The Small Hand and Dolly

It was a little before nine o'clock, the sun was setting into a bank of smokyviolet cloud and I had lost my way. I reversed the car in a gateway and droveback half a mile to the fingerpost.

I had spent the past twenty-four hours with a client near the coast and wasreturning to London, but it had clearly been foolish to leave the main route andhead across country.

The road had cut through the Downs, pale mounds on either side, and then runinto a straight, tree-lined stretch to the crossroads. The fingerpost markingswere faded and there were no recent signs. So that when the right turning came Ialmost shot past it, for there was no sign at all here, just a lane and highbanks in which the roots of trees were set deep as ancient teeth. But I thoughtthat this would eventually lead me back to the A road.

The lane narrowed. The sun was behind me, flaring into the rear-view mirror.Then came a sharp bend, the lane turned into a single track and the view aheadwas dark beneath overhanging branches.

I slowed. This could not possibly be a way.

Was there a house? Could I find someone to put me on the right road?

I got out. Opposite me was an old sign, almost greened over. the white house.Below, someone had tacked up a piece of board. It hung loose but I could justmake out the words garden closed in roughly painted lettering.

Well, a house was a house. There would be people. I drove slowly on down thetrack. The banks were even steeper, the tree trunks vast and elephantine.

Then, at the end of the lane I came out of the trees and into a wide clearingand saw that it was still light after all, the sky a pale enameled silver-blue.There was no through road. Ahead were a wooden gate and a high hedge wound aboutwith briars and brambles.

All I could hear were birds settling down, a thrush singing high up on thebranches of a walnut tree and blackbirds pinking as they scurried in theundergrowth. I got out of the car and, as I stood there, the birdsong graduallysubsided and then there was an extraordinary hush, a strange quietness intowhich I felt I had broken as some unwelcome intruder.

I ought to have turned back then. I ought to have retraced my way to thefingerpost and tried again to find the main road. But I did not. I was drawn on,through the gate between the overgrown bushes.

I walked cautiously and for some reason tried not to make a noise as I pushedaside low branches and strands of bramble. The gate was stuck halfway, droppedon its hinges, so that I could not push it open further and had to ease myselfthrough the gap.

More undergrowth, rhododendron bushes, briar hedge growing through beech. Thepath was mossed over and grassy but I felt stones here and there beneath myfeet.

After a hundred yards or so I came to a dilapidated hut which looked like theremains of an old ticket booth. The shutter was down. The roof had rotted. Arabbit, its scut bright white in the dimness of the bushes, scrabbled out ofsight.

I went on. The path broadened out and swung to the right. And there was thehouse.

It was a solid Edwardian house, long and with a wide verandah. A flight ofshallow steps led up to the front door. I was standing on what must once havebeen a large and well-kept forecourt—there were still some patches ofgravel between the weeds and grass. To the right of the house was an archway,half obscured by rose briars, in which was set a wrought-iron gate. I glancedround. The car ticked slightly as the engine cooled.

I should have gone back then. I needed to be in London and I had already lost myway. Clearly the house was deserted and possibly derelict. I would not findanyone here to give me directions.

I went up to the gate in the arch and peered through. I could see nothing but ajungle of more shrubs and bushes, overarching trees, and the line of anotherpath disappearing away into the darkening greenery.

I touched the cold iron latch. It lifted. I pushed. The gate was stuck fast. Iput my shoulder to it and it gave a little and rust flaked away at the hinges. Ipushed harder and slowly the gate moved, scraping on the ground, opening,opening. I stepped through it and I was inside. Inside a large, overgrown,empty, abandoned garden. To one side, steps led to a terrace and the house.

It was a place which had been left to the air and the weather, the wind, thesun, the rabbits and the birds, left to fall gently, sadly into decay, forstones to crack and paths to be obscured and then to disappear, for windowpanesto let in the rain and birds to nest in the roof. Gradually, it would sink in onitself and then into the earth. How old was this house? A hundred years? Inanother hundred there would be nothing left of it.

I turned. I could barely see ahead now. Whatever the garden, now "closed," hadbeen, nature had taken it back, covered it with blankets of ivy and trailingstrands of creeper, thickened it over with weed, sucked the light and the airout of it so that only the toughest plants could grow and in growing invade andoccupy.

I should go back.

But I wanted to know more. I wanted to see more. I wanted for some reason I didnot understand to come here in the full light of day, to see everything, uncoverwhat was concealed, reveal what had been hidden. Find out why.

I might not have returned. Most probably, by the time I had made my way back tothe main road, as of course I would, and reached London and my comfortable flat,the White House and what I had found there in the dusk of that late eveningwould have receded to the back of my mind and before long been quite forgotten.Even if I had come this way I might well never have found it again.

And then, as I stood in the gathering stillness and soft spring dusk, somethinghappened. I do not much care whether or not I am believed. That does not matter.I know. That is all. I know, as surely as I know that yesterday morning itrained onto the windowsill of my bedroom after I had left a window slightlyopen. I know as well as I know that I had a root canal filling in a tooth lastThursday and felt great pain from it when I woke in the night. I know that ithappened as well as I know that I had black coffee at breakfast.

I know because if I close my eyes now I feel it happening again, the memory ofit is vivid and it is a physical memory. My body feels it, this is not onlysomething in my mind.

