A Summer to Die

A Summer to Die Lois Lowry Having a sister who is blonde and pretty and popular can be tricky if you’re like Meg – serious, hardworking, and, well, plain.But when Molly becomes seriously ill, Meg, no longer jealous, has to face up to something quite different: that Molly is not going to come home from the hospital, that Molly is going to die. Difficult to accept at the best of times, and when Meg has to cope with all the problems of growing up too, it’s the hardest thing she’s ever had to do. Copyright (#ulink_e5a7c150-d7d8-5073-81a6-f234bd0aba31) Lions is an imprint of HarperCollinsChildrens’s Books, a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd, 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in the US by Houghton Miffiin Co. 1977 Published in Great Britain by Lions in 1990 Copyright © 1977 by Lois Lowry Lois Lowry asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. 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Source ISBN: 9780006735984 Ebook Edition © JUNE 2014 ISBN: 9780008100797 Version: 2014–08–18 Contents Cover (#u4c1ced35-23f9-5dbc-a3e8-95bf6a90e35b) Title Page (#ucd40fe13-80c5-551f-bead-b353efc5cd89) Copyright (#ulink_dbed0452-a6fd-5ca1-b4e9-2d9a973780a6) Prologue (#u2201e9b8-c0f6-5e05-b401-37551f6addf3) Chapter 1 (#ulink_e539db18-1ebe-58bb-9a94-5749272aaa39) Chapter 2 (#ulink_04493bed-c747-5e39-b14f-c6118440bc66) Chapter 3 (#ulink_fa5c6f43-0b5d-5c7e-b7bb-16c7f6c2e75a) Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Prologue (#ulink_6809ab84-915b-5432-a74e-4a76853906e3) A Summer to Die I don’t know what time it was when something woke me up. I wasn’t sure what it was, but something was happening that made me afraid; I had that feeling along the edge of my back, that cold feeling you get when things aren’t going right. And it wasn’t a dream. I sat up in bed and looked round in the dark, shaking off whatever was left of sleep, and the feeling was still there, that something was very wrong. “Molly,” I whispered. Stupid to whisper, if you want to wake someone up. But she answered, as if she were already awake. Her voice was strange. Frightened, and puzzled. “Meg,” she said. “Call Mum and Dad, quick.” I ran. (#ulink_0d5ed1e2-9219-5bd6-a3f6-ec6bd9600a5c) It was Molly who drew the line. She did it with chalk – a fat piece of white chalk left over from when we lived in town, had pavements, and used to play hopscotch, back when we were both younger. That piece of chalk had been around for a long time. She fished it out of a little clay dish that I had made in last year’s pottery class, where it was lying with a piece of string and a few paper clips and a battery that we weren’t quite sure was dead. She took the chalk and drew a line right on the carpet. Good thing it wasn’t a fuzzy carpet or it never would have worked; but it was an old, worn, leftover carpet from the dining room of our other house: very flat, and the chalk made a perfect white line across the blue – and then, while I watched in amazement (because it was unlike Molly, to be so angry), she kept right on drawing the line up the wall, across the wallpaper with its blue flowers. She stood on her desk and drew the line up to the ceiling, and then she went back to the other side of the room and stood on her bed and drew the line right up to the ceiling on that wall, too. Very neatly. Good thing it was Molly who drew it; if I had tried, it would have been a mess, a wavy line and off centre. But Molly is very neat. Then she put the chalk back in the dish, sat down on her bed, and picked up her book. But before she started to read again, she looked over at me (I was still standing there amazed, not believing that she had drawn the line at all) and said, “There. Now be as much of a slob as you want, only keep your mess on your side. This side is mine.” When we lived in town we had our own rooms, Molly and I. It didn’t really make us better friends, but it gave us a chance to ignore each other more. Funny thing about sisters. Well, about us, anyway; Dad says it’s unacademic to generalize. Molly is prettier than I am, but I’m cleverer than Molly. I want with my whole being to be something someday; I like to think that someday, when I’m grown up, people everywhere will know who I am, because I will have accomplished something important – I don’t even know for sure yet what I want it to be, just that it will be something that makes people say my name, Meg Chalmers, with respect. When I told Molly that once, she said that what she wants is to have a different name when she grows up, to be Molly Something Else, to be Mrs Somebody, and to have her children, lots of them, call her “Mother”, with respect, and that’s all she cares about. She’s content, waiting for that; I’m restless, and so impatient. She’s sure, absolutely sure, that what she’s waiting for will happen, just the way she wants it to; and I’m so uncertain, so fearful my dreams will end up forgotten somewhere, someday, like a piece of string and a paper clip lying in a dish. Being both determined and unsure at the same time is what makes me the way I am, I think: hasty, impetuous, sometimes angry over nothing, often miserable about everything. Being so well sorted out in her own goals, and so assured of everything happening the way she wants and expects it to, is what makes Molly the way she is: calm, easy-going, self-confident, downright smug. Sometimes it seems as if, when our parents created us, it took them