“The best.”
“Lucky you, and lucky them. I was in foster homes from the age of eight. People were very nice, but no one ever wanted to adopt me.”
Her voice was not sad, nor was her face, but he sensed sadness. Whatever happens with my first mother, he thought, I’m never going to lose my family.
“None of this has to do with Karel,” Hilda said, suddenly brisk. “He’s back on days again, but he had to leave early. He’ll be working his regular shift, seven to four, for the rest of the week.”
“Thank you.” He wanted to leave her with something, but what? He had come empty-handed, carrying only his schoolbooks. “Your patients are very lucky,” he said.
From the slight flush that tinged her already rosy cheeks, he saw he had chosen the right gift.
The next day he was at the bicycle rack at ten to four. Since his conversation with Hilda, his mind had been teeming with things he wanted to ask Karel. Had he known the three of them were there, in the field? Why did he say “Cowslip?” What was his favorite color? Did he get tired of the patients telling him things? What if you needed to do something that might hurt people you loved? What if just the idea of your doing it hurt them? The rack was at one end of the car park, in the shadow of a high, mossy wall. Standing beside it, he put all his energy into waiting. On the top of the wall a pair of wagtails bobbed back and forth; a small flock of sparrows scuffled in the ragged grass. The longer he stood, the closer the birds came. This is what it must be like to be a tree, he thought.
The back door opened. A woman walked over to the rack, unchained a bicycle, and without a glance in his direction pedaled away. The door opened again, and two figures appeared: one was not Karel, one was. Seeing him upright, walking, talking with another person, Duncan felt the ground shift. As Karel and the woman approached, the wagtails ran off; the sparrows rose, twittering, into the nearest bush.
“She’s a hoot,” said the woman. She was carrying the kind of black handbag Duncan associated with much older women.
“She makes everyone laugh,” Karel agreed. “Except herself.”
He did not have his father’s accent, but his words had the same precision. He was tall, taller than Duncan had thought when he was lying down. The woman’s footsteps were audible, not his. He wore a neat black jacket out of which his neck emerged, pale and slender. His hair was darker, but perhaps that was the gray afternoon; it was definitely longer. When they were almost at the rack, Duncan took a step forward. Neither of them noticed him. Then the woman did.
“Are you looking for someone?” Her voice, warm when she spoke to Karel, was like a knife. As for Karel, his eyes darted in Duncan’s direction, then focused on his bicycle lock.
“My name is Duncan Lang. I wanted to ask Karel a question. The matron knows I’m here.”
“That’s up to Karel.” The woman was facing him, holding her handbag with both hands like a shield.
“Do I know you?” Karel was slowly turning the combination lock.
“Not really. I’ve met your dad. Could I walk with you?” Out of the corner of his eye he could see the woman still glaring at him. He tried to recover his tree-like stillness.
“For five minutes,” Karel said. “Then I need to go home.”
The woman took a step toward Duncan and threw a hard stare in his direction. If you hurt this person, she was saying, I will never forgive you. Turning back to Karel, she said, “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I think so.”
She continued to eye him for a few seconds before she unlocked her bike, wiped the seat, slipped her handbag onto the handlebars, and pedaled out of the car park. When she had turned the corner of the building, Duncan said, “I found you in the field. With my brother and sister.”
Karel’s eyes were like his father’s: a dark rim circling tiny fractals of blue iris. Leaving his bike in the rack, he stepped over and, before Duncan understood what was happening, put his hands on Duncan’s shoulders and kissed him, warmly, on each cheek. Then he stepped back and, for the first time, smiled. “You’re younger than I imagined.”
Oh, thought Duncan, I was already inside your head. Beneath Karel’s jacket, he glimpsed the silver chain he’d seen that day in the field, and later drawn. “I’m thirteen. Does it hurt to remember what happened?”
“You’re not reminding me. I’m always thinking about it. A part of me is still lying there.”
“When we were kneeling beside you, you said ‘Cowslip.’ ”
“Cow slip?”
