Elmet

Years later and miles away that girl’s brother trudges through mud to find her. It has been days. I have seen no trace but I still have hope.

The memory of that evening in our house in the copse does not loosen. The stills do not fall from their reel. Each face and each gesture confirms its shape. Nothing slackens.

As I walk I think on the sight of them all. I think on my sister with her slick of black hair. I think on my Daddy and the words he did and did not speak. I think on the others, all eyeballs and teeth.

I was right to run.

As I walk now I look about. The further I step from home the more uncanny the sights become. My eyes respond in kind. They fall upon the familiar.

I see the chimney stack and cooling towers of a power station on the horizon, gorging on the earth and spewing measures of caustic exhaust. I see a veil of ashen smog that hangs between land and sky and the leaden vapour pooling into mock clouds. I see a chain of pylons stretching from far-ground to foreground like a vast, disarticulated arthropod, and tethered shadows, more gargantuan still, lying upon the hills like the insignia of pagan forbears. I see bovine silhouettes shift steadily across meadows, hulking their uneasy weight from trough to furrow, and elsewhere, I see the dusk settle on the fleeces of grazing ewes like sparks from flint to tinder. I watch the land glow and the sky burn. And I step through it with a judicious tread.

I pass from Elmet bereft.

Chapter Three

We kept on with our silly childhood games long after we were much too old. Our copse provided the materials we needed and an undulant terrain in which to run and hide. In another world we might have grown up faster, but this was our strange, sylvan otherworld, so we did not. And that, after all, was why Daddy had moved us here. He wanted to keep us separate, in ourselves, apart from the world. He wished to give us a chance of living our own lives, he said.

We played at archery, like we were outlaws in the wood. After the house was built and Daddy had more time, he showed us how to make bows and arrows for ourselves, and explained which were the best tools to use. We made longbows that were almost the height of each of us and whittled from a single piece of hardwood. There was a lot of ash about but oak was better, and yew the best, Daddy said. He would pick a piece that had the right shape and then we would strip away the bark, the soft new growth beneath it, and then cut it down with a lathe, only shaving off a little at each time in case we went too far. We made our arrows with materials from the woods around. When we practised with targets we made do with arrows with blunt ends as we shot them against a hessian sack with a painted bulls-eye. But when Daddy hunted birds or rabbits or muntjac he needed a hard metal tip and had to buy them.

We made bows that we could use easily now, bows that would test and strengthen us and bows that we would develop into. Cathy could pull much harder than me because her arms were so long, even though I had the broader chest, even then. She did not flinch when the arrow was released and the bow string whipped at her arm, as it can do when it is hard pulled, when you are tired or your arm is not properly aligned. Or when you have the kind of arms that are so thin and supple that when they are straightened to their limit the soft, fleshy part with the blue veins at the crook of your elbows is almost convex. Both Cathy and I had arms like these. You release the bowstring with all the power it took to pull it back, and as the arrow is loosed it slaps against your left forearm. This is not just a skin pain. It goes deeper. I did not have much else on me but skin and so it hurt me in my marrow. Those painful vibrations that send waves through your bone, and then further.

But Cathy did not seem to feel it or else she did not care. She never wore a leather armband around her forearm and always kept her arm as straight as she could, so as to keep her aim, and so inevitably, because of her supple, almost convex arms, she would pull the string back to its full extension and when it was released it would slap with a loud crack against her soft, pale skin. It went on like that, with Cathy holding the bow with her arm turned towards the string and loosing her arrows so that that she was struck hard, again and again. Her forearm became red raw and so bruised that the grey and yellow blood that settled there almost made a complete bracelet that seeped all the way around, like her skin was stained with gold.

Still, she did not alter her method. Daddy became angry with her every time he saw it. At least, he was angry in the manner that feeling is expressed when it is mixed with love. Like sadness but with the energy for intervention. He would go over to her and take the bow gently away and sit down with it some way off. He would wait for Cathy to calm down, to stop breathing so deeply with the exhaustion of it all, and for her to go and join him on the ground, amongst the leaf litter. I would go over too and Daddy would pull out some crackers and a block of hard cheese and we would sit and eat them together, and then go back to the house.

Chapter Four

There was a woman who lived down the way. Her house was maybe a mile and a half away but there was only one turning between our road and hers so that made her a neighbour. She lived alone in a white house that had a window on either side of the front door and in the summer months sweet peas grew on trellises along the side of the house. There was a garden to the front and at the back. She parked her dark blue car on one side and on the other side a farmer’s field began where there were rows of dark cabbages followed by lines of beets.

Cathy and I were unsure of how she knew Daddy. We never understood why he knew anyone other than us, but they seemed reasonably acquainted, even though we were far from Granny Morley’s home now and I thought everyone would be a stranger.

That first winter came early, and quickly too. One morning in November when it was so cold that crispy ice strangled the drainpipes and windowsills, Daddy got us up just after dawn, and we walked out towards Vivien’s house, down the hill to our little lane and then along hers. I was wrapped up in two tartan scarves and a dark green fleece that I had zipped up to the top, and I held it tight against my chin to keep the warmth locked inside. Cathy had pulled thick purple walking socks up over the ankles of her jeans to shield her legs from the biting breeze and Daddy wore his usual coat with a woollen jumper underneath, and motorcycle gloves.

The walk down the hill was slippery as the frost on the soft tussocks melted beneath our feet, and we slid a few inches with each step. The morning smelt of wood and little else. The summer scents had been bottled by the cold. It was a clear day, though, particularly now when the sun was low, and bright rays cut raw across the grass. When we got to the path the trees cast long, precise shadows. The stones on the ground were not smooth but the kind chucked up by heavy machinery, and, little though they were, they sliced the light more precisely still.

We walked quickly to keep warm and I jogged on every few steps to keep up the pace. Cathy had been quiet since the previous evening but seemed to lighten as we lengthened our strides.

‘How do we know her?’ she asked Daddy.

‘Through your mother.’

We could say nothing after he mentioned our mother. We almost never spoke of her and his mentioning her was so rare that we did not know whether to take it as an invitation or as a warning. I could not detect either mode in his tone nor read his expression. He walked on impassively, while I looked up at him then down again at the path in front of us then up again at him, like our eager dogs who trotted at our feet and turned their faces up to their masters on every other step. The dogs looked at me and Cathy. We looked at Daddy.

Becky, who never ran too far from me, slashed her tail against my shins as she hopped in front of my feet. I kept kicking her, accidentally, then stumbling on myself so as not to hurt her.

Vivien’s garden had a neatness about it but looked natural. At first sight the ground was uneven and the rose bushes were strangled at the roots by shallow weeds but I saw that there were no fallen petals or dried leaves. Those had been cleared away. The grass stopped suddenly at the patio, trimmed severely at the edges to keep a clean line, parallel to a set of French windows.

