Spring

  Clare fell silent. She was thinking she had done right to ask that Jack come and stay.

  ‘He’s a very remarkable young man,’ said Clare. ‘He talked to me like a man, not a boy. He’s suffered greatly, Margaret. I think you’ll see the changes in him. And it’ll be good for Katherine to have him here . . .’

  Margaret Foale caught a look in her friend’s eye and she laughed.

  ‘I do believe you’re match-making already, Clare! He’s only been in the house a few hours.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  But she laughed too.

  ‘. . . .now would you like me to read to you? Or turn on the radio maybe?’

  Clare shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘No, you go to bed and I’ll make up a story in my head. By the time I get to the end, I’ll be asleep. And, Margaret . . . ?’

  ‘My dear?’

  ‘Are you going to talk to Jack about Arthur? He’s not a fool and will start asking questions if you don’t.’

  ‘When the time’s right.’

  ‘The time will never be right,’ said Clare firmly, ‘so it’s best you do it as soon as possible.’

  ‘What do I say?’

  Clare thought for a moment.

  ‘Tell him what you haven’t exactly told me,’ she said. ‘The truth.’

  ‘That’s not as easy as it sounds because I don’t “exactly” know it myself.’

  30

  FIRST STEPS OF THE DANCE

  Jack woke the following morning into a world so different from what he was used to that he might as well have been on another planet.

  No traffic noise; no shouting or swearing or the clatter of feet outside his door; no institutional cooking; no set time to get up. Everything was different.

  He sat up in bed and stared out over the garden towards White Horse Hill, hoping to see the chalk figure again. Eventually he did, as the morning mist drifting across the hill from right to left began to break up, revealing the horse behind it and giving the illusion that it was the horse that was moving, not the mist.

  He heard the sound of Spring outside, and the tinkling of glass chimes.

  Someone was playing the piano and he could smell fresh coffee and bacon, while sunshine played across the windows of his huge room and all down the pale curtains. He lay back on the pillows, listened to the music, and promptly fell asleep again.

  When he awoke the second time, the piano playing had stopped, and this time he got up, very slowly, enjoying the moment.

  The bathroom was old and primitive, with a high cobwebbed ceiling, and a shower head hanging loosely over a stained roll-top bath with griffin’s feet, from which water dribbled out so slowly it took a while to get hot. But there were fresh old worn towels laid out, some rose-scented soap and a faded photograph of a younger Mr and Mrs Foale posed by a standing stone, on which ‘Avebury, 1957’ had been written in black ink.

  He drifted downstairs and made his way into what Katherine had grandly called the dining room during their brief tour of the house the day before. There was a hotplate with bacon, mushrooms and scrambled eggs keeping warm, and a blue plastic radio playing softly, with an electric cable running from its rear to a small socket on the wall.

  The coffee he had smelt was in an old-fashioned Bakelite flask, and the only cereal on offer was a box of Kellogg’s Cornflakes, with a little sugar bowl next to it covered by a square of lace, weighted at the edges with amber beads.

  His first impression from the day before was right: this house was stuck in a time warp, and he was beginning to think its inhabitants, including Katherine, might be as well.

  A clock on the mantelpiece ticked steadily, a sound he had not heard in a long time. To his astonishment he saw it was nearly ten o’clock. Maybe he was drifting into a time warp too.

  Jack had his breakfast alone but not feeling at all lonely, because the house all around him seemed to have a life of its own – drifting voices, the piano again, a bell ringing, a door opening, soft footsteps on a stone floor and, somewhere over his head, the floorboards creaking before someone stopped and opened a window.

  Only when the lace curtain at one of the windows stirred slightly did he realize that the windows in the room were actually open as well, so quiet and still was the world outside. But soon after there was a distant rumble of thunder, and a darkening that brought a sense of ominous change to the air.

  Katherine suddenly appeared. She was in belted jeans, an apricot-coloured T-shirt and wore leather flip-flops. She had a good figure which she must have noticed him assessing because she flushed very slightly and stared boldly back at him, making a considerable effort not to be fazed.

