Free The Small Hand by Susan Hill Page A

curled my fingers. There was no response.

    THE AIR WAS heavy, the bushes on either side lush, the leaves of some ancient laurel glistening with moisture from the earlier rain. I had put on wellington boots, so that I could push my way through the long grass without inconvenience.
    I came out into the clearing. There was the house. The White House. Empty. Half derelict, the glass broken in one or two of the windows. The stones of the courtyard in front of it were thick with pads of velvety moss.
    I turned away. To the side was another low wooden gate. It had an old padlock and rusty chain across it and both gleamed with moisture. But the padlock hung open and the gate was so rotten it gave at once to my hand and I went through. Ahead of me was a path leading between some ancient high yew hedges. I followed it. I could see quite well because although the sky was overcast it was barely half past five and there was plenty of light left. The path led straight. At the end, an archway was cut into the hedge and although ivy trailed down over it, the way was clear and I had no need of the cutters I had brought. I went through and down four steps made of brick and set in a semi-circle, then found that I had come out into what had clearly once been a huge lawn with a high wall at the far end and the thickly overgrown remains of wide flower borders. There were fruit trees, gnarled and pitted old apples and pears, forming a sort of avenue – I know there are proper gardening terms for these things. On the far side of the lawn, whose grass was so high that it came over the tops of my boots and was mixed with nettles and huge vicious thistles, there ran yet another tall yew hedge in which was another arch. I turned round. To one side a path led diagonally towards woodland. I went in the opposite direction, to an open gate in a high wall. On the other side of it I found what seemed to have been an area of patterned beds set formally between old gravel paths. I remembered pictures of Elizabethan knot gardens. There were small trees planted in the centre of each bed, though most of them looked dead. I leaned over and picked a wiry stem from a bush beside me, breaking it between my fingers. It was lavender.
    Every so often, I paused and waited. But there was nothing. Nothing stirred and no birds sang.

    IT WAS A SAD place, but I did not feel uneasy or afraid in any way, there seemed to be nothing odd about this abandoned garden. I felt melancholy. It had once been a place of colour and beauty, full of growth and variety – full of people. I looked around me, trying to imagine them strolling about, bending over to look more closely at a flower, admiring, enjoying, in pairs or small groups.
    Now there was no one and nature was taking everything back to itself. In a few more years would there be anything left to say there had been a garden here at all?
    The silence was extraordinary, the same sort of silence I had experienced in the grounds of the monastery. But here there were no gentle cowbells reassuring me from the near distance. I wondered which way to go. I had come because I had had no choice. But what next?
    As if in reply, the small hand crept into mine and held it fast and I felt myself pulled forward through the long grass towards the far hedge.

    THE SOFT SWISHING sound my boots made as I walked broke the oppressive stillness. Once I thought I heard something else, just behind me, and swung round. There was nothing. Perhaps a rabbit or a stray cat was following — I was going to say ‘us’, for that was unmistakably how I felt now. There were two of us.
    I reached the far side and the arch in the high dark yew and stopped just inside it. Looking ahead, I could see that I was about to enter another garden, a sunken garden that was approached down the flight of a dozen steps at my feet, semicircular again and broken here and there, with weeds growing between the cracks. On the far side stood a vast cedar tree. A very overgrown