Roots of Evil(14)

Sheer nerves, that was all.



The shameful ghosts from the early years in Pedlar’s Yard did not often return, but when they did they always brought back the old fear and the memories of all the nights spent shivering under bedclothes, helpless with fear and misery and despair. How did I stand it for so long?

The fear had not always been there. To start with it had only been a question of avoiding the anger and the drunkenness – and of escaping from the belt with the hurting buckle which was sometimes used on your back and which was used on Mother more often than anyone ever knew. She had never complained, and she had never told anyone about it because there had not been anyone to tell. In those days – it had been the early 1970s – and in that environment, there had not been such things as battered wives’ refuges, or brisk, well-meaning social workers, or even telephone numbers that could provide help. In any case, the Pedlar’s Yard house did not have a telephone. And Mother had had an odd streak of stubbornness. When you married, she said, you exchanged vows, and vows ought not to be broken. Your father married me when no one else wanted me and I was grateful. (And he was very charming when he was younger…)

But Mother had made that other promise as well – the promise that one day they would escape from Pedlar’s Yard, just the two of them.

‘You do mean it, don’t you? We’ll really go there one day? To the house with the lady from the stories?’

‘Yes. Yes, one day we really will go there.’


But Mother had hesitated – she had quite definitely hesitated, before replying, and a new fear presented itself. ‘She is real, isn’t she, that lady? I mean…you didn’t make her up?’ Mother was good at telling stories; once she had said she might have written books if she had not got married.

But it was all right. She was smiling, and saying, ‘No, I didn’t make her up, I promise. She’s real, and she lives exactly where I told you. Look, I’ll show you—’

‘What? What?’ It might be a photograph, which would be just about the most brilliant thing in the world.

But it was not a photograph, it was a letter, just very short, just saying here was a cheque.

‘But there’s the address at the top. You see? The Priest’s House, Mowbray Fen. That’s a real address.’

‘She sent a cheque?’ Cheques represented money in some complex, barely understood grown-up way.

‘Yes, she does it quite often. Does that convince you that she’s real?’

‘I think so. Yes. Only real people can send cheques, can’t they?’

‘Of course.’

So that was all right. The lady was real and the house was real, and one day they would make a proper plan and escape.

It had been too late to escape on the night that he erupted into the house, his eyes fiery with drink. He was not an especially big man, although he was quite tall, but he seemed to fill up the house with his presence on these nights.

There had not been a chance to make for one of the safer hiding places – the old wash-house or even the cupboard under the stairs – so there were only the sheets and the thin coverlet for protection. Sometimes, though, it was possible to force your mind away from the shabby bedroom and away from Pedlar’s Yard, and to delve down and down into the layers of memories and dreams…Like summoning a spell, a charm, that took you along a narrow unwinding ribbon of road, studded with trees and lined with hedgerows, and through the little villages with the Hobbit-like names that were strung out along the road like beads on a necklace…Far, far away, until you reached the house on the marshes, where the will o’ the wisps danced.

But tonight the charm did not work. Tonight something was happening downstairs that made that dreamlike road unreachable. Something was happening in the little sitting-room at the back of the house that was making Mother cry out and say, ‘No – please not—’

There was the sickening sound of a fist thudding flesh, and a gasp of pain, instantly cut off. Oh God, oh God, it was going to be one of the nights when he was hitting her: one of the nights when the neighbours would listen through the wall, and tell each other that one night that cruel monster would kill that poor woman, and someone ought to do something.

One night he would kill her. What if this was the night? What if Mother died, down there on the sitting-room floor? The horror of this very real possibility rose up chokingly. Someone ought to do something…

I can’t. I can’t. He’d kill me.

But what if he kills her?

There were ten stairs down to the sitting-room and they creaked a bit, but it was possible to jump over the third and then the seventh stair so that they did not creak at all. It was important to jump over those stairs tonight, and it was important to go stealthily down the little passage from the front of the house to the back, not noticing how cold the floor was against bare feet. It was important to open the door very quietly and peer inside without being heard. Because someone ought to do something, and there was no one else…

The room was filled with the tinny firelight from the electric fire, and shadows moved in an incomprehensible rhythm across the walls. They were huge shadows and it took a moment to sort them out because at first it seemed as if there was one monstrous creature, sprawling across the little gateleg table under the window…There was harsh rasping breathing in the room as well, like someone running very fast, or like someone sobbing and struggling…