The Small Hand Read online

  ‘I had no idea you kept up some of the garden like this,’ I said. ‘I thought it had all gone back to nature. You must have plenty of help.’

  She did not reply, only went on, a few steps ahead of me, neither turning her head again nor giving any sign that she had registered my words. We went down a gravel path which was in heavy shade, towards a yew hedge I thought looked familiar – but all high, dark green hedges look alike to me and there was nothing to distinguish it. The grass was mown short but there were no more flowerbeds and, as we continued on the same, rather monotonous way, I thought that maintenance must probably be done by some outside contractor who came in once a week to mow and trim hedges. A couple of times a year he might spray the gravel to get rid of weeds. What else was there to do?

  The shade was reaching across the grass like fingers grasping at the last of the sunlight. And then she turned.

  We had reached the arch in the yew hedge and were at the top of the flight of stone steps, looking down to where I had seen the sunken garden, overgrown and wild, its stone paths broken and weed-infested. Below me had been the strange circle, like a shading in the grass, which had been there and then not there, an optical illusion, perhaps caused by a cloud moving in front of the sun.

  But what I saw ahead was not a wilderness. It certainly seemed to be the same sunken garden, reminding me of somewhere Italian I must once have visited, but it was immaculately ordered, with low hedges outlining squares and rectangles that contained beds of what I recognised as herbs, very regularly arranged. There were raked gravel paths and, on the far side, another flight of steps leading up to some sort of small stone temple.

  And then I glanced down. At my feet was not some shadowy outline, like a great fairy-ring, but a pool, a still, dark pool set flat into the grass and with a stone rim, and I saw that, as this was a very formal garden of careful symmetry, its exact counterpart was on the opposite side. In between them stood a stone circle on which was an elaborate sundial painted in enamelled gold and blue.

  But it was the pool into which I stared now, the pool with its few thick, motionless, flowerless lily pads and its slow, silent fish moving about heavily under the surface of the water.

  I turned to Denisa Parsons to ask for an explanation, but as I did so two things happened very quickly.

  The small hand had crept into mine and begun to pull me forward with a tremendous, terrifying strength and, as it did so, a voice spoke my name. It was a real voice, and I seemed to know whose voice it was, yet it sounded different, distorted in some way.

  It was whispering my name over and over again and the whisper grew louder and clearer and more urgent. On every previous occasion, whoever the owner of the small hand might be, that person had always been completely silent. I had never heard the faintest whisper on the air. But now I heard something quite clearly.

  ‘Adam!’ it said. ‘Adam. Adam. Adam.’ Then silence, and my name again, the cry growing a little louder and more urgent. ‘Adam. Adam.’ At the same time, the small hand was pulling me so hard I lost my balance and half fell down the steps, and went stumbling after it, or with it, as it dragged me towards the pool.

  I closed my eyes, fearful of what was there, what I knew that I should see, as I had seen it in the pool at the monastery.

  ‘Here. Here. Here.’

  I flung my right arm up into the air to shake off the grip of the small hand and, as I did so, looked towards the archway in some sort of desperate plea to the old woman to help me.

  She was not there. The arch in the hedge was hollow, with only darkness, like a blank window, behind.

  I DO NOT know if I cried out, I do not remember if the hand still clung to mine. I do not know anything, other than that the voice was still in my ears but wavering and becoming fainter and slightly distorted as the world tumbled in upon me and I felt myself fall, and not onto the hard ground but into a bottomless, swirling, dark vortex that had opened up at my feet.

  Seventeen

  am sure that for a few minutes I must have been unconscious, before I felt myself surfacing, as if I had been diving in deep water and was slowly coming to the light and air. But the air felt close and damp and there was very little light. How long had I been at the house? I had gone there in daylight, now it was almost dark.

  I was lying on the ground. I reached out my hand and felt cold stone and something rough. Gravel. Gradually, my head cleared and I found that I could sit up. It took me several minutes to remember where I was. The garden was dark, but when my eyes adjusted to it I could see a little.

  I seemed to be unhurt, although I was dazed. Had I fainted? Had I tripped and fallen and perhaps knocked myself out? No, because I would surely have felt pain somewhere and there was none.

  I was alone. The garden was still. The bushes and trees around me did not rustle or stir. No bird called.

  I waited until fragments of recollection floated nearer to me and began to form clearer shapes in my mind. The old woman in the strange bundled clothing. The room in which she lived in squalor, deep in the near-derelict house. Their smell. The wavering sound of her voice. The garden.

  That part of the garden she had led me into which was not overgrown and neglected, but mown and tidy, with lawn and trees, shrubs and flowerbeds, arches in the high hedge leading down neat flights of steps to …

  I got carefully to my feet.

  I saw the dark gleaming surface of the pool, the flat stone ledge that ran round it.

  Golden fish gliding beneath the surface.

  A bench.

  Had there been a bench?

  Bench. Bench.

  My legs gave way beneath me again and I felt a wave of nausea. Bile rose into my mouth and I retched onto the cold ground.

