'I saw him, Mummy. I did. He was with me, and he held my hand between his hands, and he had the bluest of blue eyes,' insisted Kate, 'and he . . .'

'He what?'

'Don't think I'm being silly, Mummy, but he was like a guardian angel in ordinary clothes, a brown coat and a cap, and he made me better.'

Chapter Ten.

THE LONELINESS OF BEING DIFFERENT.

Freddie lay awake that night, his face turned towards the sky. The harvest moon whitewashed the flaking paint on the open window, and lit up the treasures he kept there, his collection of bird's feathers, a chunk of alabaster, his tins and matchboxes, and Granny Barcussy's nature book. The night air smelled of cider and soot. As always, Freddie was listening to the owls in the distant countryside, his mind filtering out the sounds of the town. The owls made him feel at home again, where he felt he belonged.

But he did pay attention if a motorcar drove past the bakery, sometimes even getting out of bed to watch the beam of headlights cutting through the darkness.

Engines fascinated him and he studied them at every opportunity. Today he'd had his first ever ride in one. Joan had driven him back from Hilbegut in her majestic Model T Ford, with its polished burgundy bonnet and silvery headlamps. She'd let him crank it for her, to start it, and he'd felt a buzz all up his spine when the engine responded, first with a splutter, then settling into a business-like rhythm.

'When you're old enough, you can have a go,' Joan promised, and Freddie was in awe of her as she confidently handled the huge metal beast, her bony arms steering it wildly through the lanes. He'd never been so fast in his life. Seeing hedges and trees whizzing past was strange and different, feeling the wind on his cheeks, and his legs vibrating as the car hurtled along the stony road.

He sat next to Kate's mother in the back, but they didn't talk. Sally clutched her hat with one hand and the back of Joan's seat with the other, sitting straight and alert as if she was driving herself. When they swept to a halt outside Monterose Hospital, Sally turned and looked at him.

'Thank you,' she said, 'for bringing Polly home. I don't know who you are but I'm very grateful.'

Aware that he was playing truant from school, Freddie chose not to tell her he was Freddie Barcussy from the bakery. He just said, 'Kate is going to get better, I know it.'

'How do you know that?'

'I just do.' Freddie looked directly into Sally's surprised eyes and said no more. He thanked Joan for the ride, allowed himself one glance at the hospital where Kate was, and sprinted home through the wide streets of Monterose, reaching the bakery at his usual time of ten past four.

Sad that he couldn't tell his parents about this secret day, he'd gone to bed with his mind on fire.

The sound of the Model T Ford had set up home in his mind, a sound that was both satisfying and disturbing, like a new voice on earth.

The wooden clock in his bedroom seemed to tick faster and faster, and at two o'clock in the morning he got up, lit a candle and counted the clump of money tied in his hanky. It included the precious florin Joan had given him and he spent some time examining it in the candlelight. There were a few sixpences too, and in total he had earned ten shillings and ninepence. Breathing hard with excitement he prised open the floorboard under his bed and added the money to his h.o.a.rd which was tied in a grey woollen sock, now so heavy that it had to be picked up with both hands.

Nothing had happened for years, and then so much had been packed into one day. His first experience of leading a pony, his nostalgic walk back to Hilbegut, the stone lions, the motorcar. All these events were stacked precariously in his mind and right in the middle was a window of honey-coloured light where he kept the memory of Kate.

Freddie sat on his bed in the candlelight and thought about her. The more he stared at the flame, the brighter it shone, growing tall with an edge of sapphire blue. Deep in its orange heart was an inviting archway. In his imagination he stepped through it, the flame was behind him, and he stood alone in a world of dazzling light. It was unlike any place he knew and yet he felt instantly at home there. The light energised and refreshed him, and in the bright core of the blaze was the face of an angel. He tried to see the wings, but the shifting patterns of iridescence were too swift. The eyes of the angel were all the colours of water, their expression imbued with wisdom and patience.

A voice called to him out of the light, its resonance infusing every shimmering strand like the wind blowing through wheat fields. He listened, and let the voice echo through him, through his hair, his skin, and the tips of his fingers.

'Many years will pa.s.s. Be patient. Be true to yourself. And, when the golden bird returns, you will meet her again.'

Drawing a breath from the night air, he returned with a jolt to his candlelit bedroom.

