And suddenly, I no longer want to be in Iris’s room.
I don’t want to be in the house.
I want to be out in the woods, searching for Iris and Robbie’s cottage myself.
So, without hesitation, or pause to consider how improbable it is that I’ll find it, that’s what I set off to do.
Chapter Nine
Rusty, the dog who’s been cast as Piper, is out in the meadows when I cross them, playing ball with her wrangler. She should be a Border collie, but she’s a groodle, because groodles score higher with audiences in the cuteness stakes. Imogen isn’t happy about the switch, but hasn’t kicked up a fuss. (‘It’s not the hill I want to die on,’ she’s told me.) In fairness, Rusty is extremely cute. I watch her, bounding ecstatically after her ball, and suspect she’d make Stewart feel woefully inadequate. That bird’s still going, but she isn’t giving it a scrap of attention. Stewart would have been off by now, chasing it down,in for the kill.
Poor Stewart, doomed to a lifetime of toeing the line on Parliament Hill. I feel quite protective of him, now I’m comparing him to this shaggy A-list beacon of virtue.
Leaving her and her wrangler behind, I press on, not dropping my pace until I reach the treeline. I’ve headed towards the bird’s song, for no better reason than it seems as good a place to start as any, in these woods which absolutely are vast.
The air softens once I’m beneath the trees’ canopy, muffling Rusty’s bark, and the world outside. The mist clears a little too, caught like cobwebs in the trees’ branches. I walk across fallenash and oak leaves, through firs grown tall and lean, and, as I inhale their scent, am dizzied once again by a sense of belonging in this timeless place. It’s even stronger now that I’m outside, rather than cocooned in Nick’s car. So perhaps, after all, my grandparents did bring me walking here as a child. They must have, I think.
What other explanation could there be for this nostalgia I feel, tightening around my heart?
I walk on, for what might be miles, listening to the rustling branches, my crunching footsteps, and the sound of my breaths, quickened by the cold. I don’t worry about getting lost. I trust, somehow, that I won’t.
I trust these woods.
The bird’s no longer calling; I’m not sure how long it is since it stopped, but I tilt my head, searching for it in the canopy above, where I sense it’s lurking, looking down.
My face stings, swollen with cold. When I breathe, I make clouds, and, as I watch those clouds rise, morphing with the mist, my whirring head swims with memories: elusive, intangible, impossible tosee,but there, whispering to me that I have been here, donethis, before.
A breeze blows, making the icy air quiver, and, fleetingly, I hear what sounds like more whispers: of distant shouting; a child’s laughter.
I pause, straining to hear it again.
I don’t.
But, in the lengthening silence, I can’t help but remember those voices Ialmostbelieved I heard up in the attic’s corridor, when Ana first took me there.
Those planes, too.
And, still, that face in the mirror.
It’s your imagination, I tell myself, feeling shakier yet, because why does it all seem so real?
I don’t know, and I can’t think about it.
It’s scaring me too much.
So, I walk on, clenching my numbed hands into balls, fighting to keep my fear at bay, and my attention on the trees, waiting,waiting, to spot something in their gaps.
As, eventually, I do: a solidity, all but concealed by foliage, which, the longer I look at it, takes on the shape of a wall.
Impatiently, I pick my way towards it, through a thick, tangled path of roots and branches.
I’ve found it, I’m certain: Iris and Robbie’s cottage of some sort. It’s here, right before me, and, as I push on, wrestling branches aside, I don’t lift my stare from the wall, half-afraid it might disappear.
But it remains just where it is: palest yellow, crumbling on all sides, surrounded by piles of overgrown rubble.
‘Oh,’ I say, a pressure of pure sorrow building in my throat as I take that rubble in. ‘Oh … ’
Never have Iris and Robbie’s deaths felt more personal, or more tragic, to me, than now, in this moment.
