The Small Hand Read online

  We parted outside Bodley, Fergus to go in to his eyrie beyond the Duke Humfrey Library, while I went on towards the High. It was a beautiful day now, the air clear and warm, a few clouds like smoke rings high in the sky. There were plenty of trains back to London but I was in no hurry. I thought I would walk down to one of my old favourite haunts, the Botanic Garden, which is surely Oxford’s best-kept secret.

  Six

  went in through the great gate and began to walk slowly down the wide avenue, looking about me with pleasure, remembering many a happy hour spent here. But it was the Cistercian monastery of Saint Mathieu des Etoiles and its library, as well as the possibility of acquiring a very rare book indeed, which were at the front of my mind. I knew that I could not speak a word of what Fergus had told me, not to Sir Edgar Merriman, nor to a single other soul. I was not such a fool and, besides, I rather wanted to prove to Fergus that antiquarian book dealers are not all charlatans. But I was sure that he had been half-teasing. He knew me well enough.

  I wondered how long it would take him to oil his way round to mention of the First Folio in his correspondence with the monastery – presumably by email, as he had hinted. Perhaps not long at all. Perhaps in a day or so I might know whether the business was going to move a step further forward or whether the subject of the Folio would be scotched immediately. There was absolutely nothing I could do but wait.

  I had come to the great round lily pond which attends at the junction of several paths. Three or four people were sitting on the benches in the semi-circle beside it, enjoying the sunshine. One woman was reading a book, another was knitting. A younger one had a pram in which a baby was sound asleep.

  I sat at the end of a bench, still thinking about the Folio, but as I sat, something happened. It is very hard to describe, though it is easy enough to remember. But I had never known any sensation like it and I can feel it still.

  I should stress again how at ease I was. I had had a good lunch with an old friend, who had given me a piece of potentially very exciting information. I was in one of my favourite cities, which holds only happy memories for me. The sun was shining. All was right with the world, in fact.

  The young woman with the pram had just got up, checked on her baby and strolled off back towards the main gate, leaving the reader, the knitter and me in front of the raised stone pool in which the water lay dark and shining and utterly still.

  And at that moment I felt the most dreadful fear. It was not fear of anything, it was simply fear, fear and dread, like a coldness rising up through my body, gripping my chest so that I felt I might not be able to breathe, and stiffening the muscles of my face as if they were frozen. I could feel my heart pounding inside my ribcage, and the waves of its beat roaring through my ears. My mouth was dry and it seemed that my tongue was cleaving to the roof of my mouth. My upper lip and jaw, my neck and shoulder and the whole of my left side felt as if they were being squeezed in a vice and for a split second I believed that I was having a heart attack, except that I felt no pain, and after a second or two the grip eased a little, though it was still hard to breathe. I stood up and began to gasp for air, and I felt my body, which had been as if frozen cold, begin to flush and then to sweat. I was terrified. But of what, of what? Nothing had happened. I had seen nothing, heard nothing. The day was as sunlit as before, the little white clouds sailed carelessly in the sky and one or two of them were reflected in the surface of the still pool.

  And then I felt something else. I had an overwhelming urge to go close to the pool, to stand beside the stone rim and peer into the water. I realised what was happening to me. Some years ago, Hugo, my brother and older than me by six years, went through a mental breakdown from which it took him a couple of years to recover. He had told me that in the weeks before he was forced to seek medical help and, indeed, to be admitted to hospital, almost the worst among many dreadful experiences was of feeling an overwhelming urge to throw himself off the edge of the underground station platform into the path of a train. When he was so afraid of succumbing to its insistence he walked everywhere, he felt he must step off the pavement into the path of the traffic. He stayed at home, only to be overwhelmed again, this time by the urge to throw himself out of the window onto the pavement below.

  And now it was happening to me. I felt as if I was being forced forward by a power outside myself. And what this power wanted me to do was throw myself face down into the great deep pool. As I felt the push from behind so I felt a powerful magnetic force pulling me forward. The draw seemed to be coming from the pool itself and between the two forces I was totally powerless. I think that I was split seconds from flinging myself forward into and under the dark water when the woman who had been knitting suddenly started up, flapping at a wasp. Her movement broke the spell and I felt everything relax, the power shrink and shrivel back, leaving me standing in the middle of the path, a yard or so from the pool. A couple were walking towards me, hand in hand. A light aircraft puttered slowly overhead. A breeze blew.

  Slowly, slowly, the fear drained out of me, though I felt shaken and light-headed, so that I backed away and sat down again on the bench to recover myself.

  I stayed for perhaps twenty minutes. It took as long as this for me to feel calm again. As I sat there in the sunshine, I thought of Hugo. I had never fully understood until now how terrifying his ordeal had been, and how the terrors must have taken him over, mentally and physically. No wonder he had said to me when I first visited him in the hospital that he felt safe for the first time in several years.

  Was it hereditary, then? Was I about to experience these terrifying urges to throw myself out of windows or into the path of oncoming trains? I knew that Hugo had gone through a very turbulent time in his youth and I had put his condition down to a deep-seated reaction to that. So far as I knew, neither of our parents had ever suffered in the same way.