The words soaked into him, but Freddie had no idea what they meant. A golden bird? What golden bird? Mentally he ticked the ones he knew a yellow hammer, a goldfinch, a canary. None of them fitted. He reached for Granny Barcussy's nature book which he kept by the bed. It was navy blue with the t.i.tle embossed in gold letters, and inside was a cornucopia of painted ill.u.s.trations and descriptions. Now he could feel her next to him, eagerly turning the pages in the dim candlelight, turning them faster and faster until a golden bird was there on the page, eating rowan berries from a branch. A golden oriole! He had it. Oriole Kate. She was named after a golden bird, and according to the text it was a rare visitor, and that described Kate perfectly, he thought, satisfied.

He'd never seen Kate properly, never looked into her eyes. He wanted to go down to the hospital with a bunch of roses. Red roses he'd give her. He drifted to sleep, threading the angel's words into the fabric of his life.

In the morning he awoke disturbed by a sense of foreboding. Mechanically he got up and helped Levi with the bread. They worked silently together putting batch after batch of risen loaves into the ovens, cottage loaves and tin loaves, French bread and the heavy lardy cake. He looked just once into his father's eyes as he packed the bicycle basket.

'You do your best at school today,' said Levi.

'Yes, Dad.'

'Don't go telling no lies.'

'No, Dad.'

'You know what I mean, Freddie. If you can't tell the truth, then keep quiet.'

Levi's drooping eyes looked at Freddie for a long moment, a moment he was to remember for the rest of his life.

'And look after your mother.'

'Yes, Dad.'

Freddie cycled off on the c.u.mbersome bicycle into the misty morning. He didn't feel like going to school after yesterday's excitement. School seemed totally irrelevant. He didn't want to go, ever again.

Everyone in Monterose was gossiping about the accident at the station, and people came to look at the broken cart which was still lying there next morning with 'Gilbert Loxley, Farmers, Hilbegut Farm' painted proudly on the side of the cart.

'A disgrace, that's what it is.'

'It was the older daughter. Etheldra Loxley. She drove that poor pony like a mad woman. And her little sister in the back. Shame on her.'

'Could have killed someone.'

The gossip went on circulating until it reached the bakery.

Annie was coping happily with the queue. She loved being in the shop with the warm fragrance of freshly baked loaves. She enjoyed taking them down from the shelf and wrapping them in clean paper, then taking the money and chatting pleasantly. It was her ideal life. She didn't have to go out. Levi was there, and he was proud of what he had achieved, the bakery business was thriving. Freddie was nearly fourteen. Once he left school the business would do even better. Annie was satisfied that her son's life was mapped out for him.

Until it all changed.

'I saw your Freddie was there yesterday, at the station,' said a woman in a brown and white gingham dress.

Annie frowned at her. 'What do you mean, Gladys? Freddie is at school that time of the morning.'

'He wasn't yesterday.'

'What?'

'Didn't you know?' Gladys had a piercing voice that filled the shop. 'Your Freddie was there. I saw him myself. And he was a good lad too.'

'What time was this?' Annie asked, and the sudden sharpness in her voice brought Levi out from the bakery, brushing the flour from his hands.

'Half past ten.'

'Half past TEN?' said Annie in astonishment. 'Freddie should have been in school.'

'Oh well.' Gladys winked. She stood there with her hand on the loaf she had chosen, the rest of the queue listening. 'You know what these lads are. Boys will be boys, won't 'em?'

'And what was he doing? Are you sure it was Freddie?'

''Course it were. I know Freddie, he brings the bread round,' said Gladys, relishing the story. 'Well, I looked after the older girl, she was in a proper state, and Freddie was with the little 'un who got hurt so bad. And then he offered to lead the pony home, all the way to Hilbegut. Good of him.'

'WHAT?'

'And I'll bet he enjoyed his lift back in Joan Jarvis's posh new motorcar!'

Levi spoke then and the whole shop fell silent.

'Are you telling me that our Freddie was down there? And that he took some pony out to Hilbegut?'

'That's right, Sir.' Gladys looked staunchly at him over her brown and white gingham bust.

Levi's face went purple.

'Right.' With his big hands trembling he took off his baker's ap.r.o.n and hat and turned to Annie. 'You mind the shop. I'm going up the school, right now.'

The queue parted like the Red Sea to let Levi pa.s.s through, the whites of his eyes gleaming angrily. He took two strides into the street, and crashed to the ground, groaned and lay still, his huge body stretched out on the cobbles.

