The Hollow Ferns: The Brothers Refusal

The boots on the flagstones were the kind that did not apologize. Hazel heard them from the second landing, descending the staircase of the inn with the measured cadence of a man who had walked this road so many times the road no longer noticed him. She set down her teacup. The saucer accepted it with a small porcelain exhalation, and the sound travelled the length of the corridor the way sound travels in empty buildings: it went on arriving.

She knew whose boots those were before he reached the door. There is a weight to the way Nolan Crewe walks that has nothing to do with size. He walks the way their father walked, weighted down by something he refuses to set down.

The knock came. Three knuckles, no flourish.

"Open the door, Haze."

She had not seen her brother in eleven months. Eleven months of letters unanswered at his end, of cold courtesy at hers, of the careful distance both of them had maintained because the alternative was the cellar in the old house and what was kept there. She crossed the room. The latch lifted with a rusted complaint that sounded, in the silence of the upper corridor, almost human.

He stood in the hallway, hat in hand, a smear of road dust on one cheekbone. Thinner than she remembered. The bones of his face had grown more prominent, as if some interior scaffolding had been removed and not replaced. His eyes, the color of wet slate, moved past her to the room behind her as if expecting to find someone else there.

"You might have written ahead," she said.

"I might have."

He stepped inside without waiting for invitation. The room smelled of lamp oil and the lavender she had tucked between the bed linens this morning. Her sketchbook lay open on the writing desk where she had been working on a frond of hart's tongue fern when the boots began their ascent. He glanced at it the way one glances at something one has decided not to engage with.

"Sit down, Nolan. Have you eaten?"

"I've eaten."

"You haven't. You never do on the road. You say you have so I won't fuss."

The ghost of something moved at the corner of his mouth. It might have been annoyance. It might have been the memory of a brother who used to tease her, before the farm ate him, before his wife left, before their mother began talking to walls.

"Sit, then," she said, softer now, and closed the door behind him.

He sat in the chair by the window. He did not remove his coat. He did not set his hat down. He placed both on his knees like a man holding two children from a flood.

"I came about the letter," he said.

Hazel felt it then, the small shift in the floor of the moment, the way a house settles a quarter inch before the chimney begins to crack. She went to the armchair opposite him and sat. She did not pick up her tea. Her hands folded in her lap with the practiced composure of a woman who had learned that some conversations require one's hands to be nowhere near anything breakable.

"Whose letter," she said.

"Don't."

"There are several letters, Nolan. There is the one from your solicitor last spring about the east field. There is the one from the Reverend about the church roof. There is the one from Wendell Hargrove I received yesterday, offering to take the inland parcels off our hands for a song. Which letter did you come about?"

He looked at her then, fully, and she saw how tired he was. The exhaustion lived behind his eyes, somewhere behind the slate and the bone, in the soft machinery that keeps a man upright. He swallowed.

"You know which one."

She did know. She had known since the moment the boots struck the stairs. There was only one letter in the world that would drag Nolan Crewe forty miles down the road in a single morning. The letter she had found beneath the floorboard of their mother's bedroom.

The letter lay between them now, though neither had moved. It sat on the parlour table where Hazel had placed it that morning, its envelope already split at one corner, the paper inside folded twice. A small thing. The size of a hand. The size of everything that had gone wrong.

Hazel stood first. She moved to the window and looked out at the lane, at the last of the day's copper gone, then at the trees that lined the lower paddock. The elms had not yet dropped their leaves. They would not, this autumn; the season had confused itself.

"I'll lay supper," she said.

"I don't want supper."

"Sit at the table, Nolan."

He did not argue. He stood, set his hat upon the chair he had been sitting in, shrugged his coat off and hung it on the back of the door. Underneath he wore the same shirt he had worn to market for the past three weeks, the cuffs softened to gauze, the collar buttoned at the throat despite the warmth of the room. He did not take off his boots. He never did, in this house; it was one of the few boyhood habits their mother had never managed to train from him.

Hazel went through to the kitchen. The room was cold, the range already banked for the night. She coaxed it back with a twist of paper and a single split stick, then set the kettle on. She took down the cold ham from the larder and sliced it thin, laid it on the blue willow plate their mother had brought back from Taunton forty years ago. She cut bread. She found butter. She set a jar of pickled walnuts on the tray and thought, for no reason she could name, of Maggie at seven, standing on a chair to reach the same jar, her face gone sour at the first mouthful, her eyes watering, her laughter bright and unguarded in the way only children's laughter can be.

She put the thought away. She carried the tray in.

They sat. Nolan did not take his plate. He sat with his hands flat upon the table and looked at the ham as though it were a thing that had offended him. Then he took up his knife and fork and began to eat with the mechanical discipline of a man who had long ago lost any pleasure in the act.

