by Jan Siegel
There was a chorus of laughter from Jason’s backing group. ‘’Cos he’s fat, and he s-s-stammers, and his mother’s a –’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Nathan, not angrily, but with a kind of set look on his face. ‘I told you, leave him alone.’
‘You’re going to protect him, are you?’ Jason bunched a big fist.
‘I’ll try.’
The fist shot out, knocking him against the wall. George moved to help him and then shrank away, too frightened to aid his champion. When Nathan straightened up, there was blood on his lip.
‘Now fuck off,’ Jason ordered. He had learnt both his manners and his vocabulary from his seniors at home.
‘No.’
This time, Nathan dodged the blow, grabbed the lunging arm, and drove it past him, with both his weight and Jason’s behind it. Knuckles rammed into the wall – Jason screamed as flint cut his flesh to the bone. ‘I’m sorry,’ Nathan said, ‘but in future, let George alone.’ The backing group could have jumped him, but they didn’t. Maybe they had read enough of the right books, or at any rate seen enough of the right movies, to know that this was how a hero behaved. George would have become his willing slave from that moment, if he had wanted one.
As for Hazel, she and Nathan were near neighbours, nursery playmates, squabbling companions, sharers in adventures both imaginary and real. Mrs Bagot worked in the deli, and Hazel was frequently left at the bookshop, in theory under Annie’s eye, the two children chasing each other up steps and stairways in rowdy games, or mysteriously quiet as Nathan showed her wonderful books with yellowing pages and illustrations shielded in tissue paper. Without his encouragement she would have read little: she came from a household where reading was something that happened to other people, her mother preferred the television, her father the pub. She was an only child, given to strange introverted moods when she wouldn’t speak for hours, or would climb a tree and refuse to come down, ‘watching’ she would explain later when asked what she’d been doing, or ‘thinking’. But she would always talk to Nathan. She had occasional outbursts of temper which alarmed other children, but these were rare. To look at she was a little below the average height for her age, sturdily built, with a lot of untidy brown hair which her mother was always trying to restrain in plait or ponytail or twist, but the shorter ends invariably worked loose, and Hazel would pull them over her face to hide behind. Nathan’s male classmates scorned her as a best friend because she was a girl, but it made no difference to him. Both his companions and his mother were learning that nothing anyone said or did made any difference to Nathan, once he had made up his mind.
But before George, even before Hazel, there was Woody. ‘Your imaginary friend,’ Annie called him, and Nathan accepted this, although with a note of doubt, since he thought ‘imaginary’ meant ‘not real’, and Woody was quite real. They would meet in the garden at Thornyhill – a garden that seemed much bigger than its actual size, with trellises overgrown with beanflowers, and herb beds, and rambling shrubs, and curious furtive statues hiding in leaves, and wild corners where wood and garden ran together and an infant Nathan found no boundaries to his playground. Annie learned not to worry about him: Hoover was always around, if he strayed too far. But even Hoover never saw Woody. Woody was very, very shy, an odd little creature with an elongated face, all nose, and slanting eyes that looked sideways from his head, like the eyes of an animal. His body was thin as a twig, his skin brownish and slightly mottled, varying in tone according to his background. Hair bristled on his scalp and straggled down his back. If he wore clothes, they were so close to his skin colour that Nathan never noticed. He explained that he was a woodwose, but if he had a name he couldn’t remember it, so Nathan called him Woody.
‘Have you lived here a long time?’ the child asked him once.
‘Always.’
‘How long is always?’
‘I’m not sure. Not very long I think, but I can’t remember being anywhere else.’
‘Do you have parents?’
‘Parents …?’
‘A mummy and daddy. I have a mummy, but my daddy is dead. And I have Uncle Barty, and Hoover. Who do you have?’
But Woody didn’t seem to have anybody.
‘Then you can have me,’ said Nathan.
They would crawl through gaps in the undergrowth into the woods, where his imaginary friend showed him the secret worlds in the hollows of trees, and under last year’s leaves, and they would watch new shoots growing, and the tiny lives of insects, and the green beginnings of things. Sometimes birds would come, and perch on Woody’s fingers – long, brown, knobbly fingers – or his shoulder, as if he were no more than a sapling sprouting among the roots. When Annie first heard of these explorations she was horrified. ‘He mustn’t go wandering off on his own like this. Anything could happen to him!’
‘He appears to be looked after,’ Bartlemy said. ‘You don’t have to worry. No harm can come to him here.’
And somehow, she believed him.
When Nathan’s friendship with Hazel grew he told her about Woody, but she never met him. And gradually, as he became more preoccupied with school and other activities, he saw less and less of his strange companion, and Woody faded with early childhood, until, without really thinking about it, Nathan came to accept his mother’s definition, that the woodwose had come from his imagination, and had no substance of its own.
