Sandlands Page 18

  ‘Thin,’ I’ll say, and she’ll repeat the word as if committing it to memory. ‘Thin. Slice them nice and thin.’

  Still the in-between words seem to roll along all right, as if without attention on them they have to shift for themselves.

  Seven thousand, eight hundred and sixty-seven days I lived next door, first with Mum and Dad and later just with Mum. I moved in with Auntie Joan after Mum went into hospital, and when she died it made sense to stay on. Since then it’s been almost as long again: seven thousand, eight hundred and nineteen days. That’s what counts – not Dr Stebbings with his ‘not the next-of-kin’. I wish Joan had really been Mum’s sister, all the same, and not just a neighbour. It would have made things easier.

  ‘In seven more weeks I’ll have lived here half my life,’ I told Joan yesterday. She smiled and nodded. ‘You’re a good boy,’ she said, but her eyes were glazed with tears.

  With the help of a stick and my firm grasp under her other arm, Joan can still get out on the common for walks. Mungo trots ahead in his self-important doggy zigzags, throwing in the air for imaginary guns every bird in his vicinity. Butterflies, though, are off his radar just as he appears to be off theirs: they’re mutually oblivious.

  It’s five years since we’ve seen the silver-studded blues, but we still go and look for them when the sun comes out, every July or August. There aren’t many habitats left for them in Britain – only fifteen remaining places where they are known to breed. Lowland heath is what they like, with plenty of the heather on which they feed, and a sandy soil for the ants. The caterpillars need young heather, low-springing and tender, not the woody older growth. Many colonies, they say, were lost in the 1950s when myxomatosis came and swept through the population of grazing rabbits, which had kept the heather short for the butterflies. More symbiosis – with man, the scientist, wading in as usual to mess the whole thing up.

  Blaxhall Common is ideal, and we always had a colony here. You had to know the place to look, between the sunken pathway and the pheasant covers, on a patch of open ground just past a cluster of silver birch. The adults don’t fly far once they’ve emerged – no more than ten or twenty metres in any direction, according to the books – so we could always track them down. They’re no size – nothing like the garden whites and tortoiseshells – and there were never major numbers of them. A small breeding colony, a few hundred adults at most. But on a blazing day, when the sun catches glints of blue as they bob and bounce above the heather like so many crazy ping-pong balls, they’re an effervescence of joy. Every summer they have been there, beyond the silver birches, until these last five years.

  Only the males in fact are blue. The females are a brownish-grey, on top the same as below, with little to make them stand out. All the blues are similar: the male bright blue above and drab below, the female just plain drab. There are variations in shade, but these are not to be relied upon, occurring within as well as between the species. The silver-studdeds down in Hampshire, for example, are a dull, matt mushroom colour underneath, while our Suffolk ones have a sheen of silvery grey. What distinguishes most clearly the different types of blue is the patterning that rims the wings. With silver-studded blues you have to wait until they close, and observe the underside. All the blues have a fringe of black-and-white dots but only those on the silver-studded contain at their centre the reflective, pale blue scales which catch the light like burnished metal – those telltale silver ‘eyes’ the books describe. When they settle for a moment on a tuft of heather and their wings flick and quiver, as fragile as an eyelash, they wink their silver at you as if in private confirmation. Yes, you’re right. It’s me.

  We went last week to see if they were there. There had been a shower the night before, which had washed the heather free of summer dust, restoring its evergreen gloss and the sharpness of its violets and magentas. Do I mean magenta? Joan would once have named the colours with an expert’s eye. The walls of Knit Knacks, lined from floor to ceiling with a honeycomb of small compartments crammed with wool, were better than a paint chart. The balls of yarns were ranged chromatically as well as by fibre, weight and ply, sweeping up through the rainbow and back down again, a visual glissando. A museum of colour. That’s something else the disease is slowly stripping from her. Different shades have already started to merge and lose their clarity, she tells me, and Dr Stebbings warns that she may end up colour-blind. How will she spot butterflies when she can’t tell blue from yellow?

  Today there were common blues and brimstone yellows among the coppers, browns and tortoiseshells, but not the faintest whisper of a silver-studded blue.

