Eliza
Katarina told me that Uncle Ian had insisted on getting up and dressed to greet me. I followed her into the house, that seemed quieter than I had ever found it: no pipes singing, no floorboards creaking as I crossed, no wind whistling through the single-glazed windows. It was, I thought, a respectful, watchful silence as if the house were waiting, not for me, for something altogether more momentous. In the silence my steps grew exaggerated and Uncle Ian called out to me before I had reached the sitting room.
He was in his usual chair by the window. I thought he had lost weight in the weeks since I’d last seen him. His face had the look of an ancient child, his hair stood up in tufts and his eyes were huge behind the reading glasses.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘She scared you into coming, didn’t she?’ He nodded towards Katarina. ‘Interfering old woman.’
Katarina ignored him like you would a naughty child.
I touched his tissue-paper cheek with my lips. ‘I had planned to come over about now anyway. I wanted to see the woods. I remember Grandmother Eva telling Rose and me about the woods in spring.’
‘Katarina won’t let me go for a proper walk,’ he grumbled. ‘She’s always been bossy but now there seems to be no stopping her.’
Katarina sighed and shook her head. ‘I think it’s too far and I’ve told him so but you know, he’s a stubborn old man.’
We talked back and forth and eventually it was decided that I would go with him after lunch but that we would turn around the minute he tired.
The sun’s rays spread like fingers through the branches of the trees and the air was filled with cracking, snapping sounds. I turned to Uncle Ian, who was walking toddler-stepped by my side.
‘Is it really the trees making those sounds? Eva told us about this but we never quite believed her.’
‘It’s the beech leaves.’ He raised a shaking arm an inch or two, pointing towards the canopy of young leaves that seemed to float above our heads like a pale green veil. ‘After the long freeze of winter, when the warm sun comes out, the buds burst into leaf like a series of tiny explosions.’
We stood still for a few minutes, listening. Then, as we walked further into the woods we came upon a sea of tiny white star-shaped flowers. ‘Vitsippor?’ I said. I bent down.
‘You can’t pick them,’ he said, just as I was about to do just that. ‘They’re protected.’
As we went further into the woods I was careful not to trample the little white flowers underfoot – if you weren’t allowed to pick them I was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to crush them to death either – but they formed such a dense carpet that I soon had to give up. A bird, a wood warbler perhaps, struck up its song amidst the snap-crackling leaves.
‘Let’s have a break,’ Uncle Ian said. He leant heavily against the trunk of a tree and fished out a couple of plastic cylinders, of the kind used to keep camera film, from the pockets of his jacket. ‘Here,’ he handed me one.
‘I only have a digital camera,’ I said.
‘It’s drink. Film canisters make excellent containers for akvavit.’
As I drained the canister my eyes watered. ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘Let’s sit down.’
I took off my anorak, spreading it out on a bit of grass that was more or less free of flowers. I helped Uncle Ian down and then I seated myself next to him on the coat.
‘Here, have the second half.’ Uncle Ian hauled another couple of film containers from his pockets.
Rose never got to walk in the woods when the leaves opened. Her visits to her grandmother having taken place in either winter or in summer. The thought made me feel like a cuckoo – a great big cuckoo who had taken her place.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Uncle Ian asked me.
I shrugged. ‘Nothing in particular.’
‘You were thinking of Rose, weren’t you? You know, Eliza, there has to be a line drawn between remembering the past and living in it. She knows you haven’t forgotten her.’
I turned and faced him. ‘You really do see her?’
He nodded. ‘I do.’
‘I’m sorry but I find that so hard to believe.’
‘I know that too.’
‘You’re sure it – I mean she – is not some kind of hallucination?’
He smacked the ground with the palm of his hand, crushing a whole host of the protected little white flowers. ‘Do you have to argue the toss about everything?’ He turned his head as far as his neck would let him, glaring at me sideways. ‘Eh?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Then, skal,’ he said, raising his plastic cylinder of akvavit to his lips and draining it.
‘Skal,’ I replied. As the warmth spread down through my chest and stomach I looked around me. ‘You can see why people living in a place like this believed there were trolls and elves and huldras. In fact, I would not be at all surprised if there were some of the creatures here now, hiding behind the trees and in the dead tree stumps, watching us.’
‘Now who’s fanciful,’ Uncle Ian said.
I lay down, making a pillow for myself with the palms of my hands. I might have dozed off but just for a moment or two. ‘ “Briar Rose”,’ Uncle Ian said. And my eyes snapped open. ‘That’s who you look like.’ He sounded triumphant. ‘Exactly like Burne-Jones’s “Briar Rose” lying there on your bed of flowers. My mother always said that we named you girls wrong. You should have been Rose, she said, and Rose should have been Lily. Briar Rose and Lily White.’
‘Like the fairy tale. She had the most wonderful complexion, didn’t she? Translucent. Or perhaps pearlescent is an even better word.’
Uncle Ian smiled. ‘I never ceased to marvel at how a combination of her mother’s and my genes could have produced someone like Rose.’