two tries, two daughters, to get all the qualities of one whole, well-put-together person. More often, though, when I think about it, I feel as if they got those qualities on their first try, and I represent the leftovers. That’s not a good way to feel about yourself, especially when you know, down in the part of you where the ambition is, where the dreams are, where the logic lies, that it’s not true. The hardest part about living in the same room with someone is that it’s hard to keep anything hidden. I don’t mean the unmatched, dirty socks or the fourteen crumpled papers with tries at an unsuccessful poem on them, although those are the things that upset Molly, that made her draw the line. I mean the parts of yourself that are private: the tears you want to shed sometimes for no reason, the thoughts you want to think in a solitary place, the words you want to say aloud to hear how they sound, but only to yourself. It’s important to have a place to close a door on those things, the way I did in town. The house in town is still there, and it’s still our house, but there are other people living in it now, which does something terrible to my stomach when I think about it too much. My room had red-and-white-checked wallpaper; there is a place in one corner, by a window, where I played three games of noughts and crosses on the wallpaper with a Magic Marker. Cats’ games, all of them. I played against myself, so it didn’t matter much, but it’s funny how you want to win anyway. The university clock in its high brick tower was just across the street from the house; at night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I could hear it strike each hour, the chimes coming clear and well defined as silhouettes from the ivied circle of the numbered face in the dark. That’s one of the things I miss most, living out here in the country, out here in the middle of nowhere. I like quiet. And it sure is quiet here. But there are times when I lie awake at night and all I can hear is Molly breathing in the bed next to mine; cars seldom go past on this road, and no clocks strike, nothing measures the moments. There is just this quiet, and it seems lonely. The quiet is why we came. The university has given my dad just this year to finish his book. He worked on it for a while in the old house, shut in his study; but even though he was officially on leave from teaching, the students kept stopping by. “I just thought I’d drop in for a minute to see Dr Chalmers,” they’d say, standing on the porch, looking embarrassed. My mother would say, “Dr Chalmers can’t be disturbed,” and then my father’s voice would call from upstairs, “Let them in, Lydia, I want to stop for coffee anyway.” So my mother would bring them in, and they would stay for hours, having coffee, talking to Dad, and then he would invite them for dinner, and Mother would add some noodles to the casserole, wash another head of lettuce for the salad, or quickly peel a few more carrots for the stew. We would take hours eating, because everyone talked so much, and my father would open a bottle of wine. Sometimes it would be late at night before they left. I would be in bed by then, listening to the clock chime across the street as they said goodbye on the porch, lingering to ask questions, to exhaust an argument, to laugh at another of my father’s anecdotes. Then I would hear my parents come upstairs to bed, and I would hear my father say, “Lydia, I am never going to finish this book.” The title of the book is The Dialectic Synthesis of Irony. When Dad announced that, very proud of it, at dinner one night, Mum asked, “Can you say that three times fast?” Molly and I tried, and couldn’t, and it creased us up. Dad looked very stern, and said, “It is going to be a very important book”; Molly said, “What is?” and he tried to say the title again, couldn’t, and it creased him up, too. He tried to explain to me once what the title means, but he gave up. Molly said she understood it very well. But Molly is full of bull sometimes. It was at breakfast the Saturday morning before Thanksgiving that Mum and Dad told us we were leaving the house in town. I had figured that something was going on, because my mother had been on the phone all week, and my mother is not the type of woman who talks on the phone very much. “We’ve found a house,” Mum said, pouring more coffee for herself and Dad, “out in the country so that your father can have some peace and quiet. It’s a lovely house, girls, built in 1840, with a big fireplace in the kitchen. It’s on a dirt road, and surrounded by one hundred and sixty acres of woods and fields. When summer comes we’ll be able to put in a vegetable garden—” Summer. I guess Molly and I had been thinking the same thing, that she was talking about a month or so, maybe till after the Christmas holiday. But summer. It was only November. We sat there like idiots, with our mouths open. I had been born while we lived in the house in town, thirteen years before, and now they were talking about leaving it behind. I couldn’t think of anything to say, which is not unusual for me. But Molly always thinks of things to say. “What about school?” she asked. “You’ll go by bus, to the Macwahoc Valley Consolidated School. It’s a good school, and it’s only about a twenty-minute bus ride.” “Can you say that three times fast?” asked Dad, grinning. “Macwahoc Valley Consolidated School?” We didn’t even try. Consolidated school. I didn’t even