Spring (18 page)

She heated him some and left him to begin to devour it, while she tended to Clare.

‘She’s sleeping again,’ said Katherine heavily when she came back.

She sat down without expression.

‘It must be hard for you,’ he said.

She nodded without looking at him and answered, ‘It gets harder. But there are good moments and she’s mostly positive. Doesn’t want to upset me I suppose. Just now she said she could hear us laughing earlier, which she liked. She’s glad there’s new life in the house. Do you want some more?’

Jack nodded and she fetched him some. They began to catch up all down the years. Their voices, now loud, now soft, and their laughter spread throughout the old house, threads of light in darkness reaching into the furthermost corners.

‘I’m sorry about what happened, Jack, you know – not talking for years.’

‘It was my fault too.’

‘I liked the way you talked to Mum.’

‘It wasn’t hard,’ he said.

The angry silence of the years was broken and new trust building. By the time they said good night they were friends again.

Much later, all lights out, Mrs Foale returned by cab.

She went to check on Clare, who was awake, eyes open.

Mrs Foale turned her over, made sure she was set for the rest of the night.

‘You look better,’ she said.

‘Can you tell the difference? In the house?’

Mrs Foale sat back and considered. ‘Maybe I can. I’ll check the kitchen and come back.’

It was neat as two pins except that the drying-up cloth was hung in a different place. She checked the fridge, then made herself a mug of tea and went back to Clare.

‘Well, well,’ she said, ‘someone round here finally appreciates my murky stews. It’s all gone, every last scrap.’

‘Can you feel the change?’ Clare asked again.

‘Yes, I can. Maybe the house will start coming alive again . . . ?’ said Mrs Foale with a sad smile. ‘I wish Arthur was here.’

Clare nodded, sad too.

Her friend rarely mentioned Arthur these days, but his absence was palpable around the house, he being such a big, alive person. There was a lot about his disappearance that Clare did not understand, not least Mrs Foale’s unwillingness to involve outside authorities in it. Plainly she knew more than she was saying, so Clare had felt it best to say nothing much herself unless the opportunity arose. Now it had.

‘It’s three months now, isn’t it?’

Mrs Foale nodded.

‘And you’ve heard nothing?’

‘Nothing. But . . .’

‘What?’

‘There have never been lies between us or anything left unspoken. So it’s better you ask nothing more. There’s things I can’t say. Please?’

Clare nodded, but not willingly. Katherine missed Arthur too.
She
did as well. He was father to one, older brother to the other. Now he was gone without any satisfactory explanation.

‘It’s hard not to talk about him,’ said Clare. ‘It feels we’re denying his existence.’

‘Please,’ said Mrs Foale again, unhappily.

‘His going had to do with his work didn’t it?’

‘I . . . really . . . he made me promise not to talk about it.’

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.’

J
ack 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.