‘But – there’s a difference between thinking about it, and – and –’
‘It’s not so big a difference, in the end. It’s doable, Kitty. If that’s what we decide.’
‘And what would you do? Go back to London?’
‘I don’t know. Probably. I miss it; it’s lovely here, but I don’t belong.’
Kitty could barely believe they were talking like this. Where had he found the courage? Howard, who was usually so bluff, so . . . hard to reach?
‘Look, Howard, can we – we don’t have to decide now, do we? I mean, the kids are coming, and –’
‘And that’s another thing, Kitty. “Daddy’s little girl”.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘I love Jenny, of course I do. But I love Chris, too.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you? And it’s not as if you don’t have your favourite, too. Well, perhaps not favourite, but . . .’
‘Chris was an easier baby, that’s all.’
‘That’s not all, Kitty.’
‘I love Jenny, Howard, you know that.’
‘Things were difficult for a long while, though.’
‘That’s just what happens with girls and their mothers. We’re close now.’
‘Well, she needed me then, she needed one of us behind her. It was important.’
‘It felt to me like you were taking sides.’
‘There aren’t any sides, Kitty. You should know that.’
‘That’s easy for you to say. Let’s not forget what else was going on around that time.’
Howard exhaled, sat back. ‘I know, Kitty, I was drinking a lot. And we’ve never been able to move on from that, have we?’
‘I don’t think you have any idea how bad it was – how bad you were.’
‘I’ve got a pretty good idea.’
‘No, I don’t think you have. I was doing everything, Howard: looking after the house, the kids, the cooking, taking them to school. Oh, you did the odd thing here and there, when I asked you, but I took all the responsibility, I had to be the grown-up, every single day, for years. And I couldn’t even talk to you – you were pissed half the time, and at work the rest. I felt as though I was completely on my own.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘So you’ve said, a thousand times.’
‘And I’ve meant it, Kitty. Why is it never enough?’
‘Because . . . I needed you then, and you weren’t there. How can you make it up to me now?’
Kitty was aware that her hold on the moral high ground was tenuous, but the fact of her unfaithfulness seemed somehow irrelevant; after all, she had ended the affair with Richard, she had done the right thing – despite how unhappy it had made her. And it would never detract from how awful Howard had been.
‘And what about now, Kitty? Do you need me now?’ he asked.
They held one another’s gaze for a long moment; then Kitty let out a breath and turned away. Did she? She hadn’t thought so, but perhaps she was wrong.
‘Howard, I –’
‘Actually, don’t say it. Let’s – let’s leave this for now. Have a think, eh?’
Kitty nodded, slowly. ‘All right.’
He reached over and touched her arm where she sat: lightly, hesitantly. ‘Come on. I’ll pour you another, shall I?’
And she nodded again and handed him her glass. ‘Please.’
24
Stitchwort, cow parsley, wood sorrel (oxalis). Maybugs. Nightjars churring on Babb Hill. No breeze.
Jamie was at the bungalow, picking up some things for his mother. The police had said that they would send out a team, and that someone should remain at his grandfather’s house in case he came back.
‘Any signs of dementia?’ the officer had asked; the other one was upstairs, and they could hear him pacing around the empty rooms.
‘He’s – he’s been a bit confused recently,’ his mum had said. ‘Just once or twice. Who people are, that kind of thing.’
‘He’s been sad too, Mum,’ Jamie had chipped in. The officer had turned to look at him.
‘What kind of sad?’
‘Just . . . I don’t know. Quiet.’
‘Are you close to Mr Hirons?’
Jamie had shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Thick as thieves, them two,’ his mother had said. ‘Go on, ask him what my father’s like. He’s the expert.’
Jamie had turned away from her then. Staring out of the window, he’d listened to but had not been part of the rest of the conversation, which was about sniffer dogs, about helicopters, about night-time temperatures. It was insane, it wasn’t real. It was fucking unbelievable.
