The Legacy Read Free Page A

dead thistles, an empty crisp packet.
    I stop at the barrow and look down at the village, catching my breath after the climb. There’s not much movement, a few ragged columns of chimney smoke, a few well-swaddled residents walking their dogs to the postbox. From this lonely hill it seems like the center of the universe. This populous village! Coleridge pops into my head. I’ve been doing the conversation poems with my year tens. I’ve been trying to make them read slowly enough to feel the words, to absorb the images; but they skim on, chatter like monkeys.
    The air is biting up here—it parts around me like a cold wave. My toes have gone numb because my shoes are soaked through. There are ten, twenty pairs of Wellington boots in the house, I know. Down in the basement, in neat rows with cobwebs draped around them. That one horrible time I didn’t shake a boot out before putting a bare foot inside, and felt the tickle of another occupant. I am out of practice at living in the countryside; ill-equipped for changes in the terrain, for ground that hasn’t been carefully prepared to best convenience me. And yet when asked I would say I grew up here. Those early summers, so long and distinct in my mind, rising like islands from a sea of school days and wet weekends too blurred and uniform to recall.
    At the entrance to the barrow the wind makes a low moan. I jump two-footed down the stone steps and startle a girl inside. She straightens with a gasp and hits her head on the low ceiling, crouches again, puts both hands around her skull to cradle it.
    “Shit! Sorry! I didn’t mean to pounce on you like that . . . I didn’t know anybody was in here.” I smile. The wan light from the doorway shines onto her, onto golden bubble curls tied back with a turquoise scarf, onto a young face and an oddly shapeless body, swathed in long chiffon skirts and crochet. She squints up at me, and I must be a silhouette to her, a black bulk against the sky outside. “Are you OK?” She doesn’t answer me. Tiny bright posies have been pushed into gaps in the wall in front of her, snipped stems neatly bound with ribbon. Is this what she was doing in here, so quietly? Praying at some half-imagined, half-borrowed shrine? She sees me looking at her offerings and she rises, scowls, pushes past me without a word. I realize that her shapelessness is in fact an abundance of shape—the heaviness of pregnancy. Very pretty, very young, belly distended. When I emerge from the tomb I look down the slope toward the village but she’s not there. She is walking the other way—the direction I came from, toward the woodlands near the manor house. She strides fiercely, arms swinging.
    B eth and I eat dinner in the study this first night. It might seem an odd choice of room, but it is the only one with a TV in it, and we eat pasta from trays on our knees with the evening news to keep us company, because small talk seems to have abandoned us, and big talk is just too big yet. We’re not ready. I’m not sure that we ever will be, but there are things I want to ask my sister. I will wait, I will make sure I get the questions right. I hope that, if I ask the right ones, I can make her better. That the truth will set her free. Beth chases each quill around her bowl before catching it on her fork. She raises the fork to her lips several times before putting it into her mouth. Some of these quills never make it—she knocks them back off the fork, selects an alternative. I see all this in the corner of my eye, just like I see her body starving. The TV pictures shine darkly in her eyes.
    “Do you think it’s a good idea? Having Eddie here for Christmas?” she asks me suddenly.
    “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be? We’ll be staying for a while to get things sorted, so we may as well stay for Christmas. Together.” I shrug. “There’s plenty of space, after all.”
    “No, I mean . . . bringing a child here. Into this . . . place.”
    “Beth, it’s just a