The Grasshopper's Child Read Free Page A

board.
    Mehilhoc Gardens.
    Me-hil-hoc , how were you supposed to pronounce a word like that?
    The grey stillness all around, the bare trees glistening with damp, made her feel as if there was nothing else left. As if the world where Dad was dead, and Mum was under guard in hospital, had ceased to exist. She felt like holding her breath forever, so she could stay in this lost dimension, and the terrible thing she’d done could never come back.
    She set off jogging again, faster this time because it was really cold. She’d decided she would head for the tall evergreen, and find her way back to the yellow house from there. Dirt-encrusted National Trust signs beckoned as she sped along: promising a Himalayan Valley, a Tea Room, an Azalea Slope, a Rose Arbour; but she didn’t stop until she reached
Swan Lake by accident. No ballerinas, just dark water scribbled over with strokes of light, like trembling silver fishes. No swans, no ducks. They’d probably been eaten. A small white building with a domed roof stood on a little island, joined to the shore by a brick causeway.
    Holding a stitch in her side (she wasn’t used to running) Heidi walked out and read the sign.
    The Mysterious Grecian Temple
Restored by the National Trust 1997.
    She stepped inside. The dome had an eye of thick glass in its centre that peered down, making a larger, dimmer eye of light in the middle of the floor. All around it in the darkness more eyes glittered, in tiny pairs: animal eyes that seemed to move. Her heart jolted. She thought of rats, a horde of rats, about to jump on her . She grabbed her phone and switched on the torch. The animals were harmless. They were cats.
    And they weren’t alive, they were stuffed .
    Her eyes had quickly adjusted to the gloom. She switched off the torch to save charge and walked around peering at the collection: a ginger cat, a black cat, a black and white cat; a Siamese, a white one with ginger patches, and a big, fat, fluffy tabby cat. Six stuffed cats on pedestals, posed on moth-eaten cushions. The Siamese look older than the rest. It was threadbare, like a much loved teddy, and one of its blue glass eyes dangled loose.
    Weird.
    She returned to the shore and headed uphill with the silver-scribbled lake behind her. Near the top of the rise another sign invited her to The Unmissable Blue Walk . She had a stitch again so she walked for a bit, following the pointer to a flat shelf cut into the hill. Once there’d been a turf path, winding between sinuous flowerbeds. Blue must mean bluebells. She kicked, gently, at layers of sodden leaf-litter, hoping to find green shoots: but there was only a kind of matted, brown, tangly moss. The bluebell bulbs must have died of neglect.
    The tall evergreen had vanished so she headed for the big greenhouses; that she also remembered seeing through the churchy windows on the Old Wreck’s stairs. They were huge: brick-framed hangars that you could have kept trees inside. They must have been heated once, she saw hot water pipes, and cables for electricity, but now it was colder inside than out. Doors sagged on rusted hinges. Green slime groped over glass, dead creepers sprawled through broken panes. Even the weeds that had sprung up had died.
    In the smallest house she found a collection of display boards, huddled together in a sad, long-legged herd. They featured old photos, colour and black and white, of Mehilhoc Gardens; some of them very old. The Gardens with horses and carriages; Victorian ladies in massive skirts and tiny hats, beside Swan Lake. The Famous Baroque Fountains, sparkling like crystal fireworks. The tall evergreen; which was a Sequoia Sempervirens. There was a colour photo, quite modern, of The Unmissable Blue Walk in flower. It had been taken in Autumn, not Spring. Two brilliant streams of blue flowed under glowing autumn leaves; as if the bright, deep blue of the October sky had poured down onto the green turf.
    â€˜ Autumn Gentians