‘Try not to worry too much,’ the officer had told them at the door. ‘Elderly people do sometimes wander, and we usually get them back safe and well.’
After they’d left his mum had properly fallen apart, her hands clenching and unclenching in her lap as she cried, tears and snot coursing down her mottled face and into the creases at her neck. His dad had steered him into the hallway and asked him to go home and pick up some things, said he’d sit with her and calm her down. Jamie had gone outside without speaking, but his dad had followed him out and put an awkward hand on his shoulder as he’d lifted his helmet from the bike’s handlebar. He’d turned, his shoulders up; his face had felt fixed, somehow, and he couldn’t quite meet his father’s eyes. It wasn’t anger, though, because who was there to be angry with?
‘She doesn’t mean it, son,’ his dad had said. ‘She just wants to be close to him, like you are. But he won’t let her.’
‘Well, maybe this is her chance,’ he’d found himself replying. ‘If he really is sick in the head like she says, if he needs looking after. Has she ever thought of that?’
Back at home he fetched his rucksack from his bedroom and went around filling it with the things his father had asked for, flinching inwardly a little as he chose some grey, faded underwear from his mother’s bedside drawers. He wondered for a second if he should take her one of the dolls, but he couldn’t bring himself to pick any of them up.
Racing the bike back to Ardleton through the dim, narrow lanes, he tried to think what else he could do. Fuck what the police had said about waiting: he’d head out and start looking. None of them knew the countryside around there anything like as well as he did, or the places his grandfather might go. And witnessing his mother’s grief and fear all night was beyond him.
Half an hour later he headed back out on foot, this time into the fields, leaving his mother whey-faced at the kitchen table with Mrs Dudeney from the corner shop. His dad had gone out again to search the surrounding streets with some of the neighbours, including Mr Dudeney and the couple who lived next door; they planned to go house-to-house, asking people to look in their sheds. Jamie knew somehow that it was a waste of time.
The spring night was still, the air smelling faintly of cow parsley and dung. Warm currents rose from the fields and stirred the leaves of the trees, and little rustles spoke of the hidden lives of voles and rabbits. From somewhere off to Jamie’s left a tawny owl asked a shrill question of the night.
He was glad, now, of all the times he’d spent with Harry Maddock; he felt at home in the dark landscape, he moved quietly and didn’t startle easily. More importantly, he had a sense of what should be there and what shouldn’t; he felt he would spot a lost or injured man more easily than the police would – although that could be wishful thinking, he knew.
After an hour or so he ran into a police search team on the outskirts of Copping Wood; one of their dogs had alerted there, they told him, but they had quartered the wood and found nothing. ‘Probably a poacher,’ Jamie said. He watched as they moved on, their high-powered torches criss-crossing the fields; Jamie had only his eyes and ears, but there was a moon, and more than that he wondered whether it might be more important to come to his granddad gently, calmly, than with torches and dogs. He called his name now and again, but softly, and tried to keep the desperation
from his voice.
Harry would have been useful now, he thought. He didn’t have his number any more, but he wasn’t that far from Lodeshill so he decided to head across-country to the Green Man and get Harry and whoever else was in to come out and help him look. He wished he’d thought of it before.
The village, when he got there, was still quiet. Clearly the police didn’t think the old man could have made it out this far; they hadn’t been knocking on doors from the looks of things, and there were no flashing lights that Jamie could see. The church was dark, the houses lit but silent, as though nothing at all had happened. It made the fact that his granddad was out there somewhere in the dark seem even more surreal.
As he opened the door of the Green Man and stepped into its warm, beery smell he realised how tired he was, how much he would have liked to just sit, for an hour, with a pint. The lure of normality was so strong for a moment that he almost gave in; it was Jim, ringing the bell and shouting ‘Time!’, who refocused his mind.
‘Where’s Harry, Jim?’ he asked, his hands urgently tapping the bar.
