Hyddenworld: Spring Bk. 1 (Hyddenworld Quartet 1)

by William Horwood

  ‘What?’

  ‘. . . so do I.’

  26

  ROOM WITH A VIEW

  Katherine 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.

  People very rarely stayed at Woolstone House, and when they did they were not usually male or, well . . . Jack.

  So Katherine, in a panic, had finally decided on the plain cream sheets and not the pink ones, and had changed the picture on the wall twice, in favour of a painting of boats.

  When she couldn’t think of anything else she headed downstairs and into the garden.

  ‘Katherine, is that you?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘Where are you off to? It’s cold.’

  ‘I’m just going out into the garden.’

  Mrs Foale, hearing Clare call out, came to see if she needed anything, and found her weeping.

  ‘What is it my dear?’ she asked, hugging her gently. She knew Clare was in almost constant pain, though she rarely complained, but certain small things upset her. Like her daughter not stopping
to say hello before going out.

  ‘It’s Katherine,’ Clare whispered. ‘What’s she doing out there?’

  Mrs Foale went to the conservatory doors, and watched Katherine wandering across the great garden, stopping sometimes to bend down to look at flowers, and then choose with care.

  ‘I think she’s finding something for Jack’s bedside table.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘She’s looking for the flowers of the Spring.’

  27

  WHITE HORSE

  Thirty minutes after leaving the outskirts of London, Jack’s cab driver suddenly announced, ‘Now that’s a view!’ They were on a dual carriageway heading downhill through a steep-sided cutting excavated in chalk, whose sides framed the vast expanse of the Vale of Oxfordshire stretching ahead below them.

  For Jack it seemed an unexpected portal to another world, because countryside like this was not something he had any previous experience of.

  His first reaction was to wonder why the driver even bothered to comment on a landscape that looked so featureless and flat.

  But then it drew him in, as at the beginning of a film, when the blank screen fills out and the action begins and all else is forgotten. Maybe it was the misty blue horizon, maybe some of the details he now began to see: an old farm building here, a church spire there, and then the shining silver ribbon of a stream reflecting the sky, and snaking away out of sight almost before he noticed it.

  As they journeyed further, Jack began to realize he had been living in a city too long. He felt he had never seen such lush countryside before, not this type of countryside. Quiet villages, neat hedges, undulating fields, and stands of trees, their leaves already golden brown, while beyond them extended inner, shadowy, depths of woodland inviting exploration and discovery.

  ‘England can be a beautiful country,’ murmured the driver, as if picking up on his reverie.

  Jack had to agree, as the earlier apprehension he had felt about this trip began to ease a little, replaced by a new excitement. He might not have seen this part of England before, but a memory of his brief childhood stay on the North Yorkshire Moors had come back, and before, vague though it was, another deeper memory of somewhere else: of mountains, biting cold air, and views across deep valleys. It put a yearning and restlessness into him that he could not explain but which made him feel alive in a way he hadn’t felt for a long time.

  ‘Mind you,’ added the driver, ‘that thing spoils it a bit.’ He pointed towards six great cooling towers, off to the left, from whose summits thick white steam billowed upwards into the sky.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Didcot Power Station, biggest of its kind in Europe. Spewing God knows what into the sky. We have to drive past it to get to where you’re heading, so you’ll get a closer look later. It’s not that far now before we turn off . . . Oops, spoke too soon, as usual!’

  At that moment, the traffic news broke in automatically on the car radio, and the driver turned it up so they could listen. The traffic began to slow to a crawl, as the announcement warned of delays occurring just after Junction 6, caused by an obstruction on the highway somewhere further on.

  ‘No problem,’ said the driver cheerily. ‘We turn off at that junction anyway, so with luck we’ll miss the worst of it.’

  With a sideways wink at Jack, he pressed the button on a hands-free earpiece.

  ‘Let’s see if I can find out what’s causing the obstruction.’

  For a moment he listened in to some waveband chat he had linked to, and then switched his headpiece back on mute.

  ‘That’s a new one on me. It seems there’s a horse loose on the motorway, and the traffic’s backing up while they restrain it. Shouldn’t be too . . . no, it’s all right, here we go.’

  The traffic ahead was starting to move, and a short time later they were able to turn left onto the slip road and head south, rapidly leaving the motorway behind.

  ‘Could have been worse. They must have got their horse.’

  But they hadn’t, because Jack could see it through a gap in the hedge on his right and then a few more times after that, galloping parallel with them, keeping pace with the car, its coat an undulating white-grey sheen like the sky itself.