  I didn’t study Latin or Greek at school but evidently Charles Randolph Badderley did. It’s thanks to him, and the Internet, that I’ve picked up the odd few words. The family Lycaenidae, I’ve learned, means ‘resembling gossamer’ in Greek, and it’s true their wings are as delicate as cobwebs. The sub-family Polyommatinae is Latin, referring to the many eyespots appearing around their wings, while argus – our silver-studded friend – is Greek again. It means, appropriately, ‘shining’, for their gleaming silver eyes. It’s not my job, exactly, to know all that, but I like to have the facts behind the caption cards in case somebody asks. Not that the public do ask questions much, at least not about the exhibits; it’s more often what time we close or where to find the toilets. But it means there’s plenty of time to look things up.

  Curare. That’s another Latin word I’ve found, and it means to take care of or curate. Like my job, in fact: curator and caretaker, both. Every morning before we open I clean the toilets and refill the paper towel dispensers. Every evening after closing I sweep through all the floors with the big soft V-shaped brush, amassing in the foyer by the stationmaster’s booth a tidy pile of dust and leaves, sweet wrappers and discarded ticket stubs. Once a year on 1st October I reignite the pilot light on the temperamental boiler in the basement, then work my way round eleven Victorian cast-iron radiators, releasing from the valve of each a scalding hiss of steam. And in between? In the hours between I am free to update the catalogue, or think, or look things up, or just to stand and dream.

  Not only in Latin but in English too, ‘care’ has a slippery meaning. Yesterday afternoon after work, Dr Stebbings was closeted upstairs with Joan for longer than is usual. He came down without her, wearing that smile of his that doesn’t mean he’s happy. ‘They’ll take good care of her there,’ he said. The Lilacs: a ‘residential care home’. Less of a worry for everyone. Much the best place.

  Not the next-of-kin.

  The birds at the museum in their crystal cases don’t alarm me now; I can look them in the eye. And although the faded butterflies are sad, they are so familiar that they feel like confidants. The butterfly room is on the top floor, beneath a high, arched ceiling crowned with an octagon of coloured glass. A card by the door tells people it was once an orangery. Sometimes after I’ve swept and locked up down below I climb back up the stairs, resisting the urge to tiptoe. I pull on my white museum curator’s gloves and in the pregnant hush I run my hands over the cabinet tops, smoothing the green baize like a snooker referee. One time – just once – I folded back the cloth then raised the glass of every cabinet in the room. Closing my eyes, I took a step back and I’d swear I felt against my upturned face the stir of air from myriad tiny beating wings, and that had I dared to look there would have swirled above my head a living kaleidoscope, a fountain of scattering, flittering colour.

  This morning we walked to the common again. The sky was overcast: not conducive weather for butterflies. Beyond the silver birch clump nothing stirred. The air above the heather hung silent and empty, and Joan’s weight was heavy on my arm.

  Mungo was a short way off on some quest of his own, sniffing at the roots of a patch of brambles, when suddenly with a scrabbling flurry a hen pheasant erupted, frantic, from the depths of the thicket and took off towards a distant band of trees, with Mungo close behind. Leaving Joan propped on her stick, I followed at a trot, afraid
of losing sight of the dog. When in full chase he has a habit of overrunning himself and forgetting his way back. The course the bird had flown led us across uneven ground, tussocked with heather and studded with low gorse. It made for awkward going, which Mungo negotiated in a series of delirious leaps but which slowed me down considerably. My shins beneath my shorts were soon scratched raw. Above my left boot top the red wool sock – Joan’s handiwork – snagged on a bramble and, as I tugged it free, began to unravel, a meander of unwinding scarlet.

  When I reached the line of trees, Mungo was nowhere to be seen. I shouted his name and whistled, to no response. I plunged between the nearest trees and whistled and called some more, turning to skirt the edge of the wood first left, then right. There was no sign of the dog. After a while I stopped, took a final look round, then retraced my steps to the point where I’d entered the wood. To search for him further seemed a hopeless enterprise, so I thought it best to return to Joan. I’d been out of her sight for some minutes by now and she would be anxious on her own.