know what that meant. To be honest, it sounded to me as if the school needed a laxative. Anyway, school wasn’t my main concern. I was thinking about my Thursday afternoon art class, which was just about to get into oils after umpteen weeks on watercolours, and my Saturday morning photography class, where my photograph of the clock tower at sunset had just been selected Best of the Week, beating the eight others in the class, which were all taken by boys. But I didn’t even ask about my classes, about what would happen to them when we moved to the country. Because I knew. “Dad,” groaned Molly. “I’ve just been made cheerleader.” Boy, was that the wrong thing to say to my father. He’s proud of Molly, because she’s pretty and all that, even though he always seems somewhat surprised by her, that all of a sudden since she turned fifteen, she has boyfriends and stuff. Every now and then he looks at her and shakes his head in a kind of astonishment, and pride. But he has this thing about priorities, and when Molly said that, he set down his coffee cup very hard and looked at her with a frown. “Cheerleading,” he said, “does not have top priority.” And that was that. It was all decided, and there wasn’t anything to argue or fuss about. It was too busy a time, anyway. We almost skipped Thanksgiving, except that there were students who couldn’t go home for the holiday, and so five of them spent that Thursday with us, and Mum cooked a turkey. But most of the day we packed. The students helped to put books into boxes, and some of them helped Mum, packing dishes and kitchen things. I did all my packing alone that week. I cried when I fitted my new, unused box of oil paints – a present for my thirteenth birthday the month before – into a box, and I cried again when I packed my camera. But at least those things, the things I cared about most, were going with me. Molly had to give her blue-and-white cheerleading outfit to one of the substitute cheerleaders, a girl named Lisa Halstead, who pretended to be sad and sympathetic, but you could tell it was phony; she couldn’t wait to get home and try on that pleated skirt. And all of that was only last month. It seems like a hundred years ago. Strange, how the age of a house makes a difference. That shouldn’t surprise me, because certainly the age of a person makes a big difference, like with Molly and me. Molly is fifteen, which means that she puts on eyeshadow when Mum doesn’t catch her at it, and she spends hours in front of the mirror arranging her hair different ways; she stands sideways there, too, to see what her figure looks like, and she talks on the phone every evening to friends, mostly about boys. It took her about two days to make friends at the new school, two days after that to have boyfriends, and the next week she was chosen as a substitute cheerleader. Me, I’m only two years younger, and that seems to make such a difference, though I haven’t figured out why. It’s not only physical, although that’s part of it. If I stand sideways in front of a mirror – which I don’t bother doing – I might as well be standing backwards, for all the difference it makes. And I couldn’t begin to put on eyeshadow even if I wanted to, because I can’t see without my glasses. Those are the physical things; the real difference seems to be that I don’t care about those things. Will I, two years from now? Or do I care now, and pretend I don’t, even to myself? I can’t figure it out. As for friends? Well, the first day at the consolidated school, when the first teacher said, “Margaret Chalmers” and I told him, “Would you call me Meg, please,” a boy on the side of the classroom called out, “Nutmeg”! Now, three weeks later, there are three hundred and twenty-three people in the Macwahoc Valley Consolidated School who call me Nutmeg Chalmers. You know the old saying about with friends like that, who needs enemies? But I was talking about the age of houses. As my mother had said, this house was built in 1840. That makes it almost one hundred and forty years old. Our house in town was fifty years old. The difference is that the house in town was big, with a million cupboards and staircases and windows and an attic, all sorts of places for privacy and escape: places where you could curl up with a book and no one would know you were there for hours. Places that were just mine, like the little alcove at the top of the attic stairs, where I tacked my photographs and watercolours on the wall to make my own private gallery, and no one bugged me about the drawing pin holes in the wall. It’s important, I think, to have places like that in your life, secrets that you share only by choice. I said that to Molly once, and she didn’t understand; she said she would like to share everything. It’s why she likes cheerleading, she said: because she can throw out her arms and a whole crowd of people responds to her. Here, in the country, the house is very small. Dad explained that it was built this way because it was so hard to keep it warm way back then. The ceilings are low; the windows are small; the staircase is like a tiny tunnel. Nothing seems to fit right. The floors slant, and there are wide spaces between the pine boards. If you close a door, it falls open again all on its own, when you’re not looking. It doesn’t matter much, the doors not closing, because there’s no place for privacy anyway. Why bother to close the door to your room when it’s not even your own room? When