  AND THEN I heard something, some ordinary and reassuringly familiar sound. The sound of a car. I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand.

  I could not get up again and for a while everything was dark and silent, but after a moment I saw a light flash somewhere, dip away, flash again, and a few moments later heard something else, the sound of someone pushing through the undergrowth. And calling out.

  ‘Mr Snow? Mr Snow?’

  I tried to reply but made only an odd, strangled sound in my throat.

  The light sliced across the grass behind me.

  ‘Mr Snow?’

  I did not recognise the voice.

  ‘Are you there? Mr Snow?’

  And then someone almost tripped over me and the beam of a large torch was shining into my face and the man was bending down to me, murmuring with surprise and concern.

  I closed my eyes in overwhelming relief.

  Eighteen

  lay awake for a long time that night. I had been given a stiff whisky on arriving at the Merrimans’ and then encouraged to have a hot bath. Lady Merriman was anxious for me to stay in bed and be given supper on a tray, but I wanted to get back to normality by eating with them, talking, giving all my news about the First Folio, so that I would not have to spend time alone going over what had – or had not – happened. I was quickly restored by the good malt and deep hot water and felt no after-effects of my having – what? Tripped and fallen, knocking myself out? Fainted? I had no idea and preferred not to speculate, but certainly I was not injured in any way, apart from having a sore bruise

  on my elbow where it had hit the ground under my weight.

  Lady Merriman said little but I knew that her sharp blue eyes missed nothing and that, in spite of her usual quiet reserve, she was the one who had raised the alarm and who had guessed where I might be found when I failed to arrive at the house.

  She told me that the police had been called first, but that there were no reports of road accidents.

  ‘Then I had a sixth sense, you know,’ she said. ‘And that has never let me down. I knew you were there. I hope you don’t think that weird in any way, Mr Snow. I am not a witch. But people don’t always like it if you mention things of this sort. I have learned to stay silent.’

 
‘I am very grateful for your sixth sense,’ I said. ‘Nor do I find it in the least weird. A lot of people have a slightly telepathic side to them … I am inclined to think it fairly normal. My mother often knew when a letter would arrive from someone, even if she was not expecting it and indeed hadn’t heard from that person for years.’

  ‘My husband is sceptical, but you know, after all this time even he has learned not to argue with my instincts. It doesn’t often happen but when it does …’

  ‘Well, thank God it did today. I might have been lying there all night. I probably tripped on some of that wretched broken pathway and bumped my head.’

  She said nothing.

  THE EVENING WAS enjoyable because of my host’s obvious delight in hearing that he was very likely to be the owner of a First Folio within the next few weeks. How it was to be transported to him was a minor problem, though I warned that it would have to be done before Christmas or he would not get the volume until the spring – the monastery is usually snowed in between early January and March. He suggested the best and safest way was for me to travel to collect it – I knew the place, I would be trusted and naturally both the book and I would be heavily insured. But everything in me recoiled at the idea of returning to Saint Mathieu, not because of the responsibility of carrying the book but because I felt that anything might happen in that place, as it already had happened, and I did not trust that I could travel there and back without the return of something that would once again cause me to experience terror. Because I realised that, other than the slight mishap today, I had never actually come to any real harm. What I had experienced was the extremes of fear and they were dreadful enough for me to want to avoid them at all cost. I could not speak of any of this. I simply said that I felt a professional firm used to transporting items of great value would be better bringing the Folio to England. I knew one which was entirely reliable, if costly, and Sir Edgar agreed to let me suggest the arrangement to the monastery once the deal had been finally agreed and the money paid.

  IT WAS A CLOSE, thundery end to the day. The doors were open on to the garden and we could see the odd flash of lightning over the sea in the distance. Sir Edgar had brought up a bottle of fine old brandy to celebrate his latest acquisition and we talked on until late. Lady Alice glanced at me occasionally and I sensed that she was concerned, but she said nothing more until we were going upstairs just after midnight.

  ‘Mr Snow, I have been rummaging about and finding some more things about the White House and its garden, if you are still interested. I have set them out in the small study for you – do look at them tomorrow if you would like to. But perhaps you’ve had enough of all that after your visit there today. I spoke to a friend who lives not far away and she said the place has been quite derelict and shut up for some years now. Everyone wonders why no one has bought it or had it restored. It seems terrible for it to be allowed to fall to bits like that. Anyway, I wish you a good rest and you know where the small study is if you do want to have a look through what I found.’

  I had bidden her goodnight and closed my door, walked to the window and was standing looking out into the darkness and listening to the thunder, which was now rolling inland towards the house, before the meaning of what Lady Alice had said hit me.

  It was hopeless then to try and sleep. I read for a while but the words slid off the surface of my mind. I opened the window. It was raining slightly and the air was heavy, but there was the chill of autumn on it.