  When I reached the group of birches I saw that Joan was turned with her back towards me and bending over something, which on drawing closer I discerned to be the errant Mungo. She was looking down at him, brows gathered in a frown.

  ‘Monday,’ she was saying to him. ‘Bengo. Munkum. Munkum.’

  The dog surveyed her steadily with liquid eyes, while his tail lashed slowly from side to side.

  Then his gaze faltered and he lowered his head as he began to execute a strange manoeuvre, weaving and shifting his weight from paw to paw. Something on the ground was disquieting him, something in the sand between the knots of heather.

  Ants. An army of black ants.

  Then suddenly there they were, all around us as the sun broke free of cloud, rising from the heather like a flurry of blossom caught in a sudden updraught, while the light caught skittering patterns in their incandescent eyes. Our butterflies. The silver-studded blues.

  The Witch Bottle

  It began with the installation of a damp-proof course.

  ‘These old houses,’ said Nick, ‘they didn’t bother with anything like that. Just learned to live with it, I suppose.’

  Nick was the builder she had found at Wickham Market through a recommendation from English Heritage. Specialist in conservation work and period properties.

  The house had no foundations to speak of either – just the raft of its timber frame and a floor of trodden earth beneath the Victorian brick. If global warming hit and the sea level rose, Kathy imagined Parmenters breaking loose in one piece from its anchorage and sailing away to higher ground.

  But building regulations were tighter now than in the 1500s, and Kathy less prepared than her Tudor antecedents to make mould and mildew her living companions. So Nick took up the bricks and the packed earth beneath and laid a bituminous felt membrane. And that was how, while digging up the inglenook, he came across the witch bottle.

  ‘Hey, come and see what I’ve found.’

  It was still half buried in the impacted clay, and her eyes adjusting from the dazzle of the computer screen in her brightly sunlit kitchen. Head bent close to his in the confinement of the dark fireplace, she was momentarily dizzy. His smell was hot brick and salt skin. Like the house, she was at risk of slipping the moorings she’d kept so closely bound since the shipwreck of her divorce, and floating adrift.

  At the brush of his fingers, a curve of glass became visible, glinting darkly beneath its veneer of dust. He’d heard before, he told her, of bottles like this one, found buried under the hearths of medieval houses.

  It was a talisman. ‘It will keep you safe,’ he said, but the air between them crackled with danger.

  Later, exhumed and rubbed clean, it stood before them on the wooden picnic table in the shade of the apple tree, where Nick had been persuaded to join her for a cold beer before he went home. They both stared down at his find in curiosity: the translucent greenish flask, surprisingly undulled by age, with its contents of dark-coloured cloth, wound to a crumpled twist.

  ‘Apparently they were pretty common round these parts in the seventeenth century.’ Kathy had been on Google when she should have been chasing unpaid invoices. ‘East Anglia in general, that is – but also just locally. There are stories about a witch trial here in Blaxhall.’

  Nick picked up the bottle, held it to the light. ‘And how did it work, exactly? You’d expect some eye of newt or toe of frog in there, not just a bit of old rag.’

  Kathy surveyed him with interest. Damp-proofer and Shakespearean scholar: an intriguing concoction. But after all, why not? Craftsman was the word that came into her mind as she watched his long, square-tipped hands turn the bottle slowly round and round. Perhaps he caught some part of her thoughts, because he gurned menacingly. ‘We did Macbeth at school. I made a pretty gruesome second witch.’

  ‘Spine-tingling, I’ll bet.’ What the hell was she doing – flirting with her builder? Hoping the heat didn’t show in her face, she rushed on at random. ‘Wool of bat was the one that always puzzled me. You never think of bats as particularly woolly, do you?’

  ‘Maybe you have to get up close. I expect they have secret downy places.’ His voice held the pulse of amusement; he was laughing at her. And she deserved it: a man mentioned a bat’s underparts and she found it stirring?

  She pulled herself together. ‘Well, anyway, a witch bottle didn’t call for boiling and bubbling. It didn’t hold some magical brew. The cloth would be a piece of the witch’s clothing, I gather, if they could get hold of some. And they’d often put in some small sharp objects – thorns, or shards of glass, or needles.’