we got here, I ran inside the empty house while the others were all still standing in the courtyard, trying to help the removal van get turned round in the snowy drive. I went up the little flight of stairs, looked round, and saw the three bedrooms: two big ones, and the tiny one in the middle, just off the narrow hall. In that room the ceiling was slanted almost down to the floor, and there was one window that looked out over the woods behind the house, and the wallpaper was yellow, very faded and old but still yellow, with a tiny green leaf here and there in the pattern. There was just room for my bed and my desk and my bookcase and the few other things that would make it really mine. I stood for a long time by that one window, looking out at the woods. Across a field to the left of the house, I could see another house far away; it was empty, the outside unpainted, and the windows, some of them broken, black like dark eyes. The rectangle of the window in the little room was like the frame of a painting, and I stood there thinking how I would wake up each morning there, looking out, and each day it would change to a new kind of picture. The snow would get deeper; the wind would blow those last few leaves from the trees; there would be icicles hanging from the edge of the roof; and then, in spring, things would melt, and change, and turn green. There would be rabbits in the field in the early morning. Wild flowers. Maybe someone would come to live in that abandoned house, and light would come from those dark windows at night, across the meadow. Finally I went downstairs. My mother was in the empty living room, figuring out how to fit in the big sofa from the other house. Dad and Molly were still outside, sprinkling salt on the drive so that the removal men wouldn’t slip on the snow. “Mum,” I said, “the little room is mine, isn’t it?” She stopped to think for a minute, remembering the upstairs of the new house. Then she put her arm round me and said, “Meg, the little room is for Dad’s study. That’s where he’ll finish the book. You and Molly will share the big bedroom at the end of the hall, the one with the pretty blue-flowered wallpaper.” Mum always tries to make things right with gestures: hugs, quick kisses blown across a room, waves, winks, smiles. Sometimes it helps. I went back upstairs, to the big room that wasn’t going to be all mine. From the windows I could still see the woods, and part of the empty house across the field, but the view was partly blocked by the big grey falling-down barn that was attached to our house on the side. It wasn’t the same. I’m pretty good at making the best of things, but it wasn’t the same. Now, just a month later, just two days before Christmas, the house looks lived in. It’s warm, and full of the sound of fires in the fireplaces, the sound of Dad’s typewriter upstairs, and full of winter smells like wet boots drying, and cinnamon, because my mother is making pumpkin pies and gingerbread. But now Molly, who wants more than anything to throw out her arms and share, has drawn that line, because I can’t be like those crowds who smile at her, and share back. (#ulink_16142cff-398e-5e68-be74-3252eab49d55) Good things are happening here. That surprises me a little. When we came, I thought it would be a place where I would just have to stick it out, where I would be lonely for a year. Where nothing would ever happen at all. Now good things are happening to all of us. Well, it’s hard to tell with my mother; she’s the kind of person who always enjoys everything anyway. Molly and Mum are a lot alike. They get so enthusiastic and excited that you think something wonderful has happened; then, when you stop to think about it, nothing has really happened at all. Every morning, for example, Mum puts fresh birdseed in the bird feeder outside the kitchen window. Two minutes later the first bird stops by for breakfast, and Mum jumps up, says “Shhh” and goes to look, and you forget that four hundred birds were there the day before. Or a plant in the kitchen gets a new leaf and she almost sends out birth announcements. So it always seems as if good things are happening to Mum. Dad is more like me; he waits for the truly good things, as if getting excited about the little ones might keep the big ones from coming. But the book is going well for Dad, and he says it was coming here that did it. He goes into the little room each morning, closes the door, and sets a brick against it so that it won’t fall open while he’s working. He’s still there when Molly and I get home from school at four, and Mum says he doesn’t come out all day, except every now and then when he appears in the kitchen and pours himself a cup of coffee without saying a word, and goes back upstairs. Like a sleepwalker, Mum says. We can hear the typewriter going full speed; every now and then we hear him rip up or crumple a piece of paper, and then roll a fresh one into the typewriter and start clattering away again. He talks to himself, too – we can hear him muttering behind the door – but talking to himself is a good sign. When he’s silent, it means things aren’t going well, but he’s been talking to himself behind the door to the little room ever since we came here. Last night he came to dinner looking very preoccupied, but smiling to himself now and then. Molly and I were talking about school, and Mum was telling us how she had decided to make a patchwork quilt while we’re living in