Hazel poured the tea. She did not speak. She let the silence do its work, the way she had learned to do with the cows she no longer owned and the cat she still did, the way her mother had taught her, the way silence in a house with a grief in it is sometimes the only true courtesy.

The fire caught. The room warmed by degrees. Outside, a thrush began its last song, three notes and a pause, three notes and a pause, as though practising the same phrase for an exam it could not sit.

Nolan set his knife down.

"She went down," he said.

Hazel's hand stilled upon her cup.

"That was the night," he said. "There was a storm. The lane flooded at the bend below the old smithy. The river came up over the footbridge. I was on the settee by nine. I told her I'd sit with her. I was to sit with her until your mother came back from your aunt's. I was twelve. She was four."

He stopped. He looked at the tea in his cup as though he had never seen tea before and was not entirely certain it was safe.

"I fell asleep."

He said the words with a kind of dull precision, as though he were reading them from a summons.

"I fell asleep, Hazel. I was supposed to be on the settee with my eyes open. I was supposed to hear her if she called. I was supposed to hear her if she stirred. I was supposed to be the one who watched her, and I fell asleep and the power was out and the rain was coming in under the back porch and the candle had burned down in the saucer and I did not wake."

Hazel did not move. The thrush outside sang its three notes again and again.

"She was gone in the morning."

He picked up his cup and put it down without drinking. His thumb traced the handle, the way a child's thumb traces a worry bead.

"What do you want me to say, Hazel? That I have lived with it? I have lived with it. Every day I have lived with it. I have carried it the way you carry a bag of stones up a hill, and every day I have set it down and every morning I have picked it up again. I have lived with it. What more do you want."

"I don't want anything."

"Then why did you send the letter."

"I didn't send it. I found it."

"Where."

"You don't want to know where."

"I do want to know where."

"You don't want to know where, Nolan. You want to know there is a place to point a finger at. A floorboard. A drawer. A letter. A face. You want there to be a reason that isn't you. There isn't."

He stared at her across the table. His face was very still, the way a pond is still when something has just moved beneath its surface and the rings have not yet reached the edge. She saw the muscle in his jaw tighten and release, tighten and release.

"I fell asleep," he said again, lower, as though speaking the words for a third time might finally exhaust them. "That is the truth. I was supposed to watch her and I did not. The storm came and the power went out and the candle burned down and I slept on that settee like the dead slept, and when I woke the settee beside me was cold and her slippers were still on the rug."

He stopped. He would not say more. She could see it in him, the way his shoulders had set, the way his eyes had gone flat and careful, the way a man draws a cloth over something in a room he does not want you to enter.

"Nolan."

"I won't."

"What won't you do."

"Go through the rest of it. The hours. The places we looked. The man from Bridgwater with the dogs. The policeman who asked the questions. The way your mother sat on the stairs in her coat for a week and would not come in. I won't go through that. Not tonight. Not for you, not for the letter, not for the girl if she is alive. I have carried it. I will not unpack it here."

"Someone wrote that letter, Nolan. Someone who knew the house. Someone who knew about the storm. Someone who knew the candle burned down."

"Then someone knew."

"And you won't say who."

"I won't say who."

"Even to me."

"Especially to you."

The thrush had stopped. Outside the window the lane was dark, and the elms moved in a wind that had not been there a moment before. The kitchen clock ticked twice, then once, then twice, in the small uneven rhythm of a clock that had not been wound at the proper time.

She reached for the teapot and refilled his cup. He watched her hand. She saw him watching her hand, and she understood that he was looking at it for steadiness, the way he used to look at her hand when they were small and there was thunder and she was the one who was calm.

"You wrote it," he said.

She set the pot down.

"I did not write it."

"You found it. You did not send it. But you read it. And you did not come to me."

"I have only just found it. Under the floorboard of her room. I found it yesterday when I went up to air the linens. It was folded in tissue paper in a tin that had been there, I think, since before Father died."

"Then why didn't you bring it straight to me."

"Because it is not yours to carry, Nolan. It never was."

He looked away from her. He looked at the wall. He looked at the small framed sampler their mother had stitched at school, the one that said Blessed Are The Poor In Spirit, the lettering gone brown now, the threads loosening.

"You think she's alive," he said.

"I think someone wrote that letter."

"It could be cruel."

"It could be."

"It could be Wendell."

"It could be."

"It could be anyone."

"It could."

He picked up his cup at last and drank. His throat worked once, twice. He set the cup down and placed his hands flat on the table again, the way he had begun, as though the table were the only steady thing in the room.

"I will not talk about the night," he said. "I will not go through the hours. I will not say what was in the candle when we found it. I will not say what was in the bed. I will not say what was on the stairs. If you want those things, you will have to find them yourself. I have been in that house enough."

"Then come with me."

"I won't."