'Levi!' Annie screamed. She rushed outside and crumpled beside him. She cradled his dear face in her arms, and sat there rocking for long hopeless minutes. The morning sky darkened while they searched for his pulse and strained to hear him breathing, but Levi's mighty chest was still, his face frozen in anger.

''Tis too late. He's dead,' said Annie quietly, and she watched the last sparks of his life drift past her and disappear.

'You'll HAVE to go out now, Mother,' said Alice firmly.

'You'll have to get over it,' agreed Betty.

Annie sat miserably between her two daughters on the morning of Levi's funeral. Her heart was full of heat and teardrops, her grey hair a storm of impossible curls, her face swollen with grief. She was silent now, rocking slightly, her hand picking threads out of the black shawl around her shoulders. She'd repeated and repeated her words: 'I can't,' but no one would listen, and there was nothing left to say. Only Freddie understood her fear. She looked at him now, sitting in the window, his long legs folded awkwardly, his eyes staring into the garden. He would take care of her, she was sure. He'd leave school and run the bakery. They'd manage.

Betty and Alice had always collaborated in forecasting gloom. They'd been away from home for years, and Freddie had hardly seen them in his life. Annie knew he found them intimidating, especially today. Both were dressed in the blackest of black outfits, identical hats with black net veils covering their faces, trendy tight-fitting black skirts and jackets, and grim expressions to match. Annie felt she no longer knew who they were. To her, Betty and Alice were a long ago memory of happy children.

She looked at her elder son, George, who was hunched on a chair, so like Levi, inarticulate but wise. He'd arrived on a throbbing motorbike, and she could see that Freddie was fascinated by it, more interested in the bike than in his brother who was fifteen years his senior.

Annie had wanted to blame Freddie for Levi's sudden death, but she chose to keep quiet. A death was trouble enough. She understood Freddie's aversion to school. Surely he'd suffered enough, she reasoned, and in the months and years to come she would need him. Without Freddie, Annie saw herself ending up in the asylum. She even felt threatened by her two daughters, Alice the manager and Betty the echo. There was something ominous about the way they wanted to manage her, the cast-iron conviction they had about her agoraphobia. Levi had tolerated it, Freddie understood, but Alice and Betty wanted to deny its existence.

The slow clop-clopping of the horse-drawn hea.r.s.e brought a respectful silence to the street. Neighbours stood outside their doors, workmen downed tools and took off their caps, playing children stood silently, their backs against the wall.

'It's coming,' said Freddie from his seat by the window.

Together they filed outside in their black clothes, with Annie wedged firmly between Alice and Betty.

It was the second funeral Freddie had experienced in his life. At Granny Barcussy's funeral he had walked, white-faced and distraught beside his father, and Annie had stayed at home, peering out at the sad procession. At the graveside Freddie had broken down and sobbed uncontrollably, and Levi had picked him up and held him like a baby. The smell of his coat and the feel of his big hands patting him had comforted Freddie.

Now he was nearly a man, and no one would comfort him at his father's graveside. He would have to stand there, stiff and expressionless like Alice and Betty.

When he saw the two black horses turn into the street he had a terrible feeling of deep, deep cold. The power of death to suddenly strip the vigour out of the whole street was almost disabling.

He stood at the door, next to George who towered over him with his face set rigid. Freddie wanted something from the stranger who was his brother, warmth or eye contact or a touch on his arm, but there was none. He wanted to walk backwards in front of Annie, helping her as he had always done, but Alice and Betty had her in an iron grip, their fingers clamped onto her black shawl.

Loneliness engulfed Freddie, and it was the loneliness of being different. This was his family, but he wasn't remotely like any of them, nor did he want to be. What he wanted most in that moment was to run away, to arrive at his father's funeral from a different direction and watch it as a lone observer. He wanted to experience the funeral with the sky and the wind and the twisting flight of gathering swallows. He wanted to sit on the floor of the church and feel the music rumble through stone, and watch the faces of coloured gla.s.s and stone, watch and read their expression and feel their empathy. And he wanted to share his father's journey into the unknown, into the silent land.

So he walked alone at the back of the black procession on its way to the cemetery, falling further and further behind, and he looked down from a great height and saw himself detaching, step by step, from the silver cords that bound the generations. He was alone. He saw his family drifting away from him on a river of forgetfulness, and he was glad to walk alone, his feet governed by the tolling of the church bell, his eyes gazing at a sparrow hawk hovering in the distance.