the country, using scraps of material from all the clothes Molly and I wore when we were little. We started remembering our old dresses – we don’t even wear dresses any more; I don’t think I’ve worn anything but jeans for two years. Molly said, “Remember that yucky dress I used to have that had butterflies on it? The one I wore at my sixth birthday party?” I didn’t remember it, but Mum did; she laughed, and said, “Molly, that was a beautiful dress. Those butterflies were hand-embroidered! It’s going into a special place on the quilt!” Dad hadn’t heard a word, but he’d been sitting there with a half-smile on his face. All of a sudden he said, “Lydia, I really have a grip on Coleridge!” and he jumped up from his chair, leaving half a piece of apple pie, and went back to the study, taking the stairs two at a time. We could hear the typewriter start up again. Mum looked after him with that special fond look she gives to things that are slightly foolish and very lovable. She smiles, and her eyes look as if they can see back into her memory, into all the things that have gone into making a person what they are. With Dad, I think she looks back to when she knew him as a student, when he must have been serious and forgetful and very kind, the way he still is, but young, which he isn’t any more. With me, I know her memories go back to all sorts of frustrations and confusions, because I was never an “easy” child; I remember that I questioned and argued and raged. But her look, for me, is still that same caring look that goes beyond all that. As for Molly? I’ve seen her look at Molly that way, too, and it’s a more complicated thing; I think when Mum looks at Molly, her memories go back further, to her own self as a girl, because they are so alike, and it must be a puzzling thing to see yourself growing up again. It must be like looking through the wrong end of a telescope – seeing yourself young, far away, on your own; the distance is too great for the watcher, really, to do anything more than watch, and remember, and smile. Molly has a boyfriend. Boys have always liked Molly. When she was little, boys in the neighbourhood used to come to repair her bike; they lent her their skate keys, brought her home when she skinned her knees and waited, anxious, while she was given a plaster; they shared their trick-or-treat sweets with Molly at Hallowe’en. When I was down to the dregs in my paper bag, two weeks later, down to eating the wrinkled apples in the bottom, Molly always had Mars Bars left, presents from the boys on the block. How could boys not like a girl who looks the way she does? I’ve got used to Molly’s looks because I’ve lived with her for thirteen years. But every now and then I glance at her and see her as if she were a stranger. One night recently she was sitting in front of the fire doing her homework, and I looked over because I wanted to ask her a question about negative numbers. The light from the fire was on her face, all gold, and her blonde hair was falling down across her forehead and in waves round her cheeks and on to her shoulders. For a second she looked just like a picture on a Christmas card we had got from friends in Boston; it was almost eerie. I held my breath when I looked at her for that moment, because she looked so beautiful. Then she saw me watching her, and stuck her tongue out, so that she was just Molly again, and familiar. Boys, I think, probably see that part of her all the time, the beautiful part. And now suddenly this one boy, Tierney McGoldrick, who plays on the basketball team and is also president of the junior class, is hanging round her every minute in school. They’re always together, and he lets her wear his school jacket with a big MV for Macwahoc Valley on the back. Of course, because we live out here in the middle of the woods, so far from everything, they can’t actually date. Tierney’s not old enough to drive, even if he wanted to drive all the way from where he lives; half the distance is a dirt road that’s usually covered with snow. But he rings her up every single night. Molly takes the phone into the pantry, so that the long cord is stretched across the kitchen, and my mother and I have to step over it while we’re putting the dinner plates away. Mum thinks it’s quite funny. But then Mum has curly hair too, and was probably just as beautiful as Molly once. Maybe it’s because I have straight stringy hair and glasses that the whole thing makes me feel a little sad. So Dad has a grip on Coleridge, whatever that means, and Molly has a grip on Tierney McGoldrick. Me, I can’t actually say I have a grip on anything, but good things have been happening to me here, too. I have a new friend. Just after New Year’s Day, before the school holidays ended, I went out for a walk. It was a walk I’d been meaning to take ever since we moved to the house, but things had been so busy, first with school and fixing up the house, then Christmas, then settling down after Christmas – I don’t know, the time just never seemed right for it. I guess I like to think that it was fate that sent me out for this particular walk on this particular day. Fate, and the fact that the sun finally came out after weeks of greyness and snow. I took my camera – the first time I’d taken my camera out since we came to the country – and went, all bundled up in my down jacket and wearing heavy boots, down the dirt road beyond our house. I walked towards the abandoned house that I