Kite Spirit (24 page)

Seth looked dumbfounded.

‘Don’t you think he’s the spit of him, Giles?’ Aida asked, turning to a tiny bald man wearing an old-fashioned waistcoat who stood nearby.

He took a pair of half-spectacles from his pocket and placed them on the end of his nose.

‘Can’t say. I only set eyes on the beggar once when I was home on leave.’

‘So you know who I’m thinking of?’ Aida raised her eyebrows questioningly.

‘If I’d have got hold of him, he wouldn’t have gone back to Germany in one piece,’ butted in a tall man with a shock of white hair, wearing a dapper black suit and
tie.

‘Oh for pity’s sake, Lance, can you never make your peace?’

Seth stared from Giles to Aida to Lance, a look of complete bewilderment on his face.

‘Go on then. You tell them, Aida. I’m just amazed you’ve managed to keep it to yourself for all this time.’ Giles grimaced, not exactly kindly.

‘I’ve got plenty of secrets you’ll never know about,’ Aida retorted.

‘I shouldn’t wonder!’

Aida ignored him and turned back to Seth. ‘You’ve got a look of your grandad, that’s for sure –’ she nodded at him – ‘but this bonny lass is the picture
of Lily. Jack must have seen that . . . Strange how the likeness finds its way out generations down, isn’t it? They used to call Lily Storey the belle of the valley. She was as pretty as a
primrose too –’ she smiled at Kite – ‘and the best friend I ever had.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’ Seth sat down on the bench next to Aida.

‘The prisoners of war helped work the farms round here, while our lads were off fighting. Some of them were no more than young boys.’ She glanced over to Seth. ‘I remember
Peter – he was a looker like you and sweet-natured with it. I never saw him complain even though he hardly had an hour off. But whenever he did, he used to make these toys for Lily. He gave
one to me once too.’

‘I bet he did,’ mumbled Lance bad-temperedly.

Aida shot him a dirty look.

‘I’ve still got it. You can have it if you want,’ she continued. ‘Peter Klein was his name, had the voice of an angel. He used to sing to us – we hadn’t a
clue what the words meant, but his voice could melt your heart. Lily was only sixteen and I think he was eighteen or nineteen. Then the war was over and he was packed back to Germany before anyone
knew, and well . . . the shame of it, you know,’ Aida sighed, pointing down at her own round belly.

‘They said he forced hissel’ on her,’ Lance growled. His face was flushed with anger. Kite couldn’t believe that something that had happened so long ago could still
provoke such strong feeling.

‘However it was . . . they packed the bairn off as soon as she was born. Lily named her though. I remember that because it was the name she gave her first doll when she was just five years
old – she told me then that she was going to call her baby girl Hannah, and that’s what she did when her time came.’

‘That baby was my mum!’ Seth whispered, as if he’d been winded. Kite had never seen him look so stunned, and she felt breathless and churned up herself.

‘There’s no doubt in my mind. It’s like a piece of Lily has come back to me after all this time.’

So Aida had known Lily since she was small too, just as Kite had met Dawn in nursery. It was touching to see how much she still missed her. I never want to forget Dawn either, Kite thought.

Seth stood up and started pacing around the table. He rummaged in his pocket for his rolling tobacco and walked out into the lane. As Kite followed him Aida placed a hand on her arm and pointed
to the back of her wheelchair.

Outside they found Seth drawing heavily on his roll up.

Although there was no one else about, Aida lowered her voice to a whisper so that Seth and Kite both had to lean in to hear what she said next.

‘I’m maybe the only person in these parts that can tell you this. Your grandma swore me to keep it to myself, but it seems to me you’re supposed to know.’

Seth nodded and ground his butt into the road.

‘It’s not true what they said. He didn’t force hissel’ on her, though it made them feel better to think it. They were in love, and she begged them to let her keep the
bairn, but . . . It breaks my heart still to remember her crying out for her little Hannah, long after she was gone.’ Aida took one of Seth’s hands and held it tight as if she hardly
dared ask the question. ‘Is your mam still with us?’

Seth shook his head sadly.

