Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

By next morning it was national news. The Elmbridge Farm suicide cult. Seven people found dead in a barn in Kent, the door sealed and a Nissan Pathfinder inside with its engine still running. Presumed cause of death – carbon monoxide poisoning. They’d left a cryptic note. The solution starts here .

Within hours everyone knew about the solutionists. Pundits analysed the features of cult behaviour. A few warned that this might be the start of a trend, but most treated it as the end rather than the beginning of something. BK Compton was not available for comment.

We’d seen our baby moving on a screen, but the deaths overshadowed our celebrations. I was sick with grief and guilt and unfocused dread. You tried to help, but had your own feelings to cope with – fury, mainly, that Penny had dragged me into this madness.

I look at your picture now in its silver frame. The beach front at Brighton. I have no right to mourn you with so many dead, so much irrevocably destroyed. I do though, Caro. And what if I could have you back and the rest gone, or have the rest back – the whole ruined world – and you dead. What if I had that choice? It wouldn’t really be a choice, even if I was offered it. Death is OK. It’s always been OK. People die. They die young. Even children die. That’s nature. But what the solutionists did – that was something else.

Dell has shown me such a treasure. Cat gave it her as a child, said it came from Janet who slipped it in her hand all those years ago while Brendan was seeing to his horse. Janet didn’t say, but Cat knew it was from Dell’s mother.

It’s a picture of a woman, pale and faintly coloured but so beautiful and so skilfully made she might be alive, her hair loose and flying as though the wind is blowing right through the cracked glass. The frame is silver and carved with lilies. I’ve seen treasures like it at the Hall, some on the shelves in the turret.

‘Is it my mother?’

‘Not your mother, no. It’s from the endtime. No villager could make such a thing.’

‘I thought so.’ She was disappointed, but not too much. I could tell she had more to show me. ‘I loved it as a tot, kissed and snuggled it in my bed. Later, though, I found something else.’ She turned it over and fiddled at the back of it. At last she lifted out a thin piece of wood and a sheet of paper, fine but rough down one edge, and with writing on both sides. It didn’t make sense at first. I’d never seen paper like it that wasn’t part of a book. Then I understood.

‘Oh Dell.’ I didn’t know what else to say. It disturbed and excited me to see it, to know the Book of Air was spoiled and that Sarah had done this in secret for her baby daughter and known it all these years and told no one. ‘Oh Dell. It’s beautiful.’

And it was. It was the colour of milk, with tiny delicate letters, quite black and each one perfect. Stroking it I could feel where the letters lay, something like the scales on a fish. I thought at first this was the paper itself, but the margins were butter smooth, so it must be the ink made this small roughness. I saw then there was a line drawn in the margin against some of the words. I read them aloud, while Dell listened.

‘The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, my hope quenched, my faith death-struck, swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen mass. That bitter hour cannot be described. In truth, the waters came into my soul, I sank in deep mire, I felt no standing, I came into deep waters, the floods overflowed me.’

Dell said, ‘What does it mean?’

‘It’s a page from the Book of Air, and this text she’s marked for you to study.’

‘But all what you said about it, what does it mean?’

‘I’m not sure what it means. I don’t understand all of it, but it’s about Jane’s sadness.’

‘And Jane’s my mother?’

‘No.’

‘Who then? What’s Jane to me?’

‘Oh, Jane is everything. Our first Governess.’ I saw there was a lot to explain. ‘She wrote the Book of Air. This is a hard text, though, and must be read four ways like any text in the book, so Jane’s sadness is only one part of it. This text is about water. Because water, like earth and fire, brings death as well as life. And even air, the most precious, can be poisoned with disease. And they must fight with each other, as fire boils water, and water quenches fire. And here, you see, Jane’s hope is quenched – like a flame by water.’

‘But what do I care about these four meanings? One meaning would be enough if it was meant for me. What did my mother mean by it?’

‘Oh, but of course.’ I saw it then, Sarah’s purpose in pulling this page from the book. ‘She meant her own sadness to be losing you, to be losing her love, her hope in life.’

‘And all that’s in this paper, among these marks? How can you know, from so long ago and her not here to tell you what she meant?’

I could see Dell didn’t understand me – she has no sense of writing, of how powerful and beautiful it is. ‘It’s what the writing says,’ I told her, ‘and the meaning she found in the writing – a fifth meaning, you see, just for you.’ I thought of how I might explain this. Of how I might understand it myself, what Sarah had done with a single stroke of her pen. ‘Like a message,’ I said, ‘but written in ink.’

‘I get it. It was her way of passing me the word.’

Dell smiled and I saw in her face for the first time her mother’s loveliness. And I was filled suddenly with such longing that I couldn’t sit with her, but walked out among the ruins. For want of the broad fields of my childhood rising up on to the moors where the sheep graze in summer, I looked up at the sky and imagined myself rising into its emptiness. There were faint clouds misting over the moon and I told myself that this was the same moon that shone right now over the village, and that however far you travelled it would be there just the same, but offering no comfort. I wept then for the sadness of things and thought myself a page torn from my own life, and my life like the Book of Air spoiled for ever.

Django’s back. Abigail came to my room at dawn to let me know, while I was still in bed. She asked me not to be angry. I was too weak to argue with her. My temperature’s been up these past few days. These fevers come and go like aftershocks and I pay them no attention, except they slow me down. She told me Django wants to apologise to me for burning the books. He acknowledges that he had no right to do it without my permission. He knows what he did was wrong. Perhaps he said these things. Abigail wants me to believe that he said them, anyway.

She sat on my bed and felt my forehead. ‘You’re warm.’

‘Just a bit. I’ll be all right.’

‘You push yourself too hard.’ Then she rested her hand against my chest. ‘And there’s so much sadness and trouble in you.’

‘In all of us.’

‘Yes. It’s not just our bodies we need to take care of.’

It was nice to be touched by Abigail, to feel the tension ease in me and my resentment at Django loosen its grip.

He’d turned up with food apparently – mushrooms and blackberries – and asked if he could cook, to make things right between us, all of us eating together as a gesture of reconciliation. Those things he probably did say. They sound like Django.

He’s laid the table in the dining room and got a big fire going and lit candles. I don’t know what kind of sense this makes. Django’s a pyromaniac. So as a punishment he gets to light candles – from a meagre supply that we can’t begin to replenish until spring. But to please Abigail, and because I haven’t the strength to fight, or the means to win, I sit with them, while Aleksy raises a glass of water to the cook and to peace in all our hearts and to the sown wheat.