Daddy knocked and Vivien opened the door and stared at us. She was tall like Daddy, but slim. Her hair was a thick russet and her skin so pale that you could almost see the blood behind it, the redness at her cheeks and the blueness at her eyes. It was honest skin. It was the kind of skin that could not hide a mark or a blemish or a sickness that lay within. She looked tired, either a tiredness from the early morning or a tiredness from a long life. She was perhaps forty, but seemed both older and younger, with irises that were both a bright green and a dull yellow, and an uncertain stoop that you see in both old ladies and adolescent girls. In the moment she stared at us, she inhaled deeply and exhaled quickly, as if she were conjuring a beginning or marking an ending.

‘I didn’t expect you this early,’ she said to Daddy, although her eyes still jumped between my sister and me. She turned to him now and smiled, and pulled the door wider to see us all better, and then to let us in.

Cathy took the invitation and stepped over the threshold, standing in front of the woman as she placed a long hand on each of Cathy’s upper arms.

‘You must be Catherine,’ she said. ‘I met you when you were a toddler and your brother was a baby.’

Vivien ushered Cathy through into the house and I took the step up into the hall.

She looked at me and took me as she had taken Cathy, firmly and with both hands. ‘Daniel. Come in.’

The sitting room was light despite the heavy green plants propped up on the windowsills. The French windows faced south-east towards the morning sun, and light poured in over the sharply edged papers that had been placed carefully on specific surfaces. There was a deep sofa covered by worn blue velvet, with two large sitting cushions. They dipped to meet each other in the middle but were still quite plump at their outer edges. There was a blanket on one of the arms with a scene stitched together with red and white wool but obscured by the folds. There was a carpet atop a carpet, one grey and fitted to the size and shape of the room, and one a set rectangle with tassels on the two shorter edges and a pattern of lines and angles that I would have sat down on and traced my fingers over were I younger or alone. There was a coffee table in the centre of the room and a round upright table by the French windows with a white cotton cloth and a tucked-in chair. There was a plate and a cup of tea or coffee on this table, and I supposed Vivien had eaten her breakfast there. There was a fireplace with a smoke-screen in front of it, and although there was a fire already made up, nothing had yet been lit. Fire tools were in a bucket on the hearth. Tongs. A poker. A shovel. A coarse brush. And triangles of compacted newspaper were stored in a small open-topped wicker chest, safely stowed in a corner away from the fireplace. There were some ornaments on the mantel, and I remember particularly a small clock with Roman numbers, whose face was set into a roughly hewn piece of limestone.

Daddy and Vivien came through into the sitting room to join Cathy and me. He had taken off his jacket and had his hands in his trouser pockets while she had hers crossed over her body with each hand on the opposite shoulder.

They were standing close to one another as if they were old friends but without the years of separation. There was the comfort of continuance between them. Yes, she was standing at his side but slightly in front, so that his arm could have been partially around her. I could not quite see but there might have been contact.

He opened his mouth. He looked particularly handsome today, within my own conception of what it was to be handsome, which I suppose came only from the image of my father.

‘Vivien were a friend of your mother’s,’ said Daddy again, seriously. ‘She’s going to teach you things what I can’t. She’s good at things what I aren’t. You’ll be spending your mornings with her.’

Cathy and I did not mind taking orders from Daddy. Sometimes we were more like an army than a family and he was not the type of leader to make you do anything for nothing.

Vivien looked nervous. She only seemed half on board, half off board. As she looked between us, weakly, her pink lips became whiter and she pulled them into a smile.

Daddy looked better pleased with his plan. He clapped his hands together. ‘Let’s get going then. I’ll be off for the next few hours. You can begin today.’

He turned and left the room. I heard a rustle in the hall as he picked his still-warm jacket off the coat stand and put it on. The door clicked shut after him.

Cathy’s expression was sour and she eyed Vivien suspiciously. Vivien loosened her grip on her shoulders and walked over to the small round table by the windows, the one with the tea and cake crumbs. She untucked the chair and sat down. She looked at both of us, but still mainly at Cathy.

‘I want to make these lessons, you know, fun for you both.’

I thought for a moment that she had said the wrong thing. Cathy stared. She did not raise her eyebrows or roll her eyes. She did not even purse her lips. She just stared. She felt as if she had been patronised. Slighted. I knew this because I knew my sister well, better than anyone, even Daddy, though he thought they were so alike in their hearts.

Vivien looked at Cathy seriously, unable to decipher the sudden silence.

But Cathy took Daddy deadly seriously in his attempts to train us against the world. She found a kind of solace in his tasks. She wanted to be every inch of him but believed what he said about how different she was, about how she had to be good at different things, how she had to find a different way of surviving. If Daddy thought Vivien’s lessons were important then she would commit herself to them, at least initially.

So Cathy stopped staring and came back to life, throwing herself into the moment.

‘What do we need to do, then?’ Cathy asked.

Vivien ventured a smile.

That evening Cathy and I went out into the clearing we had lived in before Daddy had built the house. It was still well-trodden but the earth was harder than it had been during the summer and the branches of the overhanging trees were thin tendrils. We sat on the cold stumps of a couple of trees.

‘I can’t think of owt worse than growing up to be her,’ Cathy said. She was talking about Vivien.

‘I thought she was okay,’ I replied. ‘She’s not very like us but I don’t know if that matters.’

Cathy didn’t answer me. She seemed sad, restless, and she cradled her mug of warm tea and looked into the liquid.

We had come outside because Daddy was in a dark mood and had shut himself up in his room alone. He had been light and brisk all day but as the sun began to set just before five o’clock he had taken a turn for the worse and slipped out of the kitchen quietly. We had not noticed right away and kept on with making the dinner. It was only when we had put the scrubbed potatoes inside the oven to bake and turned to sit down that we noticed he had gone. Cathy went out into the hall to see if he wanted any beer or cider to drink before the dinner was ready but found that the door of his room was locked shut without any answer from within. She had come back and when the food was ready we had eaten alone, leaving a plate for him covered on the hob. He stayed locked away long after we had finished, and I suggested that we go outside.

Sometimes he did lock himself away like that but we never knew why. Of course we assumed that he was troubled by something and did not want to share it with us but we could never really know because we never saw. I never saw my father waiver, never saw him lose control or stumble, and I took it for granted that I would never and could never see him cry. Perhaps he was different when he locked himself away. Perhaps he was more himself or less himself in those moments, whichever way you think of it. But I could not say for certain, because I never saw.

When Cathy did not reply to me I thought again about what she had said about Vivien, and tried to work out what she had meant by it. Sometimes she did just take against people. She told me exactly why they were bad people and she usually convinced me to feel the same way. She had not explained herself here and I was having trouble working it out.