  I put on my dressing gown, but as I moved towards the door the bedside lamp went out. There was a small torch lantern beside it for just this eventuality and by the light of it I made my way quietly across the wide landing and down the passage that led to the small study. My torch threw its beam onto the wood panelling and the pictures on the walls beside me, mainly rather heavy oils of ancient castles and sporting men. Sir Edgar had a very fine collection of eighteenth-century watercolours in the house but up here nothing was of much beauty or interest. Once or twice my torch beam slipped over the eyes of a man or a dog, once over a set of huge teeth on a magnificently rearing stallion and the eyes and the teeth gleamed in the light. The thunder cracked almost overhead and lightning sizzled down the sky.

  I found a number of magazines and newspapers laid out on the round table, opened at articles about the White House and its garden, but there were none of the photographs I had been given a glimpse of earlier, though I looked closely for the picture of myself, as a small boy, sitting on the bench with Hugo and the other child, presumably a friend. There was no reason why it would be here, of course – these were all photographs taken professionally, showing the splendour of the garden in its heyday, the royal visit. Two things made me shine the torch closely and bend over to peer at them. One was a photograph of Denisa Parsons. I had seen her before in the magazine Lady Alice had first shown me but here she was, I guessed, a decade older. She was a smart woman, her hair pulled back, wearing a flowered afternoon dress, earrings. Her head was thrown back and she was beaming as she pointed something out proudly to the King. I looked closely at her features. There seemed precious little resemblance between this handsome woman with the rather capacious, silk-covered bosom and the ragged, wispy-haired figure in the ancient mackintosh who had greeted me that afternoon. But faces change over the years, features decay, flesh shrivels, skin wrinkles and discolours, hair thins, teeth fall out. I could not be sure either way.

  The second item was a long article from The Times about Denisa Parsons, the famous garden creator, internationally celebrated for what she had done at the White House. Pioneer. Plantswoman. Important Designer. Garden Visionary. The praise was effusive.

  There was little about either her earlier life or her family, merely a mention of an ordinary background, marriage to Arthur Parsons, a Civil Servant in the Treasury, and two children, Margaret and Michael.

  The paper was dated some thirty years ago.

  I went back to my room, where the lamp had come on again. The storm was still prowling round and I could see lightning flickering across the sky occasionally as I lay in bed, sleepless.

  Do I believe in ghosts? The question is common enough and, if asked, I usually hedge my bets by saying, ‘Possibly.’ If asked whether I have seen one, of course until now I have always said that I have not. I had not seen the ghost, for ghost it must surely be, to whom the small hand belonged, but I had felt it often enough, felt it definitely and unquestionably a number of times. I had even grown accustomed to it. Once or twice I realised that I was expecting to feel it holding my own hand. But in some strange way, the small hand was different, however ghostly it might be. Different? Different from the woman at the White House. Was she a ghost? Or had she been, as I had first assumed, a visitor, or even a squatter in the empty place, an old bag lady pretending to be Denisa Parsons? Someone who had once worked for her perhaps? The more I thought about it, the more likely that explanation seemed. It was sad to think that someone had gone back there, broken in and was living among the dirt and debris, like a rat, bundled into old clothes and spending the time looking through old scrapbooks and albums of the place in its heyday. But people do end their days in such a state, more often, I think, than we know.

  It was only as I felt myself relax a little and begin to slip down into sleep that I remembered the part of the garden to which she had led me and which was tended and kept up, the grass mown, the hedges clipped, as if in preparation for opening to a party of visitors. I was confused about the place. I had walked across so many different stretches of lawn, gone through several arches cut in the yards and yards of high dark hedge, down steps, towards other enclosures, so that I had no sense of where the abandoned garden ended and the tended area began. And how many pools were there and where had the bench been on which I had apparently sat with my brother and our friend?

  I drifted from remembering it all into dreaming about it, so that the real and the unreal slid together and I was walking in and out of the various parts of the garden, tr
ying to find the right gap in the hedge, wanting to leave but endlessly sent back the way I had come, as happens to one in a maze.

  I was alone, though. There was no old woman and even though at one point I seemed to have turned into myself as a boy, there were no other boys with me. Only at one point, as I tried to find my way out through yet another archway, I felt the small hand leading me on, though it felt different somehow, as befitted my dream state, an insubstantial hand which had no weight or density and which I could not grasp as I could the firm and very real flesh and bone of the hand that tucked itself into mine in my real and waking life.

  Nineteen

  left for London the following morning feeling unrefreshed – I had slept, fitfully, for only a few hours and felt strung up but at least I left Sir Edgar a happy man and he had given me a new commission. He had become interested in late medieval psalters and wanted to know if I could obtain a fine example of an illuminated one. It was a tall order. Such things came on to the market very rarely, but putting out feelers, talking to people in the auction houses in both London and America, emailing colleagues, even contacting the Librarian at Saint Mathieu des Etoiles, would be very enjoyable and keep my mind away from the business at the White House. I also had some nineteenth-century salmon fishing diaries to sell for another client.

  I even drove some twenty miles further, taking an indirect route back in order to avoid going anywhere near the lane leading to that place, though I knew I would not succeed in forgetting it. But I told myself sternly that speculation was fruitless.