The Boy in the Field

by Margot Livesey

Around her people began to separate into two groups: those about to leave, those about to tidy up. She finished her wine and found a tray. She did not trust herself to carry it, but she could fill it with mugs and glasses. In the doorway, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flurry of movement. Her heart gave one last hopeful leap. But it was only the giant abandoning his stilts and embracing the wolf.

  Benjamin took the tray, and she started filling the next one. Someone turned up the music. Her father walked by, carrying a Christmas tree. On all sides the hall was being stripped of gaiety and possibility, returned to its institutional dullness. At home she would go directly to bed and trust the mulled wine to carry her away. Perhaps later she would wake to hear a sound she was now in a position to recognize: her parents making love. For a moment, standing there, a mug in one hand, a glass in the other, the longing that came over her was so fierce that she was ready to retrieve her coat, walk the fourteen miles to Oxford, and bang on the doors of Holywell Manor until the porter opened them and she could run up the narrow staircase to his room.

  She felt the hall lift a few inches. Firmly she retrieved it. Here was a cup branded with lipstick that might be her mother’s; here a glass with an inch of apple juice. She fetched a rubbish bag and emptied in leftover mince pies, slices of orange. Then she turned back to filling the tray.

  “May I help you?”

  The cup she was holding slipped through her fingers and bounced, unbroken, on the tray.

  He was standing on the other side of the table, his El Greco eyes fixed on her. He looked like no one else in the room, no one else in the universe. He leaned forward to set the cup upright. If he were here only to explain why he couldn’t see her again, she wouldn’t listen. Explanations meant nothing. They were a rippling curtain of words that people hid behind.

  “Zoe.”

  He came around the table and bent to read what was written on the heart pinned to her chest: Desire is the essence of everyone. “I should have guessed you were Spinoza,” he said.

  Slowly he straightened and held out his empty hands, not so much reaching for her as offering himself. “When I was with Renée, I just wanted to be with you. I told her, and I came back and sat in my room and waited to see if my feelings would change. They didn’t. I thought perhaps if I told you at the Salon of Second Chances, you’d give me a second chance. But I got lost driving here. I was afraid you might have left.”

  He was wearing a navy-blue jacket with two sets of buttons, each bearing the imprint of an anchor; a red tartan scarf framed his beard.

  “Did you tell Renée about the bear clock?”

  “The bear clock? Oh, you mean the one at the carnival. No, I never talked about that with Renée. Or anyone else.”

  They were still standing beside the table when something made Zoe turn. Across the almost deserted hall Duncan, still in his suit, was walking toward them, led by Lily. When he dropped the lead, she continued, ignoring the groups of people and the many fragments of fallen food in her path.

  Zoe found herself sinking to her knees, her black robe pooling around her. Beside her Rufus too knelt—he seemed to understand the solemnity of the occasion. He held out his hand. A few feet away Lily halted. Eyes bright, ears pricked, she regarded him thoughtfully, taking in his virtues and his faults, his desire for the straight roads of reason and his longing for the winds of passion. Zoe, she knew, believed this man was her Platonic ideal, her other half. They all three stayed quite still. Then Lily seemed to reach a decision.

  Forty

  The Degree Show

  Here is what happened eight and a half years later, on a Thursday shortly before the summer solstice. The three Lang children were making their separate ways to the hall in central London where Duncan’s degree show was being held. He was sharing the space with eight other students: six painters and two sculptors. When he took Lily for a walk that morning, he could feel the heat already gathering, along with his own anxiety. While she examined a rowan tree, he studied a rosebush in a nearby garden. Why was that creamy pink so impossible on the canvas? His sense of the day as perilous was not so much about other people’s responses to his six canvases—of course he wanted them to like them—but about his own. In his small studio he had never been able to see the paintings, which he thought of as a single work, side by side. Last night, when they were finally on the wall, he could not bear to look but had turned away to help hang his friend Gio’s lithographs.

  If he had glanced up from the rosebush, he might have seen Zoe’s plane circling Heathrow, waiting for permission to land. She had taken an overnight flight from Chicago, where she lived with Rufus. He taught at a university and edited a journal, and she wrote poetry and worked with autistic children, most of whom had no use for language. On the plane she held her unopened book and tried to figure out why Rufus wasn’t sitting beside her. Which of them had mentioned the expense, or the paper he was trying to write? She wasn’t sure, but she added this trip to the list she had begun to keep of things they would once have done together and now, to save time or money, did separately. As the plane passed over Runnymede for the third time, she thought perhaps her days in America were numbered. She had lost her gift for slipping between the teeth of time.

  Matthew, already at his office, was working on structuring a loan for a Greek shipping company. The sums were large, and exchange rates kept shifting unpredictably. He phoned a colleague in Berlin and planned a conference call to New York in the afternoon; everyone was wary. Looking up from today’s figures, he saw, across a few hundred yards of empty air, the leaded dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral catching the morning sun. The day after they graduated from LSE, he and Benjamin had climbed up to the Golden Gallery beneath the dome and, looking south across the Thames, sworn a pact; they would make money for ten years and then do something useful: dig wells, fund small farms. If I weren’t a coward, he thought now, I’d have quit two years ago. His girlfriend, Camille, had suggested they buy each other round-the-world tickets for Christmas.