could see across the fields from the upstairs window. The snow kept me from getting close to it. The house is a long distance back from the road and of course the drive, really a narrow road in its own right, hadn’t been cleared. But I stood, stamping my feet to keep warm, and looked at it for a long time. It reminds me of a very honest and kind blind man. That sounds silly. But it looks honest to me because it’s so square and straight. It’s a very old house – I know that because of the way it’s built, with a centre chimney and all the other things I’ve learnt about from living in our old house – but its corners are all square like a man holding his shoulders straight. Nothing sags on it at all. It’s a shabby house, though, with no paint, so that the old boards are all weathered to grey. I suppose that’s why it seems kind, because it doesn’t mind being poor and paintless; it even seems to be proud of it. Blind because it doesn’t look back at me. The windows are empty and dark. Not scary. Just waiting, and thinking about something. I took a couple of photographs of the house from the road and walked on. I know the dirt road ends a mile beyond our house, but I had never gone to the end. The school bus turns round in our drive, and no other cars ever come down this road except for one beaten-up truck now and then. That same truck was parked at the end of the road, beside a tiny, weatherbeaten house that looked like a distant, poorer cousin of the one I’d passed. An elderly cousin, frail but very proud. There was smoke coming out of the chimney, and curtains in the two little windows on either side of the door. A dog in the courtyard, who thumped his tail against a snowbank when he saw me coming. And beside the truck – no, actually in the truck, or at least with his head inside it, under the bonnet, was a man. “Hi,” I called. It would have been silly to turn round and start walking home without saying anything, even though I’ve promised my parents all my life that I would never talk to strange men. He lifted out his head, a grey head, with a bright red woollen cap on it, smiled – a nice smile – and said, “Miss Chalmers. I’m glad you’ve come to visit.” “Meg,” I said automatically. I was puzzled. How did he know who I was? Our name isn’t even on the mailbox. “For Margaret?” he asked, coming over and shaking my hand, or at least my mitten, leaving a smear of grease on it. “Forgive me. My hands are very dirty. My battery dies in this cold weather.” “How did you know?” “How did I know Meg for Margaret? Because Margaret was my wife’s name; therefore, one of my favourite names, of course. And I called her Meg at times, though no one else did.” “They call me Nutmeg at school. I bet no one ever called your wife Nutmeg.” He laughed. He had beautiful blue eyes, and his face moved into a new pattern of wrinkles when he laughed. “No,” he admitted, “they didn’t. But she wouldn’t have minded. Nutmeg was one of her favourite spices. She wouldn’t have made an apple pie without it.” “What I meant, though, when I said, ‘How did you know?’ was how did you know my name was Chalmers?” He wiped his hands on a greasy rag that was hanging from the door handle of the truck. “My dear, I apologize. I have not even introduced myself. My name is Will Banks. And it’s much too cold to stand out here. Your toes must be numb, even in those boots. Come inside, and I’ll make us each a cup of tea. And I’ll tell you how I know your name.” I briefly envisioned myself telling my mother, “So then I went into his house,” and I briefly envisioned my mother saying, “You went into his house?” He saw me hesitate, and smiled. “Meg,” he said, “I’m seventy years old. Thoroughly harmless, even to a beautiful young girl like you. Come on in and keep me company for a bit, and get warm.” I laughed, because he knew what I was thinking, and very few people ever know what I’m thinking. Then I went into his house. What a surprise. It was a tiny house, and very old, and looked on the outside as if it might fall down any minute. For that matter, his truck was also very old, and looked as if it might fall down any minute. And Mr Banks himself was old, although he didn’t appear to be falling apart. But inside, the house was beautiful. Everything was perfect, as if it were a house I’d imagined, or dreamed up with a set of paints. There were only two rooms on the ground floor. On one side of the little front hall was the living room: the walls were painted white, and there was an oriental rug on the floor, all shades of blues and reds. A big fireplace, with a painting that was a real painting, not a print, hanging over the mantelpiece. A pewter pitcher standing on a polished table. A large chest of drawers with bright brass handles. A wing chair that was all done in needlepoint – all done by hand, I could tell, because my mother does needlepoint sometimes. Sunlight was pouring in the little windows, through the white curtains, making patterns on the carpet and chairs. On the other side of the hall was the kitchen. That’s where Mr Banks and I went, after he had shown me the living room. A wood stove was burning in the kitchen, and a copper kettle sat on top of it, steaming. A round pine table was laid with woven blue mats, and in the centre of it a blue and white bowl held three apples like a still life. Everything was scrubbed and shiny and in the right place. It made me think of a song that we sang in kindergarten, when we sat at our