The Boy in the Field

by Margot Livesey

  “I’ll tell him,” said the porter.

  She set to work on part two of her plan: how to spend the evening in town. Moira agreed to help in exchange for information. Her comments were painfully earthbound. “I thought you thought Americans were stupid.” “He’s so much older!” “You’re not even interested in philosophy.” But she agreed to go to an eight o’clock film; Zoe would be in the lobby at ten, and Moira’s brother would give them a lift home.

  At the museum she touched the bear for luck and climbed the stairs. He was sitting at the same table as before, not working but looking down into the courtyard. His face, unguarded, wore an expression of melancholy, like that of the saint in the painting. For a moment, she wondered what she had set in motion. Then he caught sight of her. He jumped up and kissed her.

  “Here you are. I was afraid something had happened.”

  “I’m sorry I’m late. The bus met a herd of cows.”

  “You really do live in the English countryside.”

  As they walked down the street, he told her how the night before, a group of them had gone out to celebrate an acquaintance defending his thesis on Spinoza. They had just finished toasting him, when his girlfriend remarked that now maybe their sex life would improve. “You can imagine”—Rufus half smiled, half frowned—“we all rushed to change the subject.”

  Flustered by the phrase “sex life,” trying not to show it, she asked what Spinoza would have thought. She could see he liked the question. He said he didn’t think much was known about Spinoza’s love life. He was Portuguese and Jewish and had lived in the Netherlands, where he made money grinding optical lenses. He had written about the work of Descartes and a huge, elusive book called Ethics, published posthumously. While he talked, Rufus led the way down first one street, then another. They were passing a graveyard, approaching Holywell Manor.

  “I want to leave my bag,” he said. “Then we can go for a walk.”

  She followed him through the doorway, across a small courtyard, and up three narrow flights of stone stairs. He unlocked a wooden door.

  She stood there, taking in the room she had tried so often to imagine. The bed was under the slanting eaves, the desk, not as large as she’d expected, in the gable window. There was a small sofa with a lamp, and a coffee table. On the windowsill was a blue vase with a bunch of freesias. Had someone given them to him? A gray stone weighted a pile of papers. When she reached for it, the smooth oval exactly fitted her palm.

  “A souvenir of the beach at Brighton,” he said. “I’ve been here long enough to know I should offer you a cup of tea, but you don’t like tea.”

  “No.” She held out the stone. “My birthday was last week.”

  “We’ll have to celebrate.” He took the stone and gently replaced it.

  “Maybe we could celebrate today?” She unzipped her jacket.

  “Zoe.” He unbuttoned his own jacket but did not remove it. “There are so many reasons we shouldn’t do this. You’re still at high school, I’ll be going back to the States in June, your parents would be furious. Whatever we feel, having sex will, hopefully, make us feel more so.”

  He kept talking, at least his lips kept moving, but she had put her hands over her ears, replacing his words with the rush of blood. “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care. What are we alive for, if not to have feelings? I’ll hate it when you leave, but I’ll hate it even more if we’re too cowardly to do anything. You said it’s rare to feel anything; that when we do, we have a duty to pay attention.”

  He took her wrists, gently pulling her hands away. She glimpsed again that melancholy she had seen at the museum. “It’s not that I don’t want to, but—”

  “I’m not a child. Mary, Queen of Scots was married by the time she was my age.” Nearby a door opened and closed; footsteps hurried down the stairs.

  “But there are so many things,” he said, “you don’t know about me.”

  “Are you saying you don’t want to sleep with me because I’m a virgin and don’t understand causation?” It was the worst thing she could think of to say about either of them.

  He started to laugh, stopped, and pulled her close. The knit of his sweater pressed against her cheek. She slid her arms beneath his jacket, feeling the hardness of his ribs, his vertebrae. “Quite the opposite,” he said. “No, that’s not right. I want to sleep with you because you’re you.”