  After his walk with Lily, Duncan went to the primary school, where he worked as a teacher’s assistant, painting with the children, reading them stories, settling disputes. Zoe made her way to Matthew’s flat in Clerkenwell. Matthew continued to juggle figures; a German bank agreed to take on ten percent of the loan. The sun rolled up the sky; clouds—stratus, cumulus, cumulonimbus, altostratus—began to appear in the west. Duncan’s fellow students bought a crate of rosé wine, two dozen bottles of sparkling water, wedges of Brie and Gouda, a big bowl of strawberries, and a smaller one of almonds. Duncan spent twenty pounds on perfectly blue cornflowers. Last year he had met Vanessa at the Columbia Street market when they both reached for a bunch of cornflowers. Six weeks ago they had agreed they were too busy to see each other.

  When Zoe came into the degree show, her hair still damp from the shower, she sensed at once the presence of his paintings. Since she moved to the States, she had seen his work only occasionally, a sketch here, a small painting there. Now she was filled with trepidation. She wanted so badly for the paintings to be wonderful, for Duncan to have captured what he’d been working toward. First a drink. She poured herself a glass of rosé. Turning from the table, she caught sight of him across the room, standing beside a large leafy sculpture. How handsome he was with his dark hair tied back in a ponytail, his elegant black jacket over his white shirt.

  “Zoe, you made it.” His face glowed. He embraced her, careful not to spill her wine. They were still exclaiming—the flight was fine; she was so glad to be here—when Matthew arrived and hugged both of them. He had come straight from the office and was still in that hinterland between businessman and brother.

  “So where are your paintings?” he said.

  Duncan steeled himself. Wordless, he led the way to the wall where his work hung. He stopped in front of the first painting, Zoe on his left, Matthew on his right. Feeling them on either side, their eyes reaching toward the canvas, he was, at last, able to take in the crimson gashe
s, the soft greens and golds, the black lines which only he knew were swallows, darting.

  It was Matthew who spoke first. “You painted the boy in the field.”

  “I wondered,” Duncan said, “if you’d guess.” He did not say—there was no need—that these paintings, titled I to VI, were the culmination and distillation of many, many canvases, many, many attempts.

  Zoe, too, had known at once that this was Karel, or not exactly Karel but the essence of Karel, of what had happened that day in the field. She remembered kneeling beside him, calm in the face of his bloody legs, unaware that, through his closed eyelids, he saw the three of them.

  “I wanted to make twelve,” Duncan said. “A Stations of the Cross, like Agnes Martin or Barnett Newman, but the last one turned out to be the last.” Gradually he could see the painting, see it whole. It works, he thought. I think it works.

  “I love the blue,” Matthew said as they moved on to II.

  Evening sunlight, the particular gold of midsummer, poured through the high windows, mingling with the angled lights. When Duncan came to London to study art, Matthew had said, Show me the paintings you like. Together they had gone to galleries and museums. Standing in front of the canvases his brother deemed worthy, Matthew had struggled to learn how to look at abstract art; how to find the door into a painting where nothing was anything else.

  They were still standing in front of III when, straight from the train, their parents arrived, Betsy flushed from the heat, worrying that they were late; Hal, his shirtsleeves neatly rolled, taking in the tall room and its occupants. More embraces, exclamations. How splendid that Zoe had come. What would they make of the paintings, Matthew thought, not knowing their true subject? “You have to begin at I,” he said, leading the way.

  “Is Esmeray here?” Betsy asked, searching the room.

  “She’s on flights to Sardinia this week. Look what she made me for graduation.” Duncan held open his jacket to display the deep red lining.

  “How elegant.” Betsy gestured at the first painting. “This is beautiful.”

  “But a little menacing.” Hal pointed to a different part of the painting. “Storm clouds are gathering.”

  “Let me get you some wine,” Zoe said. Making her way through the crowd, she pondered again the mystery of their parents’ reconciliation. Somehow they had got past her father’s betrayal. Miranda, his younger daughter, often visited them at weekends. And yet, she thought, squeezing past a man in a dashiki, here she was still struggling to forgive Rufus for missing the poetry reading she’d given last autumn.

  By the time she returned with two glasses of wine, they were back in front of III. She could see her parents straining to say the right thing while Matthew talked easily about the space of the painting, the brushwork, and Duncan stood, silently confronting the canvas. How cruel it was, this moment when the gap between one’s secret imaginings and what one had made became public: an X-ray of one’s mind.

  “I thought you might be working on still lifes,” Hal said. “Remember how you adored Morandi?”

  “He’s here,” Duncan said, “though most people won’t know it.” He stepped back, trying to take in all six paintings, but there were too many people moving back and forth. V, he thought, was a little tentative, the gestures tangling awkwardly. He would come back tomorrow, first thing, to look at the paintings alone.

