The Book of Lost Things [15]
It looked a little like an empty swimming pool, with a set of four stone steps leading down to a rectangle of green, bordered by a flagstoned pathway. While the grass was regularly mown by Mr. Briggs the gardener, who came every Thursday to tend the plants and lend nature a helping hand where necessary, the stone parts of the sunken garden had fallen into disrepair. There were large cracks in the walls, and in one corner the stonework had crumbled away entirely, leaving a gap big enough for David to squeeze through, if he had chosen to do so. David had never gone further than poking his head in, though. The space beyond was dark and musty, and filled with all kinds of hidden, scurrying things. David’s father had suggested that the sunken garden might make a suitable site for an air-raid shelter, if they decided it should ever become necessary, but so far he had managed only to pile sandbags and sheets of corrugated iron in the garden shed, much to the annoyance of Mr. Briggs, who now had to navigate his way around them every time he wanted to reach his tools. The sunken garden became David’s own place outside the house, especially when he wanted to get away from the whispering of the books or from Rose’s well-intentioned but unwelcome intrusions into his life.
David’s relations with Rose were not good. While he tried always to be polite, as his father had asked him to be, he did not like her, and he resented the fact that she was now part of his world. It was not merely that she had taken, or was trying to take, the place of his mother, although that was bad enough. Her attempts to cook meals that he liked for dinner, despite the pressures of rationing, irritated him. She wanted David to like her, and that made him dislike her even more.
But David believed that her presence also distracted his father from the memory of David’s mother. He was forgetting about her already, so tied up was he with Rose and their new baby. Little Georgie was a demanding child. He cried a lot and always seemed to be ailing, so that the local doctor was a regular visitor to the house. His father and Rose doted on him, even as he deprived them of sleep almost every night, leaving them both short-tempered and weary. The result was that David was increasingly left to his own devices, which made him both grateful for the freedom offered by Georgie and resentful of the lack of attention to his own needs. In any case, it gave him more time to read, and that was no bad thing.
But as David’s fascination with the old books grew, so did his desire to find out more about their former owner, for they had clearly belonged to someone who was just like him. He had at last found a name, Jonathan Tulvey, written inside the covers of two of the books, and he was curious to learn something about him.
So it was that one day David swallowed his dislike of Rose and went down to the kitchen, where she was working. Mrs. Briggs, the housekeeper and wife of Mr. Briggs, the gardener, was visiting her sister in Eastbourne, so Rose was taking care of the chores for the day. From outside came the clucking of hens in the chicken run. David had helped Mr. Briggs to feed them earlier, and to check the vegetable garden for damage from rabbits and the run for any holes that might allow a fox to enter. The week before, Mr. Briggs had trapped and killed a fox near the house using a snare. The fox had almost been decapitated by the trap, and David had said something about feeling sorry for it. Mr. Briggs had scolded him, pointing out that one fox would kill every hen they had if he managed to get into the run, but David had still been troubled by the sight of the dead animal, its tongue caught between its small, sharp teeth, its fur torn from where it had tried to bite itself free from the snare.
David made himself a glass