‘He’s not been in, lad. Did he not catch up with you earlier? Think he had a bit of an offer for you.’
‘Can you call him? I need him. I need everyone –’ and Jamie looked round at the tables and snugs. There were only half a dozen in.
‘What’s the matter, lad?’
But Jamie was addressing the whole bar. ‘Everyone, my granddad’s gone missing. You all know him: James Hirons. He was born here, in the village. Now he’s disappeared, and I need you to help me find him.’
The cow parsley along the field margin was ghostly in the deepening dusk, and Jamie followed it to where a couple of planks wrapped in chicken wire made a rough ford over a stream. The bank was churned up where the cows had until recently come to drink, and he stepped carefully, noting almost without thinking the dog’s mercury dying back under the trees and the last shrivelled curl of a bluebell in the moonlight. The sound of running water as he crossed was faint, but deeply familiar.
The narrow footpath on the other side was little used and edged by stinging nettles; he was glad of the thick denim of his jeans. From the uppermost wire of the fence a row of dark shapes was suspended above the nettles’ dim leaves: two dozen moles, each one caught by its nose on a twist of barbed wire, their bodies desiccated, their spade-like paws spread in mute supplication to the stars. At the end of the line hung two longer shapes: mink, Jamie guessed, given the stream nearby. It wasn’t Harry’s work; Philip must have had the mole-catcher in before he died. He stood for a moment by the pitiful fencework gibbet, listening, then called out ‘Granddad?’ – but there was no reply.
After he had been to the pub Jamie had gone home briefly to pick up a jacket and torch. Coming back out of the house he’d seen Jim knocking on doors at the top of Hill View; he wondered now how many people would come out to help look. Bill had gone home to see if he could get Harry Maddock on the phone; ‘That’s who we need, lad,’ he’d said. ‘Harry’ll find him, don’t worry.’
Howard and Kitty lay next to one another in the dark listening to the voices fade away outside. Their doorbell had rung a little while before, but by unspoken agreement neither of them had got up to answer it.
‘What do you think it is?’ Kitty had whispered after a few moments.
‘I really don’t know. Probably someone’s lost their dog. It can’t be that important or they’d have rung again.’
‘They must know we’re in.’
‘Yes, but we’re in bed, for goodness’ sake. It’s nearly one in the morning.’
Kitty was silent for a while.
‘Do you think it’s an emergency?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m sure we’ll hear all about it tomorrow,’ said Howard, turning over. ‘I’m going to try and sleep, Kitty. I have to get up in a few hours.’
There had been some delicacy about bedtime; Howard had fiddled about downstairs for a while, waiting, she knew, until she was safely in her nightdress and in bed. She’d kept her eyes fixed on her book as he came in and got into bed beside her. The tact on both sides, after so many years together, was almost too much to bear.
And then someone at the door, so late at night. Somehow, strangely, it had made her feel as though they were a couple again – though why that should be so she couldn’t have said.
She could see, now, that there had been more to her decision not to tell Howard about her doctor’s appointment than fear that he’d fail her; keeping it a secret had been a kind of punishment, too. He was right: it was no good. And with this new honesty she dared to asked herself: could she really bear to be without him now – for ever? And if not, didn’t he have a right to know there was a chance that she was ill?
‘Howard,’ she whispered. ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’
By his utter motionlessness she knew he was listening, could tell, in fact, that his eyes were wide open.
‘What?’
‘Howard, I should have told you before. I –’
‘Kitty, please –’ He rolled back over towards her. She could feel the mattress shift beneath her as he moved, knew that he was being careful that their bodies did not accidentally touch, and somehow it was that rather than anything else that finally made her start to cry.
‘Something – happened . . .’
‘Kitty, please don’t tell me. Please.’ His voice was strained, as though the muscles of his throat were not working properly.
She felt herself go very still, felt the rising sobs stifle in her chest.
