Spring (20 page)

What had disturbed him was the feeling of having been in this place before, except it wasn’t this place, meaning the garden, it was here, right here, but different, and the tree soaring away above him, its thick trunk far too wide for him to put his arms even halfway round, gave him the uncomfortable sense that he was smaller than he was; or had been.

He was a child, but not a child.

He was the size of Katherine in his recurring dreams, but he was not like Katherine.

He was the bearded man in the nightmare, but he was not him. He was in their world, of their world, and in that world someone was watching him.

He was being watched from another place.

He stood still and acknowledged something he had been avoiding for months before coming to Woolstone.

He had often thought, or dreamed, or imagined, that there was another world just beyond his reach which, if only he could find a way into it . . .

‘Back into it!’ he muttered to himself now. ‘I’m sure I’ve been there before . . .’

If he could he would feel less restless, more at home.

Home.

The word was almost painful to think of because it represented loss.

Home.

Home was still where he wanted to get.

He felt an overwhelming need to turn these powerful, unarticulated feelings into some kind of reality. He went to one of the conifers and touched it, caressed it, looked up into its soaring heights wishing its stiff branches could take him to it. Then he peered beyond it, as if to catch sight of someone there.

‘Jack! Jack what are you
doing
!?’

It was Katherine calling from her window.

She had looked out, seen Jack touching the tree before very slowly peering around the tree to the encircled area of grass beyond.

‘
Jack!
’

‘I’m looking for someone,’ he called back, knowing the reply would infuriate her, ‘so get on with your work!’

The sense of being watched from a world other than his own increased in the following days, and to make it worse Katherine wouldn’t leave the subject alone, annoyed with him for not explaining what he had originally meant. Why it should matter to her he had no idea, but he gave nothing away.

The garden extended over at least eight acres, and evidence of its rich history since medieval times explained the confusion and false trails inherent in its walls and hedges, its abandoned terraces and obscure ponds all overgrown with brambles and bamboo.

As the days advanced through April, and encouraged by some days of rain followed by humid warmth, the vegetation grew ever more verdant and lush.

The flowers of Spring, from which Katherine made his welcome posy, gave way to those of early Summer.

The rough lawn close by the house grew green with moss and a light blue dusting of creeping speedwell; while in the spaces among the trees, dog’s mercury – vigorous and poisonous and always the first greenery to spread across the forest floor – yielded place to a carpet of bluebells, their ranks softly interrupted by the cream-white flowers of wood anemone.

Elsewhere all manner of vegetation grew, seeming almost to burst forth from itself in a series of green explosions one after the other so that, day after day, wherever he looked, Jack found something new to see and a different routeway of life to explore.

The mauve curling flowers of comfrey, in whose thick entangling hairs the bumble-bees struggled and fought in their quest for nectar; the first flush of willow herb, its form like tribal spears; or red campion, whose pert flowers were as much pink as red; among all these appeared sunbursts of cowslip and dandelion and then, of course, the first buttercups. While in among the trees on lower wetter ground sloping to one side of the property, where the sun rarely reached, were garlic-scented ramsons and . . .

It was a plant Jack had never seen before, but which like all the others Katherine taught him the name of.

‘Euphorbia,’ she said lightly, coming across Jack kneeling in this semi-dark of woodland shade on a bright May day, only a few days before her first exam. ‘Fancy a walk?’

Their walks were casual and spontaneous, and never prearranged. Tiring of revision, one or the other would suggest that they go off. Katherine led the way at first, because she knew the highways and byways of the area well from the many country walks Arthur had taken her on when she was just a little girl.

‘He taught me the names of all the flowers of the fields, or if I found one he didn’t know, he encouraged me to look it up.’

She often mentioned Arthur, as did Mrs Foale, but his disappearance was rarely referred to and after that brief discussion with Mrs Foale on his first day at Woolstone, when she hinted there were things she wanted to talk about, she had never mentioned the conversation again. His occasional attempts to do so were rebuffed and he decided to leave it to her to choose a time.

One clear day he and Katherine decided to walk all the way to the River Thames, lying eight miles to the north across the Vale of the White Horse.

‘Arthur often claimed it’s one of the great natural boundaries of England,’ volunteered Katherine, ‘and that there is a magic in its crossing. He said its spirit – like the spirit of the other great rivers of England such as the Severn, the Great Ouse, the Trent – is on your side if you respect and honour it. If you don’t, it might turn against you.’

Jack stayed silent at that, not sure what to say. Katherine knew a lot about a lot of other things, and spoke about them with an eloquence of which he was a little in awe.

‘How do you honour a river?’ he asked eventually, several minutes later.

Katherine shrugged, uncertain about that herself. ‘I think you throw an offering to it,’ she said. That’s why a lot of old and valuable things have been discovered in rivers - like money and swords.’

They found a wooden humped-back bridge over the river, and Jack impulsively rushed to climb to its highest point. Katherine followed him more slowly.

‘So,’ he said, ‘let’s honour it.’

He had a sense that he had done something like that before, and recognized at once it was all part of those feelings he had about having once known a world beyond the one he was now in. Yet another glimpse of a past memory.

‘What is it?’ she asked, seeing him staring down into the river with a blank expression.

‘I feel like I’ve done this before, but I can’t remember when.’

‘Deja vu,’
she suggested.

‘Meaning?’

‘French for “seen before”. People often get feelings like that when they happen to be in a situation that repeats something that occurred in their past.’