  At last, I managed to get up and walk towards the gates. I felt better with every step. The fear was receding rapidly. I only shivered slightly as I looked back at the pool. Nothing more.

  I was glad to be in the bustle of the High and I had no urge whatsoever to throw myself under a bus. I walked briskly to the railway station and caught the next train back to London.

  THAT NIGHT I DREAMED that I was swimming underwater, among shimmering fish with gold and silver iridescent bodies which glided past me and around me in the cool, dark water. For a while, it was beautiful. I felt soothed and lulled. I thought I heard faint music. But then I was no longer swimming, I was drowning. I had seemed to be like a fish myself, able to breathe beneath the surface, but suddenly the air was being pressed out of my lungs by a fast inflow of water and I was gasping, with a painful sensation in my chest and a dreadful pulsing behind my eyes.

  I came to in the darkness of my bedroom, reached out to switch on the lamp and then sat, taking in great draughts of air. I got up and went to the window, opened it and breathed in the cool London night, and the smell of the trees and grass in the communal gardens of the square. I supposed the panic which had overcome me beside the pool in the Botanic Garden had inevitably left its traces in my subconscious, so that it was not surprising these had metamorphosed into night horrors.

  But it faded quickly, just as the terror of the afternoon had faded. I am generally of an equable temperament and I was restored to my normal spirits quite easily. I was only puzzled that I should have had such an attack of panic out of the blue, followed by a nightmare from which I had surfaced thrashing in fear. I had had a pleasant day and I was excited about Fergus’s possible coup. The tenor of my life was as even and pleasant as always.

  The only untoward thing that had happened to me recently was the incident in the garden of the White House. Unlike the terror and the nightmare, the memory of that had not faded – indeed, if anything it was clearer. I closed my eyes and felt again the small hand in mine. I could almost fold my fingers over it, so real, so vivid was the sensation.

  Without quite knowing that I was going to do
so then, I did fold my fingers over as if to enclose it. But there was nothing.

  Not this time. Not tonight.

  Seven

  y business was going through the usual summer lull and I did not have enough to occupy me. The nightmare did not return, but although I had no more attacks of fear, I could not get that experience out of my mind and, in the end, I decided that I would talk to my brother. I rang to ask if I could go to see them for a night and got his Danish wife, Benedicte, who was always welcoming. I think that so far as she was concerned I could have turned up on their doorstep at any time of the day or night and I would have been welcome. With Hugo, though, it was different.

  He was now a teacher in a boys’ public school situated in a pleasant market town in Suffolk. They had a Georgian house with a garden running down to the river and the slight air of being out of time that always seems to be part of such places.

  They had one daughter, Katerina, who had just left to stay with her cousins in Denmark for the holiday. Hugo and Benedicte were going to the States, where he was to teach a summer school.

  I have always felt a great calm and contentment as I step through their front door. The house is light and elegant and always immaculate. But if it belongs to the eighteenth century from the outside, within it is modern Scandinavian, with a lot of pale wood flooring, cream rugs, cream leather chairs, steel and chrome. It would be soulless were it not for two things. The warmth that emanates from Benedicte herself, and the richly coloured wall hangings which she weaves and sells. They make the house sing with scarlet and regal purple, deep blue and emerald.

  It is a strange environment for my brother. Hugo has perhaps never quite picked up the last threads of equilibrium, which is why the house and his wife are so good for him. He has an edginess, a tendency to disappear inside himself and look into some painful distance, detached from what is going on around him. But he loves his job and his family and I do not think he is greatly troubled – for all that he has reminders of his sufferings from time to time.

  I ARRIVED IN the late afternoon and caught up on news. Benedicte was going out to her orchestra practice – she plays the oboe – but left us with a delicious dinner which needed only a few final touches put to it. The kitchen opened on to the garden, with a distant glimpse of the river, and it was warm enough for us to have the doors open on to a still evening. The flames of the candles in their slender silver holders scarcely flickered.

  ‘I need your advice,’ I said to Hugo, as we began to eat our smoked fish. ‘Advice, help – I’m really not sure which.’

  He looked across at me. We are not alike. Hugo takes after our mother, in being tall and dark with a long oval face. I am stockier and fairer, though we are of a height. But our eyes are the same, a deep smoky blue. Looking into Hugo’s eyes was oddly like looking into my own in a mirror. How much else of his depths might I see in myself, I wondered.

  ‘Do you ever …’ I looked at the fish on my fork. I did not know how to ask, what words to use that would not upset him. ‘I wonder if you sometimes …’

  He was looking straight at me, the blue eyes direct and as unwavering as the candle flames. But he was silent. He gave me no help.

  ‘The thing is … something quite nasty happened to me. Nothing like it has ever happened before. Not to me. Nothing …’ I heard my voice trailing off into silence.

  After a moment Hugo said, ‘Go on.’

  As if a torrent had been unleashed, I began to tell him about the afternoon in the Botanic Garden and my terrible fear and then the overwhelming urge to fall face down into the water. I told him everything about the day, I elaborated on my feelings leading up to the fear, I went into some detail about how things were in my present life. The only thing I did not mention, because there were somehow not the words to describe it, was the small hand.

