Free A Bit of Earth by Rebecca Smith Page A

yet.
    â€˜I think the rain might be stopping,’ said Felix.
    â€˜Maybe,’ said Guy. They found the terminus of a steam railway and spent a long time looking at the timetable. If they rode all the way to the end of the line and back three times it would use up the whole day. The first train left in less than an hour. They walked back along the sea front and found that a baker’s had opened. They bought cartons of juice and Chelsea buns. They ate them on the train, waiting for it to go. They waited and waited. Eventually it went. Soon they were crossing an estuary, then into the woods and heading for the mountains. Felix had picked up leaflets about all the little steam railways in North Wales. There were enough for them to go on a different one each day. It seemed like a good enough plan to Guy.

    Erica was delighted with her postcard. She didn’t even realise that it was the only one they’d sent to someone in England: ‘We have been on a different train but eaten the same cakes every day. It has rained a lot. From Felix.’ Guy hadn’t signed it. They also sent cards to their few relatives. Guy thought that it would create an impression of coping. He was in contact with them all so rarely that he had to improvise the addresses.
    At last the week was over and they could go home again, back along the A5, a small, errant bead on a broken necklace of caravans, MPVs and SUVs.

Chapter 6
    After Susannah had gone, most things stayed the same in the house, not by design but by omission. The pictures that Felix had most recently done at nursery, optimistic sunbursts and skyscapes of pinks and reds stayed up on the walls until the Blu-Tack hardened and they slipped, corner by corner. At seven, Felix pulled them all down in irritation. The bags of work he brought home from school – worksheets on weighing and measuring; handwriting books; pages and pages of tedious (and in Felix’s case always correct) numeracy problems; poems; more art; cookies baked at school and sent home wrapped in paper towels; one bag even contained a baby tooth lost at morning play, safe inside a margarine tub, never to be collected by a tooth fairy – these would stand in the hall for ever.
    It was now three years since Susannah had died. From a distance you might not think that Guy had changed at all. His clothes were the same, just even more faded and washed. His curly hair, once the colour of wet sand, was now threaded with grey and white, and had the overall look of dry sand beyond the high-tide mark. But if you watchedhim walk you would detect more of a stoop, a slower pace. He no longer looked much like somebody who was 6 ft 1. There was something even more meandering about him now.
    Up close there were changes too. His eyebrows had become two bars of white strands, etiolated seedlings left too long on a windowsill. His glasses, which predated Susannah, gold-rimmed and round, and once ubiquitous in academia, now marked him out as terminally past it. The lenses had a slightly misty milkiness which he didn’t notice, so used was he to the cracked old glass of the greenhouses.
    It would never have occurred to him to replace them. Susannah had made him an appointment and had planned to be there to supervise the choosing of the new frames; but after she had gone the date was forgotten. Reminders, new appointments, and then jaunty ‘It is a long time since you last had your eyes checked’ letters from the optician’s lay unread on the hall floor with the free papers and the pizza and fried chicken delivery leaflets. Once the drifts started to impede the opening of the front door Guy would sweep them up, like so many autumn leaves, and put them in a box in the garage for recycling. They might stay there until the end of time.

Chapter 7
    There were two entrances to the garden. The first, the official entrance, was hard to find. You followed a mean little path behind the Geography building. There were