When he was eleven Nathan won a scholarship to Ffylde Abbey, a private school run by monks about an hour’s drive from Eade. Annie had dredged up the long-forgotten Catholicism of her youth to enable him to apply: it was one of the best schools in the area, patronized largely by the sons of the rich and privileged, but with high academic standards for those who wanted to attain them and superb sports facilities for everyone else. Nathan went as a weekly boarder: the distance was too great for him to come home every evening. Jason Wicks and his gang jeered at him for being a swot and a snob, but they soon grew tired of it, since Nathan appeared genuinely indifferent to their mockery and never responded to provocation. At the new school he made new friends, and inevitably saw less of some of the village children, but his closeness to Hazel and George was unaffected. They would foregather at weekends in their special meeting place in the bookshop, known as the Den. There was a kind of storage space, like a very tall, thin cupboard, between two stacks of shelving, and they had discovered that if you climbed up inside with the help of a stepladder you would find yourself in a tiny loft area tucked under the slope of the roof, with a skylight through which you could scramble right outside. This was their secret headquarters where they would go to plan games and adventures, or just sit and talk out of the range of grown-up ears. They kept a biscuit tin there with emergency supplies, three mugs for coke or lemonade, and a lantern with coloured glass in the sides for dark winter evenings. Nathan had even made a cardboard screen to put over the skylight at such times, so no passerby would see it illuminated. Annie sneaked up there occasionally and dusted, when she was sure they weren’t around, to prevent them getting too obviously grubby. She didn’t think either Hazel’s or George’s parents would be pleased if an afternoon in Nathan’s company invariably resulted in grey clothing.
Sometimes on clear nights they would extinguish the lantern, and open the skylight to look up at the stars. ‘I wish we had a telescope,’ Nathan said. ‘Then we could see them much bigger and closer.’ He’d been doing some astronomy at Ffylde. ‘Look, there’s the Great Bear.’
‘It never looks like a bear to me,’ Hazel said. ‘More like a saucepan with a bent handle.’
‘Maybe we could see a comet,’ George said hopefully. ‘David –’ his elder brother ‘– showed me one once, through binoculars, but I couldn’t really see anything. I thought it would be very bright, with a tail, like a firework, but there was just a bit of a blur.’
‘Where’s Orion?’ asked Hazel, naming the only other constellation she had heard of.
‘I’ll show you.’ Standin
g on a box with her, leaning against the edge of the skylight, Nathan pointed upwards. ‘There. That string of stars is his belt.’
‘What about the rest of him?’
‘I’m not sure …’ His pointing finger wavered; in the dark they couldn’t see him frown. ‘That’s funny.’
‘What’s funny?’ said George. There wasn’t room for him on the box, and he was trying to gaze up past the other two, and failing.
‘There’s another star, just below Orion. It wasn’t there before: I’m sure it wasn’t. I was up here last night.’
‘Show me,’ said Hazel. Nathan pointed again. ‘Perhaps you remembered wrong. Or there was some cloud or something.’
‘It wasn’t cloudy.’
‘Perhaps it’s a comet!’ George said excitedly.
‘If there was a comet it would’ve been on the news,’ Nathan said. ‘Besides, it looks like a star.’
‘It’s not very twinkly,’ Hazel explained.
Nathan climbed down, switched on the lantern, and consulted his star map. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘There shouldn’t be a star there at all.’
‘It must be a UFO,’ George declared. ‘They can look like stars. Let me see.’ Now the others had come down, he scrambled onto the box. ‘It’ll whoosh across the sky in a minute and disappear.’
But it didn’t.
‘It could be a whole new star,’ Hazel suggested. ‘I’ve heard how they can have huge explosions out in space, and that makes new stars.’
‘A supernova,’ Nathan said knowledgeably. ‘If it is, it’ll be on Patrick Moore.’
But there was nothing about a new star on any programme, and when Nathan looked the following evening it had gone. He didn’t say much to the other two, but on his own he wondered, and would steal up the stepladder late at night to look, just in case. But it was not until the next spring, when he had almost forgotten about it, that he saw the star again.
That winter a new couple moved down from London, causing a minor flutter of interest among less glamorous residents. They were in their thirties: he was a lecturer in history at East Sussex University and a writer of up-market period novels, popular enough to be stocked in most bookshops instead of having to be specially ordered, and she was an actress of the intellectual type who had appeared regularly on stage and television. His name was Michael Addison, hers Rianna Sardou (Rianna reputedly shortened from Marianne), but they were assumed to be married, though she seemed to be away a great deal, on tour with a play or on location shoots for a TV drama or bit-part film role. However, Michael was around most of the time, and the villagers pronounced him pleasant and friendly, and began to call him Mike. He would have a pint in the pub of an evening, and chat to Lily Bagot in the deli, and to Annie in the bookshop. He was rather good-looking, in a tousled, don’t-give-a-damn sort of way, with a one-sided smile which might have been irresistible if he had been inclined so to employ it. He wore country clothes – Barbour jackets, wellies, trainers – and glasses for reading and driving. His wife on the other hand, when actually seen, was something of a disappointment. The rumpled, unmade-up look which suited Michael so well was not what the village expected of an actress, particularly not one with a name like Rianna, and local opinion found her aloof and unapproachable. She had the appropriate cheekbones, but they displayed more angularity than beauty, and her hair, though long and dark, was usually scraped back into a tight coil, with loose ends spraying over the crown of her head. Gossip said she neglected Michael, and local attitudes became tinged with an unexpressed sympathy when he was around.
