Spring (15 page)

If it hadn’t been for your parents picking me up this might never have happened to me.

Katherine didn’t need to hear the words to know what he had been going to say.

‘And if it hadn’t been for you . . .’ she shouted back.

. . . then my father might still be alive and my mother not permanently ill.

Maybe it was worse that the words were never properly said on either side, because the hurt and anger remained and grew.

Katherine hadn’t seen him since, and although he’d bitterly regretted what he’d said, he’d never had the courage to apologize. While Katherine, feeling that in some way it was her fault that Jack had suffered the way he had, couldn’t bear to face him and see that recrimination in his face again. Eventually Mrs Foale started visiting alone, having come to accept that the two of them probably needed some time apart, and to find better circumstances for meeting than a hospital bedside.

So, apart from cards at Christmas and on birthdays, the silence between them had lasted five long years.

But now Katherine was on the phone, claiming that something had happened. Something she needed to talk about.

‘
What
happened?’ he said again.

‘It’s about Arthur.’

‘Arthur?’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s disappeared.’ There was a wobble in her voice. ‘And with Mum so weak, I didn’t know . . . I needed . . .’

‘What?’ said Jack.

There was a long silence.

Eventually Katherine spoke more calmly. ‘Jack, I need someone to talk to.’

The clock turned back ten years in a flash, and all pain, all doubt, all anger over their long time apart, fled away and was no more.

It wasn’t just for her mother she had rung; it was for herself, and that was different.

‘I’ll have to make some arrangements this end,’ said Jack impulsively, ‘but it’s all right, I’ll come.’

J
ack called Katherine back the next day.

They began talking and then didn’t stop, sharing the details of their lives during the recent years. That same evening they talked again.

‘When you think about it, we don’t seem to have much in common,’ Katherine said, amazed how easy it was just talking to him, but . . .

‘You’re right, maybe I’d better not come,’ said Jack, misinterpreting what she meant.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, though suddenly uncertain.

There was a long silence.

‘Of course I want to come,’ he said finally.

He found himself astonished by what he had so nearly added, which was:
I’ve missed talking to you all these years, Katherine, and lately I’ve been thinking of, well, a lot of things. I’ve kept thinking of you and I don’t know why. Now this has happened, and it feels right.

It was true. For months before her phone call she had been on his mind.

That Spring he began noticing what he never had before – the new warmth in the air, the colours of life, buds on the urban trees, and sometimes, overhead in the evening, flocks of birds migrating from southern Europe. It had made him feel imprisoned and restless – made him think of the Foales, their country house and Katherine, and wish he was in touch with her again. Now here she was on the end of the line, a wish come true.

But Jack wasn’t going to admit any of that.

Instead, embarrassed by his own thoughts, and not guessing she was thinking much the same, he protested again, ‘Of course I want to see you.’

Me too
she thought.
Me too, Jack . . .
But all she managed was, ‘That’s cool!’

‘Tell me about where you live,’ said Jack impulsively, to change the subject.

‘The house is right across the valley from White Horse Hill,’ she said. ‘The White Horse is a carving in the chalk. I sent you a picture of it once.’

That same little card was, for no reason he ever understood, one of the very few things he truly treasured. It had pride of place in his postcard collection, and had come to represent all kind of things to him, the greatest of these being freedom. He had often imagined visiting all those places in Katherine’s postcards, riding on a great White Horse, but he never imagined visiting the White Horse itself.

‘I’ve still got it,’ he said. Then added: ‘Do you remember what you wrote on the back of the card?’

‘Yes,’ she said, softly.

It had come to mean everything to him because she gave it to him in hospital soon after some especially painful and difficult surgery, and just before their argument.

He had read those words a thousand times, and travelled the whole world with her on that horse.

He doubted he would ever tell her, or anyone, how he treasured those last two words inscribed on her postcards.

Next day he called her again.

‘I’m coming this afternoon,’ he said.

‘Great. I’ll arrange for a taxi to meet you.’

‘It’s already done. They’re paying for a cab.’

‘The whole way?’

Jack laughed. ‘That’s social services for you. It’s to do with spare funding of transport for people like me. Very weird – just shows sometimes they get things right. I’ll be turning up about four.’

‘In time for tea.’

‘Sounds quaint.’

‘You remember how Mrs Foale likes that kind of thing and . . .’

‘What?’

‘. . . so do I.’

K
atherine Shore sat in her first-floor bedroom in Woolstone House, looking out across the fields to the steep wooded escarpment that was White Horse Hill. The horse itself looked as it always did, as it had done for nearly five millennia: either galloping in from the left-hand side, or leaping off to the right, depending on her mood.

Many was the journey she and that horse had made together, many the tears she had shed on its back, many the times it took her through the wild winds of her mind to distant shores – first, on simple adventures, when she was younger; later on journeys of impossible platonic love.

Now, more recently, into unspoken yearnings that left her restless and irritable. The truth was she wanted something from Jack she couldn’t name and maybe he couldn’t either, however long they had talked.

