1 Chapter 1

The road unfolded infront of the car as it ate up the miles in the night. Way above was the high arch of the night sky, as distant and cold and passionless as the afterlife he didn’t believe in. Arthur was dead. Finally gone. After all these weeks, dragging from hour to hour, fighting for every last breath, he’d finally let go.

Matty didn’t know what to do with himself, so he drove. Not to anything or from anything, it was an instinctive urge to keep moving. Before long he’d have to turn the car around and go back, back to the farmhouse; back to Arthur’s cooling body, life drained and dignity finally returned. Not quite yet though.

Six weeks ago, he’d finally come back from France to find his brother sick. There had been no warning of it in his letters. Just the usual cheerful news about the neighbours and the cousins and the titbits about the grass in the top field starting to grow, finally, now spring eventually looked like it was coming in and they were thinking about sharing a couple of pigs this year with next door and what did he think? Nothing about the illness that must have been eating him alive from the inside even then, to be so thin when he opened the door. Matty almost hadn’t recognised him. He was stooped like an old man and his skin was dry and yellow, stretched thinly over his face. Then he’d met Matty’s eyes and Matty had drawn breath and stepped forward to put his arms around him.

“What’s wrong?” he’d asked, without even saying hello. “Is it the flu? You said you’d got over it well!” Arthur had stepped back out of his grasp, held the door wide, and didn’t answer until they were both seated at the kitchen table with a mug of strong tea.

“Doctor Marks can’t tell me,” he’d replied, brief and to the point as always. “Says it’s a cancer, most likely, but she can’t find anything specific.” He’d poured a second cup of tea and that had been that.

In the night Matty had heard him pacing the floor of his room, talking in a low and urgent voice. The lamplight had crept under the door as he’d paused outside, wondering. When he’d knocked and asked in a low voice if everything was all right, Arthur had stood in the half-open doorway, blocking his view into the room; although over his shoulder, Matty could see the disordered sheets and crumpled pillows that spoke of disturbed sleep and troubled dreams, plus piles of the ubiquitous books.

Arthur had always been one for books. All through their childhood he had hoarded them like the dragons in his stories hoarded jewels, coming home triumphant from a trip to the library with yet another new volume. And later, when Father and the rector had helped him make the break from the farm and get a place at university with a scholarship, it had fed his appetite like dry twigs to a blaze. The house was full of them—Father had had quite a few of his own, even before Arthur had begun to add his share.

Now, after Matty‘s four-year absence, there were even more. The shelves were overflowing. Small books, big books, leather-bound, and cloth-bound. Hardcovers and paper covers. Rough-edged and smooth. Wedged in on top of each other, higgledy-piggledy, balanced in stacks on every available flat surface all through the house. Arthur was writing things down too—loose leaves of paper scattered around, notes stuffed into the middle of abandoned volumes in longhand and shorthand notation.

Matty had asked if Arthur was still writing columns—he had made a reasonable income with articles and stories for various papers and magazines in addition to overseeing the running of the farm—and Arthur gave him half an answer, purposefully vague. The help on the farm had been down to one older man and a couple of boys in the last couple of years and it was hard to find the time. He found it difficult to concentrate since he’d become ill

When Matty pressed him to say when he’d first noticed his health had begun to decline, he wouldn’t say. Matty bumped into Dr Marks in the village one day and she expressed the hope that Arthur was taking care of himself. She couldn’t tell Matty very much about what ailed him; she thought it was probably a condition of the liver, but because Arthur was reluctant to let her look at him properly or be referred to a specialist, it was difficult to be certain. She was pleased Matty was home to look after him; they didn’t see much of either of them around the village these days and they were both missed.