‘She wandt very welcoming,’ I offered after a while. ‘I mean, she was and she wandt. She was polite and helpful. As much as you’d expect. But she was always distracted, like she wanted us to leave.’ Cathy said nothing and I thought again. ‘And she seemed embarrassed by us. Not that there was anyone else there to see that we were there with her. Nobody else to question our involvement with her. But she seemed uncomfortable and it was the kind of uncomfortable you feel when you’re embarrassed not when you’re unsettled or unprepared. It was like even though there weren’t any other people there to feel ashamed in front of, she felt them there anyway and she dindt want those invisible people to see her talking to us.’

‘That’s not the thing I was thinking of. It’s the way she moves around. The way she walks. Hers is the most horrible body I’ve ever seen. She can’t move forwards without moving sideways. It’s her hips. She’s not even fat. There’s no extra weight on her, but her hip bones are so large and wide that she can’t move without considering them. When she walks she has to follow their lead and they sway from side to side. God, it’s disgusting. Can you imagine running with hips like that? Can you imagine trying to run away from someone when you’re being pulled back by your own bones? Can you imagine what tops of your legs must feel like being stuck in to hips like that? Muscles on your thighs being twisted as you’re trying to run away and your knees trying to support those hips and your running thighs while trying to keep them in line with your feet. All of you trying to go forwards and bloody bones are holding you back. Jesus fucking Christ, I’d rather die.’

She continued. ‘Do you remember that time we were down by canal, Daniel? I can’t even remember which town it were or what year only that you had that white T-shirt with orange setting sun on it that Granny Morley brought you back from that holiday she went on — only holiday I ever remember her going on — and so you must have been about eight because you grew so quickly after that — when you were nine and ten — that you coundt have fitted into that T-shirt after that age. Maybe it were Sheffield we were in but I can’t remember. It doendt matter. We were there together, alone, because Daddy was somewhere else. Probably fighting outside of town. ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘We were down by canal, Daniel. Me and you, alone. We walked as sun went down and we saw that lady sitting under bridge with her knees up and the palms of each hand cradling each side of her face like her own cheeks were softest things she’d ever touched and like she were touching them for first time. We walked past her under bridge and there were sick on ground and ashes that handt singed anything but were lying on top of paving stones. Her handbag were on ground too and were open with tissues and lipsticks and that falling out and she handt even noticed, let alone stopped to pick any of it up. There were a smell of grass that had been trod on and rotted, and a smell of dogs. And that man in background. Do you remember man in background? Almost fully hidden by shadows of bridge? Standing on mud behind paving stones?’

‘I don’t remember seeing either of them,’ I said. And I did not. But I did remember the news later that week that a woman had gone missing and that she was last seen going down to the towpath. And I remember my sister telling us that we had seen the woman and that there had been a man behind her.

‘But you believe me?’ she implored.

‘Yes, of course I believe you.’

‘And you believe I was right? That it were man behind lurking in the shadows who did for her? Who pushed her in?’

I looked her in the eye. The police had searched for Jessica Harman, nineteen, for weeks before finding her tucked away by a weir, miles downstream. When they found the body and identified her they concluded that it had been a natural death. They said that she had been intoxicated and had accidentally stumbled into the canal on her way home and that the current, buoyed by recent flooding, had carried her away. They had come to this conclusion before they had found her, however. It was based on the fact that she had been out drinking with friends that evening. The police had looked for people who might have tried to kill her but decided that there was no one with a motive. Then they had found the body and decided that their assumption had been confirmed. But Cathy was sure that she had seen the woman and also a man and that Jessica Harman had been pushed.

Two weeks later a student was found washed up further along the canal by one of the locks. This time it was a boy, and it was thought that he had fallen in drunkenly, too, or else had killed himself. But we spoke again of the middle-aged man Cathy had seen in the shadow of the bridge and how easy it would be for a stealthy stranger to ease a person on their way. It would be so little like murder. Just a gentle nudge at somebody who was already unsteady. A stranger. Unless you were seen you could never be caught.

And so Daddy had asked around at Cathy’s behest. He found nothing but continued to search all the same. He patrolled the canals at night for weeks and weeks but did not come across anything out of the ordinary. He said if there had been a murderer lying in wait for young women, he had scared him off.

Of course we did not go to the police. Neither Cathy nor I had even suggested it. There was little trust there. No love lost.

But we had all believed Cathy.

Chapter Five

There was a cold spell in the week before Christmas. With the cold I became sluggish. Usually eager to help Daddy with his work outside, I spent more and more time in the kitchen, taking for myself the jobs that allowed me to stay indoors. I made sure the stove was well stoked every day and the chopped wood in the store was piled high so it did not have to be topped up from outside too often. I cleaned the house and baked cakes and mince pies for Christmas Day. Daddy went to the shop in the village and bought sheets of paper in gold and silver and red, white and green and I set about cutting them up and folding and gluing them into decorations.

I sat at the kitchen table and made snowflakes as I had at school. I cut circles and folded them into quarters and inserted apertures and grooves so when they were unravelled they became tiny sheets of falling ice, jagged but symmetrical. The gold paper became stars. I made the shapes of trees with the green paper. Winter trees. I copied the few pines that we had in the copse, the only ones that still held green. From those trees, Daddy brought in branches of green needles and pinecones for making wreathes, which I constructed as best I could, approximating those I had seen on Christmas cards.

‘You’re a funny lad,’ Daddy said to me on the morning of Christmas Eve. It was nearly nine o’clock and he had been awake and working for several hours. He had seen to the chickens and walked the puppies, who were now burly adolescents, frayed at the edges, with chalky incisors and too-long limbs. It had snowed overnight and Daddy had shovelled it into piles that now looked like an oddly dispersed mountain range. The puppies had made a scattering of deep paw prints in the snow and were now scaling these new summits.

‘Why am I funny?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know. You like making house nice and that.’

He drew back a chair from the table to sit down and I got up to pour coffee from the pot I had sitting atop the stove. Our coffee was always made slowly, brewed on the hob for hours, well-stewed, bitter, smoky. That is how we liked it.

I made my Daddy a hearty breakfast and then he went out again into the cold.

I spent the morning continuing to make paper decorations and then I stuck them up around the house. I slotted some of the shapes in the tiny gaps between the window frames and the panes of now naturally frosted glass. I stuck others on cupboards or propped them up on shelves or in picture frames. I hung paper chains of gold, silver, red, green, white — made from scraps and offcuts — from hooks on the ceiling of the kitchen which Daddy had originally pinned up to hang dried meat.

Daddy did not come back for lunch. This was unusual, especially on such a cold day. At one point I peered out the window to see if he was on his way, but he was not and I served up the vegetable soup I had made for me and Cathy anyway. We briefly remarked on Daddy’s absence but other than that the meal passed in contented silence.

As the afternoon proceeded and it started to fall dark, I began to worry. It was not that it was late. It was not yet four o’clock and it was that time of year when it seemed to get dark again almost before I could say I was truly awake. But it was rare for Daddy to stay out all day until dusk without coming home once for a bite to eat. If not lunch, then cake or an oat biscuit. And it was Christmas Eve. I had prepared a feast of hot pies and braised onions to keep us going until tomorrow when our main meal was to be goose. Cathy had stayed in especially and practised carols on her violin. Her bow strokes bounced over the strings, more like she was playing a sea shanty than a hymn, but I could recognise the melodies nonetheless and hummed along when she really got into her stride, lifting my voice to its full extent where I knew the words.

