The Greenstone Grail Read Online Free PDF Page A

came from a household where reading was something that happened to other people, her mother preferred the television, her father the pub. She wasan only child, given to strange introverted moods when she wouldn’t speak for hours, or would climb a tree and refuse to come down, ‘watching’ she would explain later when asked what she’d been doing, or ‘thinking’. But she would always talk to Nathan. She had occasional outbursts of temper which alarmed other children, but these were rare. To look at she was a little below the average height for her age, sturdily built, with a lot of untidy brown hair which her mother was always trying to restrain in plait or ponytail or twist, but the shorter ends invariably worked loose, and Hazel would pull them over her face to hide behind. Nathan’s male classmates scorned her as a best friend because she was a girl, but it made no difference to him. Both his companions and his mother were learning that nothing anyone said or did made any difference to Nathan, once he had made up his mind.
    But before George, even before Hazel, there was Woody. ‘Your imaginary friend,’ Annie called him, and Nathan accepted this, although with a note of doubt, since he thought ‘imaginary’ meant ‘not real’, and Woody was quite real. They would meet in the garden at Thornyhill – a garden that seemed much bigger than its actual size, with trellises overgrown with beanflowers, and herb beds, and rambling shrubs, and curious furtive statues hiding in leaves, and wild corners where wood and garden ran together and an infant Nathan found no boundaries to his playground. Annie learned not to worry about him: Hoover was always around, if he strayed too far. But even Hoover never saw Woody. Woody was very, very shy, an odd little creature with an elongated face, all nose, and slanting eyes that looked sideways from his head, like the eyes of an animal. His body was thin as a twig, his skin brownish and slightly mottled, varying in tone according to his background. Hair bristled on his scalp and straggled down his back. If he wore clothes, they were so closeto his skin colour that Nathan never noticed. He explained that he was a woodwose, but if he had a name he couldn’t remember it, so Nathan called him Woody.
    ‘Have you lived here a long time?’ the child asked him once.
    ‘Always.’
    ‘How long is always?’
    ‘I’m not sure. Not very long I think, but I can’t remember being anywhere else.’
    ‘Do you have parents?’
    ‘Parents …?’
    ‘A mummy and daddy. I have a mummy, but my daddy is dead. And I have Uncle Barty, and Hoover. Who do you have?’
    But Woody didn’t seem to have anybody.
    ‘Then you can have me,’ said Nathan.
    They would crawl through gaps in the undergrowth into the woods, where his imaginary friend showed him the secret worlds in the hollows of trees, and under last year’s leaves, and they would watch new shoots growing, and the tiny lives of insects, and the green beginnings of things. Sometimes birds would come, and perch on Woody’s fingers – long, brown, knobbly fingers – or his shoulder, as if he were no more than a sapling sprouting among the roots. When Annie first heard of these explorations she was horrified. ‘He mustn’t go wandering off on his own like this. Anything could happen to him!’
    ‘He appears to be looked after,’ Bartlemy said. ‘You don’t have to worry. No harm can come to him here.’
    And somehow, she believed him.
    When Nathan’s friendship with Hazel grew he told her about Woody, but she never met him. And gradually, as he became more preoccupied with school and other activities,he saw less and less of his strange companion, and Woody faded with early childhood, until, without really thinking about it, Nathan came to accept his mother’s definition, that the woodwose had come from his imagination, and had no substance of its own.
    When he was eleven Nathan won a scholarship to Ffylde Abbey, a private school