The silence of the funeral seemed to have a shape, an elongated elliptical s.p.a.ce that extended ahead of the cortege and for some distance behind, the shape excluding the normal life of the street. Freddie kept within its boundary, close enough, but apart. George didn't turn to see where he was, and Alice and Betty minced along almost carrying Annie, the backs of their three heads bobbing in the wake of the hea.r.s.e as it halted outside Monterose church. A group of people who had known Levi were at the entrance, hats in hand, and the vicar loomed like a heron inspecting an estuary.

Once, Annie had sent Freddie to Sunday school, and the teacher had refused to have him there again. 'All he does is walk around and stare at the statues and the windows,' she'd complained. 'He won't sit down with the others.' Freddie had longed to go in there again but he'd never had time off from school, the bakery, the railway, and Annie's endless errands.

He hung back as the coffin was unloaded to the tolling of the bell, the jingle of the horses' harness, and the shuffle of footsteps. The way the coffin was carried high on the shoulders of the pallbearers gave him a strange feeling of finality. His father's body was inside. There was no going back. It was grim, and it was glorious. The majesty of the church was there for Levi, the stained gla.s.s and the bra.s.s eagle, the tapestries and the music. After all Levi's work in the corn mill, his arthritis, his uncontrollable tempers, the broken china, the crying, the po-faced storytelling, the years in the bakery. After all that he was paraded into this magnificent building.

Freddie was last to go into the church, and he noticed that Gladys was there, looking at him with a blend of concern and disapproval. Ignoring her, he lifted his eyes to appraise the wood carvings in the roof, and to gaze at his favourite window which had a saint with a halo underneath a tree of the richest emerald greens, a white curly lamb at his feet, a scarlet cloak and a golden sword at his belt.

'You should sit with your family. Up there,' Gladys whispered loudly, but no one looked round. Freddie ignored her, and walked to the back of the church where he sat down on the stone step leading into the bell tower. From there he could see the entire church, his father's coffin and the backs of heads. The vicar's voice droned, the congregation stood up to sing, but Freddie closed his eyes, touched the stone floor with his hands, and went into a trance.

Through his sensitive fingers he could feel the earth below the church. It had energy like an arrow of light fired into the rocks, a sound that resonated for miles and miles through the land, through churches and castles and monuments far away. And he could feel water down there, the secret wells and springs winding, branching like arteries of silver through the dark of the earth.

The drone of the funeral service cushioned his senses like moss. Freddie stayed in his blessed trance, and then he saw something so amazing that he wanted to leap to his feet. Shining in the gloom of the church was an angel of light stretching from floor to ceiling. Its wings were rays of gold fanning out from wall to wall. Its skirt was a cone of radiance covering the whole congregation. The face was so bright that the features were invisible, only a feeling of omnipotent mysterious love emanated through the angel's resplendent being. Under its brightness, the people sat like dominoes, wooden and unresponsive.

Freddie held his breath. He longed to shout out in a loud voice, a voice louder than him. But all his young life he'd been told: No. You mustn't. You shouldn't. Don't you dare.

The shades came down, the angel vanished, and the words of his father's favourite hymn reclaimed his consciousness: 'Rock of ages cleft for me, Let me hide myself in thee.'

Freddie thought about the words: 'Let me hide myself.' Wasn't that what he'd been doing all his life? Hiding himself. Hiding his soul. And why? Because of Harry Price. Because of Levi smashing china over the accusation of his son telling lies. It hadn't been lies.

As the hymn progressed into the final verse, Freddie felt rebellious. Sad as he was to lose his father, Levi's death had liberated him. He was nearly a man now, his voice was deepening and he longed to use it, to feel its new full rumbling power in the echoing church. He hadn't joined in the singing, but now he stood up and waited for the silence that would follow the hymn.

Empowered by his solitary stance and his golden vision, Freddie took a deep breath and felt his voice rise up from the bowels of the earth. He didn't need to shout. The voice was effortlessly resonant.

'I saw an angel,' he declared. 'A golden angel shining over all of you, here in this church.'

The heads turned, the mouths dropped open, a hundred accusing eyes stared down the church at Freddie. Even Levi's coffin seemed to tremble, the feathers of the bra.s.s eagle bristled, and someone's hymnbook crashed to the floor like a shot pigeon.

Once he started, Freddie couldn't stop.

'I'm not a liar,' he said quietly.

The 'shades of the prison-house' began to crack around him, letting in c.h.i.n.ks of light, bright glimpses of the kind of life that freedom could bring.