  ‘Morning, Jack,’ she said.

  To her he remained inscrutable. By the light of day, after a good night’s sleep, he looked attractive in a tousled sort of way – which were the exact same words she had used that morning in an excited email sent to Sam. She had also used the word ‘sweet’, as if he was some charming boy who had popped in for tea.

  But in fact ‘sweet’ was something she didn’t feel he was at all.

  ‘Morning, Katherine,’ he replied, finally smiling.

  ‘Mrs Foale made the breakfast, so it’s my job to clear away and do the washing up,’ she explained.

  ‘Our job,’ said Jack, getting up. It seemed the right thing to do, and anyway he always did his own washing up.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, obviously not used to someone else helping. ‘Er . . . right.’

  She didn’t seem quite to know how to let him help, which was how she had been the previous evening. Now, as then, he did so anyway.

  But, as he dried the crockery and cutlery, he poked restlessly about like a cat getting to know its territory.

  ‘Do you want to see the house properly in daylight?’

  He grunted abstractedly.

  ‘So you do?’

  He did.

  She took him on a full tour of the house.

  They went up the main stairs at the front, and came down some narrow ones at the back, and in-between there were many different worlds of rooms, boxes, pictures of people gone, things half put away, things waiting to be found.

  There were two floors plus an attic, so substantial in itself that it had little rooms with doors in the eaves and another door out on to the roof. These attic rooms, like a few on the floor below, were unused and dusty from fallen plaster. They were filled with a clutter of old furniture, tea chests and cardboard boxes. Many of these had been opened and rummaged through, as if someone had been searching for something specific over many years but never quite found it.

  ‘That’s Mrs Foale and me,’ explained Katherine, ‘looking for various things. She keeps remembering items she once had, but hasn’t seen for years, and we do usually find them in the end. But there’s no gold and silver that I’ve ever seen! No secrets and no surprises!’

  It didn’t feel like that to Jack, however.

  The steep back stairs led down to a green-painted door that opened into a huge old kitchen, also dusty and unused, along with an adjacent scullery, a boot room, an old laundry, and a huge walk-in larder with a thick stone slab to keep things cool on. In places, Katherine told him, the building went back to the thirteenth century, there being, to prove it, the vestiges of two stone arches in the corridor leading to the rickety back door.

  ‘This bit used to be the granary,’ continued Katherine, as if all normal homes had a medieval arch or two.

  There were great stone slabs on the kitchen floor, while the back corridors were covered with grubby, mouldering rugs. Hooks in beams projected above their heads, on which, Katherine claimed, pork sides had once been hung.

  ‘Mrs Foale has no money now and she keeps threatening to let out this part of the house, but I don’t expect she will.’

  ‘Nobody would want it,’ suggested Jack.

  ‘They would,’ said Katherine rather tartly, ‘but they’d want to clear out the rubbish, knock down the walls and change everything. We
don’t want that to ever happen.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we love it – it’s home,’ she replied quietly.

  ‘I wouldn’t know what that means,’ Jack said without thinking. He didn’t notice Katherine’s discomfort at this remark. Instead he reached a hand to one wall and felt it carefully, and then stretched his fingers up to one of the old hooks above them, caressing its rusty point, trying it.

  ‘Let the tour continue,’ she said, awkwardly changing the subject.

  The front of the house was more modern, meaning early nineteenth-century: high ceilings, rectangular paned windows with shutters, and an Adam-style fireplace in the drawing room. The wide, worn oak floorboards creaked and were weak with woodworm in places, and some of the doors had thick felt hangings over them to keep out the draughts in winter.

  The radiators were great cast-iron monstrosities connected to each other by ugly pipes as thick as Jack’s arm, which ran along the top of skirting boards and up walls and through the ceiling above, where plaster had fallen away leaving ugly holes.