That morning, lying in front of her on the desk were her text workbooks for English and history, which she was now revising for her AS Levels due that coming June. She had been allowed to do home study for more than two years now, ever since her mother had become permanently housebound, thus making Katherine and Mrs Foale her primary carers. Katherine still went into the school in Wantage occasionally, to check she was still on course, but she had inevitably become isolated from her contemporaries. Having a dying mother is not conducive to making friends because, however sympathetic, other kids just don’t know what to say.

But even if they did, Katherine would never have been one of the most popular pupils. She was already tall and skinny for her age and shunned cliques; she also knew too much and preferred books to company. Besides, there was a constant look of strain in her eyes that made people wary.

During her first year at school, this sense of exclusion hadn’t mattered too much, because Katherine had bonded instantly with a chubby, red-haired, freckly girl called Samantha Fullerton. Sam also liked stories, had impossible dreams, and, best of all, had the strength and courage to stand up against the group, remaining impervious to peer pressure and youthful female spite. It said a great deal for Sam’s parents that their daughter felt so secure in herself and had her feet so firmly planted on the ground.

Sam was Katherine’s first and only school friend invited to stay at Woolstone House over the weekends, allowing the pair of them long walks over White Horse Hill and secret conversations long into the night.

Then halfway through their fourth year together at school, Sam’s father moved the family to Hong Kong. Within weeks she was gone, leaving Katherine alone once again.

It seemed too late now to find a wider circle of friendship at school, so she retreated further into her books.

Then, nearly a year later, after only a couple of garishly coloured postcards from Hong Kong, the first real letter from Sam: friendly, chatty, full of news. Full of longing for England, concerned about Clare, a little lonesome too.

Katherine wrote back at once and the friendship, never truly dead, sprang to life again.

The year before, at Easter, with GCSEs almost upon them, Saman-tha’s father brought her back to England and left her for a few days at Woolstone House. It was as if the two girls had never been separated, not for an instant, though each looked quite different from what they remembered.

They were the happiest few days of Katherine’s adolescent life.

It was from this time on that Katherine opened up about her strange feelings of close affinity with Jack, confused and unresolved as they were. Was it that she owed him a debt for saving her life or was there something deeper? It sometimes felt to her that destiny meant them to be together. The trouble was she knew that could be just a romantic dream she liked the idea of!

‘Maybe destiny and dreams are the same thing!’ Sam wrote.

‘. . . and maybe he feels the same!’ replied Katherine.

Sam texted back: ‘You’ll never know if he does if you don’t ask him. Mum says men need prompting!’

Katherine dithered for days.

‘We haven’t spoken to each other for years,’ she eventually emailed Sam, ‘and I bet he won’t want to hear from me or he would have written himself. I bet he has loads of other friends, by now. Meaning girlfriends.’

Jack, she calculated, would have by now turned seventeen.

‘Write to him,’ Sam counselled her. By then her family was living in Sydney.

She didn’t, but Katherine’s thoughts about Jack shifted and changed. He was beginning to become tangible again. Meanwhile her strange dreams about him had to be theoretical, as were most of her thoughts involving the opposite sex.

Most, but, it turned out, not quite all.

The previous year she attended a Christmas social in the church hall where Mrs Foale was parish helper. It was, it turned out, a village event involving a whole mix of different people. At one point in the evening, a nice-looking boy came dancing close and, what with one thing, then another, and the lure of old-time mistletoe, they kissed in the cold darkness outside from which, breaking away as she imagined a violated heroine might do, she began laughing, as did he.

‘Only did that for a dare,’ he confessed, grinning.

Hearing which, she realized, to her surprise, that she would have done the same.

It was all right with him after that, and it lasted a few weeks into February, and it wasn’t bad, in fact it was exciting. Except he wasn’t as tall as her, and he didn’t spark any strong emotion in her, which she thought should probably be present if he was ‘the one’. Which is maybe where her recurrent fantasies about Jack came in.

So the boy from the village was ultimately a bit of a disappointment, though she let his hands wander until there came a point where he became too insistent. He had no more idea of what he was doing than she did.

But at least he had a sense of humour, and they shared rueful laughter, and agreed that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Their secret, however; no one else need know.

Then he found someone else more compliant and drifted away, and she felt relieved that whatever it had been it was over. It was a journey into the unknown which went only far enough for her to come back safely. But she knew she wanted more of wherever her dreams and fantasies were leading her.

Sam got told all the details, and sent details of her own encounters back. They didn’t add up to that much for two girls aged sixteen in the twenty-first century.

Then everything changed. Arthur Foale, back only a short time from one of his mysterious trips, disappeared again. This time without warning or contact from him – to the stage where Margaret Foale, well used to her husband’s wandering ways, was also concerned.

Then, too, Katherine’s mother began deteriorating rapidly. When Clare said she wanted Jack to come and stay, it gave Katherine the excuse she needed to make that call.

Only when they started talking did she realize how much she needed to see him again.

Now the day had come and Katherine was sitting in her room, staring at the view and weighing up one final thing she was uncertain about concerning his bedroom, which Mrs Foale said it was her job to get ready.