  Hugo listened without interrupting. We helped ourselves to chicken pie. A salad.

  I fell silent. Hugo took a piece of bread. Outside it had grown quite dark. It was warm. It was very still. I remembered the night I had sat out on the terrace at the Merrimans’ house in the gathering dusk, so soon after these strange events had begun.

  ‘And you think you are going mad,’ Hugo said evenly. ‘Like me.’

  ‘No. Of course I don’t.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Adam … If you’re here to get my advice or whatever it is you want, tell me the truth.’

  ‘I’m sorry. But the truth is – well, I don’t know what it is, but you didn’t go mad.’

  ‘Yes, I did. Whatever “mad” is, I went it to some degree. I was in a madhouse, for God’s sake.’

  I had never heard him speak so harshly.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘It’s fine. I hardly think about it now. It’s long gone. Yet there is sometimes the shadow of a shadow, and when that happens I wonder if it could come back. And I don’t know, because I don’t know what caused it in the first place. My psyche was turned inside out and shaken, but they never got to the bottom of why.’

  He looked at me speculatively. ‘So now you.’ Then, seeing my expression, he added quickly, ‘Sorry, Adam. Of course not you. What you had was just a panic attack.’

  ‘But I’ve never had such a thing in my life.’

  He shrugged. A great, soft, pale moth had come in through the open window and was pattering round the lamp. I have never cared for moths.

  ‘Let’s go out for some air,’ I said.

  It was easier, strolling beside my brother down the garden. I could talk without having to see his face.

  ‘Why would I have what you call a panic attack, out of the blue? What would cause it?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Perhaps you’re not well?’

  ‘I’m perfectly well.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you see your GP all the same, get a check?’

  ‘I suppose I could. When you …’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t ill either.’

  We stood at the bottom of the path. A few paces away was the dark river.

  ‘I was within a hair’s breadth of throwing myself into that pool. It was terrifying. It was as if I had to do it, something was making me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m afraid it will happen again.’

  He put a hand briefly on my shoulder. ‘Go and see someone. But it probably won’t, you know.’

  ‘Did you ever ask if anyone else in the family had had these – attacks, these fears?’

  ‘Yes. So far as anyone knew, they didn’t.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I think that part really is coincidence.’

  ‘I might not be able to resist another time.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure you will.’

  ‘Might you have jumped in front of one of those trains?’

  ‘I think …’ he said carefully, ‘that there was usually something inside me that held me back – something stronger than it, whatever “it” was. But once … once perhaps.’ He shook himself. ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘The shadow of a shadow.’

  ‘Yes.’

  We heard the sound of Benedicte’s car pulling up and then the bang of the front door. Hugo turned to go back inside. I did not. I walked on, beyond the end of the garden and across the narrow path until I was standing on the riverbank. I could smell the water, and although there was only a half-moon, the surface of it shone faintly. I felt calm now, calm and relieved. Hugo seemed to have come through his own ordeal unscathed. He did not want to dwell on it and I couldn’t blame him. I think I knew that whatever had happened to me was of a different order and with a quite different origin. I also knew that if ever it happened to me again, my brother would not want to help me. Nothing had been said and in all other respects I knew I would always be able to rely on him, as I hoped he would upon me. But in this, I was alone.

  Or perhaps not alone.

  I heard the water lap the side of the bank softly. I felt no fear of it. Why should I?

  I waited for some time there in the dar
kness. I heard their voices from the house. A door closed. A light went on upstairs.

  I waited until I felt the night chill off the water and then I turned away with what I realised was a sort of sadness, a disappointment that the small hand had not crept into mine. I was coming to expect it.

  I still had the sense then that the hand belonged to someone whose intentions were wholly benign and who was well disposed towards me, who was trusting.

  I WAS TO look back on that night with longing – longing for the sense of peace I knew then, even if I also felt an odd sudden loneliness; even if I had, God help me, for some strange reason actually hoped for the presence of the small hand holding mine.

  Eight

  he following night I had another vivid dream. I was standing as I had stood that evening beside the broken-down gate that led into the garden of the White House, only this time it was not evening but night, a cold, clear night with a sky sown with glittering stars. I was alone and I was waiting. I knew that I was waiting but for whom I waited the dream did not tell me. I felt excited, keyed up, as if some longed-for excitement was about to happen or I was to see something very beautiful, experience some great pleasure.

  After a time, I knew that someone was coming towards me from the depths of the garden beyond the gate, though I neither heard nor saw anything. But there was a small light bobbing in the darkness among the trees and bushes some way ahead and I knew that it was getting nearer. Perhaps someone was carrying a lantern.

  I waited. In a moment, whoever it was would appear or call out to me. I was eager to see them. They were bringing me something – not an object but some news or information. They were going to tell me something and when they had told me, everything would fall into place. I would know a great secret.

  The light disappeared now and then, as the undergrowth obscured it, but then I saw it again a little nearer to me. I moved a step or two forward, my hand on the broken gate. I can feel it now, the cool roughened wood under my palm. I can see the lamp growing a little brighter.