  The smaller kitchen, which Clare and Katherine regularly used, and where they started this tour, was a poky little modern one located in a former cloakroom near the front door. But they hadn’t finished yet . . .

  They turned in a new direction. There was a music room with a huge grand piano, with music sheets on it, and to Jack’s surprise there was a fire guttering in a grate and the room felt warm.

  ‘I heard someone playing this morning,’ said Jack.

  ‘Mrs Foale plays most mornings. She tends to use only this room and the library . . .’

  They went on through a big oak door and stood on the threshold of an oak-panelled library. In its centre were two desks facing each other back to back. One was very tidy, the other a mess.

  ‘Guess which one’s Arthur’s!’ said Katherine, looking at the untidy one.

  When she had first called Jack, Arthur’s disappearance was one of the first things she had mentioned.

  ‘You said he disappeared . . .’

  ‘Well, there’s no other word for it. One day he was here and the next not. Mum was as puzzled as I was and Margaret’s explanations didn’t add up.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She said he had gone to do some important work, but if that were true he would have mentioned it to one of us as well. Then she said she wasn’t sure when he was coming back, which might have been reasonable if she looked happy about it, but she didn’t. But he’s been gone for three months now.’

  ‘You mean he might have gone off with someone?’

  Katherine shook her head and laughed.

  ‘Not Arthur, he’s too obsessed with his work and relies too much on Margaret’s expertise to even think about someone else!’

  ‘Only a suggestion,’ said Jack. ‘What’s your theory?’

  ‘That Margaret knows a lot more than she’s saying.’

  ‘This house gets more interesting by the moment.’

  ‘I miss him,’ said Katherine impulsively, adding, ‘It’s like losing my dad all over again. Jack, Mum wanted you to come but I did too.’ She said this in a rush and very quietly. She was embarrassed to admit she needed him.

  ‘Well I won’t disappear, unless you want to get rid of me,’ he said lightly.

  She grinned.

  ‘I’ll tell you when I do! Want to see the garden now?’

  Jack nodded but didn’t move.

  They had reached the library but he had not yet taken it in. It contained more books than he had ever seen in one room. The shelves, which went from floor to ceiling, and had even been extended over the two doors and between the windows, were jam-packed with every kind. Most of the books looked old, some very old.

  ‘Mrs Foale doesn’t like people coming in here much. Since Arthur went I’ve not liked being here at all. Let’s go.’

  Yet still Jack stood there.

  There was something about the room, or was it the things in the room, things by Arthur’s desk? He would have liked to take a closer look.

  ‘Yes, let’s go,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll go out through the old kitchen,’ she said, setting off again. ‘It’ll take us round the side of the house, which is a nice way to approach the garden. It’s quite big, I must warn you, and your trainers . . .’ – she darted a glance at his trainers, which were a lot less substantial than the leather shoes she herself was wearing – ‘might get wet. Did you bring some boots?’

  He hadn’t, because living in the city he didn’t have footwear suitable for the country.

  He shook his head.

  ‘You could use those, maybe.’ She nodded at a pair of old black army boots deposited by the back door. They were mouldy with age and one of them had a cobweb inside. ‘They’re a pair of Arthur’s old ones, but I’m sure Mrs Foale won’t mind.’

  He eyed the boots dubiously, but then relaxed and grinned. ‘Why not?’ He kicked off his trainers, shook out the boot with the spider web, and stepped into them tentatively.

  ‘They look like they fit you,’ said Katherine.

  ‘They’re okay,’ said Jack, walking up and down a bit before tying up the laces. He was surprised to find how comfortable they were.

  ‘I’ll wait for you outside then,’ she said, before slipping through the back door.

  If he could have followed straight away, he would have, but one of the laces in the boots was so rotten it snapped, and when he tried to re-tie it, it snapped again.

  By the time he had sorted himself out and stepped outside, Katherine had disappeared from sight. Which wouldn’t have mattered much except that he found the cobbled back yard he was now in had three different exits, and he had no idea which way she had gone.