When darkness fell completely I thought about going with a torch to find him but the world outside was huge and everything looked different in the snow. Even though I already knew the copse well, I could not be certain I would be able to find my way through it with just a small light held in my hand, reflecting off the bright white that obscured the familiar colours and the precise shapes of the landscape. And I could not be sure that Daddy was in the copse. That is where he usually went, but not always. And although he had said he had got work to finish up there he also said he would not be long.

I thought about the tools he used out in the woods. Sharp axes and machetes and saws. I had a vision of him slipping suddenly and cutting open his thigh, where the thick, deep arteries ran, and of him passing out in the cold, his blood at first melting the snow around then freezing again within it.

I had already put on my coat and boots when Daddy appeared in the door frame. The hall was dark as I had shut the door to the kitchen to keep the warmth inside, and Daddy was illuminated only by the stars and by the golden light of a lantern he was holding aloft with his right hand.

‘Going out?’ Daddy asked.

‘Just to see where you’d got to.’

‘Where’s your sister?’

He did not wait for an answer but called her name. The carols stopped abruptly and she came out into the hall.

‘Both of you come with me,’ said Daddy.

Cathy slipped her feet into her boots before hopping over to the coat hooks and wrapping herself in woollens, rounded off with her navy-blue mack. We followed Daddy out into the cold, shutting the front door firmly behind us. His deep footprints led from the edge of the copse and we followed them back exactly so as not to disturb more of the snow. The ash and the hazel were bare and shivered against the wind each time it blew. Their branches were frosted and held a delicate collection of snowflakes. The hazel particularly, which had been coppiced many years ago, had many surfaces and alcoves in which snow could collect and sit, compacting into itself and freezing anew. Icicles dripped from many of the higher branches where the snow had met the midday sun and slowly melted and found a gradual path towards the earth before being caught for a second time by the cold.

We arrived at the treeline and continued to walk. Daddy’s lantern swung in his hand as we bumbled along, and the spindly shadows cast by bare deciduous branches swung and bounced too. When we passed evergreen pines the shadows became furry as the light gathered and parted their needles like water soaking into a dog’s coat.

Then the light began to change, and the spindly shadows turned to point towards us, sent by a light that appeared straight ahead, through the trees, growing stronger than Daddy’s lantern with every step. The light became brighter but still its source was not clear, obscured on all sides by the trunks of trees and the thick woodland vegetation, blanketed by snow. Indeed, the light reflected off the snow in such a way that as we got closer everything looked bright.

We rounded a huge pine and saw where the light had been coming from. Another pine, much smaller, not much more than a sapling, smaller than Daddy, was covered with lanterns. I looked more closely and saw that each lantern had been fashioned from a milk bottle with a wire hoop tightly wound beneath the bottle’s lip and another bent upwards to catch onto the fronds of the tree. Each bottle had oil in its bottom quarter, with a thin metal covering over the top, through which a thick wick poked. The coverings stopped all the oil catching fire at once, but allowed a little to seep up the wick and burn at its tip. The upper three quarters of each bottle-lantern allowed air to move around the flame, and each glowed rich amber, while the light from their fellows allowed the bottles’ oil to glimmer too, dancing and refracting as the oil slowly swirled to follow the current up the wick and to the flame, as slow as still water shifting with the earth’s tilt. It was a beautiful spectacle.

We stayed out there for half an hour or so, watching the lanterns, playing with sparklers, smoking and chatting, breathing in the cool woodland air. When we walked back to the house we did so in silence, having already got out all our words for the day. I was especially snug in my bed that night. The blankets were warm and close in contrast with the biting open outside. I pulled them up to my nose and went to sleep with that warmth and the scent of worn linen in my nostrils.

Christmas morning came with a bright, white light and left with a slurry of sleet. The landscape had shone with snow and the sky had been glossy. By noon everything was matte.

We roasted and ate the goose and Cathy played her violin.

We went out to the Christmas Tree again that night, and the next night, and every night after that until the twelfth was up, just as Daddy had said. He refilled and relit the lanterns before we got there so the image we saw was identical each time. The grove smelt of paraffin and pine needles rising with the hot air. Timid popping and fizzing emanated from the burning oil.

When Daddy finally pulled the milk bottles down off the branches, he put them in a crate and stored them with his tools. He told us we would get them out again next year, along with the paper decorations I had made. But a few days later Cathy and I spotted that there was also a pile of charred branches and singed needles in the woodpile. They were from our Christmas Tree. In parts they were still fresh, and where they had been cut the soft, greenwood was still visible. But in other places they were black through, and dry and brittle, and with the delicate fronds still coming off some. Oversized charcoal quills. The heat over time had singed them, and some were so burnt it must have been from a lantern whose metal divider had failed and which had burnt all its oil at once.

We went into the copse to see the damage. Again, the greenwood was laid bare where it had been cut. There was no black here, no charcoal. That had all been removed. But the tree looked sparse. It had been wounded — not just wounded, mutilated. It now looked so unlike any of its peers.

We worked wood all the time. We cut boughs and felled whole trees. We burnt it in our stove and hacked it into useful shapes and scrap. There was no reason this should be any different.

Chapter Six

Mr Price was the sort of man who accelerated his car when pedestrians crossed the road. You could hear his engine tighten, raise its pitch, quicken.

Cathy said he liked to see us run but that it was not playful, like when nice men flirt with little kids. Like when kids kick a ball onto the footpath and a nice man keeps hold of it, pretends not to give it back, makes the kids squeal a bit, but then of course does give it back with a wink and a nod. Cathy said Mr Price did it to people he did not like, and to us particularly because he hated us, and because he enjoyed seeing us have to skip the last few steps to safety before his car caught us. She said that he probably wanted to kill us, but got a thrill from the almost, almost, not quite, and besides, he could not kill us while Daddy was around, she said, so instead, he made us run.

Mr Price had a few cars but drove his blue Peugeot saloon when visiting tenants. The ones who paid in cash. The rest did informal work for him on his land or elsewhere. They paid their rents through this work. He preferred it that way. That way he did not have to organise wages and they were his to run like dogs.

For the most part he had inherited the land he owned. Most of the houses in the villages nearby were his and he held the largest acreage of any of the local farmers. Later, he had bought up houses on the estates further into town. These were old council properties. Those that had been bought by tenants in the 1980s as part of the Right to Buy scheme but that were then bought by Mr Price after their owners fell on hard times. The occupants remained but they paid rent again. This time to Price. And this time in cash or in kind.

Mr Price had two sons: Tom and Charlie. They played cricket and rugby at a boarding school miles to the south and lived with their father in the holidays.

