‘Oh man, oh man—’ Cornelius was sobbing. ‘Thank fucking God.’
‘You hold on,’ Adrianna said to Will. ‘We’ve got you. You hear me? You’re not going to die, Will. I’m not going to let you, okay?’
He let his eyes close again. But the snow kept coming down inside his head, laying its hush upon him; like a tender blanket put over his hurt. And by degrees the pain retreated, and the voices retreated, and he slept under the snow, and dreamt of another time.
For a few precious months following the death of his older brother, Will had been the happiest boy in Manchester. Not publicly so, of course. He had quickly learned how to put on a glum face; even to look teary sometimes, if a concerned relative asked him how he felt. But it was all a sham. Nathaniel was dead, and he was glad. The golden boy would reign over him no longer. Now there was only one person in his life who condescended to him the way Papa did, and that was Papa himself.
Papa had reason: he was a great man. A philosopher, no less. Other thirteen-year-olds had plumbers for fathers, or bus-drivers, but Will’s father, Hugo Rabjohns, had six books to his name, books that a plumber or a bus-driver would be unlikely to understand. The world, Hugo had once told Nathaniel in Will’s presence, was made by many men, but shaped by few. The important thing was to be one of those few; to find a place in which you could change the repetitive patterns of the many through political influence and intellectual discourse, and failing either of these, through benign coercion.
Will adored hearing his father talk this way, even though much of what Papa said was beyond him. And his father loved to talk about his ideas, though Will had heard him once fly into a fury when Eleanor, Will’s mother, had called her husband a teacher.
‘I am not, never have been, nor ever will be a teacher!’ Hugo had roared, his always ruddy face turning a still deeper red. ‘Why do you always seek to reduce me?’
What had his mother said by way of reply? Something vague. She was always vague. Looking past him to something outside the window, probably; or staring critically at the flowers she’d just arranged.
‘Philosophy can’t be taught,’ Hugo had said. ‘It can only be inspired.’
Perhaps the exchange had gone on a little longer, but Will doubted it. A short explosion, then peace: that was the ritual. And sometimes a fond exchange, but that too quickly withering. And always on his mother’s face the same distracted look whether the subject was philosophy or affection.
But then Nathaniel had died, and even those exchanges had ceased.
He was injured on a Thursday morning, crossing the street: run down by a taxi, the driver racing to carry his passenger to Manchester Piccadilly Station in time for a noon train. Struck square on, he was thrown through the window of a shoe-shop, sustaining multiple lacerations and appalling internal injuries. He did not die instantly. He held on to life for two-and-a-half days in Intensive Care at the Royal Infirmary, never regaining consciousness. In the early hours of the third night his body gave up the fight and he died.
In Will’s mythologized version of the event, his brother had made the decision, somewhere in the depths of his coma, not to come back into the world. Though he was only fifteen when he died, he had already tasted more of the world’s approbation than most men who lived out their Biblical spans. Loved to devotion by those who’d made him, blessed with a face nobody could lay eyes upon without wanting to love, Nathaniel had decided to let go of the world while it still idolized him. He had been adored enough, feted enough. He was already bored with it. Best to be gone, without a backward glance.
After the funeral Eleanor did not stir from the house. She’d always liked to walk and window-shop; she no longer did so. She’d had a circle of women-friends with whom she lunched at least twice a week; she would no longer come to the phone to speak to them. Her face lost all its glamour. Her distraction turned to vacuity, her obsessions grew stronger by the day. She would not have the curtains in the living-room open, for fear she saw a taxi. She could not eat, except off white plates. She would not sleep until every door and window in the house had been treble-locked. She took to praying, usually very quietly, in French, which was her native tongue. Nathaniel’s spirit, Will heard her telling Papa one night, was with her all the time; did Hugo not see him in her face? They had the same bones, didn’t they? The same, French bones.
Even at the age of thirteen, Will had an unsentimental grasp of the world; he didn’t lie to himself about what was happening to his mother. She was going crazy. That was the simple, pitiful truth of it. For several weeks in May she could not bear to be left alone in the house, and Will was obliged to skip school (no great hardship there) and stay at home with her – banned from her presence (she had no wish to see a face that resembled a poor copy of Nathaniel’s perfection) but called back with sobs and promises if he was heard opening the front door. Finally, in the middle of August, Hugo sat Will down and told him that life in Manchester had plainly become intolerable for all three of them, and he had decided they would move. ‘Your mother needs some open skies,’ he explained, the toll of the months since the accident gouged into his face. He had, in his own words, a pugilist’s face; its monolithic rawness an unlikely rock from which to hear fine distinctions of thought and vocabulary spring. But spring they did. Even the simple business of describing the family’s departure from Manchester became a linguistic adventure.
‘I realize these last few months have been troubling to you,’ Papa told Will. The manifestations of grief can be confounding to us all, and I can’t pretend to fully understand why your mother’s distress has taken such idiosyncratic forms. But you mustn’t judge her. We can’t feel what she feels. Nobody can ever feel what somebody else feels. We can guess at it. We can hypothesize. But that’s it. What happens up here—’ he tapped his temple,’—is hers and only hers.’
‘Maybe if she talked about it—’ Will tentatively suggested.
‘Words aren’t absolutes. I’ve told you that before, haven’t I? What your mother says and what you hear aren’t the same thing. You understand that, don’t you?’ Will nodded, though he only grasped the crudest version of what he was being told. ‘So we’re moving,’ Hugo replied, apparently satisfied that he’d communicated the theoretical underpinning of this.
‘Where are we going?’
‘A village in Yorkshire, called Burnt Yarley. You’ll have to change schools but that’s not going to be much of a problem for you, is it?’ Will murmured no, it wasn’t; he hated St Margaret’s. ‘And it won’t hurt for you to be out in the open air a little more. You look so pale all the time.’
‘When will we go?’
‘In about three weeks.’
i
The move didn’t happen quite as planned. Two days after Hugo’s conversation with Will, quite without warning, Eleanor broke her own rules and left the house in the middle of the morning and went wandering. She was escorted home in the late evening, having been found weeping in the street where Nathaniel had been struck down. The move was postponed, and for the next fortnight she was watched over by nurses and tended to by a psychiatrist. His medications did some good. Her mood brightened after a few days – she became uncharacteristically jolly, in fact, and dived into the business of packing up the house with gusto. On the second weekend of September, the delayed move took place.
The