“No. One word, like the flower. They’re yellow. You see them in the spring. Shakespeare writes about them.”
Karel blinked, neither claiming nor repudiating the flower.
They started walking, Karel pushing his bike—it made a slight clicking sound—Duncan beside him. Above the dark jacket a crescent of pale cheek was visible; on the handlebars Karel’s hands reddened with cold. Step by step, in sideways glances, Duncan took him in. In his drawings, he thought, he had made his shoulders too narrow.
“That was what you wanted to ask me about,” Karel said. “Flowers?”
They were walking beside another, lower wall. A snail in its topaz-colored shell was inching along the top, horns delicately extended. Duncan was eyeing it, trying to shape a sentence about his first mother, when Karel spoke again.
“I remember every minute of lying there. I have very thin eyelids. When I close my eyes, I can still see lights, shapes. In the field I could see birds and clouds. People visited me. People knelt beside me.”
Duncan thought of the swallows darting overhead. Karel had seen them too. The bike bumped over a tree root in the pavement.
“I thank you and your brother and sister for finding me. I am grateful, most grateful.” Click, click. “But sometimes”—click—“I wish you hadn’t.”
The last words were spoken so softly, more like breath than sound, that Duncan wasn’t sure he had heard them. Then, as Karel pedaled away, he knew he had.
Twenty-five
Matthew
In the cloakroom they started talking about the millennium. Heather’s mother, an accountant, claimed that everything was going to crash at midnight on December thirty-first. “But there must be safeguards,” Matthew said. The idea of massive disruption was disturbing and thrilling: Big Ben with both hands stuck at twelve; trains running randomly; the Co-op giving out free food. Tim said there were safeguards, but some hacker in Moscow could topple the whole system. Raj said the important thing was not to fly on New Year’s Eve. By the time Matthew collected his jacket and retrieved his books, the bus had left. He decided to visit Rachel. Between fencing lessons and his search with Tomas, they had scarcely seen each other for a fortnight. With luck, her mother would still be at work. He half walked, half ran through the darkening streets, knocked on her door, and stood back. Maybe he’d pretend to be collecting for Oxfam. The door opened.
“Hi, I was—”
Something was wrong. Her eyes were too wide, her mouth too tight. “Matthew, what are you doing here?”
His presence had never before needed explanation. “Can I come in?” He smiled, hoping she would do the same.
“Benjamin’s here.”
She could have added several things to that simple sentence. They were studying. He was borrowing a book. But none would have given more information than those two words and the way she stood, blocking the doorway. He turned and ran into the street. As he hurtled down the pavement, his footsteps drummed out the syllables: Ben-ja-min, Ben-ja-min. How could his friend do this? What had he done to deserve this? He took refuge in the bus shelter where, a week ago, he had stored donations for Oxfam. The bench was cold and damp; from the shadows beneath rose the smell of old chips. In the midst of trying not to shiver and trying not to breathe, he had one clear thought: he could not go to school tomorrow.
He didn’t notice the car pulling up at the curb until the door opened. “Want a lift?” his father said. He settled gratefully into the odorless warm
th. As they headed out of town, his father asked if something was wrong.
“I had a row with Rachel.” Did two words count as a row? “We’ve broken up.” He understood the cliché in a new way.
“I’m sorry. And right before Christmas, with lots of parties.”
He hadn’t thought about that. Night after night he, Benjamin, and Rachel would find themselves in dimly lit rooms filled with music and mutual friends.
“Breakups are hard,” his father was saying. “Time is the only thing that helps. When I was your age . . .”
Suddenly he worried that his father might be about to confess his own romantic difficulties. Even in the midst of his misery he knew this must, at all costs, be avoided. As long as the woman was unspoken, she would have to be fitted into the small spaces left over from work and family. Any mention of her would be a step toward allowing her to take up more room. Desperately he began to talk.
“We didn’t just break up. She was with Benjamin. We’d never have got together in the first place except for him. He was the one who told me to invite her to a film he knew she wanted to see. Who told me she was interested in recycling and stuff.”