‘I don’t remember what Rose’s mother looked like.’
‘She was striking, I think one would say, rather than beautiful.’ He shifted uneasily and made a little grimace.
I asked him if he was all right and he said he thought it was time we moved on. I got to my feet and reached down to help him. He snatched at my hand like a fish snatching at bait and I bent down lower until he got a firm grip of my wrist. I gave a little tug. He remained seated. I pulled harder, gripping his arm with my other hand. I pulled as hard as I dared and he lifted an inch or so off the ground before collapsing back down with a small groan of discomfort.
‘One more time,’ I said, but still I couldn’t get him to his feet. I avoided his gaze. I knew he would feel embarrassed. It was just no good having to be helped, no, worse, failing to be helped to your feet by someone you had once dandled on your knee. Or perhaps not dandled exactly, but he had most certainly sent me to my room on at least one occasion. For the purpose of embarrassment it was much the same thing.
Above our heads a pair of magpies squabbled.
‘How about I get behind you,’ I said and I did just that, hooking my arms under his. I thought my back would go as I heaved him a few inches off the ground and I had to let him slip back down.
‘Actually,’ Uncle Ian said. ‘Why don’t we sit here a while longer? It is a beautiful day. The sun still has plenty of warmth in it.’
Sitting back down myself I said that it was indeed a beautiful day and one that it was a shame to waste. ‘Anyway, we need to sober up before we face Katarina.’
He smiled a young man’s smile. ‘You’re right about that.’
Of course we would have to get up and leave eventually but how I was going to get him to his feet I did not know. I was thinking that I might make some excuse and sneak off with my mobile to give Katarina a call when Uncle Ian said, ‘Was she happy the night she died?’
I started. ‘Was she happy?’
‘It’s a simple enough question, is it not? All I’ve heard about that day is how she died. I want to know how she lived in those last hours.’
I found myself smiling suddenly. ‘I think she was. She was excited about the dance, of course. We all were. And we had decided we were in love. Not that the boys were very important in the scheme of things.’ I laughed. ‘I would say they were more like extras in our little drama. The main players were Rose and I and of course Romance. She was wearing the dress you had bought for her. Do you remember that dress? And she had flowers in her hair. You should have seen her . . . We had all helped to decorate the assembly hall . . .’
He was asleep. Uncle Ian was asleep, his back against the trunk of the tree, a sweet smile on his face like a child who’d been told his favourite bedtime story. I touched his cheek. It was warm, as were his hands. I decided to let him sleep.
Rose had been happy that night. Happy in that fulsome, reckless way you can be when you’re very young and everything seems possible and when you really do believe that you are the centre of the universe while all else spins worshipfully around you.
And then there was Ovid. ‘Blame it on Ovid.’ Had death been a comedy that is what this particular one might have been called, Blame it on Ovid. We had been high on nymphs and gods at the time, an ancient menagerie of illusionary creatures to add the already familiar ones given to us by Grandmother Eva.
We had worked it all out. If the boys had not played their part, that is, danced with us, kissed us, done whatever the perfect hero in the perfect romantic novel would have done, by the time the dance was drawing to a close, we would go off to the lake. Portia was going to follow a little later, bringing them with her under some pretext or other. And there we’d be, Rose and I, nymphs as naked as the day we were born, splashing playfully in the dark waters of the moonlit lake. Overcome by our innocent beauty the boys would rush into the water and take us in their arms to be our adoring slaves for ever, or at least to the end of term.
But by ten o’clock the boys had done nothing much more than glance in our direction a few times. Mostly they had just hung around the buffet table, sneaking outside now and then, to swig from some bottle stashed away in the shrubbery. So Rose and I signalled to Portia and then the two of us went ahead to the lake.
We were undressed, ready to get into the water, when we thought we heard them. And I, the begetter of the whole stupid thing had, faced with the reality as opposed to the pretty picture fantasy of appearing naked in front of two boys, lost my nerve.
I grabbed my dress and ran off in the opposite direction.
And then what happened?
I think I called to Rose to come with me and, as I ran off in a muddle of laughing panic, I think I believed she was following. Did I hear the splash? I don’t know. I might have or else I had simply been told that I would have; either way I no longer knew what was memory and what was supposition. And if I had heard the splash I must have assumed that she had decided to go ahead as planned without her feckless friend. Then she called out something. I do remember that she called out something and I believe that what I heard was her laughing and calling me a wimp. That was what I believe I thought I heard at the time. So, Uncle Ian, I didn’t stop. I kept on running.
Then they found her and details that would otherwise not have merited a second thought became weighted with terrible significance and I ceased to be sure of anything at all. I went over and over those moments in my mind, playing out different scenarios until I thought I would go crazy, because in the end both the ‘real version’ and the ‘supposed version’ were as familiar as a memory. But the police told me they believed she had been intending to follow when she slipped and fell. No one said but we all knew that while that was happening, I, her best friend, I who loved her, had kept on running.