desks and folded our hands. “We’re all in our places with bright shiny faces,” we used to sing. I could hear the words in my mind, the little voices of all those five-year-olds, and it was a good memory; Mr Banks’ house was like that, a house warm with memories, of things in their places, and smiling. He took my jacket and hung it up with his, and poured tea into two thick pottery mugs. We sat at the table, in pine chairs that gleamed almost yellow from a combination of old wood, polish, and sunlight. “Is yours the little room at the top of the stairs?” he asked me. How did he know about the little room? “No,” I explained. “I wanted it to be. It’s so perfect. You can see the other house across the field, you know” – he nodded; he knew “ – but my father needed that room. He’s writing a book. So my sister and I have the big room together.” “The little room was mine,” he said, “when I was a small boy. Sometime when your father isn’t working there, go in and look in the cupboard. On the cupboard floor you’ll find my name carved, if no one’s refinished the floor. My mother spanked me for doing it. I was eight years old at the time, and I’d been shut in my room for being rude to my older sister.” “You lived in my house?” I asked in surprise. He laughed again. “My dear Meg,” he said, “you live in my house. “My grandfather built that house. Actually, he built the one across the field, first. Then he built the other one, where you five. In those days families stuck together, of course, and he built the second house for his sister, who never married. Later he gave it to his oldest son – my father – and my sister and I were both born there. “It became my house when I married Margaret. I took her there to live when she was a bride, eighteen years old. My sister had married and moved to Boston. She’s dead now. My parents, of course, are gone. And Margaret and I never had children. So there’s no one left but me. Well, that’s not entirely true – there’s my sister’s son, but that’s another story. “Anyway, there’s no one left here on the land but me. There were times, when I was young, when Margaret was with me, when I was tempted to leave, to take a job in a city, to make a lot of money, but—” He lit his pipe, was quiet for a minute, looking into the past. “Well, it was my grandfather’s land, and my father’s, before it was mine. Not many people understand that today, what that means. But I know this land. I know every rock, every tree. I couldn’t leave them behind. “This house used to be the hired man’s cottage. I’ve fixed it up a bit, and it’s a good little house. But the other two houses are still mine. When the taxes went up, I just couldn’t afford to keep them going. I moved here after Margaret died, and I’ve rented the family houses whenever I come across someone who has reason to want to live in this wilderness. “When I heard your parents were looking for a place, I offered the little house to them. It’s a perfect place for a writer – the solitude stimulates imagination, I think. “Other people come now and then, thinking it might be a cheap place to live, but I won’t rent to just anyone. That’s why the big house is empty now – the right family hasn’t come along.” “Do you get lonely here?” He finished his tea and set the mug down on the table. “No. I’ve been here all my life. I miss my Margaret, of course. But I have Tip” – the dog looked up at his name, and thumped his tail against the floor – “and I do some carpentry in the village now and then, when people need me. I have books. That’s all I need, really. “Of course,” he smiled, “it’s nice to have a new friend, like you.” “Mr Banks?” “Oh please, please. Call me Will, the way all my friends do.” “Will, then. Would you mind if I took your picture?” “My dear,” he said, straightening his shoulders and buttoning the top button of his tartan shirt. “I would be honoured.” The light was coming in through the kitchen window on to his face: soft light now; it had become late afternoon, when all the harsh shadows are gone. He sat right there, smoked his pipe, and talked, and I finished the whole roll of film, just shooting quickly as he gestured and smiled. All those times when I feel awkward and inept – all those times are made up for when I have my camera, when I can look through the viewfinder and feel that I can control the focus and the light and the composition, when I can capture what I see, in a way that no one else is seeing it. I felt that way while I was taking Will’s picture. I unloaded the exposed film and carried it home in my pocket like a secret. When I looked back from the road, Will was by his truck again, waving to me; Tip was back by his snowbank, thumping his tail. And deep, way deep inside me somewhere was something else that kept me warm on the walk home, even though the sun was going down and the wind was coming over the piles of snow on either side of the road, blowing stinging powder into my eyes. It was the fact that Will Banks had called me beautiful. (#ulink_780ba134-a257-563f-960b-290e7f5f916a) February is the worst month, in New England. I think so, anyway. My mother doesn’t agree with me. Mum says April is, because everything turns to mud in April; the snow melts, and things that were buried all winter – dog messes, lost mittens, beer bottles tossed from cars – all reappear, still partly frozen into icy mixtures that are half the grey remains of old snow and half the brown beginnings of mud. Lots of the