  He lost sight of it then for a minute or two as the car turned a corner, before the hedge transmuted into a plain wire fence and then he could see it again, clear as anything, further off now but still magnificent. It veered nearer, was briefly lost to view again, and then was right in the field next to them, head pressed forward, muscles straining. But this time on their left side? That was strange.

  ‘It’s quite a horse,’ said the driver, who had caught sight of it again as well.

  For just a few moments more the white horse was so close that Jack could clearly see its eyes and questing nostrils, and the long hair of its mane and tail flying behind it in the wind. He even imagined he could hear the thunder of its hoofs.

  Then it disappeared again and, though he strained to glimpse it, and turned his head round and tried to see through the rear window, the view was obscured, and he saw it no more. Moments later the car slowed right down as they entered a large village.

  Fifteen minutes later they reached their next turn-off, and took a series of minor roads across the Berkshire countryside.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ said the driver, consulting his Satnav. The car turned smoothly between two big blue gateposts, paint peeling and standing crooked, the gate itself long gone. The wheels crunched over weed-filled gravel till they pulled to a halt in front of a great dilapidated house.

  Jack climbed out of the cab and looked up five shallow stone steps to the double front door. One half of it suddenly opened and there stood Katherine, but looking nothing like he remembered her.

  She was taller, her hair longer, and she was dressed differently from many of the London girls he knew: dowdy, sombre, serious.

  ‘Hello, Jack,’ she called out, her smile a bit crooked, her wave a little self-conscious.

  He grabbed his backpack and climbed up the steps and shook her hand, his grip maybe too strong. Back in London girls hugged him and did the pretence of a peck on the cheek. This formal gesture felt strange, yet more sincere.

  They gazed at each other, both nervous and both maybe a little disappointed. Jack was a shade shorter than she had imagined; she plainer than he expected.

  Yet even in that first clumsy moment, it felt like a great old door, under-used and stiff with age, was slowly opening.

  I saw a white horse he wanted to say, or even shout.

  Instead he just stared at her in silence, his head thrust a little forward in that intense, disconcerting way of his, and she at him. Their initial disappointments were almost at once replaced by something else.

  ‘What?’ she said finally, curiosity in her voice.

  ‘You look different – taller than I expected.’

  What he really wanted to say took him by surprise: The clothes don’t matter, Katherine, because your eyes are beautiful and the way you hold yourself as well and . . . and . . . there’s something that makes me want to be sure that no one ever hurts you.

  Katherine had her own thoughts too: You look different, Jack. You look stronger and self-confident, like you know your place in life and aren’t afraid of it – that makes me a bit scared of you.

  But neither one of them said any of this.

  ‘Come this way,’ she said, feeling she was inviting something powerful and unpredictable into the house. ‘Um . . . through here,’ she gestured.

  The dark interior of the house loomed around him.

  ‘I saw a white horse,’ he muttered, following through the darkness this girl whose back and hips were now more like a woman’s.

  ‘Mum wants to say hello,’ said Katherine over her shoulder, not having heard what he said. He didn’t repeat it.

  So they journeyed on together into the shadowy recesses of a house that had known illness too long and was ready for
new life again.

  ‘Jack?’

  She had stopped in the shadows by a door ajar. He could see it led to a conservatory.

  ‘Jack, Mum’s not her normal self . . . I mean . . . there’s something I didn’t tell you.’

  He stared at her, saying nothing.

  Close-to he could see her nervousness. Of him? Of the situation? He felt nervous too.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mum talks strangely sometimes and . . . I mean she’s in a lot of pain. And there’s the drugs which affect her mind so she seems to see things. I mean . . .’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Jack felt he was more used to straight talking than she was. Where he came from if you weren’t clear what you wanted you didn’t get it. You had to say what you meant.

  ‘I thought you might not come if I told you she . . . has delusions. Sees things that aren’t there.’

  ‘What things?’

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘Little people.’

  ‘Like dwarfs?’

  ‘No, not like dwarfs. Like . . . people. She might talk to you about them – maybe. She talks to Mrs Foale. Not to me though, not directly.’

  ‘It’s all right Katherine, I won’t be embarrassed. I’ve been ill too, the mind plays tricks. Did she really want me to come or did you make that up?’

  ‘Of course she did. I don’t make things up.’

  He grinned, more relaxed than she was.

  ‘Let’s go and see her,’ he said, ‘and then I’ll make my own mind up.’

  She looked relieved.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘here goes . . .’

  28

  CLARE

  Jack had never been in the same room as a dying person before, and it shocked him. It felt as if something else was hovering there in the shadows whose name was Death.

  Jack knew of the Grim Reaper from his computer games. In real life he seemed much more scary. He also found that, strictly speaking, Clare was not in a room at all, which added to the odd, disturbing quality of the situation.