Jack went silent again.

‘Jack, what’s on your mind?’

‘I don’t have a past,’ he said, ‘or not one I can remember. Nobody even knows where I come from!’

‘It must be horrible to feel like that.’

‘It feels . . . empty. Except lately I’ve begun to feel I have one, after all, only it’s just out of reach.’

She came closer. ‘Tell me.’

He thought a bit. ‘All right, like those mirrors and chimes hanging in the garden, which your mother likes so much. I think I’ve seen or heard them before. I think I know what they’re for . . . except I couldn’t know.’

‘Know
what?’

He turned and looked at her.

There had been moments lately, whenever they talked, that they felt they really reached right into each other’s minds.

‘What they’re meant for. Even how they work.’

‘And . . . ?’

‘They’re for protection,’ he said. ‘They work by breaking up the world into fragments of reflections, so you can’t see past them.’

‘But . . . how could you know that?’

‘I know, I know, it’s ridiculous. But you did ask.’

She waited.

‘. . . because,’ he said slowly, daring finally to admit it, ‘I’ve seen them before. They were used once to protect me.’

‘From what?’

‘People. Dark shadowy people. I could feel their cold getting to me, freezing my mind, but they couldn’t find a way through the mirrors because they reflected themselves back and broke them up.’

‘Jack, that’s strange. It’s similar to something Arthur once said about the chimes, that they alter our perception of the world and maybe that of harmful people who want to get to us. Then he said . . .’

‘What?’

‘Something weird which I’ve thought more about since I caught you peering around that tree.’

He grinned.

‘Did you think I was crazy?’

She shook her head.

‘Arthur’s a scientist so he deduces things and tests them. He said about the chimes that they offered a clue about how to get into another world.’

‘Why would he think that?’

‘Have you ever wondered how the chimes got there?’

‘I presumed you and Clare and everybody put them there.’

‘We did, most of them. But Mum admitted once that the first ones were not put there by her or Mrs Foale. They just appeared one morning. Mum said they made her safer. Before that she had felt watched.’

Jack breathed deeply, trying to control the sense of relief that came with affirmation that a feeling he had thought unique to himself was shared by someone else.

‘So we began to add to them as the years went by, but sometimes I noticed that others appeared by themselves. I told Mum once what I thought. She said to ask Arthur about it. He listened, nodded, thought a bit and finally said, “It’s the little people.” I thought he was joking, but what with what Mum has been saying recently and now you . . . maybe he wasn’t.’

Jack just stared at her.

‘Jack? There’s more, isn’t there?’

He nodded. The sense of relief he’d felt earlier shifted now to a need for release. He felt emotional and couldn’t hold her gaze.

He turned away and said, ‘Sometimes when we’re out walking I feel we’re going the wrong way. As if there’s a better way. As if there are other paths we could take but don’t.’

‘Like unmarked public footpaths?’

He shook his head. ‘Like paths that have been there a very long time.’

It was her turn to give him a strange look, and then turn away to the river.

He waited.

Eventually she said, ‘This gets weirder by the moment. That’s what Arthur said once – or something like it. Just before he disappeared.’

Jack waited in silence a bit more.

‘He told me never to try those paths because they lead to dangerous places. He said not to go to the world they lay in, but he wouldn’t explain more. I think Mrs Foale knows more about his disappearance than she’s ever said. I think maybe Mum does too, but they don’t want me to know.’

‘Makes sense,’ Jack nodded. ‘Probably trying to protect you.’

‘I don’t need protecting.’

Jack shook his head and said, ‘I think you do.’

‘From what?’

‘I don’t know exactly but I feel it. The sense of being watched isn’t always pleasant. Sometimes it feels benign, sometimes malign. The watchers are the people who use those paths that I sense, and Arthur maybe sensed. Time to talk properly with Mrs Foale about all this. Meanwhile . . . let’s honour the river.’

He dug into his pocket and produced two fifty-pence pieces, took her wrist and put one into her palm.

Then he held her hand together with his over the river.

‘Now,’ he said.

They watched the coins fall, standing with their heads and bodies close, the coins seeming to turn only slowly as they tumbled towards the moving surface of the water beneath them, where, with two nearly silent splashes, they disappeared into the mysterious underworld beneath.

Their hands touched a few moments longer, Jack’s body close to Katherine’s, and the bridge seeming to vibrate a little. Both were breathless, each acutely aware of the other, a light breeze blowing strands of her hair across his cheek. He glanced at her, and saw her face was flushed.

She caught his eyes and pulled away embarrassed, both staring into the reflections in the river below, their eyes staying focused on those rather than on each other.

‘I made a wish,’ said Jack, suddenly turning to face her.

‘You mustn’t reveal it,’ she whispered, all awkwardness gone as she impulsively put a finger to his lips.

‘Does this bridge have a name, Katherine?’ said Jack as they turned and headed back down the bridge to the riverbank.

‘It’s called Old Man’s Bridge,’ she replied, setting off back along the path towards Woolstone. It felt like they still had a long walk home.

But briefly Jack lingered and looked back at the bridge where they had stood.

I’ll come back here again, I expect
, he told himself, and . . .

Then the world grew silent about him, all of it gone but the bridge and the river and himself. It was surely an epiphany, a moment of sensing what must be.

When I’m an old man I’ll come back here, and I’ll stand where we just stood, and I’ll be alone then but Katherine will be safe, and we’ll have done what we need to do. She’ll be safe for ever then.