Spring (19 page)

‘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, forgotten 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.

F
inding 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.

So it didn’t take long to work out where Katherine might be coming from. And going to.

And Arthur, she’s lost Arthur but got me instead
he thought ruefully.
Not much of an exchange!

So he found somewhere to sit and took time out for some space of his own until, in her own way, she came back to him, pretending she hadn’t known he was there.

‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘I needed time by myself.’

Which was just what she needed to hear.

‘Can I join you?’

He made space for her on the damp grass.

It was a moment of silence, except for the chimes.

‘You’ll get used to them,’ she said, seeming by saying so to convey that she wanted him around the place a while longer.

The first morning became the pattern for the weeks that followed. Katherine took to using the garden as her sanctuary when things inside the house, including Jack, got too much for her. She was elusive, complex and uncertain of herself; and the vast garden turned out to be a shifting, changing labyrinth which echoed the shifts and deepening patterns of their friendship.

‘What’s your favourite book?’ she asked one day.

Jack didn’t have one, he had never read much.

‘Mine’s
The Secret Garden
,’ she said softly, as if it was a secret she was sharing with him.

When he said he had seen the film she turned up her nose. But he ordered the DVD online anyway, when he discovered that Arthur had a DVD player and flat screen televison which Margaret never used. They all watched it one evening with Clare in the conservatory, the dying light through the glass behind the picture the perfect background.

‘Not as good as the book,’ muttered an obviously moved Katherine afterwards.

She left the book by the door of his bedroom and he read it, the first book in a long time.

When it was finished he scribbled one word on a Post-it note and left it with the book by her bedroom door.

Agreed
it said.

After that she felt more confident around him, more able to say what she felt, more able to go off by herself.

She was right about the garden, but it was more than an echo of their growing friendship, it was the interface between them. She had see-sawing needs sometimes to be close to Jack, sometimes nowhere near him.

Jack found it hard at first even if, in the self-awareness stakes, his troubled background and the support he had had in the past had taken him further down the road.

He couldn’t understand why one moment Katherine would be happy, laughing and easy with his company, seeming to want to do things with him, then at other times would make bitter comments about his life in the city, make fun of him and argue with him over the smallest thing. It seemed as if one moment she liked him, and at others almost hated him. It left him angry and frustrated – until the sunny Katherine emerged again and all was forgiven.

This left him with a wild, almost savage wish at times to be able to reach out and touch her, and tell her what she made him feel.

Not that anyone seeing them in those first weeks would have known, or even guessed, that such torrents of feeling and uncertainty ran beneath the calm surface of their everyday lives. They said nothing to each other about them, barely admitting anything to themselves, directing their energies instead towards activities that kept them physically busy and their minds well occupied.

Both had exams starting around the end of the May and had different ways of dealing with the workloads. Katherine locked herself away in her bedroom, emerging sometimes for a cup of something or a walk in the garden, or just to sit with her mother.

Jack’s A levels took place in June, but he was on top of the basic work and now in revision mode. He had it all sorted on cards, and when the weather was good, which mostly it was, he would find a nook in the garden and then do his revision lying on his back out in the sun.

It was while he was lying there with his eyes closed one day that Jack had the sudden disconcerting feeling that he was being watched. He knew it wasn’t by Katherine because she was working up in her room in the house. He could see her head bent over books.

It wasn’t Margaret Foale because she was out shopping.

It couldn’t be Clare.

He sat up and looked about.

The sense of it went deeper than just thinking someone could see him and he couldn’t see them. It was the sense of being watched that was the most powerful thing he felt.

He stood up slowly. He was by one of the two great conifers and he was conscious of it towering away above him as if, as if . . .