“Christ. No wonder you’re gutted. Your girlfriend and your best friend. Are you sure? Benjamin’s the last person I’d have expected to behave like this.”
A dark shape scampered across the road, a vole or weasel dashing to safety. “They were there together,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me in. I keep telling myself that Rachel wasn’t perfect. She went on and on about the Green Party, and a couple of times she wasn’t nice to Duncan.”
“People are allowed to be boring,” his father said, “but everyone should be nice to Duncan. Sometimes when I’m about to lose my temper, I think, Could I tell Duncan what I’m about to say? Last week . . .”
He began to describe a client who kept changing his mind about a fire screen. Matthew managed to say just enough to keep the conversation going until they reached home.
Lying in bed, he parsed the morning sounds—voices, doors, dishes, toilets—of which he was usually a part. He heard footsteps outside his room and a faint rustling. A sheet of paper slid under the door. A few minutes later, another followed. When the front door closed for the last time and his mother’s car coughed to life, he retrieved the notes.
The first was from Zoe: Hope you feel better. Let’s plot REVENGE!!!
The second from his mother: Dear Matthew, there’s soup on the stove, and the usual things for sandwiches. You need to go back to school tomorrow, so try to figure out what will make that bearable. See you this evening. Love, Mum. P.S. You’re a star.
Downstairs in the parlor he retrieved a cardboard box. He circled his room, gathering up reminders of Rachel: photographs, a cinema ticket, a scarf she’d knitted, prophetically already unraveling, a T-shirt from a concert, a note signed with kisses. He taped the box shut and wrote Private. Do Not Open on the side. But where to put it? He couldn’t bear the thought of it in his room, and Zoe, if she found it, would open it immediately. Finally he carried it to Duncan’s room and pushed it under the bed.
When he woke again, his priorities were clear. The person he needed to talk to was Benjamin, his friend since their primary school teacher had put them in charge of the class begonia, his friend who had said of course she likes you and who had endured many afternoons of doing homework and hanging out with Rachel, his presence both superfluous and essential. And then, when Matthew and Rachel finally got together, his uncomplaining acceptance of their need for privacy. As for Rachel, he told himself firmly, she was pretty, she was good at chemistry, she had opinions, but within a hundred miles there must be a hundred similar girls. It was his liking that had made her special.
Could he hold on to this insight? Only, it turned out, for a few minutes. Then the noose of misery tightened again. He remembered her shyly showing him a new dress, paddling in the river on a rainy day. All those hours of talking, and doing it, were not going to vanish so easily.
Downstairs he made tea and toast and forced himself to contemplate tomorrow. He and Benjamin shared every class but one. Together they moved from history to French to algebra; later there was debating club and, on Thursday, fencing. He had never asked himself, Does Benjamin like me? Or do I like him? Their friendship was a given. As he showered and dressed and did homework, he clung fast to this thought. When Zoe came home, he asked her to phone him and arrange a meeting.
“The Green Man at six?” she suggested.
A pungent memory of Tomas made him say no, the Hare and Tortoise.
A few minutes later she was back; Benjamin would be there. Sitting cross-legged on the end of his bed, she said, “Are you going to have a fight? Whatever’s going on with him and Rachel, it won’t last. He’s too clever, and too nice.”
“He’s not very nice at the moment. What makes you such an expert on romance?”
She pouted. “Statistically most teenage relationships don’t last. Unstatistically, Rachel has wandering hands. Remember Mr. Datta, the cricket coach last spring? She was all over him.”
“You never told me that.”
“I didn’t want to make trouble. Besides, nothing happened. Were you really in love with her? I thought you just wanted to sleep with her.”
Was that it? Had he only craved a few square inches of flesh? “Who cares?” he said. “The question is what am I going to say to Benjamin. He was there with her. They wouldn’t let me in.”
“I thought it was Rachel who wouldn’t. Suppose”—Zoe clasped her hands—“he went round to her house to do homework, or play a new song. They were sitting on the sofa, and she—I don’t know—put her hand on his thigh? Then you were at the door. Rachel liked the idea of two best friends quarreling over her, and pretended something momentous had happened.”