mud, of course, ends up on the kitchen floor, which is why my mother hates April. My father, even though he always recites a poem that begins “April is the cruellest month” to my mother when she’s scrubbing the kitchen floor in the spring, agrees with me that it’s February that’s worst. Snow, which was fun in December, is just boring, dirty, and downright cold in February. And the same sky that was blue in January is just nothing but white a month later – so white that sometimes you can’t tell where the sky ends and the land begins. And it’s cold, bitter cold, the kind of cold where you just can’t go outside. I haven’t been to see Will, because it’s too cold to walk a mile up the road. I haven’t taken any pictures, because it’s too cold to take off my mittens and operate the camera. And Dad can’t write. He goes in the little room and sits, every day, but the typewriter is quiet. It’s almost noisy, the quietness, we are all so aware of it. He told me that he sits and looks out of the window at all the whiteness and can’t get a grip on anything. I understand that; if I were able to go out with my camera in the cold, the film wouldn’t be able to grip the edges and corners of things because everything has blended so into the colourless, stark mass of February. For Dad, everything has blended into a mass without any edges in his mind, and he can’t write. I showed him the cupboard floor, where William is carved into the pine. “Will Banks is a fascinating man,” Dad said, leaning back in his scruffy leather chair in front of the typewriter. He was having a cup of coffee, and I had tea. It was the first time I had visited him in the little room, and he seemed glad to have company. “You know, he’s well educated, and he’s a master cabinet-maker. He could have earned a fortune in Boston, or New York, but he wouldn’t leave this land. People round here think he’s a little crazy. But I don’t know, I don’t know.” “He’s not crazy, Dad. He’s nice. But it’s too bad he has to live in that teeny house, when he owns both these bigger ones that were his family’s.” “Well, he’s happy there, Meg, and you can’t argue with happiness. Problem is, there’s a nephew in Boston who’s going to make trouble for Will, I’m afraid.” “What do you mean? How can anyone make trouble for an old man who isn’t bothering anybody?” “I’m not sure. I wish I knew more about law. Seems the nephew is the only relative he has. Will owns all this land, and the houses – they were left to him – but when he dies, they’ll go to this nephew, his sister’s son. It’s valuable property. They may not look like much to you, Meg, but these houses are real antiques, the kind of things that a lot of people from big cities would like to buy. The nephew, apparently, would like to have Will declared what the law calls ‘incompetent’ – which just means crazy. If he could do that, he’d have control over the property. He’d like to sell it to some people who want to build cottages for tourists, and to turn the big house into an inn.” I stood up and looked out of the window, across the field, to where the empty house was standing grey against the whiteness, with its brick chimney tall and straight against the sharp line of the roof. I imagined cute little blue shutters on the windows, and a sign over the door that said “All Major Credit Cards Accepted”. I envisioned a car park, filled with cars and caravans from different states. “They can’t do that, Dad,” I said. Then it turned into a question. “Can they?” My father shrugged. “I didn’t think so. But last week the nephew phoned me, and asked if it were true, what he had heard, that the people in the village call Will ‘Loony Willie’.” “‘Loony Willie’? What did you say to him?” “I told him I’d never heard anything so ridiculous in my life, and to stop bothering me, because I was busy writing a book that was going to change the whole history of literature.” That creased us both up. The book that was going to change the whole history of literature was lying in stacks all over my father’s desk, on the floor, in at least a hundred crumpled sheets of typing paper in the big waste paper basket, and in two pages that he had made into paper aeroplanes and sailed across the room. We laughed and laughed. When I was able to stop laughing, I remembered something that I had wanted to tell my father. “You know, last month, when I visited Will, I took his picture.” “Mmmmm?” “He was sitting in his kitchen, smoking his pipe and looking out of the window, and talking. I shot a whole roll. And you know, Dad, his eyes are so bright, and his face is so alive, so full of memories and thoughts. He’s interested in everything. I thought of that when you said Loony Willie.” “Could I see the pictures?” I felt a little silly. “Well, I haven’t been able to develop them yet, Dad. I can’t use the darkroom at school because I have to catch the early bus to get home. It’s just that I remember his face looking like that when I photographed him.” My father sat up straight in his chair very suddenly. “Meg,” he said, “I have a great idea!” He sounded like a little boy. Once Mum told Molly and me that she didn’t mind not having sons, because often Dad is like a little boy, and now I could see exactly what she meant. He looked as if he were ten years old, on a Saturday morning, with an exciting and probably impossible project in mind. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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