  ‘Like pins in a voodoo doll?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ They both peered closely at the bottle, but there was nothing to be seen except the twine of fabric. ‘And also, if they could manage to get anything actually from the witch herself, they’d put that in. A part of her, I mean.’

  ‘Body parts?’ He slurped his beer with salacious glee. ‘As in, liver of blaspheming Jew?’

  Grinning, she shook her head. ‘As in toenails or a lock of hair, or...’

  ‘Or?’

  Or menstrual blood, but she wasn’t about to say that. ‘Or urine. That was the commonest thing, it seems. The cloth would be soaked in the witch’s urine.’

  ‘Oh, nice.’ In pantomimed distaste he pushed his glass away. ‘And how did they go about—? But perhaps we’re better not to ask.’

  Kathy was perilously close to giggling.

  ‘So basically, you had a bottle of witch piss hidden under your fireplace.’

  ‘First, catch your witch.’ The giggles were tightening her chest, like hiccups. It was Nick’s fault; he made her feel about sixteen. She swallowed, and took a hold on herself. ‘But it’s really not funny. There’s no such thing as witches, never was.’ And it wasn’t, in truth, a thing to be laughed about. It was ignorant and cruel – or worse. ‘She’d be just some poor woman that people didn’t like the look of. An outsider, an outcast.’

  ‘Perhaps she was promiscuous. I bet witches all shagged around like nobody’s business.’ His eyes glimmered like flame. ‘Or maybe she was a lesbian?’

  Ignoring this, she said, ‘Probably had a disfigurement or something. Dragged her left foot or had a hare lip or a birthmark on her face and they decided it was Satan’s brand.’ Marked by the devil. She withdrew her fingers from the chill, beaded damp of her glass. The garden was suddenly cold.

  Maybe Nick also felt it, since he was no longer laughing either. ‘So why did they bury them, then, these witch bottles?’

  ‘Oh, it was something about the fireplace, this website said. Being open to the outside air above. It meant the chimney was the way that evil spirits could get into your house. So if you buried the bottle under the hearth, it would ward the spirits off. Keep them out, I suppose, if the witch tried to invite them in.’

  ‘Better give it back, then.’

  She looked across at him, puzzled at the choice of ph
rase.

  ‘You’d better put it back in the fireplace where it belongs, as soon as I’m done with the work. We don’t want the demons to get you.’

  Then the charm is firm and good... But on which side, exactly, lay the evil in this case – with the witch or her persecutors?

  She was smiling again, but as she held his gaze her stomach turned a strange, slow dance. ‘Let’s hope so.’

  I burn for him; my fever rises and I burn. And yet, for all, I know that it is mortal sin to think of him as I do. Has not the rector preached as much from St Peter’s pulpit every Sunday? I know that this burning in my body is the burning of hellfire, the tongued flames which slicken my woman’s parts are devil-sent, the lappings of Satan and his fiendish incubi. Oh, sweet baby Jesus in your innocence, and pure mother Mary preserve and save me, for I burn, I burn.

  Kathy had fallen in love with Parmenters the first time she drove round the corner past the row of flint-faced cottages and saw it there at the bottom of the hill, lying low and pink and mellow between the pair of cedars, ankle-deep in the buttercups of its overspilling lawn. It was the colours which seduced her as much as anything: the warm terracotta of the pantiled roof and, most especially, the soft, earthy pink of the rendered walls between the struts of timber frame. It made her think of Italy, although they called it Suffolk pink.

  ‘Pig’s blood,’ Nick informed her with unnecessary relish as he packed away his ladders. ‘That’s how they used to get the shade of pink: cut a pig’s throat into the limewash. But don’t worry – you can order it from Farrow and Ball these days, and I expect it’s strictly kosher.’

  It was a fortnight since the discovery under the hearth and he was working outside on the roof, repointing the chimney and renewing the lead flashings. ‘You really ought to get a spark guard put on there, too, if you’re planning on lighting fires this winter.’