  He stepped back and, just as she was thinking he had changed his mind, began to kiss her. All her impatience vanished. She could have stood there for a year, two years. When, finally, he retreated to take off his jacket, she saw their two reflections in the dark window, almost touching.

  “Tell me something you’ve never told anyone,” he said.

  The light of the bedside lamp shadowed his face. “I used to think I could walk on water,” she said, “if I tried hard enough.” Then she told him about finding Karel in the field, although not what might have interested him most: namely that the events of that day had, somehow, led to the events of this one.

  “So there’s a person who wouldn’t be alive,” he said, “except for you.”

  “Have you ever saved anyone’s life?”

  “Not that I know of, although I do donate blood. Five years ago my father had an accident at the factory. Afterward he made us all promise to give blood when we were old enough.”

  “Tell me something you’ve never told anyone.”

  He breathed. She breathed. Some amount of time passed.

  “When I was nine,” he said, “a carnival came to a park near our house. I begged and begged and at last Mom said I could go with my friend Keith. She gave me ten dollars and told me not to spend it all at once. We went on a couple of rides. Then I wandered around. There was one stall where you had to throw a ball at a monkey; if you knocked its hat off, you won a prize. One of the prizes was a brown china bear, standing on its hind legs, holding a clock. Mom had said we needed a new clock, and this bear clock was the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen. I spent the rest of my money buying shots, and with my very last shot, the monkey’s hat fell off. I was carrying the bear home, jubilant, when these older boys jumped out from behind a car. They just wanted to scare me, but I dropped the bear. It broke into a dozen pieces. I kicked them into the gutter and ran the rest of the way home. Mom scolded me for getting dirty.”

  “You didn’t tell her what happened?”

  “I didn’t want her to be disappointed. She was so beautiful, and I loved the bear so much.”

  And me, she wanted to ask, am I beautiful? But he was saying something else, something that it took her a moment to understand: last year he had had a vasectomy. When he was seventeen, his girlfriend had got pregnant. Three agonizing weeks had passed before she decided to give up on marrying him and have an abortion.

  “I never wanted to feel that way again,” he said.

  “So why did—” As the flow of their movements had grown most intense, he had reached for a small packet on the bedside table.

  He pulled her closer so that his words tangled with her hair. “To be safe in another way. I think I’m all right—touch wood—but if anything happened to you, I would never forgive myself.” She was still wondering if she had understood when he said, “I wouldn’t have guessed you were a Scorpio.”

  “Is your birthday in November too?”

  “April. I’m an Aries. Passionate and confident.”

  “I thought you believed in evidence and arguments.”

  He laughed. “Zoe, we wouldn’t be here if I only paid attention to arguments.”

  Then his hands were moving across her body, suggesting they resume their deeply satisfying, deeply irrational activities.

  Twenty-seven

  Duncan

  When he saw the postcard of Big Ben by his plate, his first thought was: She found me. Somehow his first mother had known about his search and written to him. But on the other side was the neat printing he had last seen in the window of the newsagents.


  “I didn’t know you knew people in London,” Zoe said.

  She was at the sink, rinsing a glass. From the slant of her neck, the curve of her lips, he knew his sister had found what she was looking for. She had begun to treat her family with careless kindness. Then, as she filled the glass with water, he revised his thought: not what, whom. Only another person could have changed her so much. He pictured Europa riding Zeus. Don’t let him carry you away, he begged.

  “Gordon’s coming back,” he said. “He wants to visit Lily.”

  “That’s nice,” she said vaguely.

  As he set the postcard on his bookshelf, he thought about London, the city where it had been purchased and written and posted and where, perhaps, his first mother still lived. He’d been there half a dozen times, most recently when Mr. Griffin had taken a group of them to the National Gallery and led them through five centuries of art at breakneck speed, holding forth in front of his favorite paintings—A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph by Cosimo, The Ambassadors by Holbein, Whistlejacket by Stubbs, Saint George and the Dragon by Uccello, The Arnolfini Portrait by Van Eyck—chivvying them past the bad ones. When they came out of the gallery, a band was playing gospel music in Trafalgar Square. Perhaps, Duncan thought now, his first mother had been there that day, dancing in the crowds.