‘No, Howard, I –’
‘For God’s sake, Kitty, it was such a long time ago. I can’t – please, whoever he was, whatever you did, it doesn’t matter any more.’
25
Poppies, deadly nightshade (‘dwale’ here?), goat’s beard seed-heads.Tawny owls calling, calling.
In Connorville that night a farmer’s son was punched to the ground outside a bar for reasons none of his friends could afterwards recall. His head struck a green electricity box a glancing blow as he fell; although he didn’t lose consciousness he was taken to Queen Elizabeth’s as a precaution, where his speech suddenly became slurred. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage at two in the morning, as the ambulance crew smoked outside and waited for their next callout. By 2 a.m. the blood and hair on the electricity box was tacky and dark. It would not be washed away by rain for another nine days.
All night, lorries thundered along the motorway’s bright seam and cars circled Connorville’s roundabouts under flat, orange light. Further out, though, the Boundway was silent, a straight line between sleeping fields. At around 3.30 the sky in the east began to lighten, but almost imperceptibly. It was still night, but dawn would not be long now.
Out in the dark landscape Jamie stood just inside the gate at Culverkeys and watched as two cats shot from the barn into the moon-shadows at the back of the house. There had always been farm cats on Culverkeys and he wondered if anyone had thought to feed them after Philip had died, and how long it had taken them to give up on humans and go back to nature.
In front of him stood the farmhouse, silent and empty. It had the strange quality of a dream: the way it both was, and wasn’t, Alex’s home, the house he had half lived in himself until six years ago and that had been nearly as familiar to him as his own. Looking at it now it seemed stupid to think that his grandfather could be inside, but he knew he couldn’t leave without being sure.
The front door was locked, of course, but Jamie rattled the iron latch anyway, just in case. The sound of it rang out like a challenge across the yard, making his heart kick in his chest. As it faded away, Jamie saw that there on the dining-room window ledge was all their old treasure: the muddy potsherds and beads, the marbles and coins and bits of rusted iron. Even in the dark he could see how commonplace it was, how pitiful; and yet Alex’s father had left it there all this time. He picked up a fragment of plate for the way
the moon gleamed off its pale glaze and considered putting it in his pocket; but after a moment laid it carefully back on the sill.
At the back of the house he found that the kitchen window was broken, and he stood still for a long while, looking at the missing pane. His grandfather had worked on the farm when he was Jamie’s age; maybe he’d wanted to come and see it before it was sold – or maybe his mum was right and he had got confused and thought that he was a young man again.
Jamie opened the casement and climbed awkwardly into the kitchen, his breath coming shallow and fast. Once inside he reached for the torch in his back pocket and switched it on. How many times had he eaten his tea in this room? Hundreds, must be. The kitchen table and chairs were gone, and the room itself seemed bigger – but smaller too somehow. Perhaps it was because it was so empty and still. He couldn’t remember ever being in Alex’s house by himself before.
‘Granddad?’ he called out tentatively – but the word returned flatly to his ears, as though the house itself had rejected it.
At the doorway into the hall his left hand felt automatically for the light switch, but of course it produced only a click. Looking back at the half-open kitchen window, though, he could see the sky was a very deep blue rather than black, and from somewhere outside came the distant but unmistakable notes of a song thrush.
Jamie turned back to the dreamlike rooms. The torch beam illuminated things abstractly, out of context: a section of skirting board and a corner of peeling wallpaper, a newel post casting a swinging shadow into the hallway behind. It made the dark seem darker, made being there again, after all this time, feel even stranger, like trying to see down, past your familiar reflection, into black and unfathomable water.
The dining room was completely empty, the oval table and chairs sold, even the old piano that nobody ever played gone. He had sometimes sat in here to do his homework with Alex, less often as they had got older and Alex was allowed a computer in his room. Jamie tried to picture the family sitting down in here to eat together, perhaps when visitors came, but found he could not.
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