking, shuffling, through dead leaves?
“Get away from here,” I heard.
It couldn’t have been my father’s voice, could it? No, it was the sound of something walking through dead leaves, imitating speech. They were still asleep in their chairs, my father and Granny, their faces in shadow, untouched yet by the faint morning light.
“Get away from here,” I heard.
But I was only dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, summer clothes, and my cold arms and legs were covered with marks, like rust.
“Get away from here,” I said out loud, but to move those limbs would be to dislocate them, to move them would mean excruciating pain. But I had to breathe; I had to breathe air beyond the boundaries of our house, if only for a short while, before the work started again.
I moved those screaming limbs; I left my chair, and I went into the hallway, where the black and white tiles tilted and the walls bubbled beneath their skin. The door swung open to reveal the earth mounds where the front garden had been.
I ran up the path that skirted the cattle pasture and onto the one which led up through the thickets of hawthorn and larch. At the banks of Coldhill pond, I stopped. I hadn’t intended to run so far, but now that I had, I gulped the morning air like a person who’d been suffocating. The pond looked black, yet it glittered with light and suddenly, a breeze split its surface into a thousand freezing beads and I looked down and saw, in the deep, what I knew at once was the face of a corpse. Without a thought, I jumped.
•••
Reverend Wilfred Lowe’s wife bent down to where I knelt. She peeled my fingers from my grandmother’s legs, which were deathly cold and streaked with dried blood; like her hands, they were tied to the chair. Mrs Lowe put a blanket over my shoulders. I knew she didn’t want me to look at the other chair by the window, the one where my father sat staring out with frozen eyes to where, I’m told, my mother lay.
“What about the Ketts?” I said to Mrs Lowe as she led me away.
I asked everyone that. I told them all: you need to speak to the Ketts. They’ll tell you how happy we were. They’ll know what happened, and when they explain you’ll see that it must have been someone else. Because how could they ever have done what all of them said they had? Only someone who’d never met them would think that. It made no sense. If they had, why not kill me too?
What do they look like, they said? Where did they go? How do we find them? Where do they live? They don’t live anywhere, I should have said. They visit.
•••
Yesterday, after fifty years, I saw them again. They haven’t changed: why would they? I was on a train bound for the coast, when, just outside a town, we slowed to a stop behind an isolated house. I saw the pale circles of their faces, the mysterious luminance of their forms, and as we gathered speed again, I saw a hand rise as if to acknowledge me. I raised my own hand in answer, to let them know I’d seen them and was grateful, even now, to be remembered.