"Then send Wendell."

He made a sound that might have been a laugh. It was a dry sound, a small sound, the sound a leaf makes when it is lifted an inch and dropped again.

"Don't send Wendell, Hazel."

"Someone is going to look, Nolan. Someone is going to go to that house and look."

"Let it be you, then."

He pushed his chair back. He stood. He picked up his coat from the chair behind the door and put it on without brushing the shoulders, the way a man puts on a coat when he has decided to walk a long way in a short time. He picked up his hat. He did not look at her.

"Stay the night," she said.

"No."

"There's a spare bed made."

"I won't sleep."

"Neither will I."

"Then we will keep each other awake, and that will be a poor use of a candle." He stood at the door with his hand on the frame. "Read me the letter again."

She went to the parlour and brought it to him. He read it standing, his thumb over the lower edge of the paper to keep it from trembling in the draught from the hall. He read it twice. He folded it. He handed it back.

"It is her hand," he said.

"Yes."

"It is her hand."

"Yes."

He nodded once. He did not say anything else. He opened the front door. The wind came in and moved the paper on the tray and the candle on the sill and the corner of the cloth on the sideboard. He stepped out. She heard his boots on the gravel, then on the path, then on the lane. Then nothing.

She closed the door. She stood in the hall with the letter in her hand and listened to the clock tick in the kitchen and the wind press against the panes and somewhere out beyond the elms, faintly, the thrush beginning its phrase again.

She stood in the hall a long while after the door closed. The clock ticked. The wind moved. She folded the letter along its old creases and slid it back into the envelope and set the envelope on the tray with the clippings and the photographs of Theo. Then she went into the parlour and shut the door.

She did not sit. She stood at the writing desk and looked at the small leather case she kept on the lower shelf, the one she had bought in Taunton the autumn she turned forty, the one she had not opened since the spring her mother died. It was a Kodak Brownie, scuffed at the corners, with a velvet shutter that had gone thin at the hinge. She took it out. She set it on the desk. She lifted the letter out of the envelope again and held it under the lamp.

The numbers were small. They were written in the margin of the second page, beneath the closing line, in a column of four, like a sum that did not add. She had read them four times in the last hour and had not understood them. Now she read them again. Twenty-seven. Forty-one. Eighteen. Thirty-three.

She set the letter flat against the blotter. She opened the camera. She leaned close and pressed her eye to the small glass window at the back and turned the dial until the numbers came clear. The shutter clicked, soft as a swallow. She wound the film. She clicked again. She clicked a third time, because her hand had trembled on the second and she wanted to be sure.

She put the camera back in its case. She put the case on the shelf. She went to the window and drew back the curtain a finger's width and looked out at the lane. Empty. The elms moved in the wind. The moon was up behind them, making the wet bark silver and the road beyond a pale, almost colourless strip.

She took her coat from the hook. She did not put on her good hat. She took the old felt with the stained brim that she wore for the allotment, and she pulled it low, and she set the collar of her coat up against the wind, and she let herself out by the back door and along the path behind the pig-sty and through the gate into the paddock that sloped down to the lane.

She walked quickly. The camera case was heavy against her hip. The lane was wet. Her boots left dark prints that the wind did not have time to dry before she was past them. She turned left at the stile and followed the footpath across the field that smelled of turned earth and old silage, and at the far stile she climbed over and dropped into the lane beyond and turned right and walked on past the empty cottages with their blank windows and on past the chapel with its bell-tower and on to the lane that bent around the hill and brought her at last to the iron gate of the cottage where Wendell Hargrove lived.

The cottage was lit. She could see the lamp moving behind the curtains, thrown by a hand or a draught, the shadows shifting. She did not go to the front door. She went around the side, past the woodpile and the empty dog-kennel, to the back door, which was set low under a lean-to roof of blackened slate. She knocked twice, soft, with her knuckle.

The door opened a hand's width. A face appeared in the gap, pink and smiling and a little too quick to smile.

"Hazel," Wendell said.

"Wendell."

"It is late."

"Yes."

"You have come alone."

"Yes."

He opened the door wider. She stepped in. The kitchen was warm and smelled of bacon fat and candle wax and the particular must of a room in which a man lives alone with a great many small objects he has collected. There were framed photographs on every wall, and a stuffed trout under glass on the mantel, and a model ship in a bottle on the dresser, and on the table a ledger and a cup of cold tea and a pair of reading spectacles folded on top of a pamphlet from the council about drainage rates.

He drew a chair out for her. She did not sit. She set the camera case on the table and opened it and took out the camera and set it beside the ledger and looked at him.

"I need a favour," she said.

"Hazel." He put his hand flat on his chest. "You know I am at your service. I have always said so. Your dear mother and I had an understanding."

"I need you to develop these for me."