They had bought an oast house on the edge of the village, with two round towers under pixy-hat roofs, and a long building in between, wood-panelled, antique-furnished, expensively renovated. The River Glyde flowed past it on its meandering way through the water-meadows, and their garden ran down to the bank, with mooring for a couple of boats, though they only appeared to have a dinghy, left behind by a previous owner. The house had been empty for a while before they moved in, and Nathan, George and Hazel had once ‘borrowed’ the dinghy, almost coming to grief in the grip of a current too strong for their oarsmanship. They had had to ram the boat into the bank in order to avoid being swept away – or sinking, since the planking proved far from watertight. Nathan, seeing Michael in the shop one day, felt obliged to mention these hazards, though he would have preferred it if his mother hadn’t been within earshot. ‘You – took – that – boat – out – without – permission?’ Annie had paled from a mixture of anger and terror.
‘It wasn’t stealing!’ Nathan protested. ‘We put it back afterwards – and anyway, it didn’t seem to belong to anybody then.’
‘Boats are dangerous,’ Annie said, dismissing the issue of theft unconsidered. ‘You could’ve drowned. What were you thinking of?’
‘We can all swim. We wouldn’t drown, honestly.’
‘There are weeds under the water which can drag you down …’
‘Never mind,’ Michael intervened. ‘Thanks for warning me, Nathan. That was very thoughtful of you. Actually, I was thinking of getting a boat of my own, just a small one, an inflatable maybe, with an outboard motor. You could come for a ride with me, if your mother doesn’t object.’
‘Of course I don’t, if he’s supervised,’ Annie said hastily. ‘It’s very kind of you, but – I mean, you don’t have to –’
‘I’d like to,’ Michael assured her, turning up the twist of his smile.
‘Could I bring my friends?’ Nathan asked.
‘Nathan –!’
‘It’s okay,’ Michael said. ‘Friends are fine – if the boat’s big enough, and there aren’t too many of them.’
‘Just Hazel and George. When will you get the boat?’
‘Oh – in the spring, I expect. Too chilly on the river now. Don’t worry, Nat: I won’t forget about taking you out, I promise. I’m not a forgetting kind of person.’
‘I wasn’t worried,’ Nathan said. ‘No one calls me Nat, it sounds a bit American.’
‘I won’t if you dislike it.’
Nathan thought about it. ‘I don’t mind,’ he decided, ‘if it’s just you. And if Mum doesn’t mind?’
‘It’s your name,’ Annie smiled.
He told the others about this, in the Den the following weekend. George was both excited and rather scared at the prospect of going out in a boat again, but Hazel looked thoughtful. ‘What’s the matter?’ Nathan asked her.
‘D’you think he likes your mum?’ Hazel said, pulling her hair over her eyes as if to hide from his response.
‘Why shouldn’t he?’
‘You know what I mean.’ She still wouldn’t meet his gaze.
‘He’s married …’
‘Don’t be silly. Married people often like other people; they get divorced; they marry someone else.’ She added, rather gruffly: ‘I sometimes wish Mum would divorce Dad. He doesn’t love her very much. Great-grandma Effie says he’s no good and never was.’
There was a short silence. Mention of Effie Carlow, Hazel’s great-grandmother, always commanded respect, since few people had great-grandmothers, and age had given her opinions the aura of wisdom, whether they deserved it or not. What that age was no one was certain: her piled-up grey hair was still abundant, her walk vigorous, her face wrinkled but not withered. She had a sharp nose and a sharper tongue, and her eyes, under heavy lids, were as keen as a hawk’s.
‘Even so,’ Nathan said at last, ‘I don’t think you should put your dad down.’
‘Only to you.’ She wouldn’t have chosen to confide in George, but Nathan had made him part of their group, and she treated him a little like a favoured pet. George being there counted no more than Hoover. Probably less.
‘Anyway,’ Nathan reverted to the original subject, ‘Mum wouldn’t … she wouldn’t want someone else’s husband.’
‘My mum says Michael’s very attractive,’ Hazel stated. ‘And Annie’s pretty. She ought to have boyfriends.’
Nathan didn
’t answer. This was a point which had troubled him occasionally. He had friends with single mums, both at the village school and at Ffylde – even some with single dads – and boyfriends and girlfriends were always a problem. Children had to sort them out, encourage the good ones, fend off undesirables. They tended to buy lavish Christmas presents, woo the children with hamburgers and then shoo them from the room so they could indulge in kissing and fondling while their audience giggled outside. Some new partners brought unwanted brothers and sisters in their train. It was a hazard of modern life. Nathan knew he was lucky not to have these problems, but … but … ‘Do you want a father?’ Annie asked him once.