We heard stories from people in the village. Stories of two handsome, slick lads who smashed up bars for fun in the knowledge that their father could pay for the damage. Two handsome lads who, when they were still boys, had driven a farmer’s tractor through the wall of his own barn and out the other side, slicing a new tunnel clean through the hay. They had learnt a collection of manners at school, though. Now they were nearly men they drove their father’s sports cars through the village and, late at night, if they had drunk too much, they rode their quad bikes over their neighbours’ crops. Two handsome, slick lads.

Mr Price left us alone for our first summer and autumn in the house but in the new year he made himself known to us. He came to our house from time to time even though we were not his tenants. Daddy had claimed the land, they said, not bought it, and we had built our house here like a fortress.

The first time Mr Price came up he was not in his blue Peugeot but his Land Rover. It was the largest vehicle he owned and we heard its tracks coming up the newly worn dirt road to our house. We heard the dampened popping and cracking of small stones under its implacable tyres. Daddy had been drying dishes at the draining board and went to the window. Daddy’s eyesight was good and he had known Mr Price from before but still he did not immediately recognise the driver. He draped the tea towel over his hefty left shoulder and headed out the front door. It was so rare for somebody to come to our house, let alone drive here, that Cathy and I followed Daddy outside.

It was late January and there were clouds of snowdrops on the hillside beneath us. Mr Price parked his Land Rover and glanced up at us as he stepped down from the high chassis. He wore a brown waxed jacket and olive, knee-high wellington boots. His hair was a light grey with strands of white. It was cropped neatly and he was clean shaven. He was handsome and healthy, possibly just less than six feet tall.

For all his brutality, Daddy liked other people. He liked people with as much affection as a huntsman had for his prey, deeply and earnestly but with cold regard. He had few friends and saw them scarcely but the people whose worth he felt were held like rare souvenirs. He took care of those people.

Mr Price was not a man who Daddy liked. He saw who it was. He stopped, stood his ground, and waited.

Mr Price approached and offered Daddy a hand. Mr Price’s skin was lightly tanned, stiff and waxy like treated pine. He wore no rings but a gold watch.

‘You’ve given me no warning,’ said Daddy.

‘I have no telephone number for you, John. How was I supposed to give you warning?’ Mr Price took a cloth cap from his inside pocket, smoothed his hair with one stroke from his other hand, and placed it on his head.

‘You could’ve got word to me through someone in village.’

Mr Price shrugged.

‘Maybe you knew I’d turn you away,’ said Daddy.

‘I’m sure you wouldn’t have turned me away, John. We go back a long way, you and I. I thought you’d greet me like an old friend.’ Mr Price smiled. ‘And besides, we certainly had something very real in common once.’ He now laughed. He had cut glass teeth and scarlet gums.

‘What do you want?’ said Daddy.

‘Nothing much. Or nothing much for you. To me it’s important as I’m sure you’ll understand.’ He looked round at me, then Cathy, then back to me. ‘Do you still fly pigeons, John? Do you still keep a loft?’

‘No,’ said Daddy. ‘I handt for years.’ Daddy was standing at his full, majestic height. When he pulled the air around into his cavernous lungs he looked lighter than he was, like a circus tent caught in an updraft.

Mr Price pressed him, ‘Only I’ve lost a bird, you see. One of my best racers. Or I thought he was going to be. He’s young and I was testing him. He came from the best stock and I had — I have — high hopes. But he should have been back by now. He should have been back in my loft yesterday.’

‘Perhaps he’s not as good as you thought he were.’

‘No, no. I released him not too far away. Over the distance I set him, if he were slow he would have been hours, minutes late. Not a day.’

‘Then he’s lost.’

Mr Price chewed his lower lip from the inside. ‘That is clear to me. I would like to find out why. Has he been distracted? Has he been shot?’

‘And this is all you want to talk to me about?’

‘Yes, of course. What else?’

‘Well I’ll tell you plainly that I don’t know where your pigeon is. You’ll have to ask elsewhere.’

Mr Price had not finished. He shifted his weight onto the other foot and continued.

‘You hunt around here, don’t you, John? And probably poach a little too, but what’s that between friends? Nobody much cares about that around here — there’s not enough money in the shooting. And besides, most of the farmers would see it as payment for all the pests you clear off their crops. A pheasant here and there for culling twenty rabbits, eh? Nobody minds that. And you’re well known.’ He stopped, possibly waiting for a response. When none came he went on. ‘But you eat the pests, don’t you? It’s not just for sport with you. I’d probably discover that these children were fairly nifty at skinning animals. And plucking birds too, I’d say.’

‘We dindt catch your bird and eat it. I know difference between a wood pigeon and a racing pigeon. Your bird were got by a hawk and I’m sure you worked that out first thing this morning before deciding to drive up here to my house.’

It seemed as if Mr Price would disagree, but he did not. After a moment’s pause he said, ‘I know you’re right. I know it. I just wondered if you had seen anything. He was a beautiful bird, you know? I’ve been working on the line for a decade and he seemed like the best I’d ever come up with. But no matter. A hawk got him and so I’ll set some traps and make sure there are fewer around. Shoot any hawk you see, yes?’

‘I won’t.’

‘No, of course you won’t. Well, never mind. Let’s see how fast his brothers and sisters are, shall we? Let’s see if they can outfly the hawks.’

He was about to leave — he very nearly went — and then he didn’t. He saw my sister and I again and stopped. ‘Your children must be lonely away from school and anybody of their own age. It’s just the three of you. They must get lonely.’ And then, ‘I’ll bring my boys up one time so they can make some friends.’

Daddy said nothing. Mr Price grimaced at Cathy and climbed back into his Land Rover. The car curled towards us before taking the track back down to the main road. Its engine was quiet and it disappeared quickly.

Daddy remained fixed to his position for some time after the Land Rover rolled away but his breathing had changed, like a sail buoyed and loosened by an irregular wind.

‘Why did he really come here, Daddy?’ Cathy asked.

She had grown taller over the winter but it had made her weaker. Her bones had stretched and thinned and her muscles had spread to cover them. She could not control her movements as minutely as she had previously. Her knees did not know the length of her femurs and tibias, and her feet smacked the ground when she walked. When she stood up she had taken to resting her weight on one leg or the other with her free foot upended on its toes behind her, tucked behind the supporting ankle. It might have been her hips that had changed. She never would get those wide, birthing hip bones that she feared she would, the ones that conform a woman’s whole body around them, but she did get something. Her pelvis developed tilted. Her silhouette took a different line and the small of her back had to curve to meet it before rising sharply as it had done before.

‘Where do you know him from, Daddy?’ she asked when she got no reply.