  The sunlight dimmed and then, reflecting off the nearby buildings, flared. Ice cubes melted in minutes. People gently fanned themselves, or each other. Betsy and Hal moved on to look at the work of the other students. Duncan rejoined Matthew and Zoe in front of the last painting, VI, the one where chaos was let loose.

  Separately and together, they remembered Karel, the boy in the field, who had on the day they found him not gone down to the underworld, who could see the swallows even when he closed his eyes, who had offered his understanding like a flower borne of sweetness, darkness, but which too many people had misunderstood. Two years ago Hugh Price had contacted each of them. While his parents were paying their summer visit to the Czech Republic, Karel, no longer afraid, had taken his own life. He had left a note: No one is to blame.

  In the aftermath of the detective’s call, Matthew and Zoe had each tried to phone Duncan. But Duncan was lying on the floor of his studio, with Lily beside him, gazing up at the ceiling, recalling that gray November afternoon when he had met Karel at the Cottage Hospital and walked beside him. He remembered the topaz-colored snail inching along the wall, the faint click of the bicycle wheels, the even fainter words, “Sometimes I wish you hadn’t.”

  A few miles away Matthew, his call unanswered, had headed out into the narrow streets around his office, searching the buildings and the faces of passersby for clues: Why? Why? Why? Here was the site of the first hospital in London, here was where Henry VIII had kept his wardrobe, here was a woman, smiling secretly as she crossed the road. If only Karel had waited, he thought. Someone would have made him want to stay.

  In Chicago, Zoe too had left the house; she had gone down to walk beside the endless lake. She remembered Karel, at the Salon, describing the river that separated him from the happy family—how he had longed and feared to cross it. I hope you’re in the kingdom of reeds, she thought, with music and food and friends who need nothing from you. She threw a cowrie—her childhood collection still sat on her desk—into the wavy water.

  Now, side by side, as the last of the evening light struck the wall, she and her brothers stood before Duncan’s painting, ignoring the heat, their lukewarm drinks, the other people.

  “His name is there,” Duncan said quietly, pointing to the lower right corner of the canvas, a dark blue gesture slashed with black. “You can’t see it, but I put his name in each painting.”

  “And then you painted it over,” said Matthew. “Perfect.”

  Their parents returned. From one glance at their children, they seemed to understand that speech was not needed. Betsy stood beside Zoe; Hal beside Matthew. Silently the five of them gave themselves over to Duncan’s painting. Their attention, their devotion, began to draw that of others. Soon a small crowd gathered to gaze at the boy in the field.

  Acknowledgments

  In 2008 the Metropolitan Museum held a retrospective of the works of Giorgio Morandi. His paintings emanated; I am grateful to have been in their presence.

  My thanks to the pupil at Dalton School who, years ago, asked why the animals in my stories don’t talk. Very belatedly, this is an attempt at an answer.

  An article about the work of the painter Peter Sacks gave me certain crucial insights.

  My dear friend Nancy Cartwright talked to me about philosophy.

  On page 127, Zoe and Rufus discuss Ursula Le Guin’s story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”

  I am once again happily indebted to Amanda Urban, my agent, for helping this book to find a home and to Jennifer Barth, my editor, for giving it one. I am especially grateful to Jennifer for her devoted editing of this manuscript over many months; no subordinate clause was too trivial for her attention. My endless thanks to Jane Beirn for being such an eloquent ambassador for my work, and for many excellent reading recommendations. And thank you to all the other stellar people at HarperCollins—especially Jonathan Burnham, Amy Baker, and Becca Putman. Sarah Ried graciously answered my many questions. Joanne O'Neill gave the novel its beautiful cover.

  I am grateful to my exemplary colleagues and students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, especially Lan Samantha Chang, Connie Brothers, and Sasha Khmelnik.

  Four keen-eyed, opinionated readers gave very particular advice on the manuscript. David Musson offered comments and suggestions on every aspect of the story and the setting. My thanks for his wonderful accuracy and my apologies if I sometimes failed him. Susan Brison led me to understand certain key scenes in a new way. I am grateful to her insights into trauma and for her amazing book Aftermath. Eric Garnick entered into the arc of the narrative and made many helpful suggestions about the art and th
e lives of my characters. And Andrea Barrett read draft after draft, answered question after question, talked about these characters and their journeys as if they were our neighbors. I am so grateful to her for keeping me company and for rescuing me from many wrong turns.

  About the Author

  MARGOT LIVESEY is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Mercury, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, The House on Fortune Street, Banishing Verona, Eva Moves the Furniture, The Missing World, Criminals, and Homework. She has also published The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vogue, and the Atlantic, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. The House on Fortune Street won the 2009 L.L. Winship / PEN New England Award. Livesey was born in Scotland; she lives in the Boston area and is a professor of fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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  Also by Margot Livesey

  Learning by Heart

  Homework

  Criminals

  The Missing World

  Eva Moves the Furniture

  Banishing Verona

  The House on Fortune Street

  The Flight of Gemma Hardy

  Mercury

  The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  the boy in the field. Copyright © 2020 by Margot Livesey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.