He looked at the camera. He looked at her. His smile did not leave, but it thinned, the way a man's smile thins when he is working out what a thing is going to cost him.

"Develop," he said.

"Yes."

"That is an old machine."

"Yes."

"It is not a small thing you are asking."

"It is three exposures of a letter. It is a small thing."

"It is not the size of the thing, Hazel, it is the nature of the thing." He sat down on the opposite side of the table and folded his hands and looked at the camera as if it were a dog that had wandered in and might yet bite. "A letter."

"A letter."

"Whose letter?"

"My mother's."

He was still a moment. The candle on the table guttered and recovered. Somewhere in the cottage a pipe knocked in the wind, a steady soft ticking, like a clock with a wooden face.

"Your mother," he said carefully, "is some years at rest."

"Yes."

"And yet a letter."

"And yet a letter."

"And you have come to me." He sat back in his chair and tilted his head and regarded her with the look of a man pricing a horse. "Not to your brother. Not to the vicar. Not to the police, who would be the natural party in such a matter."

"No."

"To me."

"Yes."

He picked up the camera. He turned it over in his hands. He opened the back and peered in at the film and shut it again and set it down.

"There was a time," he said, "when I was a man of some consequence in this district."

"I know."

"I was the man they sent for. When there was trouble at the Hall, they sent for me. When the Ridley boy was taken from the river, they sent for me. When Mrs. Palk's silver went missing in the spring of nineteen fifty-eight, it was I who knocked on every door from here to Compton."

"I remember."

"I was not always a man who sells fields, Hazel. I was a man who kept the peace." He paused. He lifted the cold tea and sipped it and set it down and made a small face. "I was removed from a case once."

"Which case?"

He looked at her a long time. The candle flame bent and straightened. The pipe knocked in the wind.

"The Crewe case," he said at last.

She did not move. She had known, before he said it, that he would say it. She had known it the way she knew the smell of wet elm bark, the way she knew the note of the thrush in the evening, the way she knew where the loose flagstone was in the kitchen. She had known it, but to hear it said was a different thing, like seeing your own house from the road and recognising it as if for the first time.

"I was removed," he said, "because I got too close."

"Close to what?"

"To a family." He lowered his voice. He leaned forward across the table. The candlelight put a shine on his upper lip. "I will say no more than that. I will say no more than that tonight, and I will say no more than that ever, except to say that there is a family in this parish which has been the subject of attention by persons of authority, and that I was instructed, in writing, by persons of authority, to cease my enquiries, and that I ceased them, and that I have never since that day spoken of the matter to any living soul, until this present moment, which I shall in all probability regret before morning."

"Wendell."

"Hazel."

"What family?"

He sat back. He shook his head. He took off his spectacles and polished them on the tail of his shirt and put them on again.

"No," he said.

"No?"

"No. I have given you more than I should. I have given you a great deal more than I should, and I have given it to you for the price of three photographs, which is a poor price for a man's peace, and which I shall not improve upon by giving you a name."

"Then give me a direction."

He was quiet a moment. He looked at the camera on the table. He looked at the candle. He looked at the door, as if considering whether to open it and put her out and be done with it. Then he sighed, a long theatrical sigh, and folded his arms.

"West," he said. "The family you are thinking of lies west of here. Beyond the ridge. Beyond the moor. You will know the house when you come to it, because there is no other house like it within twelve miles in any direction."

"West," she said.

"West. And I will tell you one more thing, Hazel, and I will tell it to you for nothing, because I have a wife asleep upstairs who believes me a better man than I am, and I should like to be able to look her in the face tomorrow." He paused. He picked up the camera and held it out to her across the table. "Do not go alone."

She took the camera. She held it in her lap. The leather was cold through her skirt.

"I have not said I will go," she said.

"You will go," he said. "You are a Crewe."

He stood. She stood. He went to the door and opened it and stood aside. The wind came in and moved the candle on the table and the cold tea in the cup and the corner of the pamphlet on the drainage rates.

"Good night, Hazel."

"Good night, Wendell."

"And Hazel."

"Yes."

"Leave the camera with me. I will have the plates for you by Wednesday. Come to the front door this time. My wife likes to see who calls."

She stepped out. The wind took her at once, pressing the coat flat against her legs, pushing at the brim of the old felt hat. She turned up the collar and walked back along the path by the woodpile and the empty kennel and through the iron gate and out onto the lane.

She did not go home.

She stood a moment in the lane. The moon was up. The elms on the ridge were black against a sky that was not quite dark, the colour of a bruise not yet set. West, she thought. Beyond the ridge. Beyond the moor. A house unlike any other within twelve miles.

She turned up the lane and began to walk. Her boots made no sound on the wet road. The thrush had stopped. The only sound was the wind in the elms and, behind her, faintly, the closing of a door.