Chapter Nine
Wynhope settles down for the night. In the lodge at the bottom of the drive, the housekeeper secures the guard across the fire; outside her husband double-checks the hen house. The fox is barking in the wood. It is a cold night even for April. Wynhope gathers the park around itself, careful not to disturb the rooks who have finally settled in the conifers or the lambs huddled with their mothers under the shelter of the spreading oaks. A badger snouts his way across the front lawn and triggers the security lights. There he is, black and white on the luminous grass and behind him Wynhope; all three floors of the magnificent Queen Anne house are illuminated for the delight of the night-sliding slugs and the sly and musky polecat. Even the damp gravel drive shines. The curious tower wriggles its toes into the clay for a foothold, clings on to the end of the west wing with its bitten fingernails. It is the bastard offspring and knows it, its gargoyles hide behind stone hands and giggle and spit at visitors when it rains.
The badger shuffles off into the wings. There is no one to applaud save the tawny owl biding his time in the Cedar of Lebanon. The plough is low in the Lent sky, the moon has risen above the fir trees, the international space station is passing over Wynhope, unnoticed; it sees sunrise every ninety-two minutes and now is beaming back footage which shows a planet at peace with itself, just the slow roll of the blue globe whispered in white. Soon it will be on the dark side and all there will be is black. A smudge on the lens of the satellite turns out to be smoke over China. Those minute variations in the colour of the sea, azure, cobalt, indigo, Persian? Sunlight on a tsunami. Beneath its crusted skin, the planet’s joints are old and stiff, the ice sheets melted from this English bed many thousands of years ago and yet still sleep does not come easy. Maybe the dog dozing in the kitchen opens one eye, or the deer trespassing in the spring wheat freeze, tremble, listen and return to graze, but the people rarely pay attention, perhaps only once in a decade questioning the unfamiliar tremor beneath their feet, or once in a century holding tight to the duplicitous banisters, or once in every five hundred years running from their homes in terror that the earth under their feet has turned against them and the cathedral spire has fallen. That time is now.
Chapter Ten
And it is Wynhope who is the first to sense trouble. There are intruders in the cellar, they are rattling the wine racks, their booted feet are pounding up the stone steps, breaking into the hall and giving the grandfather clock a good kicking until it peals for help. The house is shaken awake.
A helicopter, that’s what Diana thinks, but it’s too low, it’s going to crash. Half awake, she cries out for Edmund, but he’s in London and she’s at Wynhope. Hot, sweating, drink, menopause, fear, whatever, she is disoriented and breathless from panic. On her dressing table, face creams and foundation, the necklace she wore to the funeral, silver trinket boxes, they are all dancing to a discordant orchestra made up of expensive bottles of scent. Kefalonia, three years ago, honeymoon with Edmund, running from a restaurant, plates of moussaka sliding and bottles of retsina smashing onto the terrace, cries of seismos, seismos, as the locals fled screaming into the streets. Seismos. Earthquake. Out. Hide. Doorframe. But this is here, now, Wynhope, England. Stumbling down the landing, Diana trips on something, a body, a bag of bones, a boy.
Get out. Get out.
The boy is bumping along the floor, in his half-dream sleep he is lying across the back seat of Solomon’s car and Solomon is rescuing him, driving him away from somewhere he does not want to be and his mum’s in the front seat singing, but when he reaches out, there is no door and no handle, and he does not know where he is or why the car has become a ghost train, the rails rumbling in the dark, the rough carpet against his face. This is his aunt’s house, he remembers, and he does not know where to go so he crawls until his face finds a foot and he curls in on himself like a hedgehog.
The boy. In her panic, Diana has forgotten the boy. Grabbing at his hair, pulling at his legs, he resists, she screams. Somewhere, maybe in the hall, a smash of glass and that energises the child. Together they hurtle down the stairs to the front door, but she can’t slide the bolt across and she can’t get out, she can’t get out. Then. Stop. It’s over. The door swings open and they fall out into the blank, unmoving dawn, triggering the security lights, herself and the boy bewildered players in an unscheduled performance. He slips free of her grasp. The wind whips Diana’s dressing gown around her, the stones on the drive are mean and she retreats to the lawn to feel the sweet firmness of the damp grass between her toes. Were it not for the relentless wail of the alarm and the dog howling in the kitchen, she would have thought that she dreamed the whole thing. There is no way she can go back in there and rescue Monty, she can’t trust the house to keep its word, but imagine carrying the dog’s body from the ruins, Edmund would never forgive her. But she and the boy, they’re out. She did not think it happened like this, when you’re alone; on the news from other countries there are always neighbours running into the streets, hugging each other, counting each other, reaching for their phones and banging on doors. But here, it is just the two of them, mute, as if all words have been shaken out of them. It is so quiet she can hear the hum of the tilted, turning world.
‘That was an earthquake,’ Diana says, more because she needs to hear herself speak than anything else. ‘I know it was. Probably not a real earthquake, just a tremor. We do get them in England, not very often, but we do. And it’s over now. Everything will be all right.’
Finding no words of his own, Mikey processes those coming from this woman. He wants so much to hold on to something which is not moving, but he cannot bring himself to touch her. He has something important to say. It is an earthquake, he repeats inside his head, and his brain scans his memory: it finds a children’s book with a picture of a volcano all mixed up with doing a sponsored skip at his last primary school which had blackberries in the bushes round the edge of the playground which they weren’t allowed to eat. It did all that in a millionth of a second, but then the brain realises the uselessness of this information in the current situation and it returns to the one overriding word pounding inside him, so insistent that he holds his head between his hands for fear it might split him apart.
‘Mum.’
Inside the tower, Valerie is consumed by this sudden stillness. It is unreliable, as is the silence which has replaced the inexplicable muffled roar that rumbled up the spiral staircase and blundered into the room. When it woke her, she thought it was a bomb; that is the only thing she has ever seen on telly which might be like this, coming out of nothing and shaking everything without warning. By the light shining in from outside, she can see splinters of glass on the floor and she remembers the sampler, it must have shattered, and then she pieces together where she is and why. At Wynhope. With her sister. Not a bomb then, the only thing she can think of is a hurricane or an earthquake or something from the weather channel but whatever it is, it seems to be over. She’s survived. And Mikey?
‘Mikey,’ she screams.
Her son fills her up, there is no room in her left for anything else other than him, the Michaelness of him, his smell, his voice, his being is all that matters to her, his being safe. Without warning, the light outside is switched off, the bedside lamp isn’t working, she is inching blind through the unfamiliar room with her arms outstretched. The steps on the spiral staircase turn their backs on her and twist away beneath her feet. She slips and falls and it hurts, but not so much that she cannot carry on, one hand on either side pressing against the cold walls, reading her way out. At last, a gap. Valerie reconstructs yesterday’s guided tour and knows this must be where the passage connects the tower to the house to the landing to the spare room to Mikey. Wood. Door. Handle. Latch. Open, for Christ’s sake, open will you.
‘Mikey, Diana! Let me out. Mikey, are you there, love? Are you all right?’
In her heart she knows the door is locked from the other side. She might