  He studied his portrait of Lily. He had tried first painting her on a solid ground, like Whistlejacket, Stubbs’s famous horse, but that had made her look monolithic and, oddly, bad-tempered. Situating her in the garden seemed too random. Most recently he had painted her seated on the rug in front of the living-room fire. Granny’s father had brought the rug home from India, and Duncan had spent hours lying there, reading. The soft greens and blues, with the occasional flashes of red and yellow, reminded him of the mermaids’ garden beneath the sea. He set the picture on his easel and laid out his paints. Despite strenuous pleading, he was still confined to acrylics. All the paintings I love, he had told his parents, are made with oils. His mother argued that they were messy and expensive; his father, that the fumes shrank your brain. You’re thinking of turpentine, Duncan had said. People use paint thinner now. They had promised him a set of oil paints for his next birthday.

  As he flecked colors into the rug, trying to create the complicated greenness, he wondered if this was another mistake. Would Lily appear to be floating on a magic carpet? What if he made the rug a single dark color: crimson? forest green? Then she would be sinking rather than floating. He thought again of Morandi’s bottles. Perhaps what he needed was some additional element that interrupted the rug: a corner of the fireplace? a chair?

  He went downstairs and studied the chairs at the kitchen table, plain wood with slightly curved legs, and in the parlor, straight legs with decorative knobs. He sketched both, shading them carefully with little pencil strokes. He had never noticed before that chairs, like people, have arms and legs.

  Two nights later he woke with his hand in the knife drawer, and knew it was time to act. The next morning he waylaid his mother in the hall and asked for his first mother’s name. “I’ve spoken to Matthew and Zoe,” he said. “They understand.” He stood waiting, pen and paper in hand, for the magical words.

  But she was still moving toward the umbrella rack. “Duncan, I’m already late. Can we talk this evening?”

  Before he could respond, she had chosen an umbrella and was gone. He felt a spark of anger—why hadn’t she stopped to tell him?—and took refuge in a cherished image: a shimmering pyramid of eggs in a market in Bayonne. He remembered standing, watching the pyramid slowly dwindle as customers came and went. Maybe, when he finished painting Lily, he would attempt the eggs; he could imagine Morandi painting them.

  That evening he was sketching the legs of a chair in the lower corner of the canvas when there was a knock at his door.

  “You’ve captured Lily perfectly,” his mother said.

  “It’s for Gordon, her former human.”

  “I’m sure he’ll love it.” Silent in purple socks, she approached. “She looks like she’s about to smile. Your art teacher told us you’re very gifted.”

  “Mr. Griffin? He never praises anyone.”

  She cocked her head like Zoe, although of course it was the other way round. “Well, he made an exception in your case. He told us that we ought to let you do art for as long as you want.”

  He was still struggling with the bewildering idea that they “let” him do art when he saw the sheet of paper in her hand. He reached for it.

  “Duncan, you won’t do anything without telling us?”

  “No. I just want to know her name. It feels weird that I don’t.”

  “Weird” stood in for the weightless feeling that had swept over him when he realized that her name wasn’t in his brain; it seemed to reassure his mother. She let go of the paper and stepped back, watching as he took in the two words neatly printed at the top: Esmeray Yildirim. He sounded them out awkwardly, syllable by syllable, then repeated them, thinking even as he did so that perhaps his first mother said them in a totally different way.

  “So I might have been Duncan Yildirim?”

  “She probably wouldn’t have named you Duncan.”

  “Do you think she did give me a name?” The idea that he might have another name filled him with amazement.

  “She may have. Or she may have thought naming you would make giving you away even harder.” There was a pause during which she kept looking at him, and he kept looking at Esmeray Yildirim. From the kitchen came his father’s voice, calling “Betsy.”