Sometimes it was as if Daddy was torn apart by our questions. He wanted to be an honest man who shared what he knew with his children, imparting details of his current and former lives, knowing that if any of the details were too much for us that was the very reason for imparting them. Everything he did now was to toughen us up against something unseen. He wanted to strengthen us against the dark things in the world. The more we knew of it, the better we would be prepared. And yet there was nothing of the world in our lives, only stories of it. We had been taken out of our school and our hometown to live with Daddy in a small copse. We had no friends and hardly any neighbours. We obtained a form of education from a woman who dropped books lazily into our laps from a library she had developed to suit only her tastes and her own way of thinking. She probably resented our presence. She probably thought we were filthy and stupid but gave us her time out of some obligation to Daddy.

That was why anybody did anything for us, it seemed. Around here anyway. They feared him or they owed him favours. Other people did not seem to possess the kind of love he had nor the care he took of them from inside our hilltop watchtower. Others saw reciprocity and debts, imagined threats founded in nothing more than his physical presence, burdens passed onto their shoulders by his existence in their landscape, his insistence on integrity, the old-world morality over which he presided. The lurcher puppies that Peter had given us were tokens of fealty, and while Daddy saw them as complete payment for a service he had really done to satisfy his own frustrations, I knew that Peter still felt the debt, or feared the debt. And it was all because he remained unknown. Daddy could never draw a person in with his temperament. There was nothing generous or reassuring in his manner. The only thing that was known of Daddy was that he was the strongest man anyone had ever met, and that he was ruthless in a fight.

Daddy, of course, knew nothing of this. He could not see into other people’s minds any more than he could understand their bodies, so much smaller and weaker than his own. And he could not see any way in which Cathy and I might live our lives without him. We were not built like him and so how were we to stand against the world as he did? He had seen violence, and saw violence now, and he could not understand how a person was to defend themselves or form their place in the world but with their bare muscles and bare hands. And so he kept us here. And I see now that he tied us to everything he valued and feared.

He did not answer Cathy.

Daddy once told us that battles were only ever fought between two people at any one time. There might be armies and governments and ideologies, but in any given moment there was just one person and another person, one about to kill and one about to be killed. The other men and women who were with you or against you faded away. It was just you and another standing in a muddy field with your skin naked beneath your clothes. And Daddy told us that when we met people we had to remember that, to remember that you can only look directly into one person’s pair of eyes at any given time.

Cathy asked again how we knew Mr Price, and still Daddy did not answer.

‘We must be cautious of Mr Price,’ he said, at last. That was all he said.

Cathy stayed quiet. She had folded her arms about her body.

‘Will he come back?’ Cathy asked.

‘Yes.’

Chapter Seven

Cathy and I went to Vivien’s house on weekdays. Daddy walked us down and drank hot tea with Vivien, then left us until lunchtime. She gave us lessons like we would have had at school only without the routine that would have been expected there. The lessons were centred on Vivien’s interests at that time or the thoughts she was having on that particular day.

Cathy did not keep her promise for long, though she tried. She sat down with the books and papers and made a go of it and joined in when Vivien and I discussed what we had read. But after a while she became restless. She looked out of the living room window into the garden and the fields beyond and even when she was not looking outside I knew that was where her thoughts lay. I tried to speak to her but the words bounced and echoed as if they were leaving the house and disappearing through her into the world beyond. I had an inside sort of head. She had an outside sort of head.

Following her initial efforts, in all but the coldest and wettest weather, Cathy went outside into Vivien’s garden. Sometimes she took the book Vivien had given her. Usually she did not. She slipped into the garden then ran into the fields and only came back at the end of the morning in time for Daddy’s return and we would all have lunch together as if we had been sitting side by side for the last four hours. Vivien did not stop Cathy nor did she mention her absence to Daddy. And Daddy did not ask us questions about what we had learnt. These were separate worlds.

I preferred to stay in the house. With Daddy and Cathy I spent so much of my time in the outdoors that it was a welcome change. Vivien kept her fire well stoked. When it rained the water ran slowly in thick drops down her double-glazed windows and after a time left a small trail of their minuscule residue. She kept soft blankets folded neatly by her armchairs and cushions that her grandmother and great aunts had embroidered with harvest scenes. Those mornings at Vivien’s were comfortable and safe. It was a different life.

Cathy had talked about Vivien’s awkward body but when this woman moved about her house it did not seem awkward at all. Not to me. She seemed unconcerned by the features upon which Cathy fixated. She walked with disinterest. She situated herself effortlessly within her surroundings. Violence did not define Vivien, like it did Daddy. I think this is what alarmed Cathy. I too found it remarkable. I loved my father and my sister but Vivien was not like them. She talked to me about history and poetry and her travels around France and Italy and about art. I began to see a world that suited me in a different way. I came to prefer the inside to the outside, the armchair, the blankets and cushions, the tea and the teacakes, the curtains and the polished brass, and Vivien’s books, and the comfort of it all. And while I sat and read and drank tea, Cathy walked or ran through the fields and woods and, in her own way, she read the world too.

On a Monday morning in January, we walked to Vivien’s as usual and, as usual, Cathy picked up the work she was given and took it outside. I chose an armchair by the fireplace and wrapped myself in one of the soft quilts. I rested my feet on a small leather pouf the colour of leaf litter. Vivien crouched by the hearth. The fire was unlit. She took old newspapers from the pile and scrunched them into tight balls then packed them into the grate. I watched her place coals on the newspapers then lay strips of wood around the top like the spokes of a wheel. She lit four matches and placed them by corners of the paper such that the body of the structure was slowly overtaken by rippling flames: bright in parts like ice, dull in others like scorched tarmac.

Back at school, I had learnt to read and write and count and add up but when I remembered the lessons it was not the development of these skills but the series of profound revelations that held their clarity. People used to live in caves with woolly mammoths. There were tiny forgotten creatures buried deep inside rocks. There was once a precious little baby named Jesus. Salt and sugar dissolved in water, and this meant they were soluble. Pipistrelles were the smallest bats and they could see with their ears. Rivers cut deep paths through mountains. The moon had no light of its own. Joseph wore a technicoloured dream-coat.

The lessons with Vivien were different. Today I was supposed to be reading a book about aeroplane mechanics. It contained illustrations of the components and diagrams of how they fitted together. It set out American planes alongside their Soviet counterparts and made comparisons between them. A few weeks ago Vivien had told me that she was concerned that she was not teaching us enough about science. Science and technology, she had said. And the natural world. So she had started giving us the books she had about vintage cars, the flora and fauna of the Brecon Beacons, mushrooms and fungi of the British Isles, geology of the Grand Canyon, and the manuals from cameras that had been taken to junk shops years before, with instructions about shutter speeds and aperture settings. And with all these she supplied a dictionary. She wanted to teach us the words in the books, the definitions of the objects and organisms and how to identify them by name. I did not learn much about how anything worked, or why, or how all the birds and beetles stayed alive. I just learnt their taxonomy.

Vivien remained by the fire to watch it take hold. She stretched out her hands to warm them. Her palms turned a light tawny, slowly, from the heat and glow they reflected. I wondered about her taxonomy. I wondered how Vivien could be described.