I stood in the dim, green-lit clearing and above my head a silver paring of mooncradled the evening star. The birds had fallen silent. There was not theslightest stirring of the air.

And as I stood I felt a small hand creep into my right one, as if a child hadcome up beside me in the dimness and taken hold of it. It felt cool and itsfingers curled themselves trustingly into my palm and rested there, and thesmall thumb and forefinger tucked my own thumb between them. As a reflex, I bentit over and we stood for a time which was out of time, my own man's hand and thevery small hand held as closely together as the hand of a father and his child.But I am not a father and the small child was invisible.

It was after midnight when I got back to London and I was tired, but becausewhat had happened to me was still so clear I did not go to bed until I had gotout a couple of maps and tried to trace the road I had taken in error and thelane leading to the deserted house and garden. But nothing was obvious and mymaps were not detailed enough. I needed several large-scale Ordnance Survey onesto have any hope of pinpointing an individual house.

I woke just before dawn and as I surfaced from a dreamless sleep I rememberedthe sensation of the small hand taking hold of my own. But it was a memory. Thehand was not there as it had been there, I was now quite sure, in the dusk ofthat strange garden. There was all the difference in the world, as there waseach time I dreamed of it, which I did often during the course of the next fewweeks.

I am a dealer in antiquarian books and manuscripts. In the main I look forindividual volumes on behalf of clients, at auction and in private sales as wellas from other bookmen, though from time to time I also buy speculatively,usually with someone in mind. I do not have shop premises, I work from home. Irarely keep items for very long and I do not have a large store of books forsale at any one time because I deal at the upper end of the market, in volumesworth many thousands of pounds. I do collect books, much more modestly and in adisorganized sort of way, for my own interest and pleasure. My Chelsea flat isfilled with them. My resolution every New Year is to halve the number of books Ihave and every year I fail to keep it. For every dozen I sell or give away, Ibuy twenty more.

The week after finding the White House saw me in New York and Los Angeles. Ithen went on trips to Berlin, Toronto and back to New York. I had severalimportant commissions and I was completely absorbed in my undertakings. Yetalways, even in the midst of a crowded auction room, or when with a client, on aplane or in a foreign hotel, always and however full my mind was of the job Iwas engaged upon, I seemed to have some small part of myself in which the memoryof the small hand was fresh and immediate. It was almost like a room into whichI could go for a moment or two during the day. I was not in the least alarmed ortroubled by this. On the contrary, I found it oddly comforting.

I knew that when my present period of travel and activity was over I wouldreturn to it and try both to understand what had happened to me and if possibleto return to that place to explore and to discover more about it—who hadlived there, why it was empty. And whether, if I returned and stood therequietly, the small hand would seek mine again.

I had one disconcerting moment in an airport while buying a newspaper. It wasextremely busy and as I queued, first of all someone pushed past me in a rushand almost sent me flying and then, as I was still recovering myself, I felt achild's hand take my own. But when I glanced down I saw that it was the realhand belonging to a real small boy who had clutched me in panic, having alsobeen almost felled by the same precipitate traveler. Within a few seconds he hadpulled away from me and was reunited with his mother. The feeling of his handhad been in a way just the same as that of the other child, but it had also beenquite different—hot rather than cool, sticky rather than silky. I couldnot remember when a real child had last taken my hand but it must have beenyears before. Yet I could distinguish quite clearly between them.

It was mid-June before I had a break from traveling. I had had a profitable fewweeks and among other things I had secured two rare Kelmscott Press books for myclient in Sussex, together with immaculate signed first editions of all VirginiaWoolf's novels, near-mint in their dust wrappers. I was excited to have them andanxious to get them out of my hands and into his. I am well insured, but noamount of money can compensate for the loss or damage of items like these.

So I arranged to drive down with them.

At the back of my mind was the idea that I would leave time to go in search ofthe White House again.

Was there ever a June as glorious as that one? I had missed too much of the latespring but now we were in the heady days of balmy air and the first flush ofroses. They were haymaking as I drove down and when I arrived at my client'shouse, the garden was lush and tumbling, the beds high and thick with flowers infull bloom, all was bees and honeysuckle and the smell of freshly mown grass.

I had been invited to stay the night and we dined on a terrace from which therewas a distant view of the sea. Sir Edgar Merriman was elderly, modest of mannerand incalculably rich. His tastes were for books and early scientificinstruments and he also had a collection of rare musical boxes which, when woundand set going, charmed the evening air with their sound.

We lingered outside and Sir Edgar's blue-grey coils of cigar smoke wreathedupwards, keeping the insects at bay, the pungent smell mingling with that of thelilies and stocks in the nearby beds. His wife, Alice, sat with us, a small,grey-haired woman with a sweet voice and a shyness which I found most appealing.

At one point the servant came to call Sir Edgar to the telephone and as she andI sat companionably in the soft darkness, the moths pattering around the lamp, Ithought to ask her about the White House. Did she know of it? Could she directme to it again?

She shook her head. "I haven't heard of such a place. How far were you fromhere?"

"It's hard to tell ... I was hopelessly lost. I suppose I'd driven for forty-five minutes or so? Perhaps a bit longer. I took a byroad which I thought I knewbut did not."

"There are so many unsigned roads in the country. We all know our way about sowell, but they are a pitfall for the unwary. I don't think I can help you. Whydo you want to go back there, Mr. Snow?"