Aida’s eyes filled with tears and soon Kite found herself welling up too. It seemed so wrong that her Grandma Hannah whom she’d never met had died thinking she was unwanted by her
natural parents.

‘I’ve no wish to upset you, lass –’ Aida reached to wipe the tears from Kite’s eyes – ‘but it does you good to know that you come from love, no matter
how old you get. Lily told me when they sent the lad away that she would never love again, and I can tell you she had plenty of offers.’ She pointed into the pub and smiled with satisfaction.
‘Do you know she turned them all down, the lot of them in there!’

Kite let the tears roll down her cheeks for the great-grandmother she had never known. Seth placed an arm around her shoulders and smiled at her through his own tears.

‘Thanks for caring. Well, at least now we know.’

Jack’s brother, who had travelled from Cornwall with his carer, arrived halfway through the day. He was eighty-two years old and the only words Kite heard him utter was
that Jack had been a ‘hard act to follow’. The constant stream of visitors gathered around the table eating, drinking and sharing memories. There was plenty of singing and storytelling
at the Carrec Arms that afternoon, but Kite didn’t hear much of it, because all that she could think of was her broken hearted great-grandmother, and how sad it was that she never got to tell
her daughter, Kite’s grandmother, that she was loved, and then there was Dawn, who had been so loved but had ended her life before it had started. None of it made any sense to her and what
she was beginning to realize was how complicated life was, how full of challenges and secrets, even for these old people who she would have thought might have worked everything out by now.

Kite noticed that Seth disappeared a few times during the afternoon and when he came back he always smelt of smoke. The last time he popped out Dr Sherpa ‘kept him company’, and when
they returned Seth began singing and strumming away at his guitar.

‘You’ve got your Grandpa’s voice, all right.’ Aida started humming along, picking out lines of the story here and there in a surprisingly sweet and tuneful voice. The old
men bickered with her over the lyrics.

‘Don’t go listening to these two. They never could hold a tune!’ Aida laughed.

‘Aye, well, that’s as maybe, but we’ve been hard pushed hearing ourselves
think
all these years with you around, let alone
sing
!’ Giles was smiling
fondly at Aida. Until now Kite had never been much around so many old people, but despite all their arguments and bickering they seemed to know and accept each other as part of the landscape. She
glanced over to the cap on Jack’s empty chair; it seemed impossible that he wasn’t somewhere nearby, tapping along to the music. She wished that Lily could hear Seth’s songs and
that Hannah could have known her own story. And more than any of these things she wished that she could go back to London and walk down the stairs to Dawn’s flat, sit on her bed and tell her
all about this. She glanced outside to see that the light was fading. Tomorrow, she thought, if the wind is still raging I’ll take my birthday kite and fly it for Dawn.

‘You know I won’t be able to stop here, don’t you? I’m going to have to find the family of this Peter Klein,’ Seth said as they drove back across
the common. ‘Who knows, maybe he’s still alive.’

Kite nodded. She thought of old Jack’s photos of his time in India . . . and about how Jack and Agnes had been secretly in love. It wasn’t just where you were from; it was
all
the experiences that you drank in during your life that made you who you were. Despite everything, it was somehow comforting to know exactly how you stretched into the past and out
across the world in all directions.

In the morning Kite walked over to the spyhole window and peered out. For the first time since they’d arrived she watched the glowering rainclouds brood over the
mountain. To the left the woodland swayed in a wild wind dance.

Garth was waiting for her on the path below Mirror Falls. He wore sturdy new walking boots with a thick tread.

‘Look for the bones under this ledge – that’s what Gran said, isn’t it?’

She nodded as Garth climbed on to the stone platform where the sheep carcass had lain. He held out his hand to help Kite down, but instead she slid along the rock and jumped the remaining
distance herself. She felt as if she had been here before, in her dream. Garth eased himself over the ledge and found a foothold in the rock. The roar of the waterfall was at its most ferocious
here. Garth ducked to see into the crevice and whistled as he realized how many bones lay there.

‘I can see why Gran thought the owls were haunting her; they must have kept coming back looking for the barn and crashed to their deaths. You know they nest for generations in the same
place. No wonder she couldn’t live here with this on her conscience.’