He nodded slowly. Yes, he could imagine that. Benjamin carried away by singing, or solving a problem—both made him happy and heedless; Rachel taking advantage of him.
Outside the night was clear and frosty. He strode down the pavement, enjoying the cold air after being indoors all day, but as the pub sign came into view, the hare seated on the back of the tortoise, his knees threatened to buckle. He stopped beside a garden gate.
Could he do this?
No. No, he couldn’t.
He was still standing there when he heard footsteps. “Cheers, mate,” the jogger said as he pounded past. In his wake, a thought appeared in Matthew’s brain: Who did Karel want to see so badly that even, after working all night and getting a flat tire, he had been determined to reach their town? In all his searching, he had never stopped to wonder. If he met Benjamin, he bargained, then he could go and ask Karel.
A couple of dozen people were scattered around the pub, but the only one he saw was Benjamin, seated at a table, two glasses of beer before him. At the sight of Matthew he half rose, his thigh catching the table; the glasses rocked perilously. “Hi,” he said hoarsely.
Without looking at him, Matthew took off his jacket, slung it over the chair, and sat down.
Benjamin reached for his glass but his hand was trembling too hard to raise it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I screwed up.”
He had run into Rachel leaving school. They had started chatting; she had invited him over to play his new song. He’d been sitting on the sofa, tuning his guitar, when she kissed him. “I swear, Matty, all I wanted was to get out of there. I knew she didn’t fancy me. And then you rang the doorbell, and she did that thing. It happened so quickly. When she came back into the room, I yelled at her: Why hadn’t she let you in? She said it was none of my business. I grabbed my guitar and ran all the way to the bus stop. You were getting into your dad’s car and didn’t hear me shout.”
So Zoe was right. “Why did she want to break up with me?” he said. “Did she say?”
“I haven’t a clue. You could ask her.”
He shook his head vehemently. “If there’s anything she wants to say, she can get in touch.”
Benjamin
at last raised his beer. “I feel like an idiot.”
“Maybe she did fancy you for thirty seconds. It’s not completely out of the question.”
Watching him take in this small joke, Matthew remembered Duncan saying you could see what Benjamin would look like when he was older. “I don’t think,” he went on, “that either of us should be with Rachel. But if you told me you liked her, I’d have to understand.”
Benjamin held up his hands. “I liked her because you liked her. I’m useless when it comes to girls. The ones I like never like me. I’ve only slept with one person.” He gave a little shudder.
“I thought”—Matthew tried to sound suitably casual—“you’d never done it.”
“Ages ago.” Benjamin looked down at his beer, the foam thinning. “Before you and Rachel . . .” He did not finish the sentence, and Matthew understood: Benjamin hadn’t wanted to leave him behind. “It was my brother’s babysitter. One evening she was all over me. She was probably stoned. The next time I saw her, she told me to bugger off.”
“You don’t want to see Rachel again?”
“Not for one second. What we need to do is pass our exams and go traveling and go to uni. Then we can be in love, whatever that is. Or not.”
“It’s a plan.” Matthew raised his glass. “Zoe asked if we were going to fight.”
He spoke unthinkingly, part of the ordinary back-and-forth of their friendship, but Benjamin’s gaze sharpened. “That’s not a bad idea,” he said. “We have our foils, our masks.”
“Maybe we could use the gym,” Matthew suggested.
They looked at each other, appreciating the possibilities: a fight that was not a fight, as fake as Wallenia, or the broken corkscrews of New Year’s Eve.
Twenty-six
Zoe
Zoe had thought she might need an excuse—returning a book, a tutorial—but the porter showed no hesitation in taking a message. See you at the museum tomorrow 4 p.m. There were only a few more weeks of term; then, except for her mornings at the butcher’s, she was free until January. And now she was sixteen. Her age, which she’d so carefully concealed, was acceptable. She could leave home, she could have a lover, she could move to America.
The Boy in the Field Page 11