  Alone he said the name ten times to be sure it was firmly back in his brain. Then he couldn’t decide where to put the piece of paper. Should he pin it to his noticeboard? Put it under his pillow? Finally, he placed it between the pages of The Little Mermaid.

  Twenty-eight

  Matthew

  On Monday morning the corridors buzzed with the rumors Benjamin had started. Something was happening in the gym at lunchtime: a play? a fight? Matthew listened to the gossip, said “Wow” and “Brilliant.” He could feel himself growing nervous. Coming out of history, he almost bumped into Rachel.

  “Matthew?” she said, as if there were some question.

  “Hi.” In one quick glance he took in her smudged eyes, her rolled-up skirt, and kept walking. As he set his feet on one square of brown linoleum and then the next, he hoped she’d been impressed by his sangfroid. But if his blood were really cold, why was his heart pounding?

  The gym was a long, two-storied space with windows on one side, wall bars on the other. Loops of rope hung down in graceful catenaries—Duncan had taught him the word—waiting to be released and climbed. At one end was a stage used for debates and school plays. He and Benjamin changed into their fencing clothes behind the curtain and stood listening while Hugo set up the boombox and organized the noisy crowd to stand on either side. When “Space Oddity” built to a crescendo, Benjamin slipped out of a side door and made his way down the corridor to the far end of the gym. The music stopped mid-chord; Matthew pulled down his mask and stepped through the curtains.

  As he and Benjamin paced toward each other, he saw Duncan standing next to Will; Zoe and her friends were near the wall bars. He recognized almost everyone, and yet the familiar faces were transformed. His friends and acquaintances had become a crowd, hungry for spectacle. Ten paces apart, he and Benjamin stopped, bowed, and saluted.

  “Engage,” called Hugo, and they lunged forward.

  Matthew aimed for Benjamin’s shoulder, Benjamin went for his chest, Hugo called out the points. The crowd cheered, shouted. Suddenly Matthew’s foil was flying through the air. He ran to retrieve it, ducking under Benjamin’s thrust. They circled round, switching ends, pursuing each other up and down between the rows of onlookers. Several minutes sooner than they’d planned, Matthew lunged forward, flicked the foil out of Benjamin’s hand, and hit him in the groin. In an instant Benjamin’s white trousers flooded with red. He fell to the floor.

  “Stop,” cr
ied a voice.

  For one horrifying moment, seeing Duncan lying on the floor, Matthew thought that somehow, while pretending to stab Benjamin, he had stabbed his brother. He ran over and bent down beside him. Despite his dark skin, Duncan had turned remarkably pale. His eyelids were fluttering.

  “Duncan, it’s okay. Benjamin isn’t hurt. Neither of us is hurt. It’s just red paint.”

  “Cowslip.”

  That evening at supper, Duncan said he had an announcement to make. “I want to try to find my first mother, Esmeray Yildirim. I’ve thought about it, and thought about it. A part of me thinks Mum is right. I should wait until I’m older. But if I waited and found out something had happened to her, that I could have met her now, but I can’t later, I’d be miserable. I know she might not want to hear from me, or she might not be a good person, or I might not find her, but I want to try.”

  He stopped, looking at each of them in turn, waiting for their response.

  “But we’ll still be your family?” said Zoe. “I’ll still be your sister?”

  “How could that change? You’re the people I can draw in my sleep.”

  It was his fault, Matthew thought. The sight of Benjamin, covered in blood, had scared his brother into a decision. Reflected in the faces of his parents and his sister, he saw his own fears. All four of them wanted to stop Duncan from embarking on this search; all four of them knew that to let him glimpse their reluctance would be a profound unkindness.

  “Of course we’ll help you,” said their father, “but there’s a good chance we may not be able to find her. That you’ll have to try again when you’re older.” Neither he nor their mother were eating.

  “I understand,” said Duncan. “I just want to do the obvious things—look in phone books, ask people. I’m not going to knock on every door in London.”