  He made a left and then a right through a door in the wall.

  He found himself in a walled vegetable garden which, like the house itself, was a relic from another age. Its regular, rectangular beds had been abandoned to weeds, and the espaliered fruit trees tied back to the great brick walls still carried the dried and desiccated remnants of fruit unpicked from the previous season.

  An old barrel served as a rain butt, but it was so full of unused water that it spilled over whenever a slight breeze caught its dark, algae-covered surface.

  He heard movement.

  ‘Katherine?’ he called.

  ‘She went through to the old rose garden,’ a female voice said nearby.

  He turned and found himself facing Mrs Foale.

  ‘Hello, Jack,’ she said. ‘It’s been far too long!’

  He smiled warmly and gave her a hug. She was as he remembered her – with a wrinkled, healthy, outdoors face, hair kept in place at the back with a tortoiseshell comb, the green cardigan a man’s. Arthur’s probably.

  ‘It’s so good to see you,’ she beamed. ‘I hope you slept well last night. It’s quite a long journey from London, isn’t it?’

  ‘It was fine,’ he said. ‘I like the house.’

  ‘We like it too! It’s home. Katherine’s shown you round?’

  He nodded.

  ‘. . . and Katherine said about Arthur. Disappearing was the word she used.’

  It wasn’t very subtle, but Jack’s curiosity had been piqued by what Katherine had said earlier.

  ‘Er, yes. His work takes him all over the world.’

  She waved a hand about vaguely as if to convey an image of Arthur going walkabout. He could see what Katherine meant about her avoiding the subject.

  ‘I’ll put out some lunch later. Katherine will show you where. Now you’d better hurry and find her. The garden is rather large and overgrown, I’m afraid. Try going through that door over there, the one that’s half off its hinges. I’m afraid that Arthur was never very practical about such things.’

  She trailed off unhappily and looked away. Then, turning back to him, she pointed the trowel at his feet and brightened up.

  ‘Arthur’s boots! They’ve been all over the world, you know, and visited some strange, f
orgotten places. It’s so good to see them on you.’

  ‘Katherine said I could wear them.’

  She nodded and smiled.

  ‘Please do,’ she said. ‘As for Arthur . . . I do need to talk to you about him but . . . not yet. There’s things you need to know. Clare and Katherine are angry with me for being so vague about it all, but it isn’t easy . . .’

  She seemed to be taking him into her confidence, but what about he had no idea.

  ‘I’ll do anything I can to help,’ he said. ‘I’m just not sure what.’

  ‘We’ll have to discuss it one day soon.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  31

  INTO THE GARDEN

  Finding Katherine in the garden was not as simple as it seemed. It was large and its boundaries elusive, hidden beyond thick bushes, stretching away beyond trees.

  Right in front of the house was a wide expanse of ruined lawn, potholed by rabbits, mounded by moles and badly mown. To the right were dilapidated rose gardens, box hedges no one had cut for years, and overgrown shrubberies beneath whose overextended and broken branches leaves had collected over the years and fallen branches rotted.

  To the left were outbuildings containing abandoned cast-iron rollers, wooden rakes with woodworm, sacks infested by vermin, and roof spaces obscured by spiders’ webs heavy with dust, and brambles and other climbers which, having found a way through the walls, sought a way out towards the light from broken tiles above.

  But straight ahead from the conservatory were the great evergreen trees Jack had noticed the day before, and between them a large circle of green, damp grass, surrounded by more trees.

  Jack searched for Katherine long enough to begin to think she must be avoiding him, or at least moving from one area of the garden to another, unconsciously keeping her distance.

  She needs space he told himself when he finally understood what was happening. She’s not used to having someone like me about.

  Jack knew about needing space from the group and individual counselling sessions he had been subjected to through the years. Often he had said nothing, resolutely refusing to get involved in other people’s problems and pain, bored by their slow journeys to self-discovery. Until, in the last year or two, he had begun to make those journeys himself.