‘What do you do, Vivien?’

‘Nothing,’ she said.

She stopped speaking and I did not want to prompt her further, but she soon started again. ‘Nothing at the moment, but I’ve done various things over the years. I’m older than you might think.’

I really had no idea how old she might be. My only real comparison for adult age was Daddy, who was so worn yet so vital that it was impossible for strangers to discern his years.

‘I’ve been a painter,’ she went on, ‘and a poet. And I’ve worked in offices for money. And I spent four months becoming a lawyer but gave it up. And I even nearly became a naval officer, once, but that was actually completely ridiculous because I’m not very active and I don’t know anything about boats and I’ve never spent much time near the sea. I mean, I rented a cottage overlooking the Norfolk coast once, but I found I hardly ever looked out of the window, and when I went out for walks I went inland. Strange that, isn’t it?’

‘When Cathy and I lived with our Granny Morley, we walked by sea all time.’

Vivien smiled without teeth. ‘Most people would. But I don’t have any real interest in anything, you know. I don’t really care about anything. Not about the sea or the outdoors or nature or anything. I don’t really have any hobbies. My mother and grandmother used to sew things.’ She picked up one of the embroidered cushions. ‘But it doesn’t interest me. I do things for a bit and then get bored. Like painting or writing. It interested me for a while but I gave up.’

Some sparks flew from the fire and she swept them up and moved away from the hearth. Her knees cracked as they were flexed.

‘I think about swimming but I don’t swim,’ she said. ‘I imagine what it would be like to be in the water, especially the sea. I imagine what it would be like to dip my body into the freezing salt water and how it would feel to be fully submerged and then come up for air but I never do it. I don’t go to the beach and I don’t get into the water. Sometimes I think I could have been an actor. It’s the one profession I’ve never tried. In one way or another, I have spent my whole life impersonating other people. Acting out fantasies with personalities that I’ve made up in my head. Brave people that go about the world and do things. But it’s not like it’s the achievements that matter to me, it’s the interest. The interest the people I play take in the world around them. I suppose they love it in a way that I don’t. They’re fanatics.’

She sat down on the sofa but remained erect rather than sinking back into its curves. ‘What are you, Daniel?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What are your father and sister?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well if you don’t, then how can I? But I do know they’re fanatics. When they care about something, whatever it is, they care about it to the full. They care about it as much as anyone can. They don’t pretend, like an actor would. They’re not concerned with being seen to be doing something. They just do it.’

‘Daddy likes to fight,’ I said.

‘Yes, I know,’ said Vivien. ‘I know all about that.’ She looked as if she did. She looked as if she knew more than I did. I wondered again how she and Daddy knew each other. Daddy the brute and this well-dressed, mild-mannered lady who liked to sit inside her stylish house with her stylish possessions.

‘It’s his job,’ I said. ‘He says it’s just something he does to get paid.’

‘Do you believe it’s just a job?’

I looked up at Vivien for a moment. Then into the fire.

‘A lot of men feel like they should be violent,’ said Vivien. ‘They grow up seeing a violent life as something to aspire to. They don’t have any real sense of what it means and they hate every minute of it. Your father is not like that. There is a tension about him when he approaches a violent act and a calm about him when it is finished. The times at which he is on edge are those just before he strikes. He is most frustrated when a fight is a couple of months behind him and a couple of months ahead of him. That’s when you’ll see him shake. Your Daddy needs it. The violence. I wouldn’t say he enjoys it, even, but he needs it. It quenches him.’ She sat and looked at me. Minutes passed, possibly, but I did not respond and she did not speak again until she asked, ‘Have you ever seen a whale, Daniel?’

I told her that I had not in real life, only on the television.

‘On the television have you seen a whale breach?’ she asked. ‘That’s when it jumps clean out of the water only to smack down onto the surface of the sea. Have you seen that? The almighty splash it makes?’

I told her that I had.

‘We don’t fully understand why whales do that but there have been many suggestions. Some people say that it’s to see the world and especially the sea from a different perspective, to catch a glimpse of what it is they spend their lives swimming around in. It’s like us humans sending rockets up to the moon only to spend the next fifty years gazing at the pictures of our own earth. The whales want an experience like that. A different view. Some people have suggested that it’s not a visual experience they’re after but a sensual one. When they breach the water they feel the full size and heaviness of their own bodies in the air. They feel gravity and dry cold and when they smack the hard brine with their full airborne weight they quake to their blubber. People say that they’re trying to brush off dead skin, barnacles, lichen, and that breaching is like a horse scratching its rump against rough tree bark. But it meets at the same point, doesn’t it? The need for a physical sensation that they can’t get any other way. That sensation becomes a fixation and each time after they feel it the pressure slowly builds until they can feel it again. I think it’s something like that for the whales. They swim around for days, weeks even, feeding and sleeping and breathing and they start to think about that last time they jumped clean out of the water and how it felt when their head, then their body and fins, and then their tail, all emerged from the sea, and how it felt to momentarily hover in a substance that fills their lungs but dries their eyes, and then they remember especially about how it felt to return to the water after their moment in the air. That thump. That splash. The whale continues to think about the breach, more and more, until the urge to repeat becomes irresistible and it erupts out of the ocean only to fall again into it. And so it’s sated for a while. Your Daddy’s like that, I think. Like one of the great whales. And when he fights it’s like one of their breaches. But bloodier, much bloodier. And it isn’t a lone act. It’s not just an animal and the elements. There’s another animal too. Another human. But it’s the same. It quenches him.’

Vivien and I spent the rest of the morning speaking of softer subjects and baking cakes iced with buttercream. She kept horses in the large field behind her house and there were always chores to interrupt our routine. We paused from our work to go out and feed them and to muck out the stable.

My sister returned from her rovings before noon. Her mood was sweeter than usual. She smiled broadly as she knocked the dirt off her boots and left them on the slate by the back door. Her face was hot red from the cold and dry from the chill of the wind. Her eyes were alert.

Vivien watched Cathy come in then returned to her task. She did not ask the girl where she had been or why. We were setting the table for lunch and Vivien handed Cathy the bone-handled cutlery to lay around the place-mats as if she had just come down from an upstairs bedroom. Cathy put the items in parallel sets and Vivien went to the cabinet to pull out the plates and napkins. I busied myself at the sink. I washed and dried the tall glasses that had been in the basin since the night before and placed them on the table next to a full jug of water.

‘Your father said he was going to bring us lamb chops from the butcher.’

‘From butcher called Andrew Ramsey?’ asked Cathy.

‘That’s him.’

‘Andrew Ramsey sometimes gives us cuts of meat for no money. They’re friends, him and Daddy.’

‘They must be.’

‘Daddy goes down to village to drink with Andrew Ramsey. He’s one of the only men Daddy will drink with.’

‘He must trust him.’