Kite shivered. It was like discovering the aftermath of a massacre – and Agnes had hidden the evidence right here under her ‘dream house’.

When they’d finally cleared out the crevice, the bones half filled both hessian sacks. They climbed in silence up the path and left them at the door.

Seth was sitting at the table eating breakfast.

‘I’m helping Garth finish his sculpture,’ announced Kite.

Seth looked up and tapped the newspaper – the
Cumbrian and Westmorland Herald
. ‘I’ve been reading all about your commission from the National Trust!’ He smiled
at them both. ‘Seems like Garth’s garths are going to be all over the walkways of the Lakes! It says here your work is –’ Seth put on what he called his ‘proper
posh’ voice – ‘“A meditation on the erosion of time . . .”’

‘Really! I didn’t know that!’ Garth laughed, then picked up the paper and read it for himself. ‘Makes me sound good! I wish they’d told the Art GCSE markers
though!’

‘Why, what did you get?’

‘A “D”.’

Seth laughed and clapped him on the back.

‘I’m just going up to pack a few things, in case it rains,’ Kite called, running up the staircase. She placed the reed box in her backpack. It felt like time. She knew that
Dawn wasn’t angry with her and she also knew that she could never give her all the answers to her questions. What she could do was honour Dawn’s memory and lay her spirit to rest in a
beautiful place that Dawn would have loved, a place that Kite had come to love too. She picked up the feather and placed it back under her pillow. She had decided to keep it after all. The feather
– and the birthday card, that she now turned over in her hands. I’ll open it when I’ve buried the reed, she promised herself as she unhooked her tethered kite from the wall.

When they were gone, Seth wandered over to the large glass window and watched their journey through the valley. He saw Garth take Kite’s hand and not let go. They disappeared from view as
they descended the steep path that led down to the base of the waterfall.

Then further up the valley he saw a multicoloured kite begin to bob hopefully. The string seemed to get caught a couple of times before the kite lifted way off the ground and rose steadily,
strongly, into the fading grey sky. So here at last were the moods of the mountains. Watching his daughter from this distance, Seth felt the tears stream down his cheeks. When Garth and Kite
reached the furthest part of the valley they stopped for a moment, turned and looked back towards Mirror Falls. Seth waved to Kite, though he knew that she would probably not be able to see
him.

He looked up at the owl print on the glass. Only one wing was vaguely discernible now.

A herd of sheep gathered off the fell and huddled together, forming an orderly line in the shelter of a drystone wall.

‘They always know when it’s going to be really bad,’ Garth told her as they packed away the kite.

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before the thick black clouds that swirled across the top of the mountains gathered speed . . . and then came the cloudburst. Kite opened her mouth and drank.
Her cheeks stung with the constant pressure of the sharp rain, but she was glad that there was nowhere to shelter. She felt alive in every cell of her body for the first time in ages as they began
to climb the steep path over Kite Carrec. Kite peered up at the grey mountain that had been so green and sunny on their last walk together. Holding on to each other, they slipped here and there in
the stream that was already beginning to cascade down the track.

By the time they’d descended the slope into the reservoir they were both soaked and mud-smeared. The rain had taken only a few minutes to penetrate Kite’s thin cagoule. Garth handed
her his padded jacket, his damp shirt clinging close to his body.

Together they placed all the owl bones deep into the sheep’s belly and sealed them in with slates. As Garth worked he seemed to forget that the rain was falling.

‘Do you think you can find a place for this?’

Kite took the little box from her pocket. She lifted out the reed and handed it to Garth. He turned it over in his hands with great care, just as he had in her dream.

‘Dawn’s golden reed,’ she whispered.

Garth lodged it firmly among the slates, stones and bones of his sculpture. When the reservoir filled and the sheep was underwater, maybe all these tiny shards of history would float away from
the sculpture: the trout that Seth had caught for Jack, Agnes’s owl bones and Dawn’s music. They were all now part of the story of this place.

‘Do you want to sit and watch it disappear?’ asked Garth.

Kite nodded through chattering teeth and Garth grabbed her hand and started to run with her across the bridge and up a steep rocky slope. They were high above the dam now and Kite turned to look
down to where the boundary walls and the little bridge were already beginning to be submerged.