‘Daddy helped him with some business a while back. Andrew Ramsey had some trouble with a supplier and Daddy sorted it.’

‘He’s good like that, your father.’

Cathy nodded. Vivien went back to the kitchen to peel the potatoes and carrots. The chops would not take long to cook. She asked Cathy for help. Usually I did the kitchen work but Cathy was cheerful today and had started a conversation all on her own. They discussed the few people we all knew. Vivien told Cathy that her hair was looking lovely now that it was a little longer and she spoke about how tall she had become. Cathy told Vivien that even if she kept growing, I — her younger brother — would be bigger than her soon. Vivien looked round at me and smiled. I smiled back.

By the time Daddy came with the lamb chops the vegetables were peeled and cut and placed in pans of water resting on the hob. Vivien flicked on the gas beneath them and flames rose against their blackened bottoms. The chops were wrapped in a blue and white plastic bag. Vivien picked up a frying pan from the draining board and placed it onto the gas, wiping a knob of butter against its rim. She did all this with one smooth motion. Daddy stood beside her and pulled the meat from its wrappings. His hold was gentle so as not to spill the blood that had collected in the folds. They were Barnsley chops. A better cut. He eased the flopping maroon flesh into the pan and the fat hissed and cracked. Jess and Becky came up to his side and stuck their noses in the air and flared their nostrils to catch the savoury steam rising off the meat. I called them out of the kitchen and they did my bidding. They knew that if they did well now they might get scraps later.

Daddy and Vivien stood side by side in front of the hot stove. He was so much larger than her. The ribbed woollen jumper he was wearing accentuated the difference. The lamb was turned in the pan and when it was cooked through Daddy took each piece out with a fork and put it on a board to rest. The second two chops took less time. The pan was hotter and Daddy and Vivien preferred their meat bloody. When the carrots and potatoes were ready to drain Vivien took a colander from a low drawer and placed it in the sink. She poured the contents of each pan into it and then back into the empty pan and onto the stove for a few seconds to dry. The vegetables were then put into separate serving dishes with more butter and Cathy took them to the table.

We ate slowly and Daddy talked to us about Andrew Ramsey’s new abattoir. And then he talked about the boiler in Cybil Hawley’s bungalow that had exploded overnight. The barrel had split clean in two. Daddy had never seen anything like it. Hot water had come pouring through the house while she was sleeping in her bed and it was a mercy that her bedroom was on the opposite side of the house otherwise she might have been boiled alive. Daddy had cleaned the place up for Cybil as best he could then set her up in the spare bedroom of a neighbour. She was friendly with her neighbours. Most had been born in that street and had lived along it all their lives.

‘You take care of people and it always comes good in end,’ said Daddy.

Daddy did take care of people. He spent his mornings in the villages around or at the farms of tenant farmers. He had many stories like this.

After we had eaten and cleared away the dishes we left. Daddy walked ahead with our dogs, Jess and Becky, while Cathy and I scuffed our feet behind. The grass up to the house was damp. It must have rained while I was sitting in Vivien’s armchair talking to her as she stoked the fire. I thought about the things she had said, about Daddy and the whales, and about violence. The smooth soles of my shoes slipped with each step and more than once I had to put a hand out to steady myself.

We arrived home and Daddy went straight out into the woods with his tools. The shell of our house was sealed tight against the winter but the insides remained rough. Daddy was working on the lining and the floors. Wood was the material he used as much as he could. It was right there in the copse. Trees of different ages and different kinds.

He had a roughly built workshop and storehouse out there, sheltered by the copse so the thin walls and roof did not have to hold too well against the sudden winds that came up over the crest. He kept his tools in the house, to be safe, but took them out there to work on the wood he had collected and felled and sorted into stacks depending on type. Today he was working on walnut for a floor in the kitchen. He said it would last. He wanted everything in the house to last. Cathy and I had been given instructions to clear, clean and smooth the floor beneath so he could lay the wooden planks that afternoon. I had asked Daddy if Vivien could come up for dinner, as a way of thanking her for lunch today and all the other lunches, and the lessons, and, secretly, because I wanted to talk with her again. Daddy said that she preferred to see us in her own house and that she would only come here rarely. He said she liked the indoors and the quiet of her own home and that she was stuck in her ways.

While Daddy was out in the copse, Cathy and I moved the table and chairs and other pieces of furniture into Daddy’s bedroom, then got down on our hands and knees to work on the floor. It was hard work. Our muscles soon ached. We scrubbed and smoothed and scrubbed and smoothed but regularly had to stop and stretch like we were getting out of bed in the morning.

As the sun set I pressed my hands onto the cold surface of the kitchen floor and pushed myself up to my feet. I picked the cheese board off the marble counter in the back pantry and carried it through to the kitchen. I spotted Daddy coming from the copse and went to the door to let him in. He smiled broadly at me and took off his gloves and coat and placed them on a chair in the hall. As soon as he had shaken off his boots, his Goliath arms pulled me into an embrace and I wondered what it would be like to touch a real whale, and knew that despite what Vivien had said, Daddy was both more vicious and more kind than any leviathan of the ocean. He was a human, and the gamut upon which his inner life trilled ranged from the translucent surface to beyond the deepest crevice of any sea. His music pitched above the hearing of hounds and below the trembling of trees.

After our dinner, Cathy and I trimmed Daddy’s hair and beard as we did every few weeks. He stripped to his white cotton vest and revealed deep scars on his broad shoulders and thick black hair on his chest. He knelt on the floor by a tin bucket filled with water that Cathy had heated. We stretched to reach his head. His daughter stood in front of him with a pair of kitchen scissors and a comb which she pressed against his cheeks and chin. She pulled at the coarse strands and knots in his beard but he did not flinch. She measured the lengths approximately with the comb and snipped and brushed then doused his face with the steaming water to wash away the specks of trimmed black hair. I stood behind and cut away damp locks. Inch by inch they met the keen blades and cascaded. As the jettisoned hairs fell through my fingers to gather around my feet, I softly brushed my knuckles against the back of my father’s neck. His skin was smooth there. As smooth as my soft inner arms or the insides of my thighs. He was sensitive to my touch. His whole body quivered and as it did I thought again of the whales. Their hides were sensitive like this despite their size. They were reactive and finely tuned. They could be tickled and teased and just a small human hand on a whale’s flank could cause the beast’s entire body to ripple in the waves.

After our Daddy was pruned Cathy and I set down our scissors and passed a hairbrush back and forth to draw across our father’s scalp and chin. As we did so he closed his eyes and tilted back his head. The beads of water on his face and hair glistened in the crude light from an oil lamp that sat upon the kitchen table and a kind of halo emerged around him as he relaxed each muscle in his body save those in his cheeks that tempted a satisfied smile from his plumped lips. I selected and unfolded a towel from the pile we aired near the stove and rubbed the crisp fabric